I don’t know which word counter to believe: NaNo’s or Word’s. Since Word’s is on the generous side by three words, I think I’ll trust that one. Especially since I’ve upgraded to Office 2007 permanently, which keeps track of word count as you type. That has to be one of my favorite features of Office ’07. That and the new file type, .docx, that cuts the old .doc file size in half.

Word Count: 33,011

 

Katrina seemed distraught by this information, but vowed to find the files somehow. She would forcefully squeeze it out of Walters if she had to. Confidentiality was nothing, especially in this world, and if she so chose to she could easily snatch the information from him without his knowing. It was a dirty tactic that would cost her time away from her job, but it could very easily be done. It ran the risk, however, of having her files come in contact with Walters. She had been very careful not to allow anything to go wrong with her own shapeshifting endeavors, but there was always that slight chance.
 
Surprisingly, Walters admitted that this was open for discussion. Katrina had not expected this.
 
“I just want to know one thing – your full name, if you will,” he said, passing a stony glance into Katrina’s eyes.
 
“Katrina Carpenter. I hope that’s full enough for you.”
 
With that, discussion began. In the middle of this discussion, which in the grand scheme of life was not particularly important, Walters began to feel woozy yet again. He felt his head. He was getting a headache, and asked Katrina if she had any Excedrin. She had kept them in the middle drawer on the left side of her desk. In fact, there was quite an ample supply of both migraine pills and quicktabs, which she always kept in her pocket just in case.
 
“Prone to headaches, I see?”
 
“Quite often – it’s a very stressful job. More than you probably think.” She grinned, picked up a quicktab packet, ripped the packaging open and tossed the white disc to Walters. “Just stick that in your mouth – you don’t need water. It’s not as powerful, but it gets the job done.”
 
“Thank you,” he said, and placed it in his mouth. It dissolved into a fine powder before slithering down his throat. It was mint flavored, but had the interesting aftertaste of medicine, which made him cough and choke on the leftover power still inside his mouth.
 
“You get used to taking them after a while,” Katrina said, making remarks about his coughing. She paused, and then began speaking again after rethinking her words. “You know,” she began, “you should stay here for a while. It’ll help you recover. I’ve got a couch over on the other end of the room; it’s not too far away, since the room’s small. Make yourself comfortable until that headache is gone. I’ll be out manning the fort if you need me, though I might just have a swarm of customers around me.”
 
Walters didn’t object to some time alone. In fact, he was very much relieved that Katrina would be leaving. She was cold and distant, whatever the cause, and Walters wasn’t very fond of that. He wished she had been more polite about approaching the matter of the patient’s files. The biggest issue with bringing her those case files was that they belonged to someone he knew personally – someone he had encountered during his years of genetic research, and one of his old colleagues. It was like Katrina was proving the sex degrees theory; everybody in the world was intrinsically connected to one another, and Walters was just now finding this out to be true. It was chilling, in a way, to find out that his old friends were also friends with his new enemies.
 
The couch he was told to lay down on was incredibly tough, and not suitable for healing a headache. Walters managed to find a fairly comfortable position – not entirely satisfying, but enough that the headache should have ceased to bother him after a short while. As long as he waited, however, his headache did not subside. He had been on the couch for at least a good half an hour before approaching Katrina, asking to leave.
 
“You’re headache still isn’t gone?” she asked while turning to look at his face. “My, my, Walters,” she said in a sort of surprised manner, “that’s a nice look for you. I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing.”
 
Walters was entirely clueless. He had no idea what Katrina was talking about, but wasn’t so sure he wanted to. Out of sheer curiosity, he asked what the “nice look” was for him. Katrina said it was his hair, and Walters insisted that he had just been sleeping in a rather odd position, but this made no difference.
 
“It’s not messy; it’s different. A different color. In fact, it’s a lot darker than it was before. Still a tad grey, but whoever your genetic console is does some fine work.” This made no sense to Walters, because he had not undergone any sort of shapeshifting operation nor had he purchased any of the new Genomes, which made his appearance even more perplexing. He was now fully convinced that it was not the lighting in the NSGR that had caused the darkening, but an outside force. Because he didn’t support shapeshifting, and would never undergo any sort of treatment in that matter, he ruled that possibility out, yet there was nothing else that could explain it so easily and elegantly. There was beauty in the simplicity of that explanation – something that Walters liked, and yet still chose to deny.
 
“I don’t do ‘that kind of thing,’” he retaliated, purposely battling Katrina’s assumption. “I think I’m a little too old to be worrying about my appearance.”
 
“Well, it makes you look younger, so don’t complain about it so much. Anyways, if you’re going to leave you can walk out the door – it’s open. Though, I just want to confirm that I’ll be seeing you either tomorrow or the day next.”
 
“Don’t worry about that,” Walters said. “I’ve got it arranged and fitted into my schedule.” Walters didn’t actually have a schedule, that is, outside of the usual going to work and heading back to the apartment at the end of the day. There were the days when he would go grocery shopping, or go to pick up some gadgetry that he had been interested in, or run some other miscellaneous errand that took up some amount of time. They all inevitably came down to being time wasters, meaning that there was plenty of room to see Katrina Carpenter again.
 
Carpenter looked back at him as he left through the crowd of customers. He was not an inviting man; that was certain, but she needed the files in order to sort out her last claims. It was the final lawsuit against her and her tampered technology.
 
Not long ago she had reverse-engineered a few of the GSS’s genomes and, with a few tweaks of her own, rebuilt them and sold them for profit. Some of these went wrong, and although they were significantly cheaper than true Genomes, they were potentially dangerous, not being made by any company nor officially sanctioned by the GSS. One of the ones that had gone drastically wrong could be fixed only through a second shapeshifting procedure, and one that came at a very expensive price. It was not covered in the man’s medical insurance – though shapeshifts rarely were – so the thousands of dollars had to be paid by the man alone. However, most people would not have tolerated having to pay for a surgical procedure that only needed to be done because of someone else’s screw-up, and so neither did him. After the procedure had been successfully reversed and he was back to his normal state, he sued Carpenter for the damages done. Years later, it was finally being settled once and for all.
 
He had won.
 
Every day since the lawsuit had picked up again Carpenter had found herself with a massive headache, but that was not the only reason why. Because of a tight-knit affiliation with the GSS – one that held despite her fraudulent reverse engineering and selling of GSS genetic architecture – she had access to a good amount of shapeshifting technologies before they were released. She was not a developer, but more like a close friend. The GSS was willing to let someone like Carpenter alter their technology as long as they knew what they were doing and were friendly enough with the organization’s higher ups. She used this connection to her advantage, and received many shapeshift procedure fully covered by the GSS. However, after each one she found that she had a massive headache for days on end.
 
The pills and quicktabs accumulated in her drawers, in her car, around her apartment – not located too far away from Walters’s. She kept taking them, hoping that the headaches would cease, but they just grew worse and worse. What could have convinced her to continue getting surgery after surgery? She frequently questioned herself, looking for the answer, whether it was simple lack of self confidence, whether she felt she was compensating for someone. It ran through the generic list of psychological problems and reasons why one would manipulate their body, even though it causes pain. She did not want to relate herself, however, to an anorexic woman, because this was not what she was. Rather, she was taking advantage of what she could when the opportunity presented itself.
 
She was quite good at that, it seemed. Much like how easily she attracted Walters’s attention, she received gratis from the GSS. And much like how easily she received that gratis, she received gratis from her customers, who grew in numbers across the few first years of business.
 
It did not scare her customers that she did not seem to age year after year. She was not old – quite young, on the contrary, but kept up an appealing physical appearance. This not only attracted customers, but prominently displayed the powers of shapeshifting. It told customers that, with this procedure, they could live forever. This was entirely a lie, of course, but who was the wiser? If it made a sale, it was legitimate, much like how her altered genomes were legitimate until they began to cause problems. It was legitimate, then, that she should do business with Walters in order to do business in the lawsuit she faced. It wasn’t a sale, but it was the transfer of monetary values, and that was what really counted in the end.
 
The next day she would be meeting Walters at his own apartment. Walters had stated that he had “made room” in his schedule, which really meant that he was leaving his apartment unlocked for her to come in. He would bring the case files with him and turn them over, giving her three days to look them over and settle the claims with the man they belonged to.
 
Something now occurred to Carpenter that had not before Walters left. Walters was the person who had done the study of the problems pertaining to her lawsuit. That meant that he knew about every aspect of what had gone wrong and why it had happened. This could lead to the assumption that the genetic material was created by someone other than the GSS, or in an extreme case, deliberately fabricated to cause trouble within the shapeshifting procedure.
 
She feared the power that Walters now held over her, but held steadfast onto visiting him tomorrow. She hadn’t entirely given up yet, and never intended to. Even though the man had technically won the lawsuit, she would not let her pride falter. He needed the files to make sure that his own problem had been clearly documented and solved. Otherwise it was a problem that could still exist in the system, and someone could get away with fabricating Genomes again. Although it was not included in the suit, this was even more easily done with the new Genomes, their volatile structure easily malleable and placed inside someone’s unsuspecting pocket, and eventually into their ATC, where it could take their arm away or, in a worst case scenario, kill the person who had unsuspectingly put the tampered Genome on.