The missing limbs, the burns, the weird bar, the smart speaker, even the mysterious missing fuzzy Carl were nothing compared to the horror of feeling my face and it not being mine.
The side that had been missing was now hard and smooth. It gave slightly to pressure, but not like the flesh and fat of the other side. I tapped it with my fingers and felt the sensation of that touch—the pressure, even the slight coolness of my fingertips. The sensations were blunted, but they were there. I felt no bones under it; the skin stretched and moved as my mouth did, but it was uncannily unfamiliar.
“That was a great deal of work,” the voice said. “Your physiology is wonderful. I’m sorry I could not do better.”
I ignored the voice and reached down to feel my legs, which, under the sheets, were now taking up the correct amount of space. I swung them out from under the sheet, and indeed they existed. Just like my arm, they were smooth and white and flecked with iridescence. My mind told me I should maybe consider panicking, but then just … didn’t.
Whatever the material was, it came up to a seamless connection point with my skin on my right calf. On the left, it climbed all the way up my body, covering my hip, side, back, and chest before creeping up my armpit and around my shoulder, where it now fused with the milky material of my left arm.
It didn’t look like skin, or even feel like skin, but my legs did look and feel like legs. So much so that I gathered the sheet around me and hopped off the bed. The rough wood of the bar’s floor connected with the soles of my feet, cool and dusty. Whether or not I had muscles anymore, I felt them. I flexed them, wiggled my toes, bent my knees. And then I squatted down. I felt strong. I felt awake.
“I have rebuilt you. You are ready to be back now,” the speaker said.
“Are there any clothes?” I asked, feeling a little silly and surprisingly calm. It was just me and the Alexa, but in general, if possible, it’s best to not be completely nude in unfamiliar abandoned dive bars.
“Under the bed.”
I looked, and indeed, there was a neatly folded stack of clothes—jeans, a shirt, a hoodie, underwear, and a bra.
As “Senses Working Overtime” finished and a fucking John Mayer song started up, I yanked the clothes on as fast as I could, trying hard not to look too long at the new and unfamiliar parts of my body. The needs of the bladder can outweigh a lot of weirdness. It was a bar … There must be a bathroom. It didn’t take long to find it. Past what was probably once the sound booth for the dance floor, and just before another secondary bar area (which was unlit and creepy), a door opened into a shitty little bathroom. I pulled down my pants and squatted. The paint was peeling. Graffiti announced “For a good time, call your legislator,” and “Go Fuck a Tacos,” and “Accept Jesus”—there was a diversity of opinions among the people who previously peed here.
I was working very hard not to look down at my left leg, which was beautiful and smooth and not made out of me. The bathroom was stocked with toilet paper, and I was flooded with a surprising sense of relief. At least there I was intact and still all the way human. I was kinda shocked by how much that mattered. I felt strong enough to stand up and look in the mirror.
It took me nearly a decade to become comfortable with my attractiveness. For a long time, I was afraid of it. Or, rather, I was afraid of the attention it brought me, and uncomfortable with the idea that I could have power over someone just because of the way I looked. I realize now that power you can’t control isn’t power at all.
But after a solid year of becoming a combination social media starlet and political pundit, I had looked at my own face a lot. I had gotten more comfortable with the knowledge that looking good meant more people paid attention to me. I had realized that I needed to use every tool I had, and it was no use ignoring one just because I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. What had I done to deserve any of the advantages I had?
What I’m trying to say is, I had become a fan of my own face just in time to lose it.
I looked in the mirror, and my strength dissolved. I jerked my gaze down to the sink as my knees went weak. In the glance, I had seen the left side of my face, an inhuman mask from my hairline to my chin. I held the sink in my hands, both for support and just for something to clench my fists against, and then I looked up and kept my eyes on my face.
My ears were still mine, but my left cheekbone and all of my jaw had been replaced. I tried to find the seam between the new skin and the old. But it blended perfectly. It was not a mask on top of my face; it was my face. This was my face now. I stopped pulling and just looked.
My right arm, the one that was still made of me, looked strong and toned. Stronger maybe than I remembered it looking.
My eyes, at least, looked like my eyes. I didn’t have eyelashes on the left side, or an eyebrow. But everything moved like it should. “So this is my face,” I said, both to help myself accept it and to test how my mouth worked with half of it made of the smooth, rippling stone. The inside of my cheek felt slimy and cold against my still-real tongue. But I wasn’t done. I pulled the T-shirt off over my head.
My body had apparently been burned bad enough that much of my stomach and chest was covered in the stuff, and that included my left breast. The replacement looked like a mannequin boob. It wasn’t just the lack of a nipple that made it feel fake; it was fake. I held both of my breasts in my hands and then my brain just closed down. I stopped being able to feel anything. I pulled on the shirt and walked out of the bathroom.
The Alexa was playing Rihanna, and a little monkey was waiting outside.
“Hello, April,” it said, its voice rasping terrifyingly from its throat. “I am Carl.”
APRIL
“Hello, Carl,” I said, like I was in a dream.
“We thought it would be best if you went through that alone,” it rasped. The voice was so deeply inhuman that I couldn’t help but take a sharp step backward.
Then the music dimmed, and the speaker on the bar in the other room boomed, “Sorry again—we can use this voice if that is better.”
“Jesus Christ, this is really fucked-up, you know?”
“Yes, we do, we’re sorry. We’ve asked a lot of you.” It was still the speaker in the other room, but I looked straight into the little monkey’s eyes as it talked. Its face was pink, haloed by tawny fur. Its eyes were the color of toffee.
“I honestly can’t say which voice is creepier.”
“Yes, we weren’t sure either.” This time the words came tripping inelegantly from the monkey, like a frog that had been punched in the throat, and my face scrunched up again.
“No, no, that one’s worse. That’s definitely worse. Can I go sit down?” I was feeling weak.
The monkey ran into the other room and then hopped up onto the bar by the smart speaker.
I followed and took a seat at the bar. Somehow, this felt more normal. At least sitting at a bar is a normal place to talk to a stranger, even if that stranger is a monkey speaking through an Amazon Echo.
“May I ask, how you are feeling?” the speaker asked.
“Why do you keep switching back and forth between ‘we’ and ‘I’?” I asked, trying to deflect.
“You don’t have words for when a single consciousness can exist in multiple physical bodies. There is only one consciousness, but we thought it might be confusing for you if we used ‘I’ to refer to an entity that exists inside of several distinct physical entities. By saying ‘we,’ we make it clear that there are other bodies, which we thought would be more honest.”