The Man Who Was Bones
As he looked around him, standing at the photocopier as he was, he couldn’t help but notice that while his skin remained his own as did his organs and his mind there was something else on top of him that prevented his mind from controlling his body. It was another layer of skin, identical to his own, but floating about a millimetre or so, most likely much less, above his own skin and his own body. It was like he was the skeleton to another organ.
He was a body trapped inside a remote control body which is no body for a body to be in.
He looked around at his coworkers doing what they wanted to do with their bodies. They reminded him of supple, shell-less lobsters. Pink and raw in their free will.
He would have sighed and got back to work but his remote controlled body prevented his mind controlled body from doing so. He briefly wondered who had done this to him before he burst into tears.
——-
And he stood there at the photocopier in his suit and his skin and his life and his shell. He couldn’t help notice that while his own skin was protected his fellows’ were not. This was a recent development—his skin being protected—or not so much protected as encased. That’s how it was and how these things go. There was a tough outer coating—made of of carbon nano-fibres he guessed—but it could have been anything. That was just a guess. It stood less than a fraction of a millimetre, hovered, rather, above his skin. It would look and feel to an independent assessor like a regular skin. Like his own regular skin, he guessed. All he knew was that it wasn’t his and because it wasn’t his he wasn’t able to do the will that was his. His lobster shell, as he had come to see it in his mind, made it so that it was its own agenda that he carried out. If someone were to see the shell execute an action they would assume that it was of his own free will that the action was executed. It was neither of his own free will nor of his own execution that these actions were executed, however. The shell’s agenda was very mundane, almost exactly similar to his own, apart from the fact that the shell wished to impose its own agenda onto him whereas he had no such aspect to his agenda, just a wish to carry it out. He stood there at the photocopier while the shell made photocopies and glared at his coworkers through eyes that resembled, though were not, his own.
James Moran
