Literature / The Interface Series

In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react.
What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project.
The CIA created new departments within the CIA, and fed them steady doses of LSD, and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge, and mutate away from normal departments.
Whole projects and hierarchies were created. With everybody involved, being more or less, unwittingly under the influence of LSD.
This is how the "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" were first created - i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy.
The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.

— The Investigator, the very first post

The Interface Series is a Creepypasta series created by Reddit user _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9. Unusually, its parts were not posted to any one single subreddit, but rather it was scattered all across Reddit, submitted to threads where they were only tangentially related to the original subject. The posts first appeared in April of 2016, with the final post appearing in July of that year, with a total of 100 main posts and a few bonus ones.

Collected together they told a nightmarish story revolving around the titular "flesh interfaces"- strange tunnels made of flesh that serve as portals to a bizarre other realm, created when people use LSD- and humanity's attempts to study them. The story spans space and time, from a World War II Nazi concentration camp to a future Atlanta, and details how the various characters deal with the influence of the titular Mother Horse Eyes, a being from the other world manipulating Earth since ancient history.

The primary narratives are:

• The Investigator's Narrative: The introduction to the series, in which a person known as the Investigator explains the concept of "flesh interfaces" and how they are linked to many events in world history.
• The CIA Researcher's Narrative: Details the experiences of a CIA researcher who participates in experiments to see what lies beyond the flesh interfaces.
• The SS Officer's Narrative: Focuses on an SS concentration camp officer and his experiences with Dr. Engel and the strange project they are working on.
• The Watcher's Narrative: Follows an ancient tribe who encounters an old crone that warns them of a great evil about to attack, and the conflict between those who believe her against those who accuse her of inviting the evil onto them.
• Ben and Karen's Narratives: Follows the titular Ben, a Readjustment Specialist working for the Combined Governance/Reinhardt Corporation in a dystopian future Atlanta who helps people with hygiene beds, virtual reality devices that serve to pacify the populace in a false world. He encounters Karen Castillo, a 33-year-old woman who is awakened from one of the beds.
• The Author's Narrative: Follows Nick, the struggling, alcoholic author of the story, who is posting it on Reddit from visions of an alternate world he is having. It chronicles his experiences with Shawn, an anti-Semitic black Jew, and the evil Mother, who casts a dark shadow over his life.

The whole series can be read here.

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This series provides examples of:

• Anti-Escapism Aesop: The future Atlanta plot-line takes place in a cyberpunk dystopia where people spend all their time in Hygiene Beds, virtual reality devices which hook them up to a Cyberspace internet to play out video game-like experiences. The plot describes how this has led to the occupants becoming so detached from reality that they frequently wind up sitting in their own filth and need medical attention to get them out. This apathy has allowed an Eldritch Abomination called Mother/Q to Take Over the World unopposed, using the pods to assimilate all life into herself, and the rebels are unable to mount an effective resistance because the people would rather just stay in their little fake worlds. Even after Q has destroyed most of humanity, the survivors choose to flee to space and spend the rest of their lives in more virtual reality than bother to fight back.
• As the Good Book Says...: There are a lot of Biblical references throughout the story.
• Alien Geometries: One of the phenomena associated with the flesh interfaces are giant metallic cylinders that are segmented, with portions flickering in and out of existence.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: The kid abducted by Mother and traumatized grew up to be Nick. That's mostly the reason he's traumatized.
• Author Avatar: Nick. Needless to say, he isn't exactly doing well.
• The Bad Guy Wins Q destroys the world but some humans survive by escaping into outer space... Unless she doesn't actually exist and the narrator is just crazy.
• Big Bad: Mother Horse Eyes, aka Q, is an Eldritch Abomination responsible for manipulating all of human history and pre-history, and is responsible for all the horror in each time period. In the main timeline, she slowly establishes a totalitarian rule over the planet, keeping everyone in virtual reality prisons, while in Nick's time, she is his main tormentor and the one driving him into his alcoholism.
• Body Horror: Tons of it. Segmentation, the phenomena where random body parts disappear, is about the least of it. It gets worse in the parts in the future where we get descriptions of people who lived in virtual reality so long their bodies atrophied and the machines to clean their body waste broke.
• But What About the Astronauts?: Surprisingly they actually live.
• Came Back Wrong: People who cross an interface and return rarely survive, and those who survive rarely are unscathed. sending a corpse through the interface makes the person return alive, but they're just as messed up and usually die again shortly after.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The series chronicles the experiences of several characters on Earth who are menaced by the machinations of Mother Horse Eyes, an Eldritch Abomination implied to be the Devil herself who aims on assimilating humanity into herself. She primarily works through "flesh interfaces", strange portals leading to Mother's world, and the series is chock full of Surreal Horror, Body Horror, and dystopian horror as Mother gains more and more control over the planet. By the time of the future Atlanta section, Mother pretty much rules the planet and is keeping people trapped in virtual reality prisons. Ultimately, despite the best efforts of the various characters, none of them can even hope to stop Mother; the main timeline ends with Mother bombing most of humanity and the survivors too hopeless and hedonistic to fight back, while the other timeline ends before we see Nick confront Mother, with little indication that a lone human will be able to defeat such a powerful being.
• Cyberpunk: In the future there will be flying cars, technology that lets people fully immerse themselves into the Internet, and far-stretching conspiracies.
• Doorstopper: The whole series makes it one of the longest Creepypasta works, alongside the "50 Foot Ant" stories and the "Portal In the Forest" saga.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Mother. And the interfaces. And skin ships. And Q. There's plenty of eldritch abominations here to choose from. Q and Mother are implied to be the same thing... Maybe.
• Humans Are Bastards: All the Eldritch Abominations are created by humans meddling with the reality breaking power LSD has in this alternate history. Except that Mother is heavily implied to have altered humanity's DNA to make everything possible in the first place.
• Meta Fiction: The story starts with detailing a horrible Alternate History, but eventually this is revealed to be a story being told by a narrator who has been writing the "story" from visions of the alternate timeline and has dealt with Mother's manifestation in his world.
• No Ending: There is an ending to the story in the world with the flesh interfaces, but none for Nick's story as his story stops as soon as he enters Mother's lair.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • A side chapter shows a Crazy Cat Lady living alone with a bunch of cats. Nothing happens except her interacting with her cats and pretending they're human. It was regarded by lots of the readers as one of the creepiest chapters of the series.
  • Near the climax Nick goes to confront Mother in his world. When he reaches her lair the story just ends.
• Portal Network: The flesh interfaces are portals that link to other dimensions. The horrifying twist is that rather than being simple entry points made of warped space, they are living, breathing tunnels made of flesh, created when large amounts of people are dosed with LSD.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • After realizing that children can survive Flesh Interfaces, both the Soviets and US start using them as test subjects.
  • The technology used in the future to interface with virtual reality was made by reverse engineering flesh interfaces.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Ultimately, the resistance have no way of destroying Mother/Q, as she is too powerful, but they hope to write down their story and spread it to an alternate timeline that may be able to stop her in their place. Mother/Q then destroys the world in a nuclear holocaust. Some humans escape in space ships but most of them are too apathetic to want to try to retake earth and are content to spend the rest of their lives in hedonistic virtual reality. Meanwhile, in Nick's timeline, the last chapter ends with Nick about to confront Mother and decide the fate of the world, with the story ending just before we see the result. The one hope is that Karen has managed to dimension-hop from the prior timeline to his timeline, and will continue to fight for humanity.
• Scrapbook Story: The overall structure of the story. Posts hop between Encyclopedia Exposita-style excerpts on the alternate world's history to the forum opinionations of various characters to webs of interconnected short prose stories. Individually many could be taken as the sort of unhinged non-sequiturs one can find on reddit, the entirety only making sense (relatively) when assembled as a whole.
• Self-Deprecation: One section is just the narrator poking fun at his own story and accusing himself of making stuff up as he goes along. At the end he also accuses himself of being a misogynist with mommy issues.
• Sense Freak: Individuals recently extracted from extremely long stays in the "feedrealm" are used to instant gratification, and will often start masturbating in front of the technicians meant to be resocializing them.
• Squishy Wizard: Despite their reality twisting power, flesh interfaces are no more resilient than the flesh their made from and can be destroyed with mundane weapons.

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