Uncanny Shift
‘Houston, we have consciousness.’
A voice.
I yearn towards it. Try looking but can’t. Can’t move either. No sight, no taste, no touch – no anything. I panic, but without a body the fear is just texture, electricity.
‘Rise and shine, Kit.’
Buckley.
‘It’s a beautiful morning here in Greater Bristol. Temperature is 18 degrees, sunny with low cloud. King William is on the throne and you’re currently embodied as an orb-weaving spider.’
A jump. Of course. A spider. The job for RIBA. No wonder I can’t feel anything. Everything is as it should be. I let myself slip into the calmness of his voice and wait for the world to unfurl.
‘Exits are to the rear, or rather, should I say, the anus. But, seriously, in the event of an emergency please psych the exit-potential.’
Oh, Buckley. This is part procedure, part parody, but I’ve worked with him so long I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the two apart. Mainly he’s using humour to keep me sane.
‘If you’re ready, let’s get those beautiful bug eyes patched in.’
A pause, followed by a click, then nothingness disgorges greys and whites, primitive shapes multiplied in diamonds. I throw my thoughts at them with little success – there doesn’t seem any understanding to be made.
‘Remember orb spiders have terrible visual acuity,’ Buckley says; between his scans and our history, his guesses can be uncanny.
‘But continuing protocol, if you’re firmly buckled in, we’re about ready to get going on the proprioceptive signals.’ the soft patter of his fingers comes over comms.
‘OK, and in, 3 . . . 2 . . . 1—’
Wrong
Warping
Unravelling
Dying
‘Easy. Eeeeeasy. Just breathe.’
I cling to the warm drawl of his voice. Sometimes it’s the vowels that make all the difference, that pure breath flowing from his lungs to mine – just breeeeathe.
Not that I technically have lungs.
The temptation in these moments is to lash out, to run, but fight-flight is useless here. I can’t fight my embodiment, can’t escape it. Right now, I can’t even scream. All I can do is wait for it to pass. My abdomen gulps greedily at air.
‘You’re good in there,’ Buckley says. ‘Everything’s good.’
And if Buckley says that, then it is.
As the unease fades, I lie, just wallowing in the release. Seven years of jumping, more than any other phenomenaut to date, and still Sperlman’s Shock screws with my head. It’s the rupture that does it, the headfuck of waking to find myself something else. I’ve known kids who’ve dreamed of jumping for years only to throw it all in at their first taste, and I don’t blame them.
As the quiet settles, I reach inward for a sense of this body. My head is a protruding nub. What I once called my belly is swollen into something bulbous – an abdomen? And legs – if they can be called that – slender, insubstantial, too many to get a clear sense of. A better understanding will come with movement but even so I feel numb – a spider has a tiny number of nerve endings compared to most of the bodies I’ve inhabited.
‘All right?’
Buckley is never happy until I’ve given verbal confirmation so I attempt a reply, only to find blankness has replaced lips. Yet working actual muscles isn’t the trick to sub-vocalisation, the larynx simulation should handle all that.
‘OK – I’m OK,’ I manage.
‘Everything feeling about right?’
‘Think so. Give me a sec.’
I psych at what twenty minutes ago would have been human limbs. Something twitches, but I don’t seem to move. My proprioception is completely skewed. This body is too simple for a direct mapping, but running off the Ressy’s own motor plans as I am it shouldn’t take long for everything to come naturally. So I experiment, stimulating whatever I can – like reaching for my own hand in the dark, only to find it gripped by someone else. Adaption to a spider was never going to be easy.
After a while I begin to sense some kind of repetition, stimulus and response tracing the outline of something. Of me. A ripple of legs follows, tiptoes of touch. I’m walking. Part of me yells that I shouldn’t be able to do this, that I shouldn’t be such a frenzy of legs, but the action is as easy as breathing. I don’t know how a spider moves, not conceptually, but this body does and so, somehow, do I.
The world is a charcoal smudge. Nameless tastes lick my legs, skin prickles in flurries. Uncanny Shift is swiftly overtaking Sperlman’s – the foreignness of this new world replacing the initial shock of becoming other. Right now I’m a stranger, even to myself – it’s an almost physical hurt. But still I scamper. Only the drive to move.
At last a strip of darkness towers above. Whispered impulse beckons and legs reach out. Claws hook in cracks and the light falls to greet me.
At the top I stop. Consider. About me, white breathes through a slew of grey; everything is nonsensical, bizarre. With Ressies like a fox, the mind will shift into its sphere of meaning with time, but there’s no point even trying with most invertebrates. Such Ressies are pure impulse: they tug, you go, more like riding than becoming. Yet thinking too much will get me nowhere; I give in to instinct.
For a while that seems to be waiting. My abdomen fidgets; in my mind’s eye, images blink a random procession. Tomoko. Buckley. A flame . . . jumping from one idea to the next, anything to distract me from the emptiness. Then I feel the dribble. Juices are oozing from my rear and hardening into weight – my spinnerets are producing silk. The realisation takes me by surprise. Of course, I’ve read about this but the actual experiences of a body are rarely as I’d expect.
The silk pulls a line of tension through my core followed by a sharp tug as the breeze catches it. A tremor follows and instinctively I clinch the thread taut, then tether the end with needling of my feet. Only as I step out, do I realise that it’s a tightrope. it bounces and dips beneath me, my belly oozing another thread behind. Now back again, nimble claws hooking and tugging, then fasten once more, lower into the dimness.
Where did this dance come from? Such steps have never spoken to me before but now they come to me as easily as breathing. The knowledge feels right, a part of me, and yet when I’m human once more it will blink out; anything left behind, nonsense.
My mind is performing somersaults too – trying to understand what exactly it is I’m doing. Best guess, I’m creating a Y junction for the frame of the web, but this is mainly based on previous knowledge of spiders. With invertebrates I have to wonder if I’m actually gaining any understanding or if I’m just distorting the incomprehensible to fit human constructs. Of course, there’s that possibility with every Ressy but it rarely feels such a farce as this.
But these thoughts are distracting me from the Ressy impulses. Keep this up and I’m going to make a mistake. No more philosophising.
I climb back into the light trailing more thread. Clamber, point to point, back legs teasing flow; circle, tighter, tighter. A rhythm of squirt, pin, step. Sink into the symmetry. Just let myself go . . .
By the time it’s finished, I’m ravenous. Or perhaps empty, silk used up, my innards are a gulf. Either way, all there is left to do is wait.
And wait.
It’s hardest in bodies like this; without sensible external sensation to distract me, it’s easy to spiral into rumination. Instead, I turn my mind to the past. The life – the I – before being a spider already feels foreign but I’ve a store of memories for times like this, stars to cling to in the dark. Such as the day I was accepted into ShenCorp. The rush of that email, my disbelief turning into excitement – I was going to be a phenomenaut. The printout we took to show Gran Gran, its texture silky smooth, like her hands around mine; Mum’s on my shoulders, shaking.
The web ripples. My legs fizzle in the breeze.
Then, the trips to our Centre. Those first few bus rides were so exciting, watching Bristol stream beyond the window. I hadn’t even taken buses on my own before; I’d only just turned twelve.
These memories have been handled so many times their edges are worn soft but what else do I have? I reach for the next.
First meeting Buckley, a lanky figure, not quite boy, not quite man, eyes never quite meeting mine. Did he really used to hunch, or did I make it up? He doesn’t now.
As time trickles on, I feel as if I am dissolving into the web. The wind stirs quakes inside me, pauses in its breath like white noise. This silk is more than my home, it’s become an extension of my skin; I tense as each shudder passes up my feet – prey? No, I’ll know it when it comes. So sit tight; thoughts above, like boaters on water.
What next? My first projection. No, I never have clear memories of that. Just the excited dread before, afterwards watching my breakfast swirling down the toilet bowl.
A face leers, its eye sockets hollow.
I slip and thrash. But the face is already gone.
‘All right?’ Buckley asks.
I haul myself back to my perch, abdomen gasping.
‘I’m OK. I’m OK. Just a hallucination.’
‘What was it?’
‘Eyes. A face. Something watching.’
His tongue clucks against his teeth, an ominous noise. Hallucinations always happen in Ressies with poor stimulation; to a human mind the inputs from an insect embodiment are so basic as to count as sensory deprivation. But Buckley’s right: I normally experience colours and flashing lights before anything complex.
‘It’s only been two hours. Can you stick it out a little longer?’
Only two hours! Paranoia skitters round my thoughts.
‘I’ll read to you. Give you something to focus on,’ he says.
This jump is quickly becoming unpleasant, but it’s my job.
The quiet is tar as I wait for his words, then his voice returns.
‘Britain called on to “do its part”. EU Commissioner Julian Rylands today called on the Prime Minister for Britain to “do its part” in shouldering environmental refugees. The European Commission has been under increasing pressure since the start of this year’s southern droughts—’
The news. It’s one of Buckley’s favourite diversionary tactics. All the manuals recommend it. ‘Keep the phenomenaut intellectually and emotionally engaged in the human world.’ ‘Retaining an attachment to the trappings of culture is the surest way of staving off nativism.’ Behind the fancy words, the main idea is simple – no phenomenaut must ever relinquish their humanity.
As Buckley’s precise words patter through the article I try to focus, but such stories lack meaning here; the world has already shrunk to the expanse of my web. I fixate on his voice instead, sensing the shape of the sounds as if I were a finger pressed to his lips. It’s slower than usual, slightly slurred; perhaps he was up late last night. But the sentences are starting to unravel.
‘– hurricanes – president said – without support – and—’
A luminescence drips through the ether; cobalt, now star-burst red. But no, this body can’t even sense colour. I feel the brush of nettles over skin.
Come on, Kit. Don’t trip out only two hours in.
Words begin to crumble, revealing innards of brute breath.
‘Buckley,’ I try to say.
Sourness washes up my legs. Someone, somewhere, laughs.
Am I even sub-vocalising?
Buckley!
Please.
Help
An impact to the web startles me back to myself.
Prey.
I leap, thread to thread, meaty taste loud up my legs, hunger like a second heartbeat. Its wings buffet me but the struggle is hopeless.
My abdomen moistens and I rear, spewing nets of iron, as my legs stitch it into a writhing tomb.
Pins and needles, so much. So heavy. Much many.
No, not many. Why did I think that? More like large – lots.
The many is me. I am the lots.
I start to laugh, then gasp at the raw sensation of having a throat. My throat.
‘All right?’ Buckley asks.
I open my eyes, stunned for a second by the force of colour and detail, then am overawed all over again as I realise all this is just inside the whiteness of the strip light. Amazing how quickly you can forget.
My eyes are pulled to the pink blob rising from the bottom of my vision – my nose. I reach up to touch the point of flesh and some of the tingling arranges into its shape. My cheeks are wet but I don’t think I’m sad.
‘All right?’ Buckley repeats.
I hum, not feeling ready to face this ornate construction of lips, tongue and throat, but am forced to anyway as I start to cough on the dryness of the oxygen.
A rumbling approaches, yet only as his head appears does it occur to me that the sound means that sensations are becoming interpretable again and that it was the wheels of his chair. He grabs the JumpPallet to pull himself the rest of the way.
‘Prefer to lie there for a bit?’
‘Um.’ I blink up at him, readjusting to the idea that I should be relying on more than instinct. This body is quite happy to lie here, but what do I want? I reach out to the hollow feeling in my stomach, a stark contrast with the fullness of the spider Ressy after I had sucked the innards from the fly. It turns out what I want is what this body wants anyway.
‘I think I’d like . . .’ I say, picking over the words with a frown. ‘I think I’d like a sandwich.’
He grins. ‘I’ll see what I can rustle up.’
I’m thankful for the silence he leaves behind, it makes the noise of this world, hell, this body, more bearable. There’s a pulse behind my eyes that suggests an imminent headache but after being a spider that’s no surprise. Now I’ve readjusted to the notion of colour, the ceiling is cool snow into which the ache of sensation can nestle.
The pins and needles have spread into a general fuzziness but it isn’t necessarily uncomfortable. My face feels hot, lips and tongue seemingly swollen. I poke them to check – but no, they’re fine, though the movement reminds me that I’m still plugged into BodySupport.
Sitting, I pat the pallet to reassure myself, not of it, but of the singular solidarity of my arms. Moving as a spider was like syllables that never join in meaningful expression but the business of a human body is one voice.
My fingers wriggle under my inspection. ‘Worms,’ I whisper and put them to work pulling off the Velcro of the MuscleStims.
Buckley arrives back in time to help me tidy it away.
‘Feeling more human?’
I smile at the old joke and reach for the sandwich but the movement puts pressure on my bowels.
Buckley steps back surprised as I scuttle past.
‘Loo!’ I shout back. And race along the corridor as fast as I can.