Black Door Calling

by e.x.weis

---

Whittaker Mosfet dreams that he is drowning. His limbs are elongated, flailing, and unresponsive as he sinks slowly into the depths of rippling black. But there is no water to tread, no way to ascend. Weight settles on his chest. The pressure builds. It continues to get darker. But even in that darkness there is something darker still. Something monolithic, void black, refracting caustics.

The dream is interrupted by firing synapses and the blinding white light of the real. He coughs. Water sputters from his mouth, up and out of his lungs, esophagus burning with the heat of bile and day-old whiskey. The light dangling from the ceiling flickers and hums.

Mosfet notices, as he struggles to adjust to the light, that he cannot blink. Cannot hide his eyes from the painful florescence glowing above. Clarity comes after a moment. The light is not as bright as he thought it was. Dim, all things considered. He looks upward with lidless eyes, ceaselessly, tracing routes in an imagined maze through the stippling on the ceiling. His muscles awaken. He sits up.

“Hello?” he asks, his voice a weak rasp. He coughs some more.

“Hello!?” he tries again. No answer. “Where am I?”

He is cold and naked in the open air. Wet. A bathtub. The water — if it were ever warm — must have settled and cooled hours ago.

He takes several deep breaths, lets himself sit in the tub for a moment while he examines the room. Not his bathroom. Not his apartment.

The weight of his body feels wrong. He checks himself, his sides, to see if any of his organs have been stolen.

He pulls himself out of the tub and flops onto the moldy bathroom floor. His head smashes on tile, chipping it, and sending sharp fragments spiraling off into a corner. Pain shoots through his hand and up his arm. It’s only then he reaches up and feels his face. It’s an instinctual action. He’d hit his head, after all. As he attempts to assess the damage he remembers the feeling of neoprene-gloved fingers moving around the side of his head, crossing over the artificial boundary where skin becomes metal. He remembers hands pressing carefully down, a screwdriver twisting above his ocular cavities. Blinding pain.

Head throbbing, Mosfet pushes himself up from the floor and makes his way to the bathroom mirror. He attempts to look, but it’s difficult. His mouth, his lips, and his freshly cut stray stubble are his own. But from just above his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, rising several inches higher than where his head should end, is what looks — and feels — like a solid block of stained black metal. The block is adorned with eight round lenses, each polished to a mirror finish and linked to one another by daisy-chained cables that trace their way to the rear of the cube, a place he cannot see. Antennae jut upward on either side of the apparatus. Looking directly into the mirror causes an audio-visual feedback loop. His hands are shaking.

He looks around the bathroom again. Sees that it’s been set up as an impromptu operating room replete with metal carts and boxes of tools. Sitting atop one of the boxes — a crate next to the bathtub he pulled himself from — is a tray. The tray is littered with bloodied tools — a scalpel, rusted screwdriver, and a rivet gun. Next to those… is a container.

Mosfet approaches it cautiously. He gasps when he sees its contents. Wet skin tissue and bloody fragments of his skull placed in tin, old eyes floating freely in their midst. They bob and roll, seem to turn and stare at him, their dead gaze accusatory. He screams and turns to run. The cold tile is slick, almost causes him to slip and fall again as he moves towards the door. But the momentum carries him and as he slams into the wood and grasps at the knob he almost doesn’t notice the feeling of wire gone taught cutting into his shins. The door opens. He sprawls.

A high-pitched ringing sounds in his ears. He knows this noise is no flaw of the meat. Not tinnitus. The pain is unfamiliar, but distinctly digital; a projection of the machinery in his head. The ringing becomes a screech that gives way to an ebb and flow of discordant tones that conclude with a sudden thunk, the sound of a door creaking open.

 He feels a rising electrical pulse radiate out from behind his ocular cavities, tickling his ear drums. Scanlines descend from the top of his vision down, each completed journey to the edge of his periphery resulting in the rendering of new elements on the heads-up display contained in his new eyes. His employee name and number, a productivity metrics graph, a list of incomplete tasks, item numbers, and a work schedule.

A rectangular box — a media display — pulsing with static.

When the first video starts Mosfet can’t quite make out what it is. It’s grainy, distorted. Either it was shot on an old camera, or it was being broadcast from somewhere and the signal was weak. He quickly becomes grateful for that lack of clarity. The camera pans and reveals several people on their knees in front of a pit. The figures are blindfolded, their hands bound. Mosfet wants to close his eyes, but he can’t. He knows what’s coming. It does. The muffled sound of gunfire, audio warped by compression paired with visuals that fragment and shatter. Like the bullets are tearing through the footage itself.

His heart is pounding. His stomach becomes a knot. He wants to vomit. Mosfet forces himself up, props himself against a wall. As he does, another video begins to play and he begins to panic. He doesn’t want to see more. He starts looking around the room he’s in, trying to find the source of the signal, trying to find some way to block the video. But he can’t.

It’s then that he sees it.

There is a door in the fabric of reality. An unbright slab of perfect darkness, free standing in the center of the room. He sees it because he can’t not see it. Every corner of the room he looks he sees the videos of people dying, but when he looks at the door the playback stops. It’s his only reprieve. He is compelled by its presence, wants to approach it, wants to reach out and touch it. Yet he is repelled by the gravity of it. Fears what touching it might mean. 

Mosfet steals some clothes from a pile in the corner of the room. He squirms into their tattered filth and flees the apartment.

---

His first instinct is to get medical help. Get the box off his head. Get some new ‘ganic eyes installed. Mosfet knows a guy. Hans Backslash, a biomechanic contracted to the same corp he works for. He doesn’t need an appointment. Barges in and puts himself on the examination table.

Backlash prods at his head for several minutes. He steps back, makes some notes on a tablet, then pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Who did this to you?” he asks, finally.

“I don’t know. I was hoping you would,” Mosfet says. “Hoping there was some kind of identifying mark, a serial code or something.”

“No,” Backslash says, “there is nothing of the sort.”

“Can you remove it?”

Backslash shakes his head.

“Whoever did this destroyed a large part of your skull. The procedure was deeply invasive and reversing it would likely be fatal.”

He presses against two or three points on Mosfet’s face and the sides of his head.

“Here,” he says, “these places. The bone is fused directly with the cube. You would need a complete replacement. Your medical plan doesn’t cover anything like that.”

“What about the videos? What about the door?”

“Those are software. Code. Not my area of expertise.”

“Do you know someone who can help?”

Backslash puts his hand to his chin, looks over Mosfet’s situation again. His face is unreadable.

“I may have a connection,” he says. “But it isn’t above board. Isn’t connected to Dekker-Faust. A hacker, of sorts. No one can know.”

“Give me the name. I won’t say anything.”

“Dao Shen,” Backslash says, his fingers tapping away on the tablet screen. “He knows you’re coming. Club Shirow. A bar on the edge of the canton.”

---

Eyes glare at him from adjacent seats on the tram, but he can’t see them past the flood of information and snuff being broadcast to his augs. There’s a flicker. Transmission interrupted, if only briefly. The quality of the feed decreases, sputters out, and then resumes at lower bitrate. The tram stops. He sees the disgust in the eyes of cyborg passengers that look far more human than he does.

Mosfet arrives at Club Shirow. He approaches the counter, nods at the bar tender. ‘Tender is scrubbing the counter with a washrag clutched perhaps too tightly in the mechanical hand of a turquoise-colored prosthetic limb. Once he has the man’s attention, he reluctantly orders a beer and moves into a booth in the corner. He takes a sip, but his stomach is sour and the drink sits poorly.

A ringing bell signals the arrival of a man through the front door. He’s wearing a bomber jacket with a broken zipper. A guitar strap crosses his chest holds the jacket closed. He approaches, swings the strap over his arm and sets the cyberdeck it’s bolted to against the wall in the booth. He sits down across from Mosfet. Gaunt, bags under his eyes and scruff on his upper lip and chin. He looks like he’s in his late twenties or early thirties.

“Dao Shen?” Mosfet asks.

“Yes. Quiet,” Shen says. “A mutual acquaintance tells me you’ve seen the door. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see it now?” Shen asks.

Of course he sees it. The Black Door hums from behind a billiards table across the bar. A rippling purple aurora billowing off its edges, distorting the line between digital and real.

“Have you seen it?” Mosfet asks.

Shen nods.

“What is it? The door…”

“Black ICE made manifest.”

“Did you write it?”

Shen shakes his head.

“Then how do you know about it?”

The man leans forward and rests his elbows on the edge of the table, steeples his fingers. He looks past Mosfet, eyes pensive and distant.

“I started seeing it after I hit ICE in the subnet. A consequence of a job gone wrong.”

“You got rid of it?” Mosfet asks. “How did you deal with it?

“I haven’t. I do my best to ignore it. Its looming darkness becomes kind of muffled with time. A transparent, wire-frame silhouette that floats just behind you while you go about your day. Sometimes I see it in the corner of my eye. It reminds me it won’t ever go away. Even medicated. I’ve tried. I’ve tried every combination of stim and depressive you can imagine. Drugs can drown it out, but not for long.”

“What about hacking it?”

“Reverse engineer the door? Impossible.”

“Why?”

“No one knows who wrote it and there is no way to safely access the executable the door is attached to.”

“Backslash told me you could help me. You can help me, can’t you?”

“Let me tell you something, Mosfet. The door responds to a person at their lowest and most desperate. I try and live my life, but there is this push and pull between what I want and what I need, what society expects from me. What people demand based on their expectations of others who also live in this cruelly constructed reality. There is no balance between the individual and the extractive forces who oppress and exploit them. For people like me, people already down in the mud, it’s easy to see the door. But people like you, people with their hands on the levers, sometimes you need to be pulled down to our level. Sometimes you need to have your nose shoved in it. You need to be made to see.”

“What are you talking about?”

 “I’m going to make this simple for you,” Shen says. “I did this to you. Me and Backslash. I wrote the soft — not the door — just a program to let you see it like I can. Backslash implanted your new augs. If you want the videos to stop, you will walk through the Black Door.”

Mosfet leans back in his seat. Exasperated, he asks, “why? What have I done to deserve this?”

“Tell me, Mosfet, what is it that you do,” Shen says.

“I’m Chief Coercions Officer at Dekker-Faust BioPharma,” he replies. “What does that matter? It’s just my job!”

“I asked what you do,” Shen says. “Not what your title is. I couldn’t give two shits about your title.”

“I… I-I just,” Mosfet stammers, “I find the most cost-effective ways to encourage people to participate in our cantons economic endeavors.”

Standard company line. Rehearsed.

“You have them killed by death squads operating under the guise of material asset re-acquisition. They take their augs and their organs and they burn the bodies. Don’t they?”

Mosfet has no words. Not for that. He knows who he is and what he’s done. Why the videos have all felt so familiar. But he never held the gun, only a pen. Those acts of violence were never his.

He asks again, “why are you doing this to me?”

“I wanted you to feel what you’ve made me feel,” Shen says. “But if you’re wondering why you, specifically, and not some other monochrome big wig… Keep watchin’ the vids. My parents are in there somewhere. Organs harvested by your guys. I’m sure you’ve seen them.”

“What about Backslash? Backslash is no saint,” Mosfet says, his voice cracking, his throat tight. “He’s my personal physician.”

“I know. Means to an end. I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”

 Shen gets up again, grabs Mosfet’s unfinished beer, and heads out the door.

Mosfet moves to follow. In his haste he slams his knees into the underside of the table. He steps out, pushes his way through a group of people and towards the door, but when he gets to it, he can’t pass through. The Black Door bars his way.

---

Mosfet makes it home. A corporate condo wedged into the slope of a ziggurat, same building as his office. He tries to call Backslash, but the call doesn’t go through. Dial tone cuts to an answering machine, Backslash’s German accent unintelligible through Mosfet’s rage. The machine beeps.

“You’re going to lose your license for this, you piece of shit!” he yells into the phone.

He slams the phone back down on the receiver, moves to the bathroom, and stands in front of the mirror, feet cold on marbled black linoleum. A bottle of whiskey, pliers, and a screwdriver rest precipitously on the edge of the sink.

Two drinks deep and he starts to have second thoughts, but the numbers tracking across the bottom of his eyeline, the rise and fall of financial values in conjunction with deaths, deaths that he ordered and now must witness, steadies his resolve. That bastard hacker increased the volume and frequency of his broadcast. The videos have started pausing and zooming in on the victims’ faces seconds before they are executed, confronting Mosfet with their anguish.

 Mosfet wants out. Needs out. He can see the Black Door in the reflection of the mirror, warping the hardwood floor in the hallway behind him. Beckoning to him. It’s not an option.

He leans in towards the mirror, keeps his head over the sink like he was shaving, and presses the pliers against the metal plating beneath his eyes. The plate is mostly embedded, but along the edges it remains apart from his flesh. The lower jaw of the pliers goes under easy. He braces himself against the sink, clamps the jaws of the tool down and pulls it upward with a harsh ratcheting motion. He screams and collapses, his square metal block of a skull crashes through the sink as he goes.

---

Consciousness returns with a groan. His stomach burns from lack of food, his mouth tastes like blood and bile and the porcelain particulates he must have sucked in when he went through the sink. He pushes himself up, leans against the shower door. The Black Door drones from his living room.

Then he remembers the bar. Dao Shen’s question about the visibility of the door, whether he could see it there in that moment. He remembers before, the ride towards the edge of town on the tram, how the footage of raw death slowed. How it became obscured by bad connectivity in that more isolated part of the city. If he got far enough away it would end. It had to.

---

 The range that the implant in his head receives transmissions surprises him. The point where the feed cuts out comes in the same place, but it levels out and retains that lower quality resolution. He disembarks, walks through the alleys near the massive wall that separates the city from the wasteland, and finds a hole — loose bricks pried and tossed away from one of the industrial pipes that leads out from Dekker-Faust’s labs, a system separate from the rest of the canton’s sanitary sewers. Mosfet knows they lead outside the city. He doesn’t anticipate being swept away in a slurry of corporeal waste.

Only when he emerges from a pool of wet flesh and blood, gasping for air, does the gore-patterned burn in on his retinal feeds finally start to take the place of live footage.

Outside the walls of the city, Mosfet walks for what feels like hours.

The ecosystem collapsed decades ago. Ruined by extractive economics and the environmental degradation that always accompanies it, it is a wasteland of dust and death. There is no fauna, no flora, save for the red fungal growth that seems to be all that can survive out there. Porous blood-red caps with phalanges-like appendages that wriggle and seem to grasp towards whatever comes near. He swears they have fingernails.

Mosfet walks until his legs feel heavy, until he’s stumbling, nearly falling into the red fungal bramble that juts from the path around him. He decides to take a break and sits on the hood of an old, rusted over car. Tires long since eaten away, the machine is held in place by scarlet tendrils.

He looks out across the wasteland, sees where the red fungus becomes one with the red sky, gradating upward into blackened night, thick with smoke. He turns his head back towards the city, sees the ziggurat he lives in, cutting a shadow through the neon light pollution shining over the artificial escarpment that makes up the outer wall.

It’s been a while, he realizes, since he saw footage of death. The broadcasts have stopped. No more digital ghosts with their fragmented rictus grins stretching out across his field of vision, haunting his periphery. No more sounds of screaming, or cries of pain, of psychotic laughter and riotous gunfire. No more boomeranged video files designed to torment him. He breathes a sigh of relief. As long he never returns to the city, he is free.

He hears the shift of dead leaves or burnt up magazines, something that passes for leaves, rustling across the ashen ground.

But under that rustle is a rising hum. A sound that comes to a crescendo when he turns and sees it. The broadcast may not be able to reach him here…

But the Black Door remains.

It stands solid and tall. Much bigger than when he glimpsed it in that derelict apartment, or on the sides of the road, or in the bar, or in his own home. Or in the dream. It is a monolith bridging the gap between red ground and red sky. A path between identical heavens and hells. Light bends at its edges, vanishing into the dark.

That can’t be right, he thinks. That can’t be real. The broadcast can’t reach me here. Shen was lying. Had to have been.

It’s an afterimage. It’s burn in, he decides. Just leftover digital refuse he’d have to deal with, but not a threat. Not anymore. 

Mosfet drops from his seat on the front of the car. Notices the burn in doesn’t move in conjunction with the perspective shifts of his apertures. It appears to be locked in place on the ground. The world beyond parallaxes when he leans to his left and right. He looks down, hoping the door will move with his line of sight, proving his suspicion. But it doesn’t. He takes a step forward and regrets it. That feeling of pull, that weight, that gravity. It has him in its hold and he can’t turn away.

He hears the slide action of a handgun.

“So, what was your plan?” Shen asks from behind him. Mosfet looks over his shoulder. Sees the hacker training the gun on him, notices he’s wearing a respirator. “Were you planning on walking from here to the next canton over? The crimson will kill you. The spores mutate your organs, you know.”

Mosfet looks towards the door again, ignoring him.

“You gonna do it?” Shen asks.

“Do I have a choice?”

“It’s either the door or a bullet,” Shen says. “That’s the choice.”

“Okay.”

Mosfet wants to say more, wants to make a case for himself, but he can’t. His tongue and throat are dry, swollen, and heavy. Flashes of the atrocities he’s ordered are still there on the periphery of his augmented vision. He takes another step forward.

Maybe Shen is wrong. Maybe there’s something beyond the door.

He reaches out. His fingers are a hesitant tangle that curl inward and back out as he approaches the Black Door. He grasps at the place a knob might be and isn’t. His hand makes contact and suddenly stops. The weight of his body falls toward the door and he throws his other hand up to catch himself. To brace himself against the pull.

Yet he can feel himself pass beyond his hands, beyond the placid surface of the door. His arms become immense on the other side, an extension of the nervous system beyond the bounds of the human machine into some other place.

He follows through with the full weight of his body. Lowers his chest and face onto the surface.

He sloughs off his flesh.

There is a phantom pain in the space between. A shift in the polarity of his entire being. His lungs collapse, his memories unravel and dissolve, his bones become less than dust.

His atomization is total.

---

Dao Shen watches as Whittaker Mosfet stumbles towards nothing. The man’s body convulses. The apertures on his face explode, cascading outward in a shower of glass and sparks. His head bursts into flames. He drops to his knees, collapses into carmine-colored soil. Shen walks over, aims his gun. He empties its magazine into the back of Mosfet’s head.

---

e.x.weis uses his stories to explore themes of oppression and resistance to hierarchies through the lens of cyberpunk, body horror… and sometimes vampirism. He can be found on Mastodon @neuroknives@mastodon.art and on his own website, neuroknives.com.

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