Chapter #6Possess Mark Taylor. by: Seuzz   You continue to talk lightly with Mark, to draw his interest and to express yours in him, and after an hour or so you wind up back at his house. There is some more to drink, and then he is kissing you and you are kissing him back. It's very slow and gentle, and to draw out the pleasures you stay inside Jillian until after he has led you back into the bedroom and laid himself under you, and you have coaxed him to a hard climax. You grip him tightly afterward and kiss him deeply, and only after the glow has dampened into embers do you press deeply into his mouth and vomit yourself down his throat.
You wake to find Jillian Harding unconscious on your torso. You wriggle out from under her and go into the bathroom to make sure all the equipment is working. You check out your new body in the mirror: Mark has raven-dark hair, stylishly cut so that it curls just under his ears, and bright, intelligent eyes. He also has a strong body, though one that is not obviously "cut." All in all, it looks like a comfortable home.
You take a piss, then step back into the bed, where you nuzzle Jillian into consciousness. There is some more kissing and stroking and petting until you are both worked up again, and then you furrow her deeply. She has the groans of a deeply satisfied woman when you are finished. After that, you cuddle up with her and drop down inside Mark's head, to get to know him better.
* * * * *
"Why exactly are you requisitioning these supplies?" Carl Straussler's question isn't hostile, but there is a skeptical tone in his voice, and his eyes are sharp. You glance down at the work order. Ah. That stuff.
You run your fingers through your hair. "It's kind of a double dip," you confess. "Freeman can find a use for it anyway, but I ordered in bulk because I need some of it for a ... well, for a side project."
"Side project?"
"Something Jillian is bringing over with her. The Pentagon deep-sixed her SX-2 project, but I've been looking it over, and I think there's still some promise in it."
"I thought that was just a fixative of some sort. Anyway, it blew up in their faces."
"Yeah, well, it did some interesting things to some physical specimens. It could have medical uses."
"We're not in the medical business, Taylor."
"Yeah, but wouldn't you like to have a killer app if you decided to jump in?"
"In this economy? And this Administration?" Straussler's eyebrows shoot up.
"Look, it's something I'm doing on my own time. And my contract says you own whatever I come up with. Isn't that Protean's business model? Letting researchers have their head in return for whatever they produce?"
Straussler laughs. "All right, Mark. I'm not quibbling over price or even priorities. You'll get the stuff, if you think there's anything in it."
You're relieved. Straussler, who's the president and one of the chief owners of Protean Technologies, is not a bad man and is actually quite a good boss, but he can be very scary and unpredictable. You'd thought it a better than even chance he'd veto your requisition, which is why you tried piggybacking onto some of Benedick Freeman's orders. But apparently Straussler is in a good mood, and happy about the way you've recruited Jillian Harding to Protean. She starts next week.
Jillian is an attractive woman even on her own, and you'll be glad to have her around. But mostly you want her away from Lord and in a place where you can keep an eye on her. Taylor is smart enough that you doubt you'll need to jump inside Harding and use her brain to solve any problems, but she'll be nice as a back up. In the meantime, you've got her old memories and her notes, and you've even got some lab animals in the basement of your house. It's fortunate that the explosive force of SX-2 scales up dramatically as the mass of exposed animals increases; your exposure reduced a large warehouse to ruins, but with rabbits it makes hardly more than a small fire.
Taylor would have been a good host anyway, but there is serendipity in putting him and Harding together. He's been working on "organic manufacturing," a process whereby materials can be "grown" rather than cast or molded. There are no immediate uses for it—you can't grow a lugnut, let alone a tank—and yet if it works, it might be possible to "grow" parts that could be fashioned together into new instruments capable of doing things that more conventional instruments can't.
And the day after you'd possessed him, and got good and settled into his head and started looking over Jillian's notes, you'd seen some possible connections between her work and Mark's. His research concentrated on basic organic materials, and getting them to replicate physically; but he's been stymied by the problem of getting some kind of "code" into the material, so that it can replicate along programmable lines into useful forms. Jillian's research meanwhile, suggested that the SX-2 "reduced" physical specimens into into little more than a goop of code. This is why you still have memories and willpower: your blue, gooey body is just "you," but folded down into the most compact physical form imaginable. It is still able to interact with other organic materials, though, which is why you are able to possess other animal bodies and merge with them.
After thinking things through on Saturday and Sunday, a little light went off inside your head. It might be possible to put the two project together in a fruitful way, putting the "code" that Jillian's technology creates inside some of Mark's growable organic matter, and reproduce the organism specified by that code. If you get the two designs to work together, then, you might be able to put your goo body inside of some of Mark's treated matter, and cause it to grow a body identical to the one you lost in the accident. You could then return to your old life.
On Monday morning you had to throw yourself into Taylor's official research, which is fine, since you have to steer it towards your preferred goals anyway. But you'd also ordered up those special materials that you will need to replicate the SX-2.
* * * * *
It's Saturday again, and you'd be down in the basement turning rabbits into goop, but you have chores to catch up on. So you're out in the back yard, shirtless and in shorts, giving the grass what should be its last mow of the season. You've tried to avoid this and other chores that leave you exposed at the house, because you are not keen to run into your family.
It's odd enough seeing your father and mother (and two sisters), but it's made more awkward by the fact that your dad actually approached Mark (before you possessed him), looking for news about you. Mark, after all, works out at Fort Suffolk, and he had been the one to suggest you take a menial job at Protean; and so your father has asked Mark for whatever information he had about the fire and explosion and your disappearance. Mark had been truthfully able to tell your father that he knows nothing. Still, there's always the chance of an awkward conversation.
And that's what develops when you look up from the mower, wipe your forehead, and see your sister Mary looking at you gravely over the fence. "Hey there," you call out.
"There's going to be a protest out at the base on Monday," she says tonelessly.
"An anti-war protest?"
"Anti-military, at any rate. Some friends of mine organized it."
"I'll be at work on Monday."
"I know. You work out there. I thought I'd give you a head's up."
"Thanks." You glance over at the ice chest, where you have some beer cooling. "Can I offer you something to drink?"
"You need it more than me." Her expression hasn't shifted a millimeter since she started talking.
You shift awkwardly from one foot to another. "Look, Mary, I'm sorry. I really and truly am. Whatever I can do—"
"You can tell them to stop ... to stop covering up whatever happened and tell us!" Her voice finally cracks, and her face screws up.
You walk over and lean against the fence. Mark, truthfully, would tell her he knows nothing and can find out nothing. But you can't let Mary hear that; not with her practically breaking down in front of you.
"Look, you're not going to get answers by protesting," you tell her gently. "I mean, have the protest. It'll make you feel better. And I can't get answers either by yelling from inside the gates. But—" You lick your lips and push sweaty hair off your forehead. "Look, I know someone who probably knows something. I can't push it out of her, but I might be able to winnow something out. You just have to be patient with me. The way I'm trying to be patient with her."
Mary's stare is stony. "If what she knows is that my brother's not coming back, then she could just say so."
You decide you can tiptoe up to the edge of a disclosure. "I don't want to get your hopes up. Because I don't know anything. But I know that they were working on something very strange. Something they don't understand." You lean in close. "I think they don't know if he's coming back. But I have the impression they are working feverishly to get something back out of that mess."
She looks at you very queerly.
"Look, I'm going to say only one more thing, and that's all, because it's too much. Now, if you want miracles, read the Bible. But if you don't believe in miracles but still want to believe in the miraculous, read some science fiction. Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact. And the guys the guys at the base were screwing around in a place where one of them was about to turn into the other."
She stares at you. When she backs away, you can't tell if her expression is one of hope or of horror.
* * * * *
When you alluded to "someone" with Mary, of course you were alluding to Jillian. You've had her over for a few "dates" already, during which you've moved temporarily into her in order to use her brain. The brain-sharing has been useful, and not just intellectually, since you've used these sessions to forge a closer personal (and sexual) relationship between Taylor and Harding. In fact, that relationship has burgeoned quicker than you'd planned, and two weeks after your talk with Mary, Jillian surprises you by asking if you've given any thought to moving in together. You put her off with a gentle talk about "moving too fast" while still making clear your interest in her, because you're not ready yet for her to see the "thing" you're growing in the basement.
It started off as a rabbit, but it's now a horror out of some Cthulhuian nightmare: a pulsating blue blob with sickly green veins and yellow membranes running through it. You had started by trying to add a few reduced animal specimens to some of Mark's specially treated "organic material," but found that there was no way to get the materials to bind. More fruitful was the experiment in which you took a reduced speciman and slowly injected it with Mark's special brew. The more you added, the larger and more complex the creature got, though it also produced lots of highly noxious runoffs. The "rabbit" you've been treating is now twice its original residue weight (and about twenty percent of the weight of its original body), but you've had to put in almost ten times its added weight just to get it to grow that much. (In other words, almost 90% of the added material disappears as part of the growth process.) Nonetheless, you've been pleased that microscopic examination shows that the thing almost immediately acquired the replicative mechanisms you'd hoped to introduce to it. You can't be sure, of course, but you suspect that once you get the "rabbit" back up to its pre-reduced state, it might revert back to its original form.
The problem is how to turn this technique to your advantage. As it stands, you could only use it to replicate your old body by exiting Mark and then somehow submitting yourself to a very long process of being injected with organic material. This would leave you outside of Mark and outside of any host bodies, and thus leave you at the mercy of him or anyone else. So even though you are pleased with your progress, and try to suppress your worries by throwing yourself into the work, you are still prey to anxieties about whether all the work will be for nought.
It's an added, unexpected shock when Jillian, at an intimate dinner for two at your house, asks if she can see your research notes.
"There's nothing proprietary about them," you stammer uncomfortably. "The technology will belong to Protean, one way or another. But why are you interested?"
She stabs carelessly at the pasta you'd spent almost 90 minutes carefully preparing. "Straussler has put me to work on it, too," she says quietly. "Maybe I wasn't supposed to tell you that, but I'm not sure what is and what isn't supposed to be a secret. Why he doesn't just put us together, I don't know. But it sounds like he wants to double down on your work."
Her answer isn't clarifying. "That doesn't make sense," you agree. "We'd just be duplicating effort."
"Which is why I want to see your notes." She looks at you narrowly. "You've been doing physical experiments, right? Here at the house and not at the lab?"
"Well, yeah," you say. You feel your chest muscles tighten.
"Is there some big secret about it? Something you don't want Straussler seeing right away?"
You push some food around on your plate. "It's not pleasant to look at."
"Mark, I've seen some pretty weird things when playing with the SX-2. I don't want you getting hurt."
"I've seen your notes."
"All of them?"
"Enough of them."
"Are you sure about that?" Her manner has become very careful.
You toy with the notion of kissing and possessing her, to find out what she's worried about. But then you decide you can just ask her directly. "So tell me what I need to be careful of."
She bites her lip and looks away. "So, you know what it does to organic specimens. I mean, living animals." You nod. "I don't want to see anything like that happen to you."
"I'm being careful."
"But you're not working in a lab." She tenses. "Look, I signed some really scary non-disclosure agreements when I left Defense for Protean, so this has to be just between us. But a high school kid got exposed to the stuff before we figured out what I was playing with, and ... Well, he never got found."
"I didn't know there was that kind of accident," you lie. "But are you surprised he didn't get found? Your own research says that residues are unstable over the long term." You shrug. "Not to be hard-hearted, but he just would have ... dissolved, right?"
"Probably."
There is a deliberate note in the way she says the word. "What do you mean, 'probably'?"
"I got shut down before I could really dig into it. I'm not sure what happens over the long term when a residue interacts with another organism."
"You're using words that sound loaded. What do you mean by 'interact'?"
"I didn't think anything of it at the time," she says, leaning back and frowning. "But after Straussler put me on it I reran some of my experiments. You know, if we're going to get this stuff to work like you want, we have to see how this 'code-bearing residue' interacts with organic material. If you put it in a living specimen, it seems to bind with the nervous system. I can't be certain, but it seems to me that a residue can merge with another organism, like a parasite with a host."
"With what effect?"
"It seems to override the host's nervous system."
"I see." Well, you see what it might mean, because you know what it means. But you're still not sure that she knows what it means. "So a residue could be neurologically dangerous."
"You see why I worry about your experimenting with it outside of a controlled environment."
You lean in close to her. "I've been very careful, and I can assure you I've not ... exposed myself to any of these residues. Except in very controlled circumstances, with no chance of contamination." You pause. "You're not worried that my nervous system has been compromised, do you?"
Her eyes widen, and you regret having introduced the possibility to her thoughts. "No," she stammers. "I mean, I hadn't ..."
"It hadn't occurred to you, but now it has?"
She bites her lip and smiles tightly. "It is a thought," she admits. "It isn't wolf residue you've been playing with, has it?" She draws a finger down the side of your nose, and smiles in a way that suggests she might actually kind of prefer it if you had.
You have a sudden, giddy, and desperate idea ... | Members who added to this interactive
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