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  Sometimes, when she looked forward and saw the sheer amount of work she had to get home, she thought of an easier way to get out of things. Sometimes, when the rice was exceptionally bland and the day had been exceptionally shitty and her coworkers had been exceptionally distant and focused on their own work, she felt the vast, grinding gears of the universe pressing against her spine and...and she started to wonder if this was all there was. Nine to seven work, for a paycheck that never quite managed to pay all the bills, juggling conversion between scrip and universal credits, writing infrequent letters home to her parents, and watching the programs that were provided for free on the entertainment service.

  When the realization/thought of that going on forever hit her in those dark nights, she would idly imagine playing with the oxygen/carbon dioxide/nitrogen mixture of her space suit the next time she was out and about. The nice thing about taking out oxygen and carbon dioxide in a life support system was that a human’s lungs couldn’t breathe nitrogen. But it also didn’t – couldn’t, even – notice nitrogen. There was no suffocation reflex, no carbon dioxide poisoning, no panic like when she had been struggling to breathe through her puffy lips and choked throat.

  You just...went to sleep.

  Sarah looked down at the distant jungle floor. At this height, she was pretty sure that she’d just... splat .

  You sure about that? She thought. I mean, the fucking thing that transformed you was part of some kind of interstellar civilization of fucked up bug people. Who knows what it could do, what engineering or materials science it had access to. Right? Right?!

  So, Sarah worked it out. She could see the biological mechanisms that would give her a vertical leap on this scale. There were engineering considerations and energy considerations – but it wasn’t that far out of the bounds of human science. There were biological nano that could construct exotic and hyper-tough materials. Using those to make bones and muscles could make structures strong enough. The energy requirements were a little more sophisticated, but then again, maybe she’d need to eat twenty six square meals a day to keep from starving. Not that she felt hungry.

  The ground and the easy way out looked downright tempting…

  Sarah’s grip tightened and she clenched her teeth. No.

  No.

  No no no no! She shook her head. She hadn’t kicked off the Eye’s awareness, she hadn’t dragged herself out of the pit, just to give up now. The road ahead might have looked dangerous. It might have looked terrifying, actually. She had no idea what she even looked like, or what her coworkers would say. But she knew that just dropping off the side of a tree and splatting herself on the ground was not how she was going to go. And so, Sarah started to loosen her grip. She just needed to-

  The branch under her snapped.

  Sarah plunged.

  She had time to think: I am getting sick of falling down.

  Then the ground rushed up and she struck head first. Her neck snapped and her skull fractured from the impact. Her ribs crunched and one of them punctured inwards towards one of her hearts – piercing it with a shard of bone the size of her pinkie finger. Sarah’s consciousness snapped out of existence as sudden as she had hoped and feared.

  Chapter Three: Sarah Has A Snack

  When Sarah opened her eyes, it was day again. She was surrounded by a small patch of blackened, charred grass. Her head hurt. Her stomach was growling. And a large carnivorous animal that her research team had never seen before was nosing at her ass like an overeager college student. Sarah reacted instinctively. But it wasn’t with her old instincts. Old Sarah would have either frozen and let things happen – in the case of the college student – or screamed and died – in the case of large carnivorous animals. New Sarah apparently had an entirely new repertoire of instinct.

  She drew back a leg, then slammed it into the creature’s throat with enough force to bury her foot through pulpy, well jowly skin.

  The carnivorous creature – which looked a bit like an oversized anteater with purple skin and sharp teeth at the end of its coiled nose/tusk – froze, its bulging eyes opening wide in shock. Blood sheeted down her leg and Sarah tried to not notice how very good it felt. Warm and hot and...she jerked her leg back, twisting herself onto her back as she saw her own body in the harsh, red light of day.

  Starting with her feet.

  They were human feet. Save that her skin was now black-green and had a faintly rubbery texture, which made her look as if she had been recently oiled. The addition of blood to her right leg only made her shimmer a bit more. Oh, also, her big toes could extend claws that looked like they were designed to hook and tear out people’s throats after she leaped on them – though they could serve as climbing tools too. That had been what had tore out the scavenger’s throat. Her legs were sleek and well muscled and lead to full, generous thighs, a completely hairless...everywhere, actually. Her chest had been sculpted to fit movie model perfection and then pushed a step beyond that. Despite being...ah...just as busty as she had always been, her breasts no longer seemed to need a bra. Her shoulders were harder to see, but her fingers probed them out, finding that the shoulders themselves were smooth...but there were some strange ridges that started along her shoulder blades.

  Touching the ridges made her squirm. They weren’t painful to touch. Just…

  They…

  It was hard to say exactly how they felt. It wasn’t uncomfortable or painful, but it felt like she shouldn’t prod them overmuch. Sarah stood and touched her own butt.

  Jesus. And here, she had thought her boobs were movie star quality.

  Sarah put her hands over her face and tried to not giggle hysterically. Good to know that aliens were also perverts. Or…

  Or had the redesigns been partially based off her memories? The first tendril that had...her brain skittered away from the first few words that came to mind. Her stomach squirmed in guilt and uncertainty as she weighed words like ‘rape’ and ‘forced’ and ‘penetrated.’ Because at the time, she had wanted it. She had wanted it bad. But she hadn’t had any choices at all. What did it say about her that this was a hard fucking call to make? She gritted her teeth and forced the words out: “You were skull raped by a tentacle that fucked with your brain, Sarah! Stop getting mushy headed!”

  The words hung in the air, and felt flat and unconvincing. Like the entire jungle was listening and shaking its head and going: Yeah. Sure, tell us another one.

  Sarah shook her head. “Okay. Tentacle...enters. Takes out the HUD. But there was a connection too. So, the Eye had to have my memories. Which means he saw every shallow desire you had to be skinny and beautiful and gave you that. Great. Wonderful.” She sighed. “He also modified your lungs to filter alien pollen, spores and other things that trigger anaphylactic shock – still an oxygen breather though.” She breathed in a deep lungful of air. She also looked down while she did so, just to check, and the effect that breathing in so deeply had on her breasts was...remarkable. Sarah let out a giddy sound that was somewhere between a giggle and a squeal: Oh my god, I’m gay for my own boobs.

  Looking down had a side effect of also putting the dead animal in her vision.

  Its blood puddled on the ground-

  Consume.

  Its eyes looked off, dead and sightless-

  Consume.

  Sarah’s tongue darted sloooowly along her lips. Her mouth was wet. Her fangs were out and her teeth felt sharper, as if they knew what it was she wanted. Claws thrust from her fingertips and she dropped to her knees, crawling towards the animal. Consumeconsumecon-

  She grabbed onto the flank and tore a great big chunk of purple flesh from the beast. Black blood dripped through her fingers and she pressed her face into the raw meat, biting down into it. The flavor that exploded in her mouth was so shocking, so intense that for a few seconds she was back at the mess hall when she had gotten a merit for identifying the gene sequence that had been confounding the whole secondary biology department on survey ship 98-01. Dr. Giovanni had
bought her a sim-steak as a way to give her extra props and it had tasted sooooooo good .

  This was like that. But after she had licked her fingers clean and sucked the last bit of blood off her palms, there was still more . It was like someone had forgotten to password lock the maker and she could just print food. She grabbed and pulled and ate and ate and ate. She yanked out bones, cracking them in half to suck out the marrow, which she chewed on happily – gooey, delicious, so delicious. She plucked out an eye and chewed on it experimentally, then found that the ocular jelly had flavors like sophisticated grapes. Mmm! She knew she was getting messy as hell, but she didn’t care. She crawled almost half into the body to begin nibbling on bits of organ that were still attached to the inner ribcage.

  Finally, she pulled back, smacking her chops. Her belly was distended and she felt soooo full and so happy.

  “Mmmhm...” Sarah curled up on the patch of blackened grass. As she lay there, she thought idly about why she was on blackened grass. It wasn’t blood. It looked, rather, like it had been charred. The first thought that came to mind was that she had suffered a huge amount of damage when she had fallen – so she had to have repaired that, or else she wouldn’t be alive, right? Well, metabolic activity at that rate had to have been a hugely exothermic reaction – purely from the amount of energy being expended. Hot enough to cook grass? She had no idea.

  Her eyes closed tight.

  When she woke, she felt simultaneously better and worse than she had since this whole nightmare had started. On the one hand, she was full and utterly at peace. Her skin felt natural – like she was so comfortable and happy in it that she never needed to move. She was like some kind of primeval goddess, enjoying dirt and grass as much as thick downy beds and silken sheets. But on the other hand, she was also caked in gore, which had dried. And insects were crawling over her body, nibbling at the chunks of flesh. Sarah screamed and sprang to her feet, slapping at her body to try and get the bugs off. Then she saw the corpse of the beast she had...her eyes widened.

  For a few seconds of frantic slapping and squirming and repetitions of ‘ew ew ew ew ew’, Sarah was sure that some other animal had come in to eat more. There was no way she could have eaten that much. Right? Right! But there were no other tracks in the area, no other signs of a recent animal passage. Sarah took that horrifying detail and filed it far, far, far away from her conscious thoughts and instead, started trotting through the jungle. She barely knew where she was going at first – but then the sound of the burbling creek reached her ears and she realized what she was doing.

  She had to get a frigging bath .

  The river sounded close.

  She kept walking.

  Nice and close. It’d be here any second now.

  Sarah started to jog.

  Niiiice and close . Right?

  An ant-like-creature tried to crawl into a part of her body she preferred nothing would crawl into . She slapped it away and then started to sprint. Her legs pumped and trees whipped past – and Sarah started to count them. She knew the density of the jamming trees was one every half a mile. She passed two in about thirty seconds. She was still trying to not do the math to work out how fast she was going when she came on the creek. It was actually more of a brook – or maybe the right term was riverette? It was deep enough she could get up to her belly in it, but slow enough that she was pretty sure she’d be safe.

  Sarah waded in, still muttering under her breath: “Ew ew ew ew ew!”

  Of course, the fact she had breathe at all and wasn’t a gasping, wheezing wreck was terrifying too. Everything was terrifying! It was a terrifying kind of day. She plunged her head forward, then wriggled under the water, rubbing her hands frantically over her skin, then stood up and snapped her head backwards. Water flew off her...she just realized that she hadn’t even checked her hair. She didn’t know if she had hair. She hadn’t seen anything in her peripheral vision that looked like bangs or anything. She felt water dripping from something atop her head. Sarah gulped, then looked down at her glistening wet body. The blood was gone, rushing rapidly down the river, and she could see herself reflected in the glittering water underneath her.

  Her face was recognizably her – but better. More symmetrical. No more weirdly bigger left nostril, no more persistent barely visible mustache that she had to shave every few weeks. But her eyes were black . Not as in ‘oh, I’m no longer brown eyed.’ No, they were black black . Her irises were black and her whites were black. Everything was black and reflective, like she was looking into the pools of the abyss. She tried to smile a disarming smile at herself, to see how innocent and non-threatening she looked.

  Sarah felt immensely relieved that, even with midnight black eyes and black-green skin, she could still manage to look faintly harried and nervous all the time. Then her eyes shifted to the top of her scalp and she saw that she did have hair. Sort of. Rather than countless strands, she had several dozen spines that thrust from her scalp in a frilled pattern. The spines had several ‘knuckle’s on them, allowing them flex in various directions. She winced at seeing them – and as if responding to her thoughts, the spines clenched tight, giving her a ‘knotty’ look to her hair. Sarah bit her lower lip and tried to ‘relax’ her hair.

  It frilled outwards into a more relaxed, wavy pattern.

  “Well,” she said, her voice soft. “At least I won’t need a haircut? Or something?”

  Sarah walked out of the riverette a few seconds later, once she was sure she was clean, found a clean-ish looking boulder that had been deposited near the river by the ancient glaciers that had cleared this whole area of mountains several million years before humanity had ever swung by to stick its oar in, and sat down. There, she put her hands on her chin, her elbows on her thighs, and started to think aloud.

  “So, Sarah, let's look on the bright side. You have superhuman strength and speed...and endurance. You can run, uh, maybe thirty, forty miles an hour. Jump twenty meters from a standing position.” She licked her ups, then reached down and picked up a small rock from the riverbank. It was covered in moss. She clenched her hands around it and it exploded into a fine powder, dribbling through her fingers. “H-Holy fuck!” She laughed in delight.

  She spent an inordinate amount of time testing that out. She picked up about ten different rocks and crushed them with both hands, marveling at how the powdered rock chunks flowed through her fingers and dribbled onto the ground, at how her hands never ached nor felt tired. Instead, she felt like she could keep crushing rocks for hours and hours and hours without noticing. She tried stomping on one with a black-green heel and it exploded apart under the force with a sound like a gunshot.

  “Whew. Okay...” She grinned and looked upwards, at the pale red sky of Trappist-1a. She crouched down...and lost her nerve. Instead, she stood and bounced on her toes. Even this was remarkable – with a tiny flex of her feet, she popped up like a cork, clearing nearly half a meter before she dropped. Her knees bent slightly to absorb the shock of landing and she flung her arms out, cartwheeling them to keep herself from falling right onto her supermodel ass.

  “Whoa,” she whispered. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Sarah. You can jump super high and it won’t hurt you. You can do it. You can do it.”

  She lowered her knees.

  Lost her nerve.

  She stood up and then scowled and bent her knees. She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her hands, her claws pricking against her palm. “Annnd... jump ,” she hissed. “Jump!” Her knees remained locked – memories of the dizzying, terrifying height of the tree filling her head. “Juuuuuuump!”

  Nothing.

  Sarah opened her eyes and realized how absurd she looked – crouched, arms spread and commanding herself to jump, like a bugged out vid game character. She shook her head and slapped her hands against her sides, her cheeks darkening. She felt the flush burning through her and when she peeked over the edge of the riverette to check herself, she saw that she did blush red. For some reason, that deeply relieved
her.

  Sarah put her hands to her face and rubbed her palms against her cheeks. “Okay, Sarah, make a checklist. Lets get shit done.” She clapped her hands together and nodded. “Step one. Find out where you are on the planet. Uh...the radar trees grew along the lines of magnetic force, with the width being roughly analogous to longitude. Or latitude.” She paused. “The part that indicates side to side, not up and down. Whichever one of the two that is. I’m a biologist , Jim, not a cartographer!” She chuckled to herself, her hands on her hips.

  The quiet sounds of the jungle – the faint creak of insects and reptiles, the buzz of wings, the rustle of leaves – sounded particularly judgmental at that moment.

  “Shut up,” Sarah whispered. “Not the jungle. You. Stop talking to yourself.”

  Memories of being found talking to herself on the more cramped scout ships by fellow coworkers chose that moment to burn through her as she started to pace on the riverette bank. She had always claimed to be using her HUD, and no one had believed her because she was a terrible liar and a huge dork. Sarah started to swing her hands expressively and forced herself to think silently. Once she determined her rough position, she could find her way back to the scout ship and tell them what had happened. They could check her out and…

  Her stomach knotted as she started totting up the cost. Just the checkup fees to determine her biological baseline – things like counting heart beats, measuring blood pressure, taking scraping samples – would put her into the red. A full genetic makeup and beginning a comprehensive package for retrogenetic engineering to try and bring her more in line with her old body would put her into prole status for...centuries. She shuddered.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I can paint myself brown.” She looked down at her skin. “A-And wear a wig. That’s basically the same as being human, right?”