Corporate Spy-der

Woman: Artist References
Tarantula: Somadjinn

Dongmei was good at her job.  Probably one of the best in the world.  She'd stolen more corporate secrets than anyone else maybe in history.  This one, though, was proving far more challenging than any before it.  She'd penetrated the main computer within a few days only to discover that it was full of useless stuff.  Their public programs, their captive breeding programs, -- useless junk.  The owner of the entire facility was tumored to have
made major biomorphological breakthroughs.  But the computer that held the critical information, the information she and her handlers wanted, didn't even appear to be on the internet.  In this day and age, that was unthinkable. Unless she could get access to the subnet that held the information she would have to do the unthinkable and admit defeat.

After clearing it with her handlers, she arranged airfare and a hotel and flew to where her real target lay.  She spent weeks casing the place and finally determined that the only place that was completely cut off was a single building hidden away from the main zoo complex.  That would be her target. Though normal break-and-entry wasn't her forte, she was reasonably adept at it.  Late in the evening, she took a cab to the zoo and spent a few hours just walking around.  She was puzzled because the zoo seemed the usual zoo. Animals, plants, breeding programs, nothing really special.  Surely they'd be using the technology in the zoo somewhere.

She carefully hid herself away until the zoo was closed for the night.  Only the usual security personnel and robots would be about now.  Humans, of course, were no problem.  She was trained in evading mere humans. And she could disable any security system before it could do anything to her.  After all, computers were the dumbest things on the planet.  Give them a few instructions and they'd just as soon aid you as catch you.

After watching their patterns for a while, she found an opening and made her way carefully to the disconnected building.  She found the lock to be far more devious than she thought it should be.  It took her nearly twenty minutes to get by its failsafes.  With the delays imposed by guards and guardbots checking on their rounds, it was nearly dawn before she finally managed to get into the building.

It proved to be a disappointment.  A long corridor with doors, all locked with the same fiendish lock mechanism. She tried door after door until she came to a small group with large glass observation walls.  She tried to peer into the darkness with her flashlight but the glass obscured too much. She continued her assessment of the locked rooms and found one with a door ajar!  The simplest security failure ever and these fiends had made it!  She quickly snuck inside, careful not to close the door behind her.  That, too, could trip an alarm.  The room seemed little more than a large hotel room with beds, an eating nook and an entertainment centre.  She looked at the entertainment centre, trying to determine if it was attached to any kind of physical alarms.  It seemed that it was exactly as it seemed.  A simple entertainment centre.  Perhaps it was attached to this buildings internal network.  Unlikely as that was, she decided to risk it.  She powered up the console and quickly hacked past the entertainment user interface.

She soon discovered that she was able to get anywhere in the system except for a small locked subnet.  That must be what she'd come for!  She popped her high density drive into the console's connector slot and set about cracking the security of that subnet.  No sooner did she try her first password theft program than the soft click of the door told her she was now trapped.  She disconnected her equipment and went to try the door.  As expected, it was securely locked.  She set about to break it open and escape.  Looking at her watch, she realized she’d spent far too long here.  The people would likely be coming into work very soon.Fifty minutes of determined effort soon wasted the rest of the time she had left before a change in the lighting told her she’d been discovered.  Ah well, all she was guilty of was break-and-enter.  Her handlers would have her free in a few weeks and the decadent jails of the United States were nothing like those of her homeland.

“Ah my little web spider has been caught in a different net,” a male voice speaking in clearly machine translated Chinese stated.  She hated machine translations.  They were correct but carried no real emotion.  She couldn’t tell whether the speaker was happy or annoyed or angry.  “We’ve been watching your attempts to hack us for months now.”
“I demand ...”
“You demand?  That’s a laugh.  Your people will never know what happened to you.  I’ve been talking with the Department of Homeland Security.  Seems you are wanted on all kinds of charges.  I’ve convinced them that I can deal with you far more permanently than they’re allowed to.”
“I demand to speak to my embassy.”
“But you aren’t here.  You aren’t quite as invisible as you think you are.  Our park security system had you tracked from about five minutes in.  That’s when I contacted my friends in DHS.”
“I demand to speak to my embassy.  You cannot hold me here.”
“Indeed,” the voice stated blandly as a hiss from the overhead vents told Dongmei she might be in real trouble.

Dongmei awoke minutes or hours later (her watch and all her equipment was gone).  She was dressed in a simple cotton gown like the ones worn in hospitals the world over. Everything was gone!  All her micro-tools, all her electronic aides, her data drive, everything.  Damn them!She spent the next few hours looking for weaknesses in the walls, floor and ceilings.  She had to get out.  Though the Americans didn’t torture per se, they did use methods that were pretty close.  She couldn’t afford to have her knowledge in the hands of the enemy.

Everything seemed extruded in a single piece.  The only breaks were tiny slots for airflow, water pipes and a wide slot over a table in the main room.  None were large enough to escape through.  If she’d still had her tools, she could have sent them into the system and maybe had a chance.  She had nothing.

While she was pondering her next move, a click behind her announced what the wide slot was for.  A food tray of bland American cafeteria food appeared and slid onto the table.  Sandwiches and soup.  The utensils were cheap plastic probably made in her homeland. They’d be worse than useless.  Disgusting as it was, she ate the meal (she had to keep her strength up) and pushed the tray back into the slot.

Over the next few hours, she noticed a strange itching on her sides from her ribs to her hips.  Something in the damned food was giving her a reaction.  She had no idea how Americans could stomach the crap.  She decided she’d better check it out.  In the washroom was a mirror that was fairly easily removed from the wall.  She half thought to smash the mirror to provide a weapon before she discovered it wasn’t glass.  Some kind of aluminized plastic, it would never take a sharp enough edge to do anything.  Besides, she needed to see the rash.  Maybe, if it were severe enough, she could get transferred to a hospital and escape from there.

The “rash” was no rash at all.  She was growing a fine orange fur from ribcage to hips.  Fur?  Why fur?  Then it struck her.  This was a biomorphology research station.  She knew something of the field, little more than the public media allowed and what she’d gleaned from other jobs she’d been on.  Basic biomorphology could regrow limbs or missing organs but little else.  They’d injected her with something while she’d been out.

She had to get out and the entertainment centre was her best chance.  She sat down at the console but quickly discovered that the secure subnet had vanished.  There was nothing here now save entertainment.

“I demand to seem my embassy!” she shouted at the walls.

There was no response, of course.  Why should they let her see her embassy now?  They’d caught her by the simplest trap and she’d fallen for it.  The subnet probably was probably a phantom and nothing she had done or could do would have penetrated it.  It was simply something to keep her working until it was too late.  She got up and began to pace the tiny room like a caged tiger.  She was well and truly trapped. Over the next few hours, as ideas struck her, she’d try them out.  The entertainment console was now completely
disconnected.  The entertainment was all recorded and clearly on the machines main storage.  She pushed the damned thing onto the floor and got some of her anger out by smashing the thing to fragments. None of them useful, of course.  The main board broke into pieces, as expected, but nothing sharp or hard enough to do anything with.  After several minutes, she heard the hiss of gas again and collapsed in the debris. When she awoke some time later, the mess had been cleared up.  Nothing remained and the console had not been replaced.  She’d half expected them to use the console to communicate with her. Getting up from the floor, she walked over to the centre of the room and began a Tai Chi routine to calm her nerves but there was something throwing her balance off.  She felt heavy in her hips like something had been attached there.  A quick investigation by touch revealed a bulge that the bathroom mirror showed to be a large black furry blob about 50 cm across.  No wonder her balance was off. Despite the extra weight, she continued her routine.  There was no way she’d give them the satisfaction of seeing her discommoded by the discovery.  She was stronger than that.

After a half an hour, she decided bed was her best option.  There was nothing else to do in this room.  Eat. Sleep. Exercise.  And, or course, protest whenever anyone was listening.The next morning brought more unwelcome changes.  Her hips were completely covered by the dense orange-red fur.  She felt weaker this morning as if she hadn’t been exercising in weeks.  She felt smaller, too, as if she were shorter but when she checked in the mirror, she seemed the same height as before.  By lunch, though, she was sure she was shorter.  The height of her human portion was being moved into an extension of her hips.  The extra length was covered in the same black fur as the abdomen that had grown to immense dimensions.  She investigated the fur and found it extremely sensitive.  Clearly she’d be able to sense things around her by the movements they caused in the air.  She’d had the usual biology courses in high school and this kind of sensitive fur reminded her of something but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was.By the evening, she knew.  Eight small bulges had developed on the belly of the black furred section of her new
body.  The only furry creature she knew with eight legs was a tarantula.  They were making her into a tarantula!  

This was impossible!  How could they?  Why would they?  Didn’t they care about what she knew?  

“Stop this!” she shouted at the walls. “You can’t do this!”

No answer.

Tai Chi proved nearly impossible with the changed proportions of her body.  After trying for nearly an hour, she sat dejectedly in the centre of the room.  She didn’t want to be an animal especially not a spider.  She hated spiders.  Her uncle had died from a spider bite when she was a child and she’d stomped them whenever she found them in revenge.

The morning brought further unwelcome changes.  Her human portion had shrunk further.  Had she been whole, she’d not have been much more than 140 cm tall.  The eight legs had grown heavier and longer and now each sported a joint.  

Sitting in the bed, she found they would move but slowly, arthritically.  She began to cry.  She hated these damned monsters who could do this to her.  If she ever got the chance she’d -- she’d -- she broke down and cried again.  She had become too weak to do anything.

By lunch, she’d manage to pull herself along the floor to the food slot, half crawling on her emaciated legs and knees with the spider legs flailing uselessly.  As she ate, she frowned and decided she’d practice with the spider legs.  If she got good enough, she’d attack them when they came in to get her to interrogate her.  Of course they would be in for that.  She was one of China’s top industrial spies.  They’d want to know what she knew.  Evening saw further changes in the spider legs.  They were stronger and larger and now sported a third joint.  They were still as uncontrollable as ever.

By the next morning, her original legs were little more than stiff rods.  They had no strength whatever.  She was left with the prospect of learning how to move the damned spider legs.  Though they seemed thin, they proved fairly strong and she found they would respond even if painfully slowly.  She made her way like an ancient woman to the bathroom to get a look at herself.  It was a good thing she’d left the mirror off the wall for she would no longer have been able to reach up to pull it from the wall.  Though she was still more-or-less her own size (160 cm from head to tip of abdomen), her human portion was small, like that of a child.  She stuck out of the front of the spider body so that when she walked using the spider legs, her tummy was parallel to the ground.

She became angry again.  You can’t do this to people!  It’s inhuman.  It’s ... then she remembered some of the things her own government had been accused of.  Governments, she decided with a sigh, did what they did because they could.

By noon, her spider legs seemed complete.  She found them easier and easier to use as she practiced with them.  She doubted she’d ever be as fast with them as she would have been before ...

A click at the door caught her attention and she made her way slowly to the door.  A man in some kind of biohazard suit was letting himself into the room.  She struggled to dash across the room to attack him.  He was huge!  He must be 3 meters tall!  Then she realized that she was the one who’d changed.  From her vantage point so near the ground, everything looked huge.  He drew a gas syringe of bluish fluid from a pocket, tapped the bubbles out, and pressed it to her arm.  A hiss told her that she’d been injected with whatever it contained.  She felt scared and found herself raising her four front spider legs.  Then realizing she was completely naked, she quickly covered herself.

“One more thing,” he said as he placed a small ring around what remained of her forearm and clicked it shut.  Overhead, the translation repeated his words in Chinese.  Damned Americans.  She could speak English as well as he could likely. She twisted the now solid ring until she could see the writing etched into the metallic surface.

Subject: XTD-382
Species: H. Sapiens theraphosidae
TF Date: 2098-01-05

“Now it’ll be up to DHS.  I’m sure you’ll co-operate.  There’s much worse things that you can be made into.”

Dongmei just screamed as a robot brought a huge cage into the room.  She tried to scuttle out of the door but another robot deftly picked her up and popped her into the cage. Then the horror of what he’d said penetrated her consciousness.  She could think of other horrible things and wanted no part of them.  She'd co-operate.