The Fly

Seth Brundle demonstrates his invention to science journalist Veronica Quaife at a party with the evangelical confidence of a man who has been alone with an idea for too long: two pods that dematerialise and reconstitute matter, separated by any distance. They work perfectly on inanimate objects. On living things, not yet — the computer does not understand flesh. He and Veronica enter an arrangement: she documents the research while he works out the problem. They fall into a relationship.

He solves the problem drunk and jealous, teleporting himself through the pods one night without waiting for the proper conditions. A common housefly enters the pod with him unnoticed. The computer cannot distinguish two separate organisms and merges them at the molecular level. Seth does not know this has happened.

At first he believes the teleportation has improved him: extraordinary strength, boundless energy, superhuman agility. He attributes it to the process purifying him. Then the changes that cannot be explained away begin: coarse hairs in wrong places, fingernails loosening from the bed, a new compulsion to vomit digestive enzymes onto food before consuming it. He begins recording his own transformation with a scientist's precision and a growing horror. He names the thing he is becoming: Brundlefly.

His humanity recedes. The insect drives him toward fusion — he wants Veronica in the pods with him, and the child she carries from the relationship. She escapes. Stathis, her editor and former partner, arrives to help and has his hand and foot dissolved by acid vomit. Brundlefly forces himself through the pods one last time, fusing with the machine itself. What emerges on the other side is something beyond any classification he had prepared. It drags itself to Veronica and stops. It places the barrel of a shotgun against its own skull. It waits. She kills it.