Touch

CW: Body Horror Erotica

Two beings lay on the hotel bed, intertwined. The cells of the organisms that were genetically descended from the animal kingdom were as convinced they were distinguishably human now as they had been days ago, when the majority of the nonhuman cells in the body were still those located in the digestive system. Only by weight, of course. The hundred trillion bacterium easily outnumbered a mere forty trillion homo sapiens.

“Human” was always a misnomer. Arrogance of the matter capable of cognition to think of itself as whole, atomlike, indivisible. A self telling story kept running by the illusion of continuity. There was no need for a narrative in true intimacy. Only the experience internalized without need for externalization. The women whose limbs spiraled around each other bonelessly no longer held such nonsense in any regard.

They had willingly inhaled the cloud of fungal spores hours earlier with full knowledge of the consequences. Illicitly obtained in trades for smuggled parts to repair outmoded hardware, the canister’s pressurized contents had filled the lover’s lungs in seconds. The symbiotic biome was irreversibly transformed in mere minutes. The women had held each other’s fevered, shaking bodies as fibers and exploratory ducts wound their way through forms soon to be unrecognizable.

Skin, the barrier. Keeps the world out and the self in. What about the other? Touch is filtered. A photograph of contact through a film transmitted through nerves that distorted and twisted, selfishly hogged by the cognitive parts of the colony.

Human bodies had a sort of spore of their own, an intimacy of mixing pairs of deoxyribonucleic acids in an act of creation and pleasure. The biome within was passed along as the new creature grew and fed on its mother organism. Passing along the genetic makeup of the whole colony between the membranes of skin.

Fate was such that neither woman had been born with the arrangement of her cells and genes to participate in such an act. Beautiful, but barren. Traumatized by potential ripped from them before they had any say in the matter. This was what made them crave the True Touch.

Skin was oppression, a barrier between lovers that could not be passed. Cruelty of evolution that the organism be so limited in its ability to understand and hold its pair. unable to link every nerve ending up to its match, unable to peel and interlock, combine, become whole. This was why they had decided to consume the entire canister, rather than single drops in parts per million as many humans who considered transformation to be a recreational pastime to be cut off afterwards rather than irreversible truth.

Tendrils of mycelium piercing through epidermis necrotized hours prior. New networks interfacing with the old nervous system, cells and tissue alike devoured in autolysis, preparing for a new act of creation. Tubes like bifurcated root systems grew into each other, exchanging vital nutrients as the old bodies were broken down.

Pleasure is such a crude, imprecise concept. A primitive reward structure for a mind built on primitive hardware. Pain, likewise, did not do the experience justice. Both words were far exceeded in understood meaning as two became one. Fusing, merging. Becoming one not as reproduction, but as an experience. Eyes lifted on stalks that stretched into branches, allowing the lover to see its true beauty perfectly.

The human brains continued to think of themselves as human until almost the very end, even as they adapted to their new quadraspherical arrangement. Rationalization is a powerful tool. But as thoughts themselves rubbed against each other and mixed, that idea crumbled away into organic dust like the now vestigial limbs of the being that simply existed in peaceful, intimate togetherness on a rented room’s bed.