Beantown Bug

Needless to say, the idea that my brother and I were alone in a city, that had just yesterday filled its streets with 650,000 people, left me in something of a stupor. It was completely mindboggling. What sort of force could move that many people in, what? Six hours? I’d been up past midnight, and I only went to bed at around two. I woke up at eight, and now, all of this?

This couldn’t be a dream, I’d been conscious for far too long. I knew I was sober. There was no explanation for anything, other than that it just happened. No real reason. Maybe I was in some sort of sci-fi VR tube? But then, how did I get in the tube? Or, was I in it the whole time?

Shit, what if The Matrix was real? Am I about to be swarmed by agents?

The longer I stood there, with my face pressed up against the brick wall of a nearby building, the weirder things got. At some point, the mental list of possibilities went far beyond my control. It wasn’t even conscious thought anymore. My list grew sublists, and then the sublists grew sublists, and the sublists of the sublists had their own branches, too. There isn’t anything inherently bad about that sort of thing, but when you have ten different lines of thought going at once? That’s when things get a little fucky. I was only vaguely aware I was lying in the middle of the sidewalk, I had to put so much focus on keeping my head straight.

If anything, the harder I tried, the worse it got. At some point, my brain just gave up and scrambled itself.

My and mind I could barely was make running this out wasn’t own wild normal thoughts, much my knew. This I was that wasn’t ever living fuck? How supposed to what in. I mean, the thoughts I was drowning! I eight me’s one couldn’t parse think sequence, two, talk at three different Peters, four, five, six in my own, seven, even if I eight different — thoughts once! Eight I all like at it was there were in my head. Eight, all trying to once this wanted to, shit!

Then it was quiet. The lists were done, everything was where it should have been, and I’d organized all the possibilities. Despite being incredibly confused by what had just happened, I was confident I knew the cause all of this: magic! Duh! If there’s no proper explanation, just assume it’s magic. But, how could it be magic? Magic doesn’t—ah, shit, I shouldn’t have asked.

Magic sufficiently is advanced magic, technology that’s any all is there is indistinguishable to from it magic. So or does that is mean magic our magic technology is technology? Is what do think—

“That car is fucking blue!” I roared, pointing my hoof at an old, 90s era sedan. “I am lying on the ground!” I propped myself up against the nearest wall. “These bricks are burgundy! The sidewalk is gray and it’s made out of concrete! Tarmac is black! It’s also concrete, but bound by a substance known as asphalt, which turns into pitch at processing, where it is then mixed with the grain! That is why people call it asphalt, but they’re wrong! They should be calling it tarmac, because that is correct! I think.”

Dumb as I felt, shouting basic observations for all to hear, it was what kept me from turning into a drooling mess. Again. Whatever had happened, I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t just my body that had changed. Significant parts of my brain had probably been rewritten in the process. It was a natural assumption, considering I’d been transformed into a quadruped after a solid twenty-plus years of being a humanoid, and had the sort of basic development it took to hobble around on joints I’d only experienced for maybe an hour. But, without the initial rush of caring for my brother, things had slowed down significantly, and I now needed higher functions than ‘Ew, I look funny,’ and, ‘Wot.’ There was nothing to keep my new wiring in check, and the lights were all slowly coming on.

I was afraid. I could think faster than I could think think. I could think about dozens and dozens of different things, all at once, whether I liked it or not. Every new movement was accompanied by a blast of analysis. Stray, inconsequential thoughts were no longer stray, inconsequential thoughts: they were paths to be followed to their logical end. And whenever it got away from me, I would lose track of myself. I’d be completely absorbed by my thoughts. I could only imagine myself twitching around on the floor, foaming at the mouth as I thought of why they made stop signs into red octagons.

And as I pointed out the differences between the concrete in the sidewalk and the concrete in the road, to nobody in particular, I told myself that there had to be a better way. I had too much to do in too little time to being having a nuclear meltdown every time I had to exercise my critical thinking skills. Pointing out random things until I forgot what I was originally thinking about was most definitely not a sustainable practice. I needed to rein in this problem, and I needed to do it fast.

But not in the middle of these empty streets. I decided to return home. No use straying too far, and I had told my brother I’d only be gone for a few minutes.

When I got home, it was quiet, save for the sobbing of a broken man. I found my brother curled up on the futon. Occasionally, the splotchy, white and orange ball would expand in time to a gasp for air, before it’d settled back down to little whines and squeals of, “It’s all a dream,” and, “This isn’t real.”

So much for the carefully constructed ‘we are alone’ speech I had in mind. Still, I had to do something. We didn’t have time to sit around and cry like this. I sighed, or, I tried to sigh, and looked over to our giant, beautiful, plasma TV. Useless, now. There was nobody around to work the channels’ programming, so all we got was a blank screen. I wouldn’t bother flipping through the hundreds of channels in hope of finding something. If I did find anything, it probably wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Maybe an infomercial for a new vegetable dicer.

I turned back to Jake. I stared at him. This wasn’t a dream, and we both knew it. Looking at Jake reminded me of how I should be reacting. Just freaking out, losing any desire to do anything. Just the shock of it all. I had intended to comfort him, to maybe offer some words of encouragement.

But all I could do was stare at him. Stare at the dim, blue ball of light that floating near him. It moved whenever he did, and after a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t just near him, it was in him. Which was just great, because it meant that, on top of being transformed into some horrible, armored monster horse, being blessed with a supercomputing cluster for a brain, and all the other baggage that comes with such things, I’ve also been given X-ray vision for people’s soul-heart-things. Argh!

When I opened my mouth to speak, and maybe comfort him, all I managed was a strangled chirp.

Seeing my brother so broken was a reminder of what I should have been doing. Crying, screaming, flailing in a sea of denial. A reminder of just how fucked we were. I wasn’t me anymore. He wasn’t him anymore.

Really, I probably needed this. A good cry to start my day. To get it all out of my system, so I could focus on what really mattered. If we were the only two human beings left on this planet, were fucked six ways to Sunday. The world we knew would come crumbling down in mere hours, if it hadn’t already.

But I couldn’t even cry, really. I didn’t have the necessary equipment to cry. I couldn’t even fake it. Something inside grabbed onto the ‘I want to cry’ command, ran off into the distance, and buried it under a rock. Despair would be a waste of energy, and I was hungry—so my body told me—and looking at the little ball of light in my brother made my mouth water.

Salivating at somebody’s soul was a little hard to ignore. I mean, do you know what a soul tastes like? I don’t. My body does, but it won’t tell me. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt so excited for mystery meat. Either way, I certainly wouldn’t be eating my brother, because, well, he’s my brother.

I felt like a massive dipshit, just watching a man cry. But I was too busy dealing with all the mixed signals rushing through my body. Really, it was a small miracle my face wasn’t in the carpet at this point. It took far longer than I would have liked for everything to calm down. I wasn’t staring at some sort of meal, as my stomach wanted me to think, I was staring at an opportunity. I had a chance to to turn somebody’s frown upside down. I wanted that.

Not because, you know, this was my distressed brother, whom I cared for very deeply, but because of some other, nebulous reason. Because making people happy was good. It was a benefit to me, and I wanted to comfort my brother, not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I would get some reward out of it. So I thought. This reward wasn’t the warm fuzzies of doing a good deed, but something else, something… Something...

Fucking hell, the clock’s ticking, and here I am, contemplating my navel! I was going to do this, because Jacob was family, and I loved him as any brother would love his sibling. Not because I’d get a gold star.

I crawled onto the futon and clung to my brother for the second time that morning. This time, I didn’t have to wrestle my way around him. There was no struggling; only the quiet acceptance of a brother’s support. The sentiment went both ways.

Such went the first time I had hugged anybody even remotely in earnest in a long, long time. I wanted so badly to just take in the feeling, that reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that I had a shoulder to lean on through all the trials ahead. It was beyond mere temptation to close my eyes and bask in that warm glow. It was a need.

Then and there I understood what that nebulous reward was. Because I felt it. You know what it felt like? Elation, confusion, warmth, the lingering desire for more. Perfect stimulation. The beginnings of an addiction.

Your first orgasm.