Black. Everything was black. It was as though Petra had been plunged into complete darkness. Actually no, maybe that wasn’t quite the right way to describe it… The experience felt less like an absence of light and so much as an absence of her sight altogether; as though the pieces of her brain that were supposed to process the information coming from her eyes simply didn’t exist anymore.
What was going on?Petra focused on her muddled memories, slowly trying to piece together what exactly had happened. That was right, she’d been on a flight hadn’t she? And something had gone horribly wrong… had her plane been attacked? It had all happened so fast and her memories were all jumbled up – not neatly organised like she generally kept them – which made it hard for her to tell. Hard enough that Petra couldn’t make heads or tails of what had happened. Even so she could remember one thing, in those frantic few moments before she’d blacked out she’d been badly injured and had been sure she was going to die.
Well, fortunately, it seemed like that prediction had been wrong, she wasn’t dead – not yet at least. Though apparently she couldn’t see or hear – or feel anything from most of her senses for that matter – an experience she quickly decided was deeply unnerving . On the bright side, she wasn’t hurting anywhere despite very much recalling having been hurt somehow before she lost consciousness; although, considering the circumstances perhaps that wasn’t a silver lining.
Had her brain been damaged in whatever incident she’d gotten caught up in? Was she currently bleeding out in the wreckage of the plane, this whole experience a hallucination conjured up by her oxygen starved brain in its final moments?
Petra pushed that line of reasoning down before it could pull her into a panic. If she were imminently going to die, freaking out about it would only make that death more uncomfortable, and if she had time before she died then panicking still wouldn’t help. What she needed to focus on right now was something tangible. Something actionable.
Focusing her attention inwards, Petra latched onto whatever she could find. While the senses she was familiar with and had spent her whole life growing to rely on where all gone – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and even most of the more esoteric ones like balance and temperature – were all apparently gone, Petra could still feel some manner of sensation on the peripheries of her mind.
The first and most profound of her senses was what she thought must have once been her sense of proprioception. Petra was pretty sure the sense seemed a hell of a lot more refined and pronounced than it ever had before now – perhaps a side effect of her being cut off from all other sensory input – at least until she actually took note of what the sense was trying to tell her.
If it were to be believed, her body was some kind of puddle or blob, its central mass slowly shrinking as it painstakingly spread itself across the ground in a network of tendrils like roots or veins. In other words, whatever brain damage had taken away her other senses had also fucked this one up.
Turning her attention to her next sense, Petra found it to be even more useless and broken than the last. It was almost like taste or smell, but with her entire body and somehow experienced as something closer to touch than either taste or smell.
Pushing the smell-touch aside, Petra tried to focus her attention on the next sense in her arsenal, but found herself coming up empty… That was it? That couldn’t be it right? Just two broken senses that would do nothing to help her in her current situation…
Petra felt the panic she’d pushed down just moments earlier started to creep back up on her. When she’d had something more important to focus on she’d been able to push all that aside, but now what was she meant to do?
Panic mounting Petra desperately searched for something, anything, that she could use, until she felt a sort of draining sensation from some esoteric part of herself she hadn’t previously been aware of and her perception was flung inward, into her body. Where just a moment before Petra had been struggling with the lack of information her remaining senses were feeding her, suddenly she found herself instead overwhelmed by the sheer amount she was receiving.
Countless processes and interactions danced around Petra’s consciousness, working together like some kind of impossibly complex Rube Goldberg machine running off the chaos of the universe itself. It probably took Petra a full minute to calm down enough to actually process what she was seeing, and a further minute or two beyond that to actually comprehend it. Was she looking at her cellular processes? Somehow she was certain she was.
Petra wasn’t sure how long she spent just staring at the countless chemical reactions that somehow came together to constitute
her, but with almost herculean effort she eventually managed to tear her focus away from it. It was beautiful certainly, and interesting beyond comparison – without a doubt she’d be back to explore every inch of her anatomy later – but right now what she needed to see was the bigger picture.
Through force of will, Petra shifted her perspective, zooming out and away from the molecules that constituted the most basic building blocks of her biology, in favour of viewing her body as a whole.
Well, shit. For the briefest of moments Petra thought her body must have been completely splattered in the accident and that that was what she was looking at, but only for a moment before she realised that didn’t make sense since she was clearly still alive and thinking – not the apparent truth of the matter made all that much more sense.
Apparently Petra had been too quick to dismiss her remaining senses as faulty earlier; at some point while she was out, her consciousness had apparently been transferred to some kind of amorphous blob.
Petra probably freaked out about the state of her body for at least a couple of minutes before her curiosity once again took over as her dominant emotion. In retrospect, it probably said something about her mental state that she was able to get over such an extreme change so quickly, but in all fairness, she wasn’t exactly over the change so much as just really, really curious about it.
Her body really was branching out like she’d sensed before, though it did so incredibly slowly, spreading out in a manner she found vaguely reminiscent of a slime mould feeding. Actually, based on what she was ‘tasting’ through the vein-like projections that now comprised the bulk of her mass, she was pretty sure it was more than vaguely reminiscent of a slime mould eating.
Zooming her focus in on one of her feeding pseudopods, it doesn’t take long for Petra to witness a clump of organic matter get drawn into her body. Expecting to see the foreign cells get dragged off to some sort of digestive cavity for processing, Petra is surprised to see them instead torn apart on the spot before being engulfed by specialised cells for digestion.
Intracellular digestion? Wasn’t that a super basal trait? Wouldn’t that put her quite a long way from anything even remotely human? Even cnidarians had gastrovascular cavities.
Intrigued by her observation, Petra did a quick scan of her body, and sure enough, despite finding a massive variety of different cell types and proteins spread throughout her body, Petra couldn’t find anything even remotely resembling a proper organ. She did at least have a nervous system of some description, so she was definitely an animal of some description, but certainly not a vertebrate. Actually, screw not being a vertebrate, wouldn’t this all suggest that whatever she was, the last common ancestor it shared with a human was probably somewhere between a jellyfish and a fucking sea sponge?
Putting aside the realisation that, biologically speaking, she now probably shared more in common with the most primitive animal alive than she did with her own parents, Petra returned her attention to her still feeding body. Her body didn’t seem to be having any problems acting on autopilot and doing its own thing, but even so, Petra wasn’t completely comfortable with eating entirely unidentified substances. It was probably fine, but Petra couldn’t help but picture images of wild bears with metre long tapeworms dragging behind them – she knew full well how frequently wild animals got parasites in the wild, and she didn’t particularly want to take any chances.
Willing her body to stop doing its thing, just as she would to stop a shiver or involuntary tremor, Petra watched as exactly nothing happened, not so much as a nerve impulse to indicate that her body had even registered her command in the first place.
If Petra still had a stomach, she probably would have felt it drop the moment she realised her body wasn’t actually under her control, and it took all her willpower not to start blindly panicking then and there. She reminded herself again that even if she did panic, it wouldn’t achieve anything other than prolonging the time it would take her to figure out a solution.
First thing first, Petra focused her attention on what exactly her pseudopods were doing as they fed and it quickly became apparent to her that rather than performing actions based on some immutable genetic programming, her pseudopods instead seemed to be receiving instructions through her nervous system. That was probably good to know. Her awareness tracing the nerves through the pseudopod, Petra followed them until she reached a cluster of neurons, a ganglion smaller even than a grain of sand but just one of countless such grains spread throughout Petra’s body.
While she obviously had a distributed nervous system of some description, tracing her nerve pathways, Petra found that she possessed a sort of cordoned off inner membrane within which her physical composition was slightly altered, and more importantly, the density of her ganglia was far greater. It took Petra a
while of just watching the intricate dance of nerve impulses, both within and outside of her ‘core’, before she was able to so much as guess at how it all worked.
As far as Petra could tell, all her ganglia were either dedicated to processing sensory information or towards using that information in order to coordinate her bodies physical actions – which for the most part seemed to be finding and engulfing food. All of Petra’s ‘sensory ganglia’ were, and while she possessed ‘decision-ganglia’ outside of her core, it seemed the vast majority of them were contained within it. Well, perhaps decision-ganglia wasn’t the best moniker she could give the things, since observing the process she got the distinct impression it was more or less deterministic.
What was the point though? The who set up seemed like overkill for the apparently very simple behaviours of her species; Petra didn’t think a brain was all that necessary for the behaviours she’d shown thus far, but certainly not a relatively sophisticated one like this; if anything her ‘brain’ seemed as though it’d be more of an energy sink than anything else.
Taking a step back, Petra tried looking at the bigger picture. The fact that she was confused about this meant that either she was misunderstanding something or there was a currently a gap in her knowledge. Well, there were definitely gaps in her knowledge… More importantly, the ‘why do I have a brain’ question wasn’t important to her current situation, even if it was interesting, in other words, it was something she could look into later, once her immediate problems were solved.
Speaking of which, after analysing her brain for some time, Petra finally felt as though she might have a solution to her current predicament. Some small part of her insisted that trying to fuck with what passed as her brain was probably an absurdly bad idea, but then again, would being stuck as a passenger in her own body be any better?
Maybe actually, there was so much cool shit to study in here… but that was beside the point!
In any case, it was pretty clear to Petra, that whatever mechanism by which she was now inhabiting this body, there was no way her mind was actually running on its ‘hardware’ so to speak – its nervous system was simply too simple for that to make sense. That
probably meant it wouldn’t irrevocably fuck her up if she messed with that hardware a little…
Maybe... if she was lucky.
On a hunch, Petra focused her will, just as she had when she’d thrown her awareness into her body and willed it to bend to her wishes. It felt vaguely like she was pushing into a wall with her thoughts and after a moment of nothing seeming to happen, just when she was about to give up, she felt some kind of resistance give way, and that same draining feeling that had started when she’d first ‘entered’ her body briefly got a lot worse as her network of pseudopods stopped spreading entirely.
Petra made sure to spend a few moments running tests on herself – mostly doing maths and word games in her head – just in case she had ended up fundamentally breaking something in her brain. When she felt reasonably confident that she was fine – or at least as fine as she could be given the circumstances – Petra set about fixing the remainder of her pseudopod problem.
Her work was slow and clunky at first – more or less requiring her to ‘program’ herself new instincts in a language she didn’t understand – and she occasionally made mistakes – causing pseudopods to forcibly separate themselves from her body or to simply slough off it – but as she progressed her skills gradually improved, and by the time she was done, she’d managed to retract herself into an almost round bell like shape.
Pleased with her handiwork, Petra began mentally cackling to herself in a symbolic gesture that just felt right for the situation. She briefly considered trying to create a ‘program’ to make her body jiggle in time with her manic laughter, but even if she was channelling her inner mad scientist, considering she’d already just lost a not insignificant amount of her mass just trying to retract her pseudopods, she decided not to try again with her entire body on the line. Instead, she set about trying to create a means of moving her body along the ground.
Now that she was actually listening to her senses, Petra could tell she had something on top of her, though she didn’t get the impression it was particularly heavy or anything.
