Meta-Human

"It sounds like it wouldn't be pleasant for females, either."

"Well...yes and no. I don't have first-feel experience, but I understand it gets pleasurable after the initial...discomfort."

"How does it work between females, then?"

"Ah, that, um, involves entanglement and transfer of biochemical signals through our mucus."

"Sounds sexy," he joked.

"I understand humans consider a great many things to be sexy," she joked back, and they both laughed. Then, suddenly, she felt very hot, almost feverish.

"It's starting to get cold...." Danard said after a pause.

"Um, Dan..." Xib croaked uneasily. "I feel hot. I think...I might be having a reaction."

"Oh no. You mean a reaction to the..."

"The serum! Oh, what was I thinking...how could I know what would happen?"

"It's--it's going to be okay. Just come to the thermal shelter, I'll get you some water."

Xib glided into the shelter, trailing a film of mucus on the blankets insulating them from the floor, then Danard gave her a flask of cool water. She guzzled the water, and Danard noticed she seemed to be sweating ooze.

"Stress can affect the body," Dan said reassuringly. "You haven't slept in almost two days. Try to relax, maybe get some sleep..."

"Oh," Xib sighed exhaustedly, "yes, I'll rest and--ohhh...." she trailed off as both her head and lower body retracted inside her shell, which leaned back from a redistribution of its center of gravity.

"Xib?" Danard addressed, unsure if this was normal for blorban sleep. After a minute, the entrance to her shell was sealed off by a hardening membrane. He stayed awake for an hour after, worried if Xib really would be okay, but sleep took him as his own exhaustion set in.

When he awoke several hours later, Xib was still inside her shell. He went out to monitor the jellies, which were still pulsating in their mating displays. He checked the thermometer, which confirmed the temperature was dropping steadily. It was below freezing in the mess hall outside their blanket shelter. He put on his vacuum suit to conserve his own body heat and prepared some chemical powders to combine that would release heat inside their tent.

He carried on preparing things that would keep them warm until he decided to get more sleep. He hoped Xib would come out of her shell and tell him she felt better. Another day passed, and Danard ran out of ways to generate more heat. He huddled up against Xib's opalescent shell. He considered the possibility that she was already dead. It was so cold, he feared that if he fell asleep again, he might not wake up.

He contemplated his death, and also his life, how he had come to be where he was now. He struggled with regret. He tried to be at peace. He did not want to die, alone and in despair.

Suddenly, the blankets of the tent were illuminated brightly from the outside. Had the reactor come back on, he wondered? Were they being rescued?

He folded back the flap door of their makeshift shelter and stumbled out. He was almost blinded by the light coming from the mess hall window. The jellies were right outside the station. Danard stood in awe of the bright window at the far end of the room, and felt his body being washed with heat from the high-energy protons coming through.

He began to laugh with joy as the thermometer steadily rose. The whole station was absorbing the immense energy sheeting from the coupling jellies. This wasn't just a display, this was the act of sex itself. Danard rushed back to the tent and poked his head inside.

"Xib!" He called. "Xib, wake up! It's the jellies!"

To his astonishment, the seal on her shell chamber broke, and a body very different from the one Xib had two days before came out. She slumped onto the padded floor, splashing the blankets with clear slime.

Danard couldn't believe his eyes. She was humanoid. She had a very human-like, adult body with a pair of legs, two arms, five digits on each, complete with fingers and opalescent nails. The rest of her was still bright pink, hairless, and slimy, at least for the moment. She had the remnants of a membrane connected to her navel, like a deflated ballon, as if the old Xib had been contained within it before passing through to a new body on the other side.

Danard rushed to check if she was breathing. Careless about getting the slime on himself, he propped her head up in his elbow. She had an elongated cranium that was swirled on the sides like the looming shell that was no longer a part of her body. He shook her gently in his arms.

"Xib? Xib??" He checked for her pulse. He thought he felt something, but it could have been the hammering of his own pulse through his fingertips. He pinched her nose and pressed his mouth against hers, sending a strong breath into her lungs.

Doctor Xib sputtered and coughed, then heaved a few fast breaths as she suddenly awoke. She opened her eyes. Her irises looked like smeared gold leaf, very reflective and possessing unearthly beauty that rendered Danard spellbound.

"Dan?" She murmured.

"I'm here, Xib," He said.

"Gah!" She exclaimed, sliding her tongue around inside her cheeks, "What's in my mouth?" She brought her fingers to her lips, then widened her eyes as she looked at her hands. "I have jointed limbs!" She gaped, then looked down at the rest of her body. "I'm human??"

"Not entirely," Danard said, trying to sound calm. "You still have some...blorban features."

Xib felt her head, ran her fingers over her elongated, spiral-marked cranium.

"How could this have happened?" She lamented. "This shouldn't have happened!"

"Maybe it's reversible?" Danard offered. It was a big "maybe", but he couldn't assume it was impossible, and he felt Xib needed comfort.

"My shell!" Xib exclaimed, and began squirming, trying and failing to move towards it.

"Take it easy, let me help you," Danard said as he propped her up in a sitting position, holding her steady with one arm wrapped around her torso, sliding under her teardrop breasts. It was unreal, Danard thought, and he wondered if Xib found her human beauty to be hideous.

Xib leaned forward and would have flopped onto the floor again if Danard hadn't been holding her. She reached out and touched the rim of her shell's opening, which was hollow and empty but for the residue slime oozing out of it. Xib was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion, and heaved a great sob, followed by a series of sobs that spoke of a grief of loss Danard could scarcely fathom. He imagined how he might feel if he had gone to sleep and woke up as a giant snail.

He didn't say anything, but he rubbed her back reassuringly, to remind her she was not alone. After the grief had flowed through her, Xib reeled in her rational mind and set it to considering their immediate survival. After she had been still for a minute, she spoke.

"It's getting warmer," she said.

"Yes."

"With the coolant system shut down, we could overheat."

"We could take shelter on the shuttle in the docking bay. It should resist heat transference the longest."

"We should get moving."

Danard opened their first aid kit and handed Xib a pair of scissors. She took a shaky breath, then cut the useless membrane from her navel. She bandaged herself over her tender bellybutton while Danard packed up their essentials in a bag.

Once they had everything they could carry, Danard helped steady Xib on her fresh feet as they exited the tent. Her legs looked supple, the softness of her thick thighs hinting at undeveloped muscle under an inch of soft fat. She was wobbly, but slowly they made their way to the axle of the station, where the simulated gravity from rotation was nonexistent. Xib moved easier, needing only gentle nudges in the right direction.

They situated themselves in the shuttle, which was still cold. Danard wrapped Xib in a blanket when he noticed she was shivering, then went back for more of their insulated water. He had to shield his eyes as he passed each window, such was the intensity of the light washing the station.

Xib concentrated to use her new hands and routed power from the shuttle's batteries to its sensor array, risking damage from a power surge to get a readout on the radiation. Most of the radiation was of the non-ionizing variety, ranging from visible light to microwaves, with most of it concentrated as infrared. That ruled-out mutation from higher frequency radiation as an explanation of what had happened to her, and it was encouraging with regard to powering up the shuttle or the station, since there seemed to be little of what had caused the reactor to shut down. She told Danard when he returned with the water.

"In that case..." Danard said after some consideration, "I think it's worth the risk to restart the reactor and send a warning message to the resupply shuttle."

Xib agreed, so Danard drank some water, put on his suit's helmet, and headed for the reactor core. His suit was insulated, but it still absorbed infrared energy. He made it to the reactor room, keenly aware of the warm dampness of his own sweat saturating the small water recycler of his suit. He carefully went through the power reactivation sequence, then hurried to the long-range comms room. He shook the sweat from his eyes to see. The station had become an oven. The lights came on and he activated the quantum communicator.

"Mayday mayday mayday, Aquarius Station to UNN Manicore, this is Doctor Danard Xangwah with an emergency message. Be advised, anomalous electromagnetic activity around the station. We have restored power but it could shut down again from a radiation surge. Doctor Xib needs medical attention, but proceed with caution. Do you copy?"

He waited. After a minute, he repeated the message. Finally, there was a response: "Manicore to Aquarius Station, we receive you. We are en route and will dock in two-hundred and forty hours. Will proceed with caution. Hang in there."

"Roger that," Danard transmitted. He breathed a sigh of relief, but he felt faint. He was on the verge of going into heat stroke, and he stumbled back towards the center of the station. The heat venting system was coming back online, but with the station still absorbing so much energy from outside, the air temperature remained close to 71 degrees Celsius, or one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

Delirious, he entered the zero-G section. Panting heavily, he swung round a corner of a corridor intersection, and with the docking bay hatch in view, he blacked out.

*********

Danard felt a splash of cool water on his lips. He opened his eyes to see Doctor Xib's new, human-like face looking at him upside down. He was in the shuttle, floating in the center of the main cabin, his head cradled between Xib's naked thighs. She was using one hand to push floating droplets of water to his mouth, her other hand holding herself steady by a handle on the wall.

"Xib?" He whispered, his mind still foggy.

"I'm here, Dan," she answered gently.

"What happened?"

"When you didn't come back, I went looking for you."

"That was...risky."

"I couldn't leave you out there."

They gazed into each other's eyes, two beings sharing a moment of being alive together, their faces inverted with no up or down. Xib's breasts floated freely with no gravity, but Danard didn't avert his eyes from her face. She had a Nubian nose, similar to his own. Her soft, golden eyes held his attention in an otherworldly embrace.

The cabin was warm, but not hot, and the lights were on. He felt a slight breeze across his bare chest from Xib's breath, which washed over his dark, sweat-beaded body in waves. He realized he wasn't wearing his suit, or underwear. The sense of vulnerability, of being exposed to Xib for the first time in his nakedness, together with the tenderness of her gold-rimmed eyes stirred in his heart the headwinds of love, and it stoked in his core an arousal that brought a swelling to his cock.

"I'm naked," Danard said with a tinge of embarrassment.

"I had to get you out of your suit," Xib explained, "to cool you. I was afraid I had lost you."

"I'm here."

"Indeed you are," Xib said with a smile, flicking a glance across his body to his enlarging presence. "Is that a method for venting heat, or are you just happy to see me?"

He laughed, embarrassment and relief and joy mixing in him all at once, and Xib laughed with him.

"I'm happy you're with me," he said, and reached up by his head to place his hand against her outer thigh. She put her hand over his affectionately. After another tender moment, she let out a sigh, and her cheeks flushed a deeper shade of pink. She flashed another smile, her opalescent teeth shining in the light.

"These are...extraordinary circumstances," she said. "It's all so strange. I'm...still coming to grips with the fact that I have bones."

"Coming to 'grips'? Did you just make a joke?"

"I'm still me, you know."

"And I'm glad of it. Well...perhaps we should..."

"Right," she nodded, releasing the sides of his head from the gentle grip of her thighs, and he spun upright relative to her. "Did you get a message out?"

"I did. They'll be here in ten days."

"Well then...let's hope the reactor holds."

*********

After the heat venting system had been at work for a few hours, the temperature on the station was still sweltering, but tolerable. It fluctuated with the proximity of the coupling jellies, but luckily the new radiation of the jellies mating wasn't as dangerous to the reactor as their foreplay had been, which emitted on a different part of the spectrum.

Danard put on his boxer-briefs, but left the rest of himself bare. He and Xib set themselves to checking the station's systems, and they found no major damage. Doctor Xib mentioned how exposed she felt without a shell, so Danard gave her one of his softest T-shirts, black with constellations speckled about it in white. It was loose enough for her to wear, though she wasn't used to chafing objects against her body. It was snug against her breasts, at least, and the way it enfolded her torso reminded her vaguely of her shell. It was a long shirt, and she let the bottom of it hang about her pelvis, barely hiding her pink pubic mound.

They moved their supplies to the shuttle, in case they needed to abandon the station. Xib cautioned that they didn't know what the jellies were capable of during mating, that they might prove dangerous if the shuttle tried to move through the surrounding herd. After an hour, the heat-venting system seemed to keeping up with the rate of energy absorption, and the temperature hovered around one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Danard noticed Xib gazing at her reflection on the screen displaying data from the scopes.

"Hey," Danard said, "you alright?"

She took a breath, then smiled with a little nod, said: "I'm recording everything I can about the mating event." She tapped some notes on the pane of glass. "Since I've got it all automated, I thought we could take this opportunity to study what's happened to me?"

"Of course," I said. "Let's get you to the med bay."

At the medical bay, Danard took a tiny blood sample from Xib and placed it in the analyzer. After a minute, it showed triple-helix DNA.

"This is...." Danard gaped.

"...Just like the specimen," Xib finished.

"Do you think the original DNA is still in your lymph nodes?"

"Good question. Let's try to find it."

Despite hours of tests, there was no definitive way to distinguish between the specimen's DNA and Xib's. They did complete sequencing, and when compared to the fragments of the specimin's DNA that Xib had been able to record, her's was a perfect match. Even more puzzling was that Xib's double-helix DNA as it had been was still there, but it seemed a third sequence chain had broken off the specimen's and grafted itself onto her's. Astonishingly, the resulting hybrid code was identical to the specimen's original, which was a confounding paradox. Xib had not thought to do a direct comparison before her transformation. The probability that Xib's personal, unique DNA happened to be two-third's identical to an alien's triple-helix DNA from millions of years ago soared into the realm of the absurd. And yet, it had happened, almost as if the specimen had been designed to bond with her across an unthinkable stretch of space and time. As far as they could tell, Xib's old body had turned completely into goo inside her shell, then reformed on the cellular level. Rather than being horrified, Xib gushed with excitement about what it might implicate about the nature of consciousness since her memories somehow survived the transformation.

Danard suggested they start anew after some food and sleep, to which Xib agreed. After sharing a meal and checking the progress of the mating event outside, Danard helped secure Xib in a sleeping alcove on a wall of the shuttle, then did the same for himself.

"Hey, Dan?" Xib asked from the gloom of the dimmed interior.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever fantasized about not being human?"

"You mean like a...werewolf or..." when she didn't interject, he realized she probably didn't know enough of human folklore to understand, "...well I suppose I have imagined myself transforming into another creature. A primal thing that embraced emotion and physical power."

"That's very interesting. Old Blorban stories tell of certain individuals who can transform into a grinermop, a very dangerous animal. But I was wondering if you...well, never mind. I'm very tired. Goodnight, Dan."

"Goodnight, Xib." He was burning with curiosity, but he let it go and slipped into sleep.

When they woke, they again checked the data from outside, then shared a simple breakfast of oats in nutrient paste, which always reminded Danard of yogurt. Xib smacked loudly as she tried to get used to eating with teeth.

"So," Danard said, "You're the biologist. How would you like to proceed with examining your new body?"

"Hmm. I don't think we will be able to solve anything with the equipment we have on board. So, I think we should proceed with something simple. Something basic, like noting the changes in my physiology. I am curious how similar it is to your own."

"Very well, let's get to work." He gestured for Xib to lead the way, and she pushed herself up the halls along the railing toward the first ring of the station. He caught himself looking at her pink butt, which peeked from beneath the bottom of her shirt. He looked at the back of her head, and her spiral-marked cranium reminded him of a big, fancy hairdo he had seen once at a diplomatic convention. She really was quite beautiful, despite her strangeness, or perhaps because of it. He wondered if the person who had been in the escape pod had a head like her's? It seemed an unlikely coincidence, but then, what had happened to her could have been called miraculous. Then he remembered the age of the specimen, and he began to wonder if there was a connection to the origins of his own species.

Once in the medical bay, Xib turned to Danard by the exam table. "So, keeping it simple." She pulled her shirt off over her head, her breasts wobbling slightly in the low gravity. She removed the bandage from her navel, and was relieved to see that it seemed fully healed. To Danard, it looked like a normal human bellybutton on a flat tummy. "Will you help me take measurements of my, um physiology?" She asked a little shyly.

"What do I look like, a tailor?" Danard joked, trying his best not to look embarrassed.

"You look like a scientist, Dan, unless these eyes deceive me. Taking measurements is your job."

"Of course," He relented. "Get on the scanner?"

She obliged and laid down on the warm glass surface, which lit up and began to calibrate its gentle laser scanners.

"What, um, do you want me to measure, exactly?" Danard asked.

"Everything," she answered.