Grimdark Hyperobjects in the Ethereal Mythtank.

I went to sleep in stifling heat in front of three televisions blaring Spanish soap operas and a football match. Europop played techno refrains on my skin like some meat speaker vibrating sound.

I was tied to a chair when I awoke. I could no longer hear anything but I could make out three or four savage youths with brown skin filming me on phones. I was the subject of some sadistic home movie and when the ugly fucker in the denim cut off jacket smiled at me, displaying a mouthful of dogends for teeth, I got a whiff of chorizo and cheap wine as he stuck the meat skewer through the meat of my right shoulder. I screamed and left this planet then for the last time.

I came awake gasping for air in the fine dust of a planet that looked and smelled unfamiliar. This was the adjustment process as any memories I had left turned to ash. At first I remembered signing my life away to have my dying human consciousness uploaded into a mars rover on a future voyage to get out of prison. Once I had been released from the sweatbox I had been held in Andalusia for the last three years I was coincidentally abducted almost after my first glass of beer in the dive bar used by released prisoners. The cheeky cunts even demanded that I wore a ridiculous Covid mask and drink my beer, that tasted like carbonated urine, through a straw. As I struggled to get the fizzy piss into my mouth I was whacked on the head from behind. It felt like a pool ball in a sock. I slid off my stool and came round for the first time with these clowns toying with me. My back felt wet with what I imagined to be my blood. The older man was the torturer and the younger guys seemed to be prison cocksuckers armed with the latest phones 

Extracting my living consciousness required skilled torture to fire the kernel on a charge of adrenaline into the hard drive canister that would later change hands in some sweaty Spanish backstreet for a pile of dirty Euros.

So they got stuck in and for the first attack stuck meat skewers into my ears causing the World to be closed in silence. They burnt my testicles with a blow torch and lacerated my skin like a slow turning lump of kebab meat. The pain became kalaedoscopic until it plateaued with no part of me left untouched. They did however leave my eyes alone. I guessed from my briefing in the prison that I had to die with fully functioning eyesight for my future mission to report back any visual data. Ears I was told were an irrelevance.

As the dirt breath of my murderer managed to travel through the clagged blood in my broken nose the last thing I smelt on planet Earth was spicy pork sausage and shitty red wine.

As I tried to breath after what felt like a thousand years I just inhaled the fine red dust and moved my hands out in front of me like I was back home in England on a Summer's day  There was no feeling of physical threat or discomfort from this new environment. I saw mountains and a black tower glowing red in the far distance. I started to wheel towards it and I was accompanied by several drones in formation above my rover's observation capsule. I felt no emotion or pain and I could remember nothing substantial from my previous life on Earth. I had only one thing in mind,,,,the mission.