“Die with a T”
D-mat is the ultimate way to lose weight, right? One minute you’re there, the next you’re not.
Did you hear the one about the girl who wanted to lose weight? I mean, lots of weight, really badly. Being skinny was everything to her. She’d spend hours in front of the mirror, wondering what she could about it. She exercised. She starved. She smoked. She tried every diet, even the crazy ones. None of them worked.
It was all because of her boyfriend. He was one of those punishing douches who wouldn’t let a day go by without reminding her that she was fat. That he thought she was fat, I should say. Who knows what she really weighed? And what does that matter, anyway? If it really made such a difference to him that he went out with a stick insect then he didn’t deserve her anyway.
She tried, but of course that wasn’t enough for him. He had a friend who knew this guy (there’s always a guy–maybe one day they’ll learn how to use their powers for good) and he knew how to hack d-mat so it would change your pattern any way you wanted. Just step into a booth and run the hack. You’d be taken apart and then reassembled . . . different.
In desperation, the girl agreed to use a custom hack designed to slim her down. Only you can’t just tell the booth to take it off your thighs and tummy, because if you tell a machine to make you shorter, it’ll cut off your feet. They’re stupid that way. So she and her creep boyfriend instructed the machine to reduce the fat content in her entire body by ten percent. Because that sounds like it would work, right? If she weighed fifty kilos, that’s five kilos less of the stuff you don’t want, instantaneously. Quickest, most effective diet in the world. Hell, he thought, maybe they’d market it and make a mint. Black market it, of course, because dicking around with people’s patterns is beyond illegal.
And of course it was a dumb thing to do. Just don’t say it’s brainless, though, okay? You’ll spoil the twist.
Girl gets in booth. Charming BF turns on the hack. Zap, processing, zap–she comes back. But when the doors open, she’s gone.
Not gone in the physical sense. She’s there all right, and she looks exactly how he wanted her to look. She’s skinnier all over. She looks great, in fact, if you’re a superficial dickwad.
But there’s something missing. Something in her eyes. Something in the way she just stands there, staring at him without really seeing him. Something in the way she barely reacts when he waves his hand in front of her face.
She’s gone.
This boy, he’s a creep. We’ve established that. Well, what he does next goes so far beyond creepiness it practically leaves all words behind. He sees that she’s gone, but her body’s alive, and she’s gorgeous, and pretty soon he discovers that she’ll stand, sit, do pretty much whatever he tells her to do, like a puppet. She’s gone, but everything else is still there. Why would he call a doctor to check her out? Why get himself into trouble now she’s exactly the way he wants her to be?
Skinny. Compliant. Silent.
And all his.
He keeps her that way for a shockingly long time. That’s the great thing about having a girlfriend you’ve already browbeaten into slavery, practically: her friends have drifted away. They were used to her silence long before she disappeared for good. So when one of them occasionally wants to talk to her, he fobs them off in a way they misunderstand as his usual controlling behavior. It’s still controlling, but it isn’t usual. It’s total.
It’s probably lucky the girl is gone by then. At least, it’s good to hope she isn’t around for everything that happens after this point. You don’t want to know what he did. All you need to know is that of course she eventually puts on weight again. It isn’t as though she’s exercising, is she? Or has any control over her diet.
He decides to use the hack a second time, the creep, and she comes out just right again.
And when she puts on weight a third time, he does it again.
And again. And again.
They say that on the seventeenth hack she stopped working completely. Her heart beat its last. All respiration ceased. His doll was broken, and this time he had no choice but to call someone. He made out it was a d-mat accident, a fluke error that flatlined her in a perfectly innocent jump.
But the autopsy ruled that out.
See, neither he nor the girl really understood what fat is. It’s not just the stuff we hate to see on our thighs and tummies. It’s not just stuff we eat because it tastes so good. It’s all through our bodies. It’s an important ingredient in chemical make-up. It’s in our brains.
Every time he used the hack on her he stripped away ten percent of the fat in her neurons and the myelin sheaths of her nerves. When the pathologist opened up her skull he saw it immediately. The hack had scooped her out bit by bit until the inside of her head was hollow, like a coconut . . . literally.
Douchebag BF was charged with murder and sent to prison. They say he was force fed until he died of heart attack at thirty, and if that’s true I say, Fair enough. There’s not enough irony in the world for creeps like him.
(Original art by AnnMei at deviantART. If you are the artist, please get in touch! I would like to license your excellent work.)
