Ever since they started doing video games and TV shows where people spend a lot of their time bashing down doors and throwing flash-bang grenades into rooms full of terrorists before shooting them, all filmed in a "realistic"* style, the convention has been that the next few seconds will have everything blurry and fading back from white, with the sound muffled and drowned out by a loud ringing noise. As I understood it, this is roughly what actually happens when you're exposed to a flash-bang grenade.

* (Dingy, desaturated, and brown.)

Whether it happens when you're exposed to a high-energy electromagnetic discharge at close range, I didn't know - but that's what I subconsciously expected in the aftermath. It wasn't what I experienced, though. For a moment, everything was black; then I could see again, but I wasn't focusing correctly. This also took just a moment to clear up; I shook my head, and my eyes re-focused normally. There was a ringing sound, but it was softer and not ultra-high-pitched like the faux-tinnitus that you hear in those scenes. And, oddly, it felt like it came from inside me, and it died out in a matter of seconds.

To my surprise, I was fully conscious and functional maybe five seconds after the discharge; the only lingering effect was my heart somehow racing even faster than it had been earlier - impossibly fast, pit-pat-pit-pat-pit-pat... But it was the wrong rhythm. The heart beats ba-thump, ba-thump, a double-stroke, not this mechanically-precise one-two-one-two metronomic rhythm. Maybe Gil was right; maybe I really was going to have a heart attack...

Then my brain started catching up with the events of the last forty-odd seconds. That's right, the accident. The door was open... I looked; yes, the door was open. I tried to think - the inside of the door and the chamber walls formed a Faraday cage, but with the door open, the control room must've been exposed...but how badly was probably a function of the aperture width and the angle of incidence. I knew a radio engineer online who'd tried to explain signal propagation to me once, but I only half-understood anything he said, and my racing heartbeat was accompanied by the most distracting clatter in my head as I tried to remember now...

Wait...God, were Tammy and Emma exposed!? I swung around to look at Emma, and found myself face-to-face with-

With her headless corpse.

I gaped, horrified, dumbstruck, feeling like I should be sick to my stomach and wondering why I wasn't. My...my classmate, the person I'd just been working with...I'd helped her sign her own death warrant. I should be freaking out; I mean, with my nerves!? I should be hyperventilating...why wasn't I!?

It was then that I realized that her body was, firstly, breathing, and secondly, standing - both of which require a functioning brain to accomplish. And the place where her head and neck should've been was conspicuously not bleeding profusely. Instead, it was...emitting some kind of haze...?

It reminded me of smoke, but it wasn't. It was like a heat mirage, that shimmering in the air that makes deserts look like oases in cartoons, but it clustered and billowed and flowed like smoke from a chimney - only the "chimney" was the space between her shoulders, above her missing neck, which... I glanced, hesitantly, at the place where it should've been, but I couldn't see much through the shimmer. Considering what I should've seen, that was probably for the best.

"Gah...what was that!?"

I started, feeling a sudden release of tension somewhere in my chest, which felt...alien, somehow. But I hardly noticed, because that was Emma's voice. I looked around, wondering what in the hell was going on here, but it only took a moment before I found her, sitting snug and secure in the chair at the workstation...

...except that "Emma" here was just a severed head. I stared at her, then at her body, then back at her - and, inexplicably, neither seemed the worse for wear. Moreover, as Emma-the-head's eyes fluttered, blinking away the temporary blindness that I should've experienced and glancing around the room, the motions of Emma-the-body matched up perfectly, to the point where she reached up to eyes that were actually down and to the left, and got visibly confused over it.

"Wh-what the...?" she said, dazedly. "I can't feel...no, I can feel...why can't I reach my...?" Then she looked up at me, and past me, and back at me. "W-wait, wait. Stuart?" I was about to respond when there was a roar from behind me.

"OH WHAT THE EVER-LOVING HELL IS THIS!?"

That was Tammy's voice, and I whirled around to face her as she descended into a string of half-muttered, half-gibberish cursing. I felt a spasm somewhere in my chest at her yell - a flurry of unfamiliar physical sensations, but clearly due to being startled while already highly stressed. Is this what heart palpitations feel like? I wondered. The way my pants moved with me when I turned felt funny, too, but that wasn't important right now.

Tammy's situation was less alarming than Emma's; "severed head" had set the bar pretty high. I noticed first that something was subtly different about her, but I couldn't put my finger on what - and that line of thought was dropped when I noticed what was majorly different. Tammy's legs had become a fish's tail, peeking out from under her skirt; sleek and sinuous, with orange-gold scales.

Or, more appropriately, a mermaid's tail. Fish can be surprisingly flexible, but few (eels excepted) have a tail-section as long and articulate as merfolk.* A mermaid's tail is built more like a snake's: thick at the waist (slightly flared out, in fact, with their human-type pelvis) and tapering towards the tip, with a rounded ribcage giving the lower body a columnar cross-section. The ribs are more loosely-spaced and can move relative to the vertebrae, for added flexibility.

* (One of the funniest things about the old propaganda film was the ultra-fake nature of the "mermaid" costumes for the "actresses" playing the transformed protagonist and her careless bunkmate. Wrapping human legs with sequined fabric does not hide the fact that they only bend at the knee, and it was even more obvious to later generations who grew up with the real deal than it was to audiences in the '40s who'd been seeing that getup in nightclub acts for years. The use of file footage of the actual victims undergoing medical exams only drew further attention to it.)

Like other mermaids, Tammy's new caudal fin was oriented vertically like a fish's (rather than horizontally like a marine mammal's, the way artists always used to draw them,) and I could see her pelvic fins thrashing around under her skirt as she stared down at herself with an expression of...baffled rage? She was glaring at her new body with teeth bared and hot tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. I had to admit, it wasn't the reaction I'd expected.

As I took this all in, the stream of cursing grew louder, less muttered, somewhat more coherent, and much more imprecatory, though I still wasn't clear why she was angry about this rather than surprised, confused, and/or distressed. But there was a sudden shift in her tone, and to my surprise I heard my name come up. Puzzled, I turned my attention back to her.

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"Stu?" she was asking, a look of surprise on her face and concern in her voice. "Stu, is that you? Are...are you okay?"

I was a bit surprised. Sure, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the situation, certainly disturbed by seeing my one classmate beheaded and my other classmate angry as I'd never seen her, to the point of railing against the universe itself over this, but did it really show that much?

Okay, apparently I was much worse at hiding how I was feeling than I had thought, but still, I wasn't feeling the stress as much. The nervous tension was still there - I could feel something inside me practically vibrating with it - but the raw hormonal edge to it was gone. And they were the ones who were really dealing with something crazy here; why would she worry about-

My train of thought derailed in spectacular fashion as it hit me, the realization I should've come to much sooner: I had been caught in the discharge, too.

I felt...strange. An empty, hollow, abstract horror; not the gnawing unease I'd felt in the lead-up or the surge of gut-churning dread when I realized the door was open, but a dawning awareness that all the things that struck me as unusual in the last few minutes were actually signs that something was different about me - that I had changed, somehow, and my life was never going to be the same again.

As I tried to wrap my mind around it, the context for everything I'd half-noticed about myself shifted, and things began to make a disturbing amount of sense. As I listened to the unusually regular and alarmingly fast pit-pat-pit-pat of my heartbeat, I finally heard it correctly: tick-tick-tick-tick... As my brain wrestled with the implications, the chattering in my head and the fluttering in my chest resolved into a chorus of small, discrete motions by countless tiny, unfamiliar components that weren't what was supposed to be inside my body. And as I wondered once more why the stress wasn't making me hyperventilate, I realized that I was not, in fact, breathing at all.

Again, it struck me that I wasn't feeling as stressed as I should be - as I was, in my conscious mind. But now it was beginning to make sense why the familiar squishy, unpredictable, uncontrollable organs-'n-endocrine animal side of it would be gone. I was terrified to turn my gaze away from Tammy, terrified to examine myself and confirm the truth; but somehow, somewhere in my mental map of my own body, I felt like I already knew.

As it turned out, I barely knew the half of it. I might've guessed more, if Emma had her head on when I turned to face her, but as I forced my gaze downwards, I realized that Tammy and her chair weren't as far down as I remembered. Had...had I gotten shorter? Something brushed at the sides of my face; it was my hair. I definitely hadn't had it that long - and it hadn't been that light, either.

The ticking accelerated as a nervous suspicion - as bloodless and abstract as the stress, but no less real - took shape in the back of my mind. Recollections of well-known incidents and statistics on specific trends accumulated over the years - until now, just an idle curiosity to me - now seemed terribly relevant. I was afraid to look, but I had to know...

What met my eyes was a body that was petite, modestly shapely, clothed in a smartly-tailored simple black dress with white trimmings and some manner of frills underneath. Twin swellings in the chest area hinted at what a modestly-cut but open neckline revealed: I was now a girl.

I gasped. My voice was different, softer and higher-pitched - not terribly high, but definitely outside the masculine range. "This...this can't be...!" I stammered, shock and confusion washing over me. Speaking for the first time like this, I noticed that my voice was no longer human. Recognizably feminine, yes, but not human; it sounded like a jet of air rushing over something delicate and metallic, like a wire brush or guitar strings, formed into words. "Th-this can't be real!"

Tammy really did look worried now. "Stu? Really, listen to me. You're okay. We'll figure this out. But you need to calm down, okay? You're gonna be fine."

I wanted to fire back, to ask how she could possibly say that when we knew full well that predictable changes were still only a theoretical possibility, but it was all too overwhelming. The whole situation was insane, I was caught up in the middle of it whether I wanted to be or not, and now I was forever altered, never to return to my original body, maybe never even to return to manhood...

I felt - and heard - things inside me accelerate further, and it was clear that Tammy noticed it, too. I could feel things slipping, sticking, getting out of sync; and it was beginning to affect my perception. Things jittered from side to side, like one eye was lagging behind the other. My neck began to twitch, slightly but persistently. The hormonal side of the stress was gone, but it was still taking a toll on me.

As I got more and more worked up and Tammy kept trying in vain to calm me down, Emma broke in. "Um, guys?" she said. "Not to interrupt, but we've got bigger...well, more immediate problems right now."

That was it. I whipped my head back toward her, ready to let fly with a retort, but stopped short. Emma, who'd managed to pick her head up and was holding it in her hands, nodded towards the outside window. (That is, she tipped her hands to tilt her head forward, now that she no longer had a neck to do it with.) There was something odd in my peripheral vision, but I ignored it for now and followed her gaze.

Outside, on the path coming across the quad, a lone figure was hustling towards the Oesterlund building as quickly as anyone could in this weather. The gangly build and unmistakeable hairdo, even rain-soaked and wind-blown, were a dead giveaway.

"The game isn't over yet!" Tammy yelped. "I mean, he left it?"

Emma shrugged, dropping her head lower as if by instinct. "The power blink must've hit the rest of the campus. He's probably coming to check on the equip-" She bit her lip. "Okay, we need to get out of here, now."

Tammy frowned. "Weren't you all about how this wasn't technically against the lab rules just now?"

Emma laughed sheepishly. "If you hadn't noticed, things went a little differently than planned. I figured on only having a single, non-sentient test subject to explain if anybody started asking-" She turned to me. "Shit, I almost forgot about Lucky! Stu, can you grab him? Carrying stuff is...going to take some figuring out."

I heard, but didn't respond; I was lost in my own thoughts. All this, and now we were going to get caught, shipped off to some lab, maybe dissected... Intellectually, I knew this was nonsense, leftover cultural paranoia from an era before I was even born, but I was so addled from the cumulative insanity that it seemed as plausible as anything else. Why can't I panic properly when I need to!? I fretted.

With a shrug and an expression of minor annoyance, Emma set her head down on the table, looking into the test chamber. Her body turned and went inside, fumbling around for the cage with her intended target. I wondered what he'd turned into. Maybe in some cruel twist of fate, he'd ended up looking like a little rat-sized version of my real body.

"Stu?" Tammy said again. "Listen, I know this's gotta be a lot to take in, but we need to get the hell outta here as soon as she's got her stupid rat. Okay? The last thing we need right now is to have the administration freaking out over this while we're still figuring it out ourselves."

"O-okay," I said hesitantly. I was still afraid to speak, to hear my changed voice. If I wasn't talking or looking down at myself, the persistent ticking and chattering only reminded me of one terrifying change. But Tammy was right, we needed to make our escape as soon as possible. Dr. Curtis was probably already coming up the steps to the entrance.

Emma hadn't said anything, but her expressions and the noises from inside suggested a lot of blind stumbling into things. Presently, though, her body lurched back out with our subject, whatever he'd become; once she could see herself, she moved much more gracefully. She handed the cage to Tammy, who no longer had a lap as such; she set it down on one side of the seat and scooted her rear over to the other side, which seemed to work.

With that, Emma picked her head back up and we made a hasty exit, scurrying down the hallway to the elevator as fast as possible under the circumstances - these being that Emma had to carry her head in her hands and was seeing the world from about two feet lower and one foot further ahead than usual, Tammy's caudal fin kept dragging on the floor if she didn't remember to keep it raised up, and I was suddenly a good deal shorter than I was used to, with a shorter stride but proportionally longer legs, on top of everything feeling weird and unfamiliar after my change.

We rounded the corner to the elevator alcove and I looked back just in time to see Dr. Curtis in the foyer, shaking himself off. It was an astonishing display of discoordinated limbs flying and bushes of hair irregularly orbiting his head; part of me wanted to stay and watch, but we couldn't waste our chance. Emma had already elbowed the call button, and we crammed inside as fast as we could and hammered the door-close button until it finally registered, separating us from the man who didn't yet realize that he should be following in pursuit.