no skin? no tattoo? no problem!

That’s not exactly true. These skinless creatures, one of which I have had the accident¹ of becoming, never thought about getting a tattoo, never thought about having somebody draw on themselves. I find that a little more than interesting because they are into sleek, concise design. That’s plain to see with all the minimalist lines and forms in machinery, buildings and cars they’ve got seeming to blend into each other, fitting one piece into the other in a million different ways like some kind of universal design code permeated every shape and form of any piece of hardware no matter its purpose.
My old human body was turned to sludge before the code that is me got sent here by mistake. Apparently the other guy, the guy whose body I got, didn’t adjust to the accident as well as I did. Again, the training helped. I haven’t read the full report about how he did himself in, but I understand he had a totally bad reaction to all that skin. It wasn’t the skin so much as the sensory input bombarding a brain that was essentially a piece of hardware of essentially the same design–so he could have made it work if he would have just calmed down, like I did–but with a radically disparate set of I/O devices. We take skin so for granted. It’s very, very sensitive stuff compared to, what, no skin, I suppose.
I’m still trying to find out what he thought about the tattoos, the ones I had on my old body, the body of the guy whose body I got and who got mine. Does that make any sense? So, when he came to, did he look at his new arms and legs, the arms and legs that were supposed to be mine, and freak out more about the skin or the pictures on it or both? Probably the skin part got to first. I’ll bet he didn’t even get a chance to process what the pictures, the tattoos, were.
Waking up with the bony frame I was in wasn’t exactly the gentle moment of consciousness I had been coached to expect. Nobody knew what had happen. Not even me. I was feeling a bit like a robot, all stiff and rigid around the edges. Hot and cold didn’t register with the whole body like we are used to as humans. Everything, practically all tactile and ambient information came in through the antennae. Imagine all the temperatures, vibrations, surface textures² scents, tastes, aromas, stinks and anything chemical coming in through a couple of fingers, long, long fingers, or better yet, tongues, two long, dry tongues attached to the sides of your forehead. Got it? So instead of all this information being distributed and diffused throughout a body, it all comes in through two very sensitive, highly intense channels. Filtering all the stimuli takes practice. I never quite got it all down.
After a couple of weeks I quit playing around with this hardshell case of a body and so they started letting me walk around the compound. You know how ants can lift more than ten times their weight? Same here. It’s one of the trade-offs having an exoskeleton. I discovered I could pick up huge pieces of furniture, multiple hospital beds with their patients, cars, more cars and more stuff I didn’t even know what they were, until I got bored. I felt like more of a freak show than I actually was. I couldn’t tell myself apart from anyone else. The subtleties of physical appearances that reflected individuality were lost on me. Completely. Still, everyone seemed to know who I was even if I didn’t know who they were from anyone else.
One of my handlers left a supply pouch in my room, forgot to take it with him when he went off duty. Nothing in it made much sense to me. A couple of stylus-type devices were enclosed in cases that matched their form on the outside, a form that also fit nicely into the case as though they were one piece. I took those stylus things to be writing utensils. I had wanted to write some notes, keep a journal of these goings on since my arrival, the accident, but had been assured that record keeps were taking note of all things relevant or not that were happening to me. Okay. But I hadn’t seen anyone writing anything, taking any pictures or recording anything with any kind of device whatsoever. So, I was missing something or they were lying to me.
Teaching me the use of tools was one of their first attempts of a kind of physical therapy. That, and learning their language seemed to compliment each other in tandem. All I knew about grabbing and holding on to anything meant concentrating on the sensation at the tip of a tentacle, closing the thousands of pours that lined the thousands of follicles, embracing the surface of the object at hand, so to speak. Like all things, this took practice. By morning I could mimic the alphabet and draw. This seemed to please the staff all the next day, as though I had done what they’d hoped I would do. Fine with me.
They supplied me with more styli in more shapes and sizes than I’d thought practical. And the colors… I just didn’t get it. They’d provided me with over a hundred different pigment casings of what they insisted were the full range of natural, exotic, dull and metallic shades. No one seemed concerned when I mentioned they all looked exactly the same to me. One looked like the other. I sensed some amusement, but they let it go without comment as if it was something I would eventually figure out.
After drawing on all the surfaces available including all the walls and ceilings and floors and objects, each blending into the other, there was nothing else to cover. They promised to bring some more supplies the next day, and so I didn’t think anything of it. But I was bored. That’s when I started drawing on myself. I began recreating the tattoos that were my pride and joy of my human body.
You would have thought I’d set off a giant roach bomb and gotten out a giant magnifying glass and held it over the city. Lights and sirens, official announcements, everybody snapped to and manned their stations like they’d practiced and drilled their entire careers. Then silence. All the information coming through the two dry tongues on my forehead told me that the handlers and therapists who were handling and therapy-ing me were gone.