And then, the mysteries focused around the lapel pin, the odd object that either shouldn’t exist or had no purpose anyway, yet was somehow his only link to the gang of thieves. He took it out and looked at it again, looking for any clue on the pin that would lead him to the thieves. He found nothing but a piece of hair, and it was presumably his own, caught inside of the pin. He pulled it out of the clip area of the pin and tossed it aside. With the clip of the pin off, he noticed something.

There, on the back of the pin, was a set of numbers. The numbers were not important, but what was important was what the numbers were on top of. There seemed to be a compartment under the numbers. It was soldered shut. The pin was unusually light, so it was plausible that it was an empty compartment containing something. Dr. Reedy had said that the thieves, in the Hospiten at least, had been wearing the pins. He did not say where they were, but all the knowledge Walters needed was that they had been wearing them. And once that was firmly established in his mind, Walters slowly began to see how important the pin was, and how every time he encountered the strange group of subhumans he ended blacked out, awaking within hospital walls, recuperating below the eyes of Dr. Reedy.

They had knocked him out.

It was most strange that it took him so long to come to that conclusion, but it took him even longer to think of why they allowed him to keep the lapel pin. Perhaps they did not know he had it. Perhaps it was something he had to use, and something that they, in turn, wanted him to use. But the only thing he could do was walk up and down the pedestrian road, over and over again, waiting for a sign of the mysterious life, focusing intently on the store clerks and owners who came out of their way to stare at him walking down that same road every day. Even amidst a crowd in the night he was now looked at, like a suspicious character. He had caused no trouble nor wished to cause any. And yet they continued to stare, a piercing gaze that did not end no matter how hard Walters wished it would go away. His mind, inhabited by Dr. Reedy, told him that nobody was really staring at him, and that he had simply gone mad over a simple pin. But his own conscience told him otherwise, and he trusted that far more than he trusted a doctor, especially Dr. Reedy.

So, when he got home, he naturally tried to pry open the pin. Consistently unable to no matter what tool he used, he left it alone. There was reason to continue trying to open it, but Walters felt that a few hours per night was enough, and when enough was enough he would stop. Finally, he brought it in to the NGSR rather reluctantly. The design on the pin was rather odd according to the staff, especially so because Walters was a man, and a man carrying a pin decorated with a nude man was exceptionally odd, but his partners agreed to look at it. It would, if found out, be filed under abuse of Station tools and he may very well lose his job, but for what he got out of it, if anything came out of it, was worth it. It must be worth it.

His mind, at that time, was a pool of doubt. He was working alongside coworkers who not only supported the system, but thought he was insane for wanting them to pry open a pin. They would not think him crazy for long.

After a good hour, the pin was successfully opened, and the inside of it shocked the few people who had been working to pry it open. There was a small black computer chip, with a small black label, and on the black label were written small white letters that were obviously a model number and serial numbers. The computer chip was unknown, but would soon be very well known. Unfortunately, Walters could not expose this technology to the rest of staff for fear of losing his job. He had abandoned his current work to supervise the prying open of the pin, and now that it had been successfully opened he did not want to go back to his normal work – he wanted to stay and investigate the pin more. He wanted to reverse engineer the little thing back to whether it came from, back to its original parts and molecules. He wants to dump it in a machine and have its contents analyzed to that he knew for sure whether it was something important or whether it was simply rubbish.

He thanked his coworkers and took the pin carefully in cupped palms, traveling outside of the room with it and into his normal work station, where he current cases were sitting there, waiting for him as he’d left them there that morning. But he did not pick up the case files or the cultures that he had received for the cases. Instead he did nothing but look at the pin. It was a marvel, because it was undocumented. He wanted to show it to Dr. Reedy. He decided that he would.

That afternoon a few scientists spread word around the NGSR that the industry was taking leaps forward. Due to the obvious success of the system, the existing cylinders used for shapeshifting would be marketed at an affordable price to the common citizen, and no longer just to hospitals. This was happening within the coming days, it was reported. The actual article, appearing in a local newspaper and in the Hospiten newspaper, gave further information.

Cylinders, now simply referred to as “ATC’s” for “alteration and transformation cylinder,” were to be marketed in the coming week with a new and refined user interface that would allow normal citizens with little knowledge of the more expensive versions hospitals used to operate them with ease. Coming with this would be a new product, rather not “new” but more of an update of an existing product – the second generation of the Genome. No longer would they be expensive metaphysical objects that were sent to a hospital, but physical objects that were handed directly to a customer. This genetic information was placed into an ATC and, reading off of it, the ATC would use supplied matter to shapeshift the desired body part, or, if the person had purchased a full-body ATC, then the entire person itself would be transformed. Cheaper versions of the second-generation Genome would become available that only changed certain body parts. Custom Genomes would become more affordable; whereas previously only the rich had been able to afford them, the middle class would now be open to purchasing custom Genomes.

With this, Walters speculated, an entire new generation of industry would emerge. Stores would opt to purchase ATC’s relative to their field of work to use shapeshifting as a way of bypassing doing actual work. It was said that jobs would now become increasingly easier. This was a huge development in shapeshifting technology, and just as it was speculated that jobs would get easier and easier, it was speculated that from its release the technology would move further and further. It had come incredibly far from its humble beginnings in bone surgery and the progress had never ceased for but a moment. Even after Mike Rainer’s death, and number two’s mutation, the team of doctors and scientists moved forward ever-backed by the cosmetics industry who foresaw them receiving the benefits first. It moved so rapidly that many forgot what the technology had originally been created for, and yet nobody really cared. It was obvious that nobody cared.

The interested would proceed to learn that shapeshifting was a technology that had been created with extremely good intentions. The aim was pointed towards making a bone repair process that was simple, fast, and affordable on any level. In its very beginnings it was not so much affordable or simple, but if operated correctly it was incredibly speedy. Patients beforehand had to wait months, sometimes even years, for a broken bone to fully heal. This procedure “melted” the bone and reformed it. The very first attempts, not done on humans, were conducted with microscopic magnets placed all over a rodent’s leg bones. The bone was fractured and then repaired with an ATC, which was, at the time, a huge, hulking monster of a machine similar in size to an MRI unit with no true name but the codename “BoneDoc.” This was not the same machine that had repaired Mike Rainer, but was the precursor to what would become that very machine. By tracking the movement of the “melted” bones with the BoneDoc the success of the experiment could also be tracked. If one of the magnets ended up inside of the bone instead of outside where it belonged, something had gone wrong. It was also feasible if something had gone wrong, even if the bone had been repaired correctly, if the rodent was squirming in pain even hours after the procedure had been done.

It took hundreds of rodents and thousands of trials to get just a few successful tests. Alterations were made at every step to the BoneDoc until a procedure went right, and once it had worked all of the scientists, doctors and engineers would collaborate on their findings to figure out what had made it work, and what had made it fail. It was then released into the world in its newly revised form, much smaller yet still quite large, and when the first surgery was performed the media was sure to cover it all. News reports had a field day with what happened, and what happened was success. The first shapeshift was a grand success, and the world was able to witness it. It was done in a small hospital in a fairly rural area. The hospital’s name was “Hospiten.”

The first patient was a woman who had completely shattered her ankle. In order to repair it in the traditional fashion, metal plates and pins would have been surgically implanted under her skin and into the bone to hold it all in place until the break healed. With this new method, not only did it cut the cost of staying in the hospital from $25,000 to $10,000, but it decreased the amount of time stayed in the hospital and, if all went well, virtually eliminated recovery time. The ankle was covered in a large, dark green cylinder and subjected so slightly painful shocks during the surgery. Magnets were not implanted into the woman, because the overall goal was to have an entirely perfected and finalized procedure. The woman was in her late thirties. This was precisely the age group that the workers were looking to test.

For the purposes of it being the first surgery, the woman was given an option of having normal surgery performed upon her if she was too wary about using an experimental procedure. Before her bone was shapeshifted, genetic material was taken from her skin cells and was saved in a culture, then placed in a cryogenic vacuum to ensure that it would not change state or suffer damage. The first reason the genetic material was taken was so that it could be used as a feed for the beta ATC machine. The beta ATC would read off of the genetic material and determine, at her age, how the ankle should be formed if there were no outside variables affecting its growth. However, they also wanted the genetic material in case anything went wrong. In a worst-case scenario this was death, and the Hospiten wanted to be able to have enough data to collect and submit so that the beta ATC could be fixed.

She was also put to sleep during the procedure. Had she been left awake, she would have experienced white-hot excruciating pain surging up and down her leg from the shifting nerves in her ankle. There it would have been the most painful. The bone was restructuring itself, becoming more and more perfect with each passing minute. Within an hour, it was supposedly done, and the woman was left to wake up in the upstairs ward of the Hospiten. She awoke, fully able to move her foot. It was, to her, a miracle. The doctors came to check on her, including the chief of surgery and chief of medicine, to ensure that everything had gone smoothly. From then on it was smooth sailing – she received an incredible amount of attention from the media and from the shapeshifting industry, which had finally begun to take off now that the first successful surgery had been completed.

Improvements continued to surge forth into the field of bone repair. Eventually it progressed far enough that a person needed not be asleep while their bones were repaired. The size of the machines decreased. Soon the availability was high enough that custom-shaped machines could be made that would fit the comfort level of the patient. There were rarely ever errors in the system – it was almost flawless. The only errors that presented themselves in front of the system were minor nerve damages and merges between the bone and some small surrounding parts of the body, but it was never anything serious that actually demanded attention. Its success would continue, treating people such as Mike Rainer and biasing the country towards shapeshifting. As the country shifted in favor of the new medical procedures other industries took notice – mainly those companies that produced cosmetics. Those wanted to make the perfect human form saw potential in the glamorous shapeshifting style of the pre-ATC. Instead of selling makeup and other such products, they could just as easily market one of these shapeshifting devices – or also as easily partner with hospitals and take some of the profit for the surgeries. It would be the end of all cosmetics products. All anyone would need was one of these devices, and they could appear however they wanted.

After a good many years watching the surgical technique become perfect, the cosmetics industry went in for the kill. In alliance with a hefty government grant of research, the most recent people subjected to the pre-ATC surgical procedure for bone repair were sent letters from a new organization, who called themselves the “Genome Surgical Society.” Under the very same acronym, they introduced the newest product – the “Genome Surgical System.”

Now it had progressed what Walters hoped was as far as it would go. He did not support the more expensive and already exiting full-body shapeshifting procedure, and most certainly did not want to see a solution made widely available to the public. Such was equivalent to the apocalypse – think of all that could go wrong! Think of the lines, being blurred more and more, becoming greyer and greyer! There was no hope left to overcome this system. Walters would either have to accept it or drive himself out of society. If this new development gained support, the conservatives were in for a big loss. He, personally, was in for a big loss. If there was any hope, it was with the group of thieves he had encountered twice before.