Ba-thump.

Have you ever heard of phantom limb syndrome? If you haven't - it’s where someone missing a limb will feel as if it’s still there, still attached, as if they could still move it. Sometimes they’ll feel sensation, like touch, temperature, or pain.

Try to imagine that, but for not just an arm, or a leg.

Ba-thump.

Imagine if you knew you used to have not just limbs, but an entire body - and then imagine having it taken away.

Think about how it might feel if the only thing left behind was a blood-soaked beating heart, surrounded by a dark and empty nothingness. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

Ba-thump.

Imagine having a conversation with an imaginary listener to try to cope with your new reality of being a ba-thumping piece of flesh, seemingly floating in an endless void.

I didn’t need to imagine - because it was me. It was my heart. Or, the heart was me. I was the heart?

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

It wasn’t the kind of identity crisis I needed right then. Or ever needed, ever.

I didn’t know how it had happened. The memories I had of what came before were fragmented, sharded - I got bits and pieces, but nothing concrete. I could recall bodies being cut open and sewn back together. I faintly recognized that I might have participated in the process. But I couldn’t remember my name, or much else - what my body had looked like, for instance. Had I been a girl, or a boy?

Were all hearts gender neutral by default?

Ba-thump.

...I didn't have any masculine or feminine leanings, as far as I could tell - just bloody ones.

One thing I could say I knew, with distinct clarity, was the anatomy of my remaining self. Had I always known what the bits and pieces of the heart were, or was this knowledge something connected to my new existence? I didn’t know.

The loud contractions of my heart faded into the background as I reviewed each part, glancing over the cardiac organ with a strange sort of awareness that wasn’t anything like the five senses I'd known before. It was almost tactile, but not quite - and it seemed focused on the blood circulating my heart, not so much the heart itself.

At the ‘start’ of the process I could feel blood fill the right atrium from the superior and inferior vena cava, which connected to air, which meant the blood was coming from nowhere. Good start. It then coursed through the tricuspid valve, compressed and flew through the pulmonary valve, traveled through the pulmonary arteries... and then somehow appeared in the left atrium.

There was no physical connection evident. It just didn’t make sense. The heart had no lungs attached. How was the blood getting oxygenated? And where was the blood coming from in the first place?

The left atrium squeezed, in time with the right, and blood pushed through the mitral valve, then slammed up past the aortic valve, then through the aorta - and then I realized my awareness through the not-touch sensation was expanding. That it had been, ever since I’d gained consciousness, as blood gushed out into the void and brightened wherever it splashed in spots and smears.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

With each cumulative beat of my heart, the descending and ascending aorta spurted blood - and everything the blood touched I could, for lack of a better term, see.

I saw a lot of nothing, frankly. It seemed I wasn't floating, at the least - I was flopped on a surface, but what that surface was I couldn't tell. Not enough blood had spilled for any detailed analysis.

I wondered about the math, there - how much blood was I pumping out? How long would it take for me to see all of my surroundings, through this strange blood sight? There didn’t happen to be some kind of guide, or tutorial, for getting stuck as a disembodied heart, did there?

h̶̬̮͖̑̌̊è̴̡̏l̵̖̮̓p̸̢̟̲̈́

… what.

Help?

h̶̬̮͖̑̌̊è̴̡̏l̵̖̮̓p̸̢̟̲̈́h̶̬̮͖̑̌̊è̴̡̏l̵̖̮̓p̸̢̟̲̈́

Further attempts proved equally fruitless at getting anything other than the strange corrupted text to appear in my mind’s - no, "heart's" eye. I resigned myself to the fact that, for the moment at least, I wouldn’t be getting any assistance from whatever system might have been set up to do so.

Over the course of what must have been a few minutes, my heart continued to beat, and blood continued to spill. It didn’t take long for a rather sizable puddle to form, dense enough for me to stake the claim that I was on some kind of unworked stone, given the uneven but solid texture. Some specks of blood caught in the space above the puddle - on pebbles, I soon realized, as the puddle slowly rose to coat them and then subsume them entirely.

The novelty wore off quickly. I couldn’t remember ever watching paint dry, but in any case I was getting a sneak preview of the sequel without asking - watching blood coagulate.

Then, my blood made it over a lip of stone, and spilled down, down, down…

Eventually it splashed against another flat surface, and that puddle too began to spread. The ground was about the same, but there were things moving too, that didn't seem to appreciate being covered in blood.

Insects. Small chitinous beings, with legs aplenty.

Most of them started skittering away from what they must have thought to be a puddle of water - but a few stayed behind, either uncaring or just too dumb to move.

Then I felt a prickling, as some of the bugs remaining in the blood began to… disintegrate, for lack of a better term.

Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b̸͠ͅȋ̸͔o̶̟͂m̸̢͑a̸͙͠š̵͔s̴͓͝ added to c̷o̶r̴e̵.

Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b̴̝͖̏į̷̫̄o̴͎̊̅m̴̖̓̉a̸̟͎̎s̸̜̪̄̑ŝ̵̘̚ added to ć̵͓o̸̹͐ṟ̸͂ȅ̵̤.

Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b̶̻͇͐ị̵͒͝o̷̰͐m̶̢̢͋̑ą̴̿s̵͈̊ş̴̩̀͜ added to c̸̨̽͌õ̵͚r̸̙͆͝e̵̝͐͌.

I learned several things at that moment. One, that whatever these pop-up messages in my consciousness were, they weren't completely broken - only partly.

Two - things had ‘levels,’ apparently - and that felt new to me.

Three - those bugs weren't dumb, they were dead - and apparently putting my blood and dead things together made my heart bigger. I could actually feel my heart expanding, but not by much - after all, three bugs worth of biomass wasn't a lot.

As I felt small smears of blood drift away from my second puddle, I felt a small dragging on my consciousness. It took a hundred heartbeats to grasp what was happening, and at least another several hundred for it to come to fruition - as tiny fragments of my consciousness slipped into tiny insect bodies.

By this point, my second puddle had expanded to about two meters from the wall leading up to my heart. A few more dead insects were absorbed, adding to my heart, and a few more living bugs were touched with blood.

A small swarm, perhaps thirty strong, had fallen under my control. It wasn't picturesque, though - controlling the bugs felt like swimming through honey - sluggish, unresponsive, lagging. I couldn't give them detailed instructions, or control their individual limbs - all I could do was urge them to move. I did so, sending them out in a fan-shape away from the puddle.

The cave - I guessed it was a cave, but I couldn't know for sure until I figured out if there was a ceiling or not - was pretty big. The left side of the fan made it around ten meters, while the right side reached about fifteen. The few bugs going more or less straight just kept going, and going - I had them pull back once they passed forty meters or so, nervous that I might lose them, and worried about what I might find if I kept going.

I had already subconsciously realized that I was vulnerable - but this delving forward into the unknown brought it to the forefront of my mind. I had nothing between me and anything that wanted to attack me - my heart was just sitting on a ledge above a cave, at any moment a bat could swing by and start taking bites out of me.

I needed defenses - I could philosophize about the implications of my new bloody existence later, once I wasn't at risk of being eaten.

--