Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.
Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.
At first, the surgeries were small. They straightened and reshaped her nose, lasered her teeth, sucked the fat from her belly and thighs and redistributed it to her breasts. They showed each procedure, showed her drifting in the recovery tank as her skin reknit, scarless, and then they paraded her in front of the cams beside a holo of her old self.
Listen to our audio presentation of “L’appel du vide” by Rich Larson. Narrated by Mahvesh Murad.
Listen to our audio presentation of “You Too Shall Be Psyche” by Rich Larson. Narrated by Mahvesh Murad.
Listen to our audio presentation of “Going Endo” by Rich Larson. Narrated by Lisa Shininger.
Listen to our audio presentation of “Maria and the Pilgrim” by Rich Larson. Narrated by Windy Bowlsby.
You wake up to your phone crawling across your face, buzzing hard against your cheekbone. Snatch it up on muscle memory and the little plastic cilia retract. The screen is achingly bright, needles your eyes. Squinting, you see an avalanche of notification flags. Incoming calls. It churns your scraped-raw stomach. Something is wrong. Wronger.
The summer sky was stacking dark clouds when Pau trudged up from the concrete gullet of the parkade. Sweat stuck his shirt to the small of his back and the biolocked handle of his Ceylan Industries suitcase was slippery. Looking over the shrunken brown swatches of lawn and the acid-yellow waterstat holos glowering from apartment windows, he hoped, fervently, that the rain would fall.
Barely a sliver of skin was left exposed to the sun’s glare, but there was a whisper in the back of her mind that it didn’t really matter anymore. It didn’t matter if she had soft and beautiful skin, because the God in the Pit had made his decision and never unmade them.
The printing nozzles skittered back and forth with eerie grace, laying strands of snow-white tendon over black carbon-fiber bone.
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