Whose Flesh, Whose Commons

We met in a restaurant that served only patented food. Every dish on the menu bore a registered trademark — the lettuce was NutraStar Verdant, the bread was a proprietary grain blend called CereAlign, the water had been restructured at the molecular level and was sold under the name AquaPure Clarity. Butler had ordered black coffee and nothing else. Machado was eating the bread with obvious pleasure and occasional suspicion, tearing off pieces and holding them up to the light before putting them in her mouth.

“This bread has been engineered to make me want more bread,” Machado said. “I can feel it working. It’s good bread, though. That’s the awful part.”

Butler didn’t touch her coffee. She sat with her hands flat on the table, studying the menu like a legal document.

“Every item lists a patent number,” Butler said. “Not a price. A patent number. You don’t buy the food. You license it.”

I told them I wanted to write about genetic modification as a class system, about a world where the body itself has been enclosed — turned into intellectual property. A woman who begins an unauthorized transformation, not to become superhuman but to become something the system literally cannot categorize.

“Unauthorized how?” Butler asked immediately. “Unauthorized by what mechanism? Don’t tell me she’s a rebel with a secret lab. Give me something real. Give me the economics.”

I said I was thinking about horizontal gene transfer. Mycelial networks. A woman who cultivates a symbiotic fungal system within her own body — something that works through lateral biological exchange rather than the top-down editing that corporations sell. She’s not upgrading. She’s composting herself into something that operates on different principles.

Butler was quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s interesting. Because horizontal gene transfer is how bacteria have always worked. It’s the oldest form of biological sharing on the planet. Older than sex. Older than multicellular life. Corporations patent vertical inheritance — they own the edit, and the edit passes from parent to child, and they collect licensing fees at every generation. But horizontal transfer is promiscuous. It crosses species lines. It doesn’t care about heredity. You can’t patent a commons.”

“You can try,” Machado said. “You can always try.”

“Of course you can try. But the architecture fights you. A mycelial network isn’t a product. It’s a relationship. How do you own a relationship?”

Machado set down her bread. “This is where I think you and I might disagree about something,” she said to Butler. “You’re talking about economics and architecture and property law. Which is — yes. Obviously. But the body doing this transformation, the body becoming host to a fungal network — that’s not just an economic act. That’s an erotic act. That’s a horror. It’s desire and dissolution happening at the same time. Her skin is changing. Her digestion is changing. She’s becoming porous. That’s not a policy paper. That’s a fairy tale.”

“I didn’t say it was a policy paper,” Butler said, and there was an edge to it. “I said give me the economics. The economics are the body. Where do you think capital lives? It lives in flesh. It always has. Whose flesh gets modified, and whose doesn’t. Who can afford the edits, and who carries the raw genome. That’s not abstraction. That’s the most physical thing in the world.”

“I know that. But I’m saying the experience of transformation — from the inside — doesn’t feel like economics. It feels like a haunting. It feels like becoming the house that everyone is afraid is alive.”

I asked Machado what she meant by erotic.

“I mean that when your body changes in a way that you chose, in a way that the world tells you is wrong, there’s a pleasure in it that is inseparable from the terror. Ask anyone who’s ever transitioned. Ask anyone whose body has done something the family cannot tolerate. There’s a liberation that feels like dying. The two experiences are not sequential — they’re simultaneous. Your protagonist should feel both at once, at all times. Not ‘she was scared but also free.’ That’s greeting card nonsense. She is scared-free. It’s one feeling.”

Butler nodded, slowly. “That part I’ll take. The simultaneity. Because survival always feels like that, for anyone whose body has been contested territory. You don’t get to feel safe first and then act. You act while terrified. You make a choice about your own flesh while the system is telling you that your flesh is not yours to choose about. And you keep going because the alternative is worse.”

“The alternative is remaining legible,” Machado said. “Remaining something the system can read and therefore control.”

“So she becomes illegible.”

“She becomes illegible. Yes. But not strategically — not as a plan. She becomes illegible because her body starts following a logic that isn’t the logic the system installed. Like — do you know about microchimerism?”

I said I did. Fetal cells persisting in the mother’s body for decades, migrating to the brain, the heart, the liver. The body as host to cellular populations that are simultaneously self and not-self.

“That,” Machado said. “That uncanny biological fact where you are literally haunted by your children at the cellular level. Where the boundary between your body and another body was never as firm as you believed. I want the transformation to feel like that. Not like she’s becoming a different person. Like she’s becoming a commons. A place where multiple biological logics coexist.”

“A commons that can’t be enclosed,” Butler added.

“A commons that can’t be enclosed, and that the system finds more threatening than any weapon.”

Butler leaned forward. “But let’s be specific about who this woman is. Because ‘a woman transforms’ is not enough. I want to know what she has to lose. What does her life look like before the transformation? What class is she? What does the modification system give her that she’s choosing to abandon?”

I said I was imagining someone who works within the system — a compliance herbalist at a genomic wellness facility, someone whose job is to help newly modified clients adjust to their edited bodies. She has a modest edit herself — enough to qualify for her position, not enough to be elevated. She exists in the middle tier. She sees both the wealthy elites with their designer genomes and the unmodified underclass who can’t afford even basic edits.

“Good,” Butler said. “Because the middle is where the most interesting betrayals happen. She’s complicit. She benefits from the system enough to survive within it, but not enough to believe in it. That’s a real position. That’s most people’s position.”

“And she’s a caretaker,” Machado said. “She tends to bodies that have been changed by corporate design. So when she begins her own unauthorized change, she knows exactly what she’s doing to herself in biological terms, but she cannot predict what it will mean in experiential terms. She has the science. She doesn’t have the fairy tale.”

“What do you mean, the fairy tale?”

“I mean the story her body is going to tell her. The one that doesn’t follow the manual. Because every transformation has two narratives — the clinical narrative and the uncanny narrative. The clinical narrative says: this is what the mycelium is doing to your cell walls, your digestive lining, your neurotransmitter production. The uncanny narrative says: you are becoming the forest floor. You can hear through your skin. Your dreams are sporing.”

Butler shook her head. “The uncanny narrative is fine as inner experience. But the world she lives in is not uncanny. The world she lives in is brutally specific. When the corporation discovers what she’s done, they don’t send a fairy-tale villain. They send a legal team. They send a compliance officer with a warrant. They send someone who looks like a doctor and acts like a landlord.”

“Both,” I said. “Both narratives running in parallel.”

“In the same sentences,” Machado said. “Not alternating chapters. The same sentences. The spore count in her blood is measurable by corporate diagnostics. It is also a garden growing in her bones. Both are true simultaneously.”

There was a pause. Butler drank her coffee, which must have gone cold by then.

“I want to say something about the prose,” Butler said. She set down her cup and addressed Machado directly. “You write beautifully. That’s not a compliment. That’s a warning. Because when you write about transformation, the beauty of your sentences can become a kind of anesthesia. The reader is so dazzled by the imagery that they forget someone is in pain. And I need this protagonist to be in pain. Real, specific, bodily pain. Not aestheticized pain. Not pain as metaphor.”

Machado didn’t flinch. “And when you write about pain, the relentless specificity can flatten it. Can make it documentary. You catalog suffering so thoroughly that the reader’s response becomes clinical rather than visceral. I’ve watched readers go numb in your books — not because the writing fails, but because it succeeds too well at replicating the experience of being unable to look away from something terrible. At some point the looking away IS the human response. The surreal moment — the moment the narrative suddenly says ‘and then she became a tree’ — that’s the moment the reader’s body reacts. Because the body knows transformation before the mind does.”

“The body knows survival before the mind does,” Butler corrected. “That’s the correction I’d make. Your fairy tales are beautiful, but they happen in a vacuum. The girl with the ribbon around her neck — what’s her material condition? Where does she work? Who employs her? What happens to her health insurance when the ribbon comes off?”

Machado leaned back. “The ribbon IS her material condition. That’s the point. The fairy tale isn’t decoration on top of social reality — it IS social reality compressed into a symbol that the body recognizes faster than the intellect. But fine. I’ll grant you this: in this story, the material conditions should be visible. The corporation, the compliance structure, the economics of modification. Because that’s what makes the fairy-tale moments land harder. When you’re fully inside the machinery of a system, and then suddenly the prose tilts — suddenly the protagonist’s skin is producing chlorophyll and she can taste sunlight — that tilt is more shocking because of how grounded everything around it is.”

“Good,” Butler said. “That’s what I want. Ground it and then break the ground.”

“Break the ground and leave it broken,” Machado said. “Don’t repair it. Don’t return to normal prose after the surreal moment as if it was a fever dream. Once the ground breaks, the prose stays broken too.”

I asked if they could both live with that — a prose that begins in Butler’s register and gradually becomes invaded by Machado’s.

Butler considered this. “Not invaded. Composted. The same way the protagonist’s body changes. The prose starts as one thing and becomes a host for something else. Not a clean transition. A grafting.”

“I want to talk about the eating,” Butler said. “You mentioned The Vegetarian. A woman who stops eating meat and it destroys her family. That refusal — the refusal to consume what everyone around you consumes — is one of the most politically dangerous things a body can do.”

“It’s the oldest form of resistance,” Machado agreed. “And the most intimate.”

“In this world, the prescribed nutrition would be patented, just like the food at this restaurant. Your body requires specific inputs to maintain its edit. The modification isn’t permanent by default — it requires maintenance. Ongoing consumption of proprietary nutrients. If you stop taking the prescribed regimen, the edit begins to degrade. So your protagonist doesn’t just stop eating. She stops maintaining.”

“She lets herself unpatch,” Machado said, and she was almost smiling.

“She lets herself unpatch, and in the gap that opens, the mycelium takes root. Because a maintained genome is a closed system. A degrading genome is an open one. She has to become porous before she can become a commons.”

I asked about the family. In The Vegetarian, the transformation horrifies the husband, the father, the sister.

“Every transformation that matters is witnessed by people who cannot bear it,” Machado said. “That’s what makes it a transformation and not just a hobby. The witnesses are part of the architecture. A mother. A partner. A supervisor. Someone who loves her and genuinely believes she is dying.”

“Someone who is right that she is dying,” Butler said. “Partly right. She IS dying — the person she was is dying. Whether what she’s becoming constitutes living, that’s the question the story shouldn’t answer.”

“Shouldn’t answer,” I repeated.

“Shouldn’t answer. Because the moment you answer it, you’ve categorized her. You’ve made her legible again. The whole point is that she is becoming something that resists legibility. If the story explains what she is now, the story has done the system’s work.”

Machado was nodding. “Leave her in the uncanny. Leave the reader there too. Not ambiguity for its own sake — ambiguity because the reality is ambiguous. She doesn’t know what she’s becoming. Her body knows, but her body isn’t talking in a language she can fully translate. And the reader should have the same experience the people around her have: watching a transformation they cannot stop and cannot understand and cannot look away from.”

“And cannot help,” Butler said. “That’s crucial. The people who care about her cannot help, not because they’re too weak or too selfish, but because help is a concept that belongs to the old system. Within the framework of genomic wellness, help means restoring her to compliance. Within whatever framework she’s entering, help is not a relevant category.”

I asked about the ending.

“Don’t,” they both said.

Machado laughed. Butler did not.

“I mean it,” Butler said. “Don’t plan the ending. Write toward the ending. Let the character’s body decide what happens when the transformation reaches a point the narrative can’t hold. The ending should feel like it surprised you. If it doesn’t surprise you, it won’t surprise anyone.”

“And it should cost something,” Machado said. “Not in a punitive way. Not ‘she dared to transform and now she must suffer.’ But transformation is not free. The body pays. Something is lost that was genuinely valuable. Not just comfort. Something she wanted to keep.”

“That’s how you know it’s real,” Butler said. “If nothing is lost, it’s a fantasy. Not the genre. The delusion.”

We sat for a while after that. The restaurant was filling with people eating patented food, sipping restructured water, their modified bodies humming with proprietary well-being. Machado ate the last of her bread. Butler turned her cold coffee in a slow circle on the table.

“One more thing,” Butler said. “The fungal network. The mycelium. It connects organisms that would otherwise be separate. It transfers nutrients between trees that can’t reach each other. It’s a mutual aid system that operates below the surface. Don’t make it a metaphor. Make it literal. She is literally becoming part of a network that shares resources without ownership. That’s the thing the corporate system can’t tolerate. Not that she’s dangerous. That she’s generous in a way that can’t be monetized.”

“A body that gives itself away,” Machado said quietly.

“A body that discovers it was never only its own.”

I turned off the recorder. The bread was gone. The coffee was cold. The patent numbers on the menu glowed faintly under the restaurant’s designer lighting, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been given more than I could carry — that the story these two women had sketched in the space between their disagreements was larger and stranger and more ruthless than anything I would manage to write.

I would try anyway. That’s the only thing you can do with a gift like that.