Emmett Truesdale Wants to Become Someone Else

At 28, Emmett Truesdale weighs 323 pounds and has spent much of his life feeling ashamed of his body. He works as a Target fulfillment associate in San Diego while hoping to eventually work in education. His closest relationship is with his roommate and best friend, Lizette Castillo, an outspoken fashion designer who runs the extended-size clothing company GORDITA.

When Emmett sees an advertisement for a clinical trial from Monstera BioSciences, he immediately sees the possibility of becoming the person he has always wanted to be. The company is testing Obexity, an experimental gene therapy that supposedly rewrites the body’s energy-conversion DNA. Once activated by weekly injections of a drug called EmaC-8, patients can lose weight without dieting or exercising.

Lizette distrusts Monstera immediately, but Emmett attends the information session anyway. The $1,500 monthly stipend makes the trial even more appealing.

His desperation intensifies after two humiliating experiences. During an interview for his dream job at Future Makers, director Georgina Hodge gives him unsolicited weight-loss advice. Then, at his niece Harper’s birthday party, his sister Abby catches him bingeing in the kitchen. Emmett flees in shame.

So when Monstera accepts him into Phase II of the Obexity trial, he eagerly agrees.

During his medical screening, Dr. Gavin Halleck treats him condescendingly and diagnoses him with Type 2 diabetes. Emmett signs the trial’s paperwork despite references to potentially serious psychological side effects, including Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

The actual procedure is even more disturbing. Under anesthesia, Emmett believes he sees other patients screaming and attacking nurses before surgeons drill into his bones and force-feed him vector serum. When he wakes, he is assured that everything he remembers was simply an anesthesia-induced nightmare.

Then the weight starts disappearing.

The Miracle Treatment Comes With Blackouts

With weekly EmaC-8 injections, Emmett’s weight plummets from more than 320 pounds to 252, then below 200. His transformation attracts attention online, where his Instagram account, The True Me, begins gaining thousands of followers.

His personal life improves too. He reconnects with Aaron Wolfe, his old grad-school crush, who now works at the Museum of Us in Balboa Park. Emmett and Lizette visit the museum’s Savage Hunger: A History of Cannibalism exhibit, and before long, Emmett and Aaron begin dating.

But something is seriously wrong.

Emmett starts losing chunks of time. He wakes from blackouts with blood on his clothing and no idea what happened. Around the same time, Georgina Hodge disappears. Her mutilated body is eventually discovered, with authorities blaming coyotes.

Then an elderly Target customer named Myra insults Emmett during his shift. After she accidentally leaves behind a bottle of cocktail sauce, Emmett follows her toward her apartment. Two hours disappear from his memory. When he returns to work, he is covered in a sticky red substance that he claims is cocktail sauce.

Increasingly suspicious of Obexity, Emmett researches earlier trial participants and discovers Tanya Swygert, a Phase I patient who shot and killed her abusive ex-husband, Ken Holmes. Her lawyer blamed experimental medication for her behavior. Emmett learns the truth is even worse: Tanya ate parts of Ken’s body.

Emmett crashes a Monstera board meeting and sees autopsy photographs of Georgina showing human bite marks. Dr. Jennifer “Jenni” Saito, one of Obexity’s developers, catches him but brushes the evidence aside with an absurd explanation involving research into coyote saliva.

Saito also reveals that she grew up as an obese Asian girl and devoted herself to finding a solution to the fatphobia she experienced. Emmett leaves without fully understanding what she is really telling him.

Soon, however, he can no longer deny what Obexity is doing to him.

Emmett Discovers What He Has Become

Emmett’s appetite changes. Ordinary food becomes less satisfying as he develops an overwhelming craving for human flesh.

After another blackout, he awakens covered in blood. His relationship with Aaron is also deteriorating because Emmett remains deeply ashamed of the loose skin left behind by his massive weight loss. When Aaron sees his body in the shower and reacts badly, Emmett is devastated.

Outside, he opens the trunk of his car and discovers something horrifying: a severed human arm and the corpse of Justin Matthews, a gym acquaintance Emmett had hooked up with. Justin had insulted his body, and Emmett apparently beat him to death with a metal baseball bat stolen from Lizette’s boyfriend, Mando.

Emmett finally understands that the murders are his.

Terrified, he confesses everything to Lizette. She helps him destroy his remaining EmaC-8 injections.

For a moment, it seems Emmett might escape the cycle. Then Dr. Halleck threatens to remove him from the clinical trial because he has stopped taking his doses.

The possibility of becoming fat again terrifies Emmett more than what the drug is turning him into.

He secretly obtains black-market EmaC-8 from Niño, a drug dealer and friend of his half-brother Chris. After taking too much, Emmett’s body briefly balloons before his weight begins falling again. His murderous compulsions continue, and he kills another hookup, Marco Jiménez, eventually storing Marco’s corpse alongside Justin’s.

Rather than stopping Emmett, Monstera sees an opportunity.

His transformation has made him an online celebrity with roughly 40,000 followers. Company executives offer him millions of dollars, national fame, and—most importantly to Emmett—a lifetime supply of EmaC-8 if he becomes the public face of Obexity.

He accepts.

Monstera Has Been Covering Up the Murders

The national Obexity campaign launches on January 2, but the response is vicious. Instead of celebrating Emmett’s transformation, people attack him for supposedly cheating at weight loss. He is called lazy and fraudulent for using medication rather than losing weight through diet and exercise.

Then Aaron arrives at Emmett’s apartment and confronts him. Their argument escalates until Aaron calls him a “fucking monster.”

This time, Emmett doesn’t black out before the violence begins.

He bites off Aaron’s tongue, kills him, and dismembers his body in the living room.

Almost immediately, Dr. Saito calls. She already knows.

Monstera sends a hazardous crime-scene cleanup crew called Bio-Clean to erase the evidence from Emmett’s apartment. Saito then explains just how extensive the conspiracy is. Assistant Chief Darryl Bautista, a senior San Diego police officer and former Phase I Obexity participant, has been sabotaging murder investigations to protect the company and ensure his own continued access to EmaC-8.

Even the coyotes are part of the cover-up. Monstera genetically modified local coyotes to consume human flesh, allowing participant murders to be disguised as animal attacks.

Saito isn’t interested in fixing Obexity’s cannibalistic side effect. She views what is happening as revenge against the fatphobic society that tormented people like her and Emmett. Now she expects Emmett to become the public scapegoat. Monstera will fund his defense and arrange for him to be portrayed as temporarily insane, but he must take responsibility for the killings.

Then Emmett discovers that the conspiracy began much earlier than he realized.

Cecil Smith Is Hank Stauder

Saito leaves Emmett at the vacant luxury home of Monstera founder Dr. Cecil H. Smith. While searching Smith’s office, Emmett finds a book containing an inscription addressed to “Hank.”

The name unlocks the truth.

Cecil Smith is actually Henry “Hank” Stauder, Emmett’s former stepfather and childhood abuser. Hank changed his name after being fired from the Torrey Pines Medical Discovery Institute for conducting illegal human experiments and eventually built Monstera BioSciences.

Worse, Hank personally selected Emmett for the Obexity trial.

The man who controlled and abused Emmett’s body when he was a child has found a new way to control it as an adult.

Furious, Emmett takes twelve EmaC-8 pens. His weight crashes to an emaciated 132 pounds. In his final health-journal submission, he addresses Hank directly and promises to eat him alive.

But first, Emmett decides to expose everything.

“This Is the True Me”

Lizette picks up the barely recognizable Emmett, who goes to the Museum of Us. There he stands before Portrait of a Man-eater, a 17th-century painting donated by Cecil Smith depicting Sir Percival Blount, a man supposedly transformed into a cannibal after taking a weight-loss tonic.

Emmett then publishes an enormous confession on Instagram.

He admits murdering Aaron, Justin, Marco, Georgina, and Myra. He exposes Obexity’s cannibalistic effects, Monstera’s cover-ups, the genetically modified coyotes, and Hank’s true identity. He also reveals the childhood abuse that shaped his relationship with food and his body, including an incident in which Hank tied 11-year-old Emmett to a chair, force-fed him until he vomited, and then forced the vomit back down his throat.

Police converge on the museum.

Emmett runs up the 125 steps of California Tower, but the extreme exertion triggers a horrifying reaction to the massive amount of EmaC-8 in his system. Instead of continuing to lose weight, his body begins expanding.

Fat accumulates in violent waves as he climbs. By the time he reaches the public observation deck, Emmett weighs nearly 800 pounds, and his clothing has been torn apart by his rapidly expanding body.

Hank and Assistant Chief Bautista corner him at the top.

Hank still tries to control the situation, demanding that Emmett delete his confession and accept Monstera’s version of events. Instead, Emmett finally rejects him.

“This is the true me!” he screams before charging.

His enormous body sends officers flying, and he snaps Bautista’s arm. Bautista fires three bullets into Emmett’s chest, but Emmett grabs Hank by the shirt. Their combined weight destroys the balcony railing.

Both men plunge 198 feet toward the courtyard.

Emmett hits the ground with such force that witnesses describe his body as detonating, sending blood and tissue outward in every direction. Lizette, Emmett’s mother, the museum entrance, and even passing cars are splattered with the aftermath.

Emmett dies instantly.

Hank survives.

He strikes a palm tree during the fall and escapes with broken ankles and a concussion.

Monstera Gets Exactly What It Wants

After Emmett’s death, the story is filtered through the official investigative report prepared for Monstera by Frank Darrow and his law firm.

Rather than acknowledging Obexity as the cause of Emmett’s transformation, the report characterizes him as an unrepentant murderer whose crimes resulted from mental instability and “inherent depravity.” The corporation that experimented on him, covered up his killings, and manipulated him into becoming its spokesperson successfully distances its product from the carnage.

Monstera even creates a charitable endowment in Emmett’s name.

And Hank doesn’t merely survive the fall.

Operating again as Dr. Cecil H. Smith, he becomes a director at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. From that position, he formally congratulates Monstera BioSciences on its greatest victory:

Obexity receives full FDA approval.