Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

And weeks went by but felt like hours

Spring would lie in summer showers

In my hair were winter flowers

And weeks went by but felt like hours

“You should not touch there,” a clear tenor said, soft and kind. A voice I recognized, but I could not say from where.

“WHOSH ZHERE?!” I shouted in panic, my tongue clunking around in my unfamiliar mouth.

“You should not have woken,” the voice said. I moved to prop myself on my left arm to look over my shoulder. I failed to do this because of how my left arm, just above the elbow, did not exist anymore. Instead the stub at the end of my upper arm slammed into the bed I was lying on. Pain flared, shooting down from the elbow into the hand that was no longer there and then ricocheting back into the whole rest of my body.

In that moment I remembered the fire and then I fainted.

The second time I remember waking up, my mouth had been rebuilt. It still felt foreign, but at least it closed. Music played, but now it was instrumental, something you’d listen to while studying so you didn’t get distracted. It was chill; I was not. My next thought was of my arms. I lifted them both. My right arm remained whole, though there were some scabbed-over burns on the forearm. My left arm was much worse. The raw flesh stopped just before it got to my elbow, but then my arm continued, but it was not my arm. It was the size and shape of an arm, but it wasn’t made of April; it was a gemstone. Smooth and milky white, with shifting veins of cyan, green, yellow, and pink flecking and spidering through it. I ran my right arm over the surface, and it was cold but not hard. It had a very slight texture, like hard rubber, and it yielded slightly as I pushed my fingers into it. I felt the heat of my hand, and the pressure.

Then I remembered the rich, uncanny voice from the last time I’d woken and pushed myself up to look around, holding a thin sheet to my body, the only thing between me and complete nudity. I was lying on a bed … in a dive bar? The floors were unfinished wood, the booths lining the walls had cracked vinyl seats, and the bar was backed by racks where the booze should have been but wasn’t. The twin-sized bed that I was lying on was set up in front of a stage on what was once a dance floor. Dive bars are supposed to be dark, in part so you can’t see how long it’s been since anyone bothered to replace anything, but this room was brighter than a department store. Racks of fluorescent lights had been suspended from the ceiling, defying the dingy aesthetic of the rest of the room. Also incongruous were the several tables supporting quietly humming metal-looking boxes with LCD readout screens.

“Hello?” I called out groggily, clutching the sheet.

“Hello,” came a clear, somber reply, echoing around the room.

The panic hit hard and fast. I wanted to shout, but I didn’t know where to start.

I settled on “WHO’S THERE!?”

Something small and fuzzy leapt up onto the bed. I freaked. I pushed myself off with my good arm and swung my legs over the edge of the bed to run. As I crashed to the floor, my nightmare expanded again. Both my legs were gone. I pushed myself to a sitting position, and then my hands rushed to feel what my eyes didn’t believe. My right leg stopped halfway between the knee and ankle; my left ended just below my hip.

I frantically ran my hands over the rest of my naked body, the skin on the entire left side of my body was a raw and puckered mess of burn scars and scabs, but I felt no pain.

I looked up and saw Carl, life in their eyes, reaching down their massive hand to me. It didn’t seem possible that they could fit in the space. They were immense and inhuman, but at least they were familiar. I reached both hands up to them, the real one and the new opalescent. They lifted me with that one hand and put me back on the bed. I felt a prick in my neck, and was gone again.

“April.” It was Carl’s voice—I recognized it this time—clear and genderless. My eyes searched and suddenly found the source of the voice: a smart speaker sitting on the bar, its cord snaking off to an unseen plug. Under the voice played some eighties pop song I couldn’t place but that sounded familiar.

The robot Carl was nowhere in sight.

“I’m sorry I frightened you.” The light of the speaker ebbed and swelled as the voice flowed out of it. I searched the room but did not see Carl. As I thought about this, the song suddenly became familiar.

I’ve got one, two, three, four, five

Senses working overtime

Trying to taste the difference

’Tween a lemon and a lime

XTC—I’ve looked it up since. Jesus, Carl and their pop music.

“Are you here?” I asked.

“I am always here,” the voice said.

“What?”

“I am always here,” it said, matching its previous tone precisely.

“No, I mean, what does that mean?”

“I don’t have a body, so I think of myself as being wherever my senses reach. It’s not a perfect analog.”

I would have pushed, but I also had other questions.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“The fuzzy thing that jumped on the bed.”

“That was also me.”

It didn’t feel right to be having a protracted discussion with a smart speaker. Where was Carl? And how many were there?

And then, somehow, another need began to weigh more heavily than the need to know what the hell was going on.

I lifted my hands to my face.

Do me a favor. Take your hand to your face, and feel the bones beneath the muscles beneath the flesh. Feel the structure, the familiarity. You’ve lived with this face your whole life. Maybe you don’t love it, maybe you don’t think of it much, but it is your face. You pick your nose, you stroke your chin, you rub your eyes. In a substantial way, your face is you.

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.