Veronica planned for this to happen. She told me as much. Gave me fair warning, and still, somehow I almost fell for it.
* * *
Three months ago…
It is late at night, and I am holding a vial of freshly produced serum that will not be tested on an animal. The lab is quiet. The building is empty besides me. A security man does an external patrol every now and then, but I have made it clear that I do not wish to be disturbed.
I am standing on a precipice many others have stood on. Throughout history, scientists have come to this point and leaped past it. This formula I have right here? We cannot try this on humans. If it doesn’t work, well, that would be unfortunate. But if it does work, the results would be so unpredictable we would have to keep those people captive. And that, in spite of all that has happened lately, is still not actually legal even if we wanted to. I would never personally test on a captive population. I do not know if the same can be said for Veronica.
My curiosity is burning.
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.
