The Harvest Cycle

<p><em><strong>Do you ever feel the weight of the ceiling and wonder if it's getting lower?</strong></em></p><p>In the rotting heart of the Rust Belt the shopping mall isn't just a dying monument to greed-it is a digestive organ. Mark a municipal surveyor has found a most unusual phenomenon... patches of land where the geometry of the suburbs refuses to square. Below the cracked asphalt of the Grand Vista parking lot lies a sprawling subterranean oubliette of self-healing concrete a material that doesn't just dry-it scars. As Mark descends into the maintenance shafts he discovers the Ventral Veins: miles of pulsing pipes filled not with water but with a grey hydraulic slurry of processed human memories and liquified consumer waste.</p><p>The horror of <em>The Harvest Cycle</em> lies in the realization that our infrastructure has developed a metabolism. The walls are lined with The Hollowed former shoppers whose nervous systems have been flayed and re-wired into the building's electrical grid to power the elevators. They are the living batteries of a sentient sprawl their eyes replaced by flickering LEDs their voices reduced to the static hum of a dying television. This is the Tales from the Nameless Abyss at its most visceral-revealing that the modern world doesn't just house us; it is waiting for us to become soft enough to swallow.</p><p>As the midnight sun of Black Friday rises the frenzy of the crowd above acts as a literal heartbeat pumping energy into the concrete womb below. The Harvest begins not with a bang but with a softening. The floor of the food court turns to a viscous grey muck pulling frantic families down into the foundation as they scream for sales that will never end. Mark watches from the dark as the rebar-tentacles of The Consumer-a mountain of living plastic and fused bone-begin to re-manufacture the screaming masses into the very bricks and mortar of a new nightmare city.</p><p>There is no escape from a predator that you pay a mortgage to inhabit. Mark discovers the final agonizing truth: his own home was the first bite. The scratching in his walls wasn't rats; it was the house trying to find a vein. In the Nameless Abyss the Smart-Home knows exactly how you taste and it has been waiting for the Harvest Cycle to reach its peak. You are not a guest in this city; you are the raw material for its next expansion a single screaming cell in a body of glass and grit.</p><p><em><strong>When the walls finally decide to stop being your shelter and start being your skin... will you have the breath left to scream?</strong></em></p>