Genetech: Safari Swap

Safari Swap

It wasn't exactly a spam e-mail. "Pen Pals," it read. "International English learners looking for people to write to! No cost! Hear from exotic locales!"

Devin nearly deleted the message, but was bored enough to investigate. It was December, which made the daily commute to the sawmill cold and dark. Even just reading about someplace warmer than Canada would be a welcome change. So he checked into the mail's sender and found it seemed like a legitimate social club, then signed up.

The next week he got an actual letter, on paper. He was impressed that people still did that. Cooler yet, the sender was someone from Africa!

"Hello. Am learning in special school. Very strange place but good food, and safe. My speaking good? Got lots to learn. Be telling me about foreign places please."

Devin thought about the letter all day at work; it helped him ignore the drone of buzzsaws. The next day he wrote back, trying to encourage the writer and use simple words. Part of what he wrote was, "Your letter is typed. Do you use a computer? What kind? What's your name?"

So they kept up the correspondence for a while. Her name in English was something like Sala, and she'd grown up "in the big grass" only to have a lot of her family shot by bad men. Now she'd been taken in by some special teachers from the United States, who gave her a computer so she could talk with lots of people. Devin felt kind of disappointed that he was just one friend among many, but really that wasn't bad for either of them. Besides, Sala said she mostly spent time with her classmates and didn't know much about "the big computer net thing." The writing quality went up gradually. He wrote to her about snow and mountains, forests and Niagara Falls, and about wanting to vacation someplace warm. She wrote back about the savannah, the blazing sun, scary lions, and scarier armies. She sent him a lock of stiff black hair, and asked him for one in return. That was a bit of a weird request, but he mailed a clipping of blond hair.

By late January, he hurried out to the mailbox each day before he could freeze. The letters were a source of warmth. One day, the latest from Sala came with an invitation.

"Am hearing teachers bringing you to see me! Am leaving Africa for time and meeting new people for school swap thing." With the letter came a more formal one from "Central Education Exchange Developments." Devin puzzled over this one. It looked like there was some well-funded company affiliated with the pen-pal program, doing fancy education experiments that involved mailing him a plane ticket! The ticket wasn't for Africa at all, but for Las Vegas. This weekend. He stared at the thing, wondering what he'd done to deserve a free trip.

He managed to get time off to fly there. When he arrived, there was an escort that he barely spotted among banks of dazzling slot machines. She had spiky blond hair (not Sala, then) and a sign that read, "Devin, eh?"

He said, "We don't all say that, you know."

She grinned and shook his hand. "The sign worked. There was a bit of a pest control mishap at the company, so I'm your escort. The name's Erin."

They took her car, which had a plush porcupine in the back window. Devin enjoyed the warm desert scenery and the bizarre skyline of casinos. "Where exactly are we going?"

"Pretty far out. The company's near the border, but there's housing, so we can put you up while you're here."

They left the city far behind, driving into empty land with scraggly sagebrush. He noticed the facility out of the corner of his eye: a bunch of dusty greenhouses with an office complex. It worried him. "What's this place have to do with education in Africa?"

Erin hesitated before answering, pulling the car into an underground garage. "Well, some company officials have been working with the Mormon Conspiracy to Conquer Africa, and they expressed interest in your ancestry and genetics. I talked them into just getting some samples from you for their zebra project."

"Zebra? What?"

"It's easier to show you." Erin opened the door and gave him a badge with a green leaf icon and a company name -- not the education one, but "Genetech."

#

"Now, don't touch anything or accept any offers of chocolate." Erin led him into a corporate lobby where the halls seemed to shift from perfectly normal to... different. Within a few minutes' walk he heard someone cackling from behind a door, and passed a display of jackrabbits banging rocks together with their forepaws. A motivational poster showed the Earth from space and bore the words, "Soon the World Will Be Ours."

"So, the zebras?"

"Right in here," said Erin, motioning him through a door. She didn't follow.

He was in a stable, a high-tech one kept clean with rubbery floors and antiseptic white walls. There was indeed a zebra here! It stood barely taller than his head, sniffing at him from behind a low wall.

"Devin!" said a computer voice.

"Huh?" There was some elaborate computer hardware here, even a gratuitous sparking Jacob's ladder.

The zebra nodded its head, and the speakers said, "It's me, Sala! I know your hair scent."

"Never mind her," said a lab-coated man with long whiskers. More than that: he also had huge, fuzzy ears and... a tail? That or a lifelike pink rope tied to his back. "I take it you're here on purpose. Have a seat and I'll be right with you."

Devin sank into a chair, and stared at the zebra. "Sala?"

"Yes. Hi!"

"So... how's the savannah?"

"Boring! I was glad to get here."

"And you're a zebra."

Sala turned her head and looked herself over, stripes and all. "You didn't know that?"

Before Devin could answer, he was distracted by the guy with the lab coat. "Hold still." There was a touch of a cotton swab, and then something jabbing him! He saw the needle only after it was too late. The guy said, "There. Now within a day or two we should be able to proceed."

"Am I vaccinated against mouse-pox now?" said Devin, glaring at the man.

"What? No, that was the calibration nanites."

"...Nanites."

The doctor, if that was what he was, looked frustrated. "Yes, yes. You've got your visitor's pass, so get going and come back late tomorrow." He started shoving Devin out the door.

"Hey, come on! What'd you do?" But he felt too wobbly to resist, and was back in the hall with the door shutting on him before he could react. He banged on the door but no one answered. After a minute he steadied himself and went looking for someone who might make more sense.

That led him to the cafeteria, a place called the Genghis Galley. At first it seemed like something from a hospital or college, but usually a lunchlady didn't have cyborg limbs. Scientists sat around eating while a group of assorted dogs sat at a low table, playing "Dungeons & Dragons." Devin stared at them while he approached the counter and started picking out whatever food wasn't moving or glowing. He ended up taking a seat across from a normal-looking scientist and saying, "So... what's up with the dogs over there?"

The scientist shook his head sadly. "That situation. How could we have been so blind? We made a terrible mistake!"

"They're a mad-science experiment?"

"What? I'm not complaining about that. I meant they should never have switched to fourth-edition rules. Who are you, anyway?"

Devin poked suspiciously at a sandwich, then started eating. "A visitor. I got invited to help with some kind of zebra project."

"That's Rog Foyle's work. He's trying to uplift herbivores for some reason, working with the Cybernetics department. You're a new assistant, then?"

"I'm not sure." Devin tried to explain about the letters from Sala.

The scientist's eyes went wide. "Oh! That would explain the, uh..." He waved one hand vaguely just above his head.

Puzzled, Devin put one hand to his own head and felt a brush or something stuck in it. No, his hair felt stiff in a sort of mohawk pattern, straight back down his scalp. It was right about then that he got dizzy, too, and passed out in the cafeteria.

#

He woke up in a comfortable glass tube. It was like a Japanese "coffin hotel" room, a tube lying on its side and lit through its murky walls. Feverish, he struggled out from under a sheet, having trouble with some kind of glove on one hand. Then he saw his arm. No glove: there were only three fingers on his hand, each of them ended in a hard black nail, and his skin was covered in alternating dark and light hairs. Stripes.

Devin sat up sharply and banged his head. The mohawk hair was still there. Wincing, he looked around for his clothes and pulled on a referee shirt and black pants someone had left. It looked like the change had spread from where he'd been injected, leaving the skin weirdly prickly and sore along one arm, up to his armpit and the back of his head. "Hello?" he called out, turning to bang on the near end of the tube.

It gave a soda-can hiss and slid open to reveal that mouse-eared guy again. Foyle. "Finally," the scientist said.

"What's this about?" said Devin, showing off the changed arm. "You had me taken all the way here to give me hoof-fingers?"

Foyle took his arm and pulled; Devin was surprised at the move and let himself be helped out of the tube. Foyle said, "Of course not. We just needed to reconfigure your cells for the transplant. The side effects are just a bit excessive. But you knew that when you signed up, so what are you complaining about?"

Devin stood barefoot on a cold tile floor, with dozens of other glass tanks behind him. "Signed up? I'm here to meet Sala, that's all."

Foyle's ears drooped. "Oh, dear. The company didn't bother informing you, did they?" He sighed and headed for the door, waving Devin to follow him. "You're at least making a contribution to science. Let's get this over with."

"Hey, come on! What's going on!" Devin had no choice but to follow him to get some answers. Foyle hustled down twisty little passageways until they were back in the zebra room with Sala. It was all Devin could do to keep up, what with the fever he still felt.

Foyle produced another needle and said, "All right then; hold still."

Devin was about ready to punch the guy. "Not until you tell me what I'm missing here."

Foyle sighed theatrically. "Fine then. I just need a blood sample from you now, so that I can finish the process of changing Sala here. She was the most promising candidate of all the African wildlife the company picked up, the most likely to survive being changed without going insane."

Sala looked up from watching "Mister Ed" reruns on a black-and-white television. "Oh, hey, you're back. Can you get me one of those 'pizza' things?"

"Well-adapted to human life, as I said," Foyle boasted.

"You mean the point was to change Sala into... what, again?"

"A humanoid, of course. For science. Will you let me do my job now?"

Devin hesitated. It sounded as though what they were trying to do here was for Sala's benefit (or at least science's), and would probably help her. "Uh, all right. Go ahead."

Foyle drew blood from Devin's changed arm. Devin winced and adjusted his shirt; by now his arm was feeling all right, but the whole side of his chest itched and ached, growing striped hair too. "Can you undo this?"

Foyle ignored him, focused instead on Sala the zebra. He was just as inconsiderate to her, giving an injection to her as soon as he'd processed the blood sample in a nearby machine. "Soon my creation will be complete!"

"Yeah, that's great," said Devin. "How about an antidote over here?"

"Antidote? We haven't really budgeted for that. See, the reconfiguration is already done, so any gross morphological changes are just harmless side effects. You're still alive, aren't you?"

"Side effects! I've lost two fingers already. How far is this going to go?"

"No farther than anthro -- humanoid, I mean. It's not my department," said Foyle. "Take it up with Technical Support."

Devin fumed. He went over to Sala's stall and said, "How long have you had to put up with this?"

"Since I got here," she said through the speakers, turning a dark eye in his direction. "It's okay though. I'm gonna have hands and everything, thanks to you! And there's free food and housing while I'm here. They gave me a TS badge."

"Test Subject," said Foyle. "You're free to go, seriously. We don't need you anymore."

"TS, eh? I've got a badge too. Am I entitled to stay here for free while this... reconfiguration thing happens?"

Sala said, "Yeah! Why don't you go running with me? We can be herdmates!"

Devin turned to Foyle. "That, or I sue."

Foyle grimaced, ears folded back. "You did get a TS badge, I see. Fine then; you're free to stay while the experiment goes on, and there're various facilities you can access. I suppose I can't keep you out of here, but quit complaining, will you?"

"Complaining? Hey, it's a free vacation, at least."

By the time he got back with a free pizza, Sala was supposedly able to digest it. "How come she gets her whole digestive system rearranged without passing out?"

Sala nickered and reached her muzzle over to poke at Devin. "You got these without much trouble."

He felt something squish and looked down to find one breast bulging out from his shirt, with the other one growing in as the zebra-change crept sideways over him. "Hey!"

Foyle was busy on the far side of the room. "There's plenty to eat if you want it."

Devin checked under his shirt at the striped hair growing up and down his back, with plain white fuzz spreading ominously down his stomach. Probably he should panic. There wouldn't be much point in it though; there was perfectly good pizza available. He looked over at Sala and said, "How about we take this meal outside?"

#

Days later, they went for a run. They were outside the complex on a desert evening, two zebra-folk trying to help each other walk on two legs.

"Whoa!" said Sala, steadying Devin for the dozenth time. Devin's coordination was shot, what with walking on what amounted to one big toe per foot. The hooves thudded on sand. Sala wobbled herself, still getting the hang of being two-footed. Her voice had gotten better quickly, from a gravelly mumble that required the computers to translate, to a nice deep tone.

Devin braced against her. Sala was still pretty brawny for a human of her height, but the stripes helped disguise that. Devin had kept a lot of muscle on his own new female frame, maybe thanks to the equine genes. He flicked his big ears and balanced carefully, arms to either side. "These things are like stilts."

"Easier when you have four. Hey, check out the moon!"

A big full moon was on the horizon, white on the black sky. After staring at it for a while, Devin noticed he was standing comfortably, his ropy little tail idle instead of trying futilely to help him balance. Slowly he let his arms drop, hoof-nails clacking against his hips.

"It's like this on the savannah, some nights."

"Same way north in Canada." He looked to Sala with big, dark eyes and kept feeling he was looking down, over his muzzle. "Are you going back to Africa?"

"I don't know. I should stay here a while, and get used to living like a human. I hear they have little disguise gadgets you can wear."

Devin looked sidelong at one of his arms without turning his head. "I guess I'll need one too." He twitched his tail and said, "Hey, thanks for making contact with me. The zebra thing isn't too bad."

"You're thanking me? I owe you my hands, my voice, my --" She gave a nickering laugh and a snort.

"What?"

Sala grinned and balanced her hooves carefully on the sand, then wrapped arms around him in a hug. "I think that cell sample you provided had a few side effects. Try out that nose of yours, former human guy."

Devin sniffed the other anthro-zebra, and got a whiff of a powerful earthy scent, registering somehow as deep, strong, manly...

Sala saw his expression and gave him an equine slurp on the nose, and a quick human kiss.

"Huh? When did -- you didn't tell me --" Sala had let go of him and started running away, stumbling and laughing while he sputtered. "Get back here and explain! I'm telling your doctor!"

Sala led him in a chase all around the Genetech complex. A herd of two galloped through the desert by moonlight, getting used to a new life.