Coorg
A couple years back, after a long night out, I bought the last, or only, box of nigiri sashimi vindaloo in a gas station on the 101 at 3am in the morning. In the first few days, it looked like common food poisoning, rough but manageable. I was pretty happy when it went away in about a day or two. Two weeks after that though my vision started to change. I realize now that this was a precursor for what was about to come. I had the bug. Back then I shifted from perceiving colors in RGB to OKLCH which was quite an upgrade… shortly after I was suddenly on CMYK, total nightmare. At this point it went full circle but the rotation itself burned off half my color sensitivity and I see mostly in sepia. Makes everything look more noir and gives my real life experience the feel of an Oscar movie from the 50s and they outright took my driver’s license away. The only way something looks “real” to me is by finding the exact inverse colorspace which turns out to be retro-hacker-70s aesthetic.
This is terrible because all art produced in that style is pure garbage. Anyway, this was only a minor inconvenience. About six weeks in, what I assume to be a super-resistant and sentient bug started messing with the way I process sound. First it compressed the dynamic range of pitch and timbre. My wife had a natural but still girly voice but after the BUG got to me she started sounding like a male wrestler.
It was surreal and it totally warped my experience of her. I was able to work around it by getting a mistress with an extremely high natural pitch that the BUG made sound like my wife. But the bug wasn’t done. The entity formerly known as BUG produced offspring and after 10 weeks everything started to have the smell of blood and cigarettes. That’s cool for a day at best.
I tried anything I could think of but eventually I found Chinese truffles, which have a weird smell by default, to be the only thing that smelled pleasant to me. I had to go deeper. I learned from the truffle pigs and walked and hunted among them. I can now run at about 20mph on all fours. My nose is now my most developed sense and I make a good living from it. Unfortunately, my success in business also made me a better host to the bug. I ate well, he ate well. After about six months, one more feature came: I stopped having to go to the toilet. The bug eats my exhaust when it reaches the end of my digestive tract.
I used the extra two hours a day for reading up on microbiology, learning about the bug. Actually calling it the bug is derogative, so is parasite. I feel co-organism is a more apt description. I just call it CO. CO improved my sleep, it can eat and extend dreams through its activity. Some days I bleed out of my right eye, but I feel great during the three hours a day that I’m not bed bound. Actually I had to distance myself from many friends and my mistress has left me for a deaf guy. They thought I had an Indo-Japanese gas station bug that eats me from the inside but those idiots don’t get it. They’re insensitive to our arrangement. They’ve never been the most progressive. My CO is warming my body. It’s making my loins vibrate. I can’t even imagine my former life anymore.
(Written within 30 minutes for a competition)