Posthuman Blues

From "The Symbiosis," by Mac Tonnies:

The girl pretended not to hear. "I propose a symbiosis," she said, kneeling on the filthy ice. She began to change into a fleshy, enigmatically contoured insect, fragile-looking grappling claws crowning all six doubly jointed limbs. Her human face receded into the body with a pneumatic sigh, nose and mouth vanishing as the eyes expanded, casting a viridian glow on the ice, transforming the desolation into an emerald tapestry.

Her back became a broad shell capped by the vestigial bumps of her spinal column. Entranced, Franz watched the shell divide in two, forming a tapering slit that writhed muscularly before opening to reveal the glint of electronics. Tendrils extended from the fissure's rounded lip, beckoning with the dreamy undulations of an anemone.

Franz, bathed in green light, removed his head from his torso. Motors buzzed in protest as the skin of his neck expanded and tore, bloodless. The fragile stump of his spinal column sprayed a fine mist of lubricant into the air. It alighted on his disembodied lips, black and sour as ink.

His body sagged and fell into a twitching, bony heap on the frozen pavement. The tendrils radiating from the beetle-like shell grasped his head, hefting it as precisely and gently as an archaeologist might transfer an ancient and invaluable sculpture to a padded shipping crate. The shell closed and fused into a seamless oblate.

Tendrils plunged up Franz's nose and thrust eagerly through his ears. He reentered the urgent landscape of the sim's thoughts, his memories and desires mingling with his host's in a spontaneous neuronal tide.

The insect-like body began skittering down the street as if trying to outrun an invisible predator, clearing broken glass from its path with deftly flicking spatulate antennae.

Brittle, nascent wings detached from the insect-thing's gleaming thorax, as scintillating and elaborate as stained glass.

Through a momentary rift in the clouds, the moon glowed full and orange.