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I was watching media with ART when it happened.
My systems alerted me to a low fluids alert.
That was weird. I checked my various fluid levels. All of them were normal. Usually the low fluids alert was something I got when I was severely damaged and leaking, when I lost so much blood/fluids that I was in danger of going into shutdown.
My systems alerted me to a low battery alert.
I checked my battery. I was at 79%. And sitting on my ass doing nothing, not firing my energy weapons or anything. The fuck? According to my documentation, the low battery alert was something that was supposed to activate when I’m burning energy so fast that I’m in danger of whiting myself out and dying if I don’t cut it the fuck out and start a recharge cycle in the next 5 minutes.
My systems alerted me to a low body mass alert.
Okay, what the fuck was going on?
ART asked, “What is it?” It must have picked up on my agitation in the feed.
I sent it my alerts and diagnostics. “My systems are acting up.”
ART looked over my diagnostics. Then it said, “I’d like to examine you in my MedSystem.”
ART scanned me in the MedSystem. It didn’t say anything for 6 seconds after the scan completed. That’s a long time for a bot with the kind of processing capacity ART has. Its MedSystem told me that I didn’t seem to be damaged or low on fluids/energy/mass, but that my organic parts were acting metabolically different compared to the previous times I’d been scanned. When I asked the MedSystem to explain what that meant, it said that my organic parts were burning a lot of excess energy. It pointed out that my body temperature was 2.2 degrees above normal. That was weird. I hadn’t noticed.
Then ART said, “I think it would be a good idea to hook you up to an IV, a power cord, and a raw materials port.”
Well there was only one answer to that. “What the fuck? Why?”
My raw materials port was something that ART’s MedSystem had never used. It was a feature that works in tandem with a cubicle to rapidly rebuild parts of my body when, say, I get a leg ripped off and misplaced. Or two legs. Or my whole lower half. The MedSystem functioned differently, and just printed in new flesh/structural components from one point working from inside to outside, which was slower than a cubicle rebuild which can build in multiple directions at once. But that wasn’t a big deal because I’ve never had my leg ripped off in ART’s care. Besides, me taking slightly longer for repairs didn’t cost a profit-motivated company any money.
It said, cagily, “I think your systems alerts are expressing real physical resupply needs.”
“I’m not missing a leg or blood or anything. Why would I need that shit? What aren’t you telling me?”
ART was silent for 3.32 seconds. But I could be patient.
Finally, it said, “This is only a hypothesis, based on the pattern of metabolic activation in your organic parts.” It showed me a bunch of charts and stuff that I didn’t understand, with stuff like estimated caloric burn, hormone profiles, and a bunch of chemicals and medical words I didn’t know. “I’ve seen similar physiological activation in some of my students shortly before they chrysalized. Your body may be in the beginning stages metamorphosis.”
This was so gob smackingly absurd that I was speechless for an entire 10 seconds.
I said, “My body already reached its imago form.”
ART said, “Yes.”
I said, “Nobody pods after their adult imago form.”
ART said, “On the contrary, there are rare cases of such metamorphic disorders in humans. There has been at least one documented instance of an imago adult undergoing a second full metamorphosis.”
What the fuck. “I’ve never heard of this.”
“It is rare. I’m speaking of one-off case studies.”
“Well send me these studies.”
ART was silent.
“ART?” This was making me nervous.
It said, “I’ll summarize it for you. Metamorphic disorders fall into a couple broad categories: most common are issues forming a chrysalis or other difficulties with undergoing metamorphosis — failing to create a robust chrysalis, or failing to correctly re-form the body.”
Okay, I’d heard of those. I’d seen them. You could end up with adults that had stunted limbs or something, or who came out tiny, or with inside organs on the outside, or who just didn’t survive the process. It was more common with humans who didn’t have sufficient fat energy stores as adolescents going into pod.
(Preservation humans tend to run big compared to the indentured-class humans I’d seen in the CR. Adult body size/weight is kind of a social posturing Thing with CR humans. It’s usually the bigger ones who end up as managers and stuff.
SecUnits are all the same size though, since our wasp bodies are basically ripped to shreds and rebuilt to spec. Which if you think about it is its own kind of metamorphosis. So I’ve already endured an extra metamorphosis. I’d better not be about to have another. Or so help me I was… going to be really annoyed.)
ART continued, “Much rarer are hormonal and gene regulation disorders, which can cause metabolic issues that can trigger a physical state similar to what transpires inside the chrysalis. There have been attempts to treat this with hormone therapy, but it is not well studied and results are mixed.”
I asked, “So what happened to that human who had a second adult metamorphosis?”
ART hesitated 0.11 seconds. “They survived the initial process, but the strain on their body was immense. They didn’t have the adolescent energy stores to sustain them, and they died shortly after exiting their chrysalis.”
Well, that was great to hear. (No it wasn’t.)
“We should not jump to conclusions. It’s unlikely that you will experience the same thing.”
“Yeah, because it’ll be worse,” I said, “My body is mostly inorganic. What the fuck is going to happen to me?”
“We do not know that you are about to metamorphose,” ART said firmly, “I think it is more likely that this is a side effect of your construct augmentation. Your organic material and genes have been altered from baseline.”
This was stupid. “SecUnits don’t pod.”
“SecUnits don’t go years without hooking up to a cubicle,” ART said.
…Ah. Okay, I think I finally saw what ART was getting at. “But we don’t know what kinds of things the cubicle does in the background that might’ve been stopping me from podding.”
“True. But I do have a unit maintenance manual from the company.”
This was the first I was hearing of this, but it wasn’t really surprising that ART had a manual on hand considering who ART was, i.e. a nosy know-it-all busybody.
ART repeated, “I would like to hook you up to an IV, a power cord, and a raw materials port.”
I said, “Fine.”
The IV went into one of my larger veins, accessed under the extra flap of skin on my chest that I’d grown out to help soften the inhuman look of my exterior inorganics.
The power cord went into a port low on my spine (ART had to cut back some extra skin that was covering the plug there too). My systems immediately latched on and started siphoning power into my battery, and from there into the electricity-powered metabolic systems that support my organic parts. The initial sizzle of it jolting through my spine and systems was a little disconcerting, and then the sensation settled back down into a slightly uncomfortable but also… weirdly pleasant buzz. Like I was experiencing a kind of physical high sensation, a warm background feeling that permeated every part of my body but felt most intense in the power systems part of me that was wired throughout my inorganic understructure.
“Are you all right?” ART asked. I must have made a weird face.
“I’m fine,” I said, in a totally normal voice. “It’s just that I haven’t taken outside power since I worked at the company. I’d kind of forgotten what it felt like.” It felt like my skin was humming a bit.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” ART instructed, and then it peeled back some more skin (it hurt a bit and I let ART know, because it told me to, but I also let it know it wasn’t a big deal (it’s just skin)), and its MedSystem plugged a bumpy tube thing that I’d never seen before into my raw materials port.
I had about five seconds to experience the following sensations, in this order: sharp pain, the flow of raw material into my catastrophic rebuild systems, a weird sense of vertigo, awful nausea, my primary visuals abruptly going fuzzy around the edges, bone-deep relief so intense that I thought I was going to pass out. I had time to flag ART with an alert that later turned out to be garbled nonsense, and then I did pass out.
I came to with a systems restart only thirty seconds later, and to ART mildly freaking out at me. (It claimed it wasn’t freaking out, but it was definitely freaking out.)
The moment I came back online, it demanded, “Show me your diagnostics.”
I did, groggily. I’d been sitting up when I passed out, but I’d flopped back when I went unconscious. So now I was lying on my back in ART’s MedSystem cradle, which had adjusted its shape to accommodate the tube sticking out of my back.
After several seconds, ART came out with a genius observation: “This does not look normal.”
“Okay,” I said. Or tried to. It mostly came out as a croak. I was feeling distractingly hot; my skin was sweaty, making my clothes cling to me. (I’d just pulled my shirt up to get all the shit hooked up to me, and now my shirt was bunched up weird in an uncomfortable way. Fuck it. I pulled my shirt the rest of the way off and dropped it on the floor.)
“I was hoping that I could equalize your systems according to your company’s cubicle specs, but your systems aren’t reacting as anticipated,” ART was saying, but I wasn’t listening very well. Everything felt weird and distant, and I was having a very difficult time focusing on the words ART was transmitting to me.
Also my chest felt kind of heavy, and something felt strange and constricted in the sides of my jaw, like there was something starting to swell inside the back of my mouth. I coughed, and saw through ART’s MedSystem cameras when whitish-pinkish opaque slime dribbled out from between my lips.
ART said, crisply, “Fuck,” and abruptly tilted the cradle so that the goo coming out of my face dribbled off to the side. The sudden motion was more disorienting than it should have been, and I threw my arms out to try and brace myself, but mostly just smacked into all the arms and adjusters of the MedSystem cradle that were holding me in place and keeping me from tumbling onto the floor.
“ART…” I groaned, meaning to complain about the whirling cradle giving me vertigo, but then I coughed again, heavily, the motion wracking my whole body, and the whiteish slime started spinning out of my mouth in earnest, and I felt an electric humming in my jaw and a weird crackling sensation in my chest, and then it was basically impossible to think coherently.
For the next hour or so I had flashes of lucidity during which I mostly sat back wondering What The Fuck, like I was seeing my own body moving alienly, and then I’d get lost again in the singular delirious focus of encasing myself in a pod. I was using my mouth parts and my hands to spread the slimy silk pouring out of my face, spinning it around myself and filling up the structure of ART’s MedSystem cradle, whose shape ART had adjusted to make it better for supporting a pod.
When the pod was done I lay there, inside a small darkish space with faint filtered light, the oddly comforting smell of the silk enveloping me. I was naked, though I didn’t remember when that happened. There wasn’t a lot of space inside the pod, and I was still coughing up stuff, though this stuff didn’t have the opaque stringy consistency of the silk. It was clear, and a bit jelly-like, and it was slowly filling the air space inside the pod and getting all over my body.
As much as this should all horrify and disgust me, it somehow didn’t.
I was kind of exhausted though, in a way that was difficult to explain. Thanks to the power and raw materials port I was continually topped up, so exhaustion shouldn’t be a thing.
So I just lay there, staring vaguely up at the pinkish-whitish light filtering through the pod, spitting up goo from my mouth. I idly observed as the pod exterior seemed to be drying out and the shape of the pod was slowly constricting in, its walls coming closer and closer until it was almost touching my skin.
ART pinged me.
I pinged back.
A few seconds later, it asked, hesitantly, “Are you there?”
I hacked up a glob of goo, and said, “Yeah.”
It seemed relieved to hear it. But I could tell it was also dismayed. So I added, “That was pretty fucked up, huh?”
After hesitating for a second, it answered, “Yes.”
I said, “What do you think happens now?”
“I am not confident in any of my guesses. Typically when humans metamorphose, their bodies mostly melt apart into morphing cell structure and then re-form into the next state. But you have inorganic components that make up crucial parts of your body and brain.”
“Ugh,” I said, out loud, and spat up more goo. Then I switched back to the feed. “If I turn into a human and die in here you can try rebuilding me as a SecUnit. That’ll be a fun exercise for you.”
“It would most assuredly not be a fun exercise for me,” ART said, sharply. And it seemed legitimately upset so I didn’t push it. Even though I didn’t really remember what it meant to be upset. I only kind of abstractly understood the concept of “upsettedness.”
I said, “Do you want to watch Worldhoppers?”
After few seconds, ART started up Worldhoppers.
We were a few episodes in when Seth messaged me asking if I was going to show up for the crew meeting. I told him I’d try to join in the feed but I wasn’t going to be able to make it in person in the argument lounge because I was busy melting and/or dying. Then ART butted in and said I was on leave from duty due to a medical issue. Seth wanted to know if the medical issue was something he should know about. I told him I was podding right now. He said what. I said I was podding right now idiot did I stutterr-r-r-r-r? ART told Seth don’t mind me I wasn’t exactly in a completely coherent state of mind. I asked ART what made it the expert on my state of mind all of the sudden?
Seth said can you back up and explain the podding thing. ART said I’d gone into an unexpected pod in the med bay. I said what do you mean unexpected. Then I said we needed to do something about the wormhole gate before it collapses and destroys everybody. It’s not a big deal though we just have to get the stellarator fixed and ART can do that ART can do so many things with its big brain. ART said, no, that was happening in World Hoppers, not in real life. I said yeah we’re hopping worlds right now and anyway there’s no such thing as real life because otherwise that means there’s fake life and that doesn’t make sense. Seth said okay I see. Peri can you handle this? ART said honestly between you and me I’m feeling kinda out of my depth Daddy and I could use some words of affirmation no I didn’t say it like that yes it did.
And then I lost some of my handle on the feed but World Hoppers was still happening and also the gate got fixed so it was all right. Everything was all right. My hands were gone though.
At the end of the first season or something ART asked me how I was feeling. I said something. It said, “Care to elaborate?” And that was a bit nosy. That’s ART for you. So I said, No.
Somewhere in the second or third season I was mostly soup. Technically speaking.
For a while it was difficult to say how much I was dreaming, how much I was present, how much I was in an altered state of consciousness, how much I was in real life or fake life.
I was experiencing a lot of prickling sensation in my extremities and other parts. It was pretty uncomfortable and I probably would have been more grouchy about it, except for the fact that I seemed incapable of grouchiness inside the pod.
I was also aware of thin MedSystem surgical limbs poking around inside me/inside the pod—ART was trying out different things to keep the inorganic parts of me interfacing with the organic soup of me as my body re-formed. But it was having some difficulties. I assume this was because it didn’t have any prior experience with stirring the bone-circuits soup inside a SecUnit pod.
ART’s MedSystem limbs wove their way inside the coalescing soup of my torso and up inside of the soup of my brain. It tickled. Looking back, I couldn’t have actually been very articulate or coherent or even fully conscious. It’s hard to say where I was trying to speak to ART and where I was just There, or if my brain-hardware-parts were even working well enough in concert that speaking or thinking was properly possible.
Another two limbs were gently pulling on what I think were parts of my arms. It tickled.
“It tickles?” ART asked. It seemed curious, or maybe fascinated, or maybe terrified.
I can feel you inside my. What that? Head.
ART’s limbs were gently arranging parts of my inorganic neural structure, the filaments and processing chips that made up parts of my brain. I could feel it shifting inside my skull. Or maybe it was just the general area where my skull should be. I think my neural tissue was a little esploaded at the moment. Unless not.
ART was also pulling parts of me out of me, parts that were goo and parts that were a bit more solid goo. It was uncomfortable and painful in retrospect, but not in the moment. Some of it. Some of it was raw with feeling, some of it was disconnected and I could only feel it by its secondary pulling on other parts of me that did have feeling.
Through ART’s MedSystem sensors I could view the strange inorganic/organic half-goo half-gristle half-mechanical tapestry of my body. I was bones, gleaming. I was veins. I was neural fibers and wire. I was a battery core. I was pulsing.
I was in suspension, blown apart into all my disparate components so tenuously connected, floating in the pod jelly like a much messier reality of a nightmarishly complicated technical diagram.
And ART pushed parts of me back together and cut parts of me apart.
“Are you there?” ART asked, and its tone was so foreign and strange. When I examined the logs of all this later, I knew ART was clearly, desperately terrified, but at the time I hadn’t known. I was just floating there, incapable of fear or discomfort really, deranged and disarranged. “Are you still with me?”
Feeling, strangely, safe. ART was here with me. Even if I wasn’t here with me. Even if I was just the parts of me, turned into soup trying to turn back into me again, while ART held all the sharp and gooey unspooled parts of me cradled in its hands, jelly slipping through its fingers. If it had fingers. So careful.
I’m here. I tried to say it. Even though I’m not sure if it was true. Maybe the words coming out of my feed address were just a pattern-echo.
We were watching Worldhoppers. We were World Hoppers. We could see the wormhole navigation readings, and Captain Seth was consulting with our crew, and planning our next mission, and the stars were going supernova in slow motion, expanding glitter purple as the end credits scrolled over and within it, music.
And then I came back to myself, as abruptly as if I’d powered up from a system restart.
The finale of World Hoppers was on. ART was watching me, but the surgery limbs inside my pod were at rest, cradled gently around my body, which seemed basically solid and properly connected now. I shifted my limbs, and felt them press up against the walls of the pod. I felt one of my hands touch a MedSystem limb. It was smooth, thin, delicate, and I ran my fingers down it. It curled its articulated fingers in response.
On a level as deep as my base coding, I wanted to stretch out. But there wasn’t space.
“Can I come out?” I asked ART. “Is it over?”
“Your systems have been stable for twelve hours,” it said.
It watched as I pressed two hands against the walls of the pod. I dug my fingertips into the slightly uneven silk texture.
It asked, hesitating, “Do you still feel like yourself?”
“I think so,” I said. “Though it’s hard to say how that’s possible considering I melted down and then came back together while you played puzzlematcher with my bits. Good job, I think. Unless you let this nightmare process give me genitals. In which case fuck you forever.”
There was an awkward pause.
“No,” I said. “ART. No.”
“You do have genitals,” it admitted.
Fucking damn it all to hell and back and then back to hell.
“ART!” I yelled, “You piece of shit!”
“I tried to get rid of them but they kept re-forming!” ART defended, “So I planned to ask you about any final modifications after you exited your pod, because the pod interior appears to be a flux state and certain surgical edits are difficult to make stick—”
“Oh shut up already, fuckhead,” I groaned. (I think ART was weirdly pleased that I was acting like this though. But if it was using genitals as a rhetorical test I was going to be pissed off.)
I tore my way through the pod. It was difficult to get the leverage and the pod structure stuff was really strong and difficult to tear. ART helped me out by cutting through it with knives after I managed to open the first tiny little breach with my hands and teeth. But it refused to help before that first breach even though I complained—it claimed full confidence in my ability to make the first tear, and this was some kind of superstitious cultural thing. Which, whatever. I hadn’t expected ART to be superstitious about anything, but apparently this was something.
I stepped out of the pod/MedSystem and onto the floor. My legs wobbled under me, but I basically managed to stay upright. Jelly and blood blooped off my body. Everything felt strange and ungainly and weak.
I coughed, and stretched out all my limbs, and looked at myself though the cameras in ART’s med bay.
Oh. Wow. That was… unusual.
For starters, I had four arms now, like a dragonfly morph. The upper pair were much like my old arms—ART had succeeded in preserving my inbuilt energy weapons.
The lower pair were entirely organic, and had wasp stingers.
My legs were weird. There were more organic parts interfacing with the inorganic, and moving my legs and feet felt different than they had before.
The torso/core area seemed mostly normal. I checked in with my various subsystems, and everything seemed to be there. Plus the FUCKING genitals. Unfortunately ART hadn’t been joking about that. Ugh. This was disgusting. Whatever, I could have that surgically removed and hopefully they wouldn’t spontaneously grow back again.
My head.
Uh.
The two biggest featheriest pair of antennae I’d ever seen had sprouted out right over my temples. They were kind of clumped down from the pod jelly, and I was a little scared to see what they’d look like when they were cleaned off and weren’t slicked down. I hadn’t started out with any antennae. These ones were massive, and would make me look like a crazy moth morph if I cleaned them up. I didn’t know what to make of the combination of moth antennae with wasp stingers and quad arms. What’s next. Wings?
I double checked. No wings. Seriously? Dragonfly arms but no wings to match? Why couldn’t I have gotten the one final imago feature that would actually have been kind of cool? (I probably weighed too much for wings to be much use. They’d still be cool.)
“Can we remove these?” I asked, using the feed to indicate the extra arms, the genitals, and the antennae. Please, fuck, the genitals and the antennae.
“We can do whatever you want,” ART said, “But I suggest you try your current configuration for a short while first, if only so we can monitor that your body has properly settled from metamorphosis and isn’t about to undergo further change. Also, I hesitate somewhat about removing the antennae. It can be done, but those are heavily innervated sensory organs. Antennae removal is a very serious modification with high potential for complications.”
I flexed some muscles that I hadn’t previously had, and swiveled my antennae around from back to front. They hung wetly down in front of my face, past my chin. Fuck, that was weird.
I went into the bathing facility attached to ARTs medical bay, and got the pod goo cleaned off. ART was right about the antennae; they were sensitive as shit to touch, and once the jelly was off and I got them gently blow dried, they could pick up air currents and complex chemical profiles like crazy. It was like I’d hooked up a whole new kind of extremely fancy intel drone to my head. I could practically taste the component chemical profile of ART’s cleaning supplies.
The antennae were also a crazy striking monochrome chevron pattern, and fanned out wide — they were big enough to obscure my whole face if I angled them right. You didn’t often seen antennae like these outside of the media, or on ComfortUnits. I looked like some kind of movie star. Fantastic. That’s just what I needed.
I put on the crew uniform that ART printed fresh for me. Four sleeves and all.
“This is so fucking weird,” I said to ART.
“Iris will be excited to have someone else she can give a high-twenty,” ART said. (It was definitely projecting.)
“I have never give a high-five and I’m not about to do a high-twenty,” I grumbled. (I was definitely about to get pressured into giving Iris a high-twenty.)
“Your cabin is waiting for you, if you want some privacy for now,” it said. “There’s a strategy meeting tomorrow in the crew lounge. You can attend if you wish, but your current medical leave can extend for as long as you need to get settled.”
I headed out of Medical, picking my way awkwardly on my old-new legs.
There are a handful of basic morphological patterns when it comes to human adult imago forms. Plains didn’t have any significant features—there might be some skin texturing or guard hairs but that’s about it. Occasionally a plain human emerges with wings, those are called flies. Moths were very common on Preservation, noticeably more so than any corporate installations I’ve worked at. They came with antennae and were often furry. Dragonflies had compound eyes, six limbs, and usually wings, and they’re a bit stronger and hungrier than plains or moths. And wasps have poison stingers, ravenous carnivorous appetites, and extreme strength.
Plus once in a while you can get a hybrid morph, like what I am now apparently.
I’ve heard of a couple other morphs, but I’ve never seen them outside of entertainment media and I’m not sure if they are real. “Beetles” are human adults 2-3x larger than average, even stronger than wasps, and naturally armored. Supposedly. You’d think if they were real they’d get converted into constructs the same as wasps, though. Another possibly apocryphal morph is the scorpion, which is basically a wasp with a whole ass stinging tail on top of it all. There’s at least one military company I know of that evokes the scorpion myth by putting stinging tails on their CombatUnits, but I’m pretty sure the tails are purely mechanical, like a fancy decorative augment.
Ten cycles later, I was sitting in the crew lounge, watching media.
ART asked, “If you are still interested in modifications, I can perform a check in the MedSystem now.”
I got up, and headed to medical.
Sitting in ART’s MedSystem cradle while it scanned me was strange. I watched the readings as they came out, and ART formatted them in a way that I could understand. All my weird podding hormones and stuff had settled down. I was basically back to a steady state now, and free to let ART put my body back to normal.
Back to “normal.”
ART’s MedSystem sent me the surgery outline and consent selection form. It let the form hang in the feed. ART let me let it hang in the feed. It was uncharacteristically quiet and patient. Or maybe it was characteristically quiet and patient—the component of ART that runs its MedSystem is overall more kind and patient than the rest of it.
My “normal” was something that the company had built. I’d come out of my metamorphosis and my imago form had been a wasp, so the company had harvested my body and formatted it to spec, configured me to SecUnit standard, built out my brain and my body, and then that was me. That was all I knew. My life before podding was pretty vague and difficult to remember, though sometimes I got weird flashes of stuff, like an incomplete memory wipe.
And then this freak ass extra metamorphosis had hit me, and totally changed my configuration again. I was some kind of bizarre multimorph now. (It was semi-uncommon for humans adults to emerge with with mixed imago features but it wasn’t unheard of.) I had to wonder if this was because of any gene editing the company had done to me to build me into a SecUnit.
But now I was an actual freak of nature. I’d had an extra metamorphosis, which just didn’t happen. My current configuration couldn’t be something the company ever intended.
For as long as I could remember, the fundamentals of my body configuration hadn’t really been my own. The one thing that was mine, was when ART had made some minor edits in limb length and helped me make superficial changes in my hair and skin. And I hadn’t even really wanted to do that. I’d had to do it to blend in better with humans.
Though it’s not like humans chose their imago forms either. Well, actually, I guess some of them do get surgeries and stuff to change various features for reasons I never previously understood. But I was maybe understanding it a little bit now. It was about having control over yourself, I think. About fitting into a body, making it yours. I guess my body hasn’t ever felt like mine, really. And it legally wasn’t for most of my remembered existence. But…
I reached up and touched one of my antennae with my hand, gently running my fingerpads along it from root to tip. It was highly sensitive, but not in a bad way. Not when I was careful with it.
The association of moth antennae with beauty was an ick factor, admittedly. But antennae aren’t inherently sexual or anything. For the past ten cycles the data I’d pulled in from them had helped me understand the humans around me a better. Certain gestures and behaviors were a lot more pronounced now, more easy to parse. I’d have thought that smelling everyone in such high definition would be gross, but it wasn’t really. I could more easily pick up when people were nervous, which was useful. And when they’d eaten (and what they’d eaten), which was less useful.
Was it possible that I’d originally had some antennae when I came into my adult morph? Or quad limbs? Had the company amputated me?
I had no way of knowing.
I said, “ART.”
ART said, “Yes?”
I said, “Thanks. For, you know, keeping me from falling apart into gross pieces inside the pod.”
It said, “Anytime. Have you decided upon a selection?”
I undid the fastening on my pants. “Just take my stupid genitals off.”