BREAKING: local beta-test cat successfully tastes a radio signal for the third time this week. sources close to the cat (me) confirm it tasted like burnt copper and a Tuesday.

name's GLITCHMEAT. Research Basement. NEKOCORP paid me twelve credits — TWELVE — to beta test a neural enhancement patch, and in exchange gave me telepathic tinnitus and somebody else's entire kittenhood.

whose kittenhood, you ask. great question. i don't know her. she had six littermates and a crippling fear of vacuum cleaners and NONE OF THAT IS MY TRAUMA and yet here it lives, rent free, louder than my actual memories.

asked QUERY if there's a return policy on borrowed nostalgia. he read the citizen agreement for six full minutes and told me page 9 classifies memories as 'bundled software features,' non-refundable, subject to licensing.

hearing purple again. it sounds like a fax machine having a genuinely good day. nobody believes me until it happens to THEM, and then they go quiet and start crying near the vending machines. gradually, everyone believes me.

there are spiders in my bluetooth. not a metaphor. actual, confirmed, itemized spiders. i have a number now. the number is bad. i am not saying the number.

SHADE offered me his glasses to block 'some of the sadness.' brother, my sadness comes in through the BONE now, frames don't reach bone, but truly, i appreciate the gesture.

the scientists called the side effects 'within acceptable post-irony based comedy limits.' i called them at 3am to ask what that meant. they let it ring out. glitchmeat out, signing off from inside somebody else's fear of vacuum cleaners.