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A WIP story + Images

“Look, dammit,” Dr. Maya Daza grumbled. “We’ve been over the process a hundred times now.”

“It’s not approved for human testing,” Dr. Santos Gamero replied evenly.

“And when, pray tell, is that likely to be? In our lifetimes, I hope.”

“We’ve demonstrated the process of fusing animal species into a single viable result, I know. But you know the research institute really doesn’t want to go any farther.”

“Why? Because a bunch of medieval minds want no changes to the ‘sacred’ human form?”

“Admin doesn’t want a bunch of militant conservatives from a dozen churches parading around the park. Bad for our image and worse for our research funding.”

“So we sit on it? How many islands and how many square kilometres of land vanished when the Greenland Ice Shelf collapsed five years ago?”

“I know, and you know. Politics is still trying to keep their 1950s beliefs in the vastness of Earth’s atmosphere alive. Bad for business if we actually want to do something about the problem instead of tinkering with minor changes. Billionaires and huge corporations get the assholes elected.”

“So?”

“So we wait.”

Maya stared at her colleague. They’d had this discussion dozens of times since the spacing transporter had been perfected. Transporters, in general, were reliable and had virtually destroyed the trucking and airline industry. After all, why sit in a sardine can for eight hours when you can be there in a few minutes. The splicing transporter had come out of research on much earlier models. Many accidents in the decades past had ended up with strange and usually non-viable mixes of species. Much of the research of the past decades had revolved around keeping individual entities in the transport chamber separate.  

Dr. Daza and Dr. Gamero had taken a different approach. It was well known that the climate had reached a tipping point. The first visible effect of this was the loss of much of Asia’s rice farming areas on various river deltas. The flooded lands were still viable if they could be redeveloped into some kind of undersea equivalent. Of course, diving suits and similar energy expensive (not to mention money expensive) solutions could never work in the long run. The pair realized that deliberately fusing species could lead to the creation (or so they hoped) of human variants that could live in deserts (and these were still growing) or under the sea.

It had been frustrating work. In the beginning, there were far and away more failures than successes (even if you considered a success the survival of the composite for an hour or two). Lately, though, they’d learned enough to model the process using computers and used the computer models to generate the composite instead of letting quantum mechanics do its random thing. They’d created all kinds of composites (indeed, their snake cat was quite popular in some circles) but no one, especially the highly anti-technological conservatives of the US south, would allow any experiments involving people even if they did volunteer.

The pair worked on splicing various plant species to make a desert tolerant wheat and a form of rice that needed far less water to grow. The money it brought in funded their experiments but it brought it no closer to the fruition they both knew would be required.

Three years went by and still no approval for even limited tests. Dr. Daza could stand it no longer. Halloween was coming up and strange things always happened on Halloween. This year, she vowed, some really strange things would take place. As it happen Dr. Gamero had taken the weeks around Halloween off to return to Mexico to visit his grandparents. Both were sickly and he felt they might not be around much longer.

After he boarded his plane, she returned to the lab. Driving her electric sports car into the delivery bay, she began her work. First, she ditched everything in the trunk including the spare tire. A flat was a risk she was willing to take because she needed every kilogram of carrying capacity and every litre of space. As it was, the main computer wouldn’t fit anywhere hidden so she stashed its pair of modules on the back seat and belted them in place. The batteries for the Fusion Transporter fit into the trunk along with one of the six storage modules. This wasn’t too much of a restriction. After all, it only meant that the number of transformations and the resulting fusions would have to be limited. She did some quick calculations and determined that she’d be stuck with at most a dozen subjects and not more than four fusion forms. After thinking about which of the dozens of forms they’d generated were suitable, Dr. Daza decided that the four would have to be something spectacular: a centaur, a mermaid, a drider and a naga.

Halloween evening was warm in Idaho (Idaho over the past decades was becoming distinctly sub-tropical). It would be a perfect night for the test. Now she knew that this was an unauthorized test and decided it might be best to mask herself a bit. Using the lab fusion transporter instead of the portable one in her car, she changed her looks. After carefully storing her original pattern, she fused herself with one of the lab techs. Now blonde and buxom instead of dark haired and flat chested, no one would recognize her. She was able to borrow the lab tech’s sweater to cover her own poorly fitting dress.

Connecting everything up, she placed the Fusion Transporter Projector on the passenger’s seat and set out to find some subjects. She left late as there was no way she wanted to transform children or young teens. They were still growing and that was one problem they’d not yet solved. As she drove down street after street, it seemed that her plan might fail because no one was about.

Carina, Dara and Hira were just coming out of one of the many Halloween themed night clubs. It was late, definitely later than they’d planned on being out. Carina, as usual, was leading the way. She wanted to get off the deserted streets and to the safety of her car in the parkade several blocks away. Dara, in her tight costume, was having considerable difficulty keep up and was lagging. Hira, in her mermaid dress, was having even more difficulty. The silly thing was tight at the calves and ankles. She could barely hobble along at a walking pace.

Hira was the first one caught. She had no chance to even get out a warning as Dr. Daza sped up silently along side, stopped, pointed a strange device at her and pushed the trigger. She felt a strange electricity play along her body and then the world disappeared around her. She was floating but not in water or air. The entire space felt distorted in some way. Strange glowing blue blobs passed around and through her body. As they did so, Hira felt her tailbone disconnect and lengthen. As she looked around, she discovered that she was naked and that her legs were shrinking into a pair of fins. The strange tail resolved itself into a silvery fish tail. Then, without warning, she reappeared on the street still in a standing position. Unfortunately, fish tails are really no good for standing and she crumpled into heap on the pavement. Her dress, thankfully at least, was still on her but she felt a tight band around her middle. Her panties had become stretched and were tearing as her tail was now through only a single leg hole. The mermaid dress had disappeared below her knees or she’d have been bound up in the dress with a fishtail instead of legs.

At first she was too startled to react. The car and its strange occupant quickly drove up the street and caught Dara in the beam. Hira watched as the blue glow surrounded Dara and then she faded from view. Seconds later, the occupant pointed the device back towards her and she cringed. She needn’t have worried, though. Dara was appearing near her but totally unlike anything she’d ever seen. Shiny black and red chitin covered her whole body and eight spider legs spread out from a huge thorax that rested on the pavement. Her clothes had vanished entirely.

Carina, realizing her companions weren’t following, turned and ran back towards them. The device had soon captured Carina. Turning about, the car returned to the still stunned pair and dumped Carina on her back as a distinctly female centaur. Dara, looking over her friend, realized that she was considerably more buxom and had, in addition to her own now ample breasts, a group of four breasts forming an udder between the rear horse legs.

That evening, seven more people were fused. The online world went crazy the next day especially since no one seemed to be able to describe the occupant or the car very well. The processing they’d undergone had effectively erased their memory of that piece of their lives around the event.