Fiction
Length: ~1.5 pages, ~815 words
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
It started simply, just some razors for protection. An inch of sharpened DuraSteel™️©️®️embedded under each fingernail, a little bit of flesh removed to make space for them and their sheath. Just a little secret to feel safe on his walks to and from his car. Nothing special, millions of people had them; as common as mace had been in the time before cyberwear had become as easy to get as a tooth filling. The out of pocket wasn't even as much as a new VR game.
It was nice, to take some control over his life. To take some control over his flesh. It had always felt like his body dictated and he obeyed. Hungry, thirsty, horny, bored, tired, alert, addicted; his body demanded and he capitulated. But that first little surgery felt like he had started to turn the tide, like he had taken the first steps to collaring and leashing the out-of-control beast he had been born inside.
Next was a datajack. "Nothing special," he told himself. Most higher-end office workers had one these days; it didn't really matter that he wasn't strictly "higher-end" yet. He'd get there someday and he assumed it would just keep trickling down as time went by anyway. Eventually it would be all but requirement, people would start putting it on their CV's. There was a reason secretaries used terminals rather than typewriters these days.
A little skin came out for the jack, a little bone for the wire, a little brain tissue for the processor. Nothing major. He didn't even feel all that different afterwards. Maybe just a bit more alive, a bit more himself.
It went on like that. A piece in, a piece out, his body changing to suit his needs, his desires, the person he had always been at the core and the person he had always hoped to be. Cyberarms that were more sleek than his originals but equally more strong; vat-grown muscles produced by nanites building on a pre-designed routine not dissimilar from DNA to produce a result made of electronics and micro-machinery rather than carbon and water laid over his original bones, themselves laced with particles of titanium to strengthen them while keeping the marrow beneath alive and healthy. Cyberlegs of the same construction and cybernetic glutes that were curvier and more shapely than anything he'd ever be able to achieve as the man he'd been. His heart came out and a powerful pump went in, parts of his brain came out and micro-processors with infinitely more complexity and power than anything nature had ever produced went in, even his hair follicles were replaced with ones that he could will into producing whatever color of hair he desired.
As time went on his body began to undeniably reshape, and he reshaped his persona - at least publicly - along with them. The changes became the permission he needed to become outside who he longed to be inside.
He became a she, she became a they, they became an it. Degenderification, dehumanation, became freedom from everything that had never worked for it, for everything that it had been handed by society that had always chaffed. It added little flourishes, and it removed little flourishes. Fangs went in and came back out later, horns went in and came back out later, pointed ears went in and stayed. It liked the pointed ears and never stopped liking them.
The body became reshaped, redesigned, rebuilt in a sleek, yet powerful, image. Human, yet not. Gendered, yet not. To the outside world, to the mainstream, it became an enigma, something that was impossible to understand; but to itself and those like it, it all made perfect sense. It was in-line with itself, its internal self and its external self matched in a way it never had before.
For the first time it came to understand the Buddhist concept of body and mind as one that it had remembered once reading about. It had all seemed like nonsense to him so long ago when his body had been the enemy of his mind, at once a jailer and a prison, but to the it he had become it made perfect sense. It's body was the perfect match to its mind, a continuous thing that linked body and mind in a way that the division was impossible to tell. They flowed into eachother. Body no longer obeyed mind any more than mind obeyed body, they were a singular unit.
In the end, or maybe the beginning of a new life as itself that stretched out ahead of it, almost nothing of his body remained, almost nothing of her body remained, almost nothing of their body remained. And yet every inch of its body felt true and alive and vibrant and perfect.
It had rebuilt itself to suit itself. It had taken control of itself. It had become itself.