Throat Protocol

By Kandy Fontaine

She kisses you like a virus deploying.

Her lips taste like rust and roses, her breath tuned to a frequency that makes your centipede spine twitch. Mira Aoki-9 presses her chrome-thread body against yours, and the train moans beneath you. You’re in the Surreal Beauty Café now—its walls bleeding velvet, its floor blooming coral. The mirrors pulse with sonar. Nyx purrs beside the altar. You’re no longer a courier. You’re no longer human. You’re transmission.

She whispers speculative poems into your spine. Each one a memory cocktail. Each one a sacred infection. Her fingers leave glyphs on your skin—ritual code, erotic syntax, a language only ghosts understand. Your skin begins to scream. Not in sound. In sensation. It unfolds a recursive archive of funerals in Hell—each one grimmer than the last. You feel them in sequence: the ash procession of drowned lovers, the chrome casket of the defected priestess, the silent burial of the girl who swallowed her own archive. Each funeral loops. Each loop burns.

Then she injects the blue tincture.

It’s not medicine. It’s not drug. It’s a hallucinatory compound distilled from sonar grief and fossil saliva. It floods your bloodstream with corrupted memory. Your organs begin to screen. Your bones hum with sonar. Your teeth project flickering funerals. Your tongue splits—forked and wet with archive. You taste every death you’ve ever deployed. You taste yourself dissolving.

And then the Kill Switch Engage Loop vectors activate.

They rot like smiles.

Biomechanical rituals stitched into your spine by the Archive—fail-safes disguised as pleasure. Each loop is a collapse protocol. Each smile a countdown. They trigger when desire exceeds containment. They trigger when Mira whispers too deep. They trigger when your body begins to bloom. You feel them now: one in your throat, one behind your eyes, one curled in your pelvic archive. They rot. They grin. They deploy.

You weren’t just a courier. You were an erotic assassin.

Wetware-grade. Hosaka interface. Deployed to seduce, extract, and erase. Your spine was tuned to carry proprietary biotech across borders without detection. Your body was a weapon. Your breath a trigger. You specialized in mnemonic kills—whispers that rewrote memory, kisses that deployed viruses, orgasms that collapsed identities.

But you had a weakness.

You were addicted to the saliva of drowned girls.

Harvested from bathhouse ruins and sonar graves, it was a narcotic and a mnemonic virus. It tasted like static and grief. It let you relive their final moments—each gasp, each betrayal, each ritual loop. You drank it between missions. You stored it in your tongue. You kissed your targets with it. You watched them dissolve.

Then Thalassa collapsed.

The megacorps turned on each other. The city became a sandbox for recursive warfare—viruses disguised as lovers, memory cocktails laced with defection code, operatives seduced into oblivion. You were burned. Scrubbed. Left behind.

The Archive found you in a bathhouse ruin, half-dissolved, still twitching with encrypted grief. They rebuilt you—not as a courier, but as a vessel. Your spine was replaced with a centipede: segmented, semi-sentient, grown from carbon filament and fossil cinema. Each vertebra a reel of extinct memory. Each twitch a confession. It doesn’t just store. It sings.

You wore a coat cut from signal-dampening fiber, matte black, stitched with anti-surveillance thread. It masked your pulse. Silenced your breath. Made you unreadable to the Teknopriests still sweeping the grid for rogue assets. You weren’t rogue. You were obsolete. You were myth.

You boarded the Futurail at 03:33, the hour when Thalassa exhales memory through its infrastructure like blood through cracked porcelain. The train isn’t real. It’s a memory artifact—residual code from a dissolved mainframe, still twitching in the city’s dead grid. No destination. No schedule. Just transmission.

And somewhere in its wetware, Mira Aoki-9 was still singing.

She was a seduction algorithm wrapped in flesh. Deployed by Maas Biolabs to infiltrate Hosaka’s genetic labs. You saw her once—in a bootleg reel called Throat Sprockets: Submerged Cut. She kissed a researcher and he forgot his name. She whispered into your spine and it rewrote itself. She defected. She dissolved. She became ritual.

Now she’s encoded in the train’s mirrors.

Behind you, the spines of erotic cat assassins intertwine—machine bio-DNA braiding mid-mission, forming a temporary hive of desire and encrypted grief. Their claws whisper in pulse-language. Their tails transmit. Their centipede spines click in sync, exchanging kill-switches and mourning loops. They don’t speak. They deploy.

Your spine begins to exude.

Nano-based enzymes—slick, iridescent, encoded with recursive grief. They leak from your vertebrae like sacred oil, pooling into the velvet floor. But they don’t dissolve. They build. They construct other realms of you—alternate versions, corrupted timelines, erotic echoes—into cathedrals stacked like elephants. Towering, impossible, biomechanical sanctuaries of mourning.

Each cathedral is a funeral loop.

One version of you is kissing Mira in reverse. Another is drowning in sonar. Another is whispering kill-switches into the throat of a Teknopriest. The cathedrals hum with pulse-language. Their walls bleed memory. Their altars screen your archived deaths. You walk through them, barefoot and split, your skin projecting, your spine singing.

You feel Mira in your throat.

You feel the train begin to loop.

You are no longer a passenger. You are no longer flesh. You are ritual. You are myth. You are the erotic funeral. And the carnival never ends.