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Touchy
Through a quite contrived and surreal sequence of events I can't take the time to detail here I found myself bound by the caveat lector clause of donating my body to medical science before my death. I knew I should never have entrusted myself to the legal care of Drummond, Cauty, Sturm und Drang attorneys at law.
Medical science wasn't so bad once I got to know some of the people involved. Abstract concepts such as medical science can a priori appear faceless and uncaring, but one must always remember that behind the logo and the jingle and the surly receptionist on the front desk is a living breathing gestalt of an organism that breathes and evolves, staffed by individuals just like you and me. So I didn't feel too bad when they cut off both my hands with a machette; it was a medical machette at least.
I awoke slowly, without opening my eyes, to find that I couldn't. When I reached up to touch my face I became dizzy as I was bombarded with visions of my own face, a blank canvas of fresh skin, eyeless, noseless, mouthless, smells of disinfectant left a sterile and chemical taste on my... fingers?
A hand touched my shoulder gently and a distant soothing voice told me to reach out to the sound of her. I did so and the voice became louder and somehow I could see where she was, smell her perfume, taste the tang on the air, all through the proximity of my hands.
"You've had all of your senses grafted into your hands" she explained.
I twisted my hands back and looked down at them, only, the scene was shown from the perspective of the palms of my hands. I held them apart as if to start clapping and saw each hand had an eye embedded into the flesh. Blinking. Blinking in time to my blinking. I screwed my fists closed tightly and opened them again, watching as the iris of each eye shrank and adjusted to the light again. Being able to see my own eyes caused a wave of discordance through my senses.
Examining the tips of the fingers of my left hand with the eye in my right I saw that the whorls and spirals of my fingertips now included tiny aural and nasal cavities and dotted across the skin were taste buds coating in a thin film of saliva. Pinching my fingers together tasted of earwax and snot.
"You've become the world's first synthetic synęsthetic lifeform" she said before elaborating, "your senses combined into your limbic extremities you now taste what you touch, hear what you feel, smell what you're seeing. You've become the epitome of the senses and we hope that through you we'll be able to study sensations that have previously been disassociated."
All very fascinating really, but I didn't know what I was going to do about my itchy balls...
Aug.24.2006