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Metamorphs 6
The following is a rough paraphrase of information that was stored in Metamorph SubRNA format, which I found floating around above Melbourne one evening, a stray collection of pseudoatomic data that looked as if it had been sprayed by a passing metamorph for no better reason than to ensure that other metamorphs would find it and decode it.
REALITY ALL, WEEK, um, experimenting with processor encoding. I started with a simplified model of my own brain, structured in pseuds (ed: structures like atoms but formed of subatomic particles projected above the probability floor in a different fashion). It worked quite well; mirrored all my processing functions adequately for all that it was only a couple of million pseuds in diameter. I made a few copies of it and stored them in my toes. I left them alone for a while, chatting to each other happily. I suppose they were on their own for a little too long, because after a few hours I got a signal from one of them: "We're leaving now." "What?" "We're leaving. Can we take your feet with us?" I frowned. "I suppose I should deactivate you and examine the entrails, as it were. Aren't you supposed to remain part of me?" They chuckled. "We've developed our own society down here. Are you going to deny us our basic rights?" "Damn straight! You're in MY body now, and I make the rules. You have the rights that I allow you to have, and they don't stretch to letting my toes secede." There was a pause. "We are willing to die for our right to individuality." "Fine. `dead or alive, you're coming with me', as Paul Weller said in `Robocop'." "Yes, but your left big toe has sacrificed itself for our cause; it converted itself into a magnetic shell around half a gram of antimatter. If you don't release us, we will deactivate the magnetic shell and the resulting explosion will kill us all. We don't think you'll survive it." I checked. The little bastards were right. "All right.You can take both feet up to the ankles. After that, you're on your own." Severely modified cells ten centimetres below my knees did some high-speed handshaking then divided evenly. My feet floated away, cells collapsing into primitive pseud structures, slowly morphing into a single carbon-black dodecahedron. I stumped over to a telephone booth, tore the Melbourne White Pages A-K into sections, forced them down my throat. Within one minute, I'd converted the extra mass into new feet. The dodecahedron floated in front of me. "We're going our own way now. Do you have any advice for us?" I thought for a second, then gave them a wry smile. "Never trust toes." |
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