Many eons ago, before any dinosaur ever laid eyes on a spaceship, someone came up with a way to heal the body almost instantly. The ability to craft such technology was long-lost, but a few devices yet remained.
Sam Rizek was good on her word. Within a couple of hours, someone arrived with a bioscanner for Lasoren. The brilliant blue light healed his tiny body in minutes, leaving no visible evidence that he’d nearly died. Halfway through, however, the process was disrupted as he felt his organs heave in an unfamiliar way. His body convulsed, and pushed out waves of bile, blood, salt water, and sand. The doctor had to stop and wait for the purge to end before they could finish the healing.
Lasoren still bore the agony of pain throughout his body in the aftermath, but once it was done, the damage was gone. The phantom pain would eventually fade.
In the event that Sam and Dr. Maesera couldn’t acquire the bioscanner in a timely fashion, Lasoren did have just one trick in his playbook that others didn’t: thanks to a quirk in the design of his human body, he could temporarily heal himself by shifting, reforming his damaged body parts as his DNA transitioned from birth form to human, but the ability came at a severe cost. The injuries would return with time. Like an elastic band, his body would eventually remember what had happened yesterday—though he still did not.
Why can’t I remember it all?
Was it because he’d almost drowned? Was the fractured memory a result of trauma? He should have at least remembered shifting bodies! Shapeshifting was messier and more intense for him than for other Ryozaem, so he had to be very careful and conscious about when and where he did it. His last clear memory was on a street, walking toward the parking garage where he’d left his car. After that . . . pain, fear, and possibly drowning. He wasn’t sure if the memory of drowning was real, or influenced by the knowledge that he’d been found washed up out of the ocean.
What the hell was he supposed to tell his counselor?
Dr. Maesera refused to allow him to even consider walking, so he allowed himself to be carried to a bathtub. As he was lowered into the basin, the doctor said, “You know, it’s usually advised that you do this somewhere where you can get a good ground.”
On the rare occasion that he shifted, he always chose to use a bathtub so he could dispose of the messy remains more easily. There was a slight risk of electrocution from the energy output from a normal transformation, but he’d never had that problem with his.
“It’s not that kind of transition, Doc.”
“Oh?” The doctor’s head tilted slightly, stopping short of an avian expression of curiosity. Lasoren recognized the verbalization as a cover for customary trilling, and didn’t respond.
As much as he also preferred to have privacy, he agreed to allow the doctor to witness the transformation and take a tissue sample. It felt weird to have someone standing there, so he stared at the porcelain floor and rubberized nonslip mat, and focused on drawing out his other body, the instructions written in his flesh, just waiting for his command.
Depending the type of transition being made, it felt a little different for everyone. Many described it as an electric feeling. Like a charge building up in the flesh. For Lasoren, it was like fire. His entire body burned like a furnace.
It was a painful business on the best days: the expansion and contraction of his bones, his entire body pulling and splitting as his muscles surged and his organs inflated and reshaped themselves. His gastralia—the narrow ribs running from his breastplate to his longitudinal pubis—dissolved, excruciatingly at first, until they were gone, and left him with a momentary sense of relief.
The most painful part of transformation involved everything between his back legs. The changing of his hip bones, the transition between joint sockets, and the violently agonizing shift from a cloaca to mammalian body parts . . . and going back again was worse. Like his reptilian ancestors and avian descendants, all of his lower bodily functions occurred through the same orifice. Mammals were split. Though he couldn’t be certain, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was blacking out during that stage.
In his birth form, the bones of his sacral vertebrae (his lower back) were sandwiched between his ilia to support body and tail across the fulcrum of his pelvis. His pelvis warped and splayed for an upright body and his caudal vertebrae—his tail—reduced itself to a fifth sacral bone. The itching of hair growing in all over his body signaled the end of his transformation.
And he’d learned to accomplish it all without screaming. It would never do to have someone hear him and think a man was being murdered. Still: he lay panting on the bathtub floor with tears flowing freely down his human face as he sobbed. That had hurt more than usual, but it had to be done.
What he’d told Bernard was true: he was no geneticist. The brilliant technicians who had built this body for him were lightyears beyond his education, which equated to little more than the average American high school diploma, with an added emphasis in anthropology. Like many of his people on Earth, he specialized in human mimicry, and not much more outside of a few job-specific functions. So he truly had no idea how his body worked. At best, he was aware that multiple methods of shapeshifting had been developed over the ages, the initial technique created by some unknown race of beings and handed down from time immemorial, only to be mostly forgotten and resurrected as recently as a few hundred years ago (by Terran count). Much like the bioscanners, it predated his own people, and possibly every known race in their sector.
He could feel the doctor’s gentle hand on his shoulder. The man was saying something, but he couldn’t make it out through the pain, disorientation, and the throbbing, pounding pulse in his ears.
“What were they thinking?”
He finally heard the question, but had no answers.
He gripped the edges of the tub, and hauled himself to his feet, shaking. The doctor leapt in to help, setting aside a transparent monitor full of medical data.
The agony of transformation had one last phase, not at all helped by the sudden weight of muscle mass and engorged fat cells on his weakened skeleton. Deep in his human chest, his four-chambered heart pounded blood through his new mass with dizzying speed. That would all pass soon, so he’d just have to walk it off. It wouldn’t kill him. What might be a problem would be if he didn’t eat something. Immediately. This body craved food.
“Will you be okay if I go handle this sample?”
Lasoren nodded, staring at the floor, which was suddenly so very, very far away, and grunted under his breath, “Yeah. I’m used to this. Go ahead.”
A few minutes in the shower washed the translucent, globular remains of shapeshifting media down the drain. The lubricated material had acted as a matrix to construct his current form, and it contained critical data that the doctor would hopefully be able to use. Whenever he shifted, Lasoren was careful not to leave anything behind where a human could find it. Even degraded, it still contained enough genetic material to cause a disastrous scene in the wrong hands. Thankfully, that wouldn't be the case here.
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He hummed softly and muttered to himself, shakily working his human lips and larynx to the tune of some catchy bluegrass ditty he’d heard in a bar, just to be sure he still knew how to use them. Unlike most of his people, however, he’d spent more time in this body than his real one, so the practice came more as habit than necessity.
After that, he moved to the sink with painstaking slowness, stood against it, and stared into the mirror to be sure he’d done it properly. Bleary-eyed and lightheaded, he gazed at the reflection.
Loren Sanchez gazed back: a fat, pale, haggard-looking young man with disheveled blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Somewhere in his profile, he was a “Caucasian US Citizen of Spanish descent.” One of the many crafted aspects of his identity bestowed upon him by his employers. “Born in Miami, Florida, 1974.”
Still panting, a sudden wave of disgust overtook his empty, pleading stomach, and he gripped the marble until his fingers hurt. He gasped into the basin, his gut lurching into the back of his throat, but it never finished the job.
Tearing himself away from the image, Loren grabbed a towel and dried himself off, trying his best to regain some decency.
It wasn’t being human that disgusted him. It was knowing what he had to do. He couldn’t look at himself in any body, knowing what he was about to become.
I’m going to ruin that boy’s life.
The thought had been on his mind for days.
Humans were adaptable, flexible creatures, but not nearly the hyper-adaptive beings Loren’s employers seemed to think they were. While it was true that young humans were very adaptable, those years were critical to their development. The tension and trauma of the five-year-long Nightmare Case had done things to those children that no child of any species should have to experience—and for what? Because his own people couldn’t keep track of a pair of escaped lab rats? That case was the very reason he wasn’t supposed to be here, today, but it seemed his orders were pushed by some cold-hearted Naka commander all the way at the top. No one else would have this kind of gall.
Nothing about any of it added up properly, and the only thing he could chalk it up to was terrible judgement . . . or severe desperation.
Nowhere in his contract agreement had anyone said anything about drafting human children who had already been put through hell and pulled from service.
So much for company ethics.
His stomach lurched again . . . and then his vision swam.
Something was wrong. Something else, unrelated to the terrible assignment.
A dull throb began in his limbs, coursed through every inch of his torso as it gained intensity, and shot straight up his spine with a splitting pain that made his eyes water. His head pulsated, the fatty mass of his human brain beating against his skull.
Of all the things he’d experienced as a shapeshifter, never, ever before had anything like this happened.
Screaming, he clutched at his temples, and considered the awful possibility that he may need to shift back.
Who was going to do the mission? He couldn’t do this as a dog. Could he?
No. No, he needed the full use of his human brain.
The one that felt like it was exploding. His brain, and his whole body were on fire.
His knees hit the bathroom floor.
Everything pulsed.
And everything burned.
His body was trying to kill him.
The doctor was back at his side, talking again, trying to figure out what was happening to him.
“Just make it stop,” he wept, “Make it stop. Make it stop.”
The pain went on, and on, and on, until just as quickly as it had started, it began to fade.
He slid the rest of the way to the floor, leaning against the cabinet as he gasped for air. Beside him, the young medic waited, crouched with a syringe in one hand.
“Better?” Dr. Maesera asked him.
Loren nodded weakly, and whispered, “Yeah. Better. What’d you do?”
“Just an anti-inflammatory drug. I took a risk and used one formulated for our kind. If that didn’t work, I was going to call MHQ for more advanced assistance. Your external symptoms resembled either a debilitating migraine or an Ilaysian attack. I’ve re-checked security, just in case. I’ve never witnessed an event like that, before.”
“No. Wasn’t Them. My body . . . it was my body. I don’t understand what’s happening. Like . . . everything was on fire. Whole body . . . just lit up. Doc . . . somethin’s up with my Ka’dour.” He couldn’t bring himself to pronounce the trilled “aa,” but the doctor had no trouble understanding him. In English, they called it a symbiote. A cellular lifeform that worked to support normal cell functions, resulting in longer lives—and in some variants near-immortality.
“Kaadour-kaima is supposed to be healing you, even as a human.”
“Yeah,” Loren groaned, “Cain’t explain it, doc. Sounds like it saved my life this mornin’ and it did the job just now, but somethin’ ain’t right. It’s . . . sluggish. Like, y’know how the first time ya shift, y’gotta wait for your brain to catch up? I feel like I gotta do that every time, except it hurts, and it keeps gettin’ worse. I’ve only been in this body four years ‘n I feel like ‘m dyin’.”
He dragged himself to his feet with the doctor’s help. He was still dizzy, but his head was starting to clear, more than it had since this misadventure began in Beaufort. It occurred to him that the doctor had given him something they weren’t supposed to have, which could get the man deported. He offered a weak smile. “That’s a hell of a risk you took. Thanks. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I’d appreciate that. Thank you. Do you want me to call your supervisor?”
“No. I just wanna eat. A lot.”
His eyes fell on a stack of clothes. Khaki pants, tropical shirt, boat shoes, and a granola bar.
The doctor explained, “The Captain—I mean, Sam Lurizek left that for you.”
Loren snatched the granola bar, ignoring the clothing as he tore the package open, stuffed nearly the whole bar in his mouth at once, and fumbled for the sink, intending to drink straight from the spigot like a wild animal. A glass of water was conveniently placed in his hands.
“Thanks,” he gasped after a moment, “How many of those do we have?”
“Ease up before you injure yourself. There’s a full carton in the galley. How much do you typically eat after you shift?”
Loren shrugged, “I dunno. A lot. I’ve only done it a few times, and I don’t have any memory of last time . . . so there’s no telling how long it’s been since I’ve eaten last. I think it mighta been yesterday, but I’d have to check a calendar to be sure. Lately I’ve pretty much always been hungry, though. I feel like I’m always eating.”
Dr. Maesera frowned, entering something on his handheld monitor, “You shouldn’t be.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s still a human body, and I need to take care of it.”
The doctor shook his head, “What I mean is that you shouldn’t be hungry like that. Shapeshifting makes you hungry of course because it requires so much energy. At least some portion of that energy comes from your own body’s reserves, so it’s natural to need food after the fact, but not continuously as you’ve described. There are a few human issues that could cause that, but I can’t be sure, since you’re Ryozae, and given your other symptoms. Your real body is also drastically underweight. Your ideal weight is around fourteen pounds, and you’re closer to eight. You should be coexisting with your human body, not fighting it. Something’s definitely wrong. Would you mind if I asked a colleague to run some tests on that sample?”
Loren shrugged again and started dressing, “Go for it. I started asking for a new body last summer after working a bad case down in the Caymans, but I haven’t heard anything back. I ain’t been right since then. I ain’t no damn action star, and that was the second case last year tried t’ kill me. I’ve been tired. Tired and hungry, all the time.” He turned and studied the man briefly. “I can’t tell if your diction has changed or my brain has caught up. It seems less formal.”
“It’s probably your brain, in this case,” the doctor murmured, unexpectedly embarrassed, “But this isn’t the first time someone has made that observation. It’s a terrible habit of mine.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It’s just interesting. Do you do it in our language, or just in English?”
In the mirror, he watched the doctor’s face flush, as the man answered in an archaic-sounding dialect Loren had never heard before, like an elegant variation of the old reptilian form his parents spoke, as opposed to the modern avian dialects he was otherwise accustomed to, “Irria. Seiyassei’diu-ahn xonn, xiaanyu’zu— . . . zuli.” (Indeed. I’m afraid (I) do, qu—quite often.)
The sound was refreshing, as something Loren’s primitive ears didn’t have to strain to understand. The doctor was clearly uncomfortable, however, for some reason Loren couldn’t begin to fathom—and he was too hungry to try. Instead, he finished dressing and patted the man’s arm, “Didn’t mean to pry, Doc. Think I’m gonna head upstairs and look for those granola bars. It ain’t gonna be much, but it’ll get me to my next meal.”
The doctor nodded, with a look about him as though he were coming back from some far-off place, “Yes—right. The—oh, there’s a case of starship rations to the rear of the pantry. They’re designed for our kind, so they’re significantly denser and burn off more gradually than granola. Will you need a ride?”
Loren smiled, thinking of that beautiful Lexus in the parking lot, and imagining the purr of its still-new engine and the smell of fresh leather, “You know, I’d like that. Thank you.”
The rations were standard grade and tasted awful, but it was the first time he could remember feeling satiated in a long time. He needed a new body, but this one would simply have to do for now.