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My fist is a mouse. You might think something like that feels strange, but at least at first, it’s shockingly mundane. You’d imagine the act of cutting and pasting a conscious being into your forearm feels bad, but once the bleeding stops, the skin scabs, and the check clears, your initial hesitation all but vanishes. For me, waking up and seeing my balance cut in half honestly felt dreamlike.
Besides, I was lucky enough to get one of the smaller additions: just one small head and one tiny paw. They even let me choose which hand the mouse was sewn to. I went with my left, obviously, so in theory my ability to eat, drink, scroll; things like that would remain completely intact. And if you knew what the all the alternatives were you’d realize this is undoubtedly among the tamest. On my feeds I’ll sometimes see operations where debtors host the large unsightly mass of a heifer and around the complex people whisper stories of full skin transplants and insect colony grafts. Those, those are the unlucky ones. Mine was just prudent investment advice.
Once you leave the facility, the daily check-ins aren’t that inconvenient either. Every so often I’d get a system notification asking me to self-report the data they’re after: my heartrate, blood oxygen level, any symptoms, things like that; once more for the mouse hosted on my skin. It’s intuitive and you get a nice little bonus each time you do it. So yeah, that first week, I didn’t feel so bad. I felt relieved, secure even, knowing how I could make it through the next few months.
But then one night I tried to sleep. And the damn thing wouldn’t stop moving.
I honestly hadn’t paid the mouse much thought before that. Its tiny head remained inert most of the time, maybe confused, and oftentimes I even had to check if it was dead. Then suddenly its eyes started darting around, what was left of its neck thrashed back and forth, and its one arm jerked wildly. It moved like it was trying to run without feet and flailed like it was opening its mouth to scream without lungs. Failing this, the rodent eventually settled on trying to dig a nail into my skin. But the poor thing couldn’t even draw blood. That amused me for a while. Until the little beast turned its attention back on itself.
The mouse’s lone claw found a new target on the top of its head, and I could only look on in a mix of shock and horror. It pierced its own skin with remarkable brutality and replaced any hesitation in tearing away at its own flesh with a terrifying dedication. Fur was cleaved off to reveal pulsating muscle, muscle was parted to unveil string-like tendon, and finally tendon was split to display a blood-soaked finale in the white of bone. But the skull wouldn’t budge, and the creature paused.
I realized then that my hands were shaking and my stomach was churning. I hoped this marked the end of the bloody spectacle. But the mouse was too smart for its own good – The damn thing found its eyes. Tunneling through the gelatinous tissue, it unleashed a pain-stricken river of pink as a tears and blood and remnants of corneas all mixed together in a death march to the bottom of the snout. I simply couldn’t watch anymore. I put my hand out of sight under a blanket and cried, I bawled and I strained and I prayed for this horror to stop.
And then just as abruptly as it began, it was over. Hesitantly, I lifted the covers. All that was left of the creature on my fist was a bleeding hole.
They insisted my next check-in come in person, and I expected punishment. My voice shook as I recounted what had happened, until I realized that the crowd of doctors around me kept growing. No. Those fuckers loved every word. They said this finding was incredible, they asked if I would try again, and before I could even reply they offered me double. At a certain point I tuned all this out. The only thing in the room that held my attention was the wall of rodents in the background: future test subjects, cooped up in their little apartments, none the wiser of the horrors that await them. Utterly unable to escape.
I left, and I went back to my cage. I distracted myself with an endless wheel of content, ate one last prepared meal, and gulped down a preset portion of water. And all I could think about was the commitment and tenacity of the mouse. I pondered what the point of this life was if I, too, could not find a way to offer this world something more than just my flesh. It did not take long to come to a conclusion.
I do not have claws, but I do have a knife, and with it I will deny my keepers the results and data they so desire.
Today I will follow my compatriot’s brave example.