Chapter 1: The Lab and the Accidental Transformation
The air in Mark’s lab always smelled like ozone and burnt circuitry, a scent that had become as familiar to me as my own apartment. I leaned against a workbench cluttered with half-assembled drones, watching my best friend wave his hands through a holographic schematic that floated in the middle of the room. Blue light danced across his intense face.
“The stabilization matrix is the real breakthrough,” Mark said, his voice echoing slightly in the vast, glass-and-steel space. He was in his element, six-foot-four of pure scientific confidence. “It doesn’t just rearrange matter. It reinterprets it. Holds the new form in a quantum lock.”
“So it’s a fancy 3D printer for people,” I said, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans. My own six-foot frame felt awkward next to the sleek machines. “You’re going to disrupt the plastic surgery industry. Congrats.”
He shot me a look, the one that said I was being deliberately obtuse. “It’s for medical applications, Justin. Severe traumatic injury. Genetic restoration. Not for giving people bigger—”
“—assets, yeah, I got it.” I pushed off the bench and wandered toward the centerpiece of the room. The Molecular Alteration Unit. It was taller than Mark, framed in obsidian-black metal, its surface etched with glowing, shifting lines that seemed to crawl if you stared too long. It hummed with a deep, sub-auditory thrum I felt in my molars. “It just looks like a fancy tanning bed.”
“It’s a focused field generator,” he corrected, exasperated. He tapped a command into a floating panel, and a section of the unit irised open, revealing a chamber lined with crystalline nodes. “The subject goes in here. The system maps their base molecular matrix, then applies a new template from the database. The process is instantaneous. In theory.”
“In theory.” I peered inside. It was cramped. “You tested it?”
“On inorganic matter. Successfully. On a complex organic life form? Not yet.” He turned and walked toward a secondary console, where a single vial of glowing amber liquid sat under a light. “The template has to be perfectly calibrated. The energy required is… significant.”
I heard the rustle of papers. He was looking for a file, his back to me. The machine hummed. The runes shimmered. A single, prominent button glowed with a soft, pulsating green light on the control column beside the open hatch.
My fingers itched.
It was a lifetime habit. A mouse button, a keyboard key, a mysterious switch in my friend’s insane laboratory—if it looked pressable, I had to press it. Consequences were a later problem.
I glanced at Mark. He was muttering, flipping through a folder.
My hand moved.
The button sank under my finger with a satisfying, silent click.
For a half-second, nothing happened. Then the world dissolved into silent, blinding white.
It wasn’t heat or cold. It was a sensation of unraveling. A dizzying pull from the center of my being outwards, like I was a spool of thread yanked at light speed. I couldn’t scream. I had no lungs.
The light collapsed.
And sensation returned in a violent, nauseating wave.
I stumbled forward, out of the chamber, and my balance was all wrong. My center of gravity had dropped, plummeted. I threw out my hands to catch myself on the cold lab floor, and my arms… they were wrong. Slim. The sleeves of my flannel shirt hung loose, the cuffs swallowing my hands. A heavy, unfamiliar weight pulled at my chest, straining the buttons of the shirt.
A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I hugged myself. My body felt… compressed. Dense. And soft. Terribly, unnervingly soft in places that had only ever been flat, hard muscle.
“What the hell was that power surge?” Mark’s voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “Justin, don’t touch anyth—”
His words died.
I looked up.
Mark was staring at me, his face a canvas of pure, uncomprehending shock. His eyes were huge. The folder slipped from his fingers, pages fluttering to the floor.
“What?” My voice came out. But it wasn’t mine. It was higher. Clearer. A stranger’s melodic, feminine voice speaking with my confusion. “Mark, what’s wrong? What happened?”
I pushed myself up. The motion was awkward. My hips seemed to swing, my steps shorter. I looked down.
My jeans were baggy, pooling around my feet, held up only by the belt cinched comically tight. And my chest… the flannel shirt was stretched taut over two enormous, unmistakable curves. I brought my hands up—small, fine-boned hands with slender fingers—and pressed them against the soft, heavy fullness.
A sound escaped my new throat. A choked, breathy whimper.
“No.” Mark finally breathed the word. He took a step forward, then stopped, as if approaching a dangerous animal. “The unit… you activated the standby template. The last one loaded.”
“What was it?” I demanded, the feminine pitch of my voice making the panic sound shrill.
“Subject Z-9.” He ran a hand over his mouth. “A theoretical optimal physical form. For… for testing mobility systems. It’s not even human-derived, it’s a composite aesthetic algorithm—”
“What does that MEAN, Mark?” I yelled.
“It means you’re not you!” he shouted back, his own control snapping. He pointed a trembling finger at a reflective panel on a nearby machine. “Look!”
I didn’t want to. My heart was hammering, a frantic bird trapped in a foreign cage. I staggered toward the dull silver surface.
A stranger stared back.
A young woman. Devastatingly, perfectly beautiful in a way that seemed airbrushed. Huge, shock-blue eyes in a heart-shaped face with plump, pink lips parted in horror. A waterfall of sleek, platinum blonde hair fell over slender shoulders. The baggy clothes couldn’t hide the extreme, pornographic silhouette beneath: the impossible, perky swell of breasts, the pinch of a rail-thin waist flaring to surprisingly wide hips.
I was five feet tall.
I was nineteen.
I was a goddamn doll.
“Oh, God.” My new voice broke. I turned from the reflection, my vision blurring. “Change me back. Do it now.”
Mark was already at the main console, fingers flying. “I’m trying. The system’s processing the event. The energy discharge was off the charts. The matrix might be unstable.” Warning glyphs flashed red in the air. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the top of the obsidian unit.
“Unstable? Fix it!” I tried to stride toward him, but the movement was a jiggling, unsteady shamble. I tripped on the jeans and would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed the edge of the workbench. The vial of amber liquid wobbled.
“Don’t touch anything!” Mark roared, his eyes glued to the screens. “Just… just stay still. I need to stabilize the core, or we could get a recursive—”
A pop echoed from inside the Molecular Alteration Unit. Then a crackle. The hum rose to a whine.
The runes flickered, died, and reignited in an angry, pulsing red.
The first real flame, orange and hungry, licked out from the iris of the chamber.
Mark froze, his professional calm shattering into raw, human fear. “The containment field is failing. The whole unit could cascade.” He looked from the machine to me, to the door, his mind racing through options with visible, terrifying speed.
The fire was real now, chewing at the internal components, black smoke starting to coil toward the ceiling. The lab’s emergency lights snapped on, casting stark, spinning red shadows.
I stood there, trapped in this small, soft, devastating body, the heat of the fire warming my new skin, the acrid smell of melting plastic filling my new nose. Mark’s lab, our sanctuary, was burning. And I was locked inside the first, and only, draft of a terrible experiment.