This choice: Take Jillian into your confidence. • Go Back...Chapter #7Take Jillian into your confidence. by: Seuzz   "Okay, look, I'm going to tell you everything," you say. "And I mean everything. And I hope you'll forgive me, and that you'll understand." She looks at you with just a trace of trepidation.
You start by leading her down into the basement, where you show her your "monster." She blanches, but keeps her gorge and her emotions in check as you describe your theory and your progress, and she quickly becomes curious and comfortable with it. She also become genuinely excited when you mention your hopes that the "thing," when it reaches the mass of the original rabbit, will revert to its original form.
"This is marvelous," she enthuses. "Straussler mentioned its possible uses as a cure for muscle and tissue regeneration, and even as a solution to amputations." Of course, he only mentioned this to her, because you'd mentioned it to him. "I'll admit I was skeptical, but it looks like you're almost there."
"Well, I don't know about its uses for local replacements. I'm more interested in regrowing an entire body."
She looks at you in puzzlement. "But ... But you'd have to destroy the original body in order to regrow it. What would be the point of that?"
"Well, if there is an original body that's been destroyed, you could get it back."
"But it would have to be destroyed by being exposed to SX-2. Get rid of my stuff, and there'd be no danger of ..." She trails off. She's seen the look in your eye. "Mark, sweetheart," she says slowly. "Is this research or applied tech?"
"Applied," you say with a sigh. "There's someone I want to get back."
She pales. "What happened?"
"It's that high school kid you told me about."
"I thought you didn't know about that."
"Well, I lied. I do know all about it. He broke onto the base last month, found your SX-2, and turned himself into goop. Then he ran off."
"How do you know this?"
"He was my next door neighbor."
Jillian gasps. "He came to you? After ...?"
"After he escaped the base? Yes. Eventually. It's a long story."
And you tell it to her. All of it.
* * * * *
"Are you ready, David?" Mark asks. His demeanor is very gentle, and very grave.
"I've been ready for a long time," you reply. "No offense, but it will be nice not to have to hitch a ride with you or Jillian ever again."
He smiles wryly. "No offense, but it will be nice for us, too."
You lean back and let go of Jillian Harding's mind and body and bubble out through her mouth. It wasn't a mutually agreed condition, exactly, that the two of them take turns carrying you, and you know that on more than one occasion both Mark and Jillian had offered each other the chance to let the other carry the burden of being your temporary home. But it had worked out that you would spend some days inside Mark and some days inside Jillian, and many other times you would sit and pulsate quietly in your natural body while they got a chance to be themselves with each other for a night out. It had taken a lot of courage, that first time, for you to exit Mark, trusting that he and Jillian wouldn't freak out. But it had taken more courage for each of them to let you back in. Fortunately, it didn't take long for the three of you to win each others' confidence: that you wouldn't abuse your control of them when you were inside one or the other, and that they wouldn't betray you to someone else. And it has reached its climax now. After a few more false trails, the three of you have figured out how to use Mark's technology to regenerate a body—that rabbit is now itself again—and now there's nothing to do but let them set about growing you a new body.
You shiver as Mark carefully picks you up and puts you inside the enclosure, but it's a shiver of anticipation. It will be a long, drawn-out process, and you've no guarantee that it won't be painful, but that's nothing compared to your wild hope that you will soon be yourself again.
Mark sets you down in a tray of special solution, and then the recovered Jillian bends over and inserts the needle that will inject the nutrients that will regenerate your tissues. Luckily, you can't really feel anything. And then the preliminaries are abruptly over. Jillian and Mark look at each other and exchange nervous smiles, and then smile still more nervously down at you. They know that you can see and hear them, but they seem stuck for words. Finally, Jillian just takes a deep breath and says "Good luck. To all of us."
* * * * *
It took almost three weeks for the rabbit to regenerate, and it will take you much longer. Jillian is at least thoughtful enough to bring down a TV set and DVD player and put it in front of your transparent enclosure, but it doesn't do much good. You can't change channels or DVDs. Whether for good luck or ill, though, it seems that the regeneration process is going to distort all your senses anyway. Within a day of the IV drip beginning, you find your sense of sight fading, to be followed by all sense of touch. You are soon locked in blackness. At first, you are horrified at the thought of being locked away in what seems like a very dark and closed room for weeks or even months, but the lack of external stimulus actually seems to numb and finally destroy all sense of the passage of time. Dreams come, but they are very distorted and fragmented things, and you seem to forget them even as they pass ...
* * * * *
And then there's a horrible shooting pain, like a javenlin has been run through you. There's another, and you shudder. A raw, prickling feeling washes over you. It sharpens and deepens; it feels horribly like you're being run over a cheese grater. Something tears deep inside you. There's another tearing, and another, and with a great, bloody struggle you force your mouth open and scream and scream and scream ...
And then you're panting and gasping. You feel clammy and wet all over, but the pains are retreating. You groan, and you are suddenly aware of colors and shapes. They swirl and then resolve themselves into contours of a ceiling and a wall. You blink. You have eyes again! Not the 360-degree view you had as blob, but the stereoscopic, forward vision of a human being. Something heavy is weighing on you, and you gasp as you lift it. Something pale and liverish appears before your eyes. It's an arm, you realize. It's your arm!
"David, how do you feel?" The voice is soft and worried. You struggle and turn your head: Jillian is looking at you in alarm. You gape back at her, and then you groan.
"I feel like shit," you reply. The effort of talking has taken it all out of you, and close your eyes and pant some more.
"Let's get another IV going." That's Mark's voice. You feel a needle being jabbed into you, but you are as weak as a new-born kitten, and can only whimper softly. Darkness washes over you, and you sleep.
* * * * *
"At least I've got an appetite," you mumble. You are, in fact, starving, but Jillian and Mark have probably figured that out from the way you wolf down the bread and the deli meat and cheese. Your mouth is still full as you push some milk down your throat. "God, this tastes good."
Mark and Jillian smile at you. You're sitting at his kitchen table, clad in a thick robe. They had to scrub you to get the grime and goo off you, but you feel very clean now. And with your stomach beginning to fill up, you feel ... Dare you say it ...?
"I almost feel human," you say softly.
"That's good to hear," says Jillian. "You look human."
Indeed you do. You were able to get a good look at your limbs and trunk—and other bits that are important to you—while you were in the tub, and a mirror was one of the first things you asked for after they helped you out. The face that looked back at you seemed pale, and the hair needed cutting and combing, but you didn't look any worse than you often looked after P.E. class. It's an odd thing to say, sitting at a table, still damp, in someone else's robe and with a hunger and thirst that have barely begun to be satiated, but you feel happier than you have ever felt before.
"After this, I think I want to take a nap," you say. "Probably a very long one. And after that ..." Well, then there will be the matter of going outside and looking at the sun again and feeling the wind and ... And seeing your family?
"I think a nap would be a very good idea," Mark says. There's something in his tone which catches your ear. "If you don't mind," he continues, "I'd like to put you down in the basement again. We've got a bed set up, with a camera. I want to record your sleep cycle."
"Is there something wrong?"
"Well, I don't know. That's why we want to record it." You note the word "we"; he and Jillian have been talking. But you only shrug. There's no reason to get paranoid now. Is there?
"Is there anything you feel like we should know about?" Jillian asks. Her tone is also careful and measured.
"Like what?" You don't mean to sound sharp, but this second question has got you jumpy.
She turns a little pink. "I only mean, out of scientific curiosity. We're all partners in this, you know." She turns a little more red. "You started it, after all. And you set all this up."
The allusion to the way you possessed them discomfits you. It was one thing to accept and ignore it when you were still a blob of goop. But now that you're human again ... Well, it all seems a bit like a dream, but also sharply present. You're reminded of the time Mark tried to perform CPR on his own grandmother, to save her life when she collapsed—
You stop chewing. That's one of Mark's memories, one you had access to when you were inside him, and were able to carry with you even when you moved in and out of him. But you've still got it.
"I think I've got some of your memories still," you say bluntly. You not only run through memories but also through some mental gymnastics ... advanced mathematics far more difficult than you should be able to handle ... "I think I've also got some of your ... Well, I shouldn't be able to do calculus, but I think I could if you asked me."
Jillian and Mark glance at each other, but there's no surprise in their reactions. "We kind of expected that," he says mildly. "After all, you picked up a lot of our characteristics while you were inside us. It's not a shock that they should carry over." You grunt. Is that all? "When you're done eating, you should get some sleep. Don't worry about anything."
It's one thing to be told not to worry. It's another thing to not worry. Luckily, you're so exhausted that you're out like a light almost as soon as your head hits the crisp, clean pillow.
* * * * *
The sight is loathesome, even after it has resolved itself back into a human shape, even after it has finally resolved itself into your shape. You wonder if you'll be able to look in a mirror again without shuddering.
"How often did this happen?" you ask, trying (but not succeeding) in keeping the tremble from your voice.
"We only caught the last two transformations," Mark says quietly. He turns off the monitor. "It appears to be involuntary. And nothing happened while you were asleep yesterday, even though you were out for fifteen hours. I'd say that's a good sign."
You look down at your hands. They seem solid. You tug lightly at one of your fingers. It feels like solid flesh and bone.
"It raises two questions in our minds," says Jillian.
"Whether I can keep it from happening, and whether I can make it happen when I want," you interrupt her. Your mind feels light and effervescent, like it felt when you were inside Jillian, so it doesn't surprise you that you can anticipate what she'll say. She seems irked, though.
"Well, yes," she says. "We rather expected you'd keep some of our mental characteristics. But for you to manifest our physical characteristics as well—"
"'Manifest,'" you repeat sarcastically. "I turned into you, Jillian. And into Mark."
That's what the monitor showed. And according to their testimony, even after you'd regenerated as David Johnson, and spoken briefly to them, you'd lapsed back into a primordial state, and several times had alternated between taking on his form, her form, and your form. "Like a shapeshifter," you mutter to yourself.
"Well, that's not a bad thing, necessarily," Mark observes mildly. "So long as you can hold your own shape when you want to."
"But can I?"
"Well, Mr. Bunniesworth—" He catches himself. "Well, the rabbit seems happy to be itself. It's been almost three months since we got it regenerated, and we've never seen anything like what you went through."
"But Mr. Bunniesworth—Jesus, Jillian, why'd you have to pick that name?—it's not hopping around with extra genetic material."
"Well, not until yesterday," Jillian says uncomfortably.
"What do you mean? Oh, shit, Jillian. You didn't!"
"You know me better than that, David," she retorts. "Of course I did."
"What did you use?"
"Blood samples from a cat."
"And what happened?"
"Nothing, until I started chasing it. Then it turned into the cat and tried to claw me."
You put your face in your hands. "You fed it cat's blood, and now it can turn into a cat."
"Not quite an exact duplicate, but close enough."
"You know, I was inside a wolf for a while before I—" You catch the glance they exchange. "I didn't!"
"Only once," Mark says reassuringly. "You also turned into a guy I've never seen before."
You think a moment. "A dude named Liebrecht, probably. Or was it Sanchez?" You look over at Jillian.
"I wasn't there when it happened," she says lamely.
"Well, I picked up a little of them, too," you say sourly. "Of course, that's not the alarming thing," you add. "That deli meat you fed me yesterday. Were you hoping to see if I'd turn into a pig?"
"Well, we weren't hoping, but—"
"Oh, Jesus!"
"Well, we have to know, David, before you go running around."
"There's fucking DNA flying around all over the place!" you exclaim. "I don't have to eat it, I just have to breathe!"
"It was quite a lot of blood I stuffed into Mr.— Into the rabbit," Jillian says with something like hope in her voice.
* * * * *
As it turns out, after about a week of experimentation, it doesn't take much original material for you to pick up a transformative ability. Even just a clump of hair—so long as it's got the roots—will do it. But that's more than you're likely to be breathing in. Foods that have been cooked or processed also don't affect you. So it looks like you won't be picking up the ability to turn yourself into someone or something unless you try to pick up that ability by grabbing a bunch of raw DNA off a target.
Better still is the discovery that your earlier, involuntary transformations were apparently caused by being in an early and unstable state, so you don't even have to concentrate on being yourself in order to keep your form as "David Johnson." You are also constrained by the size of the object whose DNA you've ingested. The wolf seems to be at the lower limit of what you can manage, and you can't really manage anything with much more mass than your current body. But that still leaves a lot of scope. You can, for instance, make yourself quite tall or short, if you choose.
The fact is that you are now a shapeshifter, within limits. You are able to change your shape as "David by altering the color and texture and length of your hair, for instance; by sprouting a sudden length of beard; or by making your apparent body or fat mass increase or decrease by non-negligible amounts. By concentrating very hard, you can also turn yourself into near-carbon copies of Jillian, Mark, Kevin Liebrecht, and Eric Sanchez; you can also alter those appearances subtly, so that you can make yourself into their exact duplicates or into people who have just a passing resemblance to the originals. These more thorough transformations, especially from one gender to the other, take a few minutes, and are pretty nasty to watch.
But, all in all, things aren't bad, you reflect. There's nothing to prevent you from being yourself and resuming your life.
Except that that life is now a shambles.
The basic problem is that it is now the end of January; you disappeared at the end of September. How are you going to be able to explain your absence?
"You know, I have a sister who's only a little older than you," Mark says when you finally broach the subject with him and Jillian. "Instead of returning as 'David Johnson,' you could stay here with me and pretend to be her."
"And what about the real Jennifer?" you ask crossly; you know all about Mark's sister, of course. "What do we do about her?"
"Well, I'm not talking about your replacing her," he retorts. "I just mean ... Well, with identity theft being what it is, it would be a lot easier to reintroduce you to the world if we took her as a starting point. You know, with Social Security cards and like that. Eventually you'd carve out your own existence."
"I wish you had a brother instead," you groan.  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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