On April of 2016, User _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 commented on a thread on the subreddit "r/MildlyInteresting." The thread was about the cover of a copy of 1984 that was becoming less censored as the cover wore from use, but 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 responded with a paragraph-long piece talking about the MKULTRA experiments conducted by the CIA that involved dosing unsuspecting subjects in their own departments massive amounts of LSD, and how those experiments resulted in the first man-made "flesh interfaces." The post reads:

a unite a stage a coup a revolution a bring a genocide a new world a

In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involve being more or less unwittingly under the influence of LSD. This is how the "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" were first created i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.

Thus begins the first installment in the Interface series.

So What is it?

The Interface Series, also called the "Mother Horse Eyes" series, is a 2016 piece of web-fiction that originated on the social media/discussion platform Reddit. As with the first entry, initial installments of the series were posted randomly around in the comment sections of popular subreddits, all within a matter of days. Quick-eyed users noticed the strange stories and starting to follow 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 and archive their posts-- which is a good thing, because several early posts were deleted by moderators of the subreddits where they were posted for being off topic or spam.

The entire series is now collected here, and has a dedicated subreddit of its own here.

The series is told in vignettes, some of which are one-offs, some of which connect into several longer narratives. Many of the early vignettes follow characters involved with the creation and study of the titular "Flesh Interfaces" -- which manage to be just as pleasant as the name implies-- and are told from the point of view of assorted government officials. The Russians discovered Interfaces, so of course the US had to do it as well, and then China, North Korea, Japan, Germany-- and so on. Each nameless official attempts to justify their use, or alleviate their guilt, because not only do Interfaces require -- and cause-- a massive loss of human life, but it is soon discovered that if you want to send someone into the Interface to explore the other side, young children work better than adults. And by "work better," I mean "will once in a while come back partially alive and horribly mutated and suffering, say one or two cryptic things, then die immediately."

The unofficial title of Mother Horse Eyes comes from the author's username, and from a series of vignettes about a young child whose mother has died, and who now has a new mother made of animal flesh. He sees her as a sewn together creature, with pig skin, a goat jaw, and horse eyes. While it doesn't seem so at first (given the significant number of vignettes dedicated to government officials and seeing the interfaces from a a pseudo-scientific point of view), this story-line is possibly the most important to the entire series.

While some of the vignettes form some kind of chronological order, most do not, and they span from prehistoric Earth (or at least one of them) to a future Atlanta, to some kind of weird universe inhabited by chitinous cruciforms.

Often times, the individual vignettes will connect with one another beyond just the shared Interface elements. For example, we have a vignette of a WW2-era Japanese official trying to explain how they first came to know about the Flesh Interfaces, and trying to justify-- or at least explain why the Japanese had felt justified-- in creating one to defend themselves. A few entries later, and we have a two-part story of American soldiers during WW2 coming into a Japanese island, only to be torn to shreds by what the reader knows by now is a Flesh Interface event.

Among the testimonies of government officials, ramblings of paranoid schizophrenics, and reflections of random schmucks who stumble into inexplicable events, some of the longer or more notable narratives include:

  • A two parter about a dude in the 1970s who moves to Death Valley and runs into the Manson family.
  • A Nazi officer working at a concentration camp, who suddenly must accommodate the appearance of high ranking scientists working on some secretive new project.
  • A child who lives with Mother Horse Eyes after the supposed death of his mother and witnesses her experiments.
  • A CIA agent recounting the first and only child to have gone through an Interface portal and survived more than a few months.
  • A hygiene pod cleaner-turned-Readjustment Specialist in a alternate universe, future America where people plug themselves into online feeds inside life support pods for years and years at a time, rather than exist in the real world. Said Readjustment Specialist then inadvertently becomes involved with a grand conspiracy after he saves a girl targeted for assassination by a mysterious individual named Q.
  • A black-out alcoholic and aspiring fiction writer who finally gets into rehab, who tries very hard not to think of the source of his turmoil; a traumatic summer he spent with Mother Horse Eyes.
  • A feral cat who sees humans as monstrous abominations called "the Oily Ones," and the crazy cat lady she investigates.
  • A prehistoric tribe who stumble across a mysterious old crone, shortly before young girls from their tribe go missing.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.