Reaching Flesh.

By "Jackalope Girl."

The cold gray fog occluding this San Francisco street is an annoyance, a prickling across my carapace that takes my mind away from the only thing that matters - the data. I'm only dimly aware of the particulars of the datasets I'm working on: studies on dieting, packaged-up bonds, security video feeds. But it's not about the set, it's never _been_about the set, it's about the panopticon view the chucklefucks in business have handed me willingly, the electric eye that hangs over billions of people in trillions of time-points who will never even know I'm there. I'm tearing through the sets in my hindbrain, typing up terminal one-liners without even looking. But this one point keeps fumbling up my hands. It makes me wish I never set up the stim-sensors.

Betty's a great woman and a wonderful Body. Biggest ally of the gene-mod movement I ever knew, probably would've gone under the knife herself if she weren't so squeamish about that sort of thing. She teaches intro to anthropology at the city college on Tuesdays and Thursdays, lives almost exclusively on hole-in-the-wall chinese takeout, and every other Saturday she pretends to be me while I inhabit her mind. It's an idiotic, tedious arrangment, one gene-mods would stop doing in a second if it didn't mean getting caught by the cops. I can feel the cold rattle against the eczema on the outside of her hands, while the Chai Latte she's holding warms her palms. Written on the paper cup is "Joanne," a name that's been dead to me a long time now. She keeps walking down, watching the cars and bikes rush through the twisting streets. She thinks to me: Was there anything else you needed, Analyst?

Pick up some groceries with my card while you're out, I think back as I train an ML model on ten thousand images of dogs.

Why? I thought you had groceries delivered every few weeks.

I've been forgetting. And I have to keep them off the trail of Bay Medical Services. If they ever found out how much nutrient paste I was buying, I'd be busted that day.

I feel her nod to herself in assent and keep walking. I feel a prickling of anger at Betty, and I stamp it down, denouncing it as irrational thinking. I went under the knife because I wanted to become a god. And I have. I'm conducting six separate data science tasks at once, seeing the world like no human could, my eight hands whirling around a world of information. And yet, some small part of my frontbrain still has to pay attention to the day-to-day tasks of the long dead fictive person Joanne Wheeler.

That part of me notices something that catches my proverbial eye. In a short blur, I watch Betty walk by a row of wheat-pasted posters stuck to a brick wall lush with graffiti. The sort of thing the young, anarchist Joanne would put up, propagandizing freedom for gene-mods. I normally dismiss this sort of thing as childish and small-minded, but there was something about the design that caught me off-guard. My typing speed goes down by 4 WPM.

Betty, could you turn around and take a look at that wall?

She almost jumps at my thought. I almost never make requests of her - it's inconsiderate to treat a Body like a personal puppet, and I'm not really interested in meatspace anyway. Of course, she obliges, but I can feel her confusion, an endocrine cocktail that pulses across her skin.

When she does turn around, I gasp. Not a human gasp, more a sucking-in of air from my front pores, but it conveys the same emotion. The poster depicts a mass of human hands interlocked with one another in impossible ways, overlapping, turning in on each other. the arms they are connected to have no terminus, no body, but yet in their clasping I saw a deep sensuality. The arrangement of the posters themselves magnifies the effect, the art's duplication over and over increasing its beauty. I feel my own hands quiver a bit. 10 WPM lost.

Around the work is written:

THE PEOPLE'S ART GALLERY PRESENTS

REACHING FLESH, A NEW EXHIBIT FROM ALICE VAN BUREN

2/11/2067

Thanks, Betty. I shake my abdomen a bit and get back to typing.

What's up? I didn't know you were interested in art.

I'm not. I just found this… amusing.

***

Amusing. Amusing. Great word choice, Analysis God. Doesn't matter. Betty finished her grocery run and took the sensors out. Now it's just me and the data.

Conduct a sequence alignment of ten thousand patient DNA strands. Enhance this algorithm for identifying cheaters in a casino. Eextrapolate the distribution of the remaining honeybee population from this dataset and make future projections. The fixers know I'm a gene-mod, even across my twenty corporate aliases. But that's their game. We get to pay back the black market surgeons and live our freaky lives, and they get to hire hyper-efficient labor at dirt cheap prices. We all hate each other - the gene-mods, the surgeons, the fixers - but we all reach out anyway, grabbing our little slices of the market and holding on, holding on to each other. Like hands overlapping…

Hands overlapping. Reaching flesh. Amusing. The image is burned into my eidetic memory, and it keeps flashing back, even while my pairs of eyes stare intently at columns, rows, code blocks. It all looks like hands to me. I've never seen art like that - art that captures the beauty of relational information.

An online search for Alice Van Buren won't hurt my productivity margins too much, I think.

I'm dead wrong. All of her art is like that. Hands reaching, legs intertwining, anatomical diagrams of a beast that's just twelve stomachs in a row. Fleshy unmodded humans would call it grotesque. I love it. It all conveys an anger that's so hot that it turns into love, a love that flies off the screen and hugs me tight. I haven't felt so spoken to in years.

Zero words per minute. The everpresent flow of information of my hindbrain rolls to a stop, and I curl my body around to get a good look at a single monitor. I stop working for a full two hours. I dig a dusty microphone from my workspace and call up Betty.

"Oh, uh, hey! Is, uh, something wrong? Is there an emergency?" We never talk. She just puts on the sensors every two weeks, and I never message anyone otherwise. It's a breach of operational security.

"No, no, all is well." My voice comes out with a whining rasp, the jingle of a chain link fence and the scratch of nails on chalkboard. "I wanted to ask if you'd be available to go to that art gallery with me tomorrow." It's hard to speak - it was an afterthought in my design, as I primarily communicate through typed messages. But Betty never reads her texts.

"Oh yeah, I wasn't really planning on doing anything. It could be fun! What's gotten you into this all of the sudden? You're not really the type to, you know…"

"I don't know, I just thought it'd be amusing," I say, and something like a laugh comes out from my cloaca.

***

The people's art gallery was not the sort of event that Betty would ever go to. So it's a good thing that tonight she's not Betty, she's Joanne.

Punks of all shapes and sizes congregate in a series of semi-legal tent installations in Golden Gate Park, chatting and laughing and enjoying the comfort of the in-group. Chromed-up cyborgs show eachother their newest gear: camera-eyes, prosthetic arms, neural links, their silver gleaming in the night. _Amateurs._Witches cast their circles, Vegans serve their soups, so on and so forth. They've all come to show each other their art: paintings, music, food, zines, their own bodies.

Of course there's not a single gene-mod there; there never could be. We have to stay in our squats, hiding from the world, being good and doing the work we're given. I've let my bosses know I'm sick today - an absurdity, but one they'll have to tolerate just this once.

What's going on? You're not normally so on edge.

I didn't realize I was broadcasting my thoughts. I close my mind to her. Never mind. I'm just… burned out, I guess. She laughs. Another absurdity. Anyways, go up ahead! I think I see it.

In a small clearing of the trees, a series of canvases are arranged in a circle, illuminated by suspended string lights. As Betty entered the circle, I can't help but feel a sense of reverence. The ring of art, the ethereal lights, the night air, the forest - it feels religious.

One place where meatspace beats out cyberspace completely is in the realm of fine art. An image of a painting can never convey to you its size and its texture. I had missed an entire dimension of Alice's work.

Her paintings are enormous. They tower above me no matter how far back my Body stands. The size of them assaults me. Her hearts and livers and breasts wrench their way into my mind. I feel as if I am seeing each part of the human body for the first time, as it truly is. No associations, no symbolism, just the organ itself. I imagine seeing other things the same way -- the number 5 as just a series of strokes and not a piece of data. An impossibility, and yet Alice has opened the way.

"You look like you're in a trance," a thin voice says. Betty turns around and sees a white face with deep blue eyes and blonde hair that frames her skin like a photo. I've seen the face before. Alice Van Buren.

I realize two things in this moment: I am in love with Alice Van Buren, and that by being in love with Alice Van Buren, I mean that I am in love with the concept of her, of her mind, of the interplay of her paintings and my eyes, and not this sack of flesh. Alice's body is beautiful, but in the hollow way of all unmodded beauty: an accident of random mutations, not a carefully planned work of art like her paintings.

Even so, I decide I must get through to the artist that resides within the accident. I have to know how she makes these things, these works that have made me throw away my passions to stare at them.

Betty, please, talk to her. For me.

Um, what do you want me to say? This isn't exactly my scene.

I don't know, you know me, what would Joanne have said?

"Yeah, they are sort of hypnotic. It's really something to see all these body parts out of context. It's like they show you what an arm really looks like. And the colors are so rich!"

Alice pauses for a few seconds, blinking. "Thank you, I appreciate it. Most people don't see what I'm doing in regard to context. It's why I left high art for the DIY scene."

"You're Alice herself then? Nice to meet you. I'm Joanne."

She gives a small wave. "Nice to meet you, Joanne. Are you an artist here too?"

"I hang around the scene, but I'm only sort of an artist. An information artist, you could say." Alice giggles. Betty has a lecturer's way with words. I would never have come up with that. She continues, "and speaking of DIY, how are you liking the change? It must be quite the jump."

Alice puts a finger to her lips, thinking. My limbic system is doing acrobatics, chasing the consideration behind her eyes. "It's better, but to be honest with you, I'm a little lost. And a little overwhelmed - it's a bit embarrassing to be the belle of the ball, as you Americans like to say."

We do _not_like to say that! If I could laugh I would, all my hands are curling up. I feel like a teenager.

She sighs. "I haven't even gotten a chance to check out the other artists yet! I feel selfish. This is the people's art gallery after all."

I freeze. This could be my only chance. Betty, please, ask her if she'd like to look around the place with you.

Um, are you sure? This feels a little weird for me, you know.

Please. I'll owe you a favor. Ten favors. I'll cover your takeout budget for a week.

Deal.

"Well, if you'd like some company, maybe we could take a look around together?"

Alice pauses again, weighing options. "I'd like that," she says.

And off we go, critiquing paintings and flipping through zines and sampling meals. All the while we share our thoughts with each other, remarking on the merits of the pieces and the memories they bring up for us. Betty is a wall between us, and to be sure I want nothing more than to break through it and speak to her directly. Even so, it's the most fun I've had in years.

Some EDM types have set up an impromptu dance floor, where their bodies are packed in tight, moving to their AI-generated music. Alice looks at me, raises an eyebrow, and beckons me to come forth. I'm giddy. I can feel Betty's apprehension, but she powers through. She steps into the mosh with her, but the next time Betty looks up, she's gone. She looks all around for her, but it's impossible to see in the crowd.

_Woah, she just disappeared,_Betty thinks, you okay?

Yeah, I'll be fine.

We stood there together, adrift in a sea of overlapping hands.

***

Why do I keep lying to Betty? I'm a wreck.

I really am a bad friend, breaching all of the regular norms of Gene-Mod/Body relations to go chase after a woman who doesn't know me, who could never know me. To use a Body for personal romance is an ethical nightmare, not to mention just plain weird.

And why should I care? My sex organs are either in cold storage or bolted onto someone else. All the hormones of infatuation no longer flow through either of my brains, remodeled to support only the execution of pure logic. And god damn it, I love it that way.

Do I? Or is that just synthetic genetic programming? Joanne dreamed of being a gene-mod, but she had other dreams, too. Dreams of liberation, dreams of free people. And dreams of finding love. Did I really throw that all away to become a freak, a beast that does the dirty work of the big corporations I used to hate?

Oh, cut the melodrama, Analyst. You're for crunching numbers, not philosophizing. Get back to work. Create a real-time model of the Ecuadorian supply chain and identify points of weakness. Report on best possible avenues to improve efficiency in the Synthetic Barrier Reef project. Market Research on Citadel Paint Co.'s consumer base and - wait.

Row 1495847 of that paint database. Customer ID JXC8321. Order made to San Francisco on 12/16/2066. Two Liters Beige 21, One Liter Red 6, Two Liters Brown 7.

This is insane. I'm being creepy.

I pull up the memory of Reaching Flesh in my mind. I remember each brushstroke in perfect resolution. By hand, I transfer the memory into a digital image and analyze the color hexcode of each pixel. They're the same paints.

This is insane. There are millions of paintings.

Analyze every single painting from San Franciscan Artists publicly released to the internet since December. Database formation is trivial. Conduct a hypothesis test, where the null is Reaching Flesh. No other painting falls within even a 90% confidence interval. Fail to reject the null.

Alice Van Buren's credit card number is staring right in front of me.

This is insane. I'm a fucking pervert. The media is right about Gene-Mods, we're nothing but freaks who have abrogated ourselves of human morals.

I have a dataset of credit cards and associated purchases for a job I did for a banking conglomerate a few weeks ago. I check it, and they've forgotten to deny me access now that the job is done. Nothing left to do but search for her number.

On her card is multiple hundred-dollar purchases to Bay Medical Services.

My frontbrain continues to throw up excuses - she's got a sick grandparent, maybe she just likes nutrient paste, maybe I've got the wrong card. But my hindbrain is all in on the hunch. Hacking into citadel paints is a cakewalk, and I send her more paint cans than she might ever need. I draft a letter, too, and send it to the same address.

Your paintings make more sense now than they ever have.

-An Information Artist.

***

The first week after, I work with newfound vigor, always dreaming of what she might do when she sees my message. The second, I start to fret. What if I have the wrong idea? But I assure myself she's just working on a response. The third, I'm a wreck all over again. I've just sent a random person a creepy letter, or worse, I've sent perfect, unmodded Alice a stalkerish note. Zero Words Per Minute.

When I'm out with Betty, I ask her to go down to Mel's Drive-In and get a veggie burger, fries, and a milkshake so I can remember what it tastes like. It doesn't help. We eat in silence. When she's almost done with the last of her fries, I blurt out what I've done. Am I a monster, Betty?

Unfazed, she eats another fry. Of course not. It's a vicious cycle. You can't go outside, not really, and the only real contact you have with the outside is through your data jobs. They set you up to do this through the law, so they can call you a pervert and justify the laws all over again.

I mull that over. Is it weird how completely I've fallen for her? We only spent an hour together, and even then it was through you.

Cut out this pity party, Analyst. You're clearly touch-starved in every sense of the word. You're allowed to love someone. Now come on, we still have errands to do.

***

Winter turns to spring. All that means for me is that the heat wave management tasks start rolling in. I'm mostly back to normal now, starting to feel my love for data science once again. I'm on a tear, seven simultaneous jobs, when a sunbeam hits my eye and breaks my concentration. The other difference between winter and spring. I shift up the wall and move to close the curtains on my tiny basement window. That's when I see it.

A mural on the wall opposite my squat. It's gargantuan. Overlapping hands, but this time they all form a series of concentric circles, with one hand reaching out from the center, beckoning me to grab on.

I don't even have to go back to my computer to see the cipher hidden in the paint colors, which reads, Come to me, Information Artist, and we'll make art together.

How could I have missed this? My answer was only a lift of my head away. A wild need fills me. I disconnect the locks on my feeding tubes, stringing them out from my carapace and throwing them to the floor. I wriggle across my room, an unused maintenance closet. I pry open a sewer grate and push through.

Moving hurts. I was designed to lay on a cushion 24 hours a day - locomotion was a secondary priority. I have no limbs for movement - walking on my hands feels the same as it would for a human. It's disorienting, but I muddle through, clinging to the walls as I shimmy across the tunnels. In my mind, the route is already calculated. Halfway through, I stop, heaving air through my pores. I feel like I'm going to die. I hear a maintenance crew in the tunnels, about to round the corner. But I can't let this be the end. I hear her _come to me_in my mind, louder than any data cell ever has. Some remnant of animal determination in my genome kicks in, and I hide in an access shaft, wait for them to leave, and press on.

I don't know if hours, days, or weeks pass. But I make it. I lift myself through the grate. and I see her.

The Flesh Artist's neck undulates, shifting across the room to look at me as I crawl towards her. She has six sets of eyes on her diamond-shaped head, all different shapes - a half dozen ways of seeing. They all blink down at me in different intervals. Her gaze is kind.

"I-" I start to speak, but she lifts a long tentacle and presses it against my cloaca, shushing me. Her tentacle-tips are paint brushes. They smell like a studio. Two more tentacles press against me, holding me. I realize she's putting stim-sensors on me.

You came to find me, she thinks.

Well, you are the belle of the ball, aren't you?

No laughter. We are beyond that. I can feel her joy.

I am so sorry I left you there, when we met. I suspected that "Joanne" was just a Body, but I couldn't be sure, and Greta said she wanted to stop.

I put my hands on her tentacles. Her arms are so much longer than mine. Mine are for typing, hers are for painting. Form that follows function, fitting together perfectly. I understand. I'm sorry I had to use the tactics I did to find you.

Oh, shush. I expected it. I hoped my art would help me find other gene-mods.

Then maybe I could help you with that. Create a new kind of medium, like your message-painting. Cryptographic messaging smuggled through art. Find even more mods. A medium that becomes a movement.

I bask in her warmth, her exaltation in finding someone who understands. She picks me up in her tentacles and sets me down on her chest, where we both stare at a blank canvas.

No time to start like now, and I'm not sure if it's my thought or hers.