The Biggest Cat

Not to be outdone, the nurse simply made an incomprehensible grunt and twitched her head in the general direction of the nearest doors.

The first orderly looked at the second and shook his head.

His colleague returned the gesture as they wheeled Melissa towards the doors.

The exchange between the two seemed to indicate that even amongst criminals and lowlifes, as far as manners went, there really was a limit.

It was a cruel twist of fate that the very rooms in which Melissa was being wheeled had once housed the very laboratories where her mother had laboured for Thomas Rubin. After the massacre of the scientists who had worked there, the space had been converted to serve the function of a small, but extremely capable medical unit.

When one was involved in organised crime and had to deal with the consequences of violence on a daily basis, it paid dividends to have access to such a facility and know that no questions would be asked. The resident medical staff was on call to perform everything from mundane operations such as treating bullet wounds or setting broken bones all the way up to replacing organs or carrying out emergency plastic surgery when needed.

But the task that had been set for them in the case of Melissa would be their greatest challenge to date. They were required not simply to operate on the woman, but use all of their collective skills to transform her into a pet for the amusement of their employer.

None of the medical staff were concerned on an ethical basis. Much like the other people in Rubin's employ, they were guilty of crimes that meant they could not practice medicine in the outside world. Their only real concern was in failing to complete the task that had been set for them and as a result they had poured all their talents into a plan that would be presented to their employer for his approval.

Only when the last of the slides had been shown and the lights had come back on had they seen that Thomas Rubin was smiling, and only then had they let out a breath of relief and left to start work on their subject.

The constant sedation was thought to be the best thing for all parties concerned, there were some radical alterations that had to be made to Melissa's body and none of the medical staff wanted to deal with the consequences of her laying eyes on them before the hypno-conditioning regime that would complete her transformation could begin.

So it was that she never saw the inside of the rooms in which she was kept in those days as anything other than a white blur.

The first stage of the process was the preparation of Melissa's body, the alterations that would form the basis of her transformation into a human cat.

On the morning of her second day in captivity, Melissa was prepared for her operation by the staff that would assist the surgeons in the theatre.

She had been wheeled in on a gurney, still wearing the clothes in which she had been captured and the first task was to remove them.

This was no sensual striptease; the assistants simply produced rugged scissors and proceeded to cut her clothes away in the most efficient way possible. They sliced through the laces of her boots and pulled them from her feet, tossing them into a waiting bin beside the gurney. Her jacket was cut up the arms and her jeans slit from ankle to waist up each leg, the pieces yanked from under her body and discarded. The T-shirt that she wore beneath was removed in the same manner, which left only her bra and panties. These took the least time of all and after no more than a few short minutes, Melissa lay on the gurney, totally naked and exposed.

She was not left alone for long and soon the assistants returned with a tray holding a bowl of water, more delicate scissors and a pair of simple razors. These they used to shave Melissa's groin, armpits and even eyebrows, making sure that every hair was removed with minute attention to detail. The scissors they used to chop away handfuls of the hair on her head, cutting it ever shorter until they were forced to resort to the razors once more in order to render her bald.

Their final task was to wash and disinfect her body, cleaning every inch of her skin so that she was ready for the operating table. This done they gave a signal to the waiting team of surgeons and wheeled Melissa over to them.

The first of the men to get his hands on Melissa had been a dental specialist before his fall from grace and it was his job to replace the teeth of an evolved ape with something more appropriate to a predatory feline. But as he had been given free rein in his area of expertise (mainly on the grounds that blame for any failure could then be laid squarely at his own door at a later date), he had decided that less was more and would only replace four of her teeth.

To this end he had crafted from a synthetic material four caps that would bond with Melissa's own teeth, specifically her canines, and enlarge them by some half an inch. These new fangs would be impressive enough to the eye, but not sharp enough to tear the flesh of her lips and mouth.

A plastic frame was pushed into Melissa's mouth to hold open her lips and expose her teeth and with this in place the dental expert set to work.

His first job was to grind down the existing canine teeth, and he did this using a brutal piece of technology that simply abraded the material of the tooth, wearing away the enamel and then the material beneath with an alarming speed.

As callous and removed from the process as they were his colleagues could not help but wince at the sound of the teeth being ground down as he worked. For his own part the sound did not concern him in the slightest as he was totally absorbed in his work.

Soon he was done with the torturous tool and deftly working the caps into place on top of the stumps that remained of Melissa's own canines. The adhesive that he used would bond them to the natural material of the stumps so closely that one could not be separated from the other by any but the most drastic of methods.

There was no time to allow the dental implants even the shortest amount of time that it would have been sensible to let them settle in Melissa's mouth. The medical team was working on a tight schedule on the instructions of Thomas Rubin himself and they would mark the end of one surgical procedure by immediately beginning the next.

Next was the turn of the optical specialist, with his tray of delicate objects in one hand and a device in the other that would pin open her eyes in a similar manner to that which had spread her lips for the dental work.

His tool of choice was a pair of complicated tweezers with filaments at the tips so thin that they were almost invisible to the naked eye and he paired this with a suturing iron just as delicate. Aided by goggles that magnified his eyes to an almost comical degree, he used the former to remove from a dish of nutrient jelly a perfectly formed lens in the form of a green feline iris. Once he had the thing in position over Melissa's own hazel iris, he used the latter to burn the surface of her eye on a minute level, sealing it to the optical organ.

To call the thing a contact lens would have perhaps missed the point. It was better described as a layer of synthetically grown cells that would function in much the same way as the human iris beneath. While the lens was not capable of allowing the person to whom it was grafted to see in conditions similar to the extremes of an actual cat, it would mimic the way in which their vertical pupils moved in reaction to light, taking its cue from Melissa's own human pupil beneath.

With the lens in place, the optical specialist dripped a solution onto the surface of Melissa's eyes that would soothe the points where they had been attached and speed their recovery. Finally he sealed her eyes shut with wadded surgical padding and tape.

The dental and optical specialists now shuffled to the edge of the room as if repelled by the aura of the man who was preparing to begin work on Melissa's inert form. Neither of the men could have been taken for an upstanding member of their profession, each having been driven into the open arms of Thomas Rubin as a result of individual acts of malpractice. But both were scandalised and more than a little fearful of the man whom they called, behind his back at least, the Sawbones.

None of them knew what background the Sawbones came from or where exactly his expertise could be said to lie, but he was a personal favourite of their employer and therefore the unspoken master of the work carried out by the clinic. The rumour ran that he had achieved his position in the affections of Rubin on account of the fact that he had not and would never question what the man wanted or refuse to carry out his whims in the operating theatre.

Physically the Sawbones was a short and rather nondescript man who rarely spoke apart from when required to communicate instructions to his colleagues in a quiet, but firm voice. Of course this subdued demeanour served only to add to the feeling that the man was somewhat sinister and not to be trusted in any way shape or form.

Despite the fact that none of his colleagues were sure of his qualifications, the Sawbones was trusted with carrying out procedures that involved deep delving into the human body as well as more external operations such as plastic and reconstructive surgery. His would be the task of moving beyond the more cosmetic changes that the others had made to Melissa's body. It would be up to him to wield the knife and make the alterations that turned her into Rubin's disturbing vision of a human cat.

Where his colleagues had begun to work on her face, the Sawbones instead moved to Melissa's hands after he came to the operating table. While he was skilled in modern medical practices, the first action that he took harked back to the tasks given to surgeons in past ages when confronted with a diseased limb.

Armed with a lethally sharp and heavy blade that was mounted with a handle in the manner of a saw, he systematically removed each of the fingers on Melissa's hands above the knuckles. The ease with which he sawed through skin, muscle and bone was frightening to watch and within a matter of mere minutes he was done.

Without a hint of emotion upon his face, he staunched the bleeding from the exposed stumps and closed the wounds with expertly placed stiches. Once the last of the fingers had been sewn up, the Sawbones turned his attention to her thumbs. But rather than remove these in the same manner as he had the fingers, he amputated the entire digit from the hand, leaving nothing at all behind once he had finished sewing up the resulting void.

This mangling of her hands was simply the first step in the plan to transform Melissa into a pet for Rubin's amusement and although they looked horrendous to behold, there was no doubt that the changes he had made brought the shape of the appendages closer to those of a cat's paws than those of a human being.

In the new role for which she was being prepared, what need would she have for opposable digits?

Rubin did not intend for his pet to be able to do such things as write her name, use a keyboard or even be able to easily open a door, because why on earth would a pet need to do such a thing?

The next part of Melissa's body to which the Sawbones paid attention was her upper lip, which he marked with a specially designed pen from the bottom of her nose to the centre of her mouth. Moments later he retraced the line that ran down her philtrum with a wickedly sharp scalpel, cutting her upper lip into two halves. He quickly followed the first cut with two more at forty five degrees to the original, effectively removing the entirety of her upper lip and leaving her altered teeth and the gum from which they protruded grotesquely exposed. That done he proceeded to slice perhaps a quarter of an inch of flesh from the tip of her nose, adding to the nauseating wound in the middle of Melissa's ravaged face.

Not pausing in his work, the Sawbones plucked a complicated prosthetic from a sterile container nearby and lowered it into the gruesome hole that he had made in Melissa's face. For a man of his high level of skills and low level of morals, it was a matter of no great difficulty to marry up the blood vessels and nerve endings that would attach the thing to the flesh around it.

Though described as a prosthetic, the implant was in truth a simple affair of vat-grown synthetic flesh that contained rudimentary circulatory and nervous systems sufficient to allow Melissa some small degree of feeling once it was sewn onto her face. In appearance, despite the fact it was grey in pigment; the thing could clearly be seen to resemble the muzzle and nose of a cat.

With his work on her front completed, the Sawbones called for the theatre assistants to turn Melissa onto her back. They lifted her with all the care and delicacy they were capable of, laying her onto her stomach and ensuring that her newly altered facial features were supported in a cushioned frame at the end of the operating table that would keep them clear of the surface. When they had completed their task, her naked back was exposed to the bright lights of the theatre and the signs of the extreme surgery that had been carried out upon her body was almost totally hidden from sight.

The Sawbones once again used his pen to mark Melissa's flesh, this time picking out a point at the base of her spine and just above her buttocks. Satisfied with the position of his marks, he wasted no time in cutting into the flesh and muscle below, pulling back layer after layer until he exposed the bones of her coccyx.

As he had done with other parts of her body, the Sawbones showed no delicacy or hesitation beyond that which was necessary to avoid harming his subject. He gripped the coccyx in one hand and used his sturdy scalpel to slice down through the nerve fibres between the bones, severing the redundant vertebrae from the base of her spine. Dropping the amputated tissue onto a tray held by one of the assistants, he signalled for another to bring him an object that was submerged in a low basin of sterile liquid nearby.

Once the object had been plucked from the liquid and handed to the Sawbones, it was clear to see that it was the same basic colour and texture as the feline muzzle that had been grafted onto Melissa's face. But this new prosthetic was very different in shape, being no more than an inch in width and perhaps two feet in length. Tapering to a graceful point at one end and a bundle of delicate fibres from the other, this was clearly destined to be attached to her body at the base of the spine.

Every cat needed a tail, and Melissa's new appendage was soon being grafted on to the exposed nerve endings that had only moments before been connected to her coccyx. Every individual fibre was painstakingly married with a synthetic fibre within the tail one after another in a process that lasted literally for hours. Once his work was done, the muscles stitched back in place and the skin pulled around the base of the tail, the Sawbones could be sure that Melissa would be able to move the thing as easily as any other part of her body.

Having done all they were able for the time being, the surgeons withdrew from the theatre and left the drastically altered form on the operating table to the assistants who fussed over her, checking and cleaning every inch of her body for fear of infection setting in or signs of the implants being rejected by her immune system. Once they were done, they covered Melissa with the flimsiest of gowns and moved her to a small room nearby where she was laid upon a bed and left to rest only in a physical sense.

Now that her physical transformation was underway, her mental metamorphosis would begin in earnest as well.

Almost as soon as Melissa was secure in her bed, a complicated apparatus that covered most of her cranium was placed over her head, linking her to a bank of computers and more baffling equipment that lined two of the walls in the room. The apparatus was designed to subtly bombard the ears with sound and the eyes with visual stimuli while at the same time extend monofilament wires through the skin, skull and on into the very matter of the brain.

Taken together all of these methods worked to not only convince the subject and influence their thinking with the most advanced methods of hypnosis and suggestion, but in addition the probes extending into the brain made radical changes to the structure within in order to reinforce the desired effects. Once these changes had been made to the internal landscape of the brain and its tissues, the actual way in which a person's mind functioned could be altered to ensure that the content of the suggestions was an integral part of the architecture of the brain itself. In this manner a desired suggestion could be written into a human mind in such a way that it was as fundamental to the way the person thought and acted as genuine concepts that had been learnt as far back as infancy.

There was no coincidence that Rubin possessed access to such a technique and at the same time was able to command almost total obedience from those who worked for him. In the whole of his organisation there was not one individual who had not been subjected to this same treatment to a greater or lesser degree. But the true beauty of the procedure was of course the fact that the suggestions placed in the minds of those who worked for Rubin were always concluded with the suggestion that there had been no use of the technique at all.

In the past the process had been used to do anything from removing incriminating information from the memories of witnesses to totally altering the identity of people that needed to be made to disappear, but for one reason or another were too valuable to simply be killed. But the challenge presented by what was to be done to Melissa was something totally new and very much unique.

As the waves of conditioning swept over her partially conscious mind, there was no attempt to convince her that she has seen or failed to see a certain something, no subtle changes made to allow a new identity to come to the fore and no crude demands for information locked away in her memory.

Instead the probes attacked the structures and connections in Melissa's mind that held together the very concept of herself as a human being. They tore down the memories and associations upon which her identity was based from the most basic definition of her humanity to the highest concepts of her intellect and opinions. Soon they had deconstructed the fundaments of her psyche to the extent that had she regained consciousness, there would have been nothing remaining inside her head to animate her body or give her life beyond that of a vegetable.

Once the destructive work had been done, the true nature of the suggestion was able to seep into Melissa's blanked mind and begin to construct its own stronghold in the void created. New neural pathways formed and connections began to spread from one portion of her brain to another as the suggestion took a hold.

Where there had been the central conception of Melissa Rose, the human being, there was now the growing identity of a feline entity in its place. The world of intelligent human interaction and existence as a sentient being capable of self-determination was replaced with animal instincts, a mode of existence centred upon the physical and contentment that lasted from one moment to the next.

Melissa became a simpler creature with every moment that passed. She still retained the basic ability to recognise things for what they were and discerned their purpose, but the deeper meanings that were so fundamental to the human perception of the world simply fell away and were lost to her. From that point on to her a tree would simply be a tree, a flower a flower and a sunset nothing more than a changing of the light as the poetic beauty of such things disappeared from her thoughts forever.