24 April 2012
Ken was uncertain how long he had hung mounted on the wall as a hunter's trophy; perhaps it had been for only minutes, perhaps decades. Perception of time is suspended when you are an animal that has been arbitrarily shot, eviscerated, dragged from your forest home, thrown in a truck, dismembered, and then had the hide of your head stretched over a frame and hung in someone's den.
It was gruesome, monumentally disorienting stuff. Ken shuddered to think of what had been done to him; how could one living creature do that to another? Ah well, it would go hard on the human, but Ken would better the instruction. Thank God for cellular memory, and the reawakening within the DNA of the mounted deer head of what he had once been, and by the spirit of his kind would be once again!
"Open these eyes," thought Ken, evoking the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The obscene artificial glass orbs that had been stuffed into his eye sockets popped out of them and dropped to the floor, new tissue forming within the dry cavities and filling themselves up anew. Bone, muscle, and nerve cells blossomed beneath his organic hide, and Ken experimentally thrashed his head from side to side, his antlers clattering against the paneled wall until his head itself thunked to the floor below.
Ken's head and neck writhed on the oak floor in the pains of giving birth as the mounting plate was driven by pressure from the budding stump of his neck while the deer slowly reconstituted his lower body. It took time, to be sure, but the memory of what he had been was written into every cell, and that directory provided Ken with an infallible blueprint. Ken gasped as his lungs were formed and then reinflated, and he felt nourishment flood every cell as his heart took shape and began to beat.
It was some time later as the buck stood on his new legs that the sound of his hooves on the planks of the wooden floor drew the hunter's attention, causing him to venture upstairs to investigate. Ken thought that the look on the man's face was priceless as he lowered the massive rack of his antlers at the hunter's chest and charged...
Regeneration • Opuss № I