Just like any other morning, Kelsey was awoken by the head-splitting blare of her alarm going off. The phone screen filled her disoriented vision, telling her that it was 7:00 Monday morning. Thinking only of how to make the noise stop, she turned the alarm off and mentally prepared to roll out of bed and get ready for another day of school. But nothing happened. She didn’t move a muscle - couldn’t even feel any of her muscles - and still the only thing she could see was the lock screen of her phone.
Kelsey started to panic, wondering what had happened to her body. She could tell that she was lying flat on her back, but that was the only physical sensation that came to her. When she tried to move her arms or legs, or call for help from her own mouth, she drew a blank, as if she’d never even had any of those things. She dimly remembered reading a book years ago in English class about a soldier who lost all his limbs and his face, and could only lie in a hospital bed thinking to himself. She had to wonder if something similar had happened to her somehow, except that they’d stuck her phone in front of her face to stare at all day. And now she was watching the screen, unable to reach out and actually do anything with it.
Except... no, that couldn’t be right. Because just a minute ago, she’d turned the alarm off, without even thinking about how she had done it. She’d just wanted it to stop vibrating, since it was giving her a headache (even though she otherwise couldn’t feel her head). And, like it was second nature, the snooze button had obeyed her command. She wondered if she could control it like that again. Sooner or later, she would need to, because the snooze function only lasted for so long, and the ten-minute countdown to the next alarm buzz was already down to three minutes.
Kelsey decided to try simply willing a particular button to be pressed. It felt silly to even think about it that way, but with no fingers to touch anything, she was running out of sensible-sounding options. She needed to unlock her phone to turn the alarm off completely - and, if she could control it well enough, to call someone for help. She had to tap the screen.
And suddenly it was tapped. It asked for her password, which she had no trouble remembering. It was her birthday, 0923. Punching those digits in was just as easy as ever, despite the lack of thumbs. Was she really controlling the phone directly with her mind? She couldn’t understand how it worked, but decided not to question it for now. More importantly, it did work, and as disoriented as she was, she could at least use her phone normally while she searched for answers.
Turning the alarm off took only a few metaphorical taps, and was done in seconds. Kelsey had sort of expected a race against time to get this normally simple task done under such different circumstances, but if anything, it was easier to use her phone this way than normal.
She opened her text messages next, trying to decide who to ask for help and how to describe her strange situation, but she stopped herself. The most recent messages all appeared exactly as she remembered them last night. Surely, if she was lying crippled in a hospital bed, there would be an outpouring of sympathy texts and digital flowers, and probably at least one person trying to gently explain what had happened while she was unconscious. There was nothing like that - and only eight hours had passed since she went to sleep normally. If nobody even knew about her situation... how could this have been set up for her? Maybe it wasn’t. But then how...?
She had to see what she looked like. Whatever it was, she could take it, but she had to know. She went to the camera app, which showed her nothing but black. Okay, so something was covering the lens. She switched to the front-facing camera, bracing for the sight of a horribly deformed reflection in the digital mirror. But instead...
She saw out of the camera as if it was her own eye. And from that vantage point, there was no reflection to see. She immediately recognized the beige paint in front of her as the ceiling of her own bedroom. She took a moment to adjust to the fact that looking forward was actually staring up. She still couldn’t move at all, but her peripheral vision allowed her to see her own familiar yellow wallpaper, the band posters on her walls, and her bed, which she could just barely tell was empty. It would have been freakish enough to catch a glimpse of her own sleeping body lying over to her side, but this felt even worse. The bedsheets were all ruffled, as if her unconscious form had been teleported out from under the covers and disappeared.
Only one explanation for all of this came to Kelsey’s mind, and it was as bizarre as it was unsettling. She wasn’t using her phone right now. Somehow, she was the phone. And that made everything snap into place. Her body, from what little she could feel and see of it, was a small rectangle lying on its back on her bedside table, exactly where she’d left her phone when she went to bed last night. She couldn’t see a thing from the other camera because it was lying flat against the wooden surface of the table. And she couldn’t move a muscle, but she could feel-
Kelsey’s whole body jolted, snapping her out of her thoughts. A notification appeared in her vision, a text from her friend Mackenzie, and the vibration ran through her entire form, as if to confirm the unbelievable truth of her new body. She went to the message immediately, turning off her camera eye and letting the screen replace her entire vision once again.
“kelsey?”, it read. “u ok?”
And before she could even think of how to honestly answer that question, she saw that Mackenzie was currently typing a follow-up. Kelsey waited uncertainly for the next full-body buzz, and the next question.