MICHAL WOJCIK
She was strange, even for a monster. Most people who underwent full biomodification chose a specific mould from a classical beast: a merperson, or a cyclops, or a satyr. Very few had themselves chopped and stretched into a full-blown chimera.
Only Melanie’s face and parts of her torso remained human, the rest was replaced by raven wings, tiger-feet tipped with tiger-claws, her body a rippling array of overlapping scar tissue and fur grafted over re-grown bone. The surgeons had enlarged her heart by several chambers, elongated and toughened her major muscles, cut out her digestive tract and strung in a new set of guts, and turned her hair into a squirming mass of centipedes. The wings were purely aesthetic, too small to support her in the air, too large for anyone else to ignore.
Her amalgam of features resisted classification into one gens or another. Self-made monsters usually sequestered themselves into small communities based around their chosen templates, parallel societies signalling tastes and interests through the shape of a fang or snout. Melanie hadn’t given thought to joining any; if anything, she spent more time among the unmodified than she had before her surgery. She challenged them with just her appearance, grabbed their attention and held it. Her job as a graphic designer at an advertising firm catering to normals meant constant meetings where she enacted the same little play over and over again with unmodded clients: terror becoming intrigue becoming acceptance.
The only time her interactions with people changed was her home life; the unmodded folk who’d grown comfortable speaking to her at work weren’t so keen to have dinner or sleep in the same den as someone with bugs for hair.
So she rented a studio apartment with a centaur named Véronique, a monster who’d chosen a body unwieldy enough that her own chances of finding a herd were limited. They ended up together in this place because they didn’t fit apart elsewhere. It wasn’t exactly anyone’s dream home: adapted from an old factory office, a mess of loose brick and plaster and exposed wiring, cold in the winter and prone to leaks in spring. Then there was the constant clomp clomp of Véronique’s hoofs to keep Melanie awake at night. The centaur was an invariable insomniac.
Still, Melanie liked it. The loft had its charms; it smelled like a stable, hay and all. There was the neighbourhood too, full of derelict buildings where other monsters made their dens. A whole pack of dog-headed cynocephali hung out in the park across from the soccer field, where monopods hopped, and the roofs were spattered with griffin shit. Griffintown indeed, a menagerie taken out of a medieval bestiary or a Renaissance wonder-book.
Despite her aggressive otherness, Melanie still sometimes wanted to feel like she belonged, somewhere, outside her profession. Even this island of monstrosity had its own cliques and guilds. Outside of its streets, the unconverted didn’t all accept total biomodification; a vocal few resisted the encroachment of freaks in the downtown core with letters to the editors and rowdy marches. You could still walk through Westmount and see nary a blemmya. News stories popped up from time to time about monsters found crumpled in alleys, heads caved in by steel-toed boots. The perpetrators were rarely found, never convicted. There were no letters to the editors or rowdy marches then.
Going back to her family in BC was out of the question, not after the reaction Melanie’s mother had when she’d first got whiff of what her daughter planned to do. The rest of her relatives had been equally horrified.
Melanie plunked herself on the couch and jacked into the VR feed. The implant immediately overlaid her sight with bright words and symbols she could directly manipulate with her brain. A multitasker’s heaven – a procrastinator’s too. Funny cat videos took up the upper quarter of her vision, and through the rest she glimpsed Véronique trot into the kitchen to pull a bowl of shrink-wrapped salad from the fridge.
“Bonjour, Mel,” the centaur said while carrying the bowl into the living room. Half-hearted chat on their respective days followed, until Véronique said, “I just learned I am going to Toronto on Saturday. You will have the place to yourself. Is good, no?”
A cat jumping out of a box dimmed, the interface going clear when it sensed Melanie’s attention drawn elsewhere. “New boyfriend?” she asked.
“Photo shoots,” Véronique said. She must have still been smarting from her last tryst with that self-styled cowboy from Alberta (nice guy, a little too into horses, though). “These people who are into the Greek classics, they are always curious about what a centaur looks like in the flesh, want to take artful pictures.”
“Pay well?”
“Oui.” Véronique trundled up beside the couch and flipped on the holo for a live showing of Latvia’s Got Talent, forked in a mouthful of grass and apples. She said in a far more tentative and embarrassed voice, “I had another oracle experience today. A premonition.”
“Huh?” Melanie reoriented herself after fixating on the six-armed pole dancer dominating the holo, who might as well have been a superhero from the way she worked that pole.
“Something happened that I dreamed of. It came true. Only big this time.”
Melanie suppressed a snort. “Not that New Age crap again, Véronique. It’s just coincidence. Like the last time with the grilled cheese stand. If you have a dream about passing an artisanal grilled cheese stand on Saint-Laurent, it’s going to happen because you’re in Montreal.”
“No no no.” Véronique waved a hand in urgent dismissal. “I said it is big this time. I have this dream that keeps coming back for the last one, two months, that rocks are coming up from the ocean, and cities, ruined villes, forests. The trees drip seawater and leave puddles. I have told you about this, have I not?” She cocked her head and looked at Melanie expectantly.
“Yeah, and?”
“You haven’t seen the news?”
“I never follow the news. You know I don’t follow the news.”
“Well, take a look. Today, it has happened, Mel. It has really, actually happened.”
The interface awoke on cue, immediately slid over to the latest headlines and sorted to the most recent, sifted over to the science stories. A video bloomed open with a too-perfect announcer poised on the deck of a hovercraft, her curled locks whipping like Medusa’s snakes in the wind. She cheerfully declared an abnormal geological event was taking place in the South Pacific Ocean. The first peaks of a new Terra Incognita had risen Cthulhu-like from the waters, forming a new chain of tiny islands. Melanie watched a little while longer before letting the interface lapse into clarity.
“That’s…that’s still a coincidence,” she said, first unsure, then more firm. “The Earth’s growing more unstable, everyone knows that. And it’s just some islands, barely even islands.”
“No,” Véronique said. “This is just the start. Cities will come up from the sea, a whole new land. A land where monsters go and where we belong. Paradise.”
But I like it here, Melanie thought, involuntarily, before discarding the notion as ridiculous, like all that other talk of monsters and re-enchantment, of spiritual awakening through surgery. So much chatter, so much noise. “It’s nothing like that,” she said quietly. “Dreams don’t become real. Otherwise I wouldn’t have needed to go to a biomodder to look like this. I would’ve just moulted my old body and been reborn with this one.”
“That was before. There were not enough of us then,” Véronique insisted. “There are all sorts of stories now of monsters curing cancer, granting wishes, flying. We are doing it, Mel. We are starting to change the world. And it will be so much better now.”
Melanie yanked out the VR implant and said, “No,” before stomping out of the room, leaving a track of claw-marks impressed into the kitchen linoleum.
Phantom islands kept on appearing. Certain scientists took to the holo to insist the archipelago would vanish in short order, that it was merely a ghostly protrusion that would grow weary of the world and sink back into slumber beneath the waves. Dead islands gone back to dreaming.
Only the archipelago was just a beginning, the first sentinel of a realm coming fully awake. The landmass grew and grew, satellite images tracking its daily expansion, the new soil like a slow-spreading coffee stain over the high-res map. New mountains, new plains, new valleys, new rivers. Navies gathered at a safe distance from the coastline to observe and, if pressed, plant their nations’ flags.
Governments tried to impose a blackout on information coming from the continent, stating that it was empty and bare and that releasing any data about the land itself to the public could woefully exacerbate this volatile geopolitical situation. But it was impossible to stop the snapshots and 10-second video clips that first came trickling in through print or on unregulated corners of the VR feed, leaked by professors, scientists, sailors, and pilots. These, spread a thousandfold times across the net, were soon picked up by major news outlets once the classified nature of the material became meaningless: footage of empty cities built from cracked glass shining between the streamers of kelp and coral and barnacles that clung to the walls and died in the sunlight.
Véronique insistently showed these to Melanie, ignoring how Melanie recoiled from her attentions. The centaur’s enthusiasm was unnecessary – Melanie had already seen them, couldn’t stop herself from looking despite the images dropping a dose of dread into her stomach every time she did. She just didn’t want to talk about them. At least, not until she’d made some sense of them herself without the distraction of mystic dogma.
Some monsters were already whispering about sailing there, Véronique said. Some had already gone, Véronique said. Monsters reclaiming the sphere from whence they’d come. Terra Incognita, the Antipodes.
The Forbidden Places.
On medieval maps the monsters dwelt on the very outmost edges of the world, and the belief went that the monsters’ conversion to Christianity would mark the beginning of the Apocalypse. Melanie had read that in a textbook for a class she took at the University of British Columbia, back when she still lived on the West Coast. Back before her transformation. Now the thought gnawed at Melanie that the universe was settling into those old grooves. Soon enough the sun would shift into orbit round the Earth and the stars would affix themselves onto the heavenly spheres and begin scraping out music. Maybe some Johnny Cash.
She’d approached the idea of biomodding into monsters as a rebirth; now, all she saw was regression. A hum of religious fervour had taken over Griffintown, loud enough that Melanie avoided the other monsters when she rushed home from the advertising firm and locked the swiftly unbalancing world out of her apartment. She attempted to ignore the cynocephali who made solemn processions down the street carrying icons of dog-headed Saint Christopher before entering the park and howling in their prayer circles. She attempted to ignore the pensiveness that lay barely concealed in other monsters’ eyes.
It was just a biomod, she told herself when she went to bed that night. It was Tuesday.
The ever-growing population of monsters hadn’t summoned Mu and Lemuria from the ocean bed of the Pacific.
She hadn’t done that.
She’d gone to the biomodders because she wanted to cross the crooked mirror. Become the monster that defined the human and, in the process, define herself. Back when she was just another unmodded person, she had trouble talking to anyone, stuttering away like a dying diesel engine into silence whenever she tried to carry a conversation with strangers, staying at home and eventually fading away from social circles. After spending so long feeling out of joint with society, rejected by it, she’d wanted to own that estrangement. Become it. That’s why she didn’t pick a gens. That’s why the new body was her own design, not some indolent monk’s doodle in a manuscript’s margin.
That was why…
She drifted off into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
Her alarm switched from a gentle prodding to a more insistent hammer-beat and a dissonant snarl. Melanie rolled over, sheets damp and clinging to her skin, so wet she might as well have dragged herself up out of water. Surfacing. A heavy scent of sweat mixed with salt and roses greeted her in the world above.
Skin. Not fur and scales. Skin. She raised a hand, saw fingers long and thin and clawless. She pressed those fingers to her head, not feeling centipedes there but strands of plain old hair. She strung it out so she could see it shining gold in the morning light.
Melanie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again. The same hand hung there, the same hair stretched out there, the same sense remained that her body was thinner, lighter, weaker. Little tremors shook through her, like the kind she’d get picking up memories from dusty scrapbooks. Packets of forgotten sensation wrapped around her in a snug sack of meat and muscle, imbibed her with now alien experiences of normalcy.
She spent a few more minutes in bed, ignoring the alarm that now resorted to blasting Coldplay to annoy her into waking. Then she slowly got up, keeping the sheets wrapped tight because she didn’t want to see her body, not yet, and walked with the sheet to the washroom while avoiding looking at all the mirrors she’d specifically hung to remind herself of what she’d become and why, until she came to that one, the final one above the sink. Of course she knew what she’d see there, but it was still like looking into a photograph taken five years ago. The photos she usually avoided.
Melanie threw up.
Thank God Véronique’s in Toronto, Melanie thought as she sneaked out the back way from the apartment, hiding her face and her body under an oversized coat. Everything she owned was oversized now, designed for a different bulk. She tried calming her beating heart, her weak little four-chamber heart, tried to stop the panic bubbling up inside her, telling her to find a biomod clinic quick as she could and revert to her chimera shape. She’d saved up for years to have that procedure, and it was a delicate one too, not an augmentation you’d leave to a standard biomodder on Peel or in Chinatown without experiencing horrific post-op complications.
She’d call in sick for work, that’s what she’d do. Her voice had lost its reverb and growl but still sounded more or less the same, just softer ( weaker). She could hide her metamorphosis, as long as her boss didn’t try to put her on video – which he would, since Melanie had taken far too many unneeded sick days before. Shit, shit, shit. So instead Melanie went back inside and switched off her smartphone and anything else that could pick up the all-encompassing wifi that hung like a heavy mist over the city.
More of her thoughts turned toward biomods as she flicked switches, turned dials, pressed screens. The surgery had taken a week, and she’d needed months of recovery time. Her mind clicked through options – did biomodders steal into her house and revert her according to exact specs? No, that would have taken just as long as the initial modifications, maybe longer, not to mention that growing a custom skin to zip her in would have needed extensive body imaging beforehand. And then she’d have to lie in stasis for a while as her veins and nerves felt their way through the new meat and the nanobots knit her smoothly together again. But she was walking like she’d never had surgery, never changed into a chimera, like this had been her body all along.
On the street she kept her head ducked down, catching quick glances here and there. Barely anyone was out save a mostly unmodded couple (just the slight adjustment to the ears to make them elven) walking their dogs. Maybe everyone’s changed back…? That thought immediately fled when a blemmya came out a door and down some stairs, his headless torso uncovered to reveal the mouth gaping in a yawn from his belly and eyes darting about on his chest.
Not everyone. Some monsters remain.
Melanie blinked away the oncoming tears.
At the Old Port she sat on a bench and watched the birds circling around an angel statue that surmounted one mansion’s spire. She’d turned away from the St. Lawrence, away from any merpeople who might skim below the river’s surface like pale pink fish. Nobody cleared a path for her anymore when she walked, and the few monsters she did encounter passed without the expected nod of recognition and understanding.
There were markedly fewer monsters than she remembered from previous weeks.
They were still there, still forming little knots of strangeness, but they were muted, infrequent, and easily missed. Her gaze slid over them, only able to hold for a second or two before she had to look away. The unmodded folk she passed by so casually before now became pervasive, oppressive, all the more so because she was one of them. And the once-fellow creatures became other. Her body seemed to dictate what deserved notice more than her eyes.
There were some people she saw in clothes that didn’t fit quite right, who shrank away from others as much as she did. She thought of speaking to them, thought better of it. At least for now, while she could still doubt that some kind of monstrous rapture had taken place, snatching away the chosen form of those with little faith.
She’d left her persistent jack in the apartment along with her phone, meaning she’d cut her mind from the network entirely, and now her nose just took in city smells and ears just took in city noise: traffic, exhaust, smoked meat, pattering feet against cement, French and English and Swahili mingling, distant bells. There was something different in the buzz and chatter, a charge in the air, colours grown brighter and air grown richer and little tufts of white swirling about like sparks. She reached out for one and watched the breeze spiral dandelion dust around her fingers.
At length Melanie wound her way past Chinatown to the Plateau, over the cobbled walk to a well-lit pub called the Bonaparte. Recently opened, Melanie guessed, judging from the jumble of furniture scattered inside, judging from the attempt and failure of conjuring an early nineteenth-century atmosphere with delicate white napkins and false gilt. It was yet another try at revitalizing the district to its former young urban professional glory through quirky themed restaurants and taverns.
One satyr sat alone by the window; the rest of the clientele were anatomically conventional. The largest group were probably students from McGill, what with the one man’s moustache and plaid and the one woman’s pink-pattern hand-kerchief wrapped round her hair. As Melanie shuffled by them for the bar she heard a snatch of their conversation. Something about Aristotle, about Paul Ricoeur, about time and narrative.
A beer came off the tap – Melanie nursed at it slowly, dulling her frictional nerves. Classical music warbled in the background, The Rites of Spring. She lost herself in the arrangement until the beer was nearly gone, until someone tapped her lightly on the shoulder.
“Hey, I thought I recognized you,” a woman said and slid onto the next stool. No overt surgical modifications on her, but she had a hell of a lot of tattoos: tentacles that traced spirals round her legs and arms and neck, ending around her cheeks and disappearing behind her ears. They quivered and curled with each breath. At first Melanie thought it was a trick of the light, but no, it was a premium skin-swap, a living ink epidermis. The tattoos were an elaborate system of projected webbing that could expand, collapse, move. “Mel, right?”
“Yes?”
“Cheryl,” the tentacle-lady said helpfully.
“Cheryl…” Melanie repeated. “Oh!” Another student at UBC, same program, but a different skin, then. Skin brown and smooth and clear of octopus limbs.
“So we both ended up in Montreal after all, huh?” Cheryl said. She ordered a tumbler of scotch and then examined Melanie with uncomfortable intensity before shrugging. “What a world.”
Melanie put on a smile. It was a welcome distraction, at least, some aspect of the past that she didn’t have to fear. They drank. They chatted, an airy kind of chat between near-strangers not willing to probe too far into personal details, sending out just the barest feelers. A chat Melanie wouldn’t have possibly had before her operation without at some point lapsing into uncomfortable silence. At length they decided to ditch the Bonaparte, take a stroll up Mont Royal together and wile away the afternoon.
Cheryl had lost her job at a graphic design company earlier that week and had spent the day wandering directionless around the city same as Melanie had. Now, they passed under the gnarled trees up the trail ascending the hill, came to the long staircase and dutifully made their way up and up to the footpaths undulating along the hilltops.
“So you never went through with the surgery, then?” Cheryl asked, the conversation now finally crossing into the personal. “I remember you saying you wanted to do that, back in undergrad. Not that you talked much back then.”
Melanie shook her head.
“But you live in Griffintown. Monster central.”
“Yup. With a centaur.”
Cheryl laughed. “Of course. Of course.”
They came to a spur where the city spread out below in a slightly unreal haze, buildings arranged like dominoes, the St. Lawrence glimmering beneath the horizon.
“I can see why you wanted to, though. Me, I’m not brave enough for that. I was hyperventilating right before I got the skin done.” She waved her hands toward her face, toward the tentacles gently writhing there. “Too attached to the body underneath, I guess. But there’s something so intense about shedding the form you’re born with and becoming something completely different. It’s like, tossing away all the logic drilled into you when you grow up and giving yourself up completely to your dreams.” She waved vaguely toward the river. “There’s all these stories of monsters doing magic now. By making themselves imaginary things they’re able to do anything we imagine, if that makes sense. Like this new continent that’s showing up…they did that. Who else would’ve?”
A long silence followed. The wind rustled the branches and rustled Melanie’s hair, even the little ones all up and down her arms. There was definitely a new smell there, a new taste, like crushed roses again, and she breathed it deeply.
“So why’d you change your mind? About the surgery, I mean.”
Melanie barely even heard her. Not over the growing blend of sensations, not over her mind beginning to build a cartography of Terra Incognita and trying to dream up a home there.
Why did I change my mind? She hadn’t changed her mind since the initial session strapped on the biomodder’s bench, just gone in without realizing what it meant to become a monster. Get enough people doing the same and small shifts in the world’s daily workings would swell, swell enough to force lands up from the bottom of the sea.
A sound like the beat of a vast pigeon’s wings filled the air.
“She never changed her mind,” a voice said, hers. “She just didn’t understand. Still does not.”
The hair prickled up on the back of Melanie’s neck. She gripped the metal railing tight before chancing a look over her shoulder. From the way Cheryl had tensed, her tattoos becoming an agitated froth of cuttlefish, Melanie knew what she’d see there.
A chimera, its wings folding against its spine, centipedes coiling around a face that mirrored Melanie’s own. Yet the tell-tale signs of biomodding were gone. There was no trace of scar tissue, of leftover skin outside of that face.
She was the ideal, the sketch Melanie had given over to the biomodders before they crafted her into its echo.
Melanie swallowed, hard. The monster smiled.
“You…you’re—” Melanie stuttered
“No,” the chimera declared. “You are my creator. The mind that birthed the monster. But you never became me.
“The world has changed, Melanie. We were not together as one, so I left you, like so many have done. I will find my way across the ocean westward.”
The voice was the same, the way of speaking different. Deeper, a feral snarl beneath the words, but also a formal loftiness in the way she said them.
“Farewell, Melanie. I wished to see you one last time as you were, so you would realize what you chose to lose.” Her wings unfurled and she sprang forward, launched herself toward the city below. One talon nearly raked Cheryl, who’d stumbled back in the dirt screaming, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit!”
Melanie, though, while her heart drummed deep (overworked, too small), yelped and leapt as well. Her arms wrapped around the lower half of the chimera’s body, her body, the weight dragging them tumbling against the railing. The iron bar crunched into Melanie’s back, made her wince and cry out, but she didn’t let go.
Her fingers roamed against the fur and slick reptilian scales as she tried to find purchase, but the usual bumps and ridges from the grafts she knew so well weren’t there. The talons lashed out, claws too, scraping big tears in her clothes and drawing blood from the flesh beneath. But Melanie didn’t let go. She crawled up the creature’s body, trying to contain its powerful squirming.
They were wrestling. A brief thought back to the story of Jacob and the angel came to Melanie then, a sudden mad desire to laugh at the image as the chimera’s wings thrashed about in the dirt and brought up clouds of dust and clots of grass while they fought together. Only Melanie found she couldn’t laugh because she was already weeping, tears and great shivering sobs coming fast and hard. She realized she could no longer keep hold on that frame, not for long, which didn’t stop her from trying, from gripping, from kicking, with that weak thin body of hers, until she had her face up against the other’s. Centipedes tickled her cheeks and scalp. She stared into the eyes that weren’t quite her own and they stared back.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Please. I need this. I need you.”
The chimera’s struggles subsided, not all at once but slowly, as if the will and strength sapped away.
Their chests heaved together in the sudden stillness. One body embracing another, Melanie’s blood staining her clothes and smearing against the other’s body.
“I’m…I’m a monster,” Melanie said once softly, then louder. “I want…I will be…”
The other’s lips parted. “You are.”
It wasn’t a kiss, not quite. Just a joining, one body partaking of another, moving together in something more than an embrace. Melanie’s temples thrummed along with her heartbeat, stronger and stronger, putting pressure on her ribcage as the muscle grew and grew. There was no pain, just a building warm tingle soon surpassed by a sensation of utter joy as the skin transmuted on her arms and legs and chest, as new bones burst from her back and spread in a soft brush of feathers. Centipedes crawled out from her scalp, their little legs drumming against her skull. Muscles stretched out and grew taut, claws extended out from her fingers and toes, the latter crowding against the insides of her oversized shoes. By the time it was done, the last of Melanie’s bones clicked into place, the other chimera was gone completely.
Melanie stood.
Cheryl’s mouth gaped open; she was on her knees, poised as if in prayer or supplication. The tentacles were motionless.
“It’s my own bit of magic,” Melanie whispered. Private metamorphosis, a second coming. I’m slouching toward Montreal to be born, is that how that poem went?
She stalked over to Cheryl and extended a paw, helping her up to her feet.
“What…?” Cheryl whispered, trembling.
“I’m a monster,” Melanie said. “We all are, or we can imagine ourselves as monsters.”
“Oh?”
“We just need to accept that. That we live in a world like that now.”
Cheryl didn’t reply. Melanie gave her hand a light squeeze, then let go, turning back to the precipice and the city. She let her wings spread out to their full span.
“Wait!” Cheryl called.
Melanie turned back, lifted an eyebrow in inquiry.
“Where…where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. But it’s a choice I’ll have to make one day, I guess,” she said.
Then she spread her wings again and made a running jump over the railing, out into the air. And she flew, even though it was absolutely, fundamentally impossible for those wings to be capable of flight. Actually flew, over Avenue du Parc, over Place des Arts, toward the river before banking back over McGill University.
She wanted to explore this new, changed world first, before proceeding to its extremities, its unknown corners. Then she would fly toward a place where cities sat waiting in crystalline ruins that she might, one day, call home.