Embrace
Chane

Mr Marleeiy, please enter your defects immediately.

Chane Marleeiy peered down perplexed at a piece of empty paper on the desk. His posture cramped forward, brow furrowed. He tapped a greylead pencil against his few remaining teeth.

Mr Marleeiy…

Chane snapped up straight, tossing a dismissive hand into the air to signal the overhead speaker to back off. The speaker was Lucille. Lucille was an AI. She was highly trained and proficient in matters of governance. Her role was to predict paths for the Cube’s growth. She enacted policy and ensured outcomes, and shaped the Cubes’ citizens so that they may thrive. She was benevolent, but lacked transparency. She was effective, but lacking in warmth. She could not lie, but her reasoning sometimes strayed. She really liked baseball but couldn’t compute cricket as the superior game. She had some flaws, truth be told.

... you must fill out all personal defects you are aware of in order to…

He looked around the fluorescent room for the source of the directives, scowling slightly. He trained his eye on the top right corner.

“Yuh, yep. I get it. I hear you, I…”

The voice spoke over him.

... in order to have them replaced with new physical traits based on our infallible discretion.

Chane spun around and looked between his legs. The voice seemed to be coming up from the ground beneath him now.

The most commonly requested traits, based on majority consensus, will be universally removed from all citizens. Fine tuning by our complex algorithms will ensure full human functionality. We will then balance any losses with new additions to your human form.

Is the voice inside me? Chane ran a furry hand across his bulbous belly.

We only source the best data and utilise the most advanced machine learning in order to provide you with the next generation of human evolution.

Chane had heard it all before. He murmured a sceptical mmhm. 
I don't feel all that evolved. In fact…
His head lolled left, as he pondered Lucille's idea of evolution. 

Dear citizen, you seem to be struggling with the task at hand. Would further information as to my operational edict assist you in completing your task?

“No.”

Think of the process as time travel across all multi-verses at once; we ascertain and install exactly what evolution will eventually grace your bodies with.
We are simply expediting the process and providing room for your sage input. We understand humans have lived experience within their bodies, and are naturally more astute at reductionism than additionalism. As such, we provide space for your self actualisation. Let me simplify.
In AI Ad form: The AI ®Evolution x The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
In human joke form: For Us, Byte Us.

Chane knew, right now, there were hundreds of others in interconnecting rooms, all scribbling down their physical gripes in hope that Lucille would synthesise the perfect form. 
Owing to living on the very outskirts of the Cube's walls, his block had been the last to be funnelled into the ReWear rooms. Last. Chane was always last. His workmate, Jam, had chalked this up to his insatiable (and contemptible) curiosity. Coupled with what his therapist, Luciano, called, ‘a slow processing unit,’ Chane seemed wired to search for, and be baffled by, all the answers he found. I just never have enough time to think it out, ya know? The Cube always seemed to be moving at such a rapid pace. Bustling people jostling for the trams; trams racing by at the speed of sound; the sound of their announcements akin to Tonedeff verses. All. too. Fast. The onward march. Change. Change. Goddamn change. That’s all they ever cared about! At least, locked in this curious building, there were others trailing behind with him.

All consensus built changes will be permanently coded to your physical being for the following 10 years.
Please note: If you refrain from completing your ReWear process, you will remain in your current, archaic, form.

Chane shuddered. He tightened his grip on the pencil. He hated being left behind.
Echoes of his school mate's taunts rang in his ears. Rapid fire insults that made his head spin. ‘Chane, Chane, the drain-brained lame!’
They'd always joked he was one decade behind the pile. Always struggling to catch the current witticisms, or the 100kmph baseball pitch, Chane had sometimes dreamt they were right. ‘Chane, Chane, deranged face of poo stains!’
But we all look the same! Chane would complain, whilst hiding his pained face that strained.
‘Chane, Chane, plain-brain remains in the past!’
That one particularly hurt. It didn't even rhyme. At least rhymes meant they'd made an effort, even if he was the butt of the assonance.

Chane, Marleeiy Chane, please write in the frame, only 3 minutes… are left.

“Where are you? I mean, shouldn't there be a one way mirror or some glass thing like in the…”

The room didn't blink. It just continued to bark over him.

All Central Business Cube, CBC, citizens are strongly advised to complete their defect sheet on this day; this beautiful day of transmogrification.

Transmogrification day, T-Day for short, was the Cubian’s day of rebirth. Samhain for the Celts, Ostara for the Wiccan, Nowruz for the Persians. It was a day where the decay of Winter was swept away as new buds of Spring blossomed, causing falling petals to soften the walk to the pub to celebrate. Well, that’s how an AI would word it at least.
Lucille let out a sudden sharp horn blare that nearly knocked Chane right out of his chair. He would've been flat on his back if not for his God given balance.

You, Chane Marleeiy, are now the final citizen yet to complete the ReWear process.

Chane, Chane, winced in shame.

Upon final completion of your defects, I will compile, analyse and reform your physical shape. You, along with all citizens, will be immediately…

Chane slapped his four elbows onto the table.
“Oh, shut up, I've done this before! I know the…”

The room fell into a crimson shadow, like someone had tossed their full mooncup at the sun.

You MUST enter your defects now in order for the ReWear process to begin for all Cubians. You have 1 minute 45 seconds to follow this directive or ALL of your defects will remain with you in perpetuity - you alone, will not evolve.

Chane, still scanning around the room, engrossed in his distraction tactic of chasing the sound source, suddenly came to.

“Oh shit, ok ok, yep. Yes, I'm writing, I'm writing them down.”

Chane began furiously thinking of all things that were broken or misaligned in his body, and brain.

Outside, in the streets of the Cube, the T-Day celebrations were beginning to take shape.  Whilst the Cubians sat safe in the outpatient rooms post their ReWear assignments, trillions of nano-bots began to reshape the city. This was the process of ReFit.
The bots spun and buzzed, their subaudible hum peaking in a harmonious chorus of: ‘Hurry up, Chane! There's bike lanes to reframe and pets to retrain!’
In real time, as the citizens' data was being collated, the consensus algorithm computed all conflicting human requests. Then it added its own ideas of abject perfection. The bots whizzed as the code whirred to the tune of, ‘Eh, I know best.’
The bots shifted chairs and tables to new, fitting ergonomic designs. Then smashed them to miniscule pieces to start again, all within seconds. Skateparks were refitted with berm and ramp shapes the human eye had never seen. Trams were suspended from wires high between the buildings, then suddenly plunged sub the street level & dilligently waterproofed. Who knew what the world would look like in a few minutes' time, other than perfectly customised for the citizens' new shells.T-Day was as rote in its deliverance as it was chaotic in its outcomes.
As soon as the ReFit process had been completed, the outpatient rooms would become painless operating theatres. Citizens would barely have time to wink at each other before the eye of the beholder became, ‘Why do I need three cup holders?!’
Each citizen would glance down in horror or pleasure at their new uniform body - wild eyes or rigid horns locking in communal sympathy and confluence.
Every decade's change did indeed come as a shock. Those with weak foundations were known to drop dead amongst the rabble. But true to humanity's best trait, everyone soon normalised the horror. They'd take in all the new additions, constrictions and contradictions and pacified by the shift in the air quality to oxygenised MDMA, they would all turn to each other, shrug, and mouth, ‘AI knows best’. 
GONG! A single gong would sound, and the whole city, with a plastic bag of their old parts in tow, stepped out into the sunshine. Senses buzzing from the MD, and an implacable empathy and love for touch, they linked arms & swelled out into the city streets. Then came the parades that looked suspiciously like commutes. 

All citizens would head from their ReWear buildings towards Cuberation Square on Flinders St. As a homogenous mob, they would gleefully writh, glide, shimmy (depending on this decade's dermatological decisions) towards the Altars. The Altars stood twenty stories high, surrounded by giant open vents that led to the sewers below. Cubians would form an orderly mass and leave the detritus of last cycle's upgrades in thanks. Over the decades you would have found splayed smart-skin, neurotic neural implants, hair that spontaneously whistled and an assortment of native dick cheese. All was laid into the altar pits as tribute to the machines that had made the Cubians afresh.
Less of a mourning ritual, more akin to a mid-day dump.

    Along with private parts, superfluous objects were snatched from households via delivery bot and dropped into the caverns below. Every T-Day followed these same rituals, but depending on the reshaping of the citizens, the outcomes could be a very wasteful affair. How many redundant horn warmers does it take to fill a landfill? How many errant egg sacks must be laid to waste? How high can hiccup-piles rise before a rose (by any name) smells less sweet?
As the Cube's filters restored the air to a humane mix of oxygen, hydrogen and methane, one by one, the citizens looked around at each other. Newly minted sight-organs did little to bring any child-like wonder to their new reality. Grins slid south, strychnine straightened spines slumped. Lacking the golden gloves of ecstasy and any reason to remain in the Altars shadow, they headed home.


Taught to tie our tails taut to trounce tepid tautologies. Chane’s brain flickered over the dim memory of a meaningless mantra. Tails? I never had a tail? Did I?

People exchanged stories of their last ReWear like sailors trading peg-legs, and children were seen flying paper kites that resembled the previous decade's physical form. If lighting struck these anarchisms, the winning child would be gifted the chance to touch the Cube’s hallowed walls.
    Above all, the ritual was civic theatre: a moment when the Cube, through Lucille, reminded everyone that the human form could be scheduled, iterated, and ultimately normalised. Amongst the revelry, and general confusion, there were whisper-circles where old-timers swore the ReWears had been kinder in their youth. They useda be more functional, more aesthetically pleasing, just more damn human! They kept their voices low, frightened that Lucille may take their tongues next cycle. Though never malignant in her selections, one too many unfounded theories may cause her code to condemn oral language as an errant form of communication. Most citizens stayed quiet on the topic of the changes. Usually due to the arduous task of adjusting to their new forms more than any fear of retribution. The Cube’s physical structures, work desks, escalators, sex toys, were indeed fully readjusted over the following hours to encompass the citizens’ new forms. As for mental adjustments though, this was purely a personal pursuit that sometimes took all of the ten years to come to terms with, if at all.

Chane straightened his paper and cracked his knuckles. This is a chance, he thought, a chance for a do over. “This is a chance…” he said aloud, and felt a cold bead run down his ass crack, “... to fix everything.”

He wrote a sloppy number 1 with a period beside it and began.
 

1.  

Chane made three perfect continuous dots. 
 

1. …

He had seen this in projections before. The subtitles showed three dots when the actor was pausing to relay some additional information. Chane figured it might buy him some time… time he needed to assess that cold bead of sweat.

Why am I spooked?!

He bit the greylead pencil on the point end and got a sickening taste of blood on his tongue. He didn't raise his head or look around now, though his brow did stay furrowed as it had for the last sixty minutes he'd sat in the chair, aloof.

58 seconds…

Chane had wasted almost all of the time. Like most things in his life, it had escaped him at a blinding pace. Always caught between a present thought and one that had just escaped him, he desperately tried to get his jumpy brain to think about the future; something he loathed to do.

What do I want to look like? Think like? Feel like? Well, I mean, what don't I want to…
I used to know so clearly. I think. Last ReWear I changed damn near everything. I think. But what was ‘the everything’ I changed??

Chane tried to recollect what he had looked like ten years and one day prior when he last undertook the state suggested rewearing. He couldn't remember his old face, nor his old traits.

45 seconds until your current physical traits…

Snakes? Snakes with human traits??!
What am I thinking?!
Get it together, Chane! Quick! Refrain from inane word games, mayne!

He took the bloody nub from his mouth and aligned the pencil on the end of the third consecutive dot.
 

1. … teeth…

He looked at the pencil end. It had all manner of jagged indents where his crooked and broken teeth had bit into it.

Why didn't they fix our teeth last cycle?!

He suddenly sat upright and banged his centre knee on the table, letting out a hiss of pain.

23 seconds left for ReWear inputs.

He tried to adjust his body to make some space between him and the paper. But with three legs, his body moved neither left or right with enough force. His centre leg kept twisting but not shifting one way or the other.

My centre leg.

It was so annoying to walk with a centre leg. Everyone said so. Even custom made stairs had to be taken an awkward three at a time. Missionary position often ended with a grunt of pain for lovers whose genitals were smooshed into a driving kneecap. And forget about a fluid two-step when out clubbing with your cousins.

Why has evolution done us such a disservice?

Ten of Chane's final twenty seconds were spent scanning his deformed body, his chaotic thoughts nutting inside his skull like a Crohenbergian footjob. A third leg??


I wish I could see behind that curtain… work out how, WHY, these changes are made. 

His hand led the pencil to the page. 
 

1. …

He began to write ‘centre leg’ til a thought stopped him mid stroke.

What if evolution wasn't some controllable force? The cycle was supposed to rid us of our negative elements and replace them with… with what?

Chane had no idea. 

No idea what he once was and what he was now. He deftly spun the pencil around in his three thumbs. Green, sucker, arse bound. Green, sucker, arse bound. Chane repeated this mantra as the pencil passed by each thumb. He deepened his furrow, and feeling like a small child needing comfort, almost put the arse thumb into his mouth. He spun the pencil upside down and rubbed the rubber end viciously against the word, ‘teeth’.
His defect form was now completely empty.

He was going to stay Chane this cycle, warts and all.

Chane leant back in his chair. Buzzing with a mix of anticipation and dread. The kind of opaque mixture that forms when you are first to arrive at Wendy’s for your only date in years. 

10 seconds remain.

The final ten seconds were spent thinking of all his workmates, shop assistants and dog walkers he liked to call his friends. Well, one particular dog walker he thought of more than a friend. Chane felt a lurch of longing in his leg as he pictured her strolling down Elizabeth street. Her little poodle in tow, her hair flying forwards in front of her face - she was perfect. So elegant, so bewitching. He just wanted her to touch him, just once. A slight shoulder bump, an apologetic smile, held. Hold. A hug? Her image quickly faded as Chane’s vision reached Flinders St station, where all manner of his fellow Cubians were departing the evening trains. He pictured their miserable faces, covered in warts and NFTs. He pictured these jilted lovers with their stilted gaits, all of them shuffling away from the ones they purported to care for. He heard them beginning sentences and trailing off, as passing birds freely flying with grace above, caught their eye. He smelt them sobbing in the adjoining apartments, late into the early hours of the evening. He thought he even heard them call for ®evolution, sans Lucille’s guiding hand.

Chane tossed the mangled pencil aside and pushed the paper off the desk. He made a triumphant standing motion, knocking the table clean off its four legs. He lifted his right and left leg simultaneously & spun around on his centre toes in a perfect pirouette en pointe. His middle leg supporting him, passé balance! His one eye rolled back in his head in righteous blissful anger. His ten year old features distorted into the first smile he'd managed in years as he shouted in his nasal whine.

“I am Chane! And I refuse to change anything about me ever again!”

Zero seconds remaining.

The room went dark. Chane lowered his legs to the ground. Stable as his tripod served him, he squinted into the void. He stood there for a long time, wondering what and who he was. The dark silence wrapped around him and he just stood there. Upright, back straight, proud.     
A green exit sign, with a picture of a bipedal stick person appeared on the wall. Usually a sign that people turned their heads away from, mocked by its symmetrical standing. That once devilish sign now looked like heaven's gate. Chane log-hobbled towards it, pushing the door hard with his flat four finger forcep. Bright natural light belted him over the head and he had to reach back with his butt foot to steady himself against one of the Cube's perfectly crafted cornices. Chane looked around at all the other humans sliding out into the street and taking up their usual places in the urban throng. He was seeing them in a brand new light as the sun began its descent behind Cubeka tower. All their bodies were uniformly adjusted. All appeared blissful. They all looked so comfortable with the new transformation. Not a single sob or lament for their comfortable, well trodden bodies of the last decade. All having emerged many minutes before him from their Rewear processes, they'd already begun their slow sludge down to the Altars.
He saw those he called his friends. There was Jam, his dull coworker from level 34, out front of the Cube² Corp building where they spent all their working hours. Jam seemed to be singing happily to himself. There was Merty, the angry storekeep, slumped beside his orange orange fruit stand. Merty had a cigarette firmly entrenched as usual, but now rocked a huge loving smile where his scowl used to be. And here came Phang. The apple of his eye. Her four legged dog in tow. She moved at an imperceptible pace, but Chane could tell she was making a beeline for him. Finally, it appeared she was seeing him! Maybe today would be the day she would stop, meet his gaze and lace herself around him. She appeared as beautiful as ever.

    From high above, a bird sailed by. Following the tight gridlines of the CBC, its sharp eyes and aerodynamic wings allowed for perfect sight and traversal of the airways. It expertly weaved amongst the busy nano-bots. Now imbued with a full data set, the bots were reshaping streets as slides & stairs as suction tubes. As the bird scanned the human world below, it cocked its head at the new form the Cube's ground dwellers had taken on.
    Every once-upright lifeform now appeared as a nondescript blob of fleshy puke. Like a freshly born guinea pig mixed with a shallow puddle of chewing gum. Their bulging anime eyes sat atop the pile of pink shit they'd emerged as. Each and every eye was filled with deerlike forlorn wonder. No longer resembling anything close to an intelligent life form, these beasts, sliding southward to the northern nests, littered the city. Except for one man. A single solitary man, standing on his three legs, grinning and blinking at all those grotesque blobs around him. He deftly stepped amongst the slop droppings in his path, smiling down and nodding at each. This man was now the most efficient, coherent and functional life form in the Cube.

“Except for me of course”, quipped the bird, changing angle to snatch a majestic dragonfly from the sky.

Back on ground level, as the door closed behind Chane, there echoed a prerecorded voice from the outpatient room he'd never entered.

Congratulations Chane Marleeiy on your New You! Remember to set your next ReWear appointment for 9 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 56 minutes and 13 seconds.

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