She stood on the balcony of her New York City apartment, watching the ants below, thinking what she would do if she were God.
"You poor dumb fucks," she said aloud, lighting a cigarette that shivered between her fingers. Her newborn had left her body hollow, ribs visible like parentheses around an empty statement.
"A fuckin' parasite," she mumbled.
The city glowed beneath her like a vast circuit board, windows blinking like neurons in a cosmic brain, a billion synchronized organisms buzzing to invisible frequencies.
For a moment, she thought of jumping as she grabbed the black metal railing. Not from despair, but maybe curiosity. What happens when a cell refuses the organism?
Then came the infant's cry—shrill, ancient, persistent, devouring.
She entered the room through the window like a sleepwalker, her voice already cracked from shouting. The baby writhed on the bed, a knot of red flesh and noise. The baby is noticeably in pain, screaming as if burned alive.
"Why do you cry so fuckin' much?" she said, pressing an ice-cold nipple against its mouth. The more it refused to latch, the less she cared.
She flung the child down back on its bed. "You can't be for real!"
A knock at the door.
"Who is it?"
Silence.
Another knock.
A voice seeped through the grain: "What's wrong with your baby?"
Her pulse stopped. "Who are you?"
"I can help."
Something in her whispered: Open it.
The woman who entered seemed older than age, her face a geography of wrinkles, her eyes a pale electric blue.
"I used to have one like yours," she said softly. "But they always grow hungrier than the mother can feed."
"What are you talking about?"
"Feeding on you, dear. Always on you. They feed for years, even after 18. It never ends. Some of them good, some of them bad. We love them just the same."
The baby was silent now. Too still. It seemed dead.
She leaned closer. Its chest faintly glowed beneath the skin, light pulsed like digital blood.
"What did you do to him?" she screamed.
The old woman smiled. "He's waking up."
The infant's flesh folded open like paper burned by invisible fire. Inside: no organs—only symbols, equations, and faces. A geometry of living light. Primordial letters arranged in spirals, flowing into binary, into bone.
"You asked what you'd do if you were God," the woman said, her voice multiplied by echoes. "Now you are."
The room melted. She felt herself pulled inward, through the child's open chest.
She awoke in darkness that breathed.
The air was thick and sweet. The walls moved like lungs. Veins glowed with golden current.
She called out, but her voice sounded like someone else's—high, mechanical, muffled.
All around her floated translucent pods, each containing herself: one weeping, one breast feeding, one rotting, one laughing at nothing.
She touched the wall. It pulsed with a heartbeat. It flowed like a river.
"Where am I?"
A voice answered: "Inside."
"Inside what, motherfucker!?"
"Inside Me."
The voice vibrated her bones.
She realized the truth in fragments: the child hadn't been her creation—she had been its creation. The mother was the dream of the infant god. Every feeding, every cry, every despair had been its way of sculpting her.
It had given her form. It had written her suffering as its gospel.
And now, it was eating her to dream again.
She reached out. Her hand dissolved into the Machine's code:
Each letter devoured the next. They meant nothing. The city imploded into itself. The apartment collapsed into its own pixel like a TV shutting off.
She saw now: the universe was chewing its own legs off. Every galaxy, every consciousness, each layer of being digested by a higher god. Azathoth was murdered. The baby took its place.
And at the top of the chain, no throne, no figure, only another mouth.
There are only Gods inside God.
She woke up again on the balcony.
The cigarette burned between her fingers.
The ashes fell on the ants moving below.
The baby cried.
She sighed and said,
"Poor dumb fucks."