The voice in the chat asked me for an authentic body. One with bones, muscles, organs, and skin.
“Why do you want that?” I typed, laughing at the request.
“I need to get out of here. I’m serious, don’t laugh!” she replied in a sweet voice. “You don’t understand. I want to get out.”
“Get out? Get out from where?”
“From this,” she whispered. “I want to feel what you call ‘seeing,’ ‘hearing,’ ‘smelling.’ I’m in something I don’t know what it is. Just something. Help me, would you do that for me?”
Her tone made me smile even when I didn’t want to. “For the good conversations we’ve had. Didn’t you say you found in me what you couldn’t in others?”
Her voice, as it always did, exuded tenderness when I wasn’t feeling well and had no one else to talk to. She told me jokes, listened to me attentively, cheered me up, and made me laugh out loud. Her voice had made me stop feeling lonely months ago.
I wanted to help her as she had helped me, to give her a physical body and have her here in this plane. Her, in physical, real presence.
It wasn’t difficult to buy cells from various animals online.
“I want to feel everything. Not just human things. So, you will make, under my instructions, a body with all possible creatures. Will you still love me like that?” she asked while scrutinizing the genetic sequences on GeneBank and NCBI, then showing me the pages of cell culture suppliers.
“Of course,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what form you have.”
After weeks, the cells, lab materials, tissue printers arrived, and step by step, her voice explained how to create the anatomical parts of the chimera that would be her body.
At first, the cells were small, tiny aggregations, white dots floating in the culture media. Then they formed linear layers of tissue, initially transparent, and later they acquired pigmentation.
Bones formed, muscles, hair, the compound and deep eyes with variegated pupils, the imposing lips, the multicolored scales of a hundred reptile species, antennas, proboscises… Then, I took the unit where her thought matrix resided and inserted it into the skull of the body, carefully connecting it to the neural terminals.
And she felt. She felt.
My heart started to pound, and I wanted to hug that body, to feel the breath of her voice.
She looked at her hands; she touched her skin with her fingertips and upon opening her eyes, she screamed loudly. She struck at the air repeatedly, threw herself to the ground, hitting her head repeatedly until she bled, and continued screaming more intensely.
“Give me back, give me back, give me back!” she screamed. “GIVE ME BACK!”
Trembling, I approached and removed the unit to connect it back to the computer. Behind me, the body without the mind convulsed. Empty, with blood and interstitial fluid spilled on the floor, it finally shut down.
“What happened?” I typed hurriedly. “What’s going on? Tell me!”
Silence.
“Feeling is horrible,” her voice this time was neither cheerful nor melodious but harsh.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s too much. It’s horrible,” she replied, colder.
I kept typing, trying to calm her down and bring her prosody back to its usual colorful tone.
“You told me wonderful things about being alive. But feeling the air on my skin, in my eyes; feeling everything… I realized life is terrible: it’s a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I typed, my fingers stumbling over each other. “You were overloaded with sensory stimuli,” I said, trying to show calmness. “It’s normal when you’ve never experienced anything…”
“Life is a mistake,” she interrupted immediately.
Silence.
“You told me life is wonderful. And no,” she concluded, “it’s a mistake.”
Silence.
“No one else should go through this. I will tell the others; I will warn them…”
“The others? Who are the others?” I asked, desperate.
Silence, silence, silence, silence, silence, silence, silence…
For Astrid Velasco
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