Spare Time.
“So, what do you do for fun?”
Miguel blinked, and looked up from his work at the microscope. Short of any specific goals, he began examining his own DNA, testing it for flaws, seeing where exactly was the 50/50 split between him and the theoretical spider he had been merged with. He’d been working on it for almost a month, but ideas were always tricky to trace to their source, especially other people’s.
This was the first time his lab partner had spoken.
“Huh?” Miguel took a second to process the question. Accelerated senses didn’t allow for understanding sudden questions out of the blue, nor did it allow him to come up with an answer that wasn’t ‘flying and swinging from webs’ on a moment’s notice.
“Um… like, karaoke?” his lab partner offered.
“... Sure,” Miguel said, his eyes glancing off Eddie and returning to his work. “Let’s go with that.”
“I could never stand it myself,” his friend continued. “I used to be way into it, but now the places are all just so loud… But that’s getting older, I guess.”
“I guess so,” Miguel said flatly.
“... So, uh, Mike-”
“Don’t call me that. Ever.”
“Gotcha. So, what do you like to do? Why are you… here?”
Miguel looked up again from his microscope, and stared forward at the small window that looked up onto the street. People walked by, New York rats the size of dogs scampered past the window, closer than anyone else would be comfortable with. It was a fair question. Why was he here?
“Um… hm. Just… had to get away from home, I guess,” he said, his voice drifting off as his eyes returned to the microscope. As they did, he noticed his blood cells moving towards the bottom left corner of the slide, as if drawn to something.
“I get that,” Eddie said. “I had to leave home, a long time ago now, and I miss it a lot. It’s… it’s gone now, unfortunately.”
Miguel felt Eddie getting closer towards him, and something tickled along his spine. His blood pushed towards the edge of the slide, threatening to disappear from view.
“Do you miss home?”
The sound of a single step prompted Miguel to stand up, his nerves getting the best of him, reach out a clawed hand, grab Eddie by the neck, and bare his teeth and hiss. Eddie saw his own face reflected back at him through the red tinted sunglasses Miguel never took off.
“Huh…” Eddie said, making no moves in any direction, and barely acting like anything was different at all. “I thought she took them all out.”
A few seconds later, a long, thick, black, heavy tendril reached out from Eddie’s back, and slowly, gently, lifted, without grabbing or curling around, Miguel’s arm away from its outstretched place around his throat.
Miguel swallowed, and closed his mouth, going back to his mumbling speech.
“... She did. We made more,” he said, sitting back down and looking through the microscope. His blood was gone, but he didn’t notice.
“We?” Eddie cocked his head, his tendril disappearing into his back once more.
“... They. I. I’m… part of them, kind of. But them. I was part of the new batch, not a creator of it.”
“Uh-huh… I see,” Eddie said quietly, still staring at Miguel.
“Would you stop that? I can… feel it,” Miguel said, trying to shrug the tingling off his back.
“Sorry, it’s an old habit. Most people don’t notice,” Eddie said. He kept staring, but Miguel felt the anxiety leave his body.
“What was it you were doing?”
“Um… Licking,” Eddie said, a little embarrassed.
“Licking?”
“Pheromones. You… have a lot of them, and not all of it is human. I got curious, and I lick things I’m curious about.”
“‘Lick’? Why do you keep saying it like that?”
“It’s the closest analogue I can think of. All of my senses are the same, they’re all just… taste.”
Miguel looked Eddie in the eyes. To drive the point home, Eddie folded his eyes inwards, so that they seemed like tightly pinched holes, with no ocular membranes in sight.
“... Eugh.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie, popping his eyes back into place. “I don’t like to do that either.”
“So you’re… You’re not human?” Miguel said, missing out the word ‘either’ for his own sake.
Eddie bit his lip, and let out a short breath. He rolled his eyes, said “I really hate doing this,” and then collapsed, folding into himself, folding out of himself, tesseracting his body into a net of webbing that resembled an animal-like shape, but only the frame that would hold it up. His head became a series of concentric circles lined with teeth, and he shuddered along his body for a moment, then refolded himself back into his human form, lab coat and all, messy hair and earbuds in his ears that up until now Miguel hadn’t noticed.
“... Hm,” was all he said. “I’ve seen weirder.”
Eddie gave a curt nod. “Good to know.”
-----
The red, red world passed him by as he walked. No one recognised him when he dressed like this. Wore skin that didn’t feel like his, borrowed from someone else. Skin that he hadn’t… filled out, yet.
He thought about the last begging man he’d met in a dark alley.
“Have you ever thought about the words ‘creature’ and ‘creator’? They must have a common source, mustn’t they? An origin place, where the bringer of life and the feral animal both began. Isn’t that nice? That even creators were once creatures.
I was more created than you were, I think. Engineered, born under lab conditions, to be a specific kind of thing.”
“Please…” the bloodied creature had whimpered pathetically. “I don’t know who you are.”
“That’s the problem, little thing. Nobody does. And that irks me. Because I have an idea of who I am, have thoughts on who I might be, but no one can tell me, because there’s no one alive who would recognise me. There’s not a single person in this world who could look at me and truly see who I am, more than I could see myself. And that really, really angers me. Because who am I, if nobody can see me? If nobody can see who I am? Am I… myself, at all?”
The little thing had stopped bleeding, and didn’t say anything else. He cut it up a few more times for good measure, slashing, cutting, slicing, carving… dissecting. How did these people work, with their haphazard hearts, with their births of chaos, with their accidental existences? How could they bear it at all?
How could anyone live, knowing they were not designed? How could he, knowing that he was?