Limitless Evolution As a Snake

I woke up inside a jar. Maybe I am the jar? Holy shit. Am I a literal glass jar? Did I get reincarnated as kitchenware? This is terrible. I’m doomed. Everything sucks.

I have a massive, infuriating phantom-limb sensation of having arms, legs, and thumbs. But when my nerves fire, nothing moves except a smooth, flexible red noodle. A vibrant crimson cord. I’ve been downgraded to an animated ribbon. Fantastic. Thirty-five years of being a socially exhausted corporate slave, and my reward is becoming a forbidden string cheese.

A long, thin, forked tongue darts from my mouth on its own. It tastes the rot in the air, gathering information I don’t know how to process. My brain scrambles for an analogy. Is this like how a dog smells?

The thought is immediately followed by a wave of pure physical revulsion. My mouth isn’t supposed to do this. My tongue isn’t supposed to be forked.

I am literally licking the air to read the room. I hate this. I hate everything about this.

When I close my eyes or whatever the snake version of that is, the world completely flips. Suddenly, I’m tracking literal heat signatures. The super cold areas and freezing stone walls appear as an icy, neon blue fog, while any patch of warmth glows like a bright red target surrounded by orange. Holy crap, it’s actual thermal vision. Am I dead, high, or both?

Twisting, I finally see myself. Bright red. Lustrous, sharp scales.

I mean, I don’t exactly have a ruler on me down here, but I’m definitely well above average. Way above average. Let’s just agree on that right now.

Panic should be screaming through me, but my brain slams the door on it. Instead, a stubborn, ridiculous pride takes over. I’m not some drab colouration of a wild beast. I am vibrant crimson; these are glossy scales... this is a designer colour palette. I’m not a monster; I’m a premium exotic pet, probably.

Getting completely furious with my lack of thumbs and the smooth, cold glass pressing against my belly scales, I begin violently thrashing my body. I manage to wiggle enough that the jar finally wobbles. The heavy glass tilts, slides over the thick carpet of grey dust on the shelf, and rolls over the edge.

The glass smashes, and absolute darkness rushes in. My brain chooses this exact moment to yeet me into a sudden flashback. Time to watch my own greatest hits reel.

Matthew Vane. Matt to my absolutely nonexistent friends. I am thirty-five years old, sitting in a windowless London office cubicle, drafting a passive-aggressive email to a manager who doesn’t even know my name.

While watching the office bicycle crouch down to retrieve her dropped highlighter for the second time in twenty minutes, an act of physics that had nothing to do with highlighters, a sudden, crushing grip squeezes my chest. My coffee spills across the keyboard. I fall face-first onto my desk, my heart giving out at 4:45 PM on a Tuesday. The world goes black, and my last conscious thought is pure annoyance that I died at work. Truly a masterpiece of a life.

If I had to describe myself, I am the definition of ”mid.” Not ugly enough to pity, not handsome enough to notice. I spend my evenings eating lukewarm microwave meals, staring at fantasy novels, and jerking it to cat girl hentai on a cracked phone screen, a classic textbook nobody who let everyone walk all over him because I was too tired to care. For thirty-five straight years, I didn’t take a single risk.

Well, screw that. No more playing it safe. I am completely done being mid. If I’m stuck in a snake body, I refuse to be a basic one. I’m going to make sure I’m impossible to ignore. I don’t care about being a hero, and I don’t care about being a villain; I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to.

The flashback snaps shut.

I’m not a human anymore. I’m a vibrant red serpent with a dead man’s brain, and the world is suddenly very, very big. But hey... no more spreadsheets or fake workplace small talk.

Alright, time to get on with my new life, I guess. Maybe.

I try to stand up. My little noodle body raises up a glorious two inches off the ground, balances for a split second, and then immediately slams back down sideways like a fat, wet seal. Alright, that’s not going to work. How the hell do snakes even move anyway?

My body convulses on the floor, a frantic, squiggly line of pure humiliation. I look like a live wire having a seizure.

If anyone is watching this, please kill me again.

But then something clicks. It’s not one movement, but hundreds of tiny, coordinated pulls along my spine.

I check out my surroundings from a grand perspective of half an inch off the ground. The ruins look significantly more intimidating. The shadow of a collapsed wooden stall looms over me like a giant monster of rot. But as I look past the timber, I realise this place isn’t an old cave. It’s an entire dead city buried under what seems like an old sewer system.

My brain seems to be mostly soup, but a few weird, random bits of data stick out like sore thumbs. I look up at a shattered glass facade and spot a logo. It’s a giant, glowing neon fruit, a fruit my glitched-out mind instantly labels as a Pear with a clean bite taken out of the side. I continue to check out more of the neighbourhood. I’m currently slithering past a massive, rusted plastic sign hanging crookedly from a metal awning. It’s a giant, fading yellow letter ’M’ with a word, maybe MeDon, barely legible beneath a thick layer of black soot and mould.

Great. Good to know capitalism survived.

I have an insanely weird craving for fries that hits my chest, but it vanishes as fast as it came. The whole place is just a graveyard of these strange, familiar landmarks, completely silent, dead, and dystopian.

I wiggle forward, my shiny red scales dragging through the soot, testing out my new movements. Every single speck of dirt feels like a speed bump. It’s hard to look majestic when a draft of wind blows a massive, tumbling ball of grey lint toward you and your first instinct is to hiss defensively at it. Pathetic.

I’m throwing a tantrum at dust bunnies.

After dodging more dust bunnies, my eyes lock onto something tucked underneath the rotting edge of the counter right near the Medon sign.

It’s dark, oval-shaped, and completely still.

I slither a bit closer, my tongue flicking at the air. My thermal radar doesn’t pick up a single trace of heat, meaning whatever it is, it’s totally dead. My normal vision zooms in.

It’s a bug, I think. But not a normal bug. This thing is the size of a golf ball, armoured in a thick, iridescent midnight-blue carapace with wicked, serrated pincers that look sharp enough to clip through copper wire. It’s dry, hollowed out, and completely dead.

To a normal person, it’s a disgusting piece of underground vermin. But to a beautiful, perfect baby snake?

The cold-blooded predatory instincts hijack my brain. My mouth floods with a strange, thick saliva. My tiny slit eyes narrow, locking onto the beetle. My human mind recoils in disgust. Food? That’s not food. That’s a fucking bug.

No way. Absolutely not. I am a civilised, high-end designer exotic pet. I am not eating a dusty, oversized sewer bug off the floor.

My body doesn’t care about my luxury standards. Before I can stop myself, my snake instincts take the wheel. I slither right up to the corpse.

I unhinge my lower jaw with a deeply unsettling, fleshy click.

Right as my fangs are about to graze the dusty, hollow carcass, my human brain, the hopefully refined one, slams on the absolute emergency brakes.

WAIT. WHAT THE FUCK. HALT. NAH DUDE. I AM NOT EATING A BUG. HELLO? I’D LITERALLY RATHER DIE, AGAIN?

My new reptilian instincts are doing absolute backflips, screaming CRUNCHY PROTEIN! EAT THE TRASH!, but my human ego is holding the line;

I do not need a stupid BUG SHELL to survive. I have a degree! I have standards! I am not turning into a glorified undercity vacuum cleaner on day one.

Ding.

A glowing, vibrant blue text interface blinks into existence, hovering right in front of my silver slit eyes and blocking my vision. I blink, but the screen stays locked to my retinas.

I stare at the digital box, some deeply buried instinct in my glitched-out stew for brains recognising the layout. A Status Screen, a system, like anime, or a game, probably.

I wait for the grand, majestic, beautiful voice of a cosmic entity with massive tits and a great personality to welcome me to my grand destiny.

Instead, the text populates line by line, and a deadpan, deeply unimpressed voice booms inside my head, dripping with a thick, manly Australian accent that sounds like he’s been smoking for 50 years.

[System Notice: Bloody hell, mate, Welcome to the Indulgence System, you absolute weapon, oh bugger look out, something big green and pissed off is coming this way!]

THUD THUD THUD

My thermal vision goes white-hot. It’s not a creature; it’s a walking furnace, a heat signature so massive it bleeds out at the edges, warping the cold air of the tunnels. Its footfalls land like tectonic shifts, each one a bass note I feel through the stone and in my teeth.

I freeze. I pull my tiny noodle body into the tightest, most compact defensive spiral possible, tucking my head beneath my coils, holding my breath, and praying that the giant doesn’t look down.