The brain transplant was taking place in a small, tight and grubby stairwell, but such sights were everyday occurrences in Mythnos. It and its rival continent, Diablos, were fictional places but real to their own inhabitants, who had authored them into existence. Mythnos was defined by two things. The first was the immense sophistication of its life-science technologies, which had seen biomedical and cybernetic wonders become everyday consumer products. The second was a sadistic indifference to life itself, in which acts of killing, ultra-violence and sexual perversion were mundane and the horrors of the id were maximally unleashed.
The public had taken to wearing strange masks, such as enclosure hoods and head harnesses, when walking down the street, lest they accidentally humanise one another with the sight of each other's faces, while sexual depravity of every imaginable permutation was openly indulged. It was the rule that anyone was sexually available to anyone, at any time and in any context. The thought of saying no was absolutely taboo. This maximalist attitude to promiscuity intersected with the most advanced technologies, whereby people could be designed like characters in a video game's character creator, then printed and used to extinction to satisfy the user's erotic proclivities.
Murder and mutilation of others, printed or not, were common, and maiming of the most gruesome kind was treated as a kind of practical joke. One day my flatmate came home to reveal that his hand had been hacked off at some point during the day. He went to seek treatment in some sort of sex dungeon, and I never saw him again. Another man I encountered had had his entire head dismantled and reconstructed in the middle of an alleyway by some elaborate mechanical device, permanently leaving segments of the former head floating in a mosaic of amniotic chambers, with the brain and mouth concealed behind a thick glass screen and held together by a bronze frame resembling a religious relic. This act was done in the name of jovial cruelty, but other inhabitants of Mythnos had found ways to detach their own brains completely for short periods, in order to surrender more fully to the unrestrained impulses of the carnal.
In a cold, dark room, a woman approached me and invited me to take part in her culture, for until now I had been a tourist. Her skin was unearthly pale and her eyes dark and empty. Her face was terrifying, but it was the only one I had truly gazed upon.