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I
Exhaustion celebrated its bodily conquest.
She had been running for dozens of days without stopping. Everything before running lies in the bedding of survival amnesia. All she could remember was a running memory of a running body, the only acoustic input she remembered to receive was desperate breathing and the rowdy disturbance of her feet plunging into the khaki ground of the swamp, like two fingers being overdipped into sticky bread dough to the point they doubled the size. Her sweat found its way to the wet frost falling from the austere sequoias. Their clash was painfully real. Her legs were completely attrited, but they only stopped moving when the waterlogged ground beneath her nailed them in place.
She had no more strength to lift them, as the massive body of water submerged her feet, ankles and knees. She squatted and stayed, trying to relearn hearing any other sound but breathing and footsteps. The torpid thwack of mud falling from her skirt’s hemline into its original waters dominated her perception. She tried to focus on it and slowly expand her listening out into a wider radio, searching for a motionless retention. She stayed there without moving at
all, recharging her body.

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II
She thought:
My eyes have been closed like the gates of hell, waiting for me to burn inside.
A spinning breeze was wandering through my stomach, rolled on itself like a hypnotic pendulum, then the sound of cars honking, computer-generated voices announcing social regulations, airplanes, sirens, jingles of news reports coalescing, something like the energy strike of a solar flare.
I started to feel an acidic liquid climbing up my throat. I felt its tendrils competing to reach my mouth and tongue. Nervous tears crawling up my cheeks to my eyeballs, injecting themselves in my iris.
Tried to pull my hair, but it shrank until my fingers were too thick to catch them.
My nails started to shrink even more than I had made them shrink through nervous biting. They were growing inwardly, slowly opening like keratin curtains upon the cuticle. My nails were being pulled out slowly, 1 mm per second in a perfect line. The red flesh surface felt the cold humidity in the air and burned.
I looked down at my toes and the same thing was happening.
My feet had spasms that kept on going like thirsty dogs running in circles.
An uncontrollable moaning would burst through my throat, would scratch my vocal chords, would shake my teeth against the gum.
My body was out of control, dispersed into a thousand different agents, growing backwards as I laid in despair.

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III
This inverted growth started to ache all over her body. Her muscles shrank and her bones began to hurt, carrying her frame like toothpicks on a head-sized stone. A thunderous scream fueled her and she jumped into the air, almost ripping herself from her legs. She started running again as fast as she could, screaming against the muffled air. Intermittent screams followed by a long deep continuous howling fired up into the air and fell back onto her body as if she was electrifying herself. It felt like there was no point in running towards anything specific since she was in an uninhabited location where the liveliest beings she’d met were a group of frogs, hidden beneath the dirty water, peeking out with their eyes while she stomped and violently shook their tranquil home. The way running and screaming generated relief were inexplicable.
She felt that the same hair that had shrunk into a bald surface before was now hitting her face. She stopped to observe her nails, her feet, feel her eyes and her mouth. But as soon as she noticed that everything had grown back to where it was supposed to be - her tears out of her eyes and down her cheek, her bile back to her stomach, her nails back on their respective cuticles -, her body started to shrink and grow invertedly again. She ran before the inverted growth hit its painful phase.
She had been running for days, trying to hold her body against shrinking onto itself.

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IV

She thought:

As the sequoias dissipated into shrubbery, I saw a halo of light around the bushes that were now the only vegetation surrounding me. The halo of light was white in absence of any color, aggressive like a butcher’s shop light. It grew into wider circles reproducing themselves into infinity and then creating a stormy and voluminous cloud of light beams. I remember looking into its core after the bushes failed to cover it anymore. And then I remember nothing else.

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V
She woke up underneath a semi-circle of the most diverse tools pointing directly to her head.
A fizzing sound came from a giant spiral test tube on the other side of the room. The greenish substance had small

white bubbles travelling through the glass.
No one was there. The dominating sound of running and breathing was replaced by the fizzing greenish substance which also lit up the room with an unnatural warm glow.
Her arms had needles stuck inside her veins, ​which she tore out immediately​, before dragging herself to the bottom of the operating bed she was laying on. As she got to the bottom she threw herself to the cold tile floor.
With atrophied muscles, she lifted herself up like a person 70 years older. She approached the control desk.

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VI
She said:
Read protocol.
She heard the slightly inarticulate voice reading the protocol.
She thought:
I have been laying here for months to be investigated for further research as a part of the Perpetuum Mobile Program. Back in 29.xi t​ he research program entered a phase of decay, in which, after the failure on the first prototype of the Human Perpetuum Mobile, they were completely forbidden from receiving further funding. I was the body carrying the vast and unpredictable consequences of that same experimental failure.
The Perpetuum Mobile is a concept well-known in the 16th century of the chronological era, through which scientists - especially physicists - envisioned a mechanical and non-electrical m​ achine that would never stop moving​. Until later in 28.xii this idea was completely abandoned through the argument that infinite motion would always equate with endless abrasion and burn out. Later in 29.x a new project led by the most famous and well-known team of new engineering received extreme amounts of funding for the project in which they would create a human perpetuum mobile, a human that would be able to move forever, a biological supergenerator to be used for military or industrial purposes. Researchers conducted several experiments with vaccine-induced endless motion. In the beginning, the project had all reasons to declare success --until my body proved otherwise. Not only was I unable to naturally and without effort maintain endless repetitive motion, but also, while staying still, my body would keep moving backwards. Terrified with the results of this unfortunate experiment, I escaped and vowed to run away forever and the scientists, to avoid further embarrassment, declared my death. But they’ve found me now and have kept me here to search among my memories for a solution to correct their mistake.

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VII
She crawls down and enters the ventilation pipes. Outside, there is no bright light. The city is involved in an arm of fog pinned by the car headlights floating above. She sweeps through the handwoven traffic queues and runs. Her body will never rot, will never stop and she will live forever under the haunting search for an end.

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