This Little Piggy by Bruce McAllister
I look in the mirror and see the cartoon pig I’ve always wanted to be. The bright pink ears, the long eyelashes, the cute snout and the incredible smile—exactly what I dreamed of when I was a kid, worshipping my father and grandfather and their careers, both of them “morphs,” and then finally, as a young adult, opting for The Change when the More Human Than Human morphing movement started up again. Post-natal gene enhancing never produces perfection, but with a little make-up to ensure the shading is correct and an electric shaver to keep the bristles from appearing in inappropriate places, you can look great—great enough, in fact, to be hired by the theme parks we call The Kingdom. Which was part of my plan from the beginning: How to be the spitting image of the animal you’ve always wanted to be—a kind, cute, lovable creature—and be paid decently for it. Not that the salary of a unionized morph-worker buys you a yacht at Newport, but it does keep you from living under a freeway overpass in a packing crate, where non-morphed kids throw things at you.
It’s as wonderful as I thought it would be, making children laugh at the park, doing little jigs with two other pig-morphs because we are, after all, The Three Little Pigs. It depends on the age, but some kids are terrified of us at first; but even the five-year-olds come around if we do our best to make them laugh, which really isn’t difficult when you look like a cartoon. It helps if the parents laugh first, of course, and it helps if we tease each other and pretend-cry with all sorts of crazy antics.
My grandfather was the first generation of GEE (Genetically Enhanced Entertainment) characters at The Kingdom. Before him, The Three Little Pigs were non-enhanced young men wearing hot, unwieldy suits, looking at the visitors through little mesh screens, and often misbehaving—pushing teenage girls up against the walls of the castle and copping a feel with their snouts. What could a girl do in those days? It was The Kingdom, and these were The Three Little Pigs, a “sacred trust to the children of America.”
My wife married me not despite my porcine looks, but because of them. I’d already begun the changes when we met at the park, at Fairytales II, where we were both performing She said I was cute, and of course she likes pigs. “They want to be clean, you know. We’re the ones who make them live in filth, Charles. They’re smart as we are, and they scream like people when they’re in pain. Go ahead, Charles, make a pig sound, but no screaming.” I did. I’d studied lots of audio, and the oink and the grunt-squeal I made were good. She was smitten, and I was grinning with that amazing smile they’d given me, which had been lop-sided for a while, until surgery fixed it—sometimes gene-tampering does need a little help).
Other morphs at the parks have found partners easily, too. A duck or a mouse deserves love. We find the right partners whatever we look like, it seems.
But I’m staring into the mirror today, and I see jowls sagging a little more than they should. I’ve been warned this might happen (you can’t escape gravity or a botched gene poke) and I know that surgery with a little gen-enhancing is probably the only way to fix it.
One eye is drooping, too. I didn’t want to admit it, but I have to.
And one ear has a growth on it, one that’s getting bigger every day. My supervisor mentioned it, noting it in my file.
I’ve heard of a pig at The Kingdom in Florida who’s falling apart like this, and two at parks in Japan, and three in Europe. It happens.
The restorative work, I’m told, is rarely as successful as the original and may leave me looking less “happy” than The Kingdom needs its morphs to look. This is one of the risks I’d agreed to. It didn’t happen to my father, but it did to my grandfather, and it’s happening to me. That’s how life is sometimes.
My wife isn’t responding well. She keeps saying, “This is not what I signed up for, Charles.” What she means is: “This isn’t covered by that ’till death do us part’ thing. You’re falling apart, and that means you’re not the Charles I knew, you’ve tricked me, and I’m young and I need to move on.”
I understand this. The Kingdom is the Happiest of Places. It’s happy because people go there to get away from an unhappy world. She can’t look at me and feel that anymore, she’s saying.
But I can’t either with that wolf face of hers, one that doesn’t sag.
