* * *
This pattern continues for some time. She comes to work, I fuck her, she takes my cum. Veronica is getting impatient at the lack of a pregnancy announcement, but good things take time. It often takes more than a few weeks to get a woman pregnant, and that’s when the sperm being provided to her womb is not being engineered every which way possible.
I concentrate on Lydia when she is with me, and on my work at all other times.
And I prepare another formulation.
And I try it again.
Back to the woods I go on a Friday night, with two days to work out the kinks and enjoy the raw experience of nature as animals experience it. I am about to be unplugged from humanity, and jacked back into the wild. I can hardly wait.
I’ve made several adjustments. This time, I should be able to take the dose, assume an animal form, and stay in it for an extended period of time before returning to my human self. I am starting to consider the effects of repeat dosages, the fact that I am probably stacking all kinds of things one on top of the other, and causing interactions between the slightly different compounds.
Ideally, I would refrain from taking anything until they were all metabolized out of my system, but that could take months. And who has months when discoveries are mere minutes away?
This time I don’t wait for the moon to find its fullness. I don’t even wait until dark. I find a cozy spot off the trail again, and I drink the dose.
Within minutes, I am entirely animal, scenting delicate smells that could never have been available to my human nose. The world is an entirely different place to these senses. My human life seems laughably irrelevant now. I wonder if it was real at all. Seems like a mad dream that pushes at the edges of my ability to understand.
* * *
Lydia
I come into work on Monday, and Simon isn’t there yet again. This time he doesn’t show up while I’m talking to the printer. That makes me nervous. Around ten in the morning, I call up to Veronica’s office to see if he’s coming in or not, because I might as well go home if not. She tells me to wait and she will get back to me.
I wait until 5 p.m., having done nothing, then I go home with a hollow feeling in my stomach. I never realized how much I felt Simon’s presence in my life before. Even when we weren’t at work and didn’t see each other, I could feel him somehow. I don’t feel him now. There’s an absence where he used to be, and it is making me nervous.
The next day, I go into work and I find Veronica Valentine waiting for me in the lab. She looks grim, and seeing her there gives me a very bad feeling.
“Simon’s car has been found at the edge of a forest. We have reason to believe he’s gotten lost on a hike,” she says.
Has he, though? I have to wonder. I know he has been experimenting on himself, and I know he doesn’t want to do it around me anymore. I bet he went out there, took his formula, and is now either running around as an animal with no sense of time, or got eaten, or shot, or had some other horror befall him that only happens to unfortunate wild animals.
My eyes fill with tears as I try to hold back from telling on him. Something about Veronica makes it very clear she would not deal with that revelation well.
“You can continue on your work here,” she says. “I am sure he will be found soon. Try not to worry. Simon is a big boy.”
She leaves on that note, probably thinking I am going to do just what she says. She doesn’t know me very well, however. I won’t abandon my work entirely, but I won’t abandon Simon at all.
I take his notes and my transcriptions, I put them in my car, and I drive out to the forest to join the search for Simon. A lot of people are out here. The company has mobilized a large percentage of the workforce to be here, and others as well.
I am barely anyone among the crowd, but I join a group and we start walking. They’re looking for signs of him being lost in some way. Overhead, a helicopter is running search patterns.
The searchers are organized already and I get put into a group. We spend the day scouring a part of the forest that doesn’t feel right to me, but I can’t just run off into the woods. That’s just going to get me lost too.
As the hours pass, I become even more nervous. What if he did just have an accident? Or what if he took a new formulation and it killed him? We could easily find a body out here.
I try not to freak out, because that’s not going to help. I have a feeling something has gone wrong out here, like he’s made a mistake that there won’t be any coming back from. I know something about him nobody else knows, and it would help so much if only I could tell them, but I will sound insane if I do. It’s an absolute catch-22, and I hate it.
The day is long and exhausting, and we find nothing. There’s not a hint of him anywhere.
“It’s like he walked into the bush and disappeared,” one of the team leaders says. “The dogs can’t even get a trace past a point. It’s odd. Plenty of animals about, though.”
“What kind of animals?” I ask the question.
“Wolves, most likely,” he says. “Dogs are interested, but not predatory. So probably not deer or pigs or prey animals.”
The image of Simon standing over me, a man to his shoulders, but not above that point comes back to mind. He could be a wolf right now, and they’d never know. Can I tell them?