I’m not finished yet, but if I don’t post what I’ve got I’ll surely explode. ;) Really I need to stick it in front of myself to know where to go next. I know where I want to end up, but I want to move a certain direction to get there. I don’t know if I can, or if I should, and I need to figure that out.

EDIT: I’ve got a pretty good idea of where to go. I just have to transition the omniscience of the narrator back to Greg Walters’s mind, and out of his wife’s.

EDIT2: Got it going good! Completed my expected 7500 words for the day. Tomorrow I hit 50k and bask in my glory. But the story doesn’t end there, so I will press on still! The goal is around 100k, but the story may very well end at 80 or 70k.

Word Count: 42,523

 

It was Carpenter. He let out a sigh of relief. They would proceed immediately to discussing the files. Walters greeted her happily, and she responded back equally, and both walked to the table in the center of the living room to view the manila folder that has so elusively evaded Carpenter for years. It was incredible. If she had had this folder years ago she could have won the case, but at this point there wasn’t even hope for an appeal. In this folder was everything she needed. Walters picked it up, and looked straight into her face, then, as if it were visiting at the worst possible time, doubled over in pain, then collapsed onto the floor.
 
Carpenter stuffed the manila folder into her purse and kneeled down before Walters, asking if he was alright. He shook his head rapidly, and pointed to the phone. Carpenter dialed 911 as he went unconscious for the third time in two weeks.
 
He awoke yet again in the Hospiten in the familiar bed he had stayed in last time, accompanied by Reedy, Carpenter, and his wife. She had arrived while he had been unconscious, distraught by the news and inexplicably saddened that the person more powerful than her had been brought down by something so terribly unknown. Reedy looked down on Walters, and Walters looked back.
 
“Am I still crazy?” Walters asked.
 
“You bet you are, old man,” Reedy said, patting him on the shoulder. “I’ll give you the run-down in a bit. Wake yourself up first and eat this crap that they call food from the cafeteria.” He placed a tray onto Walters’s lap, upon which lay a fruit cup, some cereal, and a glass of odd looking milk. It was morning, he determined. He had been unconscious so long as to not only miss his wife’s return, but to go through the night entirely. They must have all been worried sorely. He was worrying himself, now, too.
 
Reedy called his wife over. “Jenna Walters, I need to see you.” Jenna stepped forth, and Reedy walked out of the room. “Alright,” he began, “I probably don’t need to tell you this, but your husband is sick. Pretty damn sick. What you don’t know is what we don’t know, and we’re working on finding the cause of his pain right now. No medical evidence says he should be having this kind of pain, so I’m convinced that he’s still a hypochondriac, but you might want to check with him on that. Has he been acting strange lately?”
 
“I wouldn’t know – I’ve been away for the past three weeks on business. I just got home last night to this.” While she was not crying, Reedy could tell that she would if she didn’t have a great amount of pride stored up inside her. Even so, her face shed tears of its own through its flabbergasted appearance. Wrinkles formed, eyelids sagged – the face was a train wreck of misery. It was not what she had wanted to come home to, and she prayed it would never happen again, though she knew it may. And one day something even worse would happen. Her husband might break a bone and need surgery, or he might die by some strange twist of fate. She might die before him, the thought of which scared her more than him dying first.
 
She wanted to visit him, but Reedy said this was impossible. She asked why “that other girl” was able to stay in with him. “She’s been taken out of the room already, princess,” Reedy said, sarcastically. But she had been taken out of the room, and in a much friendlier manner than Reedy’s tone described.
 
Carpenter was now sitting on a thick green bench coated in what seemed like a green rubbery surface, but was really a thick coat of elastic paint that made the surface soft. There she examined the contents of the manila folder – something she really should have been doing, but felt it proper for her own needs to examine anyway. She found in there all of his records of past shapeshifting. It would have been gold if it were her property: There were reports of numerous problems being shapeshifted before. The problem he had experienced might not have been attributed to her faulty Genome, though she and everyone else knew they were, but it would have been an easy way out of the consequences. Those consequences were yet to be determined, but they were supposedly just a fine, no jail time.
 
Walters was being administered a strange medicine. He did not know what the clear liquid in the syringe that pieced his arm was, and after asking found out that it would disorient him so that they could run various tests on his DNA. He would receive an examination everywhere where he had described pain, which was almost everywhere in his body. In fact, thinking back, before he became disoriented, it was literally every place in his body that had been in pain. He was glad, then, that they were putting him to rest for a while. The world faded and blurred around him, and he fell asleep.
 
They performed, during this time, a pericardiocentesis to remove fluid they found in his heart. However, when the needle returned, it had withdrawn no fluid. The doctors, puzzled, tried again, but there was no fluid in the syringe the next time around either. They did not want to puncture the heart a third time, and so ceased trying to withdraw the fluid.
 
When they re-examined the heart later, they found no excess fluid.
 
This most strange phenomenon remained unexplained for the duration of the tests. Matter was appearing and disappearing out of nowhere. Walters’s entire structure was inhuman, at least according to what his own DNA tests had told them.
 
With the shapeshifting technology appeared a new type of way to analyze DNA: Dynamic Growth. With Dynamic Growth, the DNA content was analyzed and a picture of a fetus was formed, grown rapidly according to an idealized version a human life, and there it would show how the person should look, inside and out, if there were no outside complications, at their current age. This was always taken as an approximation, because it rarely depicted the person exactly as they were. People always had some kind of condition that prevented them from growing up in an idealized state.
 
Walters, however, had gone far off from what his DNA should have been. The sample had been taken from his skin, one of the areas that had not experienced any pain. His intestines were literally scrambled in comparison to normal growth, his organs decreasing and increasing in size from where they should have ended up. Everything down the grooves in his brain was messed up. The doctors didn’t know how to explain it, and Reedy began to rethink what he had told Walters long ago. Perhaps he was not crazy, nor a hypochondriac. Perhaps Walters really was terminally ill. Perhaps the lapel pin really meant something after all.
 
It struck Reedy like a cinder block to the face – the lapel pin.
 
Where was it? Walters always had kept in it his pocket, but Reedy couldn’t be sure it was still there. He took the chance anyway. As he reached into the pocket, his spectacles dropped to the floor and he had to pick them up. As he picked them up, something else fell to the floor, out of Walters’s pocket.
 
It was the pin.
 
He grabbed it and looked at its design. His body did not match what was on the pin, as it should have if something were really going on. But part of Walters did match the pin – the one thing that had visibly changed. Walters’s hair, jet black, should have never been so dark during the course of his life. It had been incredibly dark brown, but never black – therefore it was artificial.
 
Walters was having side-effects to having been recently shapeshifted. That was all it was. Reedy sighed in relief, and left Walters alone. He couldn’t figure out why Walters had shapeshifted himself – much less his hair, which had never looked that horrible to begin with – but left that matter for Walters as well. Reedy quickly informed Jenna and Carpenter. While Jenna sighed in relief, Carpenter asserted that Walters had never had a shapeshift operation.
 
With the new technology out, nobody could be sure that was true.
 
He had, however, not purchased an ATC or a Genome, and therefore all claims were null. Nobody knew this, of course, but they would find out upon searching his purchasing records for the past three weeks. It was filled with nothing but groceries and supplies for work. Records were kept for nearly everything nowadays; from the new purchase of a diamond down to the dinner the person ate ten years ago at the diner five blocks away from their home. Everything was on record. This, above all things, made research extremely easy – and made finding Walters’s life history even easier.
 
By the time everybody had found out that Walters had not purchased an ATC or a Genome, he was wide awake and feeling woozy from the tests and the anesthetics. The side effect was still unknown, perhaps even more so than it was the couple of hours passed, because he had not shapeshifted – not willingly, at least. From what they had seen of his body, he was still shapeshifting. Reedy had put the lapel pin back inside Walters’s pocket, because he knew that as soon as he woke up Walters would look for it. It was far too precious for him to lose.
 
Walters did, as expected, reach into his pocket to pull out the pin as his first action. He wanted to make sure that the doctors hadn’t stolen it during his artificial sleep. He ran his fingers for the umpteenth time among its features while Reedy walked toward him.
 
“Old man,” Reedy said, “we don’t know what’s wrong with you. You’re showing signs of a person who has encountered side effects after a shapeshifting, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. So while you contemplate how screwed up you are, I’m going to go get a coffee and contemplate how screwed up you are. I’ll get back to you on the whole ‘being screwed up’ thing later.” And he walked away.
 
One of the other doctors, presumably an intern, replaced Reedy next to Walters. “What we really found was quite odd,” he said. “Your internal organs are pretty, well, ‘screwed up’ as Dr. Reedy said. But the oddest thing is that they’ve been shrinking and expanding, even changing shape from their normal size, without any sort of machine or extra matter. Your body is shapeshifting from the inside without any aid. Realize that this is a totally undocumented condition and bear with us, because nobody – presumably in the world – has seen a case like this before.”
 
So he was a case. He did not particularly enjoy being one, as many as he had solved and as much as he should be able to solve his own, he did not want to. It was the most blatantly feasible irony he had ever experienced, but that’s also what he viewed the real world as. The whole world was ironic, enough so that the definition of what irony is and what irony should be were two different things entirely. He lay there on the hospital bed contemplating his own completely ironic condition, and how, in reality, completely congruous it truly was. But the congruency was not something anyone would expect. They would not expect it because they had never seen it, and there was the fatal human flaw in his situation – people were prone to believe what they have experiences, and not what they could have experienced, or what they can’t see on the outside. Unless the humans surrounding his life could view this, nobody would able to figure out his condition.
 
He spoke with his wife, but not with Carpenter. Carpenter was not important enough to be worth speaking to, rather she had accompanied him only because she was the one who had called 911. There was no reason for her to remain any longer other than out of her own set of ethics, which Walters felt comforted by, but not comforted enough. He was scared to death. His heart was pounding – and changing shape at the same time. Now that he knew his organs were changing size, he could feel it. He felt his liver contract, his intestines rewire themselves, and his brain rework its construction. In fact, he felt it enough to not feel anything at all. It was the most frightening thing he had ever experienced, because he didn’t know what was happening.
 
It would all be over soon, for another while at least. There was nothing more to feel, no more pain to seep from his nerves. The chemicals that might transfer pain had run in short supply, so only the most painful things sent a twinge down his spine and up to his head, feeding the brain with its dosage of painful information every so often just to remind Walters that something horrible was happening.
 
He wanted to get out of the Hospiten more than ever at this point. The surroundings were never as uninviting as they were now. Every direction pointed towards the Twilight Zone, every pathway a repetitive maze to get lost in, to be alone in. it was not a friendly place to be alone. It was a place of fear, because it was a place of death, disease, and the ill. The hospital was empty enough, Walters thought, but he needn’t be Mike Rainer and traverse its halls to find lost rooms and hidden facilities alone in the somber blue and green dull lights of the Hospiten. He would rather stay by his existing family – Jenna and Katrina – until the pain subsided.
 
It did not subside, and he was not discharged from the Hospiten despite his arguments. He had missed lunch, but made his way through dinner. He was surprisingly hungry, yet did not know why. The doctors had done nothing to him besides the pericardiocentesis, at least nothing that went directly into his body. He should have had to sign a consent form to get that procedure, but he did not. Whether or not the doctors knew they would succeed didn’t matter. Perhaps they expected him to die. He shook with fear even more at the thought of such a thing.
 
As he rapidly consumed the piece of meat, hospital potatoes, and steamed vegetables that lay in front of him, he thought (through the pain) of what Dr. Reedy had said.
 
“I’ll get back to you on the whole ‘being screwed up’ thing later.”
 
It replayed in his mind. Was he that screwed up? It all made it seem like there was no hope left for him, that he was doomed to death. His wife must have been uninformed, because her spirits had lifted since he awoke. Then again, it was only natural for her to happy that her man wasn’t dead, and wasn’t going to die. But now Walters wasn’t so sure about that. The pain he experienced felt like it would kill him.
 
It did not kill him, however, despite his constant fear and even more constant pain. Carpenter had visited him to talk, and to tell him how pleased she was with the files. She also told him that his eyes looked different. At this mention, Walters fell into shock: His eyes looked different! What would be next? If his insides were done with themselves, what freakish change would come of him next? A third arm? A fourth arm? Would he get taller, shorter? All of the variables came into play. A storm cloud of thoughts formed in his mind, a good portion of it dealing with fear, another good portion dealing with death, and now the greatest portion, dealing with what would happen to him after he lived.
 
He desperately tried to find the right thing to think about with the storm cloud. He whittled down the possibilities, getting rid of the most irrational and keeping the most rational outcomes. Dead was death, so only one part of that good portion remained: He died, and that was all he had to think about. After death, he believed, was nothingness. It was like asking a blind person what being blind was like. Unless you were blind, you couldn’t possibly fathom what it was like to be blind without becoming blind yourself.
 
As the storm cloud became a mere cumulous annoyance, he refilled the sky with other thoughts, or rather solutions to his conundrum of a condition. There were not many possibilities.
 
Reedy was having the same problem. Now on his sixth cup of coffee, he could not figure out what was wrong with Walters. He felt sorry for him, of course, because it was Walters’s job to fix these sorts of problems. It was ironic in that sense, Reedy thought. But the most horrible irony was that he, as a proclaimed “good” doctor, could not diagnose his condition. He couldn’t even make something up. He didn’t want to make something up was a more correct statement, but no other doctor in the Hospiten would agree with him if he cried undecided. His greatest fear was that he has spent so many years working on patients who wanted a shapeshift procedure, and lost so many years of working with actual sick patients, that he’s forgotten how to diagnose a person.
 
But then, wouldn’t the other doctors be able to come up with something?
 
It was their job to come up with something as fellow doctors. They, while walking the Hospiten halls, stood poised and in ever-tempted thought. One doctor almost walked straight into a wall provoked by the tantalizing world of thought surrounding the alluring condition of Greg Walters. And yet every single one eventually backed out of thought, filled with curiosity but not with drive or courage, leaving Reedy alone to diagnose.
 
 
The halls of the Hospiten were strikingly empty. Not just literally empty, but empty of spirit. The halls, which themselves teemed with supernatural life, died as Walters was discharged from the hospital. He had been there for the night, and when Reedy could not diagnose, and Walters could not solve, they let him go. They mentioned, however, that there would be a strict watch kept on his condition. Both Katrina and Jenna were advised to keep close contact with Dr. Reedy and the Hospiten as a whole.
 
However, the pain had ceased. Walters accepted his condition. As soon as his mind stopped opposing the pain, it all seemed to melt away. But he still felt odd – he could not explain this oddity. It was a sensation that did not go through his entire body, but to his actions. It was as if his thought process were being rewritten in real time as he thought it. He found himself making strange decisions that he would not normally make. He found that his storm cloud suddenly disappeared, as though he no longer needed it. Things solved themselves.
 
They were not solved for Jenna, who watched him change in an awkwardly rapid state. She had not been with him for three weeks, and now, seeing her husband like this, it made her eyes frost over in an attempt to hide what was really happening. To her, the man she loved was degenerating in front of her eyes. He was becoming only part of what he really was, for now mostly in appearance, but God knew what was next – his brain could just completely disappear for all she knew. This is what made the situation so complicated to diagnose. Literally anything could have been happening to Walters, but it wouldn’t be until the very end that they could find out.
 
They all knew it, sadly, and waited to see his condition improve or decline. It did neither. He was stuck in a limbo of healthiness and unhealthiness. What defined his health became something totally different than what “health” in normal society’s connotation. His health was how close he was to being himself. Some days he would just lay there, unspeaking, until a thought popped in his brain and he would say, “I think I know!” and then slump back down, disregarding his comment as though it had never existed.
 
His appearance had changed further. His eyes, previously a greyish blue, turned to murky green. His hair had shortened and become blacker. He was quite sure he had gotten taller – taller than an average person, anyway. His wife seemed short. But he never ceased carrying the lapel pin.
 
The lapel pin.
 
On his fifth day out of the Hospiten, Walters knew why his appearance was changing. He could explain it all. It worked perfectly in his head. He didn’t know why he couldn’t see it before. Sure, it made little sense in a real-world perspective, but they weren’t dealing with a real-world problem – they were dealing with something far more strange and unknown. It should have been forbidden for this to happen. How could such an evil object escape and tempt those to pick it up? It was all the fault of this pin, this strange Genome. It must have been.
 
He immediately spoke with Jenna, proclaiming that he had found the answer. By this point he looked drastically different than he normally did, as though he was another person, but his thought process was nearly normal again. It must have been the shapeshifting procedure that sent him into a contemplative trance, not wanting his body to be aware of the tumults of pain it was enduring. It was a grand surprise to Jenna that he thought he had figured it out, as well as a grand reassurance. There was nothing more satisfying to her than to hear that her husband was going to be fine.
 
He was, after all, the most powerful man she knew.
 
Jenna had been keeping tabs with the Hospiten, and more specifically Dr. Reedy, every day since they had left. Because she did not know all of the details of his condition or what he had done in his three weeks alone, she could not form accurate opinions and conclusions or even report fully what was going on. She was detached from the universe of Walters’s condition. What he was going through was in no way familiar to her – granted, it was not familiar to anyone, but if there were one person not to understand the goings on of the condition, greater than anybody else it would be her. In those three weeks she had missed so much, and Walters had been so glad to see her miss them.
 
He was not particularly glad that she had come home at this time. How distressing it must be! And now to take her back to the hospital. He might have left her with Katrina, but no – that would be too obvious. She would suspect that he was ditching her and become angry, which was not too hard to do, but watching her defend herself was a sad story of a woman lost in argument. He would have to bring her while he reported his findings.
 
Reedy was waiting for them both at the front desk of the Hospiten. They had taken the shortest route possible, not by taxi, but directly through the pedestrian road. They were stopped by a red light when they approached the intersection, but the waiting for the light to change, for that white-lit walking man to appear and vanquish the horrible red progress-halting hand, felt as though they were both moving at near light-speed, time slowing down around them to a mere snail’s pace.
 
“That theory sounds even more retarded, believe it or not, than the theory that I came up with. I didn’t think it was possible – nay, dare I say it wasn’t possible at all – until you came along.” Reedy was reacting as normal, which pleased Walters but displeased his wife, who questioned why he would ever fraternize with such a blunt and rude doctor. Walters told her not to worry. Reedy was a good man underneath, albeit with some social issues and maybe some psychological ones, too.
 
Reedy asked Walters if he could see the pin, but Walters couldn’t give it to him. He’s left the pin on the living room table. It was the first time that he’d actually forgotten it while putting on his jacket.  This surprised not just Walters, but everyone who had seen him in contact with the pin. He had always clutched it for dear life, but now he had forgotten it as though it were a common object.
 
“But, you see, I told you that it was a Genome the day before the GSS’s big launch,” Reedy said, starting a debate.
 
“Yes,” Walters replied, “but you didn’t say what type. If this condition is unknown, than it could be any type of Genome – but we don’t know what. We do know that it’s acting on its own. I at least believe that it is. Matter is gained through consumption and, with the pin, shapeshifted. Whatever power source the pin in using to shapeshift is beyond me, however.”
 
“I still don’t buy it,” Reedy said. Jenna was completely lost, and tried to catch up. Her business was in genetics as well, and her business trip had actually been to another station in the Midwest, the Midwest Alteration Research Station, or MARS. There they delved into topics such as mutilation of the body during surgery, how it could be easily repaired, and practical applications to genetic and Genome development. She was not behind in terms of technology, but she was behind in terms of story. The weeks she had missed learning, she had missed a chunk of Walters’s life that could not be described in words by him, Dr. Reedy, or Carpenter, Carpenter most especially. It was depressing that she should be the one left out of the loop, and not someone who wasn’t Walters’s wife.
 
She knew enough, after listening in for a good hour, to jump in. Theories had gone back and forth, but it fell on Walters – he was right, for the most part. If they had had the pin, it would have been much easier to determine what it was doing.
 
The pin wouldn’t have let them open it anyway. In fact, it would have gone right back in Walters’s pocket, along with all of their data and all of their hopes. When they returned to the apartment, that’s just what happened. He found the pin and began caressing its edges, as though he’s been deprived of its sweet, cold surface. In his pocket it went – a totally involuntary action. Walters had no idea what he was doing, but neither did Jenna, nor Reedy. So of course he should act odd! It was as though it was predetermined by fate – Walters, seeped of his very soul, and was no longer in the room. He was on the bed, and he was asleep. A candle that he had lit next to the bed promptly went out as he slept. He had never been prone to lighting candles before.
 
As the next day rose his appearance had changed even further. His wife seemed, from his point of view dwarfed by his size. He was not that tall in reality, but he was that much taller. His appearance had become younger, less of a middle-sixties man and more of an early-forties man. Oddly enough, he did not seem conscious of it. Or rather, he did, but he didn’t feel conscious of it. Those around him were panicking, but he stayed calm and tried to assess the situation in a way that the Greg Walters everyone knew wouldn’t have. It was a godsend. Yes – God was smiling upon their home and delivering Walters the power to solve his condition. Jenna wasn’t even inherently religious, but she wanted her husband back. She began to take charge as well in his fate. She took the pin when she could examine it, trying to pry it open.
 
She succeeded.
 
Inside she found a black computer chip. It was half the size of her pinky fingernail, but it was there, ghostly grey-black. She could only imagine that within this chip was the genetic information that was so quickly altering Walters. With a magnifying glass she looked at the words written on the chip, attempting to find a manufacturer or serial number. She found one: It read, “GSS.”
 
If these were products of the GSS, they did not yet exist in public. Was it technology in development? She was missing a big piece of information that would put the puzzle together, and she needed Walters to give her that piece. He did give her that piece: If it was stolen technology, then the solution to what the lapel pin was lay in the hands of the thieves he had encountered.
 
My, she thought – that was a simple answer! He told her all about the thieves, being knocked out twice, ending up in the Hospiten, and how he met Dr. Reedy. It was peculiar that he hadn’t told her of this before, but he didn’t very well have the time, she thought, being in a condition that ought to be hospitalized and quarantined. She forgave him in her mind for not telling her all that had gone on during the weeks and focused her energy on helping Walters. Or saving Walters.
 
Jenna called Carpenter, who answered the phone reluctantly with a whining voice, “Hello? I’m rather busy.”
 
“It’s Jenna.”
 
“Jenna?”
 
“Mrs. Walters.”
 
“Ah, Greg’s wife – you were at the Hospiten. How’s he doing, anyway? Condition improved yet?”
 
“Not quite. He’s healthy, I can say that. We’ve figured some things out, but your help would probably be good in this. You have a fairly tight connection to the Genome Surgical Society, yes?” She began to tap of the desk next to the phone, eagerly awaiting an answer.
 
“Yes, I do. Why do you ask?” She began to twirl the telephone cord. She still used a corded line. She felt it made her office look more official.
 
“I took the pin apart. It’s a Genome, as we figured out a while back. But we need your opinion on it – well, I need your opinion on it. Greg’s slightly incapacitated at the moment, fast asleep, you see. He’s been going to sleep early lately.”
 
“I ought to be too; it’s pretty late. I’m about to close shop, actually. Anyways, I’d be happy to do a little research for you. What are you looking for?”
 
“We think that there’s a group of people who were stealing technology from the GSS, and we were wonder–” There was a noise, a sound of something crashing. Silence.
 
Carpenter had hung up.
 
Walters, too, wanted to find the thieves. Now more than ever did he want to encounter them once more, to throttle them against a wall and ask them why – why they had dropped such a wretched object onto the ground, so tempting him to pick it up? Now that he understood his condition, he knew that the pain might return. His opposition to it greatened. His worst fears were coming true: The one thing he had sworn he would never do was coming against him against his will, fighting him, strangling him until he was incapacitated enough not to feel the twinge of pain that shapeshifting brought. Even though he was now going through the process, he could not imagine why anybody would want to.
 
He had thought it was supposed to be painless. He had never known how wrong he was, how ignorant he must have been of the process.
 
But it was painless. In reality, not a single patient had ever felt pain after the human testing unless there was a serious malfunction in the system. The system was highly organized and intricately woven, and is some cases easily unraveled. There was no use trying to stop the unraveling if one was a error in the system. Unless the entire system rewrote itself, that person would never be able to shapeshift. The chance of a person contracting an illness related to recent shapeshifting, or acquiring a physical deformation during the process, was comparable to winning the lottery – something which still happened to nobody. It was a game for nobody, a game that nobody played. Those that played it were ignored by society; those that won it were severely researched by places such as the NSGR and MARS.
 
Scientists had put a lot of effort into making sure transformation and shapeshifting was a painless effort. This would popularize it. If it was painless, if it was flawless, and it did exactly what anyone wanted it to do, then people would want it. They would rush toward it like a beast to fresh meat. And they would spread the word, because there was meat, and plenty of it.
 
And now, with the recent addition of the GSS’s new line of pin-sized Genomes and portable ATC’s, the industry was spreading even further across the world’s markets. Many ideas had already been implemented. Job fields were quickly being overtaken by the Genome-ATC pairing. One only needed some trash to modify a household object and make it into anything they desired. It was portable alchemy. If you had mass, you could change mass. You could have done it before, but now you needn’t pay thousands of dollars for such a process. It was remarkable, and the world agreed.
 
Some were opposed to it. Some felt that tearing apart atoms in the middle of a family home was disturbing and dangerous, and could potentially cost a lot of people their lives. This was true, but the view did not gain as much exposure as did the glorifying aspects of the ATC’s.
 
It was not just objects that were accepting changes with open arms, nor people looking to improve their appearance. Athletes were gaining an edge in sports by manipulating their muscles and limb sizes. They were creating the perfect people. Not mentally perfect, but physically perfect. If one wanted, he could repair his body to the ideal point of growth. He might spend a lot of money to do it, but it was for a good cause. There were no objections.
 
Those who had been conservative had since moved over to the liberal side. The schism was shrinking in size. After weeks of seeing the product in use, people had an amazing epiphany: This invention is useful.
 
Needless to say, there were still plenty of people conservative on the matter. Most of them were scared that many people would be hurt while the product was still new, but there were departments that covered those damages. Still more believed in the morals of keeping their own form. Now humans were not only monsters as well, but they were objects. They were anything. If someone had wanted to, they could have turned themselves into a tree. They wouldn’t be able to return to human living, but they could most certainly have become a tree.
 
Many people used the awesome ability of the ATC’s to shapeshift, in their spare time, alone, into something that they did not wish for anybody else to see. A private passion, a secret always kept. Everybody wanted to be something, but could never become it until now. Now that it was becoming them, and vice versa, they rushed towards it with great anticipation. In private, people became that which they would not let other people see, and when someone returned removed the guise and became their original persona once more. This varies from person to person, but almost always was there something extra in the purchase of an ATC, and a Genome or two.
 
Many industries adopted these types of motives, but mainly used them for physical appearance changes. Not just the appearance of humans, but of objects. Grass was shapeshifted, hair was shapeshifted, and signs on the walls of buildings were shapeshifted; even the walls themselves found way to shapeshift. They were not powered by genetic material but by raw data, telling what materials to place where. Because of this everything had to be customized, and there appeared a new team of programmers – Genome programmers – who designed these types of things. They were the modern architects. However, because things such as walls were incredibly costly to shapeshift, it never caught on quite as well as people had hoped.
 
Walters was in a bomb factory, then. One wrong step and it would all explode. His body wanted the shapeshifting to finish, but his mind did not, and he knew it was not yet over. He could feel his own mind slipping back to that vegetative state that the shapeshifter loved, that Mike Rainer must have felt on his very first entry just before death. Perhaps he basked in it, thought Walters, and appreciated the quick look at heaven before going to hell.
 
It was therefore imperative that he solve this mystery once and for all, find the gang of thieves and settle his score with them. Did he have a score to settle? No, no – it was not the time to second guess. His spire had risen far too high above the ground for him to second guess! Not only could he no longer see the ground below, but he could no longer see the clouds. He was so high up that he feared to have run out of oxygen, but couldn’t resist seeing the scampering little subhumans running around, looking for their precious pin. He delighted in the sight, though he could not tell who was who. How he wished he could! He would have smashed the first one he recognized, only after squeezing every last drop of available information out of them – how to reverse this shapeshift without getting the surgery. He did not want the surgery, and he shouldn’t have to get it. It was one of his life’s goals never to get it, much less to need it.
 
He didn’t need to speak with anyone to find them. He knew now that he could find them on his own just by having the pin. Now that the lapel Genome was taking effect, they must surely come to him, knowing that he had what they took. Perhaps they had known all along and wished to hide it. Perhaps they, themselves, had known what it was they were carrying or whether it came from, but also picked it up. Perhaps it was the people he had never suspected who were the thieves, or perhaps they were the people he had suspected all along. But first he must answer the question: Who did he suspect?
 
And he couldn’t answer that, because that was precisely what he was trying to find out.
 
His clothes were beginning to get small on him. He might need new ones to go out in public. His jacket, however, still fit him properly. He wore that over his severely shrunken shirt, and found an old pair of pants that he had accidentally bought a size and a half too large. They were perfect for him now. He couldn’t imagine why he was going to throw them out, seeing how perfect that they fit him. He shook his head; of course he couldn’t see why he would throw them out. If they fitted him, he would like them. So it was his inkling now to throw out all of his other clothes, but he shook his head again.
 
If you’re going to return to normal, he told himself, you have to keep everything that you had when you were normal.
 
He was talking to himself – what level lower could he stoop from here?
 
It was going to be cold out, so Walters would need his jacket anyway. Being early morning, the coldest time of the day in late fall, he wore everything with long appendages. Long sleeve shirt, long sleeve jacket, long pants. It was the most convenient outfit for him, and even more disturbingly convenient that he had all this to fit him, much less in his size. He left – at six o’clock in the morning, no less – without telling his wife, or calling Katrina, or contacting Dr. Reedy. He didn’t need them. It was probably better that he found the group of thieves alone, he thought. At this hour, long before any store’s opening, he was likely to find them.
 
As he traversed the pedestrian road that morning, he noticed that the sky was an unusual shade of orange which he had never noticed before. It was the sunrise, a fiery and oblivious sunrise that overshadowed the entire city, castings its flame upon every object and scorching it to the ground. He avoided this, and its heat, while finding the thieves. He had struggled looking for them enough without being blind. He did not need to know what it was like to be blind.
 
The street was empty, as it always was this early. Nobody from the night before dared enter, and Walters knew why. Even the shops themselves were devoid of shop owners and clerks coming to prepare for the morning rush of customers who wanted to buy the still fairly new Genomes. They all acknowledged their ability to come in later now that the swarm of early customers had died down.
 
However, the road seemed longer than it usually did. Perhaps Waters was just becoming disoriented again. He had brought the lapel Genome along with him, still unsure whether it was a danger or not, but using it as bait to lure out the thieves. They were the key to everything, as much as Reedy would have liked to claim that they didn’t exist, even though he had seen them himself. Walters believed in them, much like a child believes in Santa Claus. Removing this believe, convincing him that it was false, or distorting it in favor of something else, was unacceptable. There was no possible way that he, who had been physically injured, could stop believing in these thieves.
 
But, Walters thought, Reedy had acknowledged the groups existence. There was always a sense of doubt in his voice that Walters could easily sense, though. It wasn’t unbelievable, or inconceivable, that a man such and Reedy would reject the idea of a gang of thieves who look so ambiguous in their appearance but carry so much loot in their bosom that they could easy sell it to gain enough money to feed a small nation.
 
Now that he thought about it, it wasn’t inconceivable that anyone shouldn’t believe him.
 
Finding this group would be his grand welcoming into a new land, a land where he wasn’t afraid to stand tall against any intruder. It was, for him, heaven on Earth. He was so confident in himself, that he swore he was seeing them pass directly by him, left and right, holding everything they had been holding before.
 
Wait.
 
He turned around. He turned around again. Nothing.
 
He turned around a final time – there was a man, or perhaps a woman, dressed in black – or perhaps they simply looked black because they chose to shapeshift into so ambiguous a figure – holding loot, Genomes, ATC’s, much more than any normal person should be able to carry.
 
Walters felt a twinge of pain. It was coming from the pin and his opposition to it, he knew. He could bring himself to fight it in order to confront these subhumans. He had not come all of this way just to be beaten by a Genome. He had come all this way to triumph over it, to triumph over his entire condition, and over these people that had eluded him for the past few weeks.
 
He saw the subhuman run into that same back alley where they kept everything and nothing. And he followed into that alley.
 
It was everything he had thought, and everything he had seen before that had been taken away the next. There was the gang, hurriedly shapeshifting themselves. He saw the process! How much it frightened him, he couldn’t define, but his nerves tightened and his legs, previously hubris-drawn, ceased movement. They all looked at him – at least, that’s what it looked like they were doing – and he returned their gaze. The last to shapeshift finished, and there was a long pause. In that one minute between him and the gang, nothing happened. Neither side could explain it, because neither side had the words to explain it. It was simply nothingness.
 
Walters overcame his unimpressive shyness: He took the first step inside the alley.