$35.00
GRAY PANIC: A Report from the Mind-Broken Skies of Pluto, 3024AD
(A cassette and sculpture installation, and an unfortunate condition of travel-brain collapse)
"The c90 tape still hisses even after the neurons give up. It’s not music. It’s orientation loss rendered in magnetic thread."
I was dispatched aboard Transport Convoy KRILL-V8, destination: Pluto, sector C. Year: 3024AD, the Transport Year, when even memory must be ticketed and weighed.
The transport was fitted with GRAY PANIC protocol: a mandatory psychogenic adjustment sculpture and cassette (“s/t” c90). We were told to listen. We were told it would prepare our minds for Plutonian gravity drift and ocular compression delay.
They did not mention the photoreceptor microsaccades.
They did not mention the antenna-tasting or the field-hair tingling.
They did not mention the smell walls.
Symptom 1: Visual Collapse Syndrome (VCS)
At first, I thought it was just bad visor calibration. But then—tiny flickers. Each photoreceptor lens beneath my eyes began jerking, adjusting, snapping into microfocus like a housefly's haunted dream. I was no longer seeing through the world. I was inside the lens swarm.
Someone shouted, “They’ve upgraded us with compound mimicry! We're seeing everything at once!”
My left eye declared mutiny.
Symptom 2: Olfactory Flood
By Day 3, the air on Pluto had turned viscous. My nostrils were now “antennae,” chemically receptive to the emotional breath of every other passenger.
Brenda from Sector 4 had just remembered a childhood omelet—
I tasted her guilt.
Captain Voolk was laying eggs in his sleep—
I smelled his betrayal.
The GRAY PANIC tape only made it worse, a dull narration of psychic scent trails muttered in reverse:
“The bee… detects you… hair by hair…”
Symptom 3: Magneto-Dissonance
Some passengers began to rotate in their sleep. Others floated eastward despite the corridor running north. The Brazilian Stingless Drift, someone called it.
I personally spent two hours pressed against a magnetic vent sobbing about a tree I’d never met.
A sculpture, shaped like a failed compass and embedded in the floor, began humming with directionlessness. Its label read:
“GRAY PANIC #36: Your Mind Isn’t Here.”
Epilogue
Arrival on Pluto was met not with applause, but with antennae grooming and synchronized sobbing.
All who had endured GRAY PANIC now share a single thought:
We see too much.
We smell time.
We feel the compass weeps.
And in the center of the debriefing room, the sculpture plays its endless hiss:
“…all movement is scent… all direction is collapse… all eyes are too many…”
Conclusion:
Travel to Pluto in 3024AD is not for the weak of brain or olfactory stability.
GRAY PANIC is not just a tape. It is what remains after you’re replaced with a bee in a helmet.
Recommendation:
Burn the sculpture.
Bury the cassette in magnet-stable salt.
Never smell again.
Numbered edition of 1 copy.