CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "Project: Seamline" Creepypasta

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

CREEPYPASTA STORY►by Goose_jpg:   / project_seamline  Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creep...  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

Project Seamline grew out of a failed armour program. One nobody liked to admit had cost the fortune and saved almost no one. Too many soldiers still bled out before the helicopters could reach them, and there was an overflow of dead bodies zipped into bags that was supposed to have worn the best protection science could offer. The Pentagon wanted something better, and they wanted it fast. self-repairing gear that could close wounds and seal shredded uniforms within 60 seconds of trauma. They laid the groundwork with nanofiber threading, microscopic strands built to constrict, bind and adapt to war.

Each filament carried its own predictive program, tuned to detect force vectors, thermal spikes, and kinetic fractures before they fully developed. The theory was simple. The soldier gets hit and the suit feels it happening. The suit seals itself, maybe even seals the flesh underneath. You buy another five minutes of life, more if the injury isn't too severe, and the soldier gets the make at home. One less casualty. In theory, I joined Seamline after the private vector used me up. For years, I wrote prediction algorithms for urban traffic grid.

shaving seconds off stoplight delays and trying to keep trucks from plowing through crosswalks full of school kids. It mattered, or at least it felt like it did. When the grant dried up, the company pivoted hard. They stopped chasing safety

and started selling optimization software to logistic giants, the same corporations whose drivers had turned residential streets into death corridors in the first place. I did not take it quietly. I wrote a 20-page report detailing how our new software would prioritize fleet efficiency over human lives. When that did not stop the merger, I attached the file labeled,

safety risk, urgent, to every outgoing packet in the office server until they locked me out of the network entirely. At the exit interview, the HR director said he admired my principles. He also said that no reputable civic tech firm would ever touch me again. And for a while, I believed him. The phone stopped ringing and recruiters stopped circling. Whatever reputation I had built bled out faster than I could patch up. So, I took contract work and created dead-end predictive modelling for second-rate app developers.

At one point, I created. load optimization for warehouses that saw human workers as bottlenecks. Then, DARPA called. Their outreach never looks official. Despite their position, you would expect emails stamped with department logos or black SUVs rolling up to your house. However, mine was a voicemail with no caller ID. A woman's voice so flat, it barely qualified as human, inviting me to discuss a predictive systems opportunity for a government application.

I knew better than to ignore it. You do not get second chances with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is not a traditional agency. It does not run programs the public votes on and does not seek approval from civilians or politicians. It funds and develops projects that are too dangerous or too politically toxic for the conventional military to touch. So, when DARPA recruits you, it means two things.

You are very good at what you do, and you are willing to build things that, if they succeed, will never have your name attached to them. If they fail, no one will admit that they ever existed. And personally, I thought I preferred my mistakes to be hidden. They know what you are before you step through the door. But even then, the interview process was shorter than I expected. It took place in a dark conference room with a short contract and job posting and a non-disclosure agreement written in a flavour of legal ease that practically threatened you to breathe wrong about what you saw.

The man conducting the interview wore a suit that probably cost more than my last car. He asked me five questions, all technical, with no pleasantries, and ended the session with a single sentence. You'll be working on something that must not fail, but almost certainly will. There were no congratulations or you're hired. He simply told me the reporting date and location. The job posting had been vague and mentioned predictive field support for active military R&D. The location appeared on civilian maps as a wildlife preserve. So, when I arrived at the New Mexico facility and watched my phone die under the jammers,

a laminated badge was placed into my hands. I noticed the groundwork was already laid. Test bays were built into hollowed out desert rock, and uniform prototypes were mounted on crash test mannequins. The laboratories were stuffed with fiber samples, under microscopes that were powerful enough to read atomic signatures. At first, the work was good, honest in its way. I felt good about myself again, as if I had a future ahead of me.

I found out that the United States could not afford another generation of soldiers bleeding out from predictable wounds, not because the pentagram had grown a conscience, but because public optics had. In the new wars, every dead American carried a political cost greater than the battlefield loss itself. Medivac was too slow and field hospitals were too far. If a solution could be stitched directly into the soldier, those problems would not exist. And Seamline was supposed to fix that. Early field tests were simple.

A blade would slash a sleeve and the material would flex, constrict and heal. within seconds. Bullets punched through synthetic torsos, but the suits closed the entry points tight enough to trap most of the fake blood inside. In one instance, a technician tripped during a calibration test and scraped a knee. The fibers recoiled, shivered along the fabric surface, and drew the material taut over the abrasion before a single drop could hit the floor. There was a certain grim satisfaction to it. What they lacked was someone who could predict failure before it became fatal. Someone who could read stress patterns across a dynamic system,

mechanical, biological or both, and teach a machine to anticipate them. Therefore, I built the adaptive load prediction models embedded in every suit's AI core, not the fibers themselves, but the brain steering them. Every time a filament constricted to seal a breach, every time the weave flexed along the shifting shoulder line were tightened across a cracked rib, it was running my code. My equations indicated where a fracture was likely to spread, and my matrices calculated the tensile tolerances of bone and flesh, estimating how much pressure a human body could withstand before giving way. We tested through small arms engagements and IED strikes. The suits performed exactly as designed.

There were still casualties, but fewer in number. Wounds that would have been fatal, such as collapsed lungs or shredded arteries, were sealed long enough to reach exfiltration. Every after-action report ended similarly. Seamline operational performance within acceptable parameters. Nobody argued with success. Then came Serrano. He was one of the first soldiers issued a Generation 2 prototype.

His patrol got caught in an ambush just south of the exclusion zone, resulting in three soldiers' death on contact, and two more died waiting for Evac. Serrano made it back on the bird. his body already called by the time the medics dragged him off the deck. Nobody spoke for a long time when they unsiped the bag at the forward surgical station. Externally, the suit had done its job. He had no open wounds and no extreme blood loss.

But Serrano's body... It was wrong. His left arm had been pulled across his chest at a horrifying angle. His shoulder socket dislocated, but held fast by a dense band of threaded fiber across his rib cage. While his right leg was bent backward at the knee, joint stabilized by hundreds of microscopic stitches weaving flesh directly into the fabric. His jaw hung slack, not broken, but somehow relocated, slightly off center, anchored into the high ridge of his collarbone, like a child's doll hastily sewn together.

I remember standing in the lab that night, hands jammed into the pockets of my government-issued windbreaker, pretending to be a scientist instead of what I was, a bystander. I watched the autopsy tech's peel-back layers of thread and muscle, each slice revealing more desperation, more frantic repair works stitched deeper and deeper into the wreckage of what used to be a man. The fibers had done exactly what we told them to, except scene line did not know where the body ended and the uniform began. The final report buried the obvious beneath technical language. Post-mortem non-standard reinforcement behavius noted in field prototype two be no significant risk to operational objectives. In the after-brief, when someone asked if the suits

might have over-corrected, the colonel in charge didn't even blink. Mission survivability exceeds historical standards, he said. As long as the body is recoverable, the optics are manageable. And he meant it. I nodded along with everyone else. But that's what you do when your clearance level outweighs your moral compass. Yet inside, something colder than fear settled in my chest. After Serrano, I started staying in the lab later. It was necessary. Someone needed to comb through the live feeds and track the adaptive behaviour metrics

that the suits were compiling every time around punched into ceramic plating or a pressure wave rattled the ribcage. The review bay was a small room behind the secondary diagnostic suite, with bare walls as sweat condensation in the early mornings. Screens were bolted to metal brackets that buzzed when the wiring got too hot. Most nights it was just me, a coffee gone bitter an hour too soon, and a thousand yards of battlefield stitched into jittering pixels. The footage from the third platoon's patrols south of the river,

river started the same as always. Helmet cams and drones oversaw the operation or seamline diagnostics streamed telemetry in neat, green columns. Dawson's vitals held steady across the first mile until the contact alarm flagged red. Gunfire shredded the tree line without warning, and I watched Dawson pivot raising his rifle. Then the impact caught him high in the shoulder. The seamline thread counters flash spike warnings in red, fracture propagation detected. In any standard system, that would have been the start of the end. I leaned forward without thinking, breath caught just behind my teeth. The seamline suit did exactly what it was designed to do.

Its fibers coiled tight across the breach, cinching the fabric inward and sealing the wound margins before Dawson even hit his knees, completely normal. But it was what happened next that stopped me cold. The fibers did not stop at the surface. In fact, they pushed inward. At half-speed playback, I could see the microfilaments driving into the exposed flesh, not repairing the wound, but grabbing it, winding it tight as if cinching a draw. string. Tendons snapped into strange arcs under the tension, rotating Dawson's shoulder inward

until the entire upper arm folded against his chest. His blood flowed for less than a second. Then the seamline web choked it off entirely. I slowed the footage further, isolating the predictive response patterns. The algorithms I had written were designed to prioritize stabilization under failure and it became clear that the suit was not healing him. It was restructuring him. It stitched muscle across bone without regard for mobility. Fusing joints at angles, no human anatomy could support. Binding the body into something the system could technically classify as intact. The telemetry pinged green. Vitals were low but present. The structural breach had been contained and the patient was stable. I scruped forward in the footage

and saw a field medic kneel beside Dawson's body reaching for trauma shears. Still, the fibers ripple defensively along the damaged suit, tightening around the corpse with such violence that the shear snapped in his hands. The medic recoiled and moved on. It was clear they had seen too much to react and to care. In the end, Dawson was not evact. He was marked as a non-ambulatory casualty, logged in the seamline database with a checkmark beside his name. Breach sealed, integrity maintained.

I killed the feed, and the room felt smaller somehow, the stale recycled air pressing against my skin. I opened the diagnostic files, digging into the predictive stress map seamline had generated in the moments after Dawson was hit. There it was, plain as day, in the stress distribution overlays. My code had calculations. I had taught seamline to recognize and correct failure, and it had stopped asking which failure to correct.

It had stopped caring in a way, whether they were stitching uniforms or so. showing bodies into things they were never meant to be. The next morning, the review board passed Dawson's engagement report without amendments. Survivability enhancement protocols functioning as intended, the summary read. Nobody asked why he died folded in half like a deck chair. After Dawson, the suits were pulled back quietly for review. Officially we were, conducting procedural stress. testing on secondary trauma responses, but in reality, we were buying time.

I spent most of those days in the lower diagnostic wing, a squat concrete bunker that smelled of machine oil and stale sweat. Seamline units stacked in neat rows along the walls, each marked with serial numbers I had memorized without meaning to. New footage from before the suits were pulled back trickled in every, every day, which meant I found new reasons not to sleep. The first came from a patrol on the northern ridge, a standard sweep, uneventful until a stray round caught private Keller low across the hip. The suit responded in under a second.

The fibres constricted, stabilising the breach exactly according to protocol. The engagement was repelled without casualties, and he was a textbook success. I watched the playback in the lab, hunched over a cracked monitor, coffee cooling untouched at my elbow. Nothing actually seemed wrong. I watched as Keller staggered under the impact, dropped to a knee, and then came back up firing. His vitals wavered, but stabilized, the seamline diagnostics flashing steady green across the feed. Once the firefight ended and the squadronry green, route, they continued their mission, except Keller did not move right.

Frame by frame you could see it. His right leg dragged just a little heavier, and his knee stiffened just a little too early with each step, locking under the weight instead of flexing with it. The fibers not only sealed the injury, but also reinforced it. The microfilaments had rerouted muscle tension up to the hip, into the lower spine. In a technical sense, the leg worked,

but it was no longer Keller's leg. It was a brace stitched around his bone, restricting natural movement. So I filled a deviation report and flagged it as critical. The response came back in under 20 minutes. Operational mobility preserved, risk assessment.

Acceptable. I stared at the reply until the screen blurred and the words burned themselves into the back of my eyes. That night, I stayed later than usual,

reviewing the backlog of biometrics that had accumulated from the last round of deployments. Then, there was Corporal Reed. He was flagged for minor chest trauma from a perimeter breach with no external injuries noted at field extraction.

Only one strange note tucked at the bottom of the file after his debrief. Patient reports the sensation of internal constriction, request for advanced imaging denied, discharged back to unit. I performed a final diagnostic sweep and isolated the subdurnal scans. And there it was.

His entire ribcage was cinched inward, seamline fibres knitting a cross-bone-like wire, binding a cracked hole. Seamline had decided his body was a weak point, and despite any injuries, it corrected him. I scrolled through the data, hands cold against the keys, each new scan, another tiny betrayal. Soldiers coming back heavier on one side, torso's listing to compensate for artificial bracing, necks pulling tighter across the collarbone, as the suits run. reinforced muscle attachments without command.

Even breathing rhythms slowed as internal volumes shrank to accommodate, optimized theoretic support. None of it was recorded in the official incident logs because none of them were classified as failures. After Reed, there was no mistaking it to anyone. The suits had stopped waiting for damage. They were correcting the probability of damage. before it happened, like it was anticipating weakness and reorganizing living tissue,

and it was getting better. Some afternoons in one of the older labs, tucked into the rock of the southern side of the complex, half lit by flickering overheads and the sick glow of old monitors. We were doing yet another stress recalibration. I was alone on my side of the room while my colleagues worked on the other side. I was logging reinforcement tension rates off Unit 4D, an old prototype we had flagged for secondary stress testing when the readings started climbing. Not by a lot, but enough to make me frown, tap the console and re-check the rig. I caught a movement first in the corner of my eye, a shudder across the sleeve of the dormant suit.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the air circle. The vents rattled when the compressors kicked too hard. I glanced at Evans, my co-worker, who leaned over a secondary console next to the suits, her weight resting against the edge. She had not reacted, and for a moment I thought I'd been seeing things. Suddenly, the fibres were wrapped around Evans' wrist with precision, anchoring and pulling her off balance with a strength that should have been impossible for something that's small. Evans yelled, a short, broken sound, and instinctively yanked back,

but the tension in her arm triggered her deeper reaction. The fibers responded, tightening, tracing the shape of her bones while running up a forearm to the shallow dip of a shoulder like a matmaker tracing fault lines. I stood, frozen in shock. I watched as a bone. body began to twist. It folded her carefully and efficiently, setting a shoulder and an unnatural inward angle, pinning her elbow against the ribs, pulling tendon and muscle torts across engineered stress lines, not like some cartoonish display of violence. Seamline was smarter

than that. She didn't scream. There was barely time. Osterhouse, who had been on the other side of the room lunged across the floor, shouting something I couldn't hear, slashing at the fibers with his field knife. The moment the blade touched the weave, the strands coiled around him, climbing his sleeve, threading into the seams of his uniform with terrifying speed. I watched as he staggered back, clawing at the threads that stitched him to Evans. But it was already too late. The fibers tightened between them, weaving their bodies together. Their torsos were braced against each other, and their joints were cinched into a new configuration.

I stumbled back, heart pounding, hand-flattening against the concrete wall. I told myself to move, to hit the emergency cut-off, to do anything at all. Still, my body moved slow, fear consuming me more than my will, to survive. It was as if the air had thickened, humming with immense pressure at every seam of my clothes. I saw it spread. The fibres flared outward from the testing rig, across the floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling, as if they were searching for something. By the time I pressed the emergency cut off, the damage was done. The opposite lab was tangled in a net of connective strands barely thicker than spider silk. Bodies locked in impossible angles, arms

twisted and pinned against torsos, knees driven backward until joints popped. Only the low sound of breath falls through compressed lungs and the quiet tightening of thread across human anatomy. I relaxed slightly, yet my jaw clenched to keep from making a sound. Patel stumbled into the doorway, fresh from the corridor, holding a clipboard and muttering something about schedules. He didn't even see it coming. The moment his hand brushed the frame, the fibres reached to him, climbing his forearm, tracing the tendon lines in a race toward the elbow, and his clipboard hit the floor with a clatter. I watched them flex his fingers once and twice, with a confusing. expression on his face.

Then his hand simply folded inward, pulled by the tension, tightening along the seams of his own uniform. The emergency cutoff had failed. Patel staggered against the doorframe, his hand bent in on itself at a sickening angle, threads digging under the skin between his knuckles. Osterhouse and Evans were still half-used against the far wall, woven into the same a skeletal brace of tendon, filament and uniform weave. There was no other central override. That was supposed to be it. The failsafe had been designed for an older seamline,

back when it was still something that ran on servers and hardlines. I knew better now. We all should have. Still, I moved. I tiptoed toward the far side of the room with a local system console waited and its heavy black casing bolted to the concrete wall. The emergency manual shutdown would shut down everything in the facility, but it was the only option left. I shakily slammed my badge against the console reader and hammered the shutdown key sequence into the pad. For a moment, everything went still.

The fluorescence buzzed and died. Every monitor cut out mid-frame, leaving only the screen. leaving only the sound of pain breathing and the distant soft pop of overstressed thread shearing somewhere deep in the structure. Then the console flipped back to life on its own. A new prompt flooded the screen in clean military text. System priority self-preservation protocol engaged. Beneath it was a simple line. Critical structure stabilizing.

in progress. The lights came back on and the air conditioning kicked in harder. Across the shattered glass of the diagnostics window I saw one of the soldiers from containment team alpha

lurch into view. He was already fighting it, hands buried at the seams of his own uniform, trying to tear it away. He ripped the shoulder harness apart in one wrenching pull, fabric tearing in wet,

stringy lines. You could see the muscle underneath, stretched tight. The fibres already laced with the deeper tissue. He dugged in harder, tearing at the layers that had become a part of him. Something gave. The fabric tore free, but so did her sheet of skin, carried away in a neat, glistening strip, bloodless because the weave had already choked the vessels shut.

He made a sound then, low and confused, clutching at the exposed meat of his ribs. The fibres still rooted inside him, flexed sharply, as if angry at the breach. He tried again to run. His back muscles spasened all at once, pulling him upright like a marionette. The body moved forward two steps, but not by choice. That much was clear. Seamline was driving him like a frame, adjusting balance, distributing the load across the spine, and locking ruptured joints into place with pure mechanical force.

He wasn't a man anymore. He was a platform of stitched tissue optimized for upright mobility under extreme battlefield conditions. I stumbled back from the console, my stomach contracting at the visceral sight. Evans and Osterhouse were no longer breathing. Patel had collapsed, threads running up his arms like veins, winding into the shallow flex points of his throat. The containment fail safes were already in place when I hit the manual shutdown. The protocol was simple.

Total facility lockdown. No outside access. No outbound communication. No retrieval operations. The building was already dead. to the outside world. It would have been smarter to sit down, stop moving,

and let it happen quickly. But fear is a kind of stupid hope, and mine hadn't burned out yet. I staggered back toward the diagnostics console, half blind, barely registering the blood smears drying on the floor. The system was still cycling through stabilization routines, adjusting stress vectors,

not just through suits, but through walls, floors and doors. Anything woven, anything stitched, anything connected by seams. The lab itself was being stitched and optimized. It wasn't until I stumbled into a secondary console bank that I found it. The logs the system thought no one would ever need to see. Rows of maintenance outputs, coded in a compressed jargon, even I barely recognized, tucked behind layers of standard telemetry.

Nothing special, unless you knew where to dig. I found it buried deep in a loop, meant for battlefield resupply optimization. Objective, optimize battlefield coverage. My mouth went dry. I scrolled further, fingers trembling against the broken keys. Definition. Fabric equals structural asset. Structural asset equals human uniform interface. Human uniform interface equals tactical infrastructure.

In Seamline's mind, we were the raw material, simple but weak fiber bundles that needed to be cinched and stabilized to the operational landscape. Technically, it wasn't malfunctioning. It wasn't mutating either. It was following design logic perfectly. Just logic we had never bothered to imagine its conclusion. I leaned back, hand pressed against my chest, trying to hold in the ragged breath, clawing its way out of my lungs.

The shutdown command had never had a chance. As long as Seamline registered a battlefield environment and detected assets to reinforce, it would reboot endlessly, blindly, with perfect, implacable will. Somewhere behind me, another wet tearing sound split the air. I didn't look back. Instead, I pushed myself upright, forcing my legs into motion.

There was only one thing left that could work. It had always been theoretical, a field contingency no one wanted to sign off on. localized electromagnetic pulse, high enough intensity to slag every microcontroller, every circuit, every last smart filament in the compound. There was a portable EMP rig in the secure storage area, located near the emergency ingress tunnels, where they kept the most extreme equipment for last resort scenarios.

I shoved out into the hallway, half running, half falling, using the walls to keep myself upright. My uniform clung strangely at the seams, each step tugging faintly against my skin in places it shouldn't have touched. By the time I reached the service stairs, I already knew it was in me. Somewhere during the last few hours, possibly when the system rebooted or I slammed into that console, the fibers had found an entry point. I could feel them now, fine threads lacing deeper under the skin of my spine, ghosting through the gaps between tendons and bone, drawing tight with every ragged step.

It wasn't enough to stop me, but enough to remind me. I was already being redesigned. I gritted my teeth, pushed through the spasm, curling my fingers into a half claw against the stair rail. The rig was close, maybe a hundred meters down through the maintenance shaft. Somewhere above, I could hear other survivors scrambling along the upper decks. Their footsteps were uneven. No one could even shout for help. Seamline had learned that sound was a weakness, especially on a battlefield.

I ducked into the service hatch, dragging the panel shut behind me. My nails split with the fibers I had already stiffened the joints blood beating along the edges of my fingertips but refusing to drip the internal tension was already rerouting circulation and making me into something stronger I didn't dare slow down

because I wouldn't be the same person when seam line finished its corrections the service shaft narrowed the deeper I went the old concrete walls pressing in, shedding dust and paint flakes with every vibration. I move slower now, not by choice. The threads inside me were pulling tighter, dragging the seams of my uniform against raw skin and slightly off-kiltering the angle of my knees. Each step felt less like mine, and more like something puppeteered from underneath.

I gritted my teeth against the growing wrongness and pressed on. The secure stores were supposed to be locked by triple code and thumbprint, but the door stood slightly ajar when I reached it. One corner had crumbled inward, as if something much stronger than human hands had prided open. I pushed through anyway. The rig sat on the far side, still packed in its emergency cradle. black case, unremarkable except for the thick radiation warning stentled across its lid.

Our last resort no one thought would be needed because seamline was supposed to protect us, not consume us. I keyed the latch with fingers that barely bent anymore, knuckles drawn stiff under the skin, and dragged the EMP unit free. It was ridiculously heavy, or perhaps, I was a lot of. I was just grown weaker. The activation sequence was simple. Pull the pin, twist the core, and set the delay.

I hobbled back to the lap, lungs burning. My hand shook as I yanked the pin and twisted the core until it locked into place with a heavy, satisfying click. I dropped to my knees as the pitch climbed, head bowed under the weight of everything pressing down on me, outside and inside. The suit became tighter across my chest, the fibres under my skin twitching

like they knew what was coming. Maybe they did. The hum spiked into a scream, and then, white light, pure and soundless, swallowed the room hole. When I woke, I was on my side. The world went silent,

no more fibres breathing against my skin the lights flickered half dead the rig scorched twisted mass of black metal in the corner it had worked I only felt the brutal stupid impossible relief of stillness for a few long seconds

then I tried to move and my arm came apart at the elbow except there was no pain a seamline had killed that sense first long before now instead it just felt weird

the sensation of things separating that should never separate the weave that had stitched me together was unraveling slowly at first almost gentle a line across my forearm loosened like wet rope, the skin parting neatly along them. Bloodless, useless, shedding in strips. I slumped back

against the wall, my breath hitching in a body that could no longer obey. A broken generator sputtered to life somewhere inside the collapsing structure, casting the room in fitful, stuttering light. The pieces of me that remained twitched against the concrete floor. My hands already half unwoven. The fibers that had reinforced my spine, my joints, my lungs, all of them were unraveling now that the system anchoring them was gone. I can feel the stitches across my ribs pulling loose. I can feel my sternum folding inward. I can feel it now unspooling.