Chapter 14: The 2nd
The silence of the empty faculty office was a physical thing. It pressed in on Lewis’s ears, a high-frequency hum from the fluorescent lights mixing with the distant, echoing clang of a janitor’s cart somewhere down the hall. He’d been waiting for twenty minutes, perched on the edge of a worn visitor’s chair, the peeling blue wallpaper swimming in his peripheral vision.
This had been a stupid idea. A dangerous, monumentally stupid idea.
After the lecture hall, after the quiet shock of seeing the full, terrifying truth of Professor Rygell, his mind had done what it always did: it had chewed on the data. It had run simulations. Rygell had called him a catalyst, a permission slip. Her transformation was tied to extreme emotion, but it was also a part of her. Her biology. Her essence.
What if that essence… transferred?
The thought was disgusting. It was fascinating. It was, he knew, a line that once crossed would leave no going back. But the curiosity was a fever in him now, burning away his better judgment. He needed a test subject. A control. Someone else.
Professor Kai’s office was next door to Rygell’s, but a world apart. Where Rygell’s space was a curated museum of sharp intellect, Kai’s was a nervous explosion. Stacks of journals teetered on every surface, annotated with colorful sticky notes. A half-assembled robotics kit shared desk space with a mug full of cold herbal tea and a stress ball shaped like a Schrödinger’s cat—both alive and dead, squished.
Kai Yamada was twenty-five, a prodigy who’d finished her PhD in biomorphic engineering at twenty-three. She was the university’s shiny new hire, a breath of anxious, brilliant air. She was also, Lewis had noted over the three weeks of her guest lectures in his advanced systems class, painfully shy, blindingly smart, and oddly pretty in a rumpled, forgets-to-eat kind of way. She blushed when called on in department meetings. She tripped over her own equipment cords.
And she’d smiled at Lewis once last week, a quick, flustered thing, when he’d offered to carry a box of sensor modules for her. It was that smile that had sealed it. She was accessible. She was close to his age. She looked at him like he was a person, not just a student ID number.
The door clicked open and she hurried in, a whirlwind of oversized cardigan and flying blonde curls. “Oh! Lewis. Sorry, sorry. The chromatograph in Lab B was being a total diva, I had to recalibrate the… thing.” She dropped a heavy satchel on her desk, sending a cascade of papers to the floor. “Crap.”
“It’s okay,” he said, standing up. “No rush.”
“You said you had questions about the photonic resonance paper?” she said, kneeling to gather the pages, not looking at him. “I have to say, it’s awesome you’re reading that deep. Most undergrads just skim the abstracts.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, helping her pick up a few stray sheets. They were covered in dense equations, her handwritten notes spiraling in the margins like vines. “It’s fascinating stuff. The implications for quantum-state transfer in organic systems…”
She looked up at him then, her brown eyes wide behind her glasses. “You actually understand it?”
He gave a modest shrug. “Some of it. You explain it well.”
The blush returned, blooming across her cheekbones. She stood up quickly, brushing nonexistent dust from her trousers. She was dressed in what was clearly her “professional” outfit: a slightly too-large pinstripe blazer over a plain black shirt, a sensible tie loosely knotted. It looked like a costume. “Thanks. So, what’s the question?”
This was the moment. His mouth felt dry. The small glass vial in his jacket pocket felt like a live coal. He’d stolen into Rygell’s private lab annex earlier, a place he only knew about from a dropped keycard and a reckless instinct. He’d found a locked fridge, picked the simple lock, and seen rows of unlabeled cryo-tubes. One of them had pulsed with a familiar, faint green luminescence. He’d taken it. He’d told himself it was for science. He knew it was a violation of trust so profound it bordered on atrocity.
“It’s more of a theoretical question,” Lewis began, leaning against her desk, trying to mirror Rygell’s casual confidence. It felt like a cheap imitation. “About cross-species, or maybe cross-individual, bio-signature propagation.”
Kai blinked, pushing her glasses up her nose. “Okay. That’s pretty niche. You mean like prion diseases? Or more like horizontal gene transfer?”
“More… immediate. Like if you took a concentrated sample of one individual’s altered cellular metabolism—something that fundamentally rewrote homeostasis—and introduced it to another host. What would the vector of transformation be? Ingestion? Injection?”
She frowned, thinking. It was a real frown of concentration, not suspicion. “Ingestion would be metabolically messy. Stomach acid, liver filtration… you’d lose most of the signature integrity. Injection is cleaner. Direct to the bloodstream. But the immune response would be catastrophic unless the donor and host were perfectly matched.” She tilted her head. “Why? Is this for a speculative fiction project or something?”
He smiled, the one he used to defuse tension. “Or something. I have this… friend. She’s into extreme biohacking. She gave me a sample of her latest ‘optimization serum.’ As a joke. Said it would give me focus.”
Kai’s eyes lit up with academic interest, overriding her social caution. “That’s incredibly irresponsible. And cool. What’s the base? Methylphenidate derivatives? Modafinil cocktails?”
“She wouldn’t say. Proprietary blend.” Lewis pulled the vial from his pocket. It was small, no bigger than his thumb, glass, chilled from his pocket. The liquid inside was clear, with just the slightest viscous sheen, and if you held it just right, in the glare of the office’s single bulb, you could see the barest ghost of green deep within its core. “She dared me to take it. I’m not that dumb. But I was wondering… from an engineering perspective… what would you hypothesize would happen?”
He held it out to her. She took it automatically, her slender fingers curling around the glass. She held it up to the light, her brow furrowed. “No labeling. Idiotic. The viscosity is off for a standard nootropic. It’s too… silty.” She uncapped it, giving a cautious sniff. Her nose wrinkled. “It’s odorless. But there’s an… ozone tension to it. Like the air after a lightning strike. That’s weird.”
“Weird how?”
“It smells like potential energy,” she murmured, almost to herself. She was hooked. The scientist in her was overriding all caution. “A purely physical smell. Static. Ionization.”
“Would you drink it?” Lewis asked, his voice deliberately light, casual.
She laughed, a short, surprised sound. “What? No! That’s lab safety 101. Never ingest an unknown.”
“But if you had to hypothesize,” he pressed, taking a step closer. He could smell her perfume now, something light and citrusy, underlain by the scent of solder and coffee. “If this was the serum of the future, and drinking it was the only way to truly understand its function… would you? For the sake of knowing?”
She looked from the vial to his face. Her gaze was sharp, intelligent. She wasn’t a fool. But he could see the conflict. The shy young woman who blushed at compliments was warring with the prodigy who hungered for the unseen mechanics of the universe. He’d presented it as a dare, as a shared secret between intellectuals.
“This is a weird conversation, Lewis,” she said, but she didn’t hand the vial back.
“I know.” He gave her his most disarming smile. “Forget it. It was a dumb thought.” He reached for the vial.
She pulled it back slightly, just an inch. A physicist’s hesitation. “What did you say it was supposed to do?”
“Focus. Clarity. A kind of… total embodied awareness.” He was paraphrasing from the sensation of being near Rygell, the overwhelming presence of her.
Kai chewed her lower lip, staring at the innocuous liquid. The office was so quiet. The flickering bulb cast a jumpy shadow over her face. “It’s probably just expensive water with some peptides and food coloring,” she muttered, a self-directed pep talk.
“Probably,” Lewis agreed, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“But the ozone note… that’s specific. That’s high-energy.” She looked at him, and in her eyes he saw the leap being made, the bridge between curiosity and action being crossed. “If I drink this, and I die of acute hepatic necrosis, you’re explaining it to my parents.”
“Deal.”
“And you’re writing my section of the departmental grant report.”
“Anything.”
She took a deep breath, a shaky little inhale. “For science,” she said, a frail attempt at bravado.
“For science,” he echoed.
She put the vial to her lips and tossed it back in one quick, grimacing gulp. She swallowed, her throat working. She lowered the empty glass, blinking rapidly.
“Well?” Lewis asked, his voice barely a whisper.
She smacked her lips together. “Tastes like… nothing. Like distilled nothing. But there’s a… a afterglow. Like swallowing a battery. A faint metallic tang on the back of my tongue.” She handed him the empty vial. “Satisfied? I think you and your friend got scammed.”
For a moment, nothing. The ordinary sounds of the building reasserted themselves. A door closing. Distant laughter. Lewis felt a crash of anticlimax, and beneath it, a sickening relief. He’d been wrong. It was just a weird sample. Nothing.
Then Kai’s hand went to her stomach. “Huh.”
“What?”
“It’s warm. Not unpleasant. Just… really warm.” She unbuttoned her blazer, frowning. “Like I drank a shot of really smooth whiskey.”
The warmth was spreading. He could see a faint flush climbing her neck, up to her cheeks. But it wasn’t a blush. It was a glow, subtle at first, like she’d been sitting in the sun. Her breathing deepened.
“Feel okay?” he asked, taking a step back instinctively.
“Yeah. Actually, I feel… really good.” She looked at her hands, turning them over. “Kind of tingly. My head is so clear. It’s like someone wiped all the fog off my brain.” She laughed, and it was different—less nervous, more genuine, richer. “Okay, your crazy friend might be onto something.”
She took a step toward him. Then another. Her movements were less jerky, more fluid. The awkwardness was sloughing away. “You know, Lewis,” she said, her voice dropping an octave, gaining a confidence that had never been there before. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you outside of class. You have these incredible insights. Most of the guys here are just… code monkeys.”
She was close now. The citrus-and-solder scent of her was changing, deepening into something warmer, earthier. The metallic tang she’d described now hung in the air around her, faint but distinct. It was the smell from Rygell’s lab. The smell from the lecture hall.
“Professor Kai…”
“Call me Elara,” she said, smiling. It wasn’t a shy smile. It was hungry. Her eyes were fixed on his. The brown was being eaten away from the center, not by a rising tide of green, but by sharp, spiking filaments of emerald that fractured her irises like stained glass. “All this formality is so… limiting.”
She reached up and pulled her tie loose, yanking it over her head and dropping it to the floor. Her fingers went to the buttons of her shirt. “It’s so hot in here all of a sudden, don’t you think?”
“Elara, wait,” Lewis said, but the protest was weak. This was what he’d wanted. This was the experiment. He was watching the data stream in, real-time, and it was terrifying.
She ignored him, popping the first button, then the second. The skin revealed was flushed, glowing. A fine sheen of sweat made it gleam under the flickering light. The warmth radiating from her was becoming heat, like standing near a space heater. “You have no idea how much I’ve held back,” she breathed, her voice thickening, slurring at the edges. “The thoughts I’ve had. Watching you in the third row. So quiet. So… observant.”
Her third button came undone. The green in her eyes was now dominant, a chaotic, vibrant emerald that held no trace of the shy professor. It held something else: a paranoid, hyper-focused intensity. Her gaze darted around the room for a second, to the shadows in the corner, to the closed door. “Do you think they’re listening? The department? They’re always watching the new ones. Testing them.”
“No one’s listening,” Lewis said, holding his hands up, a placating gesture.
“You don’t know that!” she snapped, the heat spiking with her sudden anger. A ripple went through her, a shudder that wasn’t cold. The fabric of her white shirt across her shoulders tightened, then groaned as the musculature beneath swelled, stretching the seams. A thread popped.
The transformation wasn’t controlled or fluid like Rygell’s. It was jerky, volcanic. It was as if the foreign essence was at war with her own biology, a hostile takeover.
Her blonde curls began to darken at the roots, not to black, but to a deep, forest green, the color bleeding down the strands like ink in water. She tossed her head, as if feeling the strange sensation, and a low groan escaped her. It was a sound of both pleasure and agony.
“It’s too much,” she whispered, but her hands clutched at her own chest, not to stop it, but to feel it. “It’s everything at once. I can… I can feel the current in the lights. I can hear the bacteria on the door handle. And I want…” She looked back at him, and the hunger in her green-fractured eyes was raw, immense, and singularly directed. “I want you. Right now.”
She lunged for him. It wasn’t a graceful move. It was a stumble of sudden, uncoordulated power. Her hand caught the front of his shirt, and the force of it lifted him off his feet, slamming him back against the wall next to the old, spotted mirror. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. Framed degrees rattled.
Her face was inches from his. Heat poured off her in waves. Her shirt was fully open now, and beneath it, her skin was a mosaic of human peach and virulent, crawling green. Muscles twitched and corded under the surface, expanding in fits and starts. Her once-slender frame was becoming robust, powerful, but it was uneven. One shoulder was higher than the other. The sinews in her neck stood out like cables.
“You did this,” she growled, her breath hot enough to sting his face. It carried that same ozone-metal scent, now overpowering. “This is your serum. Your gift.” Her free hand, still small but grip iron-strong, cupped his cheek. The touch was searing. “I feel incredible. I feel angry. I feel everything. And I know you wanted this. I saw it in your eyes.”
With a sound of tearing cotton and popping stitches, her pinstripe blazer split straight down the back. The sleeves burst at the seams. Her professional slacks tightened, then began to split at the thighs as they swelled, the fabric a poor containment for the rapid, chaotic growth within. Her sensible flats strained, then tore apart as her feet expanded, the sound of breaking leather and snapping buckles loud in the small room.
She leaned in, her intent clear, her glowing green eyes half-lidded. The kiss she aimed for was not one of affection, but of possession, of consuming.
Lewis twisted his face away at the last second. Her lips brushed his cheek, and the skin there tingled, numb and hot.
The rejection seemed to short-circuit her turbulent emotions. Paranoia flared, bright and violent. Her expression morphed from lust to rage in a microsecond.
“You’re rejecting me?” she boomed, her voice now a distorted echo of its former self, layered with static and fury. “After you gave me this? After you chose me?” She threw him sideways. He crashed into her desk, sending the robotics kit, the mug, the stacks of papers flying in a cacophony of shattering plastic and fluttering white.
She stood in the center of the ruin, growing, her body a battle zone. The green had fully consumed her skin, a darker, mossier shade