I had another dream, of these dewds who called themselves hackers — literally. With all the phlegm in their bodily systems they could muster, they'd blow their noses and choke up bowlfuls of mucus, offering it to me to look at. While I wasn't disgusted by this ritual custom they'd been carrying on for some time, I was curious, so I sat down with them and observed them as they'd gag and snort and spew voluminous amounts of the goo, concentrations of dark clusters?eclipsing pale amber rings, surrounded by emulsified yellow webs leading to the most liquid and transparent of the mix clinging to the outer?rings of the bowls.
The bowls themselves were of study construction, perhaps made by the hackers themselves. They appeared perfect in their imperfection, emblazoned with weird little scratch-glyphs and jagged scars down the sides, which almost made a pleasing sort of texture around the rim. Their color was that of a crispy but not-yet-burnt syenna, looped around the mainbowl tighter than a hangman's noose at high noon. Or something. And there were little grooves towards the hand-grips that were jutted out of the side, perhaps to encourage that not a drip was missed.
I tried to converse with the hackers, but they were busy… hacking away, as one might say. A lot of abrasive, churning noises came from their stomachs, almost like a Tuvan monk chant for the lungs, rising and falling tones indicating when the next hocks would be hurled forth. Before I could ask another question, the lot of them, all half-dozen plus one, pointed forward to the middle of the table before us. It was so obvious and yet I had missed it before.
I stared closer: patterns emerged on the table, a geometric elegance. It appeared to be almost like what — from my experience — I know as a computer, with some sort of organic interface, and along with buttons and menus that burbled like jelly, even a lever or switch or two that pillared upwards from the table (perhaps itself a superstructure of the whole works) like mushroom's children. Observing carefully, I noticed pipes plugged into the "machine". These pipes went up to higher-angled pipes that were wider in dimensions, which then connected to funnels, which in turn were — having the contents of the hackers's bowls dumped into them, ready for the next loading sequence.
It dawned on me what was happening: the hackers were developing coughware.