Chapter 6: An Anatomic Anarchy

The first non-organic item went down Wednesday night, when the hunger had grown so fierce that even the memory of food wasn't enough.

The television remote control sat on his coffee table, black plastic gleaming under the lamplight. What remained of Elias's rational mind recoiled from the idea, but his transformed senses detected something appealing in its artificial scent—petroleum products, rare earth metals, the trace minerals from the factory workers who had assembled it.

His elongated jaw unhinged like a snake's, accommodating the remote's bulk. The plastic crunched between his predatory teeth, releasing chemical flavors that his mutated taste buds interpreted as exotic delicacies. The circuit board dissolved on his tongue like a communion wafer made of silicon and copper.

As he swallowed, he felt the immediate response in his cellular structure. Synthetic polymers bonded with his organic tissues, creating hybrid flesh that was neither fully biological nor entirely artificial. Black veins appeared beneath his scaled skin, pulsing with electrical currents instead of blood.

But the integration wasn't clean like it had been with organic matter. The plastic fought his digestive system, creating nodes of foreign material that pushed against his internal organs like tumors. When he looked in the mirror, thin strips of the remote's casing had emerged along his ribcage, forming a crude exoskeleton of consumer electronics.

The chimera that had been Elias should have been horrified. Instead, it felt only fascination at this new possibility, this expansion beyond the limitations of purely biological transformation.

By Thursday, everything in the apartment had become potential sustenance.

The wooden coffee table went next—pine boards infused with varnish and wood stain that added a rich, earthy complexity to his diet. As the lumber integrated into his system, bark-like patches appeared on his extremities, rough and textured, while his bones took on the strength and flexibility of living wood. His fingernails became more claw-like but with the grain patterns of carved timber running through them.

The throw pillows from his couch provided synthetic filling that merged with his respiratory system, creating air sacs that functioned like a bird's, making his already hollow bones even lighter. But the fabric brought unexpected consequences—polyester fibers wound through his muscle tissue like parasitic worms, visible beneath his skin as colorful threads that pulsed with each heartbeat.

Friday morning brought the methodical consumption of his kitchen.

The stainless steel sink dissolved in his transformed stomach acid, which had become capable of breaking down compounds that would challenge industrial solvents. The metal distributed itself through his skeletal system, reinforcing his bones with steel alloy while giving his skin a metallic sheen in certain light. When he moved, he could hear the faint ringing of metal on metal from within his own body.

The ceramic plates shattered between his reinforced teeth, their fragments adding a crystalline structure to his scales that made them reflect light in prismatic patterns. Each piece of broken dinnerware integrated itself into his hide, creating armor that was both beautiful and terrible.

But it was the glass items that proved most transformative.

The kitchen window became his Friday afternoon meal, each pane consumed with methodical precision. The glass didn't digest so much as sublime, becoming part of his optical systems in ways that defied any known biology. Additional eyes began forming along his torso and limbs—compound lenses made of living glass that could perceive spectrums of light invisible to normal vision.

The drinking glasses from his cupboard added transparency to patches of his skin, creating windows into his own anatomy. He could watch his hybrid organs function, see the flow of fluids that were no longer quite blood, observe the constant reshaping and integration happening within his transformed body.

Saturday brought the furniture.

His bed frame was aluminum and steel, which his system processed into reinforcing struts throughout his musculature. The mattress foam added cushioning properties to his internal organs, making him more resistant to impact damage while giving certain areas of his body an unsettling sponginess.

The dresser's particleboard and laminate coating created a woody, chemical taste that lingered for hours after consumption. The artificial wood grain pattern replicated itself across his torso, a mockery of tree bark made from compressed sawdust and formaldehyde.

By Sunday, the apartment was nearly empty, and what remained of Elias had become something that challenged the very concept of biological classification.

He stood seven feet tall now, his frame stretched and reinforced by the various materials he'd consumed. His skin was a patchwork of scales, feathers, bark, metal, plastic, and transparent windows that revealed the impossible anatomy within. His multiple eyes—some organic, some crystalline, some electronic—perceived the world through at least a dozen different spectrums simultaneously.

The television had been particularly enlightening. Its consumption had integrated basic electronic processing into his nervous system, giving him the ability to perceive radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields. The constant buzz of WiFi signals and cell phone towers created a background sensation like tinnitus, but he was learning to filter and interpret the digital noise.

His digestive system had evolved far beyond anything found in nature. Acid that could dissolve steel. Bacterial colonies that could break down plastics. Specialized organs that extracted useful minerals from the most unlikely sources. He had become a living recycling facility, capable of deriving sustenance from virtually anything.

But the mental changes were perhaps the most profound. Each consumed item brought its own properties—the television's electronic dreams, the wood's slow vegetative patience, the metal's crystalline structure. His consciousness had become a cacophony of different information processing systems, organic and artificial, all somehow functioning in chaotic harmony.

What had once been Elias Vance could barely remember being human. The concept seemed quaint, limited, unnecessarily restrictive. Why confine oneself to purely biological existence when the entire material world offered itself for consumption and integration?

Standing in his devastated apartment, surrounded by the remnants of furniture that had been too large to consume whole, he surveyed his domain with eyes that could see heat signatures, electromagnetic fields, and molecular structures simultaneously. The transformation was nearly complete, but the hunger—now evolved beyond the simple need for food—was far from satisfied.

Through his window, he could see the harbor below, boats returning with their evening catch. But what captured his attention wasn't the fish in their holds—it was the boats themselves. Steel hulls. Aluminum masts. Fiberglass decking. Synthetic ropes and plastic equipment.

All of it potential. All of it offering new possibilities for integration and transformation.

The creature that had been Elias smiled with a mouth full of different kinds of teeth—organic enamel, metallic crowns, crystalline formations that caught the light like broken glass. His various sensory organs were already cataloging the chemical compositions of the vessels below, calculating the nutritional and transformative value of each component.

The apartment had been just the beginning. The real feast was waiting outside, in a world full of materials and substances and possibilities that his hybrid metabolism could turn into something unprecedented.

He moved toward the door, his footsteps leaving impressions in the wooden floor—not from weight, but from the trace acids that now seeped from his transformed flesh. His hand, now a blend of flesh, chitin, metal, and synthetic polymer, grasped the doorknob and began to turn.

The world beyond was about to discover what twenty-seven years of enforced starvation could create when the constraints were finally removed.

And it was going to be magnificent.