I woke up that day feeling hungry enough to eat a cow, which was, admittedly, pretty strange given how much both the cancer and the chemo had killed my appetite during the past few years. It was pitch black as I looked around my room, and so I assumed that it must have been the middle of the night at the hospice house. More focused on how ravenous I was in that moment than anything else, I groped around in the darkness to try and find my nightstand and whatever snacks that I might have left there before I went to sleep. If there was anything worth being grateful about while on hospice, it was that the food was infinitely better than the bland, flavorless rubber that they gave us at the hospital; I assumed that the reason that hospice food was better than hospital food was because they wanted dying people to at least have something tasty to eat on their way out - along with the copious amounts of morphine that they pumped into you, of course.

After reaching around for a little bit, I eventually managed to find something on the night-stand, grab it, and toss it into my mouth. There was a loud crunch as I chowed down on whatever it was, which confused me a little bit, since I didn’t remember having any chips or popcorn or anything in my room; it tasted pretty weird, too, but I assumed that it must be one of those weird mystery flavors that they like to use as a marketing scheme every now and again. But damn did it taste good, way better than any other chip that I had ever tasted, actually, and it made me want to eat as many of them as I possibly could.

As I was chewing on it, though, there was all of a sudden a brief flash of a vision in my head, where I was crawling around on the ground and everything around me was way bigger than normal. I had initially assumed that my appetite returning upon waking was a sign of having a good day with the tumor, but given that the damned thing was apparently causing me to hallucinate again, I figured that I must have assumed wrong.

Unsurprisingly, a single chip or bit of popcorn or whatever I was eating wasn’t exactly enough to satiate the overwhelming desire to genuinely just swallow an entire cow at the moment - god, I was so ridiculously hungry, arguably even hungrier than I ever had been before the cancer - and so I kept throwing the snacks down my gullet, hoping to fill my stomach and get it to stop being so demanding. Unfortunately, there was a pretty significant problem: every time that I crunched down on the snack, that same vision from before returned. Well, sort of, anyways. Sometimes I was crawling around on the ground, but sometimes I was flying around in the air, and sometimes I was climbing on the walls like I was Spider-Man or something; no matter what, though, there was always the common sense of feeling like I was really tiny?

Had the tumor developed in a way that moving my jaw made it press up against my occipital lobe, or something, and thus gave visual hallucinations whenever I tried to eat? I’d have to ask the attending doctor if something like that was even possible.

I eventually ran out of the snacks on my night-stand, but I was still pretty hungry. Like, really, really hungry. Seriously, where was a cow when I needed one? I kept searching around in the darkness for any other bits of food that I might have left nearby, but failed to find anything else edible. Sighing internally, I pulled myself up out of bed to see if I had left anything on the dresser or the coffee table. I was a bit shocked at how easily I was able to get up and walk, though; the past few weeks had been real rough on my ability to walk around, and I had taken to finally using a wheel-chair after pressure from one of the nurses.

That being said, the fact that my feet seemed to be bare on the ground was a bit odd, given that I always slept with socks on. Actually, why did the ground even feel like that? My room at the hospice house had carpet flooring, but whatever I was standing on felt cold and hard. What rooms in the hospice house even have tile flooring, anyways? The morgue? Had someone wheeled me into the morgue without my realizing it? No, if that was the case, then I wouldn’t have had my night-stand to grab food from, right?

Whatever. All that I really needed to do in that moment was turn the lights on, so that I could figure out exactly what the hell was going on and exactly where the hell I was; more importantly, I needed to do that so I could find more god-damned food, given how god-damned hungry I was. I was feeling ravenous enough to march right down to that god-damned kitchen in the middle of the god-damned night and eat every god-damned thing in the god-damned pantry.

I stopped myself for a moment as my mind was overtaken with those sort of angry, hungry thoughts. I knew, of course, that brain tumors could affect one’s personality and emotional regulation - I even had some personal experience with that sort of stuff, and I had to admit that it was pretty scary to have your parasitic little brain buddy get to decide what emotions you got to feel that day - but the kind of stuff that I was feeling right then were… Pretty extreme, even by the standards of what cancer could cause. Alright, something else to talk to the doctor about. Just had to focus on my thoughts for a while and keep them clear until that point.

That being said, I still needed something to eat before trying to get back to bed for the rest of the night, and so I began searching around for the light-switch, regardless of exactly what room I was in at that moment. As I felt around the room, though, my anxiety began to creep higher, mostly because the rest of the room that I was in felt just like the floor: cold, hard, a little bit rough, more like natural rock than tile or wood paneling or whatever else. The walls, the floor, and even the little bit of ceiling that I could reach up and touch, all felt just like rock.

I was beginning to feel pretty sure that I was no longer in the hospice house.

Okay. I didn’t need to panic. I just needed to hold still, and wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Maybe humans didn’t have perfect darkvision, but as long as there was even one speck of light wherever I was, then I should be able to start making out at least general features of the room that I was in, right? So I just had to wait, and…

Wait, no. Even though it was still pitch black, I began looking around, trying to figure something out. My eyes? I had opened my eyes when I had woken up, hadn’t I? So why didn’t it feel like I had my eyes open? Under ordinary circumstances I might have contributed that to the tumor as well, but I was presently not at all in ordinary circumstances. That was alright, though. All that I had to do was open my eyes. Right? All that I had to do was open my eyes, right? So why weren’t my eyes opening? Why weren’t my eyes opening? 

Where were my eyes?

I felt myself begin to panic. My eyes. I couldn’t feel them in my head. The fact that you could reasonably feel the presence of your eyeballs in your head wasn’t even something that I had considered until that moment, when I suddenly in fact did not feel my eyeballs in my head. What was going on? Had I been kidnapped? Was someone harvesting my organs? Who in the hell would want to harvest my cancer-ridden organs? My mind briefly considered the possibility that whoever got my organs would be at risk of developing their own cancer, before I yanked it back to focus on the situation at hand.

Okay. I at least seemed to have my legs, since I was able to move around earlier, so that was good. I was in some sort of cave, though, or maybe a mining shaft or something like that. And my eyes were gone. Okay. That was fine. Well, not really, but my mother did always tell me to try and think positive. But it was actually fine, since there were plenty of other ways for me to try to gather information about where I was, like by touch, or by sound…

Sound. There was no sound. None, what-so-ever. There wasn’t even that faint hum of tinnitus that happens when you’re in a completely quiet room. Did they take my ears, too? No, it wasn’t as if they could yank all of my ear-organs or whatever out of my head to sell them on the black market, or at least I didn’t think that was possible. Maybe they destroyed my ears to keep me deaf as well as blind and trapped wherever they had put me? Admittedly, if II had more than a few months to live I might have been more torn up about losing my sight and my hearing, but I was still pretty annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to listen to my favorite album while getting ready to pass away.

Given how ridiculous the idea of being kidnapped by black market organ dealers taking my eyes and deafening my ears was, though, I considered for a moment that I might be having some kind of weird, screwed-up dream - or nightmare, given the situation. But that was the thing, though, wasn’t it? You always see in dreams. You always hear in dreams. And I wasn’t seeing or hearing anything.

The biggest indicator of the fact that I most likely wasn’t in a dream, though, was how god-damned hungry I was. I had never felt that hungry awake, and so I couldn’t imagine that I could even possibly feel that hungry in a dream. I was so hungry. So ridiculously, stupidly hungry. There was even a thought that flitted through my mind, that if I couldn’t find anything else to eat, then I should at least eat part of myself. It was, of course, absolutely terrifying that I could even have that sort of thought. But I was just so hungry. Hungry enough that I didn’t even wonder in that moment exactly what it was that I had been eating if I wasn’t in my room.

All of that aside, I felt the need to confirm that my eyeballs were indeed gone, perhaps in an attempt to quiet down the last bit of denial that I had about the circumstances that I had found myself in. As I brought my hands up to my face, though, I realized that there were somehow yet more things going wrong with me at that moment. The first problem was that I did not seem to have fingers; my arms just seemed to terminate at the wrists, or maybe at the hand, but there were absolutely no fingers attached at the end. The second problem was that my face felt very… Squishy, much like how meatloaf felt when you were preparing it, though perhaps partially more solid.

Okay. It looked like they had taken my fingers, too, and screwed up my face something awful. It felt like I should have been very panicked at that moment, but maybe I was in such disbelief at what was going on that my mind didn’t even have the room to be panicked. Either way, what I felt did make me both quite curious and quite concerned about who exactly my kidnappers were, if they had mutilated me to such a degree.

But, no, wait. I had used my hands earlier, to eat my snacks, hadn’t I? (Actually, wait, that was a good point, just what was it that I had been eating down in this place? A problem for later, I supposed.) If I didn’t have my fingers, then how was it that I had I grasped down onto whatever it is that I had eaten, held onto it, and brought it up to my mouth to chow down on it? To try and figure that out, I attempted a motion with my arm like I was trying to grab onto something, and I instantly realized what was going on.

My arm had become prehensile. As I tried to grasp with it, my arm curved in on itself in a grabbing motion, though I was mostly just clutching at air in that moment. Needing to test my “arm” out further, I reached down towards the ground, searched around for a rock, and tried to pick it up; I had absolutely no problems doing such. My “arm” circled  itself around the rock, squeezed down, and lifted the rock up as easily as if it were my fingers doing it. I attempted to hurl the stone off into the distance, and I did so as readily and as skillfully as I had picked it up.

Alright. I no longer had hands. I had… Tentacles, instead. Thinking about that fact further, I realized that I no longer had feet, either, and my legs had also become tentacles. Indeed, it seemed that my “walking” earlier was simply me pulling myself around on the ground by grabbing onto the cavern floor and hauling my body forward; it felt like I must have had suckers on my tentacles, as well, which helped me grasp the stone more firmly and gave me more leverage with my movements.

It was becoming increasingly clear that I had not been abducted by black market organ traders. But who had I been abducted by, then? Some kind of weird, messed up, illegal biomed laboratory that had used me for some kind of weird, messed up, illegal experiment? And then I had been released into this cave to see what I could do? Or was I failed experiment, and this was where they dumped all of their failures? But I didn’t have any memories of being in vats or being stuck with needles or anything of the sort. Did they completely wipe my memories as well, in that case?

I used my tentacles to feel around the rest of my body, trying to figure out exactly what had happened to the rest of me. To my absolutely minimal surprise, I didn’t really seem to have the same body as I had before, either. All of it was squishy like my face had been, and I felt more like a blob of meat with prehensile limbs sticking out from everywhere than I did a person. Another not at all unsettling thing I discovered was that I didn’t exactly seem to have a single “mouth”; indeed, it seemed like I could spontaneously grow a “mouth” at any point on my body, complete with powerful tongue and razor-sharp teeth. Not at all horrifying, nope, not in the slightest. I seemed to also be able to grow tentacles in a similar way, even reversing the process and absorbing any of my limbs back into myself as needed. All of that would have been really cool, I supposed, if it hadn’t all been happening to me.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

There was, of course, that one last immediate question that I felt needed answering as quickly as possible: what was it that I had eaten when I first “woke up”? I had my suspicions, of course, but I needed to confirm it, one way or another. I reached my tentacles around, trying to find something, anything, that seemed to be edible; unfortunately, most of what I found were a bunch of rocks and pebbles that I was pretty sure not even my new body would be able to digest and get nutrition from.

God damnit. I needed something to eat, and I needed it in that exact moment. The hunger had never stopped, not even for a second, while I had been examining my body and trying to figure out what was going on with me. If anything, it was only growing stronger with each passing moment, with that same intense anger as before alongside it. As those emotions swirled together inside of me, it felt to me like I could just grab something and tear it apart with my tentacles and bite through flesh and muscle and sinew and bone and where was my god-damned cow?

…yeah, I needed to figure out what the hell was going on with me, and I needed to figure it out fast.

In terms of satiating my hunger, though, the biggest problem was that I didn’t have eyes or ears. Given that the average predator animal primarily used their eyes and their ears for hunting, that was probably going to be an issue; sure, some of them used scent to find their prey, but they usually had to use their sight and their hearing to actually catch it, right? Not really knowing what else to do, I swung my tentacles around wildly, hoping that eventually I’d grab something, anything like a fisher trawling through the water with a massive net.

After a while, my random flailing seemed to pay off. I grabbed onto something that was very clearly animate and living, and at that point was desperately writhing around in order to try and escape from my grasp. In a typical situation, I probably would have taken a moment to feel bad for whatever it was that I had caught - I had never really gone hunting or anything of the sort before - and then would have taken another moment to feel disgusted at the idea that I would soon be putting a still-living creature in my mouth and try to eat it, but I was not exactly in a typical situation at that moment. Before I could even remotely have any of those thoughts, my tentacles hauled the thing into a freshly grown mouth, which promptly tore it apart without any input on my end what-so-ever.

It was obviously some kind of cave creature; I assumed an insect of some sort. Again, in a typical situation, I would probably have been internally grimacing as I chomped down on a bug like I was on one of those trashy reality TV shows that used to be all the rage. But in that specific situation, all that I could think of was how good it tasted. It was meat, it was flesh, it was protein, it was nutrients, food that I had caught, that I had claimed, that I had eaten, all for myself, food that would help me grow and sustain myself. I swear upon my mother’s life, at that moment the insect that I had just eaten seemed more delicious than anything else that I had ever consumed up until that point. I needed more, and I needed it soon.

Before I could start whipping my limbs out wildly again, though, there was one last matter that I needed to deal with. After ripping apart the insect with my teeth and shoving it down with my tongue into whatever counted for a stomach in my new body, I had another hallucination; yet again, I was tiny, and I was scuttling around on the ground, looking for detritus to eat and avoiding larger creatures that were instead looking to eat me. Knowing more than I knew before, I was able to put two and two together and come to an understanding of exactly what those visions were. I wasn’t only eating the bodies of those bugs. It appeared that I was eating their memories, too.

That was… Terrifying. Perhaps the single most terrifying thing about the situation up to that point, actually. More than prehensile tentacle limbs and spontaneously growing mouths full of monstrous teeth, the ability to eat memories had so many implications on such a massive scale that I didn’t even really have the mental capacity in that moment to even begin to comprehend any of it. Thankfully, there were plenty of other more immediately important matters to focus my thoughts on, like figuring out exactly where I was, exactly how I could find my way out of it, and exactly how I could get my old body back. Maybe if I really was some messed up experiment of some mad scientists, I could threaten them with my tentacles and my jaws to turn me back to my old self. Maybe.

I began pulling myself around the cavern floor with my tentacles, growing  some more to reach around me and grab at anything that I might be passing near. It was difficult to tell exactly how much time was passing - given that the senses that I could usually rely on to tell time were presently absent from my physiology - but I felt like I must have been blindly wandering around the cavern for at least an hour, maybe two, maybe three… Okay, yeah, it was really hard to tell time at that point. During my travels, though, I managed to expand my diet a bit further, capturing worms, salamanders, and even fungi alongside the insects that I had first munched on.

The fungi, at least, didn’t cause those flashes of memory through my mind - I honestly would have been very surprised if fungi possessed any memories for me to absorb - but the overwhelming hunger that dominated my thoughts during every passing moment found them significantly less fulfilling than the animals that I devoured; either way, I decided to keep eating mushrooms and stuff like them wherever I could find them,  for the sake of whatever nutritional balance that my new body might have needed. I did worry for a while that whatever I found down there in the caves might have been poisonous, but I never ended up experiencing any ill effects from anything I ate; maybe they weren’t poisonous, or maybe my body simply had a resistance to toxins.

After a while of aimless wandering, I internally sighed to myself - given that I didn’t exactly have the body parts necessarily to sigh externally - and stopped to rest. What was I even hoping to accomplish by groping around in the darkness like that, when I couldn’t even see or hear? Even if there was some lab out there to find along with scientists to threaten, how was I supposed to do any of that without eyes or ears? As I sat there ruminating over my next move, I grabbed a passing millipede and tossed it into one of my mouths, enjoying the juicy crunch and dreading the flash of memories that would inevitably accompany it.

Wait. That was it. In those memories, I saw through the eyes of another creature. I… Didn’t actually know what that meant for my predicament, but I knew that it had to mean something good! Right? Or, maybe I was just grasping at straws. Either way, I thought about the possibilities opened up by my revelation, trying to figure out something, anything that I could do to navigate by using my ability to consume memories. Maybe I could eat creatures and observe what their most recent memories were, getting a momentary layout of the area?That seemed like a longshot, but given that I didn’t exactly have any other ideas at the moment, I-

No. No, there was something else. As I felt the millipede’s body move through my digestive system, I considered the fact that eating its brain allowed me to access its memories. If eating its brain allowed me to access its memories, then what did eating the rest of its body give me access to, besides its nutritional value? For example, what about eating its sensory organs?

It was weird, I had to admit - somehow weirder than everything else about my new self up until that point - when I realized that I could focus on my insides and sense everything inside of them, as well as I could sense any rock that I could pick up with my tentacles. Indeed, much like my tentacles, it seemed that I had total control over the inside of my body, in a way that I never could have imagined before. Using that control, I stopped my stomach from digesting the millipede’s eyes, and grew a pocket of flesh around them to keep my digestive fluids from damaging those precious sensory organs. Once the eyes were properly protected and contained, I grew out tiny, miniature tentacles within the pocket of flesh, that I was able to use to manipulate and examine the eyes.

Yeah. More than anything else, all of that was really, really weird.

As my miniature, internal picked up every detail of the millipede’s eyes, I felt my body begin to instinctively absorb that information; it felt like I was a computer having data downloaded onto one of my hard drives, or something of the sort. An  incredibly odd, unsettling feeling, to be sure, but I knew that if I kept it up, I would soon have a solution to my conundrum. It took a while for my little feelers to fully examine the eyes - taking time to pull them apart, cell by cell, figuring out what each cell did and how it connected with the other cells, and all of the other important details - but eventually I felt certain that my body completely understood what a millipede’s eyes were like.

And so I had what I needed: full knowledge of how to fully control my freakish body, and full knowledge of what made up an eye. I focused my perception as hard as I could towards a spot on the outside of my body, having my body move all of the necessary building materials over there in preparation for what I was about to try. The focus that I needed for the task was absolute, more focus than I had ever needed for any task before, to the point that I worried that I might be in danger of other creatures attacking me while I was preoccupied with my little project.

After what felt like an eternity, the eye was almost complete. All that I had to do was bridge two last nerve cells between each other, and I would see if my gambit had paid off or not - and, more importantly, I would see if I could see.

And there it was. Sight. I could see. It wasn’t even remotely the sort of vision that I had possessed when I was still a proper human, but it was sight, none-the-less. It was blurry, unfocused, monochrome… But I had vision. For the first time since I had woken up in that god-forsaken place, I could see. If I could have cheered and danced in that body, I would have; instead, I simply opted for flailing my tentacles around in celebration, inadvertently catching a beetle in the process and eating it before I even realized that I had done so. I soon realized that, having spent the time carefully making one eye, I became able to quickly make more eyes as needed, much as I was able to make more tentacles and mouths. Extremely creepy, but also extremely useful.

I looked around the cave excitedly, eager to find out what exactly there was to see. Unfortunately, there was actually… Not all that much to really see. It was a cave. It was dark. The walls and floors and ceiling were stone. There were stalactites and stalagmites, though I was never certain which ones were which - wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of mnemonic for it? Not important. What was important was that I had sight, and that meant that I could navigate and explore the cavern more reliably. I thought for a moment about the fact that caverns tended to be pretty labyrinthine, with most passages indiscernible from one another; thankfully, it was easy enough for my surprisingly dextrous tentacles to pick up a sharp rock and scratch an X into a nearby wall to designate that I had already been there. 

But, if I had managed to make myself eyes, then that surely must have meant that I could make any sensory organ that I consumed - like ears, for example. Using my newly created sight, I looked around for anything that moved nearby. The millipede eyes weren’t exactly developed enough to make out exactly what things were, but the exact visual details were unimportant; I could sense movement, and that was all that I needed to catch my next meal and my next set of sensory organs to study.

Something moved out of the corner of my eye, and I pounced on it like so many of the lions that I had seen in nature documentaries. Now that I possessed vision, I was able to realize exactly how fast I was actually moving, and how instinctive it all was; I could plant a tentacle on a surface, use its suckers to grab tightly onto it, and then put all of my strength into practically hurling myself forward at a ridiculous speed, my squishy body thankfully able to absorb the force of the impact as I landed. I was far faster than any of the other creatures in the cave, and I was definitely faster than the worm that I managed to catch. Before I tossed it into my mouth, I thought that a worm would be a dead end in terms of sensory organs, but as I studied it I came to the realization that it used its whole body much like one giant cochlea.

I took the time to dissect and closely examine the worm just as I had the millipede, and discovered that it had a shallow layer of fluid just underneath its skin that vibrated whenever soundwaves hit its body, and used that to “hear” as much as a primitive creature like it could. I set to work modifying my own body to the specifications that I had learned; my work went much faster that time, as it seemed that creating my eyes had given me important practice in how to reshape my physiology at will.

As soon as I was finished, I found myself instantly bombarded with “sound”. Much as with the millipede eyes, it was unlike anything that I had ever experienced with my human ears, but it ultimately served the same function; something moved against something else, those movements and collisions caused the air to vibrate, those vibrations reached me, and I could sense the location of the thing that moved, along with secondary information like how big it might have been or what it might have collided with. My consciousness was initially overwhelmed with all of this information suddenly flooding it, but soon enough I was able to compose myself and start listening to the nearby sounds more intently.

I actually felt quite proud of myself in that moment. I had woken up to being nothing more than a blob of flesh with tentacles, but soon had managed to give myself eyes and ears, or at least something resembling them. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was very clearly not at all in my own body and that I very much wanted to get back into my own said body, I would probably have considered the whole situation pretty amazing. Ultimately, though, giving myself the ability to sense light and sound was just a means to an end, a way for me to navigate these caves and find my way to whoever could change me back to who I was before.

Who I was before… Honestly, who even was I before? A terminally ill, tumor-ridden mess, lying in a hospice bed all day, slowly waiting for my inevitably approaching death while nodding off on high-grade narcotics? Maybe the reason that I had been taken for this Frankenstein-esque science experiment was because they knew that I was going to be dead soon enough already? And so they decided that they might as well make good use of my body in the pursuit of science before I kicked the bucket? Admittedly, I had no idea what the sort of science that I had been subjected to could be useful for, but that was besides the point. More important was the question: should I have actually felt blessed for being given a new body? I didn’t feel any cancer in myself, I had a good appetite, I could actually move around with ease, I felt stronger than I had in years - arguably stronger than I ever had been as a regular person. Hadn’t they done me a favor, thinking about things rationally?

…no. No, they had not done me a favor. I had long since accepted my death by the time that they had abducted me. I had been waiting patiently for it, watching for its arrival and ready to stare it dead in the eyes as it came for me - pun fully intended. I had made peace with my fate, and all that was left for me to do was die with my mom and my dad at my bedside. Maybe it wasn’t fair for them to watch their only child pass away at a young age and far before they themselves would go to the great beyond, but those long, emotional talks with them had managed to bring them to peace with it as much as I had. Being kidnapped, being taken to whatever lab I had been experimented on in, being dumped in this cave as a horrendous flesh monstrosity, it nothing more than an insult to all the time that I had spent preparing myself for death, not to mention the fact that it deprived my parents of being there with me for my passing.

My mom and dad… If there was any reason for me to get out of that cave and back into my own body, it was them. At the very least, I didn’t want to head back home just for them to see me like I was at that moment.

Turning my focus back to the present moment, I sat there for a while considering what sensory organ I should try to make next… And then I heard something through my fluids. At first I thought that it might have been another animal for me to hunt, but there was something odd about how it sounded. It was several sounds in sequence, rising and falling in pitch and frequency within certain boundaries. Then, there was another sequence of sounds, much like the first, but with its pitch and frequency within a different set of boundaries. Then another set, this time much like the first. A fourth set, more like the second. Back and forth, never exactly the same sounds each time, but similar, with each sequence of sounds going like they were responding to each other.

It was like the way that adults sometimes sounded in children’s cartoons, a sort of placeholder noise that told you they were talking, but didn’t tell you exactly what they were saying. I assumed that it sounded that way to me because my full-body cochlea style of hearing wasn’t accurate enough to really parse noises to a fine degree. But I still understood perfectly what it was.

Speech. Human speech. Somewhere nearby. Somewhere close.

I hurried forward, looking for the source.