Chapter 1 #6
When this becomes more widely known, I am sure it will be called the Seek Protocol.
There are three separate stages. One is a priming dose.
That is the one that prepares the body for transformation.
Then there is an active ingredient, essentially a DNA template for the primer to activate. And of course, the reversing agent.
I know that these all work because I have ten mice who look like chickens right now.
This is the moment that requires courage.
I bring the open vial to my lips, tip my head back, and drink.
I expected there to be some kind of sensation on the way down. I thought it might burn, or tingle. But it just feels like drinking a perfectly innocuous cordial of some kind. Slightly sweet, perhaps a little salty, but nothing else.
I wait.
Nothing happens.
Well, not nothing. My head becomes noticeably quiet.
Humans are animals in the biological sense, but the constant chatter of the conscious separates us from all other forms of animal existence. We are beasts with a nonstop dialog.
Meditation and such try to reduce it, but the talking goes on nonstop anyway. Even in our cells. To be human is to be confused, and to be torn between instinct and civilization. We owe so much to our social structures, and dedicate so much of our mental capacity toward relating.
All of that has gone. It just slid away, like it was never there.
I become the kind of calm that I used to observe in a cat sleeping by a window, but never truly understood.
Is this enlightenment? Perhaps. The world is open to me.
I feel myself all the way down to my soul.
I sense the pureness of my true self that has so often been clothed in anxiety and insecurity.
It is here with me now, completely unfettered and exposed because it is the one thing that stayed the same while everything around it shifted.
“Huh,” I say. “Hello, me.”
I make a brief note of all of this at one minute past ingestion. At two minutes, I try to make another note, but I find that I cannot. Because my hand is a paw.
I look at it in confusion, and then I realize that I am no longer standing on two feet, but on four legs.
I didn’t even notice the transformation happening, that is how smoothly it happened. On the cellular level, I have become what was in the vial.
I chose a wolf.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. I still seem to have my full faculties too. That’s good. All I need to do is take the antidote. The vial is still on the desk, I just need to get the contents in my mouth.
I reach for it with a paw, knock it over, and moments later everything goes black.
* * *
When I wake up, the lab is trashed, and I am naked.
I find myself lying on my back among shards of glass. That is bad enough. What is worse is that I am not alone.
Veronica is standing over me. She is fully dressed, of course. From this angle I see tall boots with a high heel, and a long skirt. As my eyes open, she drops a towel over my midsection.
“Not precisely professional behavior, Doctor Seek,” she says.
“Uh. What happened?”
“What happened is an animal was loose in here. An animal that turned into an unconscious man. I’m going to have to pay the security guard off handsomely and send him to Siberia.” Her lips quirk slightly, but I do not think she is actually joking.
“Get up, and be careful about it,” she says.
I do my best to get to my feet without cutting myself to shreds, and almost manage it. A quick trip to the facility doctor later, and a change of clothes thoughtfully brought from my home by an assistant, and I am sitting in Veronica’s office.
“I should fire you,” she says.
“Right at the moment I make a breakthrough that has never before happened in the history of mankind? Strange time to let someone go,” I say calmly.
The truth is I don’t care what she has to say. I know that what I just did was incredible, and if I can review the footage and tweak the formula, I bet I can make the whole thing much more manageable.
“I need assurances from you that you will not take substances on the property,” she says. “These formulas put us at significant legal risk.”
I know she’s just going over boilerplate things. She has to say all of this. Even her tone suggests her heart is very much not in it.
“For example,” she says when I tune back in. “There’s the matter of what might happen if someone under the influence of such substances were to impregnate someone. Would the changes propagate?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Is it possible to introduce malleable mutations into genes without the need to take the formula? The semen would have to be produced while under the effect.”
“Yes, well, it would be terrible if we were to find that out, thereby effectively creating an entirely new breed of human,” she says.
I pay full attention to her, because now I am certain she is way off script.
“I’m not dating anyone, and even if I were, I wouldn’t be impregnating them.”
“Perhaps you’ll meet someone who is interested in participating.
Or someone with whom you have a special bond,” she says.
“Certainly, I cannot ask you to procreate for science. The ethics on that are clear. So. In other matters, I think it is high time you were assigned a technical writer to ensure that the specifics of your work are being recorded for posterity.”
“I don’t want a technical writer.”
“Someone young, perhaps female, to work closely with you,” she says, her eyes locked on mine as she talks in double speak so clear I almost don’t hear the words she is actually saying nearly as loudly as I hear the subtext: I am going to hire you someone to breed.