The Strange Case (A Horrible Short Story)
The responsible doctors flanked me with towels and bagged ice. Again, my body jumped, expelling my saviors and squirting the blood onto them. As they lay on the floor, defeated, they could watch so close as the skin across my fingers began to flay. The skin rolled back, similar to an inhaling party blower. The phalanges now resembled the underside of hide: red meat dripping with blood.
I stayed hyper-aware of the pain of the mutilation of my skin. The hurt was completely indescribable and unimaginable until now. I knew the transformation would hurt, but I could never have prepared for this.
Two doctors stood on either side of me, wrapping my arms. My eye sockets stretched to opposite sides of my face, allowing me to observe both groups. For the first time in my life, I could feel the presence of my skull. I felt the hole of bone grow to one side and the matter that was once there flowing to fill the original socket. I could sense the skin around my eyes doing the same. My features now moved as liquids to keep up with my constantly changing physique.
Another doctor joined each group; this third member stepped in nobly to shoo away the feathers around the first two doctors, but they kept growing back. Eventually, they would start growing sharp, cutting the gloves and hands of the third doctors. I had just watched and experienced trait evolution. The six doctors were so focused on this futile tying they ignored the sight of my rolled skin detaching itself and floating up to the ceiling like bubbles in a lava lamp. The muscle structure of my hands was now entirely bare.
My periodic seizures had not ceased. The next time my body laid still, eyes emerged from under the layers of the now parted red flesh in my hands. I could see myself. For a moment, I was the only human to have seen myself without the help of technology. However, it is not so easily imaginable, I had not just seen from the back of my hands, but I saw myself as the three-dimensional entity I am. I could see multiple sides of the same object at once, but my vision of that around me was more intricate. I could see myself as if I was standing behind my head, laying under myself, or floating from the ceiling. My mind reeled, and struck me with pain inside my brain. No mortal was meant for sight like I now possessed. I am human, right?
I convulsed again, causing the doctors to fall again. Feathers appeared again, and blood covered the area of my form again. Even the strange case of my transformation had become as repetitive as my mortal life before. I chose to observe other things at that moment: experience what I would not be able to see earlier with my mere birth sight. My ability to move my vision grew into freedom akin to that of a flying drone: I could see and know whatever I wished. I existed in a dimension higher than those around me, in which I could move freely, undetectable and omnipotent. I no longer desired to watch my body contort and bleed out; I wanted to experience what others in the world were seeing. I wanted to be someone other than the cover-up and conspiracy theory my form was becoming.
On the other side of the world, I placed my perspective into some soldier firing their gun west. I grew bored and moved to the view of a soldier firing their gun east. I had shot myself. I felt the pain of the wound in my chest and the puncture in my lung and laughed. The doctors surrounding my body now stood in the corners of the operating room; behind them and out the door was a growing mass of nurses and doctors, all horrified and curious to watch me - a blood-stained mass of flesh unrecognizable as human - laughing. I grew tired of the stupid soldiers and now took the perspective of a small boy in a local hospital. I watched the sky flash from black to a beautiful cloudy backlit painting. The thunder was loud, but my fears were more mature: I feared for my mother in a nearby room, praying she would survive. Then, I was his mother, nearby and slowly dying of some easily preventable disease. For fun, I then watched the boy's father, obviously oblivious of the whole situation and under a sky not so scary.
Time was immediately impossible to detect but equally unimportant to me. I had looked into the lives of thousands of individuals. Each life was more insignificant than the one before. My own body grew bullet holes, burns, hickeys, and every type of scar, all while it writhed and grew into flesh spaghetti. I still felt physical pain from all the changes and new experiences, but I had no interest in letting pain be an obstacle to satisfying my new insatiable curiosity. At moments, I was ashamed of my human origin. Does the existence of my discarded human flesh make my possession of such knowledge less legitimate?
I had studied the ways of the infinity travelers and molded myself into them. Before today, my life might also have been a pathetic entertaining spectacle for higher beings. Every moment I spent scribbling my dreams, studying my intuitions, and scouring for proof of their existence was no longer wasted but infinitely worth it. I have become them, and I am everyone. I am the great Krodeva - golden winged embodiment of the infinite - and could experience all It had experienced. I had forged myself into a god.
