Bahia
Empty at this hour of even the most dedicated researcher, the tenth floor casts back the noise of her footsteps as if her spectral double walks beside her. The second scanner at the entrance to Project Benthos responds with alacrity to her tentative palm-caress.
Lights brighten automatically as the door swings shut behind her. At the control panel visited earlier, Kerry fingers the sequence of commands Dr. Teague used to summon the benthic from its homeostatic environment. Within a minute, the trolley-borne aquarium rests on the far side of the glass partition within reach of the manipulator gloves.
The limber acrobatic benthic adheres to some non-diurnal schedule, as active nocturnally as during the day. Perhaps it never needs to rest, engineered reservoirs of barely contained energy continuously propelling its silky furlings and beckoning flagellations, its coy curlings and enticing involutions around the clock.
Kerry tears her eyes away from the exogamically desirable creature, totipotent sovereign in its small realm, and steps to a workbench. Neatly racked tools yield a sharp blade. Knife pinched between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she inserts her weapon into one metal-cuffed work glove. The blade sinks easily into the index fingertip of the glove, catches in the dense rubber, responds to Kerry’s increased pressure, emerges questingly into the segregated air beyond the glass. A warning light reddens the control board. She torques the blade, enlarging the hole, then withdraws the instrument and tosses it to the floor. She thrusts her hand into the damaged glove, which comes assistingly alive. She lifts the hinged lid of the container, and dips her gashed finger into the waters of the tank.
Instantly alert and eager as any lover, the ultraresponsive benthic compresses itself to threadlike dimensions and flows into the mutilated glovetip like a finely knitted lace shawl slipped through a wedding ring.
Before Kerry can even withdraw her hand from within its partial rubber casing, the benthic has propulsively coursed the thruway of her arm, mucigenously alive against her flesh beneath her clothing. She stumbles back several paces, leaving the servomotors of the now-empty glove to whine down to silence.
A broad glistening coral-tinged pseudopod of the benthic pops up from beneath her shirtcollar, rearing back like a hooded snake calculatedly considering where to strike. At the same instant Kerry involuntarily opens her mouth, gasps, and clamps a hand to her invaded crotch.
A portion of the upper hovering element of the benthic darts down her throat, reversing the magician’s common trick of pulling silken scarf from gullet. Extrusions splay across her alarmed countenance, infiltrating eyes, ears and nostrils like needles of wind.
Kerry collapses to the floor, dorsal side down, her face suddenly eerily composed beneath the benthic’s gaudy film.
Now begins Kerry Hackett’s transubstantiation, a conversion of flesh to more than flesh, a seachange of self.
Kerry’s clothing commences slowly to dissolve, as if eaten by an esurient acid from beneath. But the liquefied raw materials of her garments do not pool away to the floor or sublimate into the air; instead, they are greedily absorbed directly into her newly hyperporous skin. Rejected metal fittings fall away, clinking to the tiles. Her mother’s thin gold chain bursts from expansive pressures and slips off her neck, puddling on the floor like a patch of jungle sunlight.
Naked now, Kerry’s supine body exhibits no activity for a short eternity. Then, convulsive tremors surge across her from toes to scalp. Her body flattens and spreads unnaturally, like an air bag simultaneously melting and deflating; imploding, her facial features vanish inward, as do her breasts. Her short black hair is reeled inside her. Arms merge into torso, legs fuse, as the forked stick of her humanity backward eggs. Livid waves of organically hued colors race each other across this ovoid corporeal landscape.
The lab clock parcels out an hour as the Kerry-larva merely intelligently pullulates. Waves of metabolic heat rising off the autocatalyzing protoplasmic mound trigger the lab’s air-conditioning to new activity.
The next stage of totipotent-directed evolution manifests first as fractally distributed ripples, as if a complex net beneath the grub’s epidermis were being shaken from multiple points. Then, reprogramming and redefinition: from distal loci, perfect digits emerge, tender pink toes and fingers with nails already tinted a unique scarab green. Limbs separate away, resuming their identity, tendons and muscles flexing. At crux of legs, mons and cunt resurface, complete with a slow trickle of menstrual blood filtering through the labia. Ribs recage themselves, a navel invaginates, breasts bud and swell, crowning themselves with nipples. Hair rethatches skull, ears appear, and the Kerry-physiognamy, that unique assemblage of cartilage, jelly, muscle and bone, pushes out from inside like an image formed from behind in a toy composed of a million floating microscopic pins.
Perfect from toenails to teeth, breathing deeply, the nude Kerry Hackett lies on the cold tiles. Only one visible difference distinguishes her reinvigorated body from her former shell:
Her birthmark is missing from her immaculate face, sluiced off like so much maquillage.
