I was looking forward to this Halloween. It’s my favorite holiday and I take it really seriously. I even bought my costume several months in advance. It’s a shame I won’t be able to put it on now. My apartment has been quarantined and I’m trapped inside my bathroom. My situation is pretty dire, actually. This might be my last post, fellow surfers on the waves of the electronic ocean, so pay attention.
I was deep into the body modification scene. I did a lot of weird stuff. We’re talking extreme tattoos (I even got one in my eye), unusual piercings, scarification, human branding… well, you get the picture, and this was only the start.
I always felt uncomfortable in the meat sack evolution had forced upon me, and I was happy to find myself living in these exciting transhuman times, even though they just began. I could at least dream about one day leaving my body behind in exchange for a new one.
I took every chance I could to change myself, exploring my morphological freedom. I even considered nullification – the act of cutting off one of my limbs – but instead, I came in contact with something else, something new and thrilling.
It was a group of people I hadn’t interacted with before. They called themselves biohackers, and they engaged in a lot of mind-blowing, invigorating stuff. Recently, they had started to inject themselves with CRISPR (a gene-editing tool hundreds of times more powerful than previous iterations). Although they didn’t utilize traditional lab-spaces, they were very serious about what they were doing. Some of them came from the body modification scene just like me, but there were also biologists, engineers and rich tech guys straight out of Silicon Valley. We were a group of people, all of us from different walks of life, with one unified vision – to escape the limitations of the human body. We called ourselves pioneers, treating DNA just like any other frontier.
I injected myself with a lot of different stuff after enlisting as a pioneer. Typical for me, I wanted to be the most extreme. While the others were given small injections in their bellies or thighs, I took a massive injection into my tongue.
“No! What the fuck are you doing?!” The creator of this particular gene therapy objected.
It was too late, I had already emptied the entire syringe. I screamed from the pain and everyone looked at me completely dumbfounded, but I was happy with my decision. I would come to regret it though.
During the first couple of days after the injection, I didn’t notice much, but after about a week, I realized that my tongue had grown noticeably longer. The following week after, it grew even more. I thought my new tongue was awesome and posted videos of it on TikTok, where I got thousands of likes. I felt on top of the world, playing with my tongue all day in front of the mirror.
My long tongue went perfectly with my Halloween costume. All of my friends encouraged me when they saw how well it worked, which convinced me I had done the right thing. However, when I could no longer fit my tongue into my mouth, I began to worry a little.
When the fuck is it going to stop growing?
I tried to talk to my friends, slurring my words as if I had a stroke, and they told me to go to the hospital. I didn’t like that idea. I hated hospitals. I ignored their advice and stayed at home, hoping it would stop growing soon. It still looked kind of cool – almost like I was a lizard or something – even though it was pretty annoying since I couldn’t talk or eat normally with a huge fuckin’ tongue sticking out of my mouth.
To my dismay, it didn’t stop. In fact, it grew faster and faster. My tongue was hanging down to my chest, and just half a day later, it had reached the floor! Once it had gotten to that point, I tried to call an ambulance, but they couldn’t understand me. I sounded like a spluttering fool.
My anxiety grew as fast as my tongue. I was feeling pretty stupid at this point. My best friend kept texting me, but I was too ashamed to talk to him. If I hadn’t been so embarrassed, I would’ve asked him to call for help. Instead, I decided to use my computer’s synthetic speech to reach out for the aid I needed.
With trembling hands, I wrote, Please send help! My fucking tongue won’t stop growing! I can’t even talk. I added my address as well.
I called 911 and had the computer read the text. Not too surprising – hearing a robot voice calling them about a never-ending growing tongue – they thought it was a prank call. I tried to scream “fuck”, but it sounded like a quacking duck. I couldn’t leave the apartment, I’d look like a monster dragging my tongue down the street. This didn’t look cool, like my other modifications, it was ghoulish.
Out of nowhere, I felt a strong hunger. I had gotten an extreme case of the munchies, which infuriated me since I couldn’t eat. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I was noticeably thinner. I was pretty fat before, but now I was reduced to skin and bones.
As my pulsating tongue kept growing, like a living being in and of itself, I realized why. My tongue had to get its material from somewhere. It was consuming me! I was literally being eaten alive by my own tongue. After putting my tongue inside of a mop bucket, I texted my friend that I needed help and that it was a life or death emergency.
The doorbell rang five minutes later. I thought it was the medics and lumbered over to the door, the bucket dragging behind me. As it turned out, it was just a couple of kids trick-or-treating. I’ve never seen such fright in the eyes of children before. I tried to tell them that it was a medical condition, but of course, the words didn’t come out properly and the kids ran for their lives. They even dropped their candy! I picked it up and tried to give it back to them, but the bucks accidentally tipped over and revealed the entirety of my grotesque tongue.
It was at that moment my elderly neighbor, Selma, stepped out of the hallway to see what all the ruckus was. As soon as she saw me, she clutched her chest and fell to the floor. I ran up to her, fruitlessly trying to yell, “I’m sorry,” and tried to perform CPR. My tongue didn’t allow for that, and as I bent over her, it rolled across her face. That was when the medics finally arrived. I was relieved, but they didn’t understand what was happening. Given their expression of disgust, I would say they were just as terrified as the kids. I tried to tell them it wasn’t what it looked like, but all that escaped my mouth was a drooling garble Before I knew it, I was tackled to the floor.
Everything eventually calmed down, and Selma had been carried away on a stretcher. The medics that remained looked at me with equal parts confusion as disgust. They helped me back into my apartment where I wrote down what had happened and asked them to cut the damn tongue off. They said they couldn’t do that without a surgeon, even though I begged them. They called for more skilled personnel.
More and more people arrived from more and more prestigious positions, first from the hospital, then from the university, then from the CDC and at the end even the FBI had gotten involved.
I was dying, reduced to bones, but they still refused to cut off my tongue. Instead, they decided to force-feed me a disgusting, gelatinous shake. I began feeling more like a lab rat than a patient, especially with all the suits ordering people around.
Pushing off the scientists, I grabbed a pair of scissors and bolted into the bathroom, my tongue flopping in my wake. I placed my quivering tongue between the blades. It picked up the taste of the cold metal, as well as urine from the bathroom floor. I closed my eyes and cut the tongue off in one quick motion. The different agency heads yelled for me to stop, but they were drowned out by my agonized screams. The entire room was painted with blood, but at least it was over with. Or so I thought…
My tongue regrew from it’s bloody stump, but not like before. Like a damn hydra, it split into four new, slithering tongues. They all grew at the same rapid rate. I locked the bathroom door and laid down in my bathtub, crying as my tongues kept filling the room. I could almost feel the flesh melting away beneath my skin. The beast that was once my tongue clearly didn’t have any regard for its host.
The suits are talking to me to make sure I’m still alive. Soon they’ll break in and grab me. They’re just waiting for a means of transportation.
These might very well be my last words. My Halloween is ruined! I never wanted this to happen. I always wanted to become something more, something more than human, that was, until I turned into this…
End
