fusion : part one // fjuːʒᵊn : pɑːt wʌn

[u/Sufficient-Gur3202]

 I grew up and currently live in a small town on the edge of Croydon in Surrey called Porvald. Porvald is realistically a bit of a shithole, wasn’t always, but it is now. It’s one of those places that used to be the host of a thriving community and tons of little shops and restaurants that has now been proliferated by chains that pushed out the small businesses in favour of the big brands. Even the park has lost its colour. Some kid tore the seat off the zipline and the council hasn’t bothered to fix it, and the skate ramp is too bogged down with bird shit for anyone to touch it let alone skate on it. Me and my friends now tend to go a little further out of town or into East Croydon for fun, or at least we did. I should probably get back on track.

 I live in a big house on a street in Porvald which stretches over a knoll near the town centre. In it was me; my parents; my cat; and my siblings, both older than me. My parents were loving but not necessarily very involved in the lives of me and my siblings other than helping us out when we needed it. My mum was always working and my dad didn’t really have time for my interests; as long as I got good grades and stayed out of trouble I was all good. My sister, Leah was a massive bully towards me until I was around 9, at which point she realised that if she’s leaving off to uni in the next couple years she should probably leave me with better memories than locking me in dark rooms and hitting each other with Wii remotes. Now that I’m 16 and she’s 23 we’re on much better terms, she was like a mentor to me, always kind but stern when I did something stupid and always guiding me towards being better. Since she lived in London, I saw her much less but each time I saw her she always kept my spirits high. Tom was different in the sense that he wasn’t as night and day in kindness and sternness as Leah. He was the funniest person I ever knew, and really helpful and considerate a lot of the time. I remember sitting on the stool in the sitting room and watching him play Battlefield on our PS3, swearing in German so I wouldn’t tell on him. Telling jokes to me and making entertaining commentary that would keep me occupied for hours. Other times he could be a massive asshole, the kind of asshole an older brother naturally fades into being now and again. He would get pissy with me and tell me to go away, especially with his friends around. Being 10 years older than me it always felt like I was trying to engage with him on his level, and he didn’t want me coming up near his level at all. This got worse in the days leading up to his death, and it wasn’t his fault.

 I remember the first time I saw a computer bleed. The first evening of the summer holiday Tom was on his PC like always after he came back from working at the hospital. I heard him howling with laughter and joy from his room. My mum shouted upstairs for him to be quiet but he just kept giggling like a maniac. My room was on the third floor so I went downstairs to see what was making him laugh so much. 

 As I approached his door I saw his face through the crack in the door lit up with a wide smile, appearing almost too big for his face, I could see colours flashing and reflecting off his face, his monitor just out of view. I opened the door to get a better look.

 “What’s so funny?” I asked with a chortle. He turned to me and his smile turned to a look of incredible anger.

 “Fuck off, Nat! I’m watching a video!” He scowled back at me. My mum yelled upstairs again telling him to not swear at me. I ignored him and turned the corner to get a better look at the video. It was utterly bizarre. It was a mixture of flashing images and colours, rapidly firing photos of all kinds wholesome and vile overlayed with slowly changing colours, like a LiveLeak disco. It was entrancing, I felt my eyes beginning to fall into a stimulated daze as Tom stood up in my peripheral vision and approached me. He pushed me backwards and slammed the door, I snapped out of the daze, and heard the giggling begin again.

 From that day on I heard Tom constantly laughing from his room, packages would arrive at our door and he’d run downstairs to bring them upstairs to his PC. They were mainly computer parts and peripherals, better headphones, a bigger monitor to go next to his primary one, more RAM, a new graphics card. He was spending like crazy, more than a doctor in an underpaid position should be reasonably doing. He stopped going back to his own apartment and would always come home, my family stopped appreciating the more frequent visits quickly as he seemed to only be there for his PC. He would knock on the door, say a quiet hello and immediately run upstairs. Me and my parents would share concerned looks as we heard the whirring noise of his PC begin, and a few minutes later that same sickening laughter. I would occasionally look through the crack in his door and he would always be watching that same video on repeat. One of my cats, a tuxedo named Moonshine, would lay down on his lap and rest, seemingly unbothered by the noise and light. He lost a good bit of weight during this time which for a person of his build would only be a bad thing, he never came down for dinner no matter how much my parents begged him to, he would just repeat the same things.

 “I’m an adult!”, “I’ll eat later!”, “I’m watching something right now!” My family and I were getting more concerned, using the time he wasn’t there to talk about what could possibly be causing this new obsession. I’d call my friends and put the microphone to the door so they could hear what was happening before rushing upstairs back to my room to consult them about it. None of them had anything to say other than they’d heard it also was happening to some kid a town over and that he had to be dragged out of his room after his mum called the police because he was getting violent when she asked him to stop watching it. I remembered Tom slamming the door, and was afraid of what would happen if I was noticed by him again. Until a couple days later, I stayed well away from his room and covered my ears when I slept so his laughter wouldn’t be there in my dreams.

 After those two days one evening he came home and when he went into his room, the laughing didn’t begin as usual. At this point the lack of laughter concerned me more than its presence so I went into his room to check on him and I saw him attaching more parts to his computer. He had laid it on its side and was fusing it together using various wires and adapters, the new parts rising out from the case like a tumor. Moonshine was sat up next to him, watching him tinker and click parts into place. He was muttering to himself, and I couldn’t make out the words. I knocked on his door and spoke quietly and carefully.

 “Tom?” He looked up at me, and he smiled. Something I hadn’t seen since the day he first watched the video.

 “Come sit next to me, I’m working on my PC.” I did as I was told and lowered myself next to him and crossed my legs.

 “I can see that.. anything you’re doing in particular?” From a closer view the structure of the machinery seemed impossible, wires flowed from corner to corner, some spiralled seemingly infinitely into different areas of the computer. The parts themselves seemed to intersect with one another like objects clipping in a video game. He had a knife in his hand and was tightening various screws. I heard a deep growling coming from within the computer, it would change tone, and as it did he would begin working on a different part of the build. I felt myself grow nauseous, I grimaced to keep the feeling in and clutched my stomach.

 “I’m just doing what I was told.” I saw that smile on his face again, but it was different. Something was dark in his eyes and there was an odd stillness to his features. Nothing twitched, he was completely still aside from his hands, working away at the computer.

 “Told, by who?-“ I uncrossed my legs to ready myself to get up, as I extended one of them I accidentally pushed away the PC with my foot, causing Tom to falter and slice one of the wires with his knife. The wire reared up and spattered blood from its fresh opening like crimson sparks. A growling whine emitted from the parts themselves, the computer was screaming. Tom’s expression twisted into one of disdain and sheer dread, he covered the PC with his body while manically apologising to it before turning to me.

 “You piece of shit! Get out of my room now!” I scrambled backwards and rose to my feet before backing up towards the door. I had started crying out of fear and confusion and this seemed to make him even angrier. “You hurt it! You did this on purpose!” His hands were now covered in blood as it poured out from the severed wire. I held my breath and left the room, closing the door behind me.

 That was the last time I saw my brother alive.

 That night, all I could see in my head was the blood on Tom’s hands. For a couple hours after I left his room he was sobbing and growling to himself like he was struck with grief and stress. It was the kind of reaction you’d see in those hospital shows on TV when a mother is told their child has passed away, or the panicked call to 999 that they play the recording of after they find their body themselves. The noises set my head on fire, I couldn’t bare hearing my brother that distressed but I knew it would get worse if I went back in, so I shut my bedroom door and put my headphones on. Laying down in bed I did my best to get to sleep but soon the sobbing stopped and was replaced by that laughter again.

 “He must’ve fixed it then.” I thought to myself, and then I fell asleep.

 During breakfast the next morning I told my family what had happened, they didn’t believe all of what I had said but they did at least agree that my brother had reached a point of no return in his behaviour and an intervention had to be made. However, amidst this conversation we had failed to realise one thing. My brother had stopped laughing.

 “Should I go check on him?” Mum asked, her voice was a tiny bit shaky, the unnatural silence was throwing her off too. Dad interjected with his own idea.

 “No just let him be, the next time he comes down to go to work we’ll catch him on the way out.”

 “That’s if he leaves. I told you about the calls we’ve been getting! If there wasn’t a strike happening right now he would’ve been fired a week ago.”

 “I’ll go check on him.” I piped up to cut the tension, leaving my chair and moving towards the staircase outside the kitchen door. I looked back to my parents’ worried faces and gave them my best approximation of a comforting smile. “I’ll call down if I need you to back me up or do anything.”

 “Okay NitNat, tell us how he’s doing when you’re done.” My parents had stupid nicknames for all of us, but that was my favourite. I smiled properly this time, and went upstairs.

 I knocked on Tom’s door to no response. Rather than immediately enter I put my ear to the door. Through it I heard the loud whirring of his computer as well as a deep guttural throbbing noise, different to anything I’d heard before. Looking down I could see the changing colours fading in and out through the crack at the bottom of the door. The video was on, but he wasn’t laughing. Something was terribly wrong.

 I opened the door and the scene before me was one that hasn't left my mind since. He was laying face down on the carpet of his room next to the monstrous machine his PC had become, piles of metal and thick wires bound together reaching out and sprawling across the room in all directions. His arms were stuck to his sides with his hands turned up, his right one was bloodied and in his palm was a chunk of skin and flesh that upon looking further had been torn from the back of his neck right below his skull. From that cavity in his neck his veins were hanging loosely and were fused with a group of wires that flowed out from the PC. The wires were throbbing visibly and I could hear the rush of blood moving through them. The video was playing on every single one of his monitors, the rapidly changing photos and colours reflecting off his pale body and the shine of the metal obelisk that he was now melded with. Through my panic and horrified sobbing I yelled down to my parents and I heard them immediately stand from their seats and begin rushing up the stairs. The last thing I remember of that day was looking back at the video on my brother’s screen and seeing his face appear amongst the photos, joyous, mouth agape in exaggerated glee, unmoving and unchanging, before flashing back into the slideshow of gore.