By midnight, the apartment felt too small, too organic. The drywall seemed to breathe with a moist, suffocating heat. Elias collapsed against his workbench, his breath coming in ragged, metallic rasps. Every time his heart beat, it sounded like a hammer striking an anvil. Clang. Clang. Clang.
Elias stepped out onto the fire escape, his new limbs clanging against the iron slats. He looked at the sprawling metropolis and saw not a city, but a graveyard of unrefined ore waiting for a god. Tetsuo: The Iron Man
He reached for a glass of water, but his hand wouldn't obey. The fingers had fused, elongated into a jagged cluster of copper wiring and rusted rebar. He watched, paralyzed by a mixture of horror and a burgeoning, electric ecstasy, as a television cable snaked out from his wrist and plugged itself into the wall socket. The surge was divine. By midnight, the apartment felt too small, too organic
The city spoke to him then. Not in words, but in frequencies. He could feel the subway trains screaming through the earth like iron worms; he could hear the structural groans of the skyscrapers leaning into the wind. He wasn't Elias anymore. He was a blueprint coming to life. Every time his heart beat, it sounded like
Should we explore a further, or
He stumbled toward the window. Outside, the world was soft, fleshy, and weak. It needed to be reinforced. It needed to be hard.