by Mel Todd
"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!"
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 prehistoric 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.
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.
The theories, arguments, and people freaking out, kept her completely distracted on the drive in. No one else had shown up yet as she pulled in, which made her smile. It meant her day should be quiet and productive. With her wireless headphones on connected to her phone, she tuned out the world around, her lost in her slides, microscopes and the discoveries that waited for her to find them.
She’d been in the lab for about two hours, working with creating a distillation of the bacterial aspect of the lichen chain. If her theory proved correct, she needed to combine two of the three lichen to create the drug. It currently moved towards cancer cells. She needed to buff up the effectiveness but that would take another hour or two of processing in centrifuge to extract what she needed.
A touch on her shoulder had her spinning in surprise even as she pulled off her headphones.
Another researcher, Simon Lamore, stood there. She’d talked to him once or twice, but he’d struck her as very awkward and uninterested in anyone or anything. She had a private bet with herself that he watched his bacteria colonies via remote cameras when at home.
"Sorry you didn’t hear me. Chuck would like to talk to us and he is extremely agitated. That impression is based on previous encounters with him."
"What now?" She knew the lab was doing well, and really just wanted the man to stay out of her way.
"From his comments it is probably about the shifter stuff going on. I know he said everyone had to be there for this meeting."
Cass arched an eyebrow, even as she put her headphones away and shut off the music. "What all six of us?"
"Yep. Though I do not understand how a meeting is more efficient than a memo." Simon had a puzzled look on his face, and she wanted to pat his shoulder, but touching and Simon didn’t go together.
If she had to guess she’d say he qualified as high functioning Asperger's. His need for order and patterns made her look like a free spirit.
"Okay. Let me note where I am with this sample."
"Of course." He stood there patiently looking at nothing, at least as far as she could tell. With quick movements Cass finished making her notes. She wanted to bitch and complain at this interruption, but Simon had nothing to do with it, so taking it out on him would be unfair. She followed him out, pulling the hair net off. She always felt ridiculous wearing one. Everyone was gathered in the small break room which held a refrigerator, sink, two tables and the vending machines she’d raided the other day. With all of them in
there the room felt claustrophobic.
"Finally." He sneered at her and she ducked her head so he couldn’t see her annoyance. "Now that the last of us have deigned to show up I wanted to talk about the shifter thing. While I’m sure it is a massive hoax, our owners feel differently. They are offering a substantial bonus if any of their employee shift and would like to allow them to run some tests." his sneer made her shrink back. "While I am sure that none of our employees here would be so low class as to change." His eyes drifted across the people in the room.
Cass cringed.
Is he looking at me? Why is he letting his eyes linger on me? He can’t know.
"If they did, be assured the bonus is generous." He sneered again. "But if you do, please don’t bother coming back here, just let corporate know. I don’t want your type polluting my environment. Health hazards you know. All that fur would violate lab protocols." Chuck sniffed. "And I would know. I’m highly allergic to cats and dogs. I’d think a wolf would be the same. Dismissed."
There was a grumble, but people started to disperse. As the centrifuge still had another twenty minutes to run, Cass headed to get some soda. She figured she could afford the sugar though she still needed to test the caloric hypothesis. As she put her money in the machine, two of her other coworkers were chatting and she felt her stomach clench as the words filtered into her awareness.
"God, can you imagine turning into an animal? I’d be horrified and never tell anyone. To be a filthy creature? I heard some of them can turn into hyenas and jackals. Carrion eaters. How awful. I’d die first than allow myself to be an animal and eat dead creatures." The speaker was a strict vegetarian and preached it often.
"I know. I watched the weird cop change and had to throw up. The way her body distorted and then she killed those men. I heard the cat ate them. Can you imagine eating people? I bet she starts craving human flesh."
