The Bodily Anomaly of Luke Trent
short horror story
Luke Trent knew there was something wrong with him after he got out of the shower one day. He was brushing his hair with a fluffy towel when he felt a noticeable stiffness in his forearms. It didn’t hurt exactly, but there was something to the feeling that made it unusual. The closest approximation was the feeling people got after sleeping awkwardly over their limbs. Although certainly annoying, it was easy to ignore.
That’s what he did at first.
Days past and that moment drifted from memory as he went in and out of work as a warehouse associate for Walmart. Perhaps the stiffness would pop up when he was picking up a heavy box, or when he was checking his notifications, but nothing too noticeable.
Luke didn’t know the exact moment when he considered the emerging malady to be a real problem. These things tend to work in gradients. The frog doesn’t know it’s being boiled alive.
The stiffness he exclusively felt in his forearms soon gravitated to the rest of his body. Three weeks since his shower incident, he knew he couldn’t ignore it any longer. He talked to his girlfriend Jessica.
She asked, “are you having trouble walking? Eating? This issue of ‘stiffness’ seems quite vague.”
He responded, “It’s not really changing the way that I do my daily activities. I still complete my work on time. It doesn’t exactly hurt to do any of the things I usually do. It’s just this annoying tingling sensation, as if I’ve been struck with lightning. The ‘stiffness’ I guess comes up sometimes when I try to move myself in any way. It seems everything triggers it.” Exactly what “it” was lay beyond his comprehension.
Jessica, being her usual supportive and comforting self, laid her arms over Luke’s shoulders. She hated seeing Luke in such a state of confusion. She rubbed his shoulders in the pattern of giving him a massage with pity in her face that treated him like a poor puppy.
He brushed aside Jessica’s attempts at comforting him while looking into her, stating with the clearest tone imaginable, “I need help Jessica. Perhaps I’m not making myself clear enough for you, but I’m not sure what’s happening to me is anything normal.” He was visibly shaking.
“Well,” Jessica whispered in his ear, “maybe you can set up a doctor’s appointment. And besides, bodily stiffness and soreness are common side effects of working manual jobs. I truly worry about you.”
With his elbows atop his pillow, Luke muttered pathetically to his girlfriend, “this might sound crazy, but my body no longer feels like my own. That it’s sensing something that isn’t there.” He didn’t know if this made any sense to himself, let alone to Jessica, but it was the best explanation that lined up with his experience.
“Just go to the doctor and have it checked out,” Jessica said, giving him a sweet kiss on the cheek, “it’s probably nothing.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Luke repeated back to her, giggling as Jessica turned off the lights before they made love.
The next morning the stiffness worsened for Luke. Again, like he told Jessica the night before, it didn’t alter the way that he moved. It wasn’t the typical soreness that accompanied picking up boxes from one location to another at work. He had already undergone that repeatedly over the years and had even gotten used to that sort of stiffness. This was something else.
Something far stranger.
The doctor that was assigned to him was a rheumatologist by the name of Dr. Brian Mendel. He was an old Hungarian immigrant with wispy white hair and a cheerful demeanor. Luke was reassured by Jessica over the phone that Mendel was a miracle worker with her knee pain. Online reviews of his services were generally positive.
Dr. Mendel asked, “where does it hurt?”
Luke said, “it doesn’t hurt exactly. I started getting these odd feelings three weeks ago. I work in a warehouse, but this isn’t your typical stiffness. I’ve taken Tylenol, which usually does the trick of numbing the pain, but it hasn’t been effective in changing anything at all.”
“Mm hmm.” Dr. Mendel checked for inflammation in Luke’s joints. He came away from his analysis stunned.
“Luke,” he continued, “I can’t detect any issue. Have you considered the possibility that your issue might be psychological?”
Bewildered, Luke wanted to understand if he heard the Hungarian doctor correctly.
“No,” Luke started muttering as he hopped off, “I don’t think it’s psychological. It’s not like I’m insane doc. Look, there’s this sensation flowing throughout my entire body. My arms and legs will inadvertently stiff up randomly right before I’m about to pick something up, or when I move one foot out in front of me. I think it’s serious doc. Can you give it another check? Maybe you didn’t look hard enough.”
The doctor, in understanding the concern of the man, checked him again. This time he had Luke undergo an X-ray assessment to check for loss of bone cartilage or damage. Luke grumbled quietly in response, knowing undergoing an X-ray would cost him extra. Dr. Mendel didn’t expect to correct his initial diagnosis, and he was right.
“I truly believe,” Dr. Mendel said, “that you need to see a psychologist. There’s no inflammation. No bony erosions. No thinning of the joints. I could come up with a diagnosis, but that would go against my moral values as a health practitioner.”
Luke stormed out of the building without saying a word, pissed that this touted “highly recommended” rheumatologist couldn’t do jack shit about his problem.
The issue was something bubbling up under the surface. What was perceived by Luke to be an involuntary stiffening slowly and imperceptibly changed into him voluntarily stiffening his limbs. It was as if he made a last-minute course correction and decided, seemingly at random, to undergo the motion of stiffening his joints. Jessica asked Luke why he was stiffening his legs one night. Unlike the last time, he just shrugged to Jessica, now oblivious to the concern he used to have for himself.
Luke one morning tried to pick up his cup of coffee, and suddenly his arm moved to grab his bowl of cereal instead. Luke rationalized this movement as him simply changing his mind. An incident that happened later that day was when he was driving to work, when suddenly, just as he was about to make a right turn, he decided to make a hard left turn instead. If it weren’t for him slamming his breaks at the last minute, a mother and a crying four year old child would’ve been squashed under his wheels. He told himself he was tired.
What fully indicated the irreversible malfunction of Luke’s body took place later than same day when he tried to relax with a soothing chai latte from Starbucks. In front of all the other Starbucks customers, Luke’s body acted completely out of whack. His arms, legs, torso, and head started contorting in ways that almost seemed to break the laws of human bodily mechanics. He violently raised his legs over his shoulders. He broke his fingers one after the other in front of panicked onlookers. He then took these broken fingers and started jamming them into his eyes for all to see. He screamed while trying to rip out his tongue from his mouth.
The horror in all of this was that all these movements were totally voluntary. What was once an inkling of doubt morphed into the full exuberance of pushing the limits of what the body could do.
Luke was shortly thereafter sent to a nearby mental institution, and the seemingly odd thing about him during his stay was that these odd but voluntary movements of his stopped. Jessica talked to him to try and understand, but it was as if Luke had undergone short-term memory loss.
What Luke didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that none of his odd voluntary movements came from him. They were the practical machinations of a sociopathic thirteen-year-old boy who had crept into his father’s secret research laboratory looking over from hilltop the first AI-directed, fully remote, and neurologically controlled human population. It encompassed the size of a small city. The experiment was privately funded, secret, and highly unethical. Up until the maniacal boy directed the AI to bow down to his command, the experiment was being conducted more or less smoothly by a team of highly qualified professionals, with the test subjects totally unaware that their movements were being coordinated remotely. Its implementation was decades in the making. It was as if nothing was happening. A two-way mirror. Everything carried on after Luke’s incident with banal continuity.
Children and machines fully integrated into an all-consuming circuit…
