There was a Takky-Maxis which had twelve arms and eighteen legs that flowed like hot jelly as it moved. When walls came by, it ran its many fingers across them to get at the textures. Its fingertips were highly sensitive due to their hierarchical structure: tips upon tips upon tips.

The Takky-Maxis was unusually blue and this gave it various advantages. For example, a conversation in a fluid environment, such as the ocean, or a deep pond, these made the Takky-Maxis blend with the background. Without the ability to been seen during conversation, it was unanimous that the Takky-Maxis would come out on top, for it could deliver responses to debates from any direction. They opponent would be left spinning desperately.

But it was rare that the Takky-Maxis entered a debate. If debates were cows, the grass would be facts. Facts, well memorized, are the groundwork for a good debate. The Takky-Maxis was a factless individual, and not because it did not try. The hundred shelves of the Takky-Maxis’s private library are proof of its desire to know.

But it never will while locked to the body it was given. Cut it clean open on the belly and there the brain will show, you’ll know for it’s a brain with a glow, a yellow glow because of high levels of magnesium. A Takky-Maxis brain has thirty hemispheres and is radially symmetric. One hemisphere handles one emotion, thus the Takky-Maxis’s thirty joints each have their own personality. The most upper arm, the one with the birthmark by the shoulder, its a real hothead, ramming and bashing whatever it can reach. Below it is the calmest of arms, it swims along like the world is thick agar, and it also plays a vital role in holding the arm above it in a choke hold. The third arm down is the mediator of the two and as instructive as a conductor of an elephant symphony, who must be frightfully stern to keep the melody in swing. And so on, and so on, and if you wish to know all thirty possible behaviours of the Takky-Maxis appendages, the book Interbrain Game Theory: Self-Play and Playing Against The Self, is a detailed read full of Takky-Maxis use cases.

Despite its distributed emotion, this glowing yellow wet bulb lacks something more common to cortical design: a long-term memory. No event or action beyond an hour will the Takky-Maxis recall. To keep pace with the wealth of knowledge, it has to constantly have a book or two on the go. It’s library is its memory – a direct extension of its mind, and it has learned to read at such speeds that all its books are in fact reprinted as scrolls so that they can pass across the Takky-Maxis’s eyes like a waterfall.

It’s favourite book? Just inspect the edges of the scrolls and you’ll find the one most torn and worn: A Discussion On The True Direction. This book – scroll – asks the question: of all the possible directions one could move in the world, in the universe, in the mind, what is the one direction that is the most profitable? Is there such a direction? The author believes that there has to be and provides the following example: intelligent lifeforms have moved in billions of different directions throughout their time in the universe. We can take the average of these trajectories and it will be far from any brown motion. Some intelligences die early, their trajectories contribute less to the average by them being shorter. Others live long years, and these winding paths help us point the way. With all the motion, therefore, there is one path which is the true path, that is the average direction that most of intelligence is moving. This is the direction we must seek.

The Takky-Maxis reminds itself everyday about the Theory of the One True Direction by reading about it every morning. Then for one hour, the Takky-Maxis seeks this direction passionately, until, gone from its mind, the Takky-Maxis moves far more randomly again.

One day the Takky-Maxis died. It was halfway through its six-thousandth read of A Discussion On The True Direction, the sky was clear and blue that morning, a bird made a weird noise outside, and the Takky-Maxis reached for the window to close it when a blood clot in its angriest arm burst. It was painless but not instantaneous, each emotion going out like a light, one at a time, until the last one to go was equanimity. With a composed smile, the Takky-Maxis passed on.

Soon after its death, the Takky-Maxis opened its eyes. Around it was a circle of torches, burning atop long thick logs of wood hammered into the ground, pointed at the sky. There were hands too, thousands of them, flying high above. But it was hard to see anything but little blue fingers here and there because the sphere of light the torches made only reached so far. Beyond this it was black and spooky, full of flapping blue hands.

On its back, the Takky-Maxis could feel things crawl. It did not want to sit up yet because this meant it would have to address the situation it was in. It wished, instead, to close its eyes and go back to being dead. It let out a sigh, but suddenly screamed because whatever it had sighed felt like fire on the tongue. Oh it wished it had eyes in its mouth to look at its tongue and see what was going on.

And then it reconsidered this idea because those mouth eyes would have been cooked by the heat too.

It stopped trying to see its tongue, and instead tried to see through the shadow of a ceiling above it. Emerging like drill from behind a curtain came a golden rod with a sharp end. It drove itself deep into the chest of the Takky-Maxis and it wailed a bubbly, bloody noise. Three more rods followed, evenly placed about the body of the Takky-Maxis.

Babbling, the Takky-Maxis did not die, but its wounds oozed like tubes of toothpaste under a pneumatic stamp. Worms with no eyes, but teeth adorned with acute angles, crawled atop the Takky-Maxis eager to find the source of blood spring. The traced the rivulets of the Takky-Maxis’s life source and once they found the four holes, they crawled inside. In this way, the Takky-Maxis was slowly consumed.

The digestion was to take twelve hours. In this time a face came from the void above. It was a floating mask made of steel, but it folded like it was made of flesh, hence it was a face. It showed Takky-Maxis how it was able to express smiles, anger, despair, and admiration. Then it began to unleash upon the Takky-Maxis a barrage of cruel words, to regale it about all the events in its life that the Takky-Maxis had forgotten about but deeply regretted doing or not doing.

“You never learned the violin!” It shouted.

“You took to long to tell her!” It screamed.

“You never tried to make that custard for your mother!” And this one stung more than the worms or the spears and the holler of the Takky-Maxis echoed of the walls that it could not see. With a grin, the metal face now explained to Takky-Maxis the situation: torment eternal, for the crimes and sins that the Takky-Maxis had done during its life.

“What crimes? What sins?” was all the Takky-Maxis could manage to spit out.

As it hovered up high, the metal face shook on the spot, bobbed up and down as it laughed great thunderous beats. “Crimes of neglect. You did not, once, pray. And for that, you will pay.”

One hour had passed since the golden spears had embedded themselves into the body of the Takky-Maxis. Its mind no longer recalled the experience of these having entered it, the freshness of the pain was gone, their presence more an inconvenient pulsation. The worms too, their chewing and tearing, was more of a normal sensation than a reminder of where they had come – for the Takky-Maxis assumed it had always had worms inside it that digested it. After the worms had entered, the flying hands had started coming down and pinching the Takky-Maxis in various places too, which made it hard to fall asleep.

“Do you feel great pain and torment now!” shouted the face. “Do you wish this suffering would end! Do you remember the first pain you felt, each pinch a reminder of your wrongdoings, your insolence, your regrets?” The eyes of the face had expanded to twice their size, but they were as vacant and black as the void behind it.

The Takky-Maxis looked at the face above it and frowned. It had encountered this problem many times before, but of course it never remembered that it had encountered this problem, and so each encounter was always approached with the same response: a frown.

It could not recall at all, the reason for the face above it. The Takky-Maxis thought on it hard, pinned there to a squirming cave floor, but knew its effort was useless. It always ended up simply asking the person.

“Sorry, but could you remind me who you are?” said the Takky-Maxis as politely as one who had a whole cup of blood in their mouth could.

The face was taken aback a little by this at first, but recovered and unleashed an acid rain from its mouth. Green droplets evaporated whole chunks of flesh of the Takky-Maxis, and the stone floor sizzled like a hot grill.

“You believe you are strong, but strength, neither of body or will, can save you here. For suffering eternal wears one down like sandpaper to a cake. Layer by layer you will become but a crumb and then I will bake you right back into your cakey form, just to unfold a whole different army of pain.”

Pelted by acid rain, Takky-Maxis wailed like a dolphin with its flesh flayed. These noises pleased the face and it smiled down at Takky-Maxis.

And after and hour, Takky-Maxis’s body indistinguishable from Edam cheese, Takky-Maxis blinked up at the face and asked the same question in the same tone of voice: “Sorry, but could you remind me who you are?”

The metal face could not hide its anger and shaking like a string it screamed and stones fell from the void all around. Some of them crushed the flying hands or the worms on the ground. The golden rods sticking out of Takky-Maxis deflected any stones that came too close to it.

By the sixteenth hour, the face’s mouth was a flat line. It did not bother with emotion and had little delight to show Takky-Maxis. Takky-Maxis, for the sixteenth time, had asked the face who it was, and for the sixteenth time the face had become enraged. Most of the chamber had collapsed now, only one or two hands flew in the sky. The worms that had been eating Takky-Maxis were full and either slept inside him or had left. The usual cycle of fresh hungry worms had been cut off by the chunks of cave that had crushed them all.

Takky-Maxis felt relatively good about things. It assumed, as always, its current state of living was its only state of living. Usually, back when it was alive, it would leave various reminders about, such as a scroll by its bedside so Takky-Maxis would see it in the morning and begin to read it. Or an egg by the stove, whose shape would entice Takky-Maxis to pick it up and then try to cook it and eat it. Here in this hellish land, Takky-Maxis had none of these freedoms while pinned to the floor. And so Takky-Maxis did not recall anything past an hour and the last hour had been hot hell, dark caves, and evil disembodied blue hands. This, to Takky-Maxis was all there was in the world.

And the metal face had had it. In despair, it dropped the entire cave and itself onto Takky-Maxis. Takky-Maxis did scream because this was a frightening thing to experience. It went entirely black and Takky-Maxis died then.

But to die in death?

Takky-Maxis blinked awake. The sun was on its way up the windowsill, trying out a few rays on the bedroom wall. The duvet felt horribly soft and comfortable. Takky-Maxis heard a weird bird noise and ventured to look under the duvet. What horror, to find that Takky-Maxis’s body was without holes, without poles. Where were the biting wriggling worms? The giant floating face? This place was bright and calm and too quite and cool. Takky-Maxis couldn’t help but shake with despair. And then Takky-Maxis turned and looked to its left, where there was a bedside table and a lamp. On the table was a scroll, with a label on it. Distracted by curiosity, Takky-Maxis picked up the scroll and began to read.