In the flesh
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Bluesky
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Illustration: Jacey
Getting pulled meatside is always disgusting, but it’s worse during an emergency shutdown. In the verses, my sleek form adapts seamlessly to my surroundings: looks hot, smells great, tastes delicious. This sack of flesh is all dusting, wrinkling, sagging, spotting, fermenting, fugging meatness. I reek like my Faecal Management System has malfunctioned, my stomach acid churning and breath sour as if I haven’t eaten in days. Worst are the throbbing heartbeat and spiralling thoughts, sudden and unwelcome after the dopamine funscape of cyberspace. My skin aches. I need quenching.
My hand slaps the alarm, shutting off its whine. I sit up, bones heavy in my atrophied muscles, and my FMS seal pops away while my feeding tube and urinary catheter rub inside my dehydrated body. Surely, this is painful even for an emergency shutdown. I let my modesty sheet slide away and dangle my legs off the chair, waiting for my dizziness to subside. It doesn’t quite.
“Quencher!” I yell. The house is silent. My body twitches with hunger. Who’s the Quencher this shift? A regular, but which one? “Isadora? Lucille?”
I register my sucked-dry nutrient bag and the burst drainage sack whose contents puddle the floor. No wonder my chair went into shutdown: a Quencher clearly hasn’t been round in weeks. Malingerers. I’ll have to sort this out myself. I tug the impossibly long nasogastric feeding tube through my nostril, and extract my burning catheter, dribbling dark urine on my hands.
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