Decisions

by Mel Todd

  Maybe I'll be lucky, and Chuck hasn't noticed.

  Walking towards her lab, she ripped open the bag and dumped them into her mouth. The salt and oil from the nuts hit her tongue and her knees almost buckled as hunger swamped her. She rarely ate breakfast and because of being late hadn't even grabbed any tea to drink on the way in.

  "What in the world?" She muttered and realized she shook with hunger. In a single move Cass pivoted and headed back to the vending machine. She slid in her credit card and spent thirty dollars on food she'd normally not eat but right now she'd eat anything to get her body to quit screaming at her.

  "Binge eating, Borden? Think you can make yourself sick and get out of explaining why you are almost four hours late?"

  Chuck's nasal Northern accent voice sounded directly behind her. Normally, Cass might have squeaked or something. Right now she needed more food. Fighting to swallow and not shove more food down her mouth, she turned and looked at him.

  As always, he had a supercilious sneer on his face, and his scraggly mustache over thin lips, no chin, and a hawk-like nose made him seem like an odd vulture you'd see on a nature special. He had a long lean body but he always stooped a bit; she resisted telling him to stand up straight.

  "I wafh," she mumbled, the words coming out a mishmash. Cass ducked her head, blushing as he loomed over her, too close.

  "Please, Borden. Don't talk with your mouth full. I don't need to be exposed to masticated food as well as dealing with an employee that doesn't know how to show up to work on time."

  Oooh, that man. This is only the second time in two years I've been late. Usually I'm here an hour before everyone else.

  Cass chewed and swallowed, upset and aggravated, but she needed the job. He could make her life even more unpleasant by making it harder for her to get access to the machines she needed and by lowering her priority in processing samples. Or even worse, he could end her processing early for a 'higher priority' request.

  With the last swallow, even though her stomach clamored for more food, she forced a smile. "I'm headed that way. Rough morning." Her smile had no more sincerity than his matching one.

  "And what can justify missing so much of your day?" His tone had her hackles rising, and that idea of her having hackles almost distracted her from her annoyance.

  "Just life, traffic, alarm didn't go off, flat tire. It happens. Besides, I'm on salary and I work late more often than not, so I'm sure I'm still on the plus side."

  He sneered at her but couldn't say anything, especially since she knew how often he left at noon on Mondays and Fridays.

  "Fine, but you better get to work. Otherwise I'll have to bump your orders for someone else that did bother to show up and put their requests in." With that he turned and slouched away, leaving her dumping another bag of peanuts in her mouth as she glared at his back.

  And this is why I talk to myself, it is better than talking to idiots. But what the hell is up with this hunger?

  Cass hated not understanding things. Knowledge formed the basis of her world – she investigated and understood everything. It also contributed to why most men didn't date her. She didn't go into obsessive-compulsive behaviors, but she needed to know why, and most men got frustrated with her need to figure out why they did things in a certain way.

  The shakes had stopped, so she headed to her lab, stopping in the little ante room. They all had lockers there, all four of them, well Chuck had one too, but he rarely stepped foot in the lab if he could help it. Usually only if requests for processing from an outside source came in. Then he'd go in and set up the machines for the samples and tests requested. But for the most part he acted as an administrator, not a scientist.

  Her lab jacket hung in her locker and she pulled it out, slipping it on with relief. She bound her hair up in a cap and grabbed her safety glasses, pausing a moment to dump the last of the peanut M&M's in her mouth. The rules said no food or drink in the lab, which made sense, and for the first time she regretted the rule. Hunger still nipped at her mind. She pulled out her research notebook, the main reason she had a real padlock on her locker. All her notes theories and experiments were in here. At the end of each week she typed everything up and uploaded it to her password protected cloud storage provided by the company. Of course, they didn't know she also mailed a copy to herself every week and also took home all the week’s filed sheets. While risking losing data would make most people nervous, it made her sick.

  "Suck it up, Borden, you have work to do. You can get a pizza on the way home." Her voice sounded odd in the empty little room and she sighed.

  She really wanted to review memories and make observations, but she didn't have time. Why couldn't Chuck just let her do her job?

  Enough. Get to work. Those samples won't wait for you.

  Reminding herself of her lichen colony growing in her special terrariums made her smile. With three unusual lichen, all from a lake in Pennsylvania. Someone had noticed injured birds eating it. But they only ate it if they were injured. The healthy birds ignored it completely.

  Each wall terrarium had multicolor growths covering the surfaces. She went to her newest glass case that had three lichen in it.

  "Good, you've got enough for me to harvest." Her voice low and reassuring, she'd given up worrying about anyone thinking she was crazy talking to her projects.

  Grabbing gloves and a petri dish she scraped off some from the orangish green one, then headed back to start running her test. The first three had implied some impressive cancer fighting properties, so she wanted to keep working on it and see if her theories were correct.

  Pushing everything out of her mind, she focused on her processes and tests, noting each step as she performed it in her ever-present notebook. Even her hunger disappeared as she worked, focused wholly on what she was discovering.

  "Huh. It worked." She leaned back from the microscope smiling. The extract from the lichen, okay extract was simplifying it, had attacked the cancer cells. It had broken down over half the cells in the sample set in less than twenty-four hours.

  She started the paperwork to patent it and rubbed her eyes trying to figure out why she felt so tired. She glanced at her watch and her jaw dropped.

  "Shit. Eight, no wonder. I'm done. Food and home." With quick, exact movements, proof of her meticulous planning, she shut down her station and headed out of the lab. Now that she had come back to reality, her body let her know how hungry she was.

  Everyone else had left, not that there were all that many people in the building anyhow. She walked to the car, stretching. Getting in, she grabbed her phone and put a pick-up order in at the grocery store and the next-door pizza shop, doubling her normal pizza and wine orders.

  Headed that way, she decided to call her sister and see if they were still on for dinner at her sister's house next week. She needed to tell her about the incredible morning and really should have called her on the way in but knew she wouldn’t have time to talk. Helena could/did ramble. Besides, she’d still been trying to convince herself it had actually happened. She told the car to call Helena. Technology was nice sometimes.

  The phone rang twice and before she could say anything, her sister Helena started babbling her voice high and stressed.

  "Oh my gosh, did you see it? That cop is a monster! She turned into a giant cat and killed those two men. What if I'd been in there? She might have killed Troy or Laila!"

  3

  Secrets

  Wolverines are smart, cover large territories, and are regarded an omnivorous but they prefer meat. They have been known to steal kills from bigger predators. Their claws cause even big cats to think twice. While related to badgers, they are differentiated by their larger size and the lack of the distinctive coloring, namely the black and white stripes, that characterizes badgers. Wolverines are known for a nasty temper and battling animals many sizes larger than themselves, but research has shown that unless they are cornered they rarely fight, preferring to act aggressive while backing
away. ~ Animal Documentary.

  Helena had always been the one who guys asked out, who knew what she wanted, and who could make friends with anyone. In comparison Cass had been shy, awkward, too smart, and not pretty enough to overcome the first things. She'd always envied Helena, her perfect marriage, charming husband, and two perfect kids. Her niece and nephew, whom she spoiled every chance she got, which was often as they only lived about two hours from her.

  But her words, words that made no sense yet made perfect sense, caused Cass’s heart to freeze.

  No one knows, I didn’t say anything to anyone. No one would believe me.

  "Helena? What are you talking about?" Her voice came out shaky, she wrapped both hands around the steering wheel and sent a silent thanks for hands free calling.

  "What? You haven’t seen the news? How can you not have seen the news? Oh, you and that lab. Really Cass, you need come up for air more often. She changed! This cop changed on TV!" Her voice had hit that high pitch again and Cass winced, but it didn’t stop the shakes of the feeling of dread that crawled up her spine and wrapped around her throat.

  Pulling into the parking lot that held her grocery store and pizza place, she pulled the car into a spot at the end of the lot. She left it running as she listened to her sister tell her all about the incident at the bank today.

  "I just can’t believe it. But what’s even crazier is after that video went viral other people started coming forward and saying they could change too. Can you believe it? How awful! I bet they’re all part of some crazy experiment. I mean who changes into an animal? Well it didn’t happen to me or my kids and I don’t want those animals near them." She took a deep shaky breath. "I can’t believe no one even told you about this. You really need to get your head out of your science, Cass. It’s not good for you to be so out of touch with reality."

  Reality?

  Cass fought down a giggle of hysterical laughter as the memories of her morning came back to her.

  I have no idea what reality is.

  "I’ll check it out. I just wanted to say hi and say I won’t be able to come over next weekend." The words came out without her planning on it.

  "Oh, something wrong?" Her sister had lost the hysterical tone, but the words rang in her head. Would she lose her sister if she found out? She could never find out. The knowledge solidified and hurt like someone had stabbed her in the chest.

  "Just life. Have a bunch of errands to run and some stuff to do. Next month, okay?" The lie almost choked her, or maybe it was the tears threatening to emerge. Of everyone, she’d thought Helena was the person she could tell and trust.

  "Okay. Yell if you need help. The kiddos will miss you."

  "Give them my love. Talk to you later." She hung up almost before the words were out of her mouth and sat in the car shuddering.

  "Suck it up, Cassandra. Go get food. You’ll feel better." She nodded, forced down the emotions, locking them away, and pulled over to the pick-up spot for groceries. The boy came right over, dropped everything in her trunk, waved and left. With a numb mind she headed to the pizza store. She managed to get the pizza without saying more than three words to anyone, a plus in her book. The smell made her dizzy but eating pizza while driving didn’t seem safe. The five-minute drive to her apartment and the two trips it took to get everything in the house almost wiped her out.

  "Put the groceries away, then you can have food. You’re being silly. You’ve had plenty to eat today." That didn’t seem to convince her body, but those nut packs were about two hundred calories a piece and she’d had four of them plus jerky and dried fruit.

  Even though she felt like she might pass out, she put away her groceries, poured a glass of wine, then went to change her clothes. She sat down at the table with the notebook she had written down her findings in open in front of her.

  "Let’s see what this says and then I need to look up that video Helena was talking about."

  Reaching out, she grabbed a piece of pizza and tried to not think about how much she’d have to watch her food for the next week, but right now she didn’t care. She was starving. The first bite exploded in her mouth and she froze as her body screamed for more. With enough thought to push her notebook to the side, she’d learned the hard way over her college years to make sure your notes weren’t near food, she devoured the slice in three bites.

  "Dear gods." But even her astonishment couldn’t put a damper on the need that drove her. In under three minutes the entire large pizza had been inhaled. Sitting there shaking, she reached out and took a deep swallow of the wine and let the taste of the alcohol try to push back the confusion. "What the hell is this?"

  Even as the question rattled in her head, she got up and ate two slices of the next pizza, the one she'd figured would be food for the next week. She still felt the need for calories, but her stomach had reached its limits. Cass had never been a big eater, and rarely ate that much, preferring small snacks to big meals.

  "Give yourself an hour, then you can have some more." Hearing her own voice helped her decide she wasn’t dreaming or having a really weird dream. With her mouthwatering, she put the pizza box in the oven to wait for her time to be up. She had thinking to do. Grabbing the wine bottle as she went back to the table she topped up her glass and started to review her notes, trying not to focus on the smell of pizza that called to her.

  "Wave of heat both before the first change and during the second." She frowned trying to remember but the details of the change itself were hard to capture, to remember. The transition between human and animal remained foggy, just not there. But she recalled the heat that felt like a bad sunburn flushing through her body.

  "Huh? Conservation of energy? Mass changing shape requires energy. Assuming that this is not magic but is a cellular based transformation, energy would be required. Human bodies only have a limited amount of bioelectric energy and the energy required to convert the structure of cells must be insane."

  "The only other energy easily available would be caloric. So how many kilojoules of calories did I burn to shift from human to a wolverine then back again?" She drank some wine as she thought. "It wasn’t a figment of my imagination. The measurements were consistent, and the weight made sense. The only question is, is it repeatable, and will the caloric constraints remain the same?"

  She leaned back looking at her notes. Repeating experiments was the hallmark of a good scientist. If you could replicate your results, then you had something you could patent, market, and present to others.

  "Research do your research. You know this."

  With reluctance, the desire to try again almost as great as her desire to eat more food, she pushed away from the table. She sat at her computer, sipping on her wine, and started to research. Typing in ‘cop changes into cat’ brought the video her sister had to be talking about to the front. Clicking on the video she blinked at how many times it had been seen already. Though the comments of ‘hoax’ and ‘great special effects’ made her mouth twist with wry humor, she watched the video with interest. The woman, McKenna Largo from the notes on the video, melted and in under twenty seconds a cougar stood there. The speed of the change stunned Cass. She’d figured it’d taken a while but the time stamp on the video showed how fast it was. Most CGI took longer, but the woman's body just flowed into a different shape. A scream of pain escaped her on the flow into an animal but when she moved back into human, there wasn’t a sound of pain.

  Cass hit pause and thought about it. The first time had hurt but she didn’t remember pain the second time.

  "Same theory as the pain or labor that your body forgets on purpose? Or did the pain levels change?"

  She made another note as something else to test. Other videos followed and she noted the different animals being uploaded by various people. The range of animals astonished her. Assuming they weren’t all copycat fakes, and at least one or two were, she noted bears, tigers, cheetah, wolves, and she’d swear some sports guy had turned into what she thought was a pr
ehistoric cat, but she wasn’t an expert.

  "Most of them are predators. Is there a reason for that? I mean the bear and red panda aren’t, but they aren’t the majority. What could have caused this?" She kept researching and looked up some details about the various animals but saved her in depth research on wolverines for later. That wouldn’t be done tonight. By the time Cass looked up from her research the summer sun had gone down.

  "Crap, it’s late and I need to get to work before everyone else tomorrow so Chuck can’t use it against me."

  Exhaustion weighed her down at the thought. If she didn’t have something going on that she was damn sure would be patentable, and maybe ground breaking when it came to cancer cures, she’d be tempted to quit. But he could be ignored, at least most of the time.

  "Either way, I have lichen waiting for me." Excitement fired up her mind as she reviewed the results from today. Discovering something new was even better than the idea that maybe she could turn into a wolverine again. Barely.

  She stood in the kitchen and ate the remaining half of the pizza. The overwhelming need had faded but she felt better with food in her. Going to bed she set her alarm and wondered what tomorrow would bring.

  4

  Lichen

  Lichen are fascinating organisms. They are a composite of algae or cyanobacteria that lives among filaments of multiple fungi in a symbiotic relationship. The combined lichens often have properties different from those of its independent organisms. It can grow in a rainbow of colors and is often taken for a plant, but it isn’t. There are also macrolichen and microlichen referring to the growth forms. There are about 20,000 known species and all the benefits of their strange symbiosis are still being discovered. ~ Science Journal

  The news, as she drove in, had nothing except the emergence of shifters across the globe apparently. From the way the news spoke, every country reported that people had shifted and turned into animals. More evidence seemed to be appearing that you could shift on command though no one knew why.