It happened slowly, starting with the background noise you never notice until it’s not there. The taste of air, and then, bright, bright light.

“Kasey!” said Anna.

The world started to came into focus. There I was, apparently arrived there perfectly fine. Except this one thing.

“Uh, hey,” I said. “Where’s… the rest of me?”

Anna held up a small metal cylinder with the letters HS-014. It was about the size of a soda can.

“I came here in that thing?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “What’d you think? Flight go okay?”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know. It was all so … distant.”

“Pretty cool, huh? Get canned in one place, wake up instantly in another.”

“Yeah, it’s a little disorienting though.”

Anna shrugged. She set down the canister that contained the rest of me.

“Wanna know how long you were canned?”

“Is that really what you call it here? No technical words?”

“Three days! And we like to just call it what it is.”

“Three days?” I gasped. “I thought you shipped me overnight!”

“Yeah, but you arrived on a Friday afternoon, and so you didn’t get out of the mail room until this morning. Besides, I was really busy this weekend with this soccer coaching stuff. Oh, and you get paid for each day here, so don’t worry!”

“Well, at five hundred a day, I guess you can keep me canned for as long as you like.”

“Plus weekends pay extra!”

“Awesome. Just one thing is a little weird.”

“What’s that?”

“I’M ONLY A HEAD!” I shouted.

Anna laughed. “Of course you are! Because you’re so cute that way. And it actually has a bit to do with our work.”

“Have you ever tried this?”

“Of course I have! It’ll be fun. I promise. I also have some company for you.”

“Company?”

“C’mon, I’ll show you!”

Anna scooped me up, and stuck me under her arm.

“Careful! I get nausea when I’m dizzy.”

“You don’t have a stomach.”

“I … could probably still get nausea.”

Anna just laughed. We exited the lab where I’d been first restored, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass windows on the way out. There I was. Only a head.

“Hey Karen,” said Anna, to a woman who passed by wearing a lab coat.

“Did she — have four arms?” I stammered.

“You’re only a head, and this surprises you?”

“Where did she get them?”

“Ooh, they might be yours!”

“Am I just extra parts to you?”

“No, we have interns for that.”

“Weren’t you an intern here?”

“I was, yeah, but I got officially hired last month.”

“Wait, so you were … extra pieces?”

“Well, that’s how it started. We first tested the new tech on interns, myself included, to make sure it was working. Now we’re gathering data about how consumers might be able to use it before developing end consumer models of our equipment.”

“I wanna have four arms.”

“Well, the tricky part is, you need someone else who’s not using theirs.”

“What about my friend Anna? I think she owes me for the time she took away my entire body.”

“Oh c’mon, you’re getting paid for this! A lot more than I am, by the way. And once the study is completed, sure, we can mess around a bit.”

“Seriously?”

“You might overestimate how attached I am to my body parts.”

“Oh, ‘attached.’ Ha ha.”

“Didn’t mean it that way, but it works, right! Anyway, check this out. You know Mark from school right?”

Anna opened a door on the left into another lab. Inside were two other employees, both female, working on computers. And on the steel table in the center of the room…

“Mark!” I shouted. “Hey, you’re just like me!”

“Oh, hey there Kasey,” said Mark. “I’d give you a hug, but I’m a bit … unable to move or whatever.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Anna invited to come be a part of her mad scientist project. I’m guessing you did the same?”

“She sure did,” answered Anna. “And you two are going to be paired together for the study.”

“Wait, why do we get paired together?”

“Well, mostly because you both told me that you had a crush on the other one. But there’s a few of these experiments that require two people, and hey, you both know each other, so why not? Okay, I’m going to get the first couple experiments, so hang on a minute.”

Anna turned and went over towards a metal cabinet at the other end of the room.

“You had a crush on me?” I whispered.

“Oh, huge one. Might as well admit this now, huh?”

“Well, I guess we might as well. No time like when we’re just a couple of heads in some strange laboratory to get that out in the open, huh?”

Mark laughed. “It is good to see you,” he said.

“And you too! How long have they had you … restored?”

“Just like an hour or so. Anna set me in here and told me she had a surprise in store for me, and that I should’t wander off…”

“Oh, har har Anna.”

“Well, we have enough of a neck that we can kinda scoot around with our chin. Try it!”

Mark demonstrated by tipping his head forward and using his chin to move himself a couple inches towards me. I did the same, leaving our heads about six inches away from one another. Perfect flirting distance really.

Anna returned with a large mechanical arm with a tangle of wires coming out from it.

“Hang on, one more thing,” she said, setting that down. “By the way, these two fine ladies here are Meagan and Amy.”

“Hi Meagan and Amy!” I said, seeing the other two look up from their computers and wave.

“Hello there,” said the one with darker hair. “And I’m sure Amy would also like to say hi, but she’s a bit… different today.”

I glanced over to Amy who rolled her eyes. It was only then I noticed what Meagan was talking about — Amy’s face had eyes and a nose, but no mouth. In its place was just smooth sealed over skin.

“Aww, what happened Amy?” said Anna, coming back with another armload of equipment. “Did you lose your bet with Meagan?”

“Well you see,” said Meagan. “Amy and I both wrote down our favorite feature about one another, and bet those on the game on Sunday. She wrote down ‘boobs’ and I wrote… well, I guess you can see for yourself, can’t you?”

Meagan licked her lips slowly, looking directly at Amy. Amy of course didn’t reply, but her eyes said she needed to. She shook her head and looked away.

“You’re wearing her lips?” I asked.

“I get them for the whole week!” said Meagan, grinning.

I was about to press for more details, such how Amy was expected to eat, or otherwise do her job (what if she had to make a phone call?), but Anna was apparently ready with her first… whatever. She turned Mark and myself to face her, and explained what we were doing.

We were going to learn how to control a robotic arm. Each of us was fitted with a chip-thing (Anna’s word) that attached to the back of our neck. A wire from the chip-thing led to the arm, and well, that was how it worked. The arm itself was made from plastic, and maybe about three feet long. It was bolted onto a heavy block of wood, I suppose to keep it upright.

“It’s a little tricky at first,” said Anna. “But after a minute or two, you’ll probably get the hang of it.”

Mark went first. For a minute, all he could do was get the thing to jiggle, and then jolt around. Finally, he seemed to dial it in a bit, and was able to perform some simple tasks like picking up a ball and flinging it across the room.

Anna hooked me up to it next.

“Try and move something,” was all the instruction I was given at first. So, I gave it a shot. The thing moved a little bit. But I couldn’t really get anything specific to happen.

“It’s kind of like it’s in place of one part of your ‘normal’ body,” said Mark. “At least I thought so. It was like trying just to move my right leg.”

“Right. But, the tricky part is that neural signals are similar, but not universal,” said Anna. “So what we’re really doing here, besides playing with robots, is collecting data about how our heads interact with this stuff, and how we can improve it.”

“Okay,” I said, managing to open and close the hand of the arm. “Oh, that’s a start.”

Then it just somehow… clicked. Using the arm I reached down and picked up the tennis ball, threw it up in the air and caught it again.

“Match Type F!” shouted Meagan, excitedly.

“Oh, nice! Looks like your neural pattern is already in our system,” said Anna. “We’ve so far found eleven different patterns that repeat, and seven of them have been decoded.”

“Awesome!” I said. “So it just works!”

I reached over and picked up Mark’s head.

“Who—“ Mark started.

“I’ve got your head!” I taunted.

“Wait!”

I saw Anna with her arms open, grinning, so I threw him over to her.

“Ahh!”

“Hey!” said Meagan. “You know the rules Anna! No throwing heads near delicate equipment.”

“Right…” said Anna, carrying Mark back over next to me, deliberately putting him just out of my reach.

“Just, go outside if you want to do that,” said Meagan, with a smirk on her lips.

“This place is insane,” said Mark. “And I will get you back for that.”

“And we’re insane for letting them do this to us.”

“Yeah, probably…”

“Okay!” said Anna. “Right now, lunch break. And then you two are going to play with some more robot bodies.”

That was exactly what we ended up doing the rest of that day. Anna showed up various ‘bodies’ that, in truth, looked more hacked together than something ready for prime-time. And calling them bodies was a bit generous, because they were really a bit more like toys that gave our heads a bit more mobility, but I’ll let that part slide.

There were some converted RC race cars, this weird spidery-thing that we could walk around on (but, even with four legs, proved pretty hard to balance with), and another “body” that was just a bunch of ball bearings we could push around with some rubber arms.

Most fun of all was the quad-copter. It didn’t do much besides hover up and down slowly, but it was the first time I could do something I *couldn’t* do with a normal body. Only drawback with that was that the battery only lasted ten minutes.

Each of these new bodies also had a few simple tests along with them.

Soon enough, it was 4 o’clock.

“Time to put you two together again!” said Anna. “Oh, but first let’s get a picture. First day done!”

Anna took out her cell phone and snapped a pic of our heads on her desk.

“Straight to facebook,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was serious. Later on, turns out she was.

“All right!” she said. “Let’s get you two re-assembled and go get some drinks.”

—

“Mark!”

“What?”

“It’s getting hard again. What do I do with it?”

“Tuck it up into your pants.”

“Um… okay.” I stuck my hand down my pants.

“Usually I try to be casual about it, but you know…”

“Oh god, that feels really good. Gotta stop.”

Anna came back with three beers, setting them down on the table.

“Kasey! Control yourself.”

“Mark told me to!”

“Oh, my bad,” said Mark.

Anna just grinned at us for a second. Then she just broke down laughing.

“You two are just hilarious,” she said. “I’m so glad this worked out.”

“Oh yeah,” said Mark. “All part of your plan to get us to participate in your mad science project and switch our heads?”

“I said it was an accident!”

“Yeah,” I said. “You say that but…”

“You don’t really sell it,” said Mark.

“Are you really complaining that I’ve given you access to Kasey’s ladyparts?”

Mark didn’t say anything.

“And Kasey?”

I shrugged. “Yes, it’s been established that I’ve wanted Mark’s dick for a while now.”

“Good,” said Anna. “You’re both welcome.”

Mark just lifted an eyebrow at me. This was sure to be an interesting night.