by Kris Schnee
* * *
Two months later, the renamed Neila roamed the main greenhouse of her undersea base. It was just beneath the waves, rippling with light and full of life. She hummed to herself as she walked between the rows of vegetables. They were growing as quickly as her. Already she carried a heavy belly that was a frequent if wonderful distraction from her work. Sometimes she spent whole days lazing around eating fish and reading romance novels from the biologist's personal file stash.
The maintenance robot was crawling along the ceiling glass, checking for cracks. She'd named this one Claire to distinguish it from Wilson, the main computer. "Any trouble?" she asked the machine.
"No, ma'am. But Wilson reports a possible incoming storm detected at the northern outpost."
"We can handle it." The most vital equipment was deep in the safest areas. She giggled and patted her middle. "Including my first crewmember."
"Ma'am?" asked the robot.
"Nothing. Just having fun. Carry on."
There was no shortage of raw materials to support herself, the machines, and what she imagined would one day be a large family setting out to explore the whole world. Maybe they'd all be rescued someday, but at this point what did it matter? So, with her bounty of resources, she'd told Wilson to once a month print up a random gift for her. Last time it was a plush planet pillow that looked like a flat Earth and now adorned her bed. Today was time for another.
She came back to the living room and found a box waiting for her. She opened it and pulled out a t-shirt. ExoTech's starship logo was on it along with the company motto: "Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained".
Neila sat down heavily on her cot, clutching the shirt. A lot of people had died aboard Titan trying to push the frontier outward and build a new life on a new world. They'd gambled and lost... but humanity had still won, so far. She owed it to them to make good use of this planet. If someone came by here again, and eventually they probably would, there'd be people and equipment waiting to greet the visitors. Maybe a whole town of her descendants!
She pulled the shirt on, though it was too tight and didn't cover her stomach. "Thank you, Wilson. It's a good gift."
Safari Swap
It wasn't exactly a spam e-mail. "Pen Pals," it read. "International English learners looking for people to write to! No cost! Hear from exotic locales!"
Tom nearly deleted the message, but was bored enough to investigate. It was December, which made the daily commute to the sawmill cold and dark. Even just reading about someplace warmer than Montana would be a welcome change. So he looked up the mail's sender online and found it seemed like a legitimate social club. He shrugged and signed up.
The next week he got an actual letter, on paper. He was impressed that people still did that. Cooler yet, the sender was someone from Africa!
"Hello. Am learning in special school. Very strange place but good food, and safe. My speaking good? Got lots to learn. Telling me about foreign places please."
Tom thought about the letter all day at work; it helped him ignore the drone of buzzsaws. The next day he wrote back, trying to encourage the writer and use simple words. Part of what he wrote was, "Your letter is typed. Do you use a computer? What kind? What's your name?"
They kept up the correspondence for several months. His pen pal's name was Sala, and she'd grown up "in the big grass" only to have a lot of her family shot by bad men. Now she'd been taken in by some special teachers from the United States, who gave her a computer so she could talk with lots of people. Tom felt kind of disappointed that he was just one friend among many, but really that wasn't bad for either of them. Besides, Sala said she mostly spent time with her classmates and didn't know much about "the big computer net thing." The writing quality went up gradually. He wrote to her about snow and mountains, forests and Niagara Falls, and about wanting to vacation someplace warm. She wrote back about the savanna, the blazing sun, scary lions, and scarier armies. She sent him a lock of stiff black hair, and asked him for some hair in return. That was a bit of a weird request, but he mailed a blond clipping of his own.
By late January, he'd made a habit of hurrying out through the cold to the mailbox almost every day. The letters were a source of warmth. One day, the latest from Sala came with an invitation.
"Am hearing teachers bringing you to see me! Am leaving Africa for time and meeting new people for school swap thing." With the letter came a more formal note from "Central Education Exchange Developments." Tom puzzled over this one. It looked like the pen-pal organization was affiliated with some well-funded company doing fancy education experiments. Whatever they were doing, involved mailing him a free plane ticket! The ticket wasn't for Africa at all, but for Las Vegas. This weekend. He stared at the thing, wondering what he'd done to deserve a vacation.
He managed to get time off to fly there. When he arrived, there was an escort that he barely spotted among banks of dazzling slot machines. She had spiky blond hair (so it wasn't Sala) and a sign that read "Tom". He waved to her.
She grinned and shook his hand. "The name's Erin. There was a bit of a pest control mishap at the company, so I'm your escort."
Erin took him to her car, which had a plush porcupine in the back window. Tom enjoyed the warm desert scenery and the bizarre skyline of casinos, each one meant to catch the eye in a different way. "Where exactly are we going?" he asked.
"Pretty far out. The company's near the border, but there's housing, so we can put you up while you're here."
They left the city far behind, driving into empty land with scraggly sagebrush. He noticed the facility out of the corner of his eye: a bunch of dusty greenhouses with an office complex. It worried him. "What's this place have to do with education in Africa?"
Erin hesitated before answering, pulling the car into an underground garage. "Well, some company officials have been working with the Mormon Conspiracy to Conquer Africa (LLC), and they expressed interest in your ancestry and genetics. I talked them into just getting some samples from you for their zebra project."
"Zebra? What?"
"It's easier to show you." Erin opened the door and gave him a badge with a green leaf icon. According to the badge, the company that ran this place wasn't the education one, but "Genetech".
* * *
"Now, don't touch anything or accept any offers of chocolate." Erin led him into a corporate lobby where the halls seemed to shift from perfectly normal to confusing. He wasn't sure if there were just embedded video screens with changing scenery, or whether someone was actually moving walls around, but he could've sworn he took four left turns in a row and ended up someplace different. Within a few minutes' walk he heard someone cackling from behind a door, and passed a desert terrarium where some jackrabbits were banging rocks together with their forepaws. A motivational poster showed the Earth from space and bore the words, "Soon the World Will Be Ours."
"What kind of place is this?" he said.
"Mad science," said Erin.
"Ah." Tom walked in silence for a little while, starting to think about running away. "So, what's this about zebras?"
"Right in here," said Erin, motioning him through a door. She didn't follow.
He'd walked into a stable, a high-tech one kept clean with rubbery floors and antiseptic white walls. There was indeed a zebra here! It stood barely taller than his head, sniffing at him from behind a low wall. Tom had seen plenty of horses back on his family's farm, but it was surreal to see one with such stark black-and-white markings like a living bar code.
"Tom!" said a computer voice.
"Huh?" There was some elaborate computer hardware here, even a gratuitous sparking Jacob's ladder.
The zebra nodded its head, and the speakers said, "It's me, Sala! I know your hair scent."
"Never mind her," said a lab-coated man with long whiskers. More than that: he also had huge, fuzzy ears and... a rat's tail? That or a lifelike pink rope tied to his back. "I take it you're here on purpose. Have a seat and I'll be right with you."
Tom sank into a chair, and stared at the zebra, stunned. "Sala?"
"Yes. Hi!"
"So... how's the savanna?"
"Boring! I was glad to get here."
"And you're a zebra."
Sala turned her head and looked herself over, stripes and all. "You didn't know that?"
Before Tom could answer, he was distracted by the guy with the lab coat. "Hold still." There was a touch of a cotton swab, and then something jabbing him in the left arm! He saw the needle only after it was too late. The guy said, "There. Now within a day or two we should be able to proceed."
"Am I vaccinated against mouse-pox now?" said Tom, glaring at the man.
"What? No, that was the calibration nanites."
"...Nanites."
The doctor, if that was what he was, looked frustrated. "Yes, yes. You've got your Visitor badge, so get going and come back late tomorrow." He started shoving Tom out the door.
"Hey, come on! What'd you do?" But he felt too wobbly to resist, and was back in the hall with the door shutting on him before he could react. He banged on the door but no one answered. After a minute he steadied himself and went looking for someone who might make more sense.
That led him to the cafeteria, a place called the Genghis Galley. At first it seemed like something from a hospital or college, but usually a lunchlady didn't have cyborg limbs. Scientists sat around eating while a group of assorted dogs sat at a low table, playing "Dungeons & Dragons." Tom stared at them while he approached the counter and started picking out whatever food wasn't moving or glowing. He took a seat across from a lab-coated man and said, "What's up with the dogs over there?"
The scientist shook his head sadly. "We should never have had them switch to fifth-edition rules. Who are you, anyway?"
Tom poked suspiciously at a sandwich, then started eating. "A visitor. I got invited to help with some kind of zebra project."
"That's Bill Foyle's. He's working with herbivores for some reason, partnered with the Cybernetics department. You're a new assistant, then?"
"I'm not sure." Tom tried to explain about the letters from Sala.
The scientist's eyes went wide. "Oh! That would explain the, uh..." He waved one hand vaguely just above his head.
Puzzled, Tom put one hand to his own head and felt a brush or something stuck in it. No, his hair felt stiff in a sort of mohawk pattern, straight back down his scalp. It was right about then that he got dizzy, too, and passed out in the cafeteria.
* * *
Tom woke up in a comfortable glass tube. It was like a Japanese "coffin hotel" room, a padded tube lying horizontally and lit murkily from outside. Feeling feverish, he struggled out from under a sheet, and had trouble because of some kind of glove on his left hand. Then he saw his arm. No glove. There were only three fingers on his hand, each of them ended in a hard black nail, and his skin was covered in alternating dark and light hairs. Stripes. Pairs of his fingers had stuck together and seemed to fuse so that he couldn't begin to pull them apart. His right hand was unchanged.
Tom sat up sharply and banged his head, including the mohawk hair. He looked around for his clothes. Someone had left them neatly stacked beside him in the tube... no, these weren't his. There was a set of black sweatpants and a referee shirt. He put them on anyway for decency, but looked himself over in the process. The change to his hand had spread out from the nick in his arm where he'd been injected, leaving the skin weirdly prickly and sore all the way up to his armpit and the back of his head. "Hello?" he called out, turning to knock on the near end of the tube.
It gave a soda-can hiss and slid open to reveal that rodent-eared guy again. Foyle. "Finally," the scientist said. They were in a chilly lab full of dozens of other glass tanks.
"What's this about?" said Tom, showing off his changed arm. "You brought me all the way here to give me hoof-fingers?"
Foyle took his arm and pulled. Tom was surprised at the move and let himself be helped out of the tube. Foyle said, "Of course not. We just needed to reconfigure your cells for the transplant, so that the samples we get from you will be suitable for our zebra test subject. The side effects are just a bit excessive. But you knew that when you signed up, so what are you complaining about?"
Tom stood barefoot on a cold tile floor, looking around at the other giant tubes. "Signed up for what? I'm here to meet Sala, that's all."
Foyle's ears drooped. "Oh, dear. The company didn't bother informing you, did they?" He sighed and headed for the door, waving for Tom to follow him. "You're at least making a contribution to science. Let's get this over with."
"Hey, come on! What's going on?" Tom had no choice but to follow him to get some answers. Foyle hustled down twisty little passageways until they were back in the zebra room with Sala. It was all Tom could do to keep up, what with the fever he still felt.
Foyle produced another needle and said, "All right then; hold still."
Tom was about ready to punch the guy. "Not until you tell me what I'm missing here."
The mouse-man sighed theatrically. "Fine then. I just need a blood sample from you now, so that I can finish the process of changing Sala here. She was the most promising candidate of all the African wildlife the company picked up. The most likely to survive being changed without going insane."
Sala looked up from watching "Mister Ed" reruns on a black-and-white television. "Oh, hey, you're back. Can you get me one of those 'pizza' things?"
"Well-adapted to human life, as I said," Foyle boasted.
"You mean the point was to change Sala into... what, again?"
"A humanoid, of course. For science. Will you let me do my job now?"
Tom hesitated. It sounded as though what they were trying to do here was for Sala's benefit (or at least science's), and would probably help her. "Uh, all right. Go ahead."
Foyle drew blood from Tom's changed arm. Tom winced and adjusted his shirt. By now his arm was feeling all right, but the whole side of his chest itched and ached, growing striped hair too. "It's getting worse. Can you undo this?"
The scientist ignored him, focusing instead on Sala. He was just as inconsiderate to her. He delivered Tom's blood to a machine, waited for it to dispense some sort of new serum, and injected that right away into the zebra. "Soon my creation will be complete!"
"Yeah, that's great," said Tom, waving his reshaped hand. "How about an antidote over here?"
"Antidote? We haven't really budgeted for that. See, the reconfiguration we need is already done, so any gross morphological changes in you are just harmless side effects. You're still alive, aren't you?"
Tom clacked his thumb against the other two fingers. "Side effects! I've lost two fingers already. How far is this going to go?"
"No farther than anthro — humanoid, I mean. It's not my department," said Foyle. "Take it up with Technical Support."
Tom fumed. So, he was going to become permanently part zebra, and the company barely cared? At least he'd keep his thumbs. He went over to Sala's stall and said, "How long have you had to put up with this?"
"Since I got here," she said through the speakers, turning a dark eye in his direction. "It's okay though. I'm gonna have hands and everything, thanks to you! And there's free food and housing while I'm here. They gave me a Test Subject badge."
Tom peered at the badge hanging nearby, with a leaf icon on it, and then down at the one he was wearing. Not a Visitor badge after all.
Foyle said, "You're free to go, seriously. We don't need you anymore."
"If I've been mixed up with your experiments, then am I entitled to stay here for free while this 'reconfiguration' thing happens?"
Sala said, "Yeah! Why don't you go running with me? We can be herdmates!"
Foyle grimaced, tilting his ears backward. He read the number on Tom's badge and tapped it into a computer. "Fine. You're free to stay while the experiment goes on, and there're various facilities you can access. I suppose I can't keep you out of here, but quit complaining, will you?"
"Complaining? You think this is a minor thing?" He sighed and ran his hoofy hand through his mane. "Whatever. It's a free vacation, at least."
* * *
By the time he got back from the cafeteria, carrying a free pizza, Sala was supposedly able to digest it. "How come she got her whole digestive system rearranged without passing out like me?"
Sala nickered and reached her muzzle over to poke Tom's chest. "You got this without much trouble. Weird that it's way up there."
He felt something squish and looked down. There on the left side of his chest was a heavy swell of flesh, soft and sensitive. He could see through his shirt that the stripe pattern on his arm had spread across it and was slowly heading for his right side, which was also starting to feel puffy.
Tom sputtered. The nanite transfer thing was going in both directions, it seemed, and from a zebra mare to him! "Hey!"
Foyle was busy on the far side of the room and paying him little attention. "Hay? If you're hungry for that already, there's plenty in the stalls."
Tom pulled up his shirt and looked in the mirror. The stiff bristles of his mohawk, or mane, were growing down his neck. Striped hide marked part of his back already and was reaching toward his stomach. His whole left arm had changed, and he had a left breast and the beginning of a right. He shivered and felt the hairs stand on end. Even as he watched, another white hair sprouted from his skin. Probably, he should panic.
Sala nuzzled him. "Can we eat yet?"
Tom laughed, trying to calm down. Running around in a blind panic wasn't going to do anything. He needed fresh air, though. "Let's take this outside," he said.
* * *
They spent a while enjoying the Genetech facility. Much of the place was off limits to test subjects, but there were gardens of exotic plants (some of them invented on-site) and a comfortable suite for Tom to stay in. The desert outside was blazingly hot during the day but nice for a run in the evening. By that first night Tom had a hefty set of breasts on a fully changed, striped chest, and the fuzzy new hide was starting to reach his right arm. His shoulders felt like they'd been pulled a little inward, and the new weight in front threw his balance off. "So," he said during their jog, bouncing with each step. "Mare."