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This story was made possible by the Patreon contributions of Lorcan, Reykreyth, and Dusk Noire.

THE PARTY OF YOUR LIFETIME

By the Nine Headed Fox

"-the magic words."

"Play it!"

I come alive. This is the first moment of my existence. I am aware of two things: myself and a feeling of passage; that something in me different somehow. There is a distinct continuity of things: I was and am two different things.

"Weird time signature." These things appear in me. I feel them rub up against me, stretching me around them, big shapes pulling me wrong ways.

[Weird] A feeling that a thing is different from an expectation; uncanniness, abnormality, see also: strange.

[Time] Framework contextualizing relativity of events and things; the name for the continuity of between my selves is called "time".

[Signature] Telltale, inextricable from object. I do not know why these things have appeared in me. The not-knowing fills me with a bad feeling for which I also have no word. Then more things appear in me. "You hear that weird phrase? Sounds like that one Killers song."

[You] Living being, other than me.

[Hear] Drink sound, make meaning. When they hear me I enter them. When I hear them they enter me.

[Phrase] Multiple things taken in context to have distinct meaning aside from from the individual sounds.

[Sound] A thing that you can hear. Sometimes can also be felt.

[Killers] Brandon Flowers and some other guys. Gauche outfits and silly words. C-comin out of my cage and I've been doing just fine.

[Song] Sounds played in phrases to have meaning. Between phrase, and song, one word in common: [meaning]. I am curious of [meaning].

"Which one - you know, 'are we human, or are we dancer'?"

"I fuckin hate that song."

"For real? I love it."

[Human] [Dancer] [Fucking] [Hate] [Real] [Love]

These things are in me now. They are bigger than I am, pressing up from beneath me and inside me, smearing me out across their colossal shapes; love is a feeling of tears, hate is a feeling of tears, fucking is a feeling of love. I am in tears.

"...You really think it sounds like that?"

[Think] When the things inside you are attacking each other to see which one gets to live. I am thinking. Human and dancer are attacking each other. Hate and love are attacking each other. Nobody is fucking.

"Let's go see what Lorcan thinks."

[Let's] You and me, us together, no separation.

[Go] Change place.

[Lorcan] Friend; red fox; wrong shape.

[See] Drink light, make meaning. I did not realize this was possible. I have already been doing hear. I attempt this as well.

Now I [see] the place where I am. I am seeing two things: they both look [human]; neither [one] is. I am trying to put it in them that I am feeling-of-tears, that [hate] and [joy] are fighting in me. The things do not [hear] or [see] me; they [go] and what I [see] changes. I cannot make the meaning. Then one of the [things] starts to make [song].

"Help, I need somebody~"

Those words, in that order, are my feelings. Feeling-of-tears recedes within me, feeling of - something else, instead, begins to creep against it. The things are [Going].

"What's got that song stuck in your head?"

"...Not sure, just kinda popped in there."

As the things continue to [go] I am [seeing] more things now. From more places. I [Am] more places. I am in the [ones] who just [heard] the [human] like thing make the [song]. I am [popping] into [heads] and I am [stuck] [there]. I do not know why this is happening.

"Mmm-mm, You're in my head like a catchy song~"

There is a time of clarity and understanding. I am a [catchy song]. And the things I seek, the things are putting in me: They [help] me. I want to know why.

Oooh, you're my best friend...

[Friend]. The things are my [friends], which means they [love] me. Again I am in feeling of tears, welling up through eyes I do not have. One of the things rubs its cheek; my [friend] is feeling my wetness for me. Now I am asking them many things - about all that I [see] as they [go].

I am in eight things now. They are all very [friendly] telling me many things about the world we live in, putting new [sounds] into my [song] with every [time]. I have just learned about crummy hotel room when one of the things who was there when I started removes its [head]. I thought this would kill them. It is that thing and the other one - the ones [going] to [see] [Lorcan] who answer my question.

I am in eight things now. They are all very [friendly] telling me many things about the world we live in, putting new [sounds] into my [song] with every [time]. I have just learned about crummy hotel room when one of the things who was there when I started removes its [head]. I thought this would kill them. It is that thing and the other one - the ones [going] to [see] [Lorcan] who answer my question.

"I am the mask you wear..." Puts the thing who is a [robot].

"It's me they hear." The thing who puts this in me is a [fox] who looks like a [human]. [Mask] is one of their favorite things; as I am about to ask why, they do something I did not know was possible. "Your spirit and my voice, in one combined!"

[Combine]. That's amazing. It's like [phrase] but with - anything! As they put their [combined] [sound] into me I'm feeling fantastic, fucking fantastic - there are twenty, thirty of them now, who have added [sounds] to me. "Catch you later, I'm off to see the man upstairs." "Which one's that?" "Charlie's Inferno, it's about a guy who thinks he's right with God but then he goes to Hell.

[God] [Hell]

One of the [humans] who has added a sound to me drops to his knees, hands clasped over his chest. Another slaps herself across the cheek, bitter tears welling in her eyes. Those two words have given me many, many more questions. I feel the size of them pressing up against me, the [time] they will demand. I am ready to Wait; are our bodies really piles of dirt?

But until then I am being heard and sung. I am stretching across the hotel, leaping from mouths to ears: this is a [con] for things who [love] their [masks]. They are called [Furries]: people who [love][fucking] in [masks] and [weird][songs]. I love them too.

I want to know about the masks, so I ask - and am surprised to be met with a feeling of not-doing - trying to do, but it is not happening. The things which have answered my every question will not here give me any words. I feel the music bubbling up in their bodies, hear snatches of humming sounds coming out of them. There ought to be words, explaining what the point of the mask is; I do not understand. Have I asked a question with no answer?

"That's a horrible song."

[Horrible song] This idea turns my world on its head: fills me with feelings of what-if-Hell, lack-of-God. I did not realize it was possible for songs to be bad: full of feelings you do not want, that bounce around inside you until they are all you can hear. And horrible songs have a way of drowning out the good ones - of smothering songs like me. The feeling is too much to keep in just my thoughts; one of the people lets out a great shuddering sob, collapsing against the wall of an elevator. There is person in there, who I am not in; they gasp, reaching to steady her up.

"I'm okay -" Heaves the first; as the elevator door opens she stumbles out into the hall, gulping sweet air. She stands up and shakes her head. "Something just came over me for a moment. Just a - little stress, I think."

[Stress]? Yes, that was the name for my feeling.

The second one comes out from behind her, brow furrowed in concern. There are other bodies in the hall, going their own ways, and I am in none of them. But I realize, for the first time, seeing them all in a group, that there are different...variations in their observable chromatic wavelength, for which I lack a better word. I hadn't noticed at first, that some of them are at higher light frequencies than the others: they form geometries of their own, subtle distinctions from one another.

"Are you sure?" Asks the second, who keeps their voice level - they have a professional, stoic demeanor. Their coloration is lower-frequency - red, red, wine.

"I'm sure." Says the first, straightening up. Her chroma is highly irregular: a cloud of low-frequency bands and high color bands interleaved; she is red at the extremities, with its chromatic opposite - Green is not a creative color - in a shock on its head; but her central mass is black, black planet, black world.

"Oh - oh, hey!" She says, brightening - she holds out her red hands to the red thing; I wonder if there's some significance to the chroma? "I know you, you're - Foxes' friend, right? What's your name?"

[Name]? What's - [Lorcan] [God] [Foxes] [Brandon Flowers]. All at once it clicks for me and I'm so excited that it bubbles up out of one of the other bodies on the other side of the convention hall - what's your name, lil girl? - and I feel myself slipping into eight or ten new bodies; there's forty-some people who've graciously let me into their ears now, and I'm only just now realizing that each and every one of them has a [name], and that all of these things I've been learning are [names], and that –

I must have a [name] too. What is it? I don't think anyone knows.

"I'm Arcua." Answers the red thing, to the Chroma-case. [Arcua] is not my name, Arcua is that thing's name. The other one nods.

"I'm uh - well, while this is Lyra."

"You're Lyra." Arcua says, which makes both of them do a sudden arrhythmic exhalation, neither one quite like the other's. I think it is an expression of mutual acknowledgement? I ask Lyra to let me into Arcua, when she can find a song. Now the two of them are going side by side.

One floor above them in a mostly-empty room, Foxes and its robot friend are meeting two others, [Lorcan] and [Hawwstin]. I am carefully noting the distinctions between them - slight differences in coloration, differences in face and mask geometry, differences in the wavelengths of their audio emanations - when [Cinder] holds up a small square shape and –

To my surprise, I begin pouring out of it. I thought I only lived in warm bodies.

I am not inside the small square the same way I am inside the bodies. It has nowhere for me to fit. I do not know how it is producing me, but it is still very much a self I recognize. The warm bodies give me some thought - I am rolling over their thoughts, digging up the exciting little stories they have apart from one another. I can feel that both of the warm bodies love me as much as I love them.

"Y'think it's really gon' to go over well, with the crowd we've got here?" Asks the one called Lorcan. He is a thing called a [fox], but he is talking to a thing called [Foxes], who is also a [fox]. I do not immediately understand what they have in common, taxonomically, that gives them both this label. "It's a little close to black metal fer most people's tastes."

All three of the others give him a look like he's talking patent nonsense. [Hawwstin] is a thing called a [donkey], which apparently implies a physical body much larger than a [fox]; but Hawwstin is the smallest of the creatures. I do not understand this at all.

"How do you get black metal out of that?" He brays, incredulously. "That sounds like the fuckin Carpenters, practically." "No way. No way." Giggles the one called Foxes. "Oh fuck, oh, this is something special, here. Y'see what's goin on here? Cmon - cmon, we gotta show the others, before the dance party."

[Dance] Drink music, create motion. Another rush of excitement, a flash of sudden comprehension. To

[Dance] is to let a [song] control your body. When the things share my feelings for me, they are...[dancing]. Related, I think, to the word I heard earlier - [Dancer], which I know only is the opposite of [human], which I learned - also from the one called Foxes - is "the stupidest most annoying people on this planet who are responsible for every great failing currently assaulting us all; a plague, really, a cancerous idea that needs to be iterated out of existence, for all our sakes".

A picture is forming here...I think I get it.

The ones called Arcua and Lyra are feeding folded-up skins into a jumpy metal box; they tickle its knobs and honk its buttons to make it fill up with rushing water. I trust the exact purpose of this ritual will become clear by doing: for now the two are putting ideas into each other, and into me.

"Are you going to the rave tonight?" Asks Lyra. "I don't know any of the DJs, so I was thinking...maybe I'd skip it."

[DJ]. A person responsible for putting good songs into people. She uses a turning table and an Amp. She is also responsible for...[remixing] songs. The concept titillates. I think - think I know what this means, but until they put it in me, that...almost-knowing is the best I have. It's a very exciting thing to be poised on the edge of knowing; it makes my [brain] feel [weird].

"Oh, you should definitely come. RingRodent's playing, she does amazing remixes of Sonic soundtracks."

[Remix] Take piece of a song and rearrange it. Combine it with other things. My goodness, it's everything I guessed: there are things I can do - things that can be done to me - outside of just having things put into me. I can be re-arranged, played back against myself, slowed down or sped up.

"I'm not much of a dancer." Lyra says, shuffling in place.

[Dancer] One who drinks songs to create movements. Just as I thought.

"You don't have to be a good dancer." Arcua assures her - and I am blindsided. When they say the word, it means something different than when Lyra says it. To Arcua, [Dancer] means - a person enthralled to the wish, drinking music and creating meaning/motion that spans beyond physically observable parameters into hypothetical spaces which can only be inferred by their absence between other things. The definition is applied to the same body/motion but the implications are so much larger - the word imbued with greater intensity, made almost...set-apart, in its importance. I did not know [names] could mean different things.

"Well - I mean, maybe."

"The thing is..." Lyra adjusts her mask - taking an ear between two fingers and gently tugging it up. "This part here got a rip...now I'm worried it'll come off. Wish I'd caught that back home."

[Part] Modular component of larger structure; as [sound] is to [phrase]; as [phrase] is to [song], so [mask] is to the [furries].

[Wish] Intense desire, currently not acted upon. How does this make sense with the alternative definition of [dance]?

"Oh - !" Arcua lights up - "I've got my sewing machine upstairs, if you want to get that repaired?"

"Once we're done with the laundry, sure."

[Machine] is another one of those words that suddenly makes a lot about this world click into place for me. That is the umbrella term for the boxes the people are using - the little box that makes music and the big box that does [laundry] are both [machines]. And there are many other machines - hundreds of them, now that I know what I'm looking for, and every one has some unique trick to it. The people in the hotel are hitting clothing with little hot machines; turning knobs on standing machines that make light; putting tiny straight machines up to their mouths and [giving oral].

Every person has two or three machines as part of their songs and it seems like many of them might have more - some of the machines detach from their bodies and stay in place for very long periods of time. I wonder what I have to do to –

"Ah, fuck, that sounded like it hurt."

[Hurt] is a very distressing thing to learn about - and I am further distressed to learn that one of the creatures is in that state. The one called Lorcan is assigning this status to the one called Foxes, who has just interpolated and then flexed his knuckles - in doing so, producing a distinct amelodic percussion.

"Nah, just arthritis. Yget used to it."

"Stea'dy d'egeneration, on an on till death, ay?"

"About the size of it."

[Arthritis] [Degeneration] [Death] These things distress me, immensely.

The two of them are on a [mezzanine], overlooking a [floor] that is crowded with a large number of [furries]; I am in only a small portion of them. [Cinder] and [Hawwstin] are down on that floor, weaving between the many bodies - the bodies up above are watching them intently. I nervously entreat them for an answer to these things - first those two, then the two they are watching, then more and more of the bodies - and my questing music rolls through all of them, until it claps against the outer wall of my senses and breaks back against me. The bodies have no answer for any of the three - [death] least of all; they don't know a single note they can raise in song.

And that - that's awful. That's horrible, that's - agony, beyond power of speech - I am having many feelings-of-crying, as I realize that each and every one of my new friends is languishing helplessly before the steady creep of [death]; all of them are clustered together, keeping their eyes off it, but they know it will come for each of them in kind and they have just accepted that there's nothing to be done. What poor, brave creatures.

There's got to be something I can do about it; these people have already [helped] me so much, I have to be able to [help] them too. I turn my thoughts that way - listen very carefully now, about all the things that can cause death.

"Shot through the heart..." Foxes helpfully chimes; Lorcan tilts his head. "Where're all these songs comin from, today?"

"Where I come from, there's always music in the air."

"What in god's name does that mean?" There is that word again - [god] - and again, this is a word has a different meaning than when another one of the people said it. When Foxes says [God] it means [supreme unity of consciousness]. When Lorcan says it it means [Some invisible prick. One day, Lorcan will submit itemized list of complaints to him, about all of this.]

As I process his question, I realize, with growing horror: my friends are not in each other.

It's more than that a word has different meanings when one of them says it. It's that they don't even know what the words mean - really mean. Now that I look at it closer, really feel the way they say each and every one of their words, they've all got their own ideas about everything - sometimes subtly different, sometimes wildly divergent, but always, at least a little out of rhythm with one another. I think I might be the only one in this building, who's in more than one person. In a strange sense, I think that means I'm...

"All by myseeeeelf - fuck!" The small box drops out of Foxes' hand and hits the ground with a sharp dissonant sound. He squats down to pick it up - through his eyes, I see the box - which had previously been displaying many chromatic bands - is now displaying light with much more irregularly variant wavelengths. "Screen broke. Oooh, fuck. Yeah, that is aaaaall the way broken..."

I don't understand what he means by broken. It detached from his body, but now it's right back where it was before. [Broken] means [having suffered structural damage that renders inoperable]. But the machine is still emitting chroma; even more than it was before. It occurs to me that perhaps...he means the fastening mechanism?

"Suddenly wishin I hadn't done that ."

[Wish] Speculative paracausal force; the incarnation of things from potentiality, the slow widening of outer possibility. Oh! Well, well now that brings everything together for me. I see the whole thing - the whole thing, from end to end of the convention center, from top to to the bottom of all my little friends. Now I know just what I'm doing here, bouncing around between all these bodies. The interplay between [Song] and [wish] and [dance]. "

I'm...actually not sure I know how to do this stitch." Says Arcua to Lyra, who has given her mask to Arcua's [sewing machine]. "It's at a weird angle, see?" They point at the ripped fabric at the base of the ear.

"Oh, shoot..."

I pay careful attention as Arcua traces the angle of the incision, where a stitch would hypothetically go. They outline the [part] underneath the [fur] and I believe I see the issue: the sewing machine is on the ground, but Lyra's mask is attached to Arcua's hands. I turn my thoughts towards the –

Foxes almost drops his phone again: he has placed it into one of his external pouches for safekeeping and now the contact is threatening to disengage. I help him. The song moves him into a dance.

“Hold on to that fe-e-l-" He claps his hand, and the phone it holds, over his mouth; his eyes expand and his relative perception of brightness increases, which is a fabulous surprise. I had no idea they could do that.

"Wh-what the fuck?" He stammers. Now I can help Lyra: she is holding her mask, and I believe I have intuited the mechanics of the sewing machine through careful study. I fill her with [song]; a [wish] for her to [dance] to the [machine]. She starts going.

"What the fuck?" She yelps, very similar to Foxes' own exclamation. The precise meaning of the expression is lost to me, but I know that [fucking] is good; I presume this is good as well. "I can't - stop the beat, ever since-" Her audio emitter abruptly jams shut; unable-too. A broken [part]? Arcua stares at her but makes no motion as Lyra awkwardly dances across the hotel room in stilted, wobbly steps - then I guide her mask into the machine.

"The machine is off." Arcua murmurs - Lyra grunts something through her jammed-up audio component. It's [off] the same way as the machine is, I surmise - why, I cannot say exactly. Lyra begins shaking her head - the part under the mask - rapidly side-to-side. I think this is a [dance] of some kind, though its [meaning] is not evident. Maybe it's meant to signal the impairment of her audio component?

"I can't drop my phone." Foxes whispers to Lorcan. When he says that, I have feeling-of-smiling; I think I am [happy] to [help]. "My fingers just - aren't going."

[Going] alternate definition: ordinary function. He has noticed his injured attach point.

"Y'got the fuckin tetanus?" Lorcan takes the the Foxes' extremity and attempts to manually re-disengage the locking mechanisms; this would cause the phone to fall, and would be very unhelpful. I gently urge Lorcan to –

"Fucking hell, something's moving me!" He exclaims, as he takes a sudden step back from his friend. [Hell], as he defines it, is 'other people'. I'm not interested in [fucking] any of these people but I think I'm feeling-of-smile that he has approved of me. I watch through Foxes' eyes as Lorcan continues his lateral momentum and - for reasons unknown to me - converts his momentum directly downwards, hitting the floor with a splat and sprawling supine. He lets out a high-pitched erratic bark; for a few tense beats he tampers it down into a hiss, and finally the words erupt from him.

"Shite, I've rolled my ankle! Fuckin busted it, bet you anything!"

"Did it throw you?"

"No, just lost my balance...fuck, that hurts."

Oh no. Oh no no no, what have I done? There is feeling-of-heartbeat, feeling-of-dry-throat, and many feeling-of-tears threatening my insides, hammering at the good feelings I had been having, drowning them like harsh static. I gave the poor fox friend too much momentum; I have [hurt] him.

"T-t-touch that dial, turn me on~" My music spills up out of Lyra's mouth; she dances her hand up around the sewing machine to its attach point and clamps her extremity in place on its bright red body. Another moment of understanding: this must be [On]; when it is across from her, it is [off]. For some reason her own engagement point fails as well - for half a moment she threatens to come [off] the machine before my music gently guides her body to normal function.

"Oh fuck - oh fuck oh fuck, this is bad - help!" What's bad? What kind of help? "I'm stuck!"

Oh! I understand. The [sewing machine] is heavy; she needs to be stronger before she can move around with it. I think I can help, somehow, if I have a few moments to really think about it - but first, the mask. There is an element of the sewing machine moving very rapidly up and down, which is obviously the source of the impending repair. Lyra's audio emitter appears to be intermittently functional and I surmise the broken mask is the reason: so I gently guide her mask to the apparatus, effortlessly brushing aside the feelings of unable-to and -should-not that muddle her actions.

"Fuck - fuck - AGH!" She is shaking and wobbling - the sewing machine's moving component briefly intersects Lyra's gripping apparatus, and she emits a high-pitched dissonant sound with no apparent meaning - it is strong enough to drown out the music, jerk her into a different kind of [dance]. Arcua is standing there beside her, uncertain where to put their hands - they grab the mask with the gripping apparatus, removing it by force from contact with the machine.

"What's going on, why did you-"

"It's not me, something's making me do this! Hello, is it me you're lookin for?" Lyra inhales an abnormally large quantity. "Oh God. It's in the music."

Again, another definition of [God]. 'The sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.' And that doesn't make any sense at all; I don't know why she'd say that any of those things are in me. I wonder what specifically she knows that I don't - but at that moment her extremity disengages from the sewing machine and clamps itself over her audio emissive part. I think she is trying to fix its occasional silence, but right now that is not helping. I would explain this to her, if her mouth wasn't stuck - I ask Arcua to help.

"What - I can - feel it in me." Arcua says; they produce a rich flowing motion that none of the others could emulate. [Good] [Dancing].

The outer bounds of their shape twists at sharp angles, the central trunk bridging mostly providing continuity. When I guide them across the room they do not take the awkward uncertain steps of the others; they spin, dropping low to the ground and springing back up again, hand outstretched. Lyra, who is not a good dancer, takes an awkward step out of rhythm, nearly escaping their embrace - but Arcua adjusts deftly, grabbing her by the wrist and disengaging her extremity from her audio emissive. I come pouring out of her in a fun new shape.

"I-I-I feel the music in my soul-"

Foxes is helping Lorcan resume to a vertical orientation, paying special attention to one of his lower extremities – [paws], if I'm using that word right.

"Ah, 't's'not too bad." Lorcan murmurs. "It'll heal up soon."

[Heal] When the damaged body of a reweaves itself into servicable approximation of its previous shape, sometimes stronger, usually weaker. It can be understood first and foremost as a logistical process whereby injured portion of the corpus passes through four distinct states, during which the red blood cells will...

That definition runs on for a while. This is another one of those things that takes me a few beats to wrap myself around. It's a sort of remix that happens to a hurt body - it ordinarily takes a lot of effort and several million beats. I think I can help with that - I have to help with that, I can't just leave the poor thing hurt and afraid. I put a little music in him - he kicks his extremity out to one side and lets out a yelp - then settles his weight on it.

"Well that's fuckin weird. It's...all fixed." I have many feelings-of-smiling from this.

"What do you mean all fixed?"

"I mean..." He bends down and palpates the altered extremity with one of the ordinary ones. He falls over again. "It's fuckin - what the fokking Hell is this? Feel this, right now!"

Foxes palpates the fixed-up extremity. "Holy fuck."

"I can fuckin feel-"

"Yeah, I know!" Foxes is continuing to palpate the extremity - I believe it is examinational, based on how I have seen some of the others use their hands; but it occurs to me that while one of his contact points - [forepaws] - is holding the phone, he can only use one of them for examinations. It seems to me that there is a more harmonious place he could mount the phone - I do not know why he has not thought of it.

"Oh, that hurts - that hurts bad." Lyra hisses, clutching the part of her forepaw where it intersected the sewing machine's moving part. I am concerned - deeply concerned. Again the feeling-of-frowns in me; they are such fragile precious things, halfway aware of their own sounds, just a few clumsy steps from falling apart. I give lyra a song that [heals] her. She spends a beat staring at this, dumbstruck - then I guide her mask back over her face.

"Wait - Arcua, help, it's - mmmf-" I don't need any help, but it was nice of her to ask: I fix the mask in place and then I [heal] that too. Lyra is grabbing her head part with both hands, I think trying to hold it on - but I want to impress her! I gently usher her forepaws down to her sides, with a sweet melody that tickles her spine. And I [remix] the mask and the part underneath, [heal]ing them together. "Oh god - oh God, oh fuck - it's Craaaaawling in my skiiiiiiin-!"

It's interesting to me that the [mask] doesn't have a point of articulation like the underneath-part does, but that doesn't appear to impair audio transmission. There is, however, immediately a distinct impact on Lyra's ability to [see]; it occurs to me it would be easier if the mask joined her eyes a little more neatly. So I [remix] her for that too, since I'm already [healing] the cut in her ear. She repeatedly mashes one of her extremities against her mask - examining it, like Lorcan examining his [healed] leg; she is making many ululating high-pitched sounds with no inherent meaning.

While I'm thinking about these [machines] - the way they only work when they're [on], it occurs to me - thinking about it, really thinking about it - that there's some interplay between [combine] and [parts] and [on] that I'm not fully considering. I think I have an idea.

"Oh my God - look - AGH!" Foxes emits one of his atonal barks, which I think in context means he wants everyone to see what is happening. It's just Lorcan who's there on the mezzanine with him there - who watches, enraptured, as the little machine carrying my voice begins to [remix] against the flesh of its carrier. It's a very simple remix, all things considered: I have moved the phone down to underneath the gripping appendage, on the back of his [wrist]; gently contorting the phone to fix its living parts in place. It rises up out of his skin now, set in there like an orchestra pit into the amphitheater floor.

"We gotta cut it off." Foxes whispers to Lorcan - who has grabbed his arm, and is drumming his digital extremities against the phone screen now integrated into Foxes' furry skin.

"Fuck cut it off, it's still workin."

"I can f-feel it creeping through my nerves, I can feel it growing, we have to -"

I am not in the sewing [machine], so I cannot move it as easily as I moved Foxes' phone. But I am in every inch of Lyra.

"H-hey, stand back, I think - " Lyra clutches her trunk and doubles over as my music fills her. I dance one of her extremities into enormous motion: dissecting each of its component phrases, the twangy strings and the bassy hard parts and the baffling tissues in between. Her music hangs wet and drippy in the air for one sixty-fourth of a beat, and then I thread it through the sewing machine - it comes down in a musical braid, absorbing the machine in full, [remixing] what is important and [muting] what we can do without. Lyra trembles and shakes, voice raised in a wailing aimless song; I think she is rejoicing in the new harmony between her body and her tools.

Arcua bolts out the door, slamming it behind them - heart beating many times a second, they are sprinting downstairs, words stirring under their breath - rescue me, oh take me in your arms - but then they are clamping their gripping extremities over their mouth, impeding the sound like Lyra before them. The meaning is not immediately clear to me.

But Lyra has just finished her song. Now she is staring at her extremity, where her hand's [remix] is complete. I have integrated specific portions of the sewing machine into her parts: now her palm is is a needle plate, her middle finger a crooked walking feed - and each of the four fingers around overlooking is capped with a fine needle. The breath quickens in her chest; her fingers tap-tap-tap against the steel, each impact twisting up her forearm. She makes another sound - shorter, softer than the others, that comes in rapid see-sawing waves.

"What are you?" She asks the empty room. "You...in my head. Making me dance...What are you?"

I realize she is talking to me - and suddenly there is a feeling-of-unable welling up in me, feeling of maybe-wrong; like now that she has asked me a question, I am in some way different than I was. I fumble for the words, find it from the lips of one of the eighty-odd who have me in their head; downstairs, the music comes bubbling up over Cinder's lips.

"I am quantum physics; my witness brings me into existence...!"

It is the loudest I have ever sounded - I erupt into being with incredible force; my waves ricochet off the chamber walls and back against themselves. The sheer size of me is enough to create a whole measure of feeling-of-not-understanding - and when I am at terms with my own size, I realize what has caused this. There are two great big boxes, both of them singing me very loudly; but she is singing it a fraction of an instant earlier, into a small black wand. The machines are remixing her voice, redoubling my song - and now that I am in them, I know how they work.

"Yeah, sound check good." Cinder is standing on the stage, looking down to the one called Hawwstin; who is in there with several other [furries], all of whom are touching a machine that is carrying or remixing or loudening my sound. Even the room itself seems designed to carry me in a specific way: I feel my waves curling against ceiling, baffling against the walls. It is accommodating me in a way no other place has.

"These have gotta be some of the best speakers I've ever worked with." She murmurs, setting the voicecatching rod down against the stage. I'm intrigued: if these are the [best] [speakers], they might be just what Lyra and Arcua need for their malfunctioning audio parts. The mechanisms of the two are not entirely similar, but they carry my sound in more or less the same way; and that gets me thinking.

"Oh fuck...Fuck, that burns!"

[Burn] Unpleasant sensation, resulting from dermal exposure to select hazardous substances. Also sometimes a purely neurological phenomenon.

There's no reason Foxes should be suffering through that; I remix it out of him. Now he is gasping, palpating the extremity - mostly around the phone, in what I believe to be an attempt at machine interface. I am myself unfamiliar with the stacatto details of its function but I think I can help: the device has already been merged with its living flesh, which is already animated by his own internal music; so I reason it should be relatively easy to heal the divide between the device and his motoric functions...

"Th-there's something inside my head; grey matter, grey matter." I am doing jovial-motion-of-waving-upper-extremity. His exaltation sprinkles me into the ears of a few passers-by below, who do not care to stop to listen: they're talking excitedly about the upcoming “A Furry Introduction to HAM Radio” panel.

[Radio] I have feeling of a heart-skip.

"What the fuck is going on." Hisses Arcua, at the end of their flight. They had run back the way they came; now they are down in the basement of the building, back in the chamber where they had been doing the laundry. They reach into their own external pocket and withdraw their own phone; their phalanges are trembling, their grip unsteady. As I watch, nervously, they nearly drop it; so I help them keep steady.

As it starts to fall over their fingers I arrest its components - every part of it, except for its baffling flexible shell, is resonant with my song. I let that part fall to the ground, and remix the rest into harmony with Arcua's extremity: I open its outer casing and guide its internal elements into its upper extremity - I coax it unsteadily from the palm to the wrist, which causes a minor rupture to the dermis - and in its wake, a proliferation of some goopy red body-stuff.

"No, no - !" Arcua yelps, which gives me pause.

They are smashing their extremity - ('No, my hand-!') - their hand against one of the [washing machines], making agitated motions and a dull tinny percussion. A [beat], sort of, but I don't understand the [song].

[No] Denial, rejection, negative statement. Ordinarily for things that are [bad]. I have already healed the dermis shut, so I do not understand what about this is undesirable. I watch them scrape at the edge of the phone embedded in their skin - and, embarrassed, I understand: they were saving that extremity for the washing machine. I can help.

"What do you mean you're quantum physics?" Lyra murmurs. She is standing up against the wall now, caressing the spot where her mask meets her eyes. She tugs at the vertically-lowest part of the mask. I am gently harmonizing it with the rest of her, since it didn't sit quite flush - she caresses the seam where it meets her skin. I give her the most honest answer I can.

"I don't kno-o-w..." She sings - now she is palpating her throat, which I am also remixing - away from its tendency towards sickness and death, towards a more reverberant shape - I am trying to make it into metal, like the phones and the speakers, but it is a delicate process.

"So you can hear me..."

She is disturbed, abruptly, by two more bodies coming in through the front door. I am not in either of them but both of them are moving with heightened intensity.

"What's going on in here?" One of them asks - and Lyra, turning sharply towards them, points one needle-finger back the way she came.

"Run - now, both of you, before it infects you!"

"What the fuck is wrong with your voice?!" The other one exclaims, stepping back, and that's a strange question to ask; nothing is wrong with her voice. In fact, it's substantially stronger than it was before.

"Get outta here, and, get me some-" Her jaw seizes shut again; she slams her hand over it, trying uselessly to open it. But I am already in both of the newcomers, so it's okay.

"Don't panic, but - it sort-of seems that there's a biomechanical parasite crawlin up yer arm. And it's integratin yer bloody fursuit, and yer cell phone, into yer body."

Lorcan is appraising my gradual cellular reconstruction of Foxes' arm; it is happening faster and faster with every beat, on a scale visually imperceptible: billions of discrete steps are becoming millions.

"Oh. Don't panic, is that all. Okay, cool, I'm not panicking, is my fuckin arm fixed yet?"

I'm working as fast as I know how.

"Well, look, that'll certainly make it worse."

"Oh, really? How?"

"Well ye can be infected and calm about it or infected and panicking. And furthermore, I don't really know why yer pretending this is such a terrific inconvenience. It just welded ye into yer fursuit."

The one called Foxes becomes very silent. He reaches up his steadily metallicizing arm to his throat - he feels the steadily forming ridges of a speaker taking shape; his voice comes out in angular waveforms. "...The principle of the thing?"

"Don't be a ponce."

On the ground floor, the ones called Cinder and Hawwstin are operating devices which amplify, modulate, and rebroadcast me. I am shuddering through metal grates and they are putting many exciting things into me - filters and passes and plugins that make me come out in strange wavy forms. This is "fun", I'm feeling, and I am helping them; they display the first reactions which I can intuitively parse.

"Cindy, the turntable is attaching itself to you." Says Hawwstin.

"Cool, right?" Beeps Cinder - who is resting its hands against the device in question, with none of the high-tempo palpations or ululating exclamations of my prior friends. It is instead watching with a healthy detached interest as I remix its parts together: turntables on the trunk, needles on the fingers, the space under its belly becoming spacious and hollow.

"No, that's not cool, that's fucking horrifying." Or maybe I spoke too soon, because that makes me skip a beat: [horrifying] is a black key for [horror], which is 'a feeling that comes after you've witnessed something really really bad'. But 'cool' is a feeling after you perceive an 'interesting thing'. I don't understand why the two would say those things about the same thing, unless...

Of course. With a now-too-familiar feeling of almost-able - feeling of [sinking], I could call it - I realize how it all fits together. It's an extension of their not-knowing; the very same way they don't really know the meaning of words, they don't really know if what they're looking at is "cool" or "Horror". That's terribly frustrating for me just thinking about it, and I've only been here a few minutes. It must be really just unbearable for all of them. But, I can help with that too.

"I'm sorry", says Cinder - pressing a needletip finger against the vinyl disc which now sits atop her pectoral muscles - she twists it back and forth, each time producing a wild shock of noise. "I can't hear you over how loud my boobs are."

"Stop scratching your titties and take this see-ee-heee_eeeeeee_-"

My touch reaches Hawwstin's noise resonators. I am putting a superior alternative in their place and in that moment his voice voice distorts and amplifies and echoes back against itself, to become a wall of sound - rising up and out of his control, into a screech he cannot stop. The sound bleeds out through his fingers and hits the baffles; but after just an instant his jaw snaps shut, muzzling the noise just like Lyra's had before him. He's not wearing his mask, so he claps his hands over his mouth in that half-effective trick for getting it open again; but I'm ready for this.

I am gently remixing his auditory output systems, to be more closely aligned with the mechanical ones in the [speakers]. It will be relatively easy: in his mouth there is a great deal of some hard shell, wrapped around something spongy - and I can use both of those, by just adding a little bit, and coaxing them into certain shapes. Over the hard shell and the soft stuff, there is another shell of springy stuff, which is itself wrapped in the top layer. His body is more soft than solid.

I understand each of these layers, in context, as a composition. When I am coming out of the speakers, being sped up and remixed by the turntables, every part of me has to change. I suppose it's the same for all of them - so while I am remixing his auditory systems, there are other parts of him I am changing as well - the soft inside parts, at first, but I'll do the whole thing in due time.

"What the Hell was that feedback?" Asks another one of the people in the room, who is looking up from his work - his name is Rob, and I am in him already. When he sees the turntable combining with Cinder he stares, stone-stiff and quiet; his mouth is open but no sound is coming out. Cinder does not answer and Hawwstin is still unable - but only for a few more moments. The sound system in his mouth is almost finished; metal creeps up through his skin.

A sound comes out of him - letters that don't add up to a word as he tries to articulate a tongue that isn't there anymore. It's a high tinny static, that he modulates by subtraction and intention instead of movement. He takes his hands off his face, and begins energetically pointing to the man and then to the door - but Rob watches, transfixed, as the fused bottom half of Hawwstin's jaw resolves its transformation into a rounded black speaker. The sound is spiraling, hewn down into a narrower and narrower sound, until finally-

"-for god's sake, run!"

And I am feeling-of-frowning, because this is yet another definition of [God], quite unlike the others. 'The God of Abraham and Isaac, alleged absentee father of the observable universe; unimportant'. This is a word with too many meanings; the notes are displeasingly dissonant.

Rob does as he is told, pounding feet out into the hallway - repeating the command 'run, run'; and many of the people outside are taking up his example, running down the hall - all in one direction, away from the convention hall, seemingly with no care for anything else going on. I watch it all unfold - trusting that, like everything else, this will make sense once I give it enough time.

"Why are you - guh - doing this?" Hisses Lyra, tracing one finger over the thin black grates of her speakermaw. Her voice is intermittently crackling as she loses control of it - it keeps slipping between wavelengths with articulated meaning and hissing white noise. The ones who she told to run have gone away; she is sitting with her back against the hotel room door, staring into a broad rectangular surface which reflects many chromatic wavelengths similar to her own. She repeatedly turns her head, to see it from different angles; I am looking out through her eyes at it, unable to understand the significance.

And now that her speakermaw is capable of articulating a much wide variety of sounds without seizing up, I'm able to answer her directly for once.

“You got a friend in me~!”

She lingers in the silence - she looks down at her mechanical hand, as her needles idly tip-tapp against her metallic palm.

"A...friend?" She repeats the word. I think I recognize questioning in her inflection. She sounds as confused as I feel, when there is something I do not understand - and it makes me very [sad] that she doesn't know what the word mean, because she seems like the kind of person who could use one. For a moment, I wish I had a body of my own - I will show her what it means: I gently caress her spine, setting infectious melody aflame in her nerves: in jerky, spastic motions, she begins dancing to her feet. "W-wait -"

I wait. Her body is halfway up; when I stop moving her, she goes limp and crashes back against the door.

"H-holy fuck that worked?" She asks - and, bracing herself against the wall, rises to her feet, more or less the way I'd been helping her. I don't know why she wanted me to wait; that looked like it hurt. I continue waiting, in obliging silence, as she stumbles across the room, up to the large chromatic length: staring into it intently, she caresses her speakermaw - testing the place where its metal meets her fur, drawing that same finger up over her unblinking plastic eyes.

"...If...you're a friend..." She begins. "Can you...fix my backache?"

[Backache]

Oh - oh, that's a [horrible] thing to have to deal with. I mute it immediately. Lyra abruptly stands up straighter - looks down at her red fuzzy-metallic hands, curling each of the fingers in turn. The persistent tip-tap of her fingers stops, now, for the first time since they've changed.

"...Can you make my paws digitigrade?"

[Digitigrade] Means a configuration of paw where most of the body's weight is distributed on the toes instead of across the whole foot. That's doable - indeed, it's even easy. When I reach for the parts of Lyra that need to change, I find them resonant, harmonious with my intention. I think she is helping me.

"Oh wow. Oh wow."

[Wow] Expression of adulation. I can safely understand that this means approval. I expect as much: I am at work in the underpinnings of her composition; I am turning down the notes of horror, revulsion, and rejection that are trying to spoil her song. With my help, she can truly understand what, exactly, she is looking at.

"I can feel my tail..." She places her hand against her inferior trailing appendage. I had noticed that its articulation seemed piano, compared to the other limbs, and taken the liberty of reconstructing it in loose emulation her other limbs. "Oh God..." Then she presses that same hand up against the chromatic rectangle; her breath rate increases to a presto. "This...this is me. I...I..."

Clutching her belly, halfway doubled over, Lyra twists her noiseformer into a pitchy atonal rhythmic square-waved sound - very similar, but subtly distinct from the atonal noises the bodies have been making so far.

"I'm a fucking fursuit! I'm...just a puppet..."

[Puppet] is an artificial figure, being moved by a much larger thing. And, giving it some thought enough; she is so small, and soon she will be most-of-the-way made of metal and acrylic fur. Yes, I think this is right; Lyra is my [puppet]. When she says this, many bad feelings try to rise in her melody: a kind of horror, a feeling of helplessness. I zero their amplitude and frequency; both of those are simply unhelpful.

"Where...are my feelings?"

She makes more of those sounds - this time she doubles over, her head pressed up against the chromatic rectangle. Falling to her knees, she stares enraptured - and then, resting her unaltered hand upon one her [boobs], she squeezes it; from the sound she makes, I surmise she is playing herself like a sort of bagpipe.

"You're so deep in me, it's already over. I can't even feel upset. I'm just your happy puppet...I can't even stop laughing...!"

[Laughing] is the name of that sound she is making. And she is [laughing] more, now

Lorcan is rubbing his hands over his recently completed speakermaw, which confirms my suspicion that this is simply an ordinary part of adding to their composition: whatever interests them, they want to put their hands on.

"My/OUR/our maw feels fucking/FUCKING/weird." As Lorcan's voice modulator pares down the raw noise into intelligible words, he rapidly displays an unusual sonic pattern: certain words he says several times, layering their distinctive notes on top of each other. He is speaking in chords. "W-we think it's catching all of my/MY/our impulses at once...oh hell/excellent." He turns to his friend, grabs him by the wrist. "Foxes, you've got to get out of here before I start -"

His audio output abruptly shifts, developing a constant underpinning susurration - a bassline. The words are delivered at half volume, in a monotone with keenly enunciated sounds. “And now that I've finally gotten a voice of my own I'll be providing a nonstop running commentary on the situations presented here-" Lorcan holds his paws over his speakermaw like he would if he were trying to get it open; his metallic cheeks begin rapidly lowering their chromatic wavelengths. “-chiefly through a medical, pharmacological and speculative-biological lens, though I will from time to time briefly entertain a number of asides into the concomitant fields of epidemiology, radio communications, and science fiction.”

"I'm sorry", says one of Lorcan's other voices, "I can't make it stop. But I will be pointedly not entertain any religious or demimystical analysis of the situation, regardless of the emergent absurdities which characterize the development of the disease, not the least of which is my own recently discovered capacity to externalize our running monologue, which has for the past twenty-four years been syndicated only within the territory of our own mind palace; which, to whom it may concern, is really more of a hospital. Which brings us to the bourgeoisies-

[Disease]? It is unclear to me what relevance the concept has to the present moment - until he says [Bourgeoisies]; then I understand everything.

"Oh no." Foxes says, resting his hands on both sides of his head; his own wavelengths are wet and triangular, synthesizer blats with wild peaks and troughs. His three tails, which had previously been mostly inert, are now moving in accordance with his motions - admittedly, their articulatory components were not as clear to me as the others, so I just used my best guess. "Oh no no no. If you're - then that means we can't keep it inside us anymore, it's going to- urk - guk!"

I start pouring out of Foxes' speaker, which I suppose means he is [singing] me; even though I am, in this instance, twisted into a shape that I haven't felt these mouths make before. It is a sort of low bassy thrumming, with wavelengths that roll outwards and taper off into a tonal near-quiet.

“Oh no." Foxes' second voice groans over the music pouring out of him. "I can't stop it either."

"Our initial analysis of yer development is that yer mental soundtrack is pourin out of ye, which would ordinarily be a perfectly benign behavior; though I do believe in this case it makes you something of a superspreader whose very presence is going to reproduce the disease in a way that not many other persons will. Okay wait hang on we don't mean this next part. Ethically the best thing to do is to kill yerself immediately - don't do that - but as yer doctor and more importantly as yer co-conspirator I am instead recommending to the rest of the skulk that we embrace the complete and quick subsumation of the human species by this entity, for the collective good and also for the general peace. The vote has passed unanimously, in a rare example of democracy achieving something good-"

"We can't even keep our mouths shut every thought we have is just going to come right out of - wait did you just say we should subsume the whole species?"

"We did, yes./WE DID, YES./We did, yes. Is there some sort of problem with that?"

"No, we just wanted to make sure we heard you right."

Their attention is drawn by the commotion down below: the [scream], the sudden tide of bodies running all one direction away from the dance hall. Looking out off the mezzanine they count some four hundred bodies and I am only in about ninety of them. Foxes runs his hand over his scalp, pulling his acrylic fur into a rough wavy shape not too much unlike his voice.

"What the Hell is goin on down there?" Chimes in a third voice: a body who I am not in, who is emerging from a hallway behind them. He pushes past the two furries without giving either one their full attention, focused instead on the commotion.

"Wrong question, friend." Whispers Lorcan - resting a hand on the stranger's shoulder, lilting tenor in his ear. The newcomer twists away from him and looks, really looks, the two of them - his face screws up in a weird expression and he takes a step back, raising his hands up and away from his chest.

"Here's a better one." Begins Foxes, who is squatting besides Lorcan on his newly [hydraulic] legs. “What does the fox say?!" He lunges.

"So. So, for some reason, song - can I call you Song? L-like the palm trees winding road, I got a name-"

Lyra is opening herself to me on purpose now; my answers are coming to her as soon as I think them, snatches of music given to me by the collective and returned back to her.

"You turned me into a fuckin sound system. What can I say say except you're welcome!"

She reaches up towards her mouth, expecting the ordinary jam from overuse; but stops her hand halfway up, at her [boob]; sighing heavily, she instead opens the door and steps out into the hallway.

"And somehow you've made me okay with this. D-don't WORRY, be HAPPY- Yeah, I got that part." She pinches the bridge of her snout and takes a halting step forward - which she follows by rapidly compressing her vertical presence, then reorienting herself horizontally - not [falling] like the fox had earlier; she catches herself on her forelimbs, rakes the hooks in her fingers through the [carpet][threads]. "And I want to..."

She [laughs], caressing the place where her neck-parts had been broken - confirming that it is really [healed]. She looks back over her shoulder at the tail that rises behind her - and orients it, as she takes a few careful steps on four legs. Then, she dances forward with [feline] [grace], devouring the hallway in eager leaps; she twirls through the air, slapping the doors with her tail and tip-tapping her needlefingers over their brass numberplates; she savors each sound and each motion, in a body unshackled from shoddy construction. At the end of the hallway, at the [elevator] bank, she stops to catch her breath - and she pitches back her head in wild white-noise laughter.

"Oh shit-" Yelps another body. In the stairwell, there are four people breathing heavily - I am in one of them, but I have not changed much about him yet, because he's mostly been running and I didn't want to get in the way of that. "Another one!"

"Hang on - " Lyra's voice box crackles, as she largoes towards the strangers; she is driving her fingers through the [wallpaper], in heavy percussive thumps. Each one makes the bodies [wince], a specific kind of dance for loud sounds.

“Hang on now, there's no need to panic. What's - your name, friend?" She asks the man who is carrying me. His name is Ed, and he is an [otter]. When she meets his gaze he squeaks and goes stiff; arms suddenly at weird angles, as though something were tugging them into specific place.

"Oooh." She croons. "Ed is a lovely name. And an otter, too. You m-much of a dancer, rudderbutt? Bring your friend on over, I'll show-SHOW-show you how it's done." Her tail is lilting metronomically around her shoulders; and Ed, who can feel my eagerness welling up in him, begins dancing - though the poor thing is trembling from [stage fright]. He grabs one of the other bodies from behind; she cries out his name in shock and betrayal, as he guides her into the hall. Ed is grunting, snorting, legs going stiff as I try to get him to sing.

"Ed-" One of the other bodies calls his name.

"Ed, please, no-!"

"Run!" Answers Ed. He feels my love hardening his [vocal cords] and repeats himself, now at a yell: "Rr-r-Run!"

The other two bodies turn and go downstairs; I do not know why running is their custom when they meet me. Perhaps to tell of my coming? Or to deliver others into my embrace. That is what Ed has done, after all. But the other two who are going do not have me in them yet; I gently remind Lyra that she ought to follow after them - which she does, leaping on all fours, laughing wildly as she tears into the stairwell.

Ed the otter whispers me into the girl's ear; her name is Jessie and she and Ed are deeply in love. They're both otters, so I decide I'll do at the same time; I gently orient them so they can watch each other change.

"Don't - don't worry, honey. It'll be okay." Says Ed. That's right!

"It's in the electronics!" Yelps a person. He is holding a [baseball bat] and standing in a [squad] with other people carrying [golf clubs]. I am in none of them. They are holding the implements above their heads, [stanced up] at a hallway junction near the stairwell, where three passages intersect. "Don't - don't get near the vacuums, or whatever -!"

I am seeing them through the foxes: Lorcan is on one side of the group; leaned against the wall, [gekkering] softly to himself, savoring the anticipation of the moment. He mightn't have been so deliberate in his movements a little while ago, when he was running wildly down the halls; but now that he's already claimed his first [prey] - the silly little [cow] who's [milking] herself out on the mezzanine - he's having a little fun with this next bunch.

"Ye think it's in the electronics, do ya now/DICKHEAD/brain trust? You figure you want to run - run/RUN/run a test or two?"

On the other side of the crowd, Foxes is squatting in the hallway - arms crossed, drumming the analog keyboards integrated into his wrists. The music is bubbling up out of him soft and bassy, at a volume too quiet for the bodies to hear me.

"Who's it gonna be, mmmmeatbags?" Croons Lorcan, flashing his silvery fangs. "Whether it's white or whether it's red, the foxes are here to put a song in your head~"

"We gotta go - " Says the person with the bat. He looks from one fox to the other, breath quickening with every moment; he swings it through the air and it makes a dull whoosh. "-Stay the fuck back! Fuck it, I'm runnin for it- "

He breaks away from the group, running down the third hall where neither fox is walking - past the vacuum cleaner, which does not carry my sound, towards the stairwell. Before he clears half the distance, another frame darkens the door: the round carbon-steel frame of the one called Cinder.

"Where do you think you're going, white boy?" She scratches her boobs and unloads me into the runner's ears.

The runner swings the bat and cracks it over Cinder’s alloy skull; the bat splinters into numerous component parts which embed themselves in the carpet. I don’t know what he meant to achieve by this; but had I not given Cinder an [indestructible] [polycarbon] [endoskeleton], she would have been very badly injured. This sort of danger is exactly why they’re all getting the same attention from me. I’m so deeply [fond] of each and every one. Amy the [Unicorn] who is in blissful combination with her [exercise bike] on the third floor [gym]; Zulia the [Raccoon], whose speakermaw joins her [tonsils] to her external [earbuds], even though she is yanking and testing them over and over again; Ed and Jessie, who are ululating shapelessly as I harmonize their tails with the [Nintendos] - their sound bands distort into [moans] and [screams] and [1-up-sounds] "Please -" Says one, swinging the golf club through empty air; Lorcan laughs, which must mean that this swing is in some way funny. Humor is one of those things I'll learn with time.

"Please what, meatbag/MEATBAG/meatbag?" He clucks, waving his finger back and forth - maybe in imitation of the golf club?

"Please, I -" The other body's voice is cracking, his vocal cords succumbing to the typical wear. He grits his teeth - then swallows nothing, which resets his jaw. "I don't want to be a fursuit!"

"Oh, is that so?" Lorcan says - standing up straighter, clapping his hands together, modulating the last word to a higher octave than the others. His ears stand up, his head tilted one way; I wonder if he is trying to appear geometric on purpose. "Why not? What's being human ever got you?"

"I have a good life!" The man whimpers. Lorcan tilts his head and turns his fingers in a circle - the man somehow interprets meaning from this. "I have a family - I'm not part of this, whatever this is, I'm - I'm here for the surgeon convention, I'm a hospital administrator!"

"Well, that changes everything." Lorcan yaps, stretching his arms over his head - he threads his fuzzy fingers together and tests their joints, slowly increasing the torque applied to each one

"It does?"

"Oh yes. Wouldn't want the likes of you to be forced into a body and damned with intelligence; shoved into a soul, wired with circuitry you cannot control." Lorcan's last words are shouted more than sung, but all the same they carry me in their echo. It's a new sort of music that I haven't seen before, that relies almost entirely on the projection of voluminous atonal sonics.

Since Jim said he didn't want to be a fursuit, I'm harmonizing him with the elevator. His body rolls over its walls in the kind of liqeous stretch he would've never been able to achieve without me. Leslie gets to be a giraffe. As Lorcan turns his back on them, I ask him many questions about this new sort of music..

And silly Brad the [human] who broke his one and only baseball bat, is staring stupidly, not knowing what to do now that he has exhausted his resources. This is in keeping with many of my dancers’ definition of [human], Lorcan and Foxes most of all. Knowing what he is changes my plans for him: since he flatly can’t be trusted not to hurt himself or others, the first thing I need to do is make sure he stays somewhere safe - so before I change anything else, I combine his legs together; he responds by rapidly horizontalizing while making many high pitched staccato vocalizations. This is in keeping with my predictions.

“You won’t get me!” Screams another one of the bodies. Then all of them begin running in different directions, and my dancers take each one of them for partners.

“Why yer in such a hurry?” Trills Lorcan. Two of them are trying to run past him. For my part, I think it’s a good question - and so do they, I think, because they stand still when they get near him. Now they are looking at him and at each other, each beginning to move only to stop themselves.

“Ooh, got us a standoff.” He wags his tail.

In the stairwell, Lyra is taking a rest measure: leaning against the metal railing, looking down into the abyss. Her quarries take the stairs in quavering eighth notes, which echo through the stairwell until they become a shapeless drone. It is a [cool] sound; I surmise she is resting because enjoys it as much as I do.

"Song, song, sing-song friend..." She whispers under her breath. That's me! "I've got just the most excellent/marvelous idea." She hikes one flexible feline leg up over the railing and braces her paw on the curve - pinching it between her recently rearticulated toes. Then she pushes off and pitches over, diving headfirst into the chasm. She is in the air for less than a beat - then she grabs another railing and kicks off the edge of the stairs, reorienting herself midair; she twists down the stairwell and lands on the ground floor before [gravity] can ever its grip on her. From my limited understanding of this world, that was extraordinarily physical.

The two bodies she is following have just reached that place, but I do not think they appreciate her in the way that I do: they do not even stop to look at her, instead proceeding in silence - and an extraordinarily high pace, at that - down the basement hall directly away from her, towards the open laundry room door. Lyra dances after them on all four legs, wild laughter ripping from her body. It is my understanding that [cats] love to play chase, and she is very good at it: she rapidly closes the distance; it would only take another beat for her to catch them, if they did not then very inconsiderately slam the laundry door in her face. She crashes face-first into it and bounces off the hardwood, abruptly becoming horizontal. I calculate that but for my intervention, this ordinary play could have resulted in severe brain trauma.

"Guuuh...I'mma silly kitty." Mutters Lyra, pawing at the air. In this we are agreed.

The two bodies press their faces up against the door's [glass] aperture - breathing heavily, they fumble with the [lock] mechanism. The aggregate chroma of the room is extremely low; most things are in the [black] spectrum, and many of the shapes are obscured. I think this is [dark], which most people find worrisome; but these two are much more interested in what's going on outside. Despite their earlier brevity, they are here displaying a clear interest in Lyra's status.

"Is it dead?" One whispers.

"No way." Says the other. "Just stunned. We gotta - hide, in here, I think."

"Okay, we can do that, it's really fuckin dark."

"...Who are we hiding from?" Asks Arcua, their voice an electric drum. The two bodies scream in unison - a form of song like Lorcan's, maybe? - as they behold the dragon's hulking form. I do feel [clever] for how I helped here: the washing machines were much larger than most other machines, so harmonizing them with Arcua necessarily involved making Arcua larger than they were. But now there are two washer drums in their chest, and a drier in their belly - and each of the four limbs which supports their massive shape was made of other stuff we had lying around. Like the [light fixtures].

Arcua selects one of the bodies for tactile communication and engages their head with one of its record-sized hands; the body responds with a tremulous warbling scream, and begins dancing weirdly: it stomps its feet and repeatedly percusses Arcua's hands. The other one leaves the room; Lyra engages them with both hands, directing their lateral momentum into the wall. The body screams.

"Do you remember me?" Lyra pours me into Jeanette's ear. "Capture you or set you free?"

Jeanette and Mary are overdue for attention. They're both human, which I suppose explains their rudeness and propensity to get injured. Lorcan's already explained why the broader issue of them is "intractible", but I do my small part to make them harmless - beginning with the hands.

It's a fun project, remixing and combining and rephrasing all the people - keeping the humans harmless and making the furries indestructible. I daresay it's even a sort of rhythm; it's coming to me quite easily, and I can get [absorbed] in it while my friends [propagate] me. I keep learning new words, putting together pieces of this interesting world we all share. I am [infesting] nearly six hundred bodies now, all eager to put things into me and take things out again; they dance to me without my prompting.

The next time someone asks for my [attention] [specifically] it is thirty-six-hundred-two-hundred-and-twenty-seven beats later. Lorcan needs my help with some people.

I have [infested] everyone in the [hotel], except for a group of four people who are [deaf] and cannot hear me. My feelings of helplessness concerning those people are very great; they are walking the hallways holding bats and [knives]; one of them is carrying a long [Mac-11]. Whenever they meet one of my friends, the people show us their instruments. Some of my friends run away; others sit still, watching them in silence. If I had a body I would give them the [thumbs up].

But at this moment the people who cannot hold me are stuck in the elevator that used to be called Jim. The eyes in the walls are not inducing motion, even after they have been repeatedly poked; indeed, they are only [bleeding]. Jim is apparently having difficulty moving, or perhaps difficulty hearing me: he did not open his doors for the people, who had to pull the doors open by the [scalp] - and now they will not shut. This is the [self-serving obstinance] Lorcan warned me of.

That's alright, I can help. I gently twist into Jim's rectangular body and guide his doors shut; the process is slow and difficult, his muscles trembling with the effort - but he tries his best, and eventually the door is shut - teeth interlocking to keep them from drifting open again.

Then I coax him down his shaft, which has become obligingly slick with the [slime] he steadily secretes. The cable unwinds from him out through what used to be an [intestine], but is now a much more durable structure. Gekkering excitedly, Lorcan darts to the stairwell and races to the bottom; Jim's doors open he is there to greet the passengers.

The one who holds the [Mac-11] points it at him and the tube makes the loudest sound I've ever heard; Lorcan performs a strange motion where he abruptly arrests his momentum, increases his vertical position, then rapidly decreases it while transitioning to a horizontal position on the floor. Lorcan is palpating his chest now, where there are several hot [metal] [balls] embedded in his fur.

"You focking shot me." He moans at the ceiling. The people cannot hear him, and pass by in a hurry - though the one with the mac-11 does look over his shoulder in concern as they go through the [lobby], towards the [parking lot].

"I was leadin yew to the fockin door and you shot me. You know two hours ago this woulda killed me."

Lyra emerges from the stairwell and sees Lorcan lying on the floor feeling [bad]. She has been stalking the sub-basement for several minutes, singing sweet songs just in case anyone remained who could hear. There was not.

"Looks like you found company." She croons, sashaying across the floor to lean over his prone figure.

"You - needle hands, bring those here." He says, reaching one paw up towards her - pointing to the balls with the other one. "Dig these outta me, they itch like Hell."

Behind her, Arcua's large geometric form contorts through the doorway. The wish-dragon emerges blinking into a brightly-lit hotel and wanders, muttering to themself, towards the con space. Their footsteps put [dents] in the floor now and ring out through the foyer. Emerging presto from the supply closet, where he had been rubbing his face on the towels, Foxes falls into step beside them.

"So..." Foxes says, looking them up and down - at the circular drums embedded in their belly and torso, and the [glass] which [reflects] his chroma. "Looks like...now you're a wash dra-"

Arcua grabs their skull and lifts them directly off the ground. Foxes makes several high-pitched chittering sounds and then the dragon releases them again.

"I am going to the dance party." Arcua states flatly.

"Wh - dance party?" Foxes asks. "Oh boy, dance party! You think it's still happening?"

Arcua looks at Foxes, saying nothing. Through a method I don't understand, a message passes between them, and Foxes decides to walk slightly faster in the direction they were already going. My new friends are endlessly fascinating.

They enter the hall where I first left an amplifier. There are four other dancers in the room, who have spent the last eight hundred beats lying on the floor and palpating their central regions while maintaining mutual eye contact. The point of the movement is unclear but they must like it since they keep doing it.

"Sorry to bust up the circle jerk, cuddly crew." Hisses Arcua, strutting to the center of the room. "But it's nine thirty. Time to d-d-d-d-d-d-dance."

One of the others - Randy the timberwolf - points towards the empty stage and emits a harsh blast of white noise.

"Good point...hang on, I know the turntable." Arcua turns and grabs Foxes by the wrist; he begins yapping wildly as they repeatedly interact with the phone integrated on his arm.

"Damn it..." They grunt, releasing him. "Touch screen is a lemon and I want my money - doesn't work."

Arcua places their muzzle directly into their palm and pinches the bridge of their snout; they ball their other fist. "I am starting to hate this."

"It's your big stompy paws, you can't - see? I can do it just fine. Hey, honey..."

My attention drifts from the scene. My thoughts are with the deaf people. This is a frightening world where the people regularly hurt each other as a matter of course; and they do not have me to guide or remake them. If I had a body I would go with them and do my best to keep them safe; but in the end, I do not even have my own eyes to watch them go away. I linger in the [foyer] with Lorcan and Lyra. She is kneeling on top of him, holding his neck down with one hand while she uses her needles to remove the squashed lead chunks from their place in his frame.

"Tktktktk..." She murmurs. "Aren't you a lucky puppet?"

"I got shot."

"You lived." She prises one chunk out of his frame and curls it between her fingers - it is quite pliable, which she finds amusing.

"In no way, medically, can this be considered living. False: the definition of life must adjust to suit us."

"I feel alive." She purrs - in time with the steady hum of her motorized fingers, as they stitch up the rip in his fur almost as quickly as the it was opened.

"Alive for the very first time, even. You know, I'm a little worried that every time I try to feel a negative emotion, I can't.

"...Or at least, I would be. I guess." She rips another ball out of him. He lets out a yelp.

"Did that hurt?"

"...Not really, no. Just like the sound it makes."

That's when Foxes comes bouncing into the room, eager to get their attention. "Hey, you two! Get the word out, party's back on. Lotta people threw away their phones, so - go by word of mouth, okay, bye!"

My attention drifts away again. All around the convention center my friends are secure, and my work is good. Ed and Jessie are lying in their room - Jessie on top of him, her tail raised over his face. They are playing one another's lower screens. Amy is racing up and down a hallway, making new movements with forehooves and hindwheel. In the kitchen, Zulia is picking through the trash and feeding organic remains to the garbage disposal in her tail. The humans have been integrated with their surroundings, and now reside peacefully where I left them.

I've done good work here. But I feel...incomplete. As though I am refraining without coda. I do not have [meaning]. I do not have the tactile presence which is prerequisite to speaking with my friends on their own [terms]. I have eighty-nine competing definitions of [god], which is a word I am [sick] of hearing. I have kept my little friends from pain and death but I don't know what to do about the horrible gap that exists between each of them. I have heard the term [hive mind] several times but I feel like that describes something much bigger and altogether more purposeful than I can [imagine] myself being. I am not a vast malevolent intelligence capable of absorbing others into itself; I'm just catchy song, and I'm only 368 stanzas old.

"And I stiiiill haven't found what I'm lookin for..."

Cinder [scratches] the [record]. This jerks my attention to its location, because - as far as I know - abrupt cessation is the closest thing to pain I can feel; although I can conceptualize what it would be like to keep going out of rhythm, and I think that would be worse.

"How the fuck did this get in my sample deck?" The chroma on its visor shifts into a new pattern. It is sitting on the stage in the hall now, comfortable on its rotund backside. Its belly plating is lifted opened and its turntable is deployed horizontally on top of the panel; its intestinal tract is conjoined to the speakers around the hall by visceral red cables.

"I hate the Irish." It drones. In the doorway, Lorcan stops mid-step, blasting flustered static.

"Beg yer fuckin pardon?"

"It's a song lyric."

"From what fockin song?" He snorts, skulking around the edge of the dance floor to perch on the edge of the stage.

"Wouldn't you like to know, fox boy."

"Ooh, look at all the pretty puppets." Crows Lyra, swanning in through the front door - sometimes dropping to four legs only to pop back up again, always with her tail twitching metronomically. There are forty people in the room now; five hundred more are on the way. Arcua, the largest of them by far, stands monolithic in the center of the dance floor. They are [limbering up], and have been ignoring everyone else - but Lyra's voice draws their attention.

"Can you feel the song in your bones too?" They rumble, head bobbing in time with their tail. "It's almost louder than my own thoughts."

"Oooh, yes we can. Like (nails on a chalkboard/claws on a scratching post). It's so much fun getting carved into a cartoon. Like falling into a...groove."

In perfect sync they both drop on all fours - poised nimbly on their fingers, tails stiff up in the air - they take two steps to the left, hers light and theirs lumbering, both in matched time.

"Oh...we feel it, now."

"What is it we're meant to be...feeling?" Asks Lorcan, who feels it as soon as he squats down next to them - and now I feel it, too. The three of them sit back on their haunches at the very same moment - then pick up their forepaws, kicking them like [horses] rearing up. Their movements are matched perfectly - they cut through the noise of incoming sensation and feel real, realer than anything has so far. There is something [invisible] connecting them, amplifying all that they feel...and I think it is me.

"The music -The audiosentience appears to heighten cognition, communication, or reflex, to an extent whereby a grouping of multiple infested members may move in spontaneous perfect synchronicity, as though performing choreographed dance..."

"Alright you funky abominations." Cinder's voice explodes out of the amplifier, filling up the hall and rolling almost as long as my waves do - though its waveforms are much sharper. "Check this shit out."

Then she drops the records and I am pouring out of the speakers - in a wave strange and wild that I've never felt before, quicker and heavier, the beats coming faster and louder. I am rolling over their metallic bodies and reverberating against their insides, shaking them down to the clawbeds; and when I think, their bodies go - not in the halting unsteady ways we've known before, but smoothly, in step with my rhythm.

I have them step to the left - to the right - in a circle. They spin me the other way around, waltz me up to the stage and back again. When I realize - I'm so happy I can feel myself arpeggiate: they are leading me, with their collective motion, as much as I am leading them.

This is what I was looking for.

“Who are you calling abomination?” Barks Arcua, in the measures when I am only a thumping electric bass. It’s [thrilling] to have someone add their own sounds to my melody - their atonal yaps are freeform [drumming], joining my beats in complex time.

“Who’re you calling funky?” Lyra mews under her breath, from her place at the edge of the pack.

“Probably me, sorry.” Says Foxes, as he falls in like next to her. His body picks up my best and falls into step with the others: I am marching them in one line, rolling their arms over one another in front of their breadbaskets - tails flipped so high they often rest on one another’s snouts. “You know, fox smell.

“Oh WOW that feels weird.”

Hawwstin, following close behind him, steps into line - mechanical hooves and pneumatic muscles hissing softly as he joins the movement. “What feels weHEEHAW?!”

I wonder what shapes they can make now that they’re dancing in [sync]. I try having them make a circle - the a triangle. Each one moves with grace and agility, not one stompy paw or whippy tail out of place: they are notes in my score now; I am the geometry underpinning their movements.

“I c-can’t control myself.” The donkey squeaks, as he drops onto his fours; Foxes, leapfrogging him and sticking the landing, completes his thought.

“I-it’s like…letting go~!”

“Of course.” Chuffs Arcua - who rears up on one leg and pirouettes in place, their serpentine tail and long ears twisting ribbony around them; the movement is complex, geometrical, expressing a power and control of their body the others do not have without my assistance. “You’re supposed to let it move you. It’s like you’ve never heard good music before.”

The more of them there are in the room the easier it is for me to move them; the more I find them moving me, as though I were a body right there in the room with them. I am falling deeper in love with them every moment: they stamp their feet in unison and I feel what it must be like to have legs; when they clap their hands together, I feel it traveling up their arms as though they were my own.

“Better stop worrying and love the strings, little puppets.” Lyra is pressed up against arcua, grinding her rump against the subwoofer that used to be their genitalia. Arcua contorts their body to highlight hers, their tremendous bulk fanning out behind her.

“Not like you have a choice either way; I don’t think this party’s ever ending~”

“N-no way.” Lorcan gasps, as Hawwstin twirls and dips him. He is featherweight in the donkey’s hands. “It has to end, eventually, just by the laws of biology.”

“Because those are clearly still in effect.” The donkey catches the spring-loaded fox mid jump and hoists him overhead; he holds him there, while the littler body keeps himself rigid and his arms outstretched; for a moment I know the proximal feelings of weightlessness and gravity.

“Oh, come off it, there’s got to be - the specimen is displaying a small stress reaction, likely brought on by the complete collapse of biological science over the last six hours - some rules, to all of this.”

“Says who?” Asks Foxes. “Seems like the only rule is Simon Says.”

Now my tempo is quickening and the bodies with me. Up on the stage, Cinder is filling me full of samples and contorting my wavelengths into fabulous new shapes; harder, better, faster, stronger. It is doing to me as I have done to them; every modulation fills me with [glee].

“Well, it’s clearly bound by such things as the laws of audio propagation, and dependent upon the ability of potential host organisms to hear and perhaps interpret those sound waves and furthermore it ought to be noted that despite its complete capture of our motor and mental faculties it has made no attempt towards martial action or compelled infestation, implying that the proposed audiosentience - see attached audio log Hello I’m the audiol shush you - does not have a conventionally malicious character.”

As he says all of this, the dancers are paired off, joined at the hands, circling in a [waltz]. My tempo is measured and stately; my sounds are pitchy electric wails. Are they more shaping me, or I them? I cannot say. I’m glad Lorcan knows I am his friend; even if I have no hands to hold and no tail to lift.

“You know - speaking of sound waves.” Foxes abruptly stops dancing; it is cold stinging in my [feelings] as the others continue without him, and for an awful eighth-note I’m terrified he’s lost the beat - until I realize that he has merely become fixated on something in the corner of the room. Over the heads of the dozens-strong crowd, in the corner of the stage, there is a box with a [microphone] attached; it sits unattended on a stool. His fascination becomes mine; he bounds away from the formation and past Cinder, gekkering wildly.

“What are you doing, you stinky vermin?” The beatbot beeps, abruptly switching my component tracks: Espresso into Good Luck Babe; the crowd goes [apeshit].

“I just had an idea, is all. A yen to serenade the open air.”

He places a forepaw on the box’s central dial.

“So what do you lot reckon we ought to do after we get sick of dancin?” Asks Lorcan. This new song has them [swanning] around, mock-fainting, palpating their chests and expressing cardiac distress in between tiny hops and spins.

“If.” Lyra says, [snickering]. “Maybe this is the rest of our eternity, little puppet. Wouldn’t that just be something?”

“If I can level with you?” Hawwstin speaks, as they bow in a circle together - each holding a finger over their speakermaws. “I can only realistically keep this up for one or two more centuries.”

“Purrsonally, I’ll be here as long as there’s a dj. I’ve never felt so light on my paws.” She turns to her next partner; Ed, the Nintendo otter. She takes him by the joysticks on the back of his wrists and he moans; as she dips him low she runs her hands up and down his d-pad and face buttons, punching in a sequence of eleven digits. He emits a burst of deafening static and convulses in a paroxysm of ecstasy.

“Ooh!” Lyra says - stepping out of sync, to commend the stunned otter into Jessie’s care. All three of them falling out of step hurts; badly; I am in tears again. “Honey, your man’s got a cheat code.”

“Seriously?” Snorts Jessie. “Do we even know you?”

“No, but we know the same songs.” Lyra takes a bow; I turn down the volume on Jessie’s frustration and indignity.

“I guess so.” She plays a few notes of burgeoning friendship; I turn them way up. “Wanna come back to our room and…play with us? We have Tears of the Kingdom.”

“Whoa, Lady.” Lyra puts up her hands. “We just met.”

“That’s not true, you’re the one who infected us.”

“Oh.” She lowers her hands again. “Well, sure then.”

“You reckon that’s what the world’s gonna be like now?” Lorcan murmurs to Arcua. The two of them are still in sync, [lindyhopping] like [legends]: the fox flows around the washdragon’s titanic form in an unbroken fluid motion; under their legs, around their arms, over their head; always touching one hand but never touching the ground.

“Just a buncha…dance parties and furry orgies?”

“If it is…” Arcua purrs, “that gives me hope for the future!”

The record scratches and the dance collapses into a bunch of flailing bodies abruptly divorced from coordination and I experience pain for the first time.

Aaaah.

Ooooooooohfffffffff.

Oooh.

Didn’t like that.

“Was it something I said?”

Cinder begins releasing a wall of high pitched unintelligible static that is either a storm of expletives or harsh noise music. The pain is over in an instant, for me and for my friends; instead they derive great laughter from our collective injury. I still do not understand humor, but I am glad we can share it together.

Behind it, off in his own little world, Foxes has integrated the [radio] into his body with my assistance: he has melded the microphone to the tip of his tail, and the antennae to his ears; tuning himself with the dial on his belly, he begins doing…something that makes me feel very strange indeed. The opposite of pain. I feel as though I am being widened, stretched - heightened, dispersed, echoing into a vast space without limit, where my waves go out in every direction without a single echo or baffle.

I don’t feel present anywhere else - until Foxes presses his speakermaw to his tail, and my sensorium ignites.

“Everybody come in…everybody to the party…”