This is my first shot at fiction of this scale, so I'm sure there are things I have missed and can improve on. I have intentionally left the dates vague, mainly because I haven't been able to keep on top of the fenspace thread for about 2 weeks.
But I present this first part for a thorough thrashing. I would prefer to make changes now, before I have invested even more time into it, than to have to throw half of it out the window.
*****
I was halfway through the veterinary program at UC-Davis when news of Handwavium hit the general populace. By the end of my third year a combination of deficient funding, lack of sleep, and increasing american paranoia lead to my Crazy Plan. The Plan was rather simple in it's inception: take a year off from college and travel to Australia, treat fen who where running into the realties of becoming part animal, get paid in cash or gear (sell gear for tidy profit in gray market), use new funds to pay for 4th year of college. And if things went well enough I might even be able to make a dent in my student loans.
For the most part things went according to Plan. Traveling to Australia was easy enough, though the first two weeks it took me to hook up with the local fen in Perth were more of a drain on my bank accounts than I had planned for. The few catgirls I met with mainly had issues with nutrition and one case of an ear infection. The ability to ask what is wrong (and get a meaningful answer) can not be understated, it enabled me catch a case of aspirin poisoning soon enough to get her to certified vet in time. I was able to make enough to pay the bills, but in order to come out of this trip in the black I needed to meet more potential clients, and that meant leaving earth.
The cost of storage for my worldly possessions and transport to L5 put me (once again) a lot closer to broke than I would have liked. The three days it took for word of mouth to get around completed my transition to insolvency. My lack of currency lead to lack of residence, which forced me to make house calls (or would that be ship calls?). Initially I considered my need to go to the patents a perk. More often then not a discussion of how they were coping and what obstacles they encountered stretched long enough that I was offered a meal, and sometimes a spare bed. Even after my cash flow was positive I found myself continuing to make house calls. Being in a comfortable setting was more important than having access to a wide variety of equipment (which I didn't have and couldn't afford to store). Being able to ask questions and get meaningful answers enabled me to trim down my necessary gear to the point that everything I needed fit into a backpack.
Granted, by the end of the first month half the stuff in my backpack was 'waved and tended to give nonstandard readings (the cobbled together stethoscope played music whose tempo matched the pulse). A 'waved palm pilot got me enough web access to schedule appointments and manage logistics.
Of course a willingness to walk onto someone's ship without knowing much about them (aside from the fact that they needed help) caught up with me.
-----
The first thing I noticed in my climb back to consciousness was the taste in my mouth, somewhere between pickled lemons and rotting onions. My attempt to scrape the offending residue off my tongue led to discovery number two: my arms where secured behind my back. That discovery got my eyes open, heart pounding, and adrenaline flowing. After almost panicking for a longer period that I like to admit, I took stock of my environment as best as I could tell. Metal chair; single light hanging from above; the walls, ceiling, and floor were painted an industrial grey. The metal chair was affixed securely to the floor, my hands cuffed behind my back through on of the back supports. My shoes and socks were missing, my pants where taped to the chair legs, but aside from that my clothes where largely intact.
I didn't see any way out of the room, the three walls I could see where uniform in their color (grey) and texture (smooth). The only difference on the ceiling was the line for the light bulb that was stapled in place and ran out of my sight. The floor was gray as well, but it contained a collection of stains that I didn't want to thing too much about. My back and shoulders hurt too much for me to attempt to get a good look at the wall behind me. But I assumed the door was there, as I couldn't see it anywhere else.
As I sat in the chair and tried to free myself, I came to a few conclusions: The chair was bolted to the floor, handcuffs are very hard to pick, and duct tape is very hard to rip with no leverage. In short I spent somewhere between a half hour and 2 hours rubbing my shins and wrists raw. I was able to discern that I was on a small ship or very small space station, the smell of recycled atmosphere and vibrations of whatever I was on docking with (or being docked with) something else gave that away.
Shortly after the vibrations of docking, the door behind me opened. I aggravated my already sore shoulders in a reflexive attempt to see who it was, I shouldn't have bothered. The man wasted no time behind my back. He loomed over me for a few seconds before setting the rusting yellow toolbox he was carrying down between us. He was both taller and wider than my 6' 150 lb. frame. Short black hair framed an angular face, something danced behind his eyes that ratcheted my fear up another notch. A lab coat that had seen better days was draped over his frame, about as clean as the cell floor. His pants were black, and I saw the suggestion of boots before he spoke and snapped my attention back to his face.
"You have made a name for yourself among the animals, yes?" he had a slight russian accent. "Word has gotten around: 'See Jonathan, he will help you'."
I was half way to voicing the protest that was lodged in the back of my through when he smiled, it wasn't a nice smile.
"My name is Gregory, and now you will help me." I didn't like the sound of that.
"I have experience with the human body, you know animals, we will work together and make my employers happy." he said as he rummaged around in the toolbox.
I managed to get find my voice this time, "What are you talking about? Where am I? Why would I cooper-" the words died on my lips as he held up a nasty set of pliers.
The smile was back. "Don't fool yourself into thinking you have a choice."
I don't like to remember what happened next. Suffice it to say that when he was done the floor was messier, I was curled up in a corner missing toenails, and he had my help.
-----
When Gregory came back in latter, he brought a bottle of water and some energy bars. The food and water as tossed at me as he started to speak.
"It is time for our work to begin. You will follow me. You will not touch anything unless I tell you to. You will answer my questions as best you can."
I was too busy filling my stomach to do much more than nod and chew.
He turned around and walked out of the cell, I limped after him. He didn't have to worry about an ambush from behind. He could have mopped the floor with me on a good day, and it was far from a good day.
Gregory led me through several short corridors to the 'lab'. The room was 15' square, made of the same metal sheeting that the rest of this place was constructed out of. Along the wall to my left were plastic containers ranging from gas can size to industrial monstrosities 4' across and 6' tall. They were all connected with an assortment of hoses and pipes in no pattern I could discern. At the far wall the pipes fed into something that started it's life as a bathtub, what it was now I couldn't say. In the right far corner next to the not-bathtub was an operating table. Shelving and various expensive machinery I couldn't make out occupied the rest of the right wall until about the halfway point.
The closer half of the right wall was occupied by two cages, each about 4' on a side. The metal bars were welded directly to the floor and ceiling, a door was built into the front of each one, and a sizable padlock made sure the occupants stayed put. The nearer of the two contained two wolves (dogs don't have the same fur pattern), they were curled in the corner on some bedding. They didn't look too healthy, the ribs where showing, and something else seemed off. The inhabitant of the other cell caught my attention, and I forgot about the wolves. It was a woman, somewhere between 18-22 years old. She was also huddled in the corner, eyes wide and staring at me. Her face was a mix of fear and questions. Her pants and shirt were in same state as my own, trashed.
I turned to find Gregory leaning against one of the cabinets, but before I could formulate a question he cut me off.
"You are not here to ask questions, you are here to answer them." His tone voice left no room for argument. "But in order to answer them you must know a bit of what is happening. So listen well. Some of the fen have managed to remake themselves as animals. Mostly as, how do you say, catgirls?" He didn't stop for my answer. "My employers wonder what else can be done, cats do not make good soldiers, they are too independent. But wolves, there is an animal that can be worked with." The smile was back, I was really starting to hate that smile.
"But my work so far has not been too successful," Gregory explained as he motioned to cage with the wolves "They do not eat, they do not understand what I say, something is wrong with them. You will find out what it is. Jessica will be better."
I didn't have to be told who Jessica was, she was staring at me and Gregory and me. Her questions had been answered, and I pitied her for that. My stomach tried to rebel as I limped my way over to the first cage, but fear of another session with Gregory and his pliers kept the bile down. With a sick realization I knew what had seemed wrong about the wolves earlier, their bodies where a mix of human and wolf geometries. As I reached the cage Gregory walked over and unlocked the cage with a set of key that quickly vanished back into his lab coat. The wolves (kids? they were too small to be anything else) woke up at the sound of the door opening. They reoriented themselves as I entered the cage, facing my direction and keeping low to the ground. The closer one made sure to keep itself between me and other wolf, growling when I stepped into the cage. I decided not to aggravate them an more than I already had and crouched down where I was.
The hips and shoulders where structured wrong, not quite human or wolf. The hands a strange mix of paw and fingers. Their legs were digitigrade, and the feet had a set a set claws to match those on the hands. Their foreheads and slope of the face was steeper and wider than a normal wolf, signs that a human size brain rested inside. But aside from that, the ears, eyes, and teeth were standard wolf. As I stood up and backed out of the cage the wolf stopped growling, but I didn't feel any safer.
-----
Over the next three days Gregory picked my brain of everything I knew about wolves (not all that much), dogs (a lot more), and 'wavetech in general (next to nothing). In between answering his questions I attempted to gain the acceptance, if not the trust, of the wolves. I did manage to learn that my initial assumption of their origin was correct, though it did little for my conscience. They had originally been brother and sister, ages 14 and 16. Gregory told me he thought the 'brew had been a little strong', and that adjustments to breeding goo (held in the collection of pipes and containers on the opposite wall) had been made.
On the morning of day four I was woken by Gregory opening my cell door and tossing me the standard meal (bottled water + energy bar). I tried not to think about long term nutritional impacts. As I dragged myself out of the meager bedding he had found for me, I couldn't help but notice the smile was back. This didn't bode well.
"Get up Jonathan! Today we find out if we are a success." I tried not to think about what this meant to Jessica.
When I arrived at the lab I found that Gregory already had Jessica restrained on the operating table, with a drip in her arm. She was dressed in a flimsy paper gown. Desperate to stall for time, I jumped at the first thing I could think of. "Please tell me your not using diazepam." I said while gesturing to the IV in Jessica's arm.
Gregory looked up from adjusting something inside the not-bathtub and just glared at me. He wasn't amused at my questioning of his methods, for a moment I feared he would get the pliers again. Instead a dangerous muttering emerged, "And what is wrong with diazepam?"
As fear ran little circles in my brain, I prayed he hadn't studied modern veterinary pharmaceuticals. "Nothing for humans, but for canines it also acts as a neural inhibitor." I didn't manage to sound as sure of myself as I hoped, and covered for it by glancing meaningfully at the wolves in the cage.
Gregory stood up and frowned, and for a brief moment I thought he smelled the steaming pile of b.s. I had just fed him. After a nerve-racking couple of seconds he nodded to the cabinets and grunted "Then find something safe, she needs to stay under for another half hour." Seemingly content with this delegation, he returned his focus to the insides of the not-bathtub.
Not really believing my luck, I started to search the contents of the cabinets. Gregory had never let me near them before, and I quickly saw why as my search progressed. A wide collection of pharmaceuticals and psychotropics littered the shelves, none of them easy to come by or legal to posses. The moment I saw the amphetamines I knew it was my best and likely only chance. It was surprisingly easy to remove the diazepam drip and introduce a hastily measured amount of stimulant into the IV drip, mainly because Gregory was busy double checking the connections that feed wavium from the breeding tanks into the not-bathtub.
Gregory walked around the monstrosity that was once a bathtub with the horrid smile on his face and exclaimed in a tone all to cheerful for what was about to be done, "Now you will see what Science can do!" After releasing the straps that had held Jessica to the table he lifted her shoulders and told me to grab her legs. I had never seen the inside of the tub, but as we lowered her inside I saw more than I ever wanted to. What had started out as a large metal bathtub had, in various stages, been embossed, engraved, laminated, and welded with a dizzying array of pictures, diagrams, anatomical sketches, and chemical formulas. The images of wolves and humans overlapped and intertwined with each other in a way that made my head hurt. The outside of the tub was affixed with more sensors and metal boxes than I could make sense of. As Gregory fitted her with a oxygen mask that was integrated with the head of the tub, I felt a part of me give up hope. She hadn't woken up in time, I had miscalculated the dosage, or hadn't accounted for some other drug in her system. I had a chance to save her and I failed.
Gregory muttered under his breath about various measurements I didn't catch as he turned the taps in the tub on. Instead of clear water pouring out of the spigot a thick viscous red emerged. It was streaked with darker streamers of gold and black that didn't seem to move with the same flow as the rest of the goo. I started transfixed until Jessica's head disappeared beneath the murky red wavium. Tearing my gaze away from her face, I stumbled over to the wolf cage and sat down with my back to the bars. The wolves were noisier than normal, pacing around the cage and making sounds half way between a growl and a whine. Maybe they recognized what was happening, or maybe they were as scared of Gregory as I was.
I watched him fuss around the outside of the not-bathtub, recriminations chasing each other around my head. He occasionally would put on heavy rubber gloves and reach into the tub to check on something, but I lost interest. My guilt and exhaustion conspiring to drag me into unconsciousness. I'm not sure what woke me from dreams that centered around being chased by wolves and Gregory. The wolves were sitting eerily still, only a few feet from me, making the occasional chuffing noise and staring at the tub. Gregory, on the other had, was practically dancing around the tub looking at readings and sticking his arms up to the elbow into the red muck.
I stared at this production for about a minute and was about to try and get some real sleep when Gregory suddenly went stiff and screamed. Left arm sill in the tub, he flailed around a bit with the right until he was able to get a firm grip on the edge and haul himself backwards. What followed him out of the tub, jaws firmly attached to his left wrist, was close to 150 pounds of very pissed off female werwolf. In the few seconds it took my brain to kick into gear a stray thought bubbled up from the back of my mind 'huh, well I guess the amphetamines worked after all'.
Gregory was busy trying to extract his arm from Jessica's jaws and find a decent weapon with his other hand. Jessica was frantically trying to chew off Gregory's hand and extract herself from the tub at the same time. A process that was made harder since she her movements were still a little clumsy and she couldn't gain traction on the smooth surface of the tub. Their mutual distraction enabled me to sneak behind Gregory and attempt to brain him with the IV stand. It probably would have worked, if I hadn't gotten one of the legs tangled in the cabling running across the floor. My furtive yanking and cursing did catch Gregory's attention though, and quicker than I could react he had grabbed me and shoved me against the tub. While my body didn't make all that good of a shield, Jessica found considerably more traction in my back than on the metal tub.
Somewhere between Jessica dragging me into the tub on her way out and Gregory finally loosing his balance on the goo covered floor, the tub capsized. My head met the far sides rim on it's way up and I sat in a dazed stupor trying to arms and legs to work again. Gregory was sprawled on the floor, trying to fend off Jessica. I heard the wet snap of bone as Gregory's wrist gave way. It apparently did not go unnoticed by him either, as his screams escalated into shrieks. Jessica finally let go of his now limp arm and scrabbled across the slippery floor to get a better position over him. He managed to hold her off for a couple of seconds until Jessica landed a blow against his broken arm. As Gregory curled around his broken appendage his neck became exposed, it was not a wasted opportunity. Jessica latched onto his neck and shook him like an oversized rag doll, or at least she tried to. He still outweighed her by close to half again her own weight and the metal floor, slippery with wavium, didn't offer much purchase for her claws.
In the end it didn't really matter though, Jessica managed to dig her claws into his shoulders and with a sharp twist removed a large section of Gregory's neck. As he bled out onto the floor I had a horrible feeling that I might be next. After all I didn't exactly protest what was going to be done to her. I had been too concerned with keeping my own fingers and toes to worry much about her neck. But apparently I wasn't a high priority, Jessica stood up and shuffled on unsure legs over to the cages. The wolves inside were sitting by the door to the cage wagging their tails and making encouraging little barks and yips and she made her way over. When she reached the door her stance seemed to deflate a little bit and I heard her growl in a tone that seethed with frustration. Jessica turned to face me, one hand holding the lock to the cages. Her mouth opened and a short chuff of a bark came out, blinking and shaking her head she tried again without much better results. The frustrated growl emerged again as she shook the lock in one hand and pointed at Gregory's corpse with the other. It didn't take to long for my addled brain to piece the request together. She was tired from the fight and didn't much look forward to trekking all the way back to where I was to get Gregory's keys.
I decided not to bring up her apparent loss of speech, and emerged from the relative shelter of the tub to search the body. My back started to complain at once. I didn't want to think about what it looked like, but it felt like strips of bacon. I managed to turn Gregory's body on it's side and rummaged in his pockets for a few seconds before finding his keyring. As I stumbled my way over to the cages I tried to think of what to do next. We had no idea if Gregory's employers were due to arrive, where we were, if we could escape, or if there was transportation for us to flee in. My nervous mental rambling was cut short as I arrived at the cages.
Jessica stepped back and looked at me expectantly. As I hunched over the lock to find the right key Jessica let out a strange sound behind me. I figured she was trying to speak again and would interrupt me if it was important. When I opened the door the wolves ran out and cavorted around us. Their obvious joy at freedom brought a smile to me face. I turned to Jessica, expecting to see her smile as well. But she wasn't even looking at them, her gaze seemed to flicker between her claws and my chest. I hadn't realized how sad and dejected she could look until that point, fur matted down by the wavium, the outline of ribs visible along her torso.
"Hey, something wrong?" I didn't know if she could answer, but it was worth a shot.
My question seemed to snap her out of introspection. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before issuing a bark of frustration. That brought the wolves up short, the trotted over to Jessica and whined a query. In response she hesitantly reached out to my shoulder and slowly turned me around. I didn't want to think about what my back looked like, it only really hurt when I attempted to lift or move something. Denial and adrenaline were my friends at this point, they kept me functional. I was hoping that was an sign the damage was purely superficial, and not that I had lost enough blood to go into shock. I didn't even want to think about what the goo was doing in my wounds, that though could be saved until I was able to clean them out. Until I could, the best I could hope for was to limit blood loss and try to get help as quickly as possible. Apparently my back didn't look good at all, as the wolves scampered off to one of the larger cabinets, opened it with their paws, and came back with packages of gauze and medical bandages hanging from their jaws. Perhaps calling them wolves was wrong. They acted much more like the kids they where at one point.
I tried to remove my shirt, but not being able to raise my arms above my head quickly stopped that idea. Jessica saved my from further aggravating my injuries by taking my collar in both hands ripping the shirt in half down the back. The only parts that offered any resistance were the collar and waist. As the sodden mess that used to be my shirt hit the floor, I saw bloody tatters that the back used to be.
"Ok, perhaps your right. This does need to be taken care of." Jessica managed to emote a strange combination of guilt, embarrassment and something else I couldn't pin down in response. It took a few false starts, but eventually I was able to talk Jessica through bandaging my back.
*****
I am making several assumptions about the rules of fenspace that no longer may be true:
1) There is significant black market interest in space
1a) more than one criminal element (or one that is willing to spend enough) are interested in maintaining the upper hand mook wise. It's a little hard to threaten people when then can mop the floor with you.
2) We care about the biology of biomods enough to start looking at dietary restrictions, or at least dietary hampering. This may well be treated the same as bathrooms (aka not at all).
any input is gladly welcome.-Terry
------
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die." - Carmen Boyle (Olympic Luge Gold Medal winner - 1996)
Mary Sue's theme music
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
But I present this first part for a thorough thrashing. I would prefer to make changes now, before I have invested even more time into it, than to have to throw half of it out the window.
*****
I was halfway through the veterinary program at UC-Davis when news of Handwavium hit the general populace. By the end of my third year a combination of deficient funding, lack of sleep, and increasing american paranoia lead to my Crazy Plan. The Plan was rather simple in it's inception: take a year off from college and travel to Australia, treat fen who where running into the realties of becoming part animal, get paid in cash or gear (sell gear for tidy profit in gray market), use new funds to pay for 4th year of college. And if things went well enough I might even be able to make a dent in my student loans.
For the most part things went according to Plan. Traveling to Australia was easy enough, though the first two weeks it took me to hook up with the local fen in Perth were more of a drain on my bank accounts than I had planned for. The few catgirls I met with mainly had issues with nutrition and one case of an ear infection. The ability to ask what is wrong (and get a meaningful answer) can not be understated, it enabled me catch a case of aspirin poisoning soon enough to get her to certified vet in time. I was able to make enough to pay the bills, but in order to come out of this trip in the black I needed to meet more potential clients, and that meant leaving earth.
The cost of storage for my worldly possessions and transport to L5 put me (once again) a lot closer to broke than I would have liked. The three days it took for word of mouth to get around completed my transition to insolvency. My lack of currency lead to lack of residence, which forced me to make house calls (or would that be ship calls?). Initially I considered my need to go to the patents a perk. More often then not a discussion of how they were coping and what obstacles they encountered stretched long enough that I was offered a meal, and sometimes a spare bed. Even after my cash flow was positive I found myself continuing to make house calls. Being in a comfortable setting was more important than having access to a wide variety of equipment (which I didn't have and couldn't afford to store). Being able to ask questions and get meaningful answers enabled me to trim down my necessary gear to the point that everything I needed fit into a backpack.
Granted, by the end of the first month half the stuff in my backpack was 'waved and tended to give nonstandard readings (the cobbled together stethoscope played music whose tempo matched the pulse). A 'waved palm pilot got me enough web access to schedule appointments and manage logistics.
Of course a willingness to walk onto someone's ship without knowing much about them (aside from the fact that they needed help) caught up with me.
-----
The first thing I noticed in my climb back to consciousness was the taste in my mouth, somewhere between pickled lemons and rotting onions. My attempt to scrape the offending residue off my tongue led to discovery number two: my arms where secured behind my back. That discovery got my eyes open, heart pounding, and adrenaline flowing. After almost panicking for a longer period that I like to admit, I took stock of my environment as best as I could tell. Metal chair; single light hanging from above; the walls, ceiling, and floor were painted an industrial grey. The metal chair was affixed securely to the floor, my hands cuffed behind my back through on of the back supports. My shoes and socks were missing, my pants where taped to the chair legs, but aside from that my clothes where largely intact.
I didn't see any way out of the room, the three walls I could see where uniform in their color (grey) and texture (smooth). The only difference on the ceiling was the line for the light bulb that was stapled in place and ran out of my sight. The floor was gray as well, but it contained a collection of stains that I didn't want to thing too much about. My back and shoulders hurt too much for me to attempt to get a good look at the wall behind me. But I assumed the door was there, as I couldn't see it anywhere else.
As I sat in the chair and tried to free myself, I came to a few conclusions: The chair was bolted to the floor, handcuffs are very hard to pick, and duct tape is very hard to rip with no leverage. In short I spent somewhere between a half hour and 2 hours rubbing my shins and wrists raw. I was able to discern that I was on a small ship or very small space station, the smell of recycled atmosphere and vibrations of whatever I was on docking with (or being docked with) something else gave that away.
Shortly after the vibrations of docking, the door behind me opened. I aggravated my already sore shoulders in a reflexive attempt to see who it was, I shouldn't have bothered. The man wasted no time behind my back. He loomed over me for a few seconds before setting the rusting yellow toolbox he was carrying down between us. He was both taller and wider than my 6' 150 lb. frame. Short black hair framed an angular face, something danced behind his eyes that ratcheted my fear up another notch. A lab coat that had seen better days was draped over his frame, about as clean as the cell floor. His pants were black, and I saw the suggestion of boots before he spoke and snapped my attention back to his face.
"You have made a name for yourself among the animals, yes?" he had a slight russian accent. "Word has gotten around: 'See Jonathan, he will help you'."
I was half way to voicing the protest that was lodged in the back of my through when he smiled, it wasn't a nice smile.
"My name is Gregory, and now you will help me." I didn't like the sound of that.
"I have experience with the human body, you know animals, we will work together and make my employers happy." he said as he rummaged around in the toolbox.
I managed to get find my voice this time, "What are you talking about? Where am I? Why would I cooper-" the words died on my lips as he held up a nasty set of pliers.
The smile was back. "Don't fool yourself into thinking you have a choice."
I don't like to remember what happened next. Suffice it to say that when he was done the floor was messier, I was curled up in a corner missing toenails, and he had my help.
-----
When Gregory came back in latter, he brought a bottle of water and some energy bars. The food and water as tossed at me as he started to speak.
"It is time for our work to begin. You will follow me. You will not touch anything unless I tell you to. You will answer my questions as best you can."
I was too busy filling my stomach to do much more than nod and chew.
He turned around and walked out of the cell, I limped after him. He didn't have to worry about an ambush from behind. He could have mopped the floor with me on a good day, and it was far from a good day.
Gregory led me through several short corridors to the 'lab'. The room was 15' square, made of the same metal sheeting that the rest of this place was constructed out of. Along the wall to my left were plastic containers ranging from gas can size to industrial monstrosities 4' across and 6' tall. They were all connected with an assortment of hoses and pipes in no pattern I could discern. At the far wall the pipes fed into something that started it's life as a bathtub, what it was now I couldn't say. In the right far corner next to the not-bathtub was an operating table. Shelving and various expensive machinery I couldn't make out occupied the rest of the right wall until about the halfway point.
The closer half of the right wall was occupied by two cages, each about 4' on a side. The metal bars were welded directly to the floor and ceiling, a door was built into the front of each one, and a sizable padlock made sure the occupants stayed put. The nearer of the two contained two wolves (dogs don't have the same fur pattern), they were curled in the corner on some bedding. They didn't look too healthy, the ribs where showing, and something else seemed off. The inhabitant of the other cell caught my attention, and I forgot about the wolves. It was a woman, somewhere between 18-22 years old. She was also huddled in the corner, eyes wide and staring at me. Her face was a mix of fear and questions. Her pants and shirt were in same state as my own, trashed.
I turned to find Gregory leaning against one of the cabinets, but before I could formulate a question he cut me off.
"You are not here to ask questions, you are here to answer them." His tone voice left no room for argument. "But in order to answer them you must know a bit of what is happening. So listen well. Some of the fen have managed to remake themselves as animals. Mostly as, how do you say, catgirls?" He didn't stop for my answer. "My employers wonder what else can be done, cats do not make good soldiers, they are too independent. But wolves, there is an animal that can be worked with." The smile was back, I was really starting to hate that smile.
"But my work so far has not been too successful," Gregory explained as he motioned to cage with the wolves "They do not eat, they do not understand what I say, something is wrong with them. You will find out what it is. Jessica will be better."
I didn't have to be told who Jessica was, she was staring at me and Gregory and me. Her questions had been answered, and I pitied her for that. My stomach tried to rebel as I limped my way over to the first cage, but fear of another session with Gregory and his pliers kept the bile down. With a sick realization I knew what had seemed wrong about the wolves earlier, their bodies where a mix of human and wolf geometries. As I reached the cage Gregory walked over and unlocked the cage with a set of key that quickly vanished back into his lab coat. The wolves (kids? they were too small to be anything else) woke up at the sound of the door opening. They reoriented themselves as I entered the cage, facing my direction and keeping low to the ground. The closer one made sure to keep itself between me and other wolf, growling when I stepped into the cage. I decided not to aggravate them an more than I already had and crouched down where I was.
The hips and shoulders where structured wrong, not quite human or wolf. The hands a strange mix of paw and fingers. Their legs were digitigrade, and the feet had a set a set claws to match those on the hands. Their foreheads and slope of the face was steeper and wider than a normal wolf, signs that a human size brain rested inside. But aside from that, the ears, eyes, and teeth were standard wolf. As I stood up and backed out of the cage the wolf stopped growling, but I didn't feel any safer.
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Over the next three days Gregory picked my brain of everything I knew about wolves (not all that much), dogs (a lot more), and 'wavetech in general (next to nothing). In between answering his questions I attempted to gain the acceptance, if not the trust, of the wolves. I did manage to learn that my initial assumption of their origin was correct, though it did little for my conscience. They had originally been brother and sister, ages 14 and 16. Gregory told me he thought the 'brew had been a little strong', and that adjustments to breeding goo (held in the collection of pipes and containers on the opposite wall) had been made.
On the morning of day four I was woken by Gregory opening my cell door and tossing me the standard meal (bottled water + energy bar). I tried not to think about long term nutritional impacts. As I dragged myself out of the meager bedding he had found for me, I couldn't help but notice the smile was back. This didn't bode well.
"Get up Jonathan! Today we find out if we are a success." I tried not to think about what this meant to Jessica.
When I arrived at the lab I found that Gregory already had Jessica restrained on the operating table, with a drip in her arm. She was dressed in a flimsy paper gown. Desperate to stall for time, I jumped at the first thing I could think of. "Please tell me your not using diazepam." I said while gesturing to the IV in Jessica's arm.
Gregory looked up from adjusting something inside the not-bathtub and just glared at me. He wasn't amused at my questioning of his methods, for a moment I feared he would get the pliers again. Instead a dangerous muttering emerged, "And what is wrong with diazepam?"
As fear ran little circles in my brain, I prayed he hadn't studied modern veterinary pharmaceuticals. "Nothing for humans, but for canines it also acts as a neural inhibitor." I didn't manage to sound as sure of myself as I hoped, and covered for it by glancing meaningfully at the wolves in the cage.
Gregory stood up and frowned, and for a brief moment I thought he smelled the steaming pile of b.s. I had just fed him. After a nerve-racking couple of seconds he nodded to the cabinets and grunted "Then find something safe, she needs to stay under for another half hour." Seemingly content with this delegation, he returned his focus to the insides of the not-bathtub.
Not really believing my luck, I started to search the contents of the cabinets. Gregory had never let me near them before, and I quickly saw why as my search progressed. A wide collection of pharmaceuticals and psychotropics littered the shelves, none of them easy to come by or legal to posses. The moment I saw the amphetamines I knew it was my best and likely only chance. It was surprisingly easy to remove the diazepam drip and introduce a hastily measured amount of stimulant into the IV drip, mainly because Gregory was busy double checking the connections that feed wavium from the breeding tanks into the not-bathtub.
Gregory walked around the monstrosity that was once a bathtub with the horrid smile on his face and exclaimed in a tone all to cheerful for what was about to be done, "Now you will see what Science can do!" After releasing the straps that had held Jessica to the table he lifted her shoulders and told me to grab her legs. I had never seen the inside of the tub, but as we lowered her inside I saw more than I ever wanted to. What had started out as a large metal bathtub had, in various stages, been embossed, engraved, laminated, and welded with a dizzying array of pictures, diagrams, anatomical sketches, and chemical formulas. The images of wolves and humans overlapped and intertwined with each other in a way that made my head hurt. The outside of the tub was affixed with more sensors and metal boxes than I could make sense of. As Gregory fitted her with a oxygen mask that was integrated with the head of the tub, I felt a part of me give up hope. She hadn't woken up in time, I had miscalculated the dosage, or hadn't accounted for some other drug in her system. I had a chance to save her and I failed.
Gregory muttered under his breath about various measurements I didn't catch as he turned the taps in the tub on. Instead of clear water pouring out of the spigot a thick viscous red emerged. It was streaked with darker streamers of gold and black that didn't seem to move with the same flow as the rest of the goo. I started transfixed until Jessica's head disappeared beneath the murky red wavium. Tearing my gaze away from her face, I stumbled over to the wolf cage and sat down with my back to the bars. The wolves were noisier than normal, pacing around the cage and making sounds half way between a growl and a whine. Maybe they recognized what was happening, or maybe they were as scared of Gregory as I was.
I watched him fuss around the outside of the not-bathtub, recriminations chasing each other around my head. He occasionally would put on heavy rubber gloves and reach into the tub to check on something, but I lost interest. My guilt and exhaustion conspiring to drag me into unconsciousness. I'm not sure what woke me from dreams that centered around being chased by wolves and Gregory. The wolves were sitting eerily still, only a few feet from me, making the occasional chuffing noise and staring at the tub. Gregory, on the other had, was practically dancing around the tub looking at readings and sticking his arms up to the elbow into the red muck.
I stared at this production for about a minute and was about to try and get some real sleep when Gregory suddenly went stiff and screamed. Left arm sill in the tub, he flailed around a bit with the right until he was able to get a firm grip on the edge and haul himself backwards. What followed him out of the tub, jaws firmly attached to his left wrist, was close to 150 pounds of very pissed off female werwolf. In the few seconds it took my brain to kick into gear a stray thought bubbled up from the back of my mind 'huh, well I guess the amphetamines worked after all'.
Gregory was busy trying to extract his arm from Jessica's jaws and find a decent weapon with his other hand. Jessica was frantically trying to chew off Gregory's hand and extract herself from the tub at the same time. A process that was made harder since she her movements were still a little clumsy and she couldn't gain traction on the smooth surface of the tub. Their mutual distraction enabled me to sneak behind Gregory and attempt to brain him with the IV stand. It probably would have worked, if I hadn't gotten one of the legs tangled in the cabling running across the floor. My furtive yanking and cursing did catch Gregory's attention though, and quicker than I could react he had grabbed me and shoved me against the tub. While my body didn't make all that good of a shield, Jessica found considerably more traction in my back than on the metal tub.
Somewhere between Jessica dragging me into the tub on her way out and Gregory finally loosing his balance on the goo covered floor, the tub capsized. My head met the far sides rim on it's way up and I sat in a dazed stupor trying to arms and legs to work again. Gregory was sprawled on the floor, trying to fend off Jessica. I heard the wet snap of bone as Gregory's wrist gave way. It apparently did not go unnoticed by him either, as his screams escalated into shrieks. Jessica finally let go of his now limp arm and scrabbled across the slippery floor to get a better position over him. He managed to hold her off for a couple of seconds until Jessica landed a blow against his broken arm. As Gregory curled around his broken appendage his neck became exposed, it was not a wasted opportunity. Jessica latched onto his neck and shook him like an oversized rag doll, or at least she tried to. He still outweighed her by close to half again her own weight and the metal floor, slippery with wavium, didn't offer much purchase for her claws.
In the end it didn't really matter though, Jessica managed to dig her claws into his shoulders and with a sharp twist removed a large section of Gregory's neck. As he bled out onto the floor I had a horrible feeling that I might be next. After all I didn't exactly protest what was going to be done to her. I had been too concerned with keeping my own fingers and toes to worry much about her neck. But apparently I wasn't a high priority, Jessica stood up and shuffled on unsure legs over to the cages. The wolves inside were sitting by the door to the cage wagging their tails and making encouraging little barks and yips and she made her way over. When she reached the door her stance seemed to deflate a little bit and I heard her growl in a tone that seethed with frustration. Jessica turned to face me, one hand holding the lock to the cages. Her mouth opened and a short chuff of a bark came out, blinking and shaking her head she tried again without much better results. The frustrated growl emerged again as she shook the lock in one hand and pointed at Gregory's corpse with the other. It didn't take to long for my addled brain to piece the request together. She was tired from the fight and didn't much look forward to trekking all the way back to where I was to get Gregory's keys.
I decided not to bring up her apparent loss of speech, and emerged from the relative shelter of the tub to search the body. My back started to complain at once. I didn't want to think about what it looked like, but it felt like strips of bacon. I managed to turn Gregory's body on it's side and rummaged in his pockets for a few seconds before finding his keyring. As I stumbled my way over to the cages I tried to think of what to do next. We had no idea if Gregory's employers were due to arrive, where we were, if we could escape, or if there was transportation for us to flee in. My nervous mental rambling was cut short as I arrived at the cages.
Jessica stepped back and looked at me expectantly. As I hunched over the lock to find the right key Jessica let out a strange sound behind me. I figured she was trying to speak again and would interrupt me if it was important. When I opened the door the wolves ran out and cavorted around us. Their obvious joy at freedom brought a smile to me face. I turned to Jessica, expecting to see her smile as well. But she wasn't even looking at them, her gaze seemed to flicker between her claws and my chest. I hadn't realized how sad and dejected she could look until that point, fur matted down by the wavium, the outline of ribs visible along her torso.
"Hey, something wrong?" I didn't know if she could answer, but it was worth a shot.
My question seemed to snap her out of introspection. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before issuing a bark of frustration. That brought the wolves up short, the trotted over to Jessica and whined a query. In response she hesitantly reached out to my shoulder and slowly turned me around. I didn't want to think about what my back looked like, it only really hurt when I attempted to lift or move something. Denial and adrenaline were my friends at this point, they kept me functional. I was hoping that was an sign the damage was purely superficial, and not that I had lost enough blood to go into shock. I didn't even want to think about what the goo was doing in my wounds, that though could be saved until I was able to clean them out. Until I could, the best I could hope for was to limit blood loss and try to get help as quickly as possible. Apparently my back didn't look good at all, as the wolves scampered off to one of the larger cabinets, opened it with their paws, and came back with packages of gauze and medical bandages hanging from their jaws. Perhaps calling them wolves was wrong. They acted much more like the kids they where at one point.
I tried to remove my shirt, but not being able to raise my arms above my head quickly stopped that idea. Jessica saved my from further aggravating my injuries by taking my collar in both hands ripping the shirt in half down the back. The only parts that offered any resistance were the collar and waist. As the sodden mess that used to be my shirt hit the floor, I saw bloody tatters that the back used to be.
"Ok, perhaps your right. This does need to be taken care of." Jessica managed to emote a strange combination of guilt, embarrassment and something else I couldn't pin down in response. It took a few false starts, but eventually I was able to talk Jessica through bandaging my back.
*****
I am making several assumptions about the rules of fenspace that no longer may be true:
1) There is significant black market interest in space
1a) more than one criminal element (or one that is willing to spend enough) are interested in maintaining the upper hand mook wise. It's a little hard to threaten people when then can mop the floor with you.
2) We care about the biology of biomods enough to start looking at dietary restrictions, or at least dietary hampering. This may well be treated the same as bathrooms (aka not at all).
any input is gladly welcome.-Terry
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"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die." - Carmen Boyle (Olympic Luge Gold Medal winner - 1996)
Mary Sue's theme music
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
