Your phone beeps. Glancing down, you narrow your gaze, frown half-tilted. ‘Fusion App?’ What’s that? Definitely not something you downloaded.
Hoping it’s not a virus, you open it up for further inspection, surprised by the detailed interface design. If it is a virus, someone put a lot of coding into it. Scams are usually cheap, easy, fly-by-night affairs; maybe the eStore auto-downloaded it as a free test, a marketing tool or something?
Regardless, the instructions seem simple, and it looks to be some kind of photo manipulation tool. It’s already hooked up to the phone’s camera, asking you to snap a picture of someone and make sure that nobody else is in the frame.
Figuring you have nothing to lose, especially if you don’t photograph yourself, you scan the immediate vicinity. It’s a sunny day, and plenty of people are out and about, pedestrians conducting menial business, chatting, waiting, or otherwise simply enjoying the warm air and pleasant weather.
Spying an attractive woman sitting on a park bench scrolling through her own phone, you snap a photo of her. The app then prompts you to take a photo of someone else. Looking up once more, you spot a man reading a paperback novel, leaning against a streetlamp. One further snap later, and the app presents a flurry of sliders, checkboxes, and other options. This seems like less and less of a possible scam by the moment, unless the NSA wants random people to spy for them, which they do well enough on their own with the prevalence of selfies, so again, you don’t see any harm, swiping sliders and turning dials seemingly at random.
You slide the ‘Gender Weight’ bar all the way to the left for ‘First Subject,’ leave ‘Awareness’ at 100%, and check the box for ‘Fuse Personalities’ rather than ‘Two Minds, One Body.’
Figuring this will do nothing more than a bad photo morph of two random bystanders, you hit the final ‘Activate Fusion’ button and immediately gasp as the two subjects lift into the air, hovering in place. They express their own shock and confusion before flying through the air towards one another, locomotion seemingly completely out of their control before each slams into the other.
“Where’s the ‘Undo’ button?!” you think, frantically searching for any other options, but the app refuses to show anything more than a loading screen, reading ‘Fusion in Progress.’
Shoulder to shoulder in the air, the man and woman both gasp again, one letting fly a flurry of expletives, the other simply screaming. Their flesh, the fabric of the clothes, all of it seems to melt and flow like liquid, the woman’s button-up blouse merging with the man’s band T-shirt. The left and right arms of both mash into one another as the touching shoulders join completely, sliding the shouting heads closer and closer until they clap together.
By the time their united top has lost most of its buttons to a small collection at the top of what now looks to be a casual polo shirt, the band logo shrunken into a tiny clothes brand emblem, the woman’s bosom has reoriented itself so that each body has a breast all its own. The further each torso melds into the other, the larger each breast becomes until they nestle against one another once more, the extra mass filling up an increasingly strained bra.
The upper body complete, a single well-endowed woman’s torso with a regular arm on either side, both having changed to match a uniform feminine configuration, the changes leave the heads alone for now and instead sweep down to the pelvises and legs. The woman and man’s heads never stop screaming, and you can hardly blame them, though at least they don’t seem to be in pain, simply confused out of their minds.
The woman’s short skirt slides along the man’s jeans, one lowering and the other rising as the soft, black fabric and sturdy denim equalize into a knee-length jean-skirt. Meanwhile, the woman and man’s respective sets of legs themselves merge into each other, the newly united female leg acquiring fuller thighs while its increasingly less-masculine counterpart becomes smaller and shapelier, finally leaving both as a pair of well-formed womanly legs. Even the shoes, black pumps and red sneakers, reform as a pair of stylish yet casual sandals with a slight bit of heel.
Lastly, the man and woman’s heads press further into each other, the line between where one ends and the other begins blurring into nothingness. Four eyes merge into two, thin lips prompting a plump pair to become even fuller, stubble receding into a smooth chin, cheeks, and narrow neck letting loose a voice that is at once feminine but deeper than expected, almost sultry. The man’s short black hair flows into the woman’s blonde locks to create a wavy chestnut curtain, leaving the physical changes finalized.
“What did I do?!” you think as you shove the phone in your pocket and race down to the newly-fused single woman. “I didn’t think it was real!”
“Are you alright, you two?” you ask, stammering, not sure how to address them. “Sir and ma’am? Just ma’am?”
The new woman looks confused, as if her mind is reeling, or perhaps, two are splashing and mixing into one.
“What just happened to us... To me?” she asks. “My name is... Sarah? Charlie? Charl...Ara... Call me Kara.”
Your phone lets out a final beep, and checking it, the app displays ‘Congratulations on completing your first fusion! Just fuse four more people to reach Level Two options!’ Below that is a brief profile of the new person.
Subject One: Sarah Jones [accountant, straight, amateur artist, firm and direct]
Subject Two: Charles “Charlie” Smith [musician, bi, literary enthusiast, comical and passionate]
Fusion Name: Kara Jones-Smith
Sex: Female
Persona: Actress [Sarah + Charlie], bi [Charlie], theater enthusiast [Sarah + Charlie], firm [Sarah], direct [Sarah], passionate [Charlie]
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an ‘undo’ button...