Glitch
A Promptoberfest story
© 2024 by Walter Reimer

Thumbnail art by  tegerio

Prompt: coincide


The day had been going by pretty nicely until I received an urgent call from the other voices in my head, empaneled as the Executive Committee.

“Yeah,” I asked, “what do you want? I’m busy.”

“You need to see this,” the septipartite voice said in a worried tone.

That intrigued me, so I switched on my Inner Eye Cam.

My ears went back. “Oh. Well, that’s certainly unexpected.”

What met my gaze was a hideous amalgam of flesh and fur. There were maybe seven tails – well, I could count seven; there were a lot more – along with various limbs sticking out at odd angles along with heads and various other parts, including various breasts and penises. There were enough eyes and mouths to qualify it as either a Hindu deity or something H.P. Lovecraft might have imagined.

It was trying to say something in several hundred voices, but all that was coming out was a high-pitched, squeaky gibber combined with ululations in a sliding vocal scale from soprano to basso profundo.

“Hmm,” I hmmed. It sensed I was looking at it, and it writhed in a rather odd way. “Okay,” I said to the Executive Committee, “I know what it is.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “Sure. I’ve been giving the Muse such a workout that all of her Aspects have manifested simultaneously. And, since you really can’t have two entities inhabit the same space at the same time – “

“Ah,” the Committee said. “What do you propose doing to fix it? She seems to be in pain.”

“She’s not. Just confused. Put her in a dark place for a few days, and she’ll eventually calm down enough to start dissociating.”

“Gotcha.” At the Executive Committee’s direction, several of the Monkeys and a few servitor beasts shoved the Muse into a neural lacuna and closed the door.

“Anything else?” I asked the Committee.

“Nope, that seems about it,” they said, and I was back at my keyboard.

I glanced at the readers. “The Muse just needs a few days. She’ll be fine.”


end