Genetech: The Seeds Of Doom

by Kris Schnee

Copyright © 2018

Kris Schnee

All rights reserved.

Cover art uses images by Grafixar,
http://mrg.bz/4dc1d9 (Morguefile License)
and Lorc, https://game-icons.net/lorc/originals/erlenmeyer.html (CC-BY).

Contents

The Seeds Of Doom

Author's Note
About the Author/Other Works

The Seeds Of Doom

* 1 *

"Can I interest you in one of our unusual pets, sir?" said the saleslady.

Aldous stood at the doorway of Better Companions, Limited, which had sprung up yesterday in a deserted section of the mall. Warm animal scents wafted from inside, making him think of pets he and his friends had owned over the years. "I'm actually here to look for work. I don't think I can afford even a standard bunny right now." He'd graduated with a useless degree, but a short-term job would help him pay the bills while he figured out what to do next.

"We don't sell standard anything," the lady said with a cute smile. "Why not have a look around while I get you an application?"

The clerk led Aldous past racks of cages, past kittens and a parrot that squawked, "Magnetic containment tokamak!" Aldous got distracted by a ferret that peeked out from a plastic tube and squeaked at him. He crouched by its cage and grinned, waving to the critter.

"A good choice," the clerk said. "Some people mind the musk, but we've toned it down."

Aldous blinked, his attention drawn back from the bright beady eyes. "You had the glands and everything removed?"

"Genetically tweaked," she said. "This store is a subsidiary of Genetech."

Aldous' eyes widened. "Some sort of gengineering firm, selling biotech pets?" He looked around the store again, now noticing unusual colors, exotic breeds, and purpose and curiosity in some of the animals' expressions. The strangeness unnerved him. "I've never heard of Genetech." They hadn't been at the career fair last semester.

She said, "The company's new. I was only hired last month myself."

"Oh? How do you like working here?"

"Seems all right. The application was weird, but they've got a great health plan."

They chatted a bit. She was a little vague about her own background but said she'd grown up on a farm. It'd be fun to get to know her better.

"I haven't even had a cat since I went to college," he admitted. "No time or money."

"Understandable. If you work here they'll probably expect you to change that, though. The boss talks a lot about having employees learn through experience."

Though it was fun talking with her, Aldous did have some business to attend to. "Is the shop actually hiring, or are they just 'taking applications'?" He sighed, remembering how excruciatingly selective every employer was, lately. The job market for biologists had crashed just as he was graduating.

"I think so." She pulled out some forms from behind the counter.

Aldous glanced at the sheaf of papers. "I'm a little surprised you didn't just say 'Go to our Web site'."

"Genetech tends not to do anything the standard way."

Well, he could fill the papers out later. "Thanks." He paused, looking away at the cages. "Say, are you interested in meeting up at the food court when you've got a break?"

She wavered, then said, "Okay. In an hour or so."

Aldous sat in the mall, nibbling a salad and working through the application. Name, work history, citizenship, favorite color, phobias... Aldous blinked. That kind of made sense, if they wanted to screen out people afraid of animal bites. He put down "None".

A few questions down: "Have you ever stolen from an employer?"

No, he answered.

The next question was, "How much?" He left that blank.

The next one was, "C'mon, just between us...?"

He checked the box labeled Seriously, no.

On the next page he saw, "Have you ever imagined being a different gender?"

No, he checkmarked. He didn't think it was even legal to ask that kind of thing.

"Have you ever imagined being a different species?" Aldous was really staring at the form now. He put Yes for the hell of it, thinking of a couple of Halloween costumes he'd had.

"In fifty words or less: How would you defeat a rampaging velociraptor?"

Aldous skipped ahead. About half of the paperwork was fairly ordinary, with some fun logic puzzles, and the rest a bunch of nonsense. Okay, so this was a prank on the saleslady's part. While Aldous waited for her, he went along with the joke. For the raptor question he wrote, "Two lamp-posts, and a big rubber band." It went downhill from there.

"Done yet?" asked the clerk, coming over to his table.

Aldous said, "Very funny," and handed the papers over.

"I warned you. That's the actual application."

Aldous shook his head. "Weirder then Google's, even. I guess that means no job for me; I went into smartass mode halfway through."

"I did that too, and they hired me. The name's Sue, by the way."

The two of them had a low-pressure date at the food court, and for a week, nothing much happened. Then came the call.

* 2 *

The phone rang at five in the morning. Aldous startled awake, sprawled across his bed. He rolled over, opened one eye, and snagged the phone. If this wasn't a family emergency or a robo-call he'd curse out whoever it was.

"Mister Dulac?" The voice was deep, and friendlier than it had any right to be at this hour. When Aldous mumbled a response it went on: "I'm Erin, from Genetech TransHuman Resources. I believe we have a position in our Technical Support department that you'll find unique and exciting. If you're interested, meet me at the pet store you applied to, in twenty minutes."

The line went dead.

Aldous was tangled up in his sheets and still half asleep. He didn't need this kind of treatment. He fiddled with the phone and thought about calling back to tell the guy off. The mall was at least ten minutes away, and couldn't even be open yet!

"TransHuman Resources." Advanced biotech. An actual job offer. He didn't want to pass this job up without at least seeing what it was. He threw on the first shirt and slacks he laid eyes on. He left his apartment looking like it'd been ransacked: sheets on the floor, drawers open, papers spilled. He drove through the quiet, empty streets and found the mall's parking lot nearly deserted. The closest car to the entrance had a plush porcupine in the back window and a bumper sticker proclaiming, "DNA Is Life."

Aldous found the mall's doors locked, of course. But there was a service entrance to one side, held open with a brick. He guessed it would be okay to enter, since he had a mall tenant's permission, but he hoped he wouldn't need to explain that to a guard. He slipped through the door with three minutes left before his appointment.

The hallway was lined with lasers. Not even the proper infrared kind; these were big, obvious red beams scanning up and down, back and forth.

"Come on, said Aldous. "This is not standard mall security."

Aldous watched the beam emitters' timing, hopped over a laser beam, limboed under another, peeked around a corner, hid from a rotating security camera, and dodged more beams and a suspicious floor panel before finding himself in a maintenance hallway behind the shops. He was off-balance, standing on one foot after avoiding another trap.

Aldous saw a man leaning against the pet shop's rear door. Aldous tried to compose himself, but felt sweaty and gross and half-dressed. In his haste he'd put on a grungy t-shirt that read, "When all else fails, manipulate the data." Not a good way to show up for an interview.

Aldous stood there catching his breath, and said, "Very funny."

Erin met Aldous' glare with a smile. He wore a t-shirt with a DNA spiral design and his hair was unkempt as though he'd just gotten out of bed himself. Aldous felt less disheveled by comparison. Aldous said, "Did somebody at corporate make you show up early just to prank me?"

Erin checked his watch. "Sorry about that. The company needs people who can deal with the unexpected. Want a job?"

"Seriously? Dodging laser beams? I thought I'd be working at a pet shop!"

Erin chuckled. "We have something else in mind."

"Look, I don't know what kind of enterprise you're running, but I'm not planning to get into organized crime."

"No, we don't want you to do anything illegal. It's just that the Proactive Acquisitions department was interested in you too, so I gave you a version of their test. You passed that, despite missing the infrared sensor --"

"The lasers were visible red."

"The ones that you paid attention to, yes! Anyway, you also took the most obvious route instead of even trying to pick the front doors or use the ventilation grates. But again, you did well enough."

Aldous was still stunned. "You're kidding, right?"

"What we'd want you for," said Erin, "is to apply that dusty degree of yours to helping with troubleshooting operations inside and outside the company. You'd get free housing at our Genetech East corporate campus, plus expenses and a company discount." He named a decent salary figure.

"Troubleshooting," said Aldous. "So it's not 'customer service' in the sense of sitting by a phone?"

"Oh, hell no."

"The housing sounds nice." Aldous was surprised to find himself actually considering this job after all. "Where is this campus place?"

"Near Bermuda, with an ocean view."

"And what exactly is the discount for? Pets?"

Erin smiled. "Among other things." Then he flickered. His face was changing, and his hair... Aldous now stared at a man with a little snout, with a head and arms covered with spikes!

Erin said, "This is me without my disguise projector." He tapped his watch; it was a computerized model that seemed oddly bulky. "As you know, we have some unusual technology."

Aldous stammered. "You're... you're a hedgehog." He was backing away, stopping just short of the lasers. This guy might maul him or eat him or -- or offer him work!

"I'm a human with porcupine-related modifications. Not the most popular choice, and it wasn't completely intentional at the time. So, do you want the job? I need to get going; I've been so busy lately dealing with other matters that I've been shedding quills."

"Well, uh. It seems like a good offer..." Aldous sweated, overwhelmed. "I've got a six-month apartment lease, though, and I don't know what I'd do with my car."

"The company will work something out. Come on, man, do you want to be fifty years old and wondering why you kept looking for a mundane job after seeing me?"

Aldous imagined being a grey-haired corporate drone working in a cubicle, and shuddered. It would be safer than whatever Erin had in mind, but he feared that boring fate more than he did the porcupine. His voice wavered as he said, "Fine. I accept."

Erin seized his hand and shook it, nearly scratching him with a stray spine. "Great! Check your e-mail for a printable airline ticket. Your flight is at ten tonight."

* 3 *

The company must have really wanted him. Aldous scrambled to pack his bags and reach the airport. He brought little but clothes and a computer. On the little plane he reviewed some files from his biochemistry and bio-medical engineering classes, and felt inadequate.

An unsmiling driver with a sign met him in Bermuda, a tiny island of limestone houses where a warm, humid breeze blew even at this hour. The man silently led Aldous to the sparkling moonlit shore to find not a car, but a boat. The other passenger had a hat... no, she had bunny ears on her head. And grey fur, and pink finger-pads on the hand she offered. "Hiya! I'm Cindi."

Aldous stared until it got awkward, then shook her hand. "Uh, hi. Are there a lot of rabbits at the company?"

"A couple. So I hear you're a new hire! It's, like, awesome here!"

The driver took the wheel and the boat zoomed away, carrying the three of them over the waves. Aldous asked Cindi, "What do you do?" He thought she might be a secretary.

"Like, all kinds of neat stuff. Lately I've been engineering plasmids in vivo for study of the p53/pRB cancer suppressor genes. You know they're the same sequence in different reading frames?"

Aldous blinked, finding her suddenly less ditzy. "Nice."

She handed over a shiny computer thumb drive. "So here's the assigned viewing for newcomers to Genetech East. You've got Atlas Shrugged -- the extended version -- Frankenstein, Bioshock, and ya might as well add The Evil Overlord's List. Then there's the Non-Disclosure Agreement From Hell."

Aldous let the drive catch the moonlight as the boat bounced along. "You know, nobody's explained yet exactly what my job is."

"You'll be working for Mister Dwalin's troubleshooting squad, in Technical Support. For instance, last month we had a vine-zard outbreak in the Battle Dome, and the trainers tried to contain it with an electric fence. Using electricity on a plant monster? Like, duh!" She slapped her forehead. "So Dwalin had to go deal with that. Got any questions?"

"I don't think my list is getting any shorter."

Cindi laughed. "Just roam till Dwalin gets back. There's probably nothing that'll kill you, so the boss would say everything will make you stronger. He also says guided tours are for the weak."

"Okay... do I get an office?"

"A room in the Prometheus Dome. Sorry; I can't lead you there."

The boat stopped after a while in the middle of nowhere. There was just empty water under a starry sky. Aldous stood unsteadily and looked around. He saw nothing special. "What's wrong?"

"We're here," said Cindi. "See the unusually stable buoy with the suspicious double doors and an elevator call button?"

Aldous squinted. There was a buoy here, but -- "So what?" His eyes slid away from it.

"Right, right. Keep staring."

He was getting annoyed. "Why?" Still he followed Cindi's jabbing finger to look again at the thing.

"See it yet?"

"Of course I --" Wait, how could he be dismissing something like this, like -- "An elevator?" There was a little artificial platform on the water's surface, just as Cindi had described. Like a mirage it was hard to see well, but as he focused it got a little easier.

The driver said, "You saw past the Field faster than some."

Now Aldous really glared at it. He kept feeling tempted to look away, to ignore it. "I can't quite focus on it. What's going on?"

Cindi said, "It's got a Someone Else's Problem field. I think it's powered by Higgs bosons and dark energy. Good for when people see the buoy in passing. To them it's just an uninteresting obstacle."

They docked. Cindi brought Aldous to the elevator, which apparently lead down into the water -- into a big structure hidden beneath the waves! She used a keycard to open the doors.

"Do I get one of those keys?" asked Aldous, stepping inside.

Cindi's smile showed buckteeth. "Yep! It's in your room. Good luck!" The doors shut and the car dropped, while from outside, Cindi waved goodbye.

* 4 *

The elevator lurched downward, with its speakers blaring "Ride of the Valkyries." When it let him out, he was in a round hall of glass, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond the curving wall and the bright clear water was a jungle of blue spheres and tunnels, like a huge molecular model. Fronds of green kelp brushed along domes anchored to the seafloor. Aldous stepped forward until his nose bumped the glass. Erin was right about there being an ocean view! Fish drifted by. It took him a minute to remember he was here to work. Looking back and forth, he frowned; apparently useful signage was also for the weak.

Through a blue door on the right, he entered a greenhouse. No; the big sphere was an office area full of terraces, draped with fragrant vines. He smelled an animal musk somewhere too. At first he thought it was from the laboratory in a glass-walled arc across the room, but actually it was a startled ferret-man baring fangs at him from a cubicle. Aldous hopped away from the creature, eyeing the guy's teeth more than his tie and pocket protector, and hurried towards one of the humans instead. He found a woman who looked perfectly normal but for her bright purple hair, whose shades varied enough to make it not look like a dye job. He said, "I'm new here. I'm looking for my room -- Prometheus Dome, I think. Is there a map anywhere?"

The employee pushed her chair back from her desk and shook his hand. "Hey there, and congratulations! I'm afraid there isn't a reliable map. Our director says --"

"-- For the weak?"

"Last month he issued a directive that we should strive not to take notes, so as to develop our memories better and overcome our mental frailty and dependence on writing. We all got paper copies of the memo."

"What have I gotten into?" Aldous muttered.

"Oh, don't mind the director too much. We're the ones who get work done around here."

"If I may ask about your hair...?"

She fluffed it. "Specialized transformation virus. It's going to go on sale to everyone soon. We're going to be rolling out a lot of exciting products soon, I think, but have to ease into that. If you got hired, you're less vulnerable to panic at the sight of strangeness than average folks are. So if you're feeling uneasy, imagine how others might react if everything went public at once."

He nodded. "Even so, I'd like to find my room and lie down for a moment."

"Right. Understandable. To reach the housing area, just go past the cafeteria up there, then..." She rattled off a series of turns. "Can't miss it."

Aldous thanked her, and as he climbed the stairs next to a garden terrace, wondered what she was laughing at.

Aldous got confused by the hallway junctions and was soon lost. Any sane office building would have been designed better than this! He was about to turn back if he could, when he spotted the cafeteria. It had big tables, little tables, beanbags replacing some of the chairs, and even a wooden perch, all in the top half of a glass sphere that lurked just beneath the ocean's surface. "Nice," he murmured at the ceiling. The array of food reassured him enough that he decided to take a break and have a moment of relative normality. He was in no hurry anyway. He hadn't even been given a specific time to report to work.

The cafeteria could have passed for one anywhere, if not for the lunch-lady's obvious cybernetic implants. He got himself some veggie lasagna, feeling almost at home.

The lady fixed him with an unnerving metal eye when he pulled out a twenty from his wallet. "We don't take funny-money."

"I'm pretty sure it's real. Want a credit card though?"

"We take company credits, and gold." She started to lecture him about the evils of fiat currency.

He interrupted her just as she was launching into a history of the Federal Reserve. "So! Uh, how do I get company credits?"

She smiled. "I could take your play money and cover for you, at the right exchange rate. Or you could just wait for your bank account to be assimilated."

A minute later, feeling poorer after that "exchange rate", he took the furthest table away from the lunch line. He sat there grumbling, calming down as he ate. Yeah, he thought, it didn't much matter if there were animal-people running around and he had to work in a secret undersea base. It would be fun, mostly. Aldous was getting sleepy just sitting there with his meal. And then an angry bearded guy showed up.

"What are you doing?" said the man. He looked like hell -- filthy in a mildewed ski parka, with a hammer at his belt and a sack on his back.

Aldous yawned. Yeesh, he should get some sleep. "Just getting in."

"Bah!" The man stomped over to the lunch-lady. "Two Skunk Beers. Cold." He returned and shoved an open bottle under Aldous' nose. A stench woke Aldous up, making him recoil and sit up straight.

The man said, "That's better. So the bosses saddled me with a mundane loafer who can't keep his eyes open."

Aldous realized: "You're Dwalin!"

"So I hear. Drink now, and maybe I can use you tomorrow."

Aldous was shamed enough by having his new boss find him half-asleep that he drank the nasty beer with Dwalin. It was actually pretty good. Bold flavor. "Sorry," he said. "It's been a strange couple of days."

"I just got back from saving Antarctica. What happened to you? Did the airline not let you keep the whole can of soda?"

Aldous stood unsteadily, swigging his beer. "Can we start over tomorrow?"

Dwalin nodded. "Get yourself down that hall over there, then go to the bottom floor. Call me tomorrow. And don't touch anything on the way."

Aldous got out of there, feeling his cheeks burn with shame at making a bad first impression. Dwalin's directions proved easier to follow, taking him down a glass staircase to a clear ball in the depths, full of apartments. One of the doors opened as he passed, revealing an empty room. It held little more than a steel-framed bed, a glass desk with an ID card and lanyard laying on it, and some lockers for furniture. Aldous shrugged, flopped onto the bed, and fell asleep.

* 5 *

He woke up itchy. When he rolled over onto his back, he winced at a pain from somewhere on his spine. There was a fluffy pillow beside him... with black fur and white stripes... attached to him.

He leaped out of bed, unable to escape his new tail. The fur felt coarse, a little scratchy against his hand. Tugging it just hurt him, and he could feel its every twitch. The company had poisoned him with their mad science! He pulled out his phone but had no signal. It took him a moment to recall that he was somewhere beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

The desk had an intercom panel on it, though. He pushed a button and said, trying to sound calm, "I want to talk to Dwalin in Technical Support."

The phone played thirty seconds of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" before Dwalin came on and said, "Twenty hours' sleep is a good sign."

"I have a tail!"

"Good," said Dwalin. "Meet me in the cafeteria."

The line went dead, leaving a flustered Aldous to snatch the keycard on his desk, stomp his way back upstairs, and feel the tail bouncing behind him with every step. There was no way to hide the thing. In the cafeteria the water overhead looked night-dark. His sense of time was completely thrown off. Dwalin shared a table with two others: a blue-haired woman, and what appeared to be a centauroid lioness. Four-footed torso with an upper chest that had her arms and head, which were just as fuzzy and leonine as her lower body. Aldous grimaced at the thought that he kind of fit in, now, what with the ridiculous thing bobbing behind him. He looked at the blue-haired one and said, "Does everyone here have to be weird?"

She stared at Aldous with a look of scorn from deep purple eyes. "I had burns on eighty percent of my skin when Genetech found me."

Aldous' tail hid between his legs. The feeling of the new muscles and the fluff around them startled him. "Sorry. But what happened to me? Is this just something that happens to every new employee? Wait a moment... It was the beer, wasn't it? How?"

Dwalin nodded. "I think we owe you an explanation. Have a seat."

Aldous was about to flop onto an aluminum chair when the lioness called out, "Tail!" Aldous stopped himself from squashing his tail and turned the chair around, so that he could lean forward against the back of it. The lioness added, "You have to keep aware of your shape, if you've changed recently. Once you get used to the sensors or whatever, you'll be fine."

"Sensors?"

"In my case. I'm part machine." When Aldous listened carefully he thought he heard faint whirring when she moved.

Dwalin said, "The beer and a few other vittles here have low-level nanites in 'em. When my bosses are more interested in playing games with a newcomer than giving him a thorough scan for hostile nanotechnology, I find beer to be a useful line of defense."

The lioness explained, "He gave you the beer as a medical test. Each model of nanites usually has just one effect. The beer is a novelty item with low-level nano in it, that fancier kinds override. So if you drank the beer and all you got from it was a tail and glands, that means you're probably not carrying anything nasty and contagious."

So Dwalin had done this to him for a reason. "Wait a minute. Scent glands?"

"Yes," said Dwalin.

Aldous shuddered. "You were drinking the same stuff!"

"I've been exposed to nanites and worse already, so most kinds don't affect me. I just like the taste."

Aldous' mind raced. Just yesterday were the interview with Erin, the plane flight and the boat ride. Then he'd slept nearly a full day, and the tail had happened in his sleep. He tried to put aside his own fluffy problem and figure out just what was going on. He didn't like the sound of "contagious" nanotech. He said, "You've got advanced technology here --"

"It's a work in progress," the lioness said with a toothy grin.

"And someone is trying to kill you with it?"

Blue-hair spoke in a thick Slavic accent. "It is world domination they pursue. The final doom of Man."

"Or not," said the lioness. "Oh yeah -- miss gloom there is Marie. Since there was nobody with changes like mine when I got them, I'm going by Firestar." She looked expectantly at Aldous.

His brow furrowed. "So you're Firestar the cat-centaur?"

"Close! I'm the first-taur."

Dwalin interrupted Aldous' groan. "We have a job to do."

"Right; sorry," said Aldous. "Tell me, who else has the tech to create animal-people? Nanites with that kind of power could be -- well, incredibly deadly." Anyone who had the technology to turn someone into a creature like Firestar could, more easily, disassemble them cell by cell into a puddle of goo.

Dwalin grunted. "So you do know something. The answer is, Genetech itself. We're in the East Campus. The West and South divisions work mostly independently under our General Management, and we suspect one of those two is sabotaging us."

Marie of the blue hair added, "If the West or South division becomes dominant within the larger company, there will be suffering and oppression and probably layoffs."

Aldous said, "Uh-huh. And what do those other two branches say about this one?"

Firestar said, "They think we're frivolous, and not aggressive enough in pushing our technology. Our Director Gattart doesn't want to rule the world, I think. He'd rather rant and flex his muscles at it than actually administer anything."

"Now," said Dwalin, "Genetech East's Technical Support department -- largely consisting of us -- has been assigned to keep the inter-campus rivalry in check. A few of our clients have been wondering why they're getting conflicting messages from the company. You know that news story where the Arabs accused the Americans of releasing man-eating badgers in Iraq?"

Aldous nodded; there were occasional paranoid stories in the Mideast's news that made it into Western press.

Dwalin said, "The badgers were supposed to go to Afghanistan."

"Did I walk into some kind of corporate civil war?" asked Aldous.

Firestar reared up on her hindlegs and shrugged with her arms and forepaws. "There's some sibling rivalry, and a few bad apples. We're the ones who keep the trouble from getting any worse."

Aldous found himself overwhelmed, but he could say honestly, "It's an honor to be trusted with a job like this, sir. I can put my biology and engineering skills to use if there's mad science to investigate. It'll be great to learn about all the technology here while I investigate the sabotage attempts. It'll be like detective work."

Dwalin scoffed. "That's my mission. What I have for you suits your skills as a newcomer. You're hereby part of the Excellence Or Else Workplace Task Force." He dug out a sheaf of pamphlets decorated with a steel smiley face. "Morale has been low."

Aldous picked up a pamphlet and saw that the whole stack was actually one document, around fifty pages long. "What have you done to overcome customer expectations?" he read. He looked up at the others. "I can see why, if they have to read this."

Marie said, "This is abridged."

Dwalin said, "You can tell people you're working to improve morale -- which is true -- but really the point is to make sure they get the job done and don't mess with the customers too much."

Aldous slumped against his chair. "So I'm basically a cheerleader."

Dwalin's expression was hard to read. "I don't know why Management sent you to me, but we'll make the best of it for now, and get you some experience. Now, I'm headed back to Genetech South to do some..." His expression hardened for a moment. "Cleanup work, and see what I can learn there. Aldous, pick one of these two to stay here and hold your hand while the other goes to the West Campus."

Aldous was vaguely flattered at having the choice, and not too insulted at the thought that somebody would be helping him figure out what his job was. He looked to Marie and Firestar. Marie was the more normal one, who would make him feel like there was some sanity here, but he found himself drawn more to the lioness' attentive slit-pupiled glance. "Firestar, would you mind?"

"Sure."

Dwalin said, "All right. If you're intact when I get back, we'll discuss further work."

* 6 *

Aldous walked with Firestar down a glass-tube hall, self-consciously clutching his tail and feeling the tickle of his hand against the fur. "How do I get rid of this?"

"Why do you want to?" Firestar's own thinner tail twitched, showing off a golden tuft at the tip.

"It's weird."

"Not around here. We can get you some modified pants; we have a tailor."

Aldous paused to watch a jellyfish drift by outside. "I don't want to advertise this thing."

"No problem. Our motto is, 'Don't ask, don't tail'."

"Well, what if I sit on it and hurt myself?"

Firestar kept walking. "The medical plan includes dent-tail coverage."

"Quit that," said Aldous.

"Quit what?" she said with a grin. "Okay, we're here."

They'd stopped at a big airlock-style door. Firestar tapped a panel with one of her forepaws to make it whoosh open. Beyond it was another section of cylindrical hallway, this time metal, with a door at the far end. "Airlock?" asked Aldous.

The lioness nodded. "Remember, you're here for morale-building. Chat them up, get 'em talking, find out what their complaints are." She opened the inner door.

Aldous looked into a room dominated by a swimming pool, open to the ocean below. Light rippled along the ceiling and the dive gear on the walls. Dense, humid air wafted around him. "Wrong room," he said.

Three dolphins' heads broke the water's surface. Each had a panel of circuitry on its jaw. One waved a wrench in its teeth and squeakily said, "New guy?"

Aldous glanced back at Firestar, who had settled on all fours onto the tile floor. Finding no help, he tried to give the interview/pep talk he'd expected to give to a bunch of cubicle-dwellers, or at least surface-dwellers.

"I'm Aldous, with the Workplace Task Force. I'm here to ask about morale, and, uh, working conditions."

The dolphins looked to each other in confusion.

Aldous scratched his head, tail curling indecisively. How to talk to them? "Um. Job good?"

"Job good!" said one dolphin, and the others nodded, squeaking.

"Okay. Any problems? Bad things?"

They considered this. "Want more fish. Want plas-ma tee-vee. Sur-round sound."

"What exactly do you do here?" he said, half to himself. "What your job? What is?"

"Fix tun-nels. Fix glass ball things. Sea no squish hu-mans."

"Engineers! Okay, that's something I can relate to. Got tools? Good tools?"

"Tools good. Get more fish? Sword-fish?"

"Sorry. I didn't bring any." They looked blankly at him. He tried, "Me no have fish."

"Have big tail," said one.

Another chimed in, "Like big tails. Not lie. Oth-er mam-mals not de-ny. When --" The other dolphins said, "Ssh, ssh."

Aldous wasn't sure what else he could get across to them. "You see problem, you tell me. Okay?"

"O-kay, hu-man! Bye now!" The sleek heads ducked beneath the water and were gone... until one surfaced just long enough to squeak, "Hope you swim bet-ter than you talk!"

Aldous stood there looking at the empty pool. "They were putting me on?"

Behind him Firestar said, "Cybernetic augmentation doesn't make 'phins stop being smartasses."

"Is there someone else I could talk to?"

"How about my favorite department? They're usually pretty boring."

"I'm sure. So... when do I get to start working for real instead of being pranked?"

She seemed surprised. "That was legitimate work. You just helped some of our employees have fun, and even got a specific request for a TV."

* 7 *

The lioness led Aldous back out of the pool room and down stairs and tunnels to another lab, deeper underwater. A sign labeled it "Integrated Investigation". This cluttered room of machinery seemed to be part chop shop, part medical clinic.

"Can I touch stuff in here?" asked Aldous, admiring a robotic workstation that was weaving threads of plastic into an elaborate cable.

"Yeah, but be careful," said Firestar. "Generally you should watch out before touching anything unknown in this company. Or eating or drinking, or wearing anything, or inhaling anything. You don't want to spend a month as a busty skunk-girl, at least by accident."

"Is that possible?" he said. The fluffy tail behind him wriggled, still catching his attention. He'd have to be careful not to knock anything over with it. Already he'd felt it brushing against the walls or tickling his legs.

"That's more the Genetic Engineering department. What goes on here is -- well, you can pester Luke over there."

A big man with glasses and a scruffy jacket was staring blankly at a screen, drumming his fingers on one knee. When Aldous greeted him, he waved. Aldous said, "What do you do here?"

"This and that. Cyborg stuff." A wall chart showed grey muscles that Aldous realized looked like the material that the nearby robot was weaving.

Aldous said, "I'm hearing that there's been some trouble around the company lately. Know anything?" By now, Aldous had figured out that he needed to work on how to read people, but he guessed that Luke wasn't Mister Enthusiasm.

Luke shrugged. "I've been kind of bored lately. Haven't asked around."

"Bored! Here?" said Aldous, too stunned to follow that up.

Firestar said, "Excuse Aldous; he's new here. Can he look around?"

"Whatever."

Aldous went into an area that was walled off with glass; it had a lot less motor oil and stray wiring to hurt himself with. He saw a couple of inner rooms whose walls were frosted glass, and stepped through a doorway. There he saw a fox-furred nurse fussing with equipment around a girl in a hospital bed.

The girl winced as the nurse adjusted an IV tube running to a needle in her arm. "Can I come back and visit sometime?"

The nurse sighed. "You won't remember. We can't advertise everything we do, just yet."

Aldous felt he should leave them alone, but it wouldn't hurt to say hello. He did.

The nurse just nodded. The girl was cheerier. "Skunky!"

"What?" Aldous said, and then he remembered the weight curled along his back. "Oh. Heh. Like it?"

"It's cute. Are you a doctor?"

"No, I'm kind of an inspector for now. Can I ask why you're here?" The nurse didn't object.

"I was real sick, an' then this guy talked to my parents and had the doctors chop out all the bad stuff and give me a robot lung an' a robot liver. I hate liver, don't you?"

"Yeah," he said. He didn't know anyone had invented implants like that yet. He hadn't heard of any clinical trials... which might explain why this surgery was happening twenty leagues under the sea. It was illegal, and being done with only a wink and nod from the government, if that. He looked to the nurse. "So you're using some kind of memory suppressor to hide the details of what we're doing?"

The nurse shrugged. "Whatever gets the job done and us out of trouble."

Aldous gave a last smile to the girl and ducked out of the room, feeling proud of the medical tech but vaguely troubled. He went back to the grungier machine area to look for Firestar, and saw her long torso sitting improbably on a table. Then he reached out to tap her on the shoulder... neck... whatever, when he saw a gaping grey hole in the flesh.

"Yaaah!" he shouted.

"Eek!" said a creature inside the wound.

"Yaaah!" he replied. His tail flicked higher, and with just a moment of warning he shoved it back down before he could do anything unpleasant by instinct.

The creature blinked. She seemed to be a rat in a blue jumpsuit, brandishing a wrench. The "wound" was only some kind of mechanical access panel, lined with plastic. The rodent said in a chirpy voice, "I didn't expect the Skunkish Inquisition!"

Aldous tried to slow his heartbeat. "No one expects --"

"Yeah, hi. I'm Alice. Don't startle me like that."

"Aldous, from Technical Support. You too. What happened to Firestar?"

"She's over there." Aldous looked where Alice pointed and saw the lioness flipping through an overstuffed binder. He did a double-take and looked back at the table in front of him. On closer inspection, this one was more fox-taur than lion-taur, with an inert, glassy expression on its muzzle.

"What's this?" he said. "Is there a whole centauroid product line?"

Alice leaned on her wrench, which was as big as herself. "I'm doing a little work on our cybernetic life support system. The South Campus guys came up with the tech to make someone into a 'brain in a jar'. But they thought that the brain should either float there menacingly and emit psychic control rays, or strut around in an armored war-spider. We don't even have psychic control rays, I think. So, Marketing had us steal the idea and make the mobile brain pod cute instead. But the support hardware is still so big and heavy that we couldn't fit it into a humanoid robot body."

"Couldn't you make a plain quadruped, a big one, and fit all the batteries and other gear into that?"

"We thought about it, but hands are nice, you know? So is being able to look regular humans in the eye. So, we built cyborg bodies to hold the brains, but made them into cuddly robot centaurs. Pleasant-looking, eye-catching, and able to do most normal human social stuff."

"That almost makes sense," said Aldous. He'd clearly been here too long. "Wait. Does that mean that Firestar is a brain in a tank? She did say she was part machine."

"Yeah. Calls herself a mecha-cat." Alice hopped down to the table, a drop several times her height, and attacked a huge bag of pretzels. Aldous helped open the bag. She said, "Thanks. As much as I like the 'taur bodies, I'm trying to make the life support pod smaller. Miniaturization makes everything better."

"Have you noticed any morale problems lately?"

Alice paused in sawing a pretzel log. "Everybody's in the dumps lately. I've been feeling a little blue myself, but I'm okay. Why?"

"I got this fifty-page tract about how if you're not productive and happy, you're 'engaging in anti-conceptual mentality' or something. Is the propaganda itself depressing people?"

"Oh, that? I don't think anyone's read it. I could barely lift it."

"What's wrong, then?"

Alice said, "I don't know. At least Firestar's okay."

Aldous' tail curled as he thought. "Thanks. I might talk to you later."

He found Firestar and motioned her outside to the hallway. "You didn't tell me you were almost all machine."

"You didn't ask," she said. "I was in the hospital and in... terrible shape, let's say, and then I got recruited and invited to 'participate in a medical study for what turned out to be Genetech. Turned out pretty well, I think. Got a problem with that?"

"No, no, I like it. I'm just surprised. I don't know what to expect here. You're fine."

"Why, thank you," said Firestar, looking mollified as she gave him a complex bow. "Having few assumptions might be part of why you were hired. What's up?"

"You don't even eat normal food, do you?"

She blinked. "Huh? No, I don't have a digestive system anymore. Have you got some kind of bio-chauvinism?"

Aldous let the lab's door close and glanced down the empty glass tunnel. It was empty. He spoke quietly. "This might be nothing, but something weird is going on. You're fine. The girl in there was on an IV. Alice apparently eats from giant-sized bags of snack food. Dwalin had just gotten back from a trip when we met. The dolphins are smartass fish-eaters. The only people who've been bored and depressed are the ones who seem to have a normal diet. So... am I seeing a pattern or just leaping at coincidences?"

"What about you?" she said, tilting her head.

"I was totally out of it when Dwalin saw me -- which was right after I had the veggie lasagna at your cafeteria. And I was told that I'm extra-vulnerable to nanites due to lack of past exposure. Where is this place's food coming from?"

Firestar's ears flicked back in alarm and her tail thrashed. "The greenhouses of Genetech West!"

* 8 *

Aldous said, "Could it be that the sabotage is something healthy and nutritious?"

"You can never trust eggplant." Firestar led Aldous farther out of earshot from the lab. "We've been looking for ordinary employee gripes, expecting that there's just some ordinary argument or grievance going on. Meanwhile, Dwalin and Marie are off looking for nanotech attacks. But maybe, the real problem is the food. We've got to do something! Quick, buy us first-class tickets to Vegas."

She ran off, leaving Aldous to stand there blinking. He went back to the cyborg lab and said, "Can I borrow a computer and an expense account?"

Firestar returned wearing a backpack and saddlebags. "Got them yet?"

He held a computer tablet, but she'd only been gone for five minutes. "It'll cost a fortune, and I'm not paying out of pocket, especially since you didn't say why."

"As I suspected, I couldn't reach the others. We need to go to Genetech West in person to test your theory before this problem gets any worse."

"It's in Las Vegas?" A secret research base wouldn't be the strangest building there.

She looked exasperated. "It's near the border. We fly in, drive the rest of the way, expose the conspiracy, then play blackjack at the Luxor."

Aldous said, "Look at yourself. The company's disguise tech might be good enough to hide someone like Erin, but what about you? Can you even fit into an airplane seat?"

Firestar slumped on her four feet. "You're right. I've had this body for half a year. But I keep forgetting I still can't do everything that normal people do, not in public."

He tried to reassure her. "For now, we can do some kind of inquiry remotely, I bet, instead of trying to smuggle you onto a plane. If the research here is really as impressive as I've seen so far, you'll be able to get into a regular humanoid body sometime soon and we can hang out openly in Vegas. Together, if you like."

"But I like being a taur!" she said. "I love being able to stand up and dance and leap and haul my own weight after... what I went through."

He didn't know if it was right to ask her about her background. Maybe he should just get packed and let her work out the travel arrangements. "If you don't want to say, that's fine."

"Here." Firestar snatched up pen and paper, then handed him a scribbled note while looking away. "That's your answer; don't blab. I have a new life now. Anyway, it sounds like I can't fly out there myself. So buy just one plane ticket for yourself, and rent a car with your ID card. Get to the Genetech West facility and look around for anything suspicious about the food production there. You're a harmless, clueless newbie, so they hopefully won't do much to you. Get what evidence you can without arousing suspicion, and we'll take it to General Management. Look for a message from me at the airport; I'll do research while you travel."

Aldous was overwhelmed. "You want me to spy on Genetech West, alone?"

Firestar tugged at Aldous' shirt, adjusting it as though dressing him for work. "You did okay so far. Your cover story can be that you're there to complain about the latest batch of Vixena. Just don't ask for a demonstration."

"Okay. Okay, then. I can do this." He turned the computer back on with unsteady hands, and ordered one plane ticket for him to fly across a continent to spy on people he'd never met. The good news was that he could fly first class for free.

He felt Firestar's forepaw clutching his tail, with little claws tickling his soft fur. She said, "Remember this? You need one of these." She held out a watch, like the one Erin used as a disguise projector. Aldous looked at the watch and felt the touch on his tail, and knew he wasn't human anymore. No, he told himself. I'm just different. He donned the watch. Now, when he looked back, he saw only a faint ripple in the air behind him. He had trouble looking straight at it. He still felt it being touched; his tail was hidden, not gone.

Firestar stepped away, saying, "Good luck. Have fun storming the castle."

Aldous returned to his room to sit and think before leaving the base. He'd hardly been here a day and all this had happened. Should he use the chance to quit and run away screaming? He could go back to being safe at home, and not be surrounded by this madness.

The crumpled note was still in his pocket. He took it out, wondering what Firestar had gone through. The note simply said, "Afghanistan."

He sat there for a while, full of mixed feelings. He wondered just how strange this company was, and whether that was a bad thing.

* 9 *

At the airport, a metal detector beeped. "Remove your watch, sir."

Aldous sweated. How did Erin travel with his own disguise? What would the guards do to him? "I'd really rather not. It's valuable."

"Then you don't get on the plane, sir."

There wasn't a good way to handle this. Improvise. He removed the watch while trying not to be seen from behind.

"Huh?" said one of the guards. Aldous' tail had reappeared, waving hello.

Aldous talked quickly. "I wear the tail for religious reasons. Realistic, isn't it? Have you smelled the good news of the Church of Stripedastrian Mephitology? It's really changed my life."

The guards were looking at him with a mixture of disgust and bafflement. Aldous put his watch through the X-ray machine and strode through the metal detector again. "Can I interest you in some literature? I've got scratch-and-sniff pamphlets."

"No, that's -- never mind. Just go."

Aldous picked up his backpack and the watch, marched along to the nearest men's room, and locked himself in a stall to hyperventilate and hide his tail again.

The flight was uneventful, with room for his tail in the first-class seat. Many miles later, a car-rental clerk at the airport handed him keys and a sheaf of papers. Slot machines beeped from the baggage claim area. "Your company sent you an address to visit. Oh, and there's a message for you." Reading from a screen, the clerk said, "Bring back some gourds! This message will self-destruct."

Aldous ducked. After several seconds he peeked over the counter.

"I'm not sure why they said that, sir. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Sorry. I've had a tough few days."

* * *

The long drive was hot and boring. Aldous found himself wishing for Firestar's company. After a while he reached an area that looked like just more desert at first -- sand, cacti and sagebrush -- but he kept looking around, knowing that the place had to be nearby. There! The Genetech West Campus stood off to the right: a complex of dusty tan greenhouses that seemed to make his eyes slide away. This place couldn't hide so well; there was too much in the open, and there had to be a road entrance somewhere. Sure enough, he found a sign for "Consolidated Engineering Enterprise Dynamics," with a green smiley-face logo that gave him the willies. The sign took him to an underground, unguarded parking lot.

It was when he tried his ID card at the door's scanner that the security started. A cheery voice asked, "Can we help you?"

"I'm here to talk to someone about the latest batch of 'Vixena'."

A young man's face appeared on a screen. "You don't look like a vixen. Are you a customer?" He seemed to be fumbling with a computer on his end. "No, wait, you're an employee. Hang on."

Aldous shrugged and entered when the door opened. The guy at the reception desk didn't look organized; there were stacks of papers and take-out containers everywhere. The clerk said, "Sorry, man. I'm new here."

"Don't worry about it. I just arrived in Bermuda myself."

The receptionist froze. "Wait. You're with the East Division?"

Aldous mentally kicked himself. "Don't we all have access to every campus?"

"I'm not really sure. I think your boss and Boss Walters have some kind of feud going on."

Aldous kept hands in his pockets, hiding a cell phone with a camera. He tried to sound casual. "Oh? Say, I've had nothing but airline food all day. Is there any place to eat here?"

"There's the Genghis Galley, over that way. Lemme give you a badge." The guy handed over a "Visitor" badge. "About the Vixena, what were the side effects this time?"

"Oh, the usual."

The receptionist snickered. "Talk to That Fox about it."

"What fox?"

"That's what he's called. I think That Fox started out as a wild animal. He likes chasing mice and designing molecules. Third basement floor."

"Thanks."

This place actually had signage! Aldous made his way to the little cantina. He saw scruffy scientists slouched over beer; a group of hovering drones seeming to drink milkshakes through straws; and a band of mutants playing a catchy tune. He made his way warily through the crowd and saw a familiar-looking cyborg lady behind the counter. Really a clone or robot, maybe? "Awaiting order," she said.

"What do you have for vegetables today?"

Her steely voice unnerved him. "No vegetables detected."

Aldous took a step back and examined the food. He'd been hoping to find clues here, but they wouldn't use poison gourds on their own employees... probably. He saw a steamer tray full of some kind of casserole and said, "What about that?"

"You are logged in as a guest," said the cyborg. "Please enter your administrator password to select this item."

Aldous was about to turn away and get a bag of potato chips for a snack, when a gaunt old man laid a skinny hand on him. "You don't want that stuff," the man said. The accent was faintly Russian, unsettling Aldous.

"The chips?"

"The casserole. I don't believe in messing with legitimate visitors."

"Hmm? Oh, this badge," said Aldous, taking the chance to remove the Visitor tag so he wouldn't be an obvious outsider. He flashed his company ID at the man, with his thumb over the raindrop-like logo of East Campus. The Western version had a sun. "I'm actually a new hire, in Technical Support. The receptionist said the guest badge would make me safer somehow."

"Don't bother with it; they just issue the badges to collect data from the radiation film and nanite sensor. I can see partway through your disguise field; you've already got a watch and some kind of big tail. Squirrel?"

Aldous relaxed a bit and removed the watch, revealing his tail. "Close. So, what's wrong with the casserole? I've already been tricked into drinking Skunk Beer; does this have the Carrots of Doom or something?"

"Doom carrots are more South Campus' style. This just has my own little project in it." The old man cleared his throat. "Behold: the Rutabagas of Ennui!"

Aldous blinked.

"They impart a certain fin de siecle, je ne sais quois feeling." He saw that Aldous had no idea what those meant, and added, "Angst. Docility. Cow-like nirvana."

Aldous tried to hide his fear. He really needed some stronger deodorant. The man in front of him was involved trying to sabotage rival divisions with mind-control salad! "That's kind of extreme, isn't it?"

"Bah! Marketing wants to call everything 'extreme' or 'radical' on the theory that you kids can't hold still long enough to pay attention to anything normal. But the rutabagas themselves help solve that problem."

"Sorry to bother you," said Aldous."

"Don't you want to stay and eat?"

"That's all right. Thanks!" Aldous excused himself and got out of there, to a sunny hall of flowers. This facility was a lot more open, a nice place with a self-contained jungle to one side and to the other, a day care center with too many cacti.

After some exploration he found his way to a huge greenhouse. Cubicles dangled from the trees around rows of plants and racks of hydroponics vats. He strolled along, looking for evidence and trying to remember what rutabagas looked like. A bunny-girl hummed to herself while attaching electrical leads to a cabbage. Aldous said, "Excuse me. Where are the Rutabagas of Ennui?"

"Thataway," she said, giving a flick of her ears.

He found only a steel door where she pointed. Beyond it was a big indoor garden, packed with yellowish root vegetables. Aha! The humid air scorched his skin and made his tail droop. No one was tending this room except for a couple of shiny robotic ferrets. He waited until they were some distance away, then knelt and used his car keys to slice off a few leaves and other bits of veggie and put them in his pockets. Great! Now all he needed was to escape. He turned to the door, and found the old botanist staring at him. "What," said the man, "are you doing in my laboratory?"

Caught! Aldous decided to try bluster. "I'm on to you! We've already discovered your conspiracy to subvert employee morale with genetically-engineered rutabagas grown by robot ferrets!"

The botanist just stared at him like there was something unreasonable about Aldous' theory.

Aldous forced his way past the man, saying, "Don't try to deny it. I've got the authority to be here for Technical Support."

"Wait! Seriously, what conspiracy?"

Aldous stopped, uncertain. "To feed these to Genetech East."

"To them? No, no! These rutabagas are for a government contract, for school lunches. What makes you think they're being served at your facility?"

"They're even at your own cafeteria, under security."

"The casserole? That's just for unsuspecting auditors and lawyers. I don't know how any of my crop would be getting into the Genetech East food supply."

"Then you won't mind my going back and telling my bosses that."

"Of course not."

From the main greenhouse outside the rutabaga room came a woman's voice. "I'd mind."

Aldous said, "Marie?" His blue-haired co-worker was descending a staircase, pointing a dart gun at him.

"Think you're pretty smart, eh?" she said. "You were supposed to stay at the office and fool around, not go meddling in Genetech West's affairs." She pointed lower with the dart gun, showing its chamber full of glowing purple stuff. "Is that a root in your pocket? I can't let you have that."

Aldous looked for a good escape route and found none. The botanist was protesting but Aldous interrupted: "Even these things' maker doesn't support you, Marie. If you're a double agent for the West Division, you're hurting them too."

"That's none of your business, newbie. Now --"

Aldous snatched a bioluminescent jack o'lantern off a nearby vine and threw it at Marie, saying, "Trick or treat!"

Marie fumbled as she warded off the grinning pumpkin, and the dart gun fired at the ceiling. Aldous ran, hearing the botanist trying to restrain her. Aldous dashed past the startled bunny-girl, dodged a huge Venus fly-trap that snapped at him, and past a shelf of melons. He was nearly to the door when he tripped over a pipe.

Marie ran up behind him, saying, "Stay right there." He looked over his shoulder and saw her finish reloading. He'd just gotten to his feet and was ready to run or fight, but she aimed at his back and said, "Not another step."

"What's in those darts, anyway?"

"Killing you would be against company policy, but you can be reassigned. Really, you'd have been fine if you hadn't interfered. Now put your hands on the cantaloupes where I can see them."

Aldous reached for the fruit displayed in front of him, making no sudden moves. Great; he'd probably be "reassigned" to a zoo. This job stank. Oh, wait...

He sucked in his gut and yanked down his pants...

In a moment Marie was gasping, collapsing backward into a patch of grain stalks. A dart thudded into a table and Aldous leaped ahead, trying to recover and fix his belt. Marie coughed and cursed while the botanist called to some guards, "There! Catch her in the rye!" They weren't chasing him yet and he was happy to be ignored for the moment. He remembered something, then called out over his shoulder: "Evil Overlord's List, Rule 7: Shoot first, taunt later!"

Down one hall and another he dashed. People hustled to get out of his way. His eyes watered but he didn't smell that bad, did he? Not even the receptionist stopped him as he fled the building, jumped into his rental car, tossed bits of rutabaga onto the back seat, and found the keys.

* 10 *

The boat stopped at the East Campus entry buoy on a blazing afternoon. Aldous thanked the pilot and carefully sighted the tiny dock before stepping on. The elevator took him down while playing the bombastic tune of Holst's "Jupiter."

Dwalin and Firestar ambushed him in one of the halls, saying, "Welcome back!"

Aldous said, "Did the samples I sent arrive? Is everything dealt with?"

"Aye," said Dwalin, "and we've changed our menu a bit. Genetech South will be hearing from us."

"South?"

"The West group wasn't doing anything to us intentionally, this time. Marie was playing all three sides, tricking the West into using its menacing vegetables against the East. General Management was not pleased to learn of the South's treachery."

Firestar pulled a present out of her saddlebags. "The boss wanted you to have this."

Aldous grinned and pulled away the gold ribbon. Inside was a photo. A picture of a man flexing his muscles, wearing a shirt advertising "Galt's Gym". It was autographed in black marker: "To Alvous: Glad the job's working out for you. -- A. Gattart."

"Uh, great," said Aldous.

Dwalin shook his head at that. "This news might thrill you less than that present, but it seems I can use you for more than giving morale surveys. I'm short a good Technical Support agent, after all."

Aldous stared out from the glass walls and into the water, watching fish drift by. He'd had time in Las Vegas before his return flight, but he'd avoided the casinos for fear of being seen with his tail somehow, and being exposed as a freak. No, that wasn't the right word. He was different now, and didn't feel quite at home among the people who'd never heard of Genetech. "How long will it be," he said, "before people like Firestar can go wherever they want? Before everyone can benefit from what we do here?"

Dwalin said, "Patience, lad. Let's get a drink. A safe one."

Firestar grinned. "No drinks for me, sorry, but I'll come along. Let the researchers keep doing their thing, while we keep it all from going wrong. Soon we'll show more of our stuff to the world. We'll show them all!"

Aldous nodded, satisfied, and let the others lead him on.

* 11 *

Aldous was at lunch, setting him temporarily free from an all-day training session. After the initial excitement he'd had a relatively dull few days and was catching up on Genetech's "normal" procedures for new employee on-boarding. He'd gotten official credits at the cafeteria, for instance.

He asked the lunch lady, "What's safe to eat today?" He was still unsure what she was, after seeing her identical twin out west.

"We only sell safe food."

He wondered if she'd been reprogrammed to deny the rutabega incident. He had no desire to tick her off, since the cafeteria seemed to be the only place to eat around here, so he didn't argue. He grabbed some pizza, though he eyed it suspiciously.

There were some chairs available for people with tails, so he had one of those today. As he ate, he watched his fellow employees. Most were still apparently regular humans. His skunk features stood out but were hardly unique, given the fuzzy ears and tails that a fair number of people had on them. He had yet to actually meet anyone else who'd had the Skunk Beer.

After lunch, and after a few more hours of listening to lectures, he headed for the employee medical clinic. Finding it took him twenty minutes of wandering through the unlabeled hallways. Finally he got in, and found a dragon presiding over a hoard of tools and drugs. At least that was the impression; the doc had copper scales on his arms and clawed hands, and a pair of impressive horns behind his fin-like ears. Aldous blinked at him and said, "I haven't seen metallic scales before. If I may ask, what are you?"

The doctor laughed. He was otherwise physically human. "You're definitely a new employee. I've just been using some tricks from Nora in the Genetic Augmentation department."

"And you wear one of the disguise watches whenever you go outside?"

"Oh, I don't get out much lately. I'm happy with my research. Now, hold out your arm."

Aldous had learned better by now. "For what, exactly?"

"Basic defensive nanites. You've seen how some of our products change people, but it's time to get your current form 'locked in' so that anything else that affects you can be reverted quickly."

Aldous' tail twitched and curled. "Uh, doc, what about this thing?"

"That's a bit tricky. Have a seat." The dragon-doc offered him a stool. "I didn't have anything happen to me in my first week here, to the point that I saw all sorts of nonsense going on around me and felt a little left out. So, I got the defensive nano that was available at the time, and that meant my default form was simply human." He showed off his scaly arms. "Now I have these. It would take a few weeks at most to recover from these changes and go back to how I was, if I wanted to. With the latest defense version, you could probably undo a change like mine in under a week. The question is, how intent are you on going back to full human?"

Aldous said, "Are you saying it'd be extra-tough?"

"We'd have to do more than surgically remove the tail. As you may have noticed, there were some other changes."

He winced. "Don't I know it. The... scent came in handy though. I'm just worried about getting startled from behind."

"Bah; that's mostly a cartoon thing. You should be able to control the spraying reflex. Just make sure you don't get your tail caught in any doors! So, would you like to go through standard and nanite-based surgery to get the skunk changes fully undone, before getting the defensive injection?"

Aldous looked around the lab. Most of it was no different from a standard doctor's office, but there was a porthole looking out on the ocean and several medical charts on display for bodies with tails or wings or stranger arrangements. "How likely am I to get infected with something more dangerous before the surgery?"

A shrug. "If you're worried about that, go to your room and try not to interact with anyone. We can schedule your tail-docking for tomorrow. But really, so long as you use common sense, you probably won't be changed against your will. Not on this campus anyway."

The injection was a sort of question, then, about what he wanted as his baseline body. "I could probably change on purpose and make that into my default, huh?"

"Certainly. And it's not like any form is set in stone forever, even after the injection."

Aldous stared at the part-dragon. "Do you realize how radical a statement that is?"

The doc only smiled. "I would have thought it so, before I got hired here."

* * *

Aldous thought about the doc's offer all the way back to his room. He made sure not to touch anything the least bit suspicious along the route. He saw a room that was some kind of battle arena for gengineered monsters, but didn't go in for fear of somehow becoming one himself. He muttered, "Just hang out for a day and do paperwork."

His apartment was still plain and spartan. He'd barely unpacked what with all the recent excitement, and there were a few black and white hairs on the bedding that he'd shed. He lay down and ruffled his own tail curiously. He'd expected it to be soft and silky, but the texture was surprisingly coarse, something like a wool sweater.

He took a shower and (several towels later, what with the tail) a nap. He woke up hungry. The water outside was dark again and the clock read eleven PM. He was a little puzzled by that, thinking it was off by an hour, until he recalled that the corporate director had rebelled against Daylight Saving Time.

The cafeteria had shut down for the night, to his annoyance. Aldous laughed at himself. He was deep underwater, yet he expected there to be 24/7 food at his beck and call.

A passing scientist saw him looking forlornly at the registers and said, "Try the vending machines."

"Where are those?"

The man gave him directions to "go down two floors and just keep following the left wall", as though solving a maze. That was about as helpful as Aldous could've expected. He was starting to suspect that some of the elaborate ocean base's modules got rearranged while people weren't paying attention. Maybe the smartass dolphin mechanics were responsible.

Downstairs, he found a spherical glass room full of vending machines and a few arcade games with names like "Polybius" and "Kangaroo Kwest". He knew better than to even touch those; they could be a trap.

Unfortunately, it was pretty obvious that half the vending machines were intended for research purposes too. There was Soda Pup aplenty along with cool, refreshing OtterWater; a snack dispenser had candy bars with dinosaur-themed names (slogan: "We Spared No Expense") and another machine seemed to sell only packets of hay and alfalfa. Yet another machine was a plain black thing with a single button and no labels at all but a scratched-out sticker reading "SCP". Aldous soon thought he'd discovered a machine with perfectly normal, familiar brand names, but on closer inspection they weren't quite right.

"I don't even know," Aldous said.

"New here?" asked a sleepy guy in a shirt with loosened tie.

"Yeah, I'm in Technical Support. Will anything in here not change me, or am I better off going hungry?"

"They like to keep everyone on their toes. There's a good chance anything you buy is really a normal product repackaged with a goofy name. And if it's not, well, you can always get the effects undone."

"Always?" asked Aldous. "A lot of the employees seem to have tails or other changes."

"Mostly by choice. It shows solidarity with the company, or something. Except for the director, who of course is a perfect human specimen."

Aldous shook his head. "Is he on some kind of high-tech steroids? I saw his picture."

The man carefully chose a soda from a vending machine. "Yeah, he's been testing those, even though he also seems to always be working out while he dictates memos and makes corporate decisions." He pulled the bottled drink he'd bought out of the machine and frowned at it. "I didn't buy the RC Cola."

"That's a real brand, anyway. Guess you got lucky, if you're trying to stay normal."

The man sniffed skeptically at the cola and drank, shrugging. "So how is Technical Support? They have you on the phone a lot?"

"It's been exciting so far," Aldous said, unsure how much of his work was secret. "I've done some employee surveys and learned a little about the place."

"A positive attitude is important, so long as we're waiting to finally start putting our products on the shelves. For the general public, I mean."

Aldous said, "It's already starting. I saw a pet shop that was selling gengineered critters."

The man said, "Really! That's good news. I'm surprised Director Gattart didn't trumpet it all over yet." He yawned and took another swig. "Nice meeting you. I'll see you around."

As the employee walked away, Aldous noticed that the bottle had some extra letters on it, written in a font that blended in with the soda inside until enough of the bottle was empty to make them visible. The brand name was actually "RaCcoon Cola". Aldous started to say something, but stopped himself. It was probably a little late to warn the guy. Ah well; soon enough it'd be obvious whatever the soda did.

Aldous tried buying a soda with the same button the other guy had used. Out popped a bottle of "Foxy Red", with an ingredient list that had "Vixena" in small print after "Red Dye #63".

He figured he was going to be seeing a lot of this kind of thing, while working here.

He took the unopened bottle along toward his room, got lost despite being sure he'd gone the same way as before, and passed a laboratory with another swimming pool visible inside. Through the glass walls he could see a pair of dolphins chatting with a cybernetic mermaid. Aldous would've gone in to say hello, but any more contact with the weird tech around here might change him more. He didn't want to be stuck as a water-breather with a tail instead of legs, or something.

Although, it wouldn't be all bad to try that temporarily, would it?

Aldous watched the few employees who were still awake go about their lives in this undersea base. They all seemed to be dealing with the mad science pretty well. Whatever scary things might be going on elsewhere at Genetech, so far it looked like the company was doing more good than harm, even before going fully public with its products. He just wan't getting to participate in all of it, yet.

When he got back to his room he set the soda bottle down well away from him, looking once more at it. "Temporary, huh." Why not try becoming something else for a while, or a lot of different somethings? He could even justify it as product research and being a team player.

He tried messaging the doc on the corporate computer network to see if he was still awake. "Doc, I've got a question."

A reply came back quickly: "Yes?"

"I don't think I want to wait until tomorrow. I don't feel like a real employee yet. Can I get that injection tonight?"

"Not a lot is going to happen between now and tomorrow evening."

Aldous wrote, "You never know around here, right?"

"Ha. That's true enough. Come on over to the lab and I'll get you fixed up."

Aldous was about to cut the connection and walk over there, when an idea occurred to him. "So long as we're going to lock in my current form, do you think you could make my, uh, my tail fur softer?"

The doc didn't answer for a while, leaving Aldous to sit there blushing. It certainly wasn't a normal thing to ask of a doctor.

Finally the doc answered, "That's easy; I've got just the thing. Can even fix that receeding hairline on your head too, if you don't mind getting stripes up there."

Aldous grinned. "You know what? Let's do that." He could have something distinctive to be his new "home" body, and experiment with other changes from there. "I'll be right over."

On his way out the door to go meet the doc again, Aldous grinned at the foxy soda on his desk. "I'll save this one for the weekend, maybe."

There was going to be a lot of interesting work, and "work", ahead at Genetech.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this collection, please consider rating it on Amazon or Goodreads!

Another Genetech story, "Safari Swap", appears in "Perspective Flip". And of course, I've done some longer, more serious stories.

About the Author

Kris Schnee has been a parrot trainer, an MIT graduate, a zoo intern, a lawyer, a game designer, and most recently a software developer. He lives in Florida.

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The Crafter Series

Crafter's Passion
Crafter's Heart

The Thousand Tales Series

Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game
2040: Reconnection
The Digital Coyote
Thousand Tales: Extra Lives
Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly
Fairwind's Fortune
Liberation Game

Also By Kris Schnee

Everyone's Island
Striking the Root
Dragon Fate: Interactive Fiction
Perspective Flip
Mythic Transformations
Tales of Kitsune
Fateweaver's Quest