Before making money, Walter had something he needed to take care of. In pursuit of this, he Ubered to a small town about an hour’s drive away. Then he started walking down a nearby forest path with his phone-lens gadget out. It took a few hours, but he managed to find an anomaly.

To the naked eye it just looked like some dirty chicken. Its feathers ranged mostly from sanguine to black with occasional patches of a clean white. To the lens, though, the animal was a featureless, deep blue blob that stood in stark contrast to the red of the world around it.

Walter called the old man to report the chicken.

The old man came to meet him in under fifteen minutes.

“Have you been following me?” Walter asked.

“No, why do you ask?”

“It seems like you’re always in the neighborhood back in the city, but if that were true then you can’t exactly be out here too.”

The old man chuckled. “Perhaps.”

“So what is it then? Can you teleport around or something?”

“Teleport?”

“Like, disappear in one place and reappear in another.”

“Hmm, not exactly. Now what have we here?”

Walter stared at him intensely. Not exactly? He must have gotten here by some spooky wish shit that he’s not telling me about.

“Oh dear, this is unfortunate.” The old man was squatting over the chicken. “Look, it’s awake but it doesn’t even care that I’m here.” He plucked a crusty black feather. It regrew instantly, now a pristine white. He shook his head.

Walter stepped closer. “What’s up with it?”

“It’s alive, been alive too long I suspect. This is one of the more common wishes. Someone loved this bird and their love met a power it shouldn’t have: a chance at immortality. In the time since then I’m sure it’s met more hungry mouths than any creature should.” He sighed and shook his head again. “Poor thing’s given up. Probably stopped feeling anything a long time ago. Living that long requires a damn good reason which animals like this too often lack.”

The old man took out the hinged tool which Walter had seen blow away a “bad wish” a few days ago. Before the object was activated, Walter put out a hand.

“Mind if I try it?”

The old man hesitated for a moment but then shrugged and handed over the object.

Walter aimed at the chicken and squeezed open the hinge. To the naked eye there was no change. Walter checked through the lens, though, and saw that the blue had disappeared.

The old man nodded. “Looks like the wish was just fixing it. Without that, it’ll just live out its remaining life naturally.”

Lens still in hand, Walter turned to the old man and saw the incoherent mess of colors which filled his silhouette. Looking down, he saw that the hinged thing was totally black. I can’t have you using this on my plans again. Walter aimed.

The old man was still looking down at the chicken, a touch of wistfulness in his eyes. “I suppose now’s the time for your paym-”

When Walter opened the hinge again, the old man disintegrated. From his clothes to his bones, it all turned to dust in the blink of an eye. Gone was the incoherent splatter of colors going around undoing wishes, the only one in the woods was Walter. And the chicken, of course.

The non-chicken was in shock. What? That wasn’t supposed to happen! He was just supposed to not be able to teleport anymore! I just didn’t want him to… oh fuck I’m a killer now. Oh god no.

Elsewhere the old man sighed. I put that app in front of that hacker, now I’ve gone and lost a body. This whole affair has been far too sloppy.

----------------------------------------

Sam sat in his room. His stomach was full from dinner and his mind was full from Helen. The sliders no longer said he was happy. The high of “we’re friends” had decayed into the rejection of “we’re just friends”. He was trying not to think too much about her, but unfortunately “I should stop thinking about Helen” is a thought about Helen.

Being friends is enough, right? Now we can do friend things that friends do. I should do something for her, friends do things for friends…

All of the things he wanted to do for her were categorically not friend things.

This sucks. I should just stop thinking about her. Look, the door’s open, I’ll go close it.

Sam got up and closed the door.

Maybe my mistake was going too quickly. If I’d become a girl before she knew me that well and then not told her about the app then maybe I could’ve gotten around whatever’s turning her off. Then again, that would probably need to have been before the semester started and back then I thought she was straight.

Sam sighed. If only I could change how she feels but that stupid app only affects me.

He got out his phone and considered erasing the crush. After all, it’s not like she’d know. But… the idea that she preferred him the way that he was was deeply compelling.

Her issue with his changing himself didn’t quite make sense to him, though, so he tried running through an analogy:

He wasn’t attracted to Ben, that was as true as the law of gravity. If Ben got the app and got a save of Helen’s body, would Sam be into him then? No, it’s still Ben. If Helen also got the app and all Ben’s mental settings were matched to hers so that Ben was just like Helen on the inside too, what about then? Still no, and the idea struck Sam as deeply uncomfortable for some reason.

What’s the difference though? Well, I don’t think the app could give him her memories, but am I only into her memories? If he did have her memories… nope, still weird. I guess I’m into her and not into some weird clone of her. And either way it would still be Ben in there…

A quiet chuckle passed his lips. Sorry dude, it’s not you it’s me. Or… I guess you’re straight anyway so it doesn’t matter. Rejecting the hypothetical somehow made the non-hypothetical rejection easier to swallow.

It didn’t take his mind off the events from earlier that day, though. For one, right before that guy from the bus put Rex to sleep he literally made him fall over with the app. Nothing remotely like that had ever occurred to Sam.

Pulling up the app, Sam got up and started walking in a circle to replicate the situation. He found a slider labeled “walking”, set it to zero, and then steadied himself when it suddenly forced his legs to stop. Then he searched “standing”. It took a moment to load a slider fitting that description. When he decreased it and pressed “update” it seemed to hesitate for a moment before knocking him over onto his bed.

This was the thing that finally took his mind off Helen. He sat on his bed, curling and uncurling his fingers while watching the “clenched right hand” slider go up and down. The way the app could tell exactly what he was doing was mesmerizing.

This is wild. Now, what if I-

A knock came at the door.

His father’s voice followed, “Hey, mind if I come in?”

“Uh… sure?”

The door opened.

“I noticed your grades are back up, yeah?”

“Yup.” Because the app made me smarter.

“That’s good, that’s… So for next semester, were you thinking-”

“I’m not joining another sport, Dad.”

“Alright, alright. It’s just you seemed so set on-”

“Did you seriously just come here for that?”

“Well, no. I was thinking we should catch up.”

“Catch up? We just talked at dinner.”

“Man to man I mean. Sam, I found out I had a daughter and then that lasted less than a week. I think there’s some stuff we need to clear up.”

“Alright, let’s start with your obsession with the whole sports thing. Why keep pushing that when you know I’m not interested?”

When did he get so harsh? “Well, back when I was your age I had a lot of fun with that sort of thing. For a while there it seemed like you were having fun too, with basketball.”

“Nope. Did it to impress a girl and it didn’t even work. All that effort and nothing to show for it.” Sam laughed at himself, humorlessly. “Not like you got anything more than fun out of it.”

Sam’s father stood in silence for a moment before turning around. He took one step and said “Come, there’s something you should see.”

There was another moment between the father leaving and the son following. They climbed the stairs to the attic, then over to a closet from which a box was retrieved. Inside the box were a couple medals and a trophy.

“That one’s for soccer, these two are baseball. We had some pretty good school teams back in my day. This big one’s for a race I ran, turns out running fast is enough to get by in a lot of different sports.”

Sam was flummoxed. “You… never mentioned any of these?”

“Oh yeah, they’re incredibly embarrassing.”

“...eh?”

“Well, I did a lot of sports and I did ‘em well and I had a lot of fun. When I went to college it was mostly for athletic reasons. So I did well on my teams and I floundered through my classes and after I’d failed enough of ‘em they stopped letting me do the sports. That didn’t help the classes, though, so eventually academic dismissal came and I’d lost both things. These are awards for being a failure, I’d throw them away if they didn’t have so many good memories attached.

“And, to be clear, when I suggest you get into something like basketball or whatever, I’m not suggesting you get yourself a failure award. Your mother is right, grades are important to be able to do what you want to do. It’s just… even after everything I still think enjoying life is important and I want you to be happy.”

“Huh… sorry for what I said earlier.”

The father laughed. “Apology accepted. You probably should’ve thought that one through more too. After all, I met your mother at college, so definitely more than just fun. Now it’s your turn, tell me about this girl who doesn’t like basketball.”

“Lesbian.”

“Ah, that’s tough.”

“Yeah. That’s why I was a girl for a while there, same reason as the basketball thing.”

“Right, and you changed yourself both times with… an app?”

“Yup. See, here it is. If I pull this one then-”

The father put up a hand. “That… won’t be necessary.”

“Oh okay.”

He sighed and spoke slowly. “Your… mother and I have been talking about that and… I think you should uninstall it.”

A silence set in before Sam processed the suggestion enough to say “What?”

“Well, an app like that is… well the fact that it exists is ridiculous. It’s a bit too much for someone who hasn’t even finished his first semester of high school.”

“But… but…” It’s all I have. “I don’t think you understand. The app solves so many problems. If I get sick I can fix it and not miss school. If something happens and I” die “get hurt, I can heal immediately.”

“It could also do the opposite of those things. Look, Sam, it’s not something we understand-”

“Yes it is, it does exactly what you’d expect it to do!”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am.” The image of Rex losing control of his body chemistry and getting kicked out before the big game weighed heavily on Sam’s unspoken thoughts.

“Well, even assuming that, you’re changing yourself too much. I don’t think you knew what you were getting into when you just jumped into girlhood out of nowhere.”

“Maybe not, but that doesn’t change the fact that the app is good and I need to keep it!”

“Need? Listen, if I don’t need that thing and your mother doesn’t need that thing and most people haven’t even heard of such a thing, then why would you need it? It may have some benefits but at the same time it’s too powerful. So now I’m telling you, delete it.”

“But… but…” I’m nothing. I’m nobody. I don’t matter and without this I won’t be able to protect the people who do.

Seeing his son panicking, Sam’s father put a comforting arm around his shoulder. “There there. For what it’s worth, your mother wants me to just take the phone. I think she actually agrees with you that it’s important, I just figure this solution is easier and doesn’t require buying a new phone and all that.”

A stillness came to the boy and he nodded. “Okay, I’ll do it. Just a moment first, though.”

Sam hid his screen, went into the phone’s files like Cyborg had shown him earlier, and moved the body saves out of Bod.io’s program files.

“Alright, now look. I’m uninstalling like this… and it’s gone.”

“And there’s no recycle bin to undelete it?”

“Nope.”

“And you’re not going to just download it again?”

“Can’t… see? It’s not on the app store anymore.”

“Huh. Well, that went easier than expected.”

The father then wished his family a good night and left for work.

----------------------------------------

The next day Sam found Cyborg and thrust his phone onto her.

“I accidentally deleted the app, could you copy yours over?”

“What? How’d you manage that mistake?” She chuckled. “Isn’t that thing like your whole personality or something?”

Sam just glared.

“Alright, alright, I’ll do it.”

----------------------------------------

Walter sat on a blanket in the woods. He had a pebble in his pocket, that pebble was a person, and he was preparing to present his plan.

Alright, focus. This is the most important meeting of your life. They’ll get here any minute now and then you’ll show them the same trick as you did that bodyguard broker. Then you’ll make lots of money and get the protection that you need now because…

He shivered, partly because the sun had gone down by that point. Partly, also, because the consequences of having, he thought, killed the old man were way more terrifying than the people he was about to meet.

Speaking of, a rustling sound came from beyond Walter’s lantern light. Seemingly all at once, a group of imposing figures appeared and formed a circle around the blanket. They all turned their backs on him while he nervously stood up. Two guards then scuttled sideways like a pair of sliding doors to reveal a thin man with a pencil mustache and slicked back hair.

Walter braced himself. First impressions: firm handshake! He put his right hand out.

The thin man ignored the hand and dropped onto the blanket.

Walter, following suit, sat.

The thin man spoke. “I’ve never had a picnic at night, what’re we having?”

“Wha- we’re…” keep it cool “just talking business.”

“Hmm. You know, med students say that after dissecting cadavers they often find themselves strangely hungry. Wanna know how I know that?”

Walter gulped nervously. “How?”

“Well you see, in my line of work I’ve med quite a few of them!” He posed like he was ready to take thunderous laughter.

Wha… did he just… Walter chuckled out of a sense of obligation.

Then the thin man stuck out his hand. “The name’s Dominic Fazoli, folks call me Dom.”

“I’m Walter,” he said while giving a handshake firmer than his confidence in his own life choices.

“Ah, fake name. Good habit to start young. I never got the hang of it, I’m too used to wearing my heart on my sleeve. Or, well, it’s not always my heart.” He released the hand to make finger guns. “Heyo!”

To clarify, he’s talking about killing people and taking their organs.

“O… okay?” Walter stammered.

“Our muscular mutual acquaintance says you’ve got a trick that may interest me.”

“Alright,” this he was ready for, “watch this!”

With a haste that probably slowed him down, Walter pulled the pebble from his pocket. Then he produced a modded version of Bod.io and reverted the rock into an unconscious Rex.

Fazoli nodded. “Instant butthead, I like it. It’s a neat trick.”

“It’s not the half of it. As you can see, I transformed him using this application I have on my phone here. It’s a bit… I’m still working on it, but it can already do more than just turn a rock into this guy. Watch his right hand.”

Walter poked at his phone and a ring of blood formed around Rex’s right wrist. Fazoli curiously lifted the hand and was surprised when it cleanly separated from the arm.

“Good, and now when I do this…” A button press replaced the hand and halted Rex’s bleeding. “...he’s good as new. We can repeat this any number of times, producing as many of any part you want. My method both produces more for you and-”

“You’ve got something good here kid, I’ve really gotta hand it to you. Heyo!”

“...and leaves the donor intact,” Walter finished, mostly for himself. Should I mention that hand is dripping blood on his suit?

“Would you mind giving another demonstration?”

“Sure. Pick a part and I’ll show you how versatile this thing is.”

“Hmm, it works with anyone, right?”

“...yes.” Please don’t make me use it on myself.

“Nice, let’s test it on one of these meat heads.” Fazoli turned to one of his men. “Hey you, lie down on the blanket.”

The guard didn’t seem to notice he was being addressed. Walter took the moment to stone Rex back into his pocket, thus clearing the blanket.

Fazoli tapped on the guard’s leg. This got him to turn around.

“What’s up, boss? You need something?”

“I need you to get on the damn blanket and lie down!” After the guard was supine, Fazoli smiled at Walter. “Here we are, do your thing.”

“Okay. First you’ll need to press this button.”

The instant the guard poked Walter’s phone, his mod automatically carried out the process of creating a new account for the app with randomized credentials and saving a backup of the guard’s current body. Walter nodded to himself. Good thing I streamlined that ahead of time.

“Next, I’ll put him to sleep…”

Thump.

“Looks like it’s working. Pick a part.”

Fazoli pointed. “The head.”

Eyeing the blood stain on his picnic blanket, Walter sought out a setting. A button press later, the guard turned dead pale as the blood vanished from his body. A last gasp of air left his lungs as all his organs failed.

Walter then detached the head and rolled it to one side. When he loaded the save, the guard came back to life. In particular, the main body came back to life with a new head rather than the severed head getting de-disembodied, which has philosophical implications which are beyond the scope of this story.

“There you have it. Now I’ll just wake him up and-”

“Not yet.” Fazoli tapped another leg. “Search him.”

The second guard squatted down and checked the unconscious body of the first. After a couple minutes, he held out a small device to his boss.

“A recorder! Hey bozo, looks like you owe me.”

Begrudgingly, another guard turned around and gave Fazoli a 20 before returning to silently staring into the dark.

“Right, so, Walter, my boy, my new associate. Could you make this guy disappear like the first one? We can decide what to do with him later, I just want him to not exist for a while. I’ll keep this, though. Seems some older associates of mine are in need of a heads-up. Heyo!”

“Sure, I can do that.” He pebbled the guard and put him in his pocket.

Fazoli picked up the guard’s remaining part like he was about to start reminiscing about poor Yorick. “You know, in this business you’ve really gotta keep your head.”

Walter nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Yeah. After all, these things are expensive! Heyo!”

Oh no, is he always like this?

The thin man stood. “Well, I think this looks like the start of a beautiful partnership. You get me a download link for that app and I’ll gather up my usual chop-and-ice crew. You and me, buddy, we’re gonna be Henry Fords but for lungs! We’re gonna be industrialists for intestines! Marrow magnates, liver lords, pancreas princes, kidney kings! The future is bright for everyone here. Except maybe that Mr. Thinks-he-can-betray-me McHeadsalot in your pocket there, he chose a life of dryer lint. Anyway, you’ll hear from me again.”

Fazoli turned and left, entourage in tow.

Now alone, Walter took out his now growing collection of petrified humans. To tell them apart, he turned the former bodyguard into coal. Then he turned his mind to Rex.

Walter wasn’t sure what to do with him now that the demonstration was over. On one hand the park with the guns had police tape around it (they’d already connected those to the one Rex left in the girls’ locker room but Walter didn’t know that). On the other hand Rex was already plugged into the app, and used to it, which was a rarity that could be made use of.

Thus Walter turned Rex back into a human, sat him up against a rock, made some safety adjustments, and woke him up.

Rex found himself in a dark forest illuminated only by a single electric lantern. A half-visible figure sat on a cloth beside a single lantern and stared at him as though probing his soul. He said “huh.”

“What’s your name?”

He looked down at the writing on his arm. “Rex?”

“Alright Rex, what’s your deal?”

“...why can’t I move my arm?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Also who are you?” Rex asked. “Am I in trouble?”

“Probably.” Walter muted Rex’s rising panic via the app. “All those guns you left everywhere had your fingerprints on them.”

“Is that illegal?”

“It’s… er… Well, it’s at least littering. Also I hear you attacked a teacher. Why’d you do that?”

“She kicked me off the basketball team.”

“Why’d she do that?”

“‘Cus she’s a bitch. Hey, I really can’t move. Am I dead?”

The question came with an incongruous calmness on account of Walter’s influence.

He held up his phone. “You’re not dead, I just removed most of your motor functions.”

After Rex took a moment to process this, Walter noticed an increase in anger in the app. He then reverted Rex to placid.

“That’s not fair.”

“True,” Walter shrugged. “Now why’d you attack that other kid, the one with the app?”

“I dunno, I was mad. Hey, could I have some control? My arm itches.”

Walter found the itch and deleted it himself. “You think of yourself as a tough guy?”

Rex thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Well I happen to know someone who hires tough guys to guard folks and move stuff. Want to work for him?”

“Nope.”

“Why not, don’t you want money?”

“I don’t need it, I can just sell guns.”

“Sell… why do it that way?”

“I can make lots of guns with the app. It’s free money.”

“Couldn’t you just duplicate the money?”

“...huh…”

“You could get tips from the other tough guys to get tougher.”

“Sounds gay.”

Okay so it’s either police or parents. I guess the latter probably leads to the former in this case. “Different topic, where do you live?”

“Nice try, but you won’t doxx me that easily.”

Nice try? Do direct questions seem sneaky to you? “I’m guessing you live with your parents, right?”

“Nope.” Rex sat silent for a moment, waiting for Walter to ask why so that he could spin a yarn about how he'd been fending for himself in a dangerous world.

Instead he turned into a rock and woke up two days later having appeared in a police station. There was a lot of paperwork that day.

----------------------------------------

Sam was surprised how easy it was to lie to his parents. His early childhood memories had him expecting otherwise. Between episodes of staying up late in bed with a video game or of trying to skip brushing teeth at the end of the day he’d gotten used to being too easy to read to pull anything.

But then there he was, dinner after dinner for an entire weekend, deftly talking around the fact that he’d taken steps to get the app back. When it came up that he deleted it, he simply nodded and kept a poker face. When it was noticed that his phone was gone, he acted like he hadn’t noticed. The lie was then followed by a half truth: since it must still be at school, he should check the lost and found. Note that while the use of “should” makes this an accurate hypothetical conclusion, the fact that he knew it would be heard as “will” was the lie. Somehow the space of meanings and impressions was clearer and easier to navigate.

Being separated from the app after so long was odd. He hadn’t noticed how reliant he was on it. For example, the past couple days he’d edited out a minor headache and a dry throat and forgotten about it. Appless, he discovered that he had a minor cold.

Suddenly he couldn’t control when he was tired, focused, chilly, or anything the way he could only a couple days before. Those three in particular posed an annoyance since the semester was ending and he had studying to do.

Separation from the rest of the phone also mattered, of course. After all, he’d been using it as a morning alarm, a role his father volunteered to fill. He also wished he could ask Cyborg for progress updates but, well, it’s not like he could text her.

Thus Sam found himself counting down the days until the school week began again. Granted it was the weekend but he definitely counted down both days.

When Monday actually arrived he almost missed the bus because his father wasn’t there to wake him. It surprised him enough that he checked around the house looking for him. The bathrooms were unoccupied, the lounging areas open, the kitchen empty, even his parents’ bedroom was deserted.

His mother, too, was strangely absent. She left a note, though:

Out looking for your father. Don’t be late for school. -Mom

It seemed weird, but Sam had something else on his mind. Post breakfast he headed to school with someone to find.

In school, though, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for. The worksheet for a lab report due next Wednesday? Easy. The results of a math quiz you did pretty good at? Hard not to find, really. A particular person you don’t have class with that day? Suddenly the world is a very big place.

He asked Ben at lunch, “You seen Cyborg around today?”

“Nope, no classes together. Now look, I’ve got something to show you.” Ben reached into his pocket.

“What?”

He pulled out the entire contents of his pocket, which was nothing. Empty handed, he gave a “never mind, I’ll show you tomorrow” and changed the topic.

In english Helen was absent and after school Cyborg was nowhere to be found. This posed a problem for Sam: what to do if asked about his phone? If he said he checked the lost and found, then it would seem like he’d properly lost it and would need a new one. The idea of his parents moving to buy him a new phone over a dumb lie felt like a bad end, so he couldn’t say he checked the lost and found. Why didn’t he check? He decided “I forgot” would be the best answer since after that all further questions (eg. “how?”) could be handled with an “I don’t know”. In this way Sam discovered that feigned absentmindedness is easy mode for lying.

It turned out he was overprepared, though, when he saw his mother. She was sitting on the couch in the living room staring blankly at the wall. She didn’t turn when he came in and didn’t respond to a “hello”, which seemed weird enough that Sam asked if she was okay.

“Hmm?” she turned. “Oh, I’m fine just… been up too long.”

“...right.” Sam started walking past her.

The mother stopped him. “Hey. So. Just to… bring you up to speed. Your father didn’t come home this morning and he’s not answering calls. The police said not to worry because it’s probably nothing but they’ll look into it when they get the chance. Apparently they’re busy or something. And dinner’s gonna just be a frozen pizza. Uh… that’s all.”

That night Sam had trouble sleeping. Helen’s gone and Cyborg’s gone and Dad’s gone… The last thing I said to him was a lie. What the fuck am I doing. Worst cases nipped at him from the dark.

----------------------------------------

Cyborg was at school the next day, though. The release of worry was so great that he hugged her the moment he saw her, which was at the beginning of swimming class.

She took it calmly. “You sure now is the time?”

“Right, right, didn’t think that through.”

She gave him back his phone on the way to lunch. Sure enough the app was there.

“I saw your saves on there.”

“Oh yeah?” Two thoughts. First, that none of those bodies were, say, naked or something weird like that. Second, that the saves meant he didn’t “accidentally” delete it.

“Yeah, I noticed that you aren’t carrying anyone else around. Respect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if memory serves, you got a save of Helen’s body at the store that one time, right?”

The implications were sudden, shocking, and obvious in hindsight. “I… wait… no… I didn’t… not like that!”

Cyborg chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Good job.”

“Oh god,” Sam ran his hands over his face. The door of darkness had been opened. More memories around that popped into his head. I literally got her to press the button without telling her what it would do. And then I loaded it in front of a mirror! Granted, the next thing Sam did was delete the save. But I still did it! “And in a swimsuit too! Listen, I swear I’m not a creep!”

“Calm down buddy,” she laughed. “You probably don’t want to be saying that too loud.”

“Gaah.” All the things you could, but definitely shouldn’t, do while controlling a perfect copy of someone’s body were swarming his head like bees. “It just never occurred to me that you could use the app like that.”

“That’s probably a good thing.”

“I guess.”

“Oh also,” she put her bag down at a cafeteria table, “could you pull up the body list thing?”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Okay?”

“Alright, down… now stop there. You take up duping for a costume shop or something?”

While they got food, Sam recounted the day at Helen’s house, omitting the more intimate details. Cyborg was basically satisfied by the time they got back to the table.

“Actually, about Helen,” Sam said, “I didn’t see her in class yesterday. Any idea what’s up?”

“I dunno, maybe she’s sick?”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Not yesterday, do you think something happened?”

“Not sure, it’s just-”

“Yo,” Ben barged in, “lookie here!” He slapped some papers onto the table.

The other two leaned over to look.

“Coupons?”

“Yeah they are! A couple coupons courtesy of moi. Each of these gets you game credits at Smithy’s.”

Smithy’s was a local arcade known for featuring some machines completely original to the establishment’s owner. These ranged from a custom Polybius cabinet to an ill considered cross between a coin pusher and a claw machine. It was a subject of debate among regulars whether Smithy’s continued to exist because of or in spite of its idiosyncrasies.

Sam grabbed one of the coupons. “Watch this.” Pocket, save, remove, load, remove. “Now you have another coupon.”

Cyborg shook her head. “See that bar code? I bet they scan these when you trade them in, so duplicates won’t work.”

“oh, okay.”

Ben reassured him, “It’s still a neat trick.”

“yeah, I guess.”

“Listen, Sam, I’ve got a plan. Do you know the game Pull Up?”

“I don’t think so?” To be fair, the game in question only exists within Smithy’s and Sam wasn’t a regular.

“Well, it’s like one of those punching bag games except instead of punching a thing you’re pulling a thing. Like, lifting it quickly.”

“Pulling it up?” Cyborg volunteered.

“Yes,” Ben said, “you got it. Now I was thinking, pulling a thing up is a lot like lifting dirt with a shovel and my friend Sam here’s got one of his weird phone bodies specifically designed for that.”

“The one from when I was a girl?”

“Yup. So the plan is we go down to Smithy’s this weekend, I supply the coupons, and you earn a bunch of points.”

“We could also just make the changes when we get there. That way we-”

“No, it has to be the yard work body, that’s important.”

“What? Why-”

“Hey, mind if I come too?” Cyborg interjected.

Ben stroked his chin. “Now there’s an idea, you’ve got that app too. If you got bigger then maybe you could be pretty good…”

Cyborg narrowed her eyes.

“At the game, I mean.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it won’t work. There’s a button that permanently prevents the app from updating the body state and I've already pressed it.”

“Huh, that’s a shame. I wish I’d downloaded that thing when I had the chance.”

“You could still get it,” Sam said. “Cyborg could copy hers onto your phone.”

“Wait, you can do that?”

Cyborg sighed. “I can but it won’t… know what? I’ll just show you. Here, try making an account.”

Ben took her phone. “This isn’t, like, some trick where you’re gonna have control over my body and give me a mustache or something right?”

“If you’re worried then you can log out.”

“Makes sense.” He tried and got an error message. “Um… it says ‘No longer accepting new accounts’.”

“Yup, even if you had the app you wouldn’t be able to use it.”

“Great, so I missed my chance twice. Anyway, how’s 1pm on Sunday sound?”

----------------------------------------

Walter was having a bad time. The problem with his new gig wasn’t the pay, he got paid up front and plentiful. The problem wasn’t the workload either, he could handle distributing his mod of Bod.io and fixing bugs whenever they were noticed. The problem wasn’t the festering mix of guilt and paranoia over, he thought, having committed murder. No, the problem was his new boss Dom Fazoli.

An example. Fazoli had come to him asking how the GUI on the mod worked.

“So say I want to make someone scared,” he’d asked.

“Then you type in ‘scared’, find the setting, and press ‘update’.”

“Right, okay, and if I want to make them sweat?”

“You’d type it in like this,” Walter demonstrated.

“Okay, now let me try.” Fazoli typed in a word for a condition one can get after they’re beat up. He then stood up with a grin, said “There, that’s swell. Heyo!”, and left.

How a self-proclaimed “marrow magnate” had free time to do this kind of thing was a mystery. Walter was convinced Fazoli did it explicitly to waste his time for no good reason.

Another example. Fazoli had come asking for more heads of the guard that Walter had turned into coal. After he had a few, he turned to Walter.

“Man, you really know how to pull these off! I thought hiring you might’ve been a toss up but now I’m coming up all heads! You know people say I’m a bad guy, but let me tell you I’m not as tearible as this! Heyo!”

You literally kill people and take their organs.

Walter felt like he was losing his mind, but knew that if he ever brought it up Fazoli would turn it into some bafflingly distasteful joke about brains.

Their interactions weren’t all slowly corroding Walter’s patience, though. Sometimes Fazoli came through with some actual professionalism. Early on, he’d asked Walter for a quality of life (Heyo!) feature in the mod. In addition to automatically creating an account on button press, he wanted a mode that would automatically turn the subject into a pebble. Walter took a moment to process the fact that (as he should have expected) his employer regularly carried out kidnappings, and then had the feature ready by the end of the day. Walter wished every interaction they had could be so blandly transactional.

Shortly after that, Fazoli had invited him to an abandoned-looking warehouse on the outskirts of the city to see the “fruits of our labor”. The fruits in question were a man’s testicles. Fazoli had some poor haggard-looking guy strapped down to a table. A big man in a mask strode around the table doing some profoundly terrible things to the prisoner and healing the damage with the mod immediately after inflicting it. Then, using the mod, the guy was put to sleep, his balls were taken, and then he was woken up to look at them in horror.

Fazoli slapped Walter on the back. “Look how far you’ve come, kid. We’re the types who rule over lowlifes like that. We reach out and pluck the hearts and minds of the- hey, watch the shoes.”

Walter was losing his lunch in the corner.

He went home that day utterly demolished. Having betrayed the old man was almost something he could stomach, but having betrayed him for this? The bus he was on passed a police car on the way back and he almost had a heart attack over it.

After a few sleepless nights, Fazoli came to him with a status update.

“I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Alright.” Walter braced himself.

“So the main leg of the business operates on debt. Some gambler or addict fucks up their life and winds up with a lot of negative money. Anyway, then we offer to buy, say, a liver or something off them so they can afford to keep Tiny Tim in school or whatever. Now let me tell you, those are some of the worst livers I’ve ever seen. And it’s not just the booze: enough debt and they aren’t even live-ers at all! Heyo! Anyway I digress, we then sell it to save some rich customer and make bank.

“Now, I was off supervising the running of the business when I saw one of our gambling addicts. He’d sold us a few fresh hearts, come away unscathed, and earned enough money to put his life back together.”

Walter’s heart soared into the sky. “Wow, that’s some great news!”

Fazoli grabbed the heart and dragged it back down to earth. “Good news? No, no, Walter, my boy, my guy, my protege, that’s naive. If every piece of trash collected itself, what would the garbage men do? We made a pretty profit off this guy, but if he heals like he hopes then he won’t need to sell his heart again.”

“He may donate some if he knew he could save lives for just a couple minutes of time.”

“Ha! You always were a kidder Walter. No, see I had a way better idea. Instead of waiting for the good hearted to donate their good hearts as spare parts, I figured it would be more efficient to just grab some folks off the street.”

“oh.” That’s why you wanted that new feature. “...is that the good news?”

“Ah, no, the good news is I’ve already started up a separate division for this and the disassembly line is being assembled at the warehouse as we speak.”

“Already. Of course you have.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Once production gets started up we’re gonna need more hands-on training and technical support for your app. These guys know all about storage and keeping the goods fresh, but the new system is very different from the old scalpel. What do you say?” Fazoli put out his hand.

Walter got the impression that if he said no he’d wind up in a worse state than the lump of coal on his shelf. “I’m with you. One condition, though. If the folks you’re grabbing stay missing then that may draw too much attention. I suggest releasing them and bringing in new batches occasionally. That way, you also get a wider variety of organs and more chances at compatibility.”

“Sounds good, that’s the kind of practical mindedness that I like to see.”

Walter shook his hand. Then he asked, “by the way, does this mean you’re phasing out the debtor model?”

“Hmm… if they can’t even sell their kidneys, what’s a debtor to do? I may do it, for now I’ll just…” Fazoli reached into a pocket and pulled out a flap of flesh and cartilage. “...play it by ear! Heyo!”

What am I doing with my life?

----------------------------------------

Some headlines and subtitles that appeared in the newspaper:

Dozen Missing Persons Appear In Arby’s Parking Lot

“In the security footage it’s like they just pop into existence,” manager says

Firearm Dump Linked To Assault At Nash High

Police suspect lone wolf attacker connected to gun trafficking ring

Rumor Says Mystery Phone App “Cures Being Asian”

Online misinformation after the COVID-19 pandemic

Of course the paper had other stories, these are merely the most relevant. That said, note that Sam’s father is both the one reading the paper and one of the dozen mentioned in that first article.

In the days before the father reappeared, Sam and his mother had found themselves in a state of powerlessness that few other experiences could match. There’s simply no reliable way to find a missing person. They’d tried driving around looking for him, but the cold and the failure drove home a sense of futility that had them driving home.

Sam’s father, in the meantime, had been unconscious, inhuman actually. He was among a number of rocks dumped into an empty parking lot by a passing criminal that would wake up soon after being turned back into humans.

On the whole, he was taking it rather well. It had been confusing not knowing where he was, and even more confusing finding his family so relieved to see him after what felt like just one night, but when it came down to it all he’d experienced was blacking out for a few days. An impressive number of lungs matching his would appear in various disreputable marketplaces, but he still had both of his and it wasn’t even clear to him yet what had happened anyhow.

----------------------------------------

“Here it is!” Ben gestured toward a large gray machine-thing in front of him and Cyborg.

The entire contraption seemed to consist of a pillar with a screen on it, a handlebar thing that one is presumably meant to Pull Up, and a big block of plastic meant to conceal whatever sorts of devices made the game work. At the top of the pillar was painted the name of the game in what one could only assume was the handwriting of the owner of Smithy’s. Was this person named Smithy? Nobody knew.

Cyborg scratched her head. “Why not theme it after the sword in the stone or Thor’s hammer or something?”

“Well… I think the idea with those is that you can’t lift them, or at least it’s very hard to. With this the idea is to pull it fast.”

“Right… so maybe it would be more like a lawn mower theme?”

“‘Hey kids, try starting this old lawn mower.’ That’ll sell.”

“Worse than this?”

“Okay, fair.”

Pull Up stood strangely austere before them. The vast majority of the other machines in the arcade, mass-produced and original, had colorful flashing lights and a controlled cacophony of sound. This machine merely existed, a monolith of blandness adorned with the name of an exercise completely unrelated to the actual game.

“Why was this made?”

Ben shrugged. “I have no idea. Wanna try pulling it up?”

“Not really, I’m mostly here for pinball.”

“Ah, those are over there.”

“I know, I just thought I’d wait until-” Both their phones buzzed. “Well, speak of the devil.”

A message in a group chat announced that Sam was only a couple minutes away. Ben and Cyborg turned to walk toward the door. Before the first step away from the game, though, they hesitated and looked back. Something about that boxy anomaly seemed like a thing you shouldn’t turn your back on. Nevertheless they left it for

“Sam,” Ben grinned, “what’s up?”

Following instructions she’d come as a girl, specifically the one Ben requested. Now, recall that the save in question had been made immediately after digging and sweating in the dirt. So it needed to be cleaned. Also, since the lie to the parents was still up, she’d needed to get dressed twice: once in the default body and another time in the digger body. Simply put, it was a hassle.

Sam said “I still don’t get why this is necessary.”

Ben said “Don’t worry, it’s for the game.”

Cyborg considered saying “how?” but decided not to.

Sam asked “Did you guys hear about all those disappearances?”

Ben nodded. “I heard the phrase ‘Epidemic of Missing Persons’ yesterday. People are saying it’s, like, aliens or something.”

Sam pulled a coin-sized chip from her pocket. “My mom had me bring a tracker.”

Cyborg nodded. “I heard about that, the city recommended it on TV and everything.” Then she eyed the device. “Weird choice.”

“What, is it weird to follow the recommendation?”

“No, that’s just a weird brand to choose. See that qr code on the back? They send all the location data to a central server that anyone with that code can access. The system is really insecure.”

“Why do you know so much about trackers?”

The trio stopped at the counter to redeem the coupons for a pair of cards. Sam duplicated some money, which they then loaded onto the cards. Before long they returned to the imposing Pull Up machine.

Sam put her hand to her chin. “So… it’s speed?”

“Yeah. You know how a punching bag machine measures punches by how fast the bag swings? This thing measures pulling by how fast the handle goes up. So it’s less about pulling hard and more about yanking quickly. Something like Yank It would be a more accurate name.”

“I can see why they didn’t go with that. Alright, so I’ll stand here and pull it.” In this case “here” means the side of the handle facing the machine with the other two behind.

“I think you should start on the other side,” Ben said.

Cyborg frowned. “What, so she can’t see her score?”

“That way we can get a better look at her… at what she's doing. To help adjust our strategy and stuff.”

“Hmm…”

Sam fed a couple credits to the machine and took her position. The handle was pretty near the ground, so she had to squat down to reach it. She grabbed the handle from a position with her shoulders high and her arms straight. Then she pushed down with her legs and pulled up with her arms as hard as she could. It was lighter than she expected, enough that she lost her balance from the momentum.

That wasn’t the only demonstration of the law of inertia.

Ben nodded and said “nice!” without even looking at the score.

Cyborg turned to him. “I see what this is.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” she smirked, “so you should give me the second game card.”

“So be it,” he said, accepting her blackmail.

Cyborg was skipping off to the pinball machines by the time Sam got back to her feet.

“How’d I do?”

“Well,” now Ben actually checked the score, “you got a bunch of points which is good. Looks like there’s a record there. You didn’t beat it but I bet it’d be extra points if you did.”

“Hmm… I have an idea.”

Sam took out her phone, adjusted some body position sliders, and handed it to Ben.

“Alright, when I tell you, press ‘update’ and this thing’ll lift quicker than it ever did!”

A couple credits for the machine and she took the same straight-armed squatting position as before. The plan was that, when the app made her stand up, it would take the handle with her, thus pulling it with ludicrous speed. Unfortunately, when Sam said “Now!”, the app made the change in a discontinuous manner. So one moment she was squatting with her hands around the handle and the next she was standing with her hands around… nothing. The handle hadn’t moved.

Sam looked down at the handle and then up at the machine behind her. The dark, inhuman geometry of Pull Up loomed over her as though demanding that the ritual be completed. She gave the handle a perfunctory pull and scored worse than she had the first time.

She shook her head as she walked over and took the phone back.

“It didn’t work?”

“Obviously. I’ll try it from this side so that I can see my score. This thing must be beatable.”

Ben didn’t have an excuse to object. Then, from behind, he saw Sam go through the same squat and pull motion. He nodded to himself. This works too. Between rounds Sam gave herself more leg strength, and the girth on her thighs visibly increased with the muscle. Yeah, this really works.

Grinding for the high score on the machine was oddly satisfying for Sam. The task in front of her could take her full attention, and with the app she didn’t need to worry about exhaustion or not being strong enough. Instead, making the machine record a higher score wound up being an interesting puzzle. It scored based on the fastest moment of speed during the round, not the total time from handle down to handle up. The fact that this particular metric is tested basically nowhere else gave optimizing it a unique kinesthetic sensation. The game was surprisingly good. That strange gray box was willing to give back to those it judged worthy.

Eventually Cyborg’s de facto pinball card ran out of credits and she rejoined the other two. She eyed the game with a tilted head. “It’s like… an exercise machine for an exercise that doesn’t make sense.”

“Shush,” Ben whispered. “Look, Sam’s about to beat the high score.”

At this point Sam was kneeling, as though the handle were an altar. She grabbed it, yanked it quickly, and then dragged it up at a more leisurely pace to end the round. The score was a new personal best but still pretty far from the record.

“Huh,” Cyborg said, “that number’s pretty high actually.”

What wasn’t high were the credits on the game card, so Sam duped some more cash.

“It’s crazy,” Sam said, “that someone managed to pull off a score like that without the app. Like, even with this thing my score’s been kinda plateauing.”

“How so?” Cyborg asked. “Can’t you just make yourself faster?”

“Well, whenever I try something like that it winds up adding muscle mass. Then when I pull the handle, that added mass slows me down again. I dunno how you get around that without, like, pushing down on the other end of a lever or something.”

“Hmm… So you need a way of lifting the thing without lifting more of yourself?”

“Yeah, that’s where the kneeling thing came from.”

“Couldn’t you just lie down and push up with your legs?”

The moment she said that, she saw the wheels turning in both of the other two’s heads.

Ben grinned.

Cyborg’s eyebrows rose. “Wait, no, I didn’t mean it like-”

“That could work, actually.”

Moments later, Sam was lying on the ground in a kind of upside-down squat with the Pull Up handle playing the role of the ground.

Cyborg covered her face. I am now complicit in this.

It took a few more tries, but this strat, together with a little extra added boost with the arms on the ground, managed to beat the high score. When the record went up, a tinny deep voice came from within the machine saying “Nice score.” Was this the voice of the game’s creator? Nobody knew.

At Sam’s request, Ben got the whole thing on video. She beat the machine, posed with her score, and then demonstrated on the recording how the app made that possible. In particular she did some quick big ↔ small switching and then turned back into a guy. Thus where two girls and a boy had entered Smithy’s, two boys and a girl left.

Outside, the three meandered about indecisive about what to do next, one of them walking a bike as they went. Their consensus pointed toward food, but not anything specific. While they waffled, Sam pulled out his phone to show Cyborg the new position tricks.

“Look, this one changes when I move my fingers.”

Ben announced that he was going to go use the restroom and the other two took a seat on a bench nearby. Cyborg took out her phone to try the trick, which worked even though she’d disabled the “update” button.

Sam watched Ben as he walked away. There weren’t many other people on the sidewalk, so he had a good view despite the distance. About halfway to the facilities, Ben passed an alleyway, from which a shady figure emerged.

One moment Sam was looking at two figures, the next he was looking at one. A sly tap of a phone on Ben’s finger had turned him into a small rock.

Dumbfounded, Sam nudged Cyborg without taking his eyes off the man from the alley. “Please tell me you just saw that too.”

----------------------------------------

Alex, the app designer, was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. His laptop was on the table nearby, occasionally he’d glance over. He had open a list of Bod.io’s account login hashes. Each string corresponded to someone using the app, for better or for worse… back to the ceiling.

The old man’s words were ringing in his head.

A child transformed into a dog…

It’s more likely than you think.

After they’d spoken, Alex had gone and searched through the app’s modification requests. Species was shockingly common. People were becoming dogs, cats, birds, snakes, all manners of things which probably can’t operate a phone well enough to change back.

He’d pushed an update, after the one that blocked new accounts, hiding species sliders behind an advanced setting much like he’d done with the mental ones. This generated more pushback than he expected. One person, on a tirade in his dms, had slipped and dropped the particularly memorable line “If I can’t change then it’s just bestiality!” before deleting and replacing it with something more innocuous.

What the hell am I doing.

He sighed. I’m doing this all wrong. Putting it up on the store was a mistake because too many people had it with too few restrictions. Spreading it person to person was a mistake because it doesn’t let the actual benefits make a big enough impact. If the app’s primary function is body modification, which is typically reserved for medicine, then maybe I should’ve just handed it over to a hospital to begin with…

But what, then, am I supposed to do now?

What he did was look back at the screen. Each hash corresponded to a person, somewhere, using Bod.io for something. Those people behind the garbled strings could be putting their lives together or… wait, did a new one just appear?

Alex sat up and double checked. A new account had just been created.

What? How?

Every updated instance of the app should’ve been preventing new accounts. Further, creating an account required connecting to the server. When connected, the server should send the update to the user’s phone and it should be processed before account creation is finished.

Retrieving database records, Alex found a pattern which should’ve been impossible. The already low rate of new account formation had somehow only increased after the update was put out. So there must’ve been some kind of bug preventing the instances of the app from blocking new accounts at the client-side.

Ugh, annoying. I guess it’s time to set up a server-side block too.

----------------------------------------

Walter now spent his working hours in a side room of a warehouse. He had an apple pie scented air freshener plugged into the wall to block the blood-fumes from the other room. The warehouse, being abandoned, had no electricity.

Just gotta remember, I’m making loads of money.

His day to day at the job was spent holed up in the side room trying to avoid most of the realities of his life. Occasionally one such reality would come in with a feature request or a bug fix or something other to help them, as Fazoli once put it, “play the organs”. He would do whatever he needed to, send whoever away, and proceed to idly tinker away at his mod.

To a certain extent, he thought of himself as research and development. Someone with a bone saw once came in asking for a way to streamline organ freezing for storage and Walter showed off how to keep the body frozen with the app. When Fazoli found out about this, he made sure Walter knew he found it “cool”.

He also spent a certain amount of time testing the limits of the app. On one occasion he’d pulled out the guard-turned-coal, restored him, explained the situation, and made the guy into a test subject. What happens if you set someone’s hair on fire, make a save, and then load the save repeatedly? Well, the fire keeps burning but it never reaches the skin and the scalp temperature is never allowed to climb.

It was while burning the coal man that a couple ne'er-do-wells had entered his room with the sneaky “heh, look at this” air of a child who’s brought home a dead frog. Unfortunately it was significantly worse than a frog. What they brought into Walter’s quasi-office was a cart with a pair of twins on it. A small pair, conjoined at the arm. Really small. Infants.

“Wha- how… where…” Beyond Walter’s new instinct to not ask unnecessary questions, he wasn’t even sure how to formulate this one. So many different things had to be wrong with the world in order to get to this point.

So the questions got repressed, and Walter set to work trying to figure out how the app represented conjoined twins. Once he had a working theory, he pulled the coal off the shelf and tried some settings. In a few minutes, Walter managed to spawn a second body onto the former guard’s arm. After a few more minutes, his test subject recovered from the shock of it.

Walter nodded to himself. “Now, as long as you’re like this, you’ve got two hearts.”

“That’s… uh… yup. That’s quite… Change me back? Whew, thanks. Wow. How’d you even think to do that?”

“Some colleagues brought in… someone else with that condition.”

“Wow. Siamese gamblers, that’s a new one.”

“Not a gambler, a…” baby “civilian. We’re moving away from the debt slave model toward something like catch-and-release. Since the vic- um, subjects’ bodies can be restored instantly, this model should be no more harmful than an inconvenient jury duty.”

Thus cycled on the process of app research and mod development. After the conjoined twins, Walter had all instances of his mod send a copy of all body saves back to him for testing. He then loaded the saves onto his guinea pig and filed information about them into a spreadsheet. Learning how to test for blood type and tissue antigens and such gave him lots of time to not think about, for instance, where the fuck they’d gotten a baby.

It was while Walter was doing this kind of work that Fazoli entered with bad news.

“I’ve got bad news,” Fazoli said.

Walter’s ears perked up. His expectation for bad news from his boss was something like some fluffy puppies having been reunited with their mother.

“I’m getting reports that collection just stopped working.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your app’s not rocking around the blocks like it used to.”

A guard stepped forward for Walter to test. Sure enough, when pressing the button on the mod, he stayed human. Internally there was an error message: the server had prevented his mod from giving the guard an account.

“Huh.”

“Just ‘huh’? Can you fix it?”

“Um… So the way the app works is it sends instructions to a server and the server does all the magic-type stuff. The problem is the server isn’t following some requests, and since I don’t have direct access to the server there’s nothing I can do about that… I guess we’ll just have to stop grabbing folks off the street.”

“If we can’t get new bodies, or even use the app on the usual lowlifes, then we can’t afford to release the ones we have.”

“Right… I’ll rig the app up so that we can at least collect more body saves, in case one of them has something good.”

Fazoli was clearly not pleased. “You really can’t fix this?”

“Not without server access.” I guess I’ve got no use to you now, eh?

“And if you could access this server?”

“Well, then there would really be no limits on the app. At that point it may even be possible to modify people who don’t have accounts.”

“Hmm… come.” Fazoli led Walter onto the warehouse’s main area and spoke to all in attendance. “I’ve got business to attend to. While I’m gone, Walter is in charge. If you have any questions, go to him.” He turned to Walter and smiled. “Break a leg, kid. But not one of ours, that’d be a waste of money. Heyo!”

Maybe it would be best if this whole business quietly crumbled away. Then again, I’d probably get buried in the rubble.

----------------------------------------

Ben’s kidnapper slunk back into the alley without having seen Sam or Cyborg. Cyborg looked up from her phone. She saw that Ben was gone, but hadn’t seen the perpetrator.

Sam was spiraling.

That guy just took Ben! He made him disappear like it was nothing. And I just sat here watching. I’ve got this app that can do so much and I didn’t even pull out my phone. Is that all this thing’s good for? Winning dumb games? Wait… how did he…

He pulled out his phone, opened the app, and searched. It was tricky to specify, but there were sliders that could turn him into a rock. And after having seen how Ben was taken…

Oh my god he’s got the app! I don’t know how he used it so quickly, but there’s no other way he could’ve done that.

Sam nudged Cyborg again. “Ben just got turned into a rock.”

“What?”

“Like this.”

When Sam pressed “update”, his body disappeared and his phone fell onto the bench. Cyborg panicked for a moment making sure the phone didn’t fall asleep and then loaded a save to bring him back.

“Why the hell’d you do that?”

“That’s what happened to Ben. There’s a man in the alley over there. I saw him do that to Ben, I think he’s got the app.”

The two of them just looked at each other. Sam had just witnessed the true meaning of the “Epidemic of Missing Persons” and the gravity of the situation had them both in free fall.

“Are you sure?”

“I saw him disappear. I bet if I walked past then the same guy would try something. Actually…” Sam started to get up.

Cyborg stopped him. “You’re not going without a plan.”

“But I need to save Ben.”

“Do you in particular need to do that? Maybe saving Ben means asking for help.”

“I’m the only one who can do this. I have the app, so I can come back to life.”

“And if you turn into a rock like you just did and don’t have anyone to change you back?”

“Fine, what do you have in mind?”

It took a bit of thought, but what Cyborg decided on was a copy of Sam’s phone so she could bail him out if things went bad and a scan of the qr code on Sam’s tracker so she could keep track of him. The latter was trivial, but the former was tricky since the app’s duplication was tied to its behavior around clothing and things in the pockets of clothes. Hitting a button on a screen in your pocket is tricky, but Sam managed it.

He got up and started walking. Even if I don’t matter, my friends do. I’ll protect you like I did… Helen didn’t show up to class. It wasn’t just Ben. Sam’s pace quickened.

After he passed the alley, he felt a tap on his finger. Turning around, he was face to face with the kidnapper. The shady figure looked surprised. Why wasn’t Sam a rock?

I need to get to Helen too.

Pressing a button in his pocket, Sam became a rock. The kidnapper then stuffed Sam into a side bag and took a call.

----------------------------------------

Sam reappeared lying in the back of the kidnapper’s car. Looking up, he saw he hadn’t been noticed by the driver. Also in the back seat was a bag of rocks, among which Sam had been riding. The rocks were all very similar to each other and, in particular, weren’t labeled in any way.

He pulled out his phone and wrote to Cyborg.

⠀⠀⠀⠀Sam: can’t tell which rock is Ben

⠀⠀⠀⠀Sam: can’t change him back anyway

⠀⠀⠀⠀Sam: I think they also got Helen

⠀⠀⠀⠀Sam: I’m going deeper

Then he turned himself back into a rock.

----------------------------------------

He woke up a few more times on the car ride. Presumably it was Cyborg’s doing with the copy of his phone. Each time he simply turned himself back into a rock to avoid detection.

Inevitably one of his wakeups landed him next to a shelf by a wall in the warehouse. It was a cold place with a heavy metallic smell. None of the lights seemed fixed into the building, they looked like they had only been put up temporarily.

On the shelf were a bunch of rocks, presumably petrified people. None of them had labels, instead the whole shelf was labeled “unsorted”. Any of them could be Ben and there wasn’t any hint as to where Helen was.

This is probably what happened to Dad… Are they planning to release all these people too? What’s the point of this?

Footsteps. Shadows came from the other side of the shelf. Sam wedged himself up against the wall to avoid detection. The figures passed.

If I can’t figure out who’s who, then the only way to turn my friends back is to turn everyone back.

First he’d need a phone with access to all the stoned people. The encounter with Rex gave him an idea for that.

More footsteps. Sam waited for them to pass, snuck up behind, and tapped one of their fingers with his phone. In the time it took the man to turn around and investigate, Sam had hid his phone on the floor behind the shelf and turned himself into a rock.

----------------------------------------

Telling time is impossible when you don’t even have a brain. When he woke up, he checked where he left the phone. Good, still there. It still had the save he’d taken. He put on that body and pulled the man’s phone out of the new pocket. It didn’t have a biometric login, so he couldn’t get in to even see if it had the app.

Okay, new plan. With this body he could move around the building. Hang tight guys, you’ll be out in no time. He turned a corner and had to stop when he saw the warehouse main room.

Stretching out through the entirety of the room was Walter’s new business venture. Dozens of tables stood with open chested people lying on them. Pairs of workers stood taking bodies apart and depositing said parts into fridges beside the tables. Then another team combed their way between the tables collecting from the fridges. The whole thing moved like a strange factory of flesh.

The shelf Sam was by turned out to be on the second floor, so all of this hit him at once. Now it was obvious why they were taking people. Now it was obvious that he needed to stop it.

He started wandering the warehouse. There was a restroom, a prayer room, a break room with some vending machines… What was he even looking for? He came upon an unmarked door and opened it. Lights out, seemed like nothing. Another such door had some brooms behind it.

“Whatcha looking for?”

Sam almost jumped. Turning, he was face to face with someone in a surgical mask and lab coat, both stained by splotches of red.

“Uh… looking for the boss. I’ve got something to tell him.”

“What is it?”

“Very urgent. No time to explain.”

“Hmm… was he not in his office?”

“...I forgot where that is.”

“Seriously?”

Thus Sam was led to another unmarked door. This one, though, had a familiar face behind it.

Walter was testing some code for further automation. He had his test subject unconscious on a chair and was running a loop on him. The process de-blooded a finger, froze it, detached it, and restored it. After only a few seconds quite a pile had formed.

This is the scene Sam walked in on, still wearing the body of someone from perimeter security and still accompanied by a disassembly specialist.

“Hey boss, this guy says he’s got something to tell you.”

“Alright?”

Sam stepped forward. “Privately, please.”

Strange… Walter sent the specialist back to the floor and turned the former guard back into coal to free up the chair.

“So… what’s up?”

Sam took out his phone and changed back to his normal body.

Walter’s eyes widened. I’ve been found out! “Ohoho, hey, yeah, it’s you, right, okay. So, you’ve probably seen… um… we’re running a blood drive here! Yeah, and… and… it’s specially for people with the app because y’all can change your blood type or replenish your supply like it’s nothing! And… um… you know, it’s for a good cause. Spare… blood… like that can really save people’s lives you know. So… heh, you know I think you should consider donating, it really is for a good-”

“You’re kidnapping people and turning them into rocks.”

“I… um… so you’re not wrong…”

“You should change them back.”

Walter sighed and took a moment to collect himself. “There are multiple reasons I can’t do that right now.”

Sam entered some settings into the app. “If you don’t change them back, I’ll turn into a huge rock and flatten this whole place.”

Walter frowned. “No you won’t, you wouldn’t be able to change back.”

“I duped my phone, a friend will change me back. In fact, she’s watching my body state right now. Even if you take my phone, if I just curl my fingers then this whole place will be destroyed.” He and Cyborg had no such agreement but Walter didn’t know that.

“Hmm… I still think you won’t do that. If you flatten this place then it won’t be possible to change anyone back. You’d be cutting yourself off from your goal.”

“If you aren’t going to change them back then I have no way of doing so. In that case I might as well bury whatever the hell this place is to keep you from taking anyone else.”

Sam put out his arm and turned the hand at the end into a large rock. The room shook when it hit the floor.

Walter gulped at the threat. This kid’s not messing around. Then another thought occurred to him. The rock at the end of Sam’s arm reminded him of the conjoined bodies he’d been experimenting with.

“So… one of the reasons I can’t release everyone is the production out there would stop. The crowd I’m in with right now would probably kill me if that happened. However, I know a way to maintain the current level of production with only a single body. So, if you hand yourself over, I’ll release the folks we’ve collected.”

“Alright, I’ll do it.”

“Woah, so quick?”

I don’t matter, they do. “Yeah, I think it’s worth it.”

“Nice, okay.”

Walter drafted a contract and handed it to Sam to sign.

“You’re really going to release everyone?”

“Sure, if I don’t need them anymore then they’re just a liability.”

Sam signed the contract and gave Walter his login credentials for the app.

----------------------------------------

In the warehouse there were a number of roles. Obviously Walter was in software development and a temporary leadership role. New recruit Sam had just obtained the position of “large system of comatose conjoined bodies” and was playing a major role in production. Then there was everyone involved in removing, storing, and transporting organs. Finally, there’s the muscle: guards who maintain the security of the operation. It is to two men in this division that we now turn our attention.

Their particular station was at the front door, away from all the meat moving. One of them had just returned from the break room with a soda bottle for the other.

“Thanks, I’ve been getting thirsty out here.”

“Yeah… so, you been in there recently?”

“Hmm? Well, no, the job’s out here, mate.”

“You know what they’re doing in there?”

“Erm… crimes I imagine.”

“Organ harvesting actually.”

A silence passed between the two. They sipped at their sodas.

“Huh. Well, glad I’m out here then.”

“Right, right. You know, I was in there a couple hours ago and I thought to myself ‘wow, that’s a lot of people’.”

“I imagine a lot of people need organs.”

“A lot of criminals, you mean.”

“Yes, criminals… we’re criminals too, you know. Technically.”

“Sure. But, you know, organ harvesting.”

More silence. Gulp, gulp, gulp, ahh.

“I see your point, I always preferred gambling houses. Even an opium den is… well, at least it’s quiet if a bit depressing."

“Sure. Well, I was just in there, right?”

“That you were,” he held up the bottle.

“Right, you see… it’s different now. It’s like they took all the folks who they were… you know…”

“Harvesting organs from?”

“Yes, that, and it was like they fused them together at the arm, hung them up, and were just letting organs spill out of them.”

“Fused?”

“Yeah, so, like, instead of shoulder arm arm hand it’s shoulder arm arm shoulder and so on.”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Yes, maybe I’m not explaining it right.”

“I’ll go in and look.”

“Are you sure? It’s quite nasty.”

“I reckon I can take it.”

He went in and came out.

“Bad, right?”

“Right…” He looked down at his soda, having lost his appetite. “Say, are we the bad guys?”

“That’s what I was thinking. We may be.”

----------------------------------------

When Helen woke up, there were police cars everywhere. She seemed to be at the side of some road somewhere. Next to her was a parked car with a big sack of rocks in the trunk. In front of her was an old man holding something that reminded her of a refrigerator magnet.

“Good morning,” said the old man.

“Hello… where am I?”

“Oh, nowhere special. Now, this is officer Jenny. Tell her your name and she’ll get you home.”

Helen turned to a police woman beside the old man. Then she looked past her to a handcuffed man getting filed into a car. Then back to the rocks.

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry,” the old man said. “I’ll make sure they’re alright and these nice folks in uniform will handle the rest.”

----------------------------------------

Cyborg was out of breath. I just wanted to play pinball! What the fuck is this!

She’d doubted a bit before the man in the alley put rock-Sam in a pocket and drove away. Following the car, even at a distance, had been tricky too. The code for the tracker worked, but it only sent out a signal when Sam was in human form and this guy just kept turning into a rock.

Eventually the signal stopped moving, though. She didn’t get too close to the warehouse, instead lurking in the woods on a hill right outside it. Their plan hadn’t included going into some random sketchy building so she wasn’t sure how to proceed. For a while she just sat and waited for Sam to come out. He didn’t, though.

Instead, what changed was that the sliders on his app stopped making sense. He was, apparently, somehow, fully blonde, fully black haired, fully short, fully tall, basically every trait was turned up to an extent that seemed contradictory. What, have you turned into Canby? Add to that an absolutely obscene number of legs and you can see why she went into motion.

So she called Sam’s phone. She figured it wouldn’t give him away any more than his turning into some sort of centipede man. While she waited, her copy of the phone rang and displayed her name.

An unfamiliar voice picked up. “Hello?”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Ah, you must be the friend he told me about. Don’t worry, he’s fine, he just can’t come to the phone right now.”

“I can see his body state, you know. What the hell is going on in there?”

“Hmm… He gave us a trade… that may be making Bod.io malfunction. The readings are probably fairly strange, yes?”

“Strange doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Right… well, it’ll stay that way for a while. In the meantime, like I said, he’s fine. I could even send him out to meet you if you’d like.”

“Put him on the line first.”

There were some shuffling sounds and then the voice changed. “Cyborg? Is that you?”

“Sam! What the fuck is going on in there?”

“I’m not sure. They had me do something with the app that I don’t understand, but I got everyone out so it’s okay.”

She’d seen a couple guys load a sack of rocks into a car and then drive away, so this seemed plausible.

“How’d you do it?”

“I’ll tell you later. Where are you?”

“I’m- actually, get out of there first, I don’t want them finding me.”

A couple minutes later, the front door opened and Sam walked out unaccompanied. Cyborg guided him away from the building, and then led him on a long, roundabout path up to the hill where she was.

“I take it you didn’t get my hand signals?” Sam said.

“What signals?”

“Never mind.”

“Where’s Ben?”

“Long story. Come closer, it’ll make more sense with pictures.”

“Oka-”

“STAY BACK,” bellowed a voice from somewhere in the woods.

Both figures looked around. Cyborg’s heart was beating with the fear that whoever was in the warehouse had found her. The other’s panic was for a different reason…

The old man emerged from behind a tree and turned “Sam” back into Walter.

Tears of relief came to Walter’s eyes. “You’re alive!” Then he went pale. “Oh no, you’re alive.”

“What the hell is going on?”

Walter looked from Cyborg to the old man. Everything really was falling apart. He couldn’t help but laugh.

The old man stepped between him and Cyborg.

“What’s going on?” Walter said. “I’ll tell you what’s going on! I just solved one of medicine’s greatest problems! There will never be another organ shortage again, and all that’s required is a single donor! I’M A HERO NOW!”

“The police are on their way,” the old man said.

“Yeah, I figured.”

----------------------------------------

Farnsworth the hacker looked up as a thin, mustachioed man and a pair of bodyguards entered his office.

“Hiya! The name’s Dominic Fazoli.”

Farnsworth shook his hand. “What can I do for you, Mr. Fazoli?”

“Oh please, call me Dom. I hear you’re pretty good with computers, good with making them talk and all that.”

“I am, but I don’t come cheap.”

“Oh that won’t be an issue. You know what they say, can’t buy an omelet without selling a few ovaries. Heyo!”

The fuck? “Right… what’s the job?”

“I’ll show you.” Fazoli turned to one of the guards. “You, show him the app.”

A phone was brought forward.

“I’m told this app works by sending messages to a specific server. I want you to trace that signal and find me the server.”

Ugh, this again. “Alright, let me get that loaded onto my computer here and then…” Wait… He recognized the IP address. A quick cross reference with his files and he was sure of it. This was the same server with the same owner the old man had had him find. Jackpot! “Gentlemen, I have some great news for you.”