He sat there with his mouth hanging open, trying to wrangle together the loose thoughts in his head. He felt like a shepherd of a herd that had been infected by a virulent strain of rabies. A few solutions seemed to flirt close to his conscious eye as he spun his cognitive knobs searching for answers. Are helmholks always yellow? Are tractor beams only composed of red-shifted photons by design? The pamphlet in his hand held no answers, but he continued his show of studying it intently. Reading the gibberish language while diverting his awareness from its meaning. At least the top of the pamphlet made some sense. It read: Eye Cosmetics of the Third Kind. Below the title was a beautiful figure. Genderless, but favouring softer features. It possessed the biological attributes of his species perception of beauty: wide mouth like a sliced cantaloupe, pursed lips like fruit of palm, cheeks squeezing from the surface like the rising of fresh dough, and eyes – three of them – large and innocent. The third one was not a standard feature. It would have sprung directly from this model’s forehead over the course of a few days of medical management. The shot of this model was wide enough that it captured four breasts hanging from the chest, four polished milk sacks pivoted into emblems of attraction. During the ancient times, the market for breasts had been solely monopolized by female births. Now, breasts were like the modern adornment of jewelry. Two shoulders supported four arms, held out and intervals of thirty degrees from the body, the elbows making air-filled cavities at right angles. The hands were supporting invisible pillows against the pull of gravity. It’s skin was the color of blue that had been dragged through a cheese cloth.

Stem cells were the masterminds at play here. Once people broke free of the embryological shackles that bound them to forever be a starfish made of flesh, bodily images went on some fantastic fashionable freewheeling. He recalled a decade when it was popular to transplant the buttocks and the face. The natural tendency was for everyone to then walk around on their hands and knees, so hence hands were replaced with more knees. Hands were put elsewhere like near the bottom of the spine (which was now the neck of the new face). Innate biological attractions went into overdrive and bore some interesting – and unknown – sexualized morphologies. Psychology research took two decades to catch-up and develop medicines to thwart the amalgamations before they became mainstream. One person was famous for covering their entire body with ear holes, sans lobes. Responses to ASMR sounds was literally body convulsing. A classic case was a man who grew breasts in various shapes such as a duck or a trombone. Particularly fashionable was the face of famous celebrities such as the Queen of England. Real eyeballs were sometimes used as adornment to enhance the (first-person) viewing experience.

Bodies were not just for the use of pleasure though, and some engineers started manufacturing augmentations for the intended task. A metal-worker benefited from a twice-enhanced shoulder blade and hands with eight fingers in a star pattern, which allowed for stable grip and supported lifting. Those with scoliosis tendencies regrew supporting spine structures. Futurists once believed that the trajectory for computer interface technology was for computers to appeal more to human-like interactions, for example via natural language. None predicted the orthogonal result which was for humans to edit themselves to interface better with computers. It’s not uncommon to identify a software engineer by their number of fingers. Twenty, forty, and even one-hundred present levels of commitment to their trade. The basis for editing one body is that the self-identifying controller – the brain – stays in-tact and keeps the person constant between body transformations. But if brainless, these body assemblies can be treated more as construction tools. Cranes are the great symbol of the steel-age in early humanity, haulers of the heavy and piercing the sky with their matte yellow rigidity. Now, these are made of flesh. They bend and sway and wobble and heave, and look just like a giant human arm that has sprung from the roots of some human-plant hybrid seed. An array of internal muscles and an interface for a human driver make lifting of steel rods a trivial automation. Monitors have arms to shake your hand when you greet a friend in video chat, doors have smiles to project a human emotion on the opener, security cameras are the acute eyes of hawks proliferated aplenty inside a self-operating mesh of wire, and taps are mouths that smile to you as they drool out water.

He stopped trying to read the pamphlet just then. His thoughts had been interrupted by someone calling his name from the waiting room.

“Edmond Joyce? Ah, there you are. Come right this way please. How are you today? Doctor Frenk is waiting for you in this room to talk to you about your concerns. Here you are right this way…”