The silence of a deep night left one vulnerable to one’s thoughts. Dimitri was troubled by a great deal of worry. Though he didn’t feel any more fatigued nor the slightest pain or discomfort, the colour of his skin never ceased to disturb him. It was repulsive. He hardly knew a thing about his condition and had nothing but anxiety to guide him in his research which was only confounded by the inherent fear, as illogical and absurd as it was, that his state of intelligence would gradually recede to the level of plant-rudimentary.

Dimitri wasn’t an especially emotive person, and had no particular appreciation for the sensitivities of others. But, contrary to the many comments he received long ago (of course, not directly) that he seemed increasingly like a robot the more he worked on engineering one, Dimitri acknowledged that subtle stream of vague emotions that clouded over his mind as an assurance that he was human.

Dimitri noted that he had considerably less frequent hunger pangs since his transformation and he seemed to never run out of energy. It was as if his body had adjusted to the change and welcomed the sunlight, soaking up the new state of his evolution. He felt like a foreigner in his own skin and wanted nothing more than to tear it away.

Dimitri understood the benefits his new coat had brought him, but he simply couldn’t stand the thought of succumbing to the plant side of himself. The patches were still growing, though more slowly. There was no pain, nothing to indicate whether it was still functioning, but that only made the green skin even more frightening. With every patch taking over what was once human skin, Dimitri felt as if a part of him was being eaten away by the strange thing. He worried that he would become less human … then what would he be?

When he had first arrived at the village, he had taken comfort in the fact that many of the people were also incomplete. Though in a different way than he, Dimitri had chosen to focus on their incompleteness and believe that they were essentially the same when it came to the definition of a human. But what was the definition of a human? He knew what he thought it was, but did these people share the same?

Now that he had calmed from the initial despair, Dimitri found it increasingly difficult to see the similarities between them as he focused on the green. That cursed green.

Green usually came in the form of a blessing. It was good to eat and good for the eyes. Green signified ‘go’ on traffic lights. It was the colour of recycling. Green ticks on a page were a pleasant sight antagonistic to red crosses. Green was generally good, but not when it lived as a part of you. It just wasn’t right. Dimitri wasn’t a biologist by any means, but there must be some reason why, as far as he knew, there were no parts of the human body that were inherently green. The body was made of hues of red and yellow with blue for the veins that run through. That was surely proof that whatever was infiltrating his skin was unwelcome and unnatural to the human body.

Dimitri could not stand it any longer. The contempt he had for the thing far outweighed any pain he might be expected to inflict. Dimitri tried all sorts of means, abusing his skin, but nothing ever worked satisfactorily. The green started from his forearm and crawled upwards towards his shoulder. There had been a moment when Dimitri even entertained the prospect of amputation—wouldn’t that solve his problem?—but he decided against it because he was hesitant to lose the functionality of fingers. However wonderful Ilya’s mechanical prosthetics were, it was a mean feat to match the level of complexity in the tasks they were capable of. It was a fair reason why she was a greater specialist in mechanical legs than arms—fingers could do a lot more than toes, which was what made them so difficult to mimic.

Dimitri needed to get rid of it. He wanted nothing more than to free himself. He needed that to happen now. Each passing second added fertiliser to the agony which had sprouted ever since the beginning, grew a bud when he faced the wretched scientists and was now deeply rooted in his veins. He spun a pocket knife in his hand, the one Ilya had saved him from. The knife would not take his life, but Dimitri entertained the thought of it tearing his flesh, freeing himself from the things that were growing on him.

The blade pierced through the green epidermis easily. But the outer layer could not be peeled off without the flesh underneath. Dimitri muffled his cries by biting on his shirt. Then he continued to tear away.

He stopped after a while when the pain got too bear. After all that agony, he had only managed to get rid of a little of the green. A small puddle of blood had pooled on the floor, and his flesh was raw and stinging. A part of Dimitri was pleased to discover that underneath the green, there was still blood running.

***

The plants crawled close to the ground at night, covering the solid floor of pseudo-granite, their leaves a humble substitute for grass. The whole terrain transformed into a meadow at night, rendered grey by the absence of light except on days when there’s a fire burning outside, then it is still not green, but a fuzzy and flickering orange.

Dimitri laid on the grass and shut his eyes. He imagined that daylight had arrived. He transported himself back to a time in his childhood where he had laid on the grass for lack of better things to do. He had tried to stare at the sun for no other reason than the fact that his parents had specifically warned him not to.

Sunrays seemed to dance through his fingers when he moved them. Dimitri peeked through them at various angles, trying to find the ‘secret’ way to see the sun. It might have been seconds or hours that passed. The sun hadn’t set, so it mustn’t have been too long. He rested his forearm over his eyes and fell asleep in the warm summer heat.

When he woke, it was to his horror that his fingers had turned green. Then he saw that it wasn’t only his fingers. His whole hand. And not just his hands. His arms were covered in green. He quickly looked at his feet and saw that they, too, were not spared. He didn’t have to check his body to know the answer to be expected, but he did it anyway. It was as if someone had painted him in his sleep and reset the colour of his skin so not a single patch on him suggested he had ever represented another colour.

He was the same colour as the grass beside him. Dimitri hadn’t paid close attention to the grass before, but at present, it seemed as if it was visibly growing. The blades grew longer as the seconds ticked by, taller so it seemed they would soon engulf him. Dimitri scrambled to his feet, ready to take off. To anywhere. Anywhere but there.

He realised his efforts were futile when the grass reached his height and surpassed it. The waves seemed to come in all directions. There was no escape. Besieged by the giant grass that towered over him, Dimitri felt like Thumbalina from the fables. Only, she had been kept within a flower, whose petals were soft and surfaces were smooth. It could hardly be considered the same as the grass so razor thin that light reflected off the tip. You didn’t have to touch the edges to know they would draw blood.

For a brief moment, Dimitri saw a vision of himself being dissected from every possible direction, at every possible angle. It would happen in barely an instant. One moment, he would be a man, the next, he might be several unrecognisable specimens of meat and bone so fine you would not be able to tell which animal’s carcass it was.

The grass didn’t get to him, though. Not yet.

Dimitri ran, despite understanding that running in any direction was equivalent to death. The grass seemed to make way for him, parting like the Red Sea—only, it couldn’t be. It was too easy.

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He tripped.

It was one slip-up that could have cost him his life but Dimitri scrambled to his feet and escaped death’s scyther by an inch.

The grass struck then, bending over to engulf him so he looked no different from a little green hill. Dimitri opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He was trapped within the grass like a corpse in a coffin. Then he felt himself sinking. He was right, the grass was indeed a coffin getting lowered into a grave. Dimitri braced himself as the thing plunged him further into the ground. He knew he was going downwards because the light from above seemed to grow fainter with the addition of dirt. When he felt the motion stop, there was only silence apart from his own ragged breathing.

All alone, in the most claustrophobic space, all Dimitri could do was wait. He didn’t realise he had been screaming until Ilya woke him. He was cold and his body was sticky with sweat.

“Are you okay?” He only needed to hear that voice for the worst of his fear to dissipate.

“Yeah,” replied Dimitri. He was surprised by how breathless he felt.

“You were screaming,” said Ilya.

“Had a bad dream.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Dimitri shook his head and said nothing.

Ilya stood up to leave.

“Stay.” He held her wrist gently.

She looked at his arm. Her eyes widened.

“Dimitri–”

He pulled away and hid his arm under the blanket.

She kept silent for a few moments. Dimitri appreciated how she didn’t press him about something he didn’t want to explain.

“I don’t feel like being alone right now.”

“I…” She choked, then cleared her throat. “I was just going to get you some tea," she said, her voice shaky.

She came back within a few moments.

“It’s so late, why are you still awake?”

“I was working on something.”

Dimitri nodded. The girl was a workaholic, through and through. It wasn’t surprising. Most geniuses had the tendency to be like that too.

“Does it trouble you that much?” She handed him a warm cup.

“What?” asked Dimitri. He blew on the surface of the drink.

“The state of your skin,” she said. “Here, we don’t care about such things, as your people do. Here, we believe that you are your mind and your soul. The body is just something of convenience … or inconvenience,” she added after a few moments. “We need the body to see and hear and touch each other. That’s all, but the connections we make, the relationships we have. Our thoughts and our ideas … they all exist beyond the body. It’s meaningless to develop an attachment to it. People don’t remember other people for their good looks when they die, or even before that, when they grow old. But they do remember all the time the spirit of the ones who touched their lives.”

It reminded Dimitri of the conversation they had had before, when she had mentioned the silly silicone. Then he realised that was what she thought the body was—no more important than a slab of silly silicone, though it was something that required more care and effort to preserve. He thought he had understood it before, but he now realised that he hadn't.

“It’s a container,” he said, articulating the point she had been driving at.

“Exactly.”

Dimitri saw more clearly the way she thought about these things. But it didn’t mean that he agreed with her. Perhaps she was right, and he had been for far too long, too deeply indoctrinated within his city’s strangeness and immersed within the myths of the body conjured by doctors and the rest of society, that all the beliefs permanently tattooed onto him and prevented him from fully accepting her way. It was all still too fresh, too foreign and too different from what he was used to. But given time, he just might change his mind.

At the moment, though, Dimitri couldn’t stand living with the ugliness on his skin. He needed to find a way to get rid of it. It didn’t matter to him if the method involved a lot of pain. What was pain but a mental sensation? It wasn’t real. Just a bunch of receptors bossing him around. They were useful at times, but also posed a flaw. Pain was the main source of burdensome fear, which is often the trigger for action or inaction.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to find a cure yet,” Ilya said quietly, looking down at her hands.

“No, please don’t say that. You’ve already done so much for me, far more than I could have hoped for.” The last thing Dimitri wanted was for Ilya to feel bad.

“Why do you want to get rid of it so badly? I’m curious to know.” asked Ilya. “I’m just saying, I think some people would love to have what you have,” Ilya said. “It would eradicate starvation as a cause of death, wouldn’t it? Think about how many lives this would save.”

Dimitri’s eyes flashed a silent fury. “It’s not natural,” he said coldly.

“Why do you want to be natural?” Ilya pressed.

“Because natural is beautiful.”

“I thought you already knew better than that,” said Ilya, alluding to the conversation they had a few months back. She looked away self-consciously.

Dimitri immediately realised his mistake. “Your robotic parts are beautiful too. It’s just this green I can’t stand,” he said, looking down at his arm.

“But they help you, don’t they?” replied Ilya. “Your body has become stronger because of it and unless you stay away from the sun for days, you’ll never have to worry about not having enough food or energy since the plant parts do that for you. I wish I could be more like you.”

“Don’t say that. Not even as a joke,” Dimitri said in a warning tone. He couldn’t stand the thought of the same curse falling upon this incredible girl.

“You don’t need to overreact,” Ilya said calmly. Dimitri eyed her suspiciously. “What? You don’t trust me? I really won’t. I don’t know how it’ll modify my body. I know there are a lot of risks involved,” Ilya tried to reassure him.

Dimitri was horrified that Ilya would even think of inflicting herself with the same poison that had ruined him. He had seen first-hand the extent of her abilities. Accomplishing a feat like that would probably pose little difficulty.

”You’re like a living solar cell, you know?” Ilya changed the topic. She pulled a chair to take a seat beside him. “I’ll bet a great number of the starving people in the world would give anything to live as you do. You don’t have to do anything and your body automatically provides food for you.”

“I don’t want to be different from other humans. You understand that.”

Ilya looked straight at him. “Humans will evolve into a different species if we survive on this planet or another for long enough. This change you’re experiencing is only skin-deep. Your genetic make-up is still mostly human. Can’t you just think of it as evolving before most of the human race? How is that different from what I’m doing for my people?”

“It is different. I just don’t feel comfortable being a product of genetic engineering. It’s different from what you’re doing.”

“How so?”

“You’re working on bionics.”

“So? The change to the human body is just as drastic, isn’t it? There’s no difference,” said Ilya.

“There is,” Dimitri insisted, but he struggled to come up with a convincing argument.

“I think it’s very likely nature will do the same to all humans, given enough time,” Ilya said, gently resting a hand on his arm.

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not the one looking like a monster with green skin.”

Ilya flinched. She clenched her fists tight, trembling. “But I am a girl with robotic legs. Doesn’t that make me a different kind of monster?” asked Ilya. The hurt in her eyes was apparent.

Dimitri’s heart sank. He hadn’t meant to pick at her insecurity.

“Why can’t you see that you’re perfect this way? You’re perfect to me, isn’t that enough?” he told her.

“I’m a monster,” she insisted.

“No, you’re you,” said Dimitri, tilting her chin so she would look at him. “A beautiful mind and a wonderful soul.”

“You’re only talking about the mind and the soul.”

“What else matters?”

She shook her head. “Why don’t you ask yourself the same question?”

Dimitri was stunned for a few moments before he could finally speak. “I already said it’s different. Drop it.”

“Alright,” Ilya resigned.

“Just like that?” Dimitri thought she had given in a little too easily.

“I’ve already done my part trying to convince you,” she said. “I believe you’ll figure it out on your own sooner or later. For the record, I think you also have a beautiful mind and a wonderful soul. I just wish you could see it too.”