She turned on the brand new Body Machine 2.0 and threw away the 1.0, which worked perfectly but never stayed upright.
She started with the feet and cleared her originals out with a quick swipe of the finger. The knobbly bit past the little toe poked out too much and rubbed on her shoes and were the reason she didn’t wear flip-flops, and that’s besides the scratchy looking nails.
She thought about the dainty childlike ones (because they were cute) but went with the Turners, named, of course, after the celebrity; great line from foot to shin like the curve of a vast mountain smoothed by a million-year file of weather — but still feminine, and with the scent add-on synonymous with Turner products from the second wave of that marketing campaign.
When asked if she would like to keep the originals she instead opted to trade them in for additional tokens.
The middle section was tougher to pick and she eventually chose the bum that the algorithm had suggested at the start. Shapely but elegant, sizeable but not excessive — not silly, no.
She did away with the belly button. It always looked weird … some fetal remnant that also smelled a bit odd. Instead a pretty little naval earring on its own for a centerpiece. The sparkly glints in the light reminded her of dancehall walls, and she decided to up it to a little disco ball that always rotated.
For obvious reasons she spent the most amount of time on the head, paying particular attention to that face of hers. Immediately she dumped the original hair, always made her think of straw … like hay. Like hay! D8 was a great alternative. Plaited, lustrous, unspooled sunlight draped from her crown, befitting any of the great Disney princesses.
By accident she dragged the slider slightly too far on the eye edges — but liked the resulting hint of Asia. Lovely. She couldn’t decide on dark blue or bright hazel for the color so did one of each. Well, and then a second iris in the dark blue seemed to make sense, why not? Smaller than the main, and half a millimeter lower.
Next up were the hands. Knowing she had some fruity ideas for them, she waited until she had a good flow going before getting stuck in. First off: No nails at all. To hell with the tugging scrap of skin at the corners that she always pulled too far — but she knew she would miss painting them pretty colors, so she got the chameleon skin for the tips that changed with her mood.
And no thumbs! No need now when you have five additional opposable fingers and the claw to boot. No more thumb to do that twitchy thing where it jerks constantly and made her scared she was beginning to get Parkinson’s, or perhaps a stroke coming on even, heavens!
But then there’s all the other stuff … the obesity and diabetes if you move too little, the central nervous system damage if you move too much, the underactive or overactive thyroid, the blood clotting in every vein, the infections at every hole, the abyss of seizures — cancer, that dreaded cancer!
Even the cardiac arrest seizing the ventricles of the heart, the source of love, the butterflies fluttering within all meat, meat, meat! No, this simply won’t do!
She opened the Advanced Options, thinking, Why hadn’t I done this sooner?
All those hours looking into that one window with the worst view in the world — the mirror … the view from the prison of the prison. Damn the mirror forever more.
Who knew glass hurt more when it isn’t broken?
She zoomed straight through the next layers and went to work on the organs. Ugh, the stomach that gave her acid reflux, gone, whoosh, goodbye! Instead a little pillow with frilly edges that replaces the discomforting cramps with gentle coziness right there in the middle, ooh and you can’t get fat with no stomach. Even less chance when she removed her tongue and put in its place the interior of a clam’s shell, the light shining off the pearl visibly dribbling out.
Swapping out the intestines generated a lot of space, and so she gave in to a little extravagance, putting the contents of her rucksack in. The right decision, she felt, although she felt heavy below her breasts, like the bottom half of her was being drawn inexorably down towards the center of the Earth.
That nuisance gravity would have to be countered with a motor in the shape of a ring she scaled to fit snugly around her waist.
Still she felt a slight disequilibrium — perhaps four degrees on the upper-right side — so she slapped a small tile of table-wood poking out on the left side to balance it out, and oh, ah, perfect! The numbness of the table tile was refreshing; no blood of God-knows-what pressure being forcibly pump-pump pump-pump pumped through it, all nice and smooth save for where it entered, where there was angular pain of shapes conflicting.
Ah but that numbness … it was intoxicating; she must have more of it. After a few more loose scraps of wood poking in and out here and there she moved onto other materials: The ceramic lid of a cistern through the back of her neck as some broad backdrop, made all the more ostentatious by the lit glass light bulbs that half-emerged from her chest and chin. And a couple more serpentine metal pipes appearing and disappearing through her thighs like an intricate tattoo of a dragon — sure.
But the pièce de résistance was the section of car which, after various conflicts, accounted for 30 percent of her body, and bulged out much further than any other part of her.
Regrettably, the perspective was skewed, so both interior and exterior elements of the car came through, but it was the newest model, so the exterior parts were smooth, shiny and modern. Oh it was so modern!
She wasn’t entirely happy with how far out it bulged, but it was getting hard to gauge properly; it was getting difficult to see now that wiring from the engine was crossing through her cornea …
Unfortunately she had forgotten to turn the car off, and could feel the engine chugging, and many of the light bulbs had smashed when she moved, and bits of glass were in her breath, but at least the table bits and car exteriors remained smooth and numb.
She went to scream but it was just KTCH¡¡ KTCH¡¡ and whirring and system crashes from non-compatible components scraping against each other like needle ends and she scratched at the Body Machine 2.0 but the session had timed out and the final result had been automatically confirmed.
And it turned off.
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