Psychomorph

“In the very earliest time,

When both people and animals lived on earth,

A person could become an animal if he wanted to

And an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

And sometimes animals

And there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

Might have strange consequences.

It could suddenly come alive

And what people wanted to happen could happen –

All you had to do was say it.

Nobody could explain this:

That’s the way it was.”

Eskimo Magic Words

1

I lie snarling on the couch, in the little hospital treatment room. The couch is black plastic, sticky to the touch; it’s glued for a moment to my skin when I try and move. Yet it’s cold; the whole room is cold; it has that cold non-human smell – shit masked by disinfectant and sick-drugs that contain medical processes I no longer understand. The company Doctor watches me. He stares into my eyes; he like a pin-eyed, grey skinned insect, me – his victim - raw, unable to connect anymore. No wonder; who could respond to his procedures? The most I can hope for is that I can fool him somehow. But he is monitoring my progress with the cold detachment his profession is getting to be famed for. There is interest there of course, but it is the interest of a vivisector in a freak of animal nature, interest that will confirm his theories, his mechanistic reduced worldview, and his position of safety, of authority. He’d call it professionalism, I guess. The little wisps of silvery hair behind his ears seem to tremble slightly as I howl out my name yet again. That’s all I’ve got to cling to in my imploding self – a name, a name that meant much more an hour ago.

“Imagi” he repeats, calmly.

My name, but no longer me. His skin is repulsive, a grey shadow of human skin, I conclude. It starts to provoke feelings of extreme rage mixed with liberated excitement in my solar plexus as my enhanced part-wolf consciousness judders down my spinal column at fifteen-second intervals. Animal thought is similar to human thought, though it speaks in the immediate and the sensations of your senses are a thousand times as intense when they hit your brain. Well, four times as intense, to be precise. That would be the size of my enhanced wolf sense consciousness. That brain area is four times as large in a wolf as it is in a human’s. Buddha, it feels like more. These are the most pleasurable animal sensations I have ever got off any piece of genetic code. Meat and sex and lust and hunger.

On the way in, I’d seen my face twisted, part wolf snarl, in the glass door. I knew then that the morph had been a powerful one. Now I was in the Company’s hands. Trouble is, the genetic pattern is only three quarters complete, the psycho morphing still spasmodic. If only I was in the privacy of my own home. I know I have to remain in control, no matter how beautiful, fierce and wild it feels. Or Herr Doktor will exert a restraint sequence. Invade my mind with his spider narcotics. If I can keep control, I can still get out.

“We will transfer you now Imagi. A private ward. You don’t need to fight anymore.” he peers at me, muttering “psychotic,” under his breath.

But I still can’t feel him there as another person, another human being. Maybe I have ended up reduced, rather than enhanced. Yes, that last sentence, he spoke, it seemed to be in a foreign language. I can feel control, life slipping away from me. His hands like insect legs, fuss around me.

“You’ve taken a splice too far.” His mouth makes empty human sounds. He prepares a needle.

“I am actually going to die then? I have dismembered my soul you know. Can you tell me what is going to happen to my corpse?”

“You’re not going to die. You’re going to…..”

It is gonna be damned difficult. Holding. On. I look down at my half naked body, peachy and shivering, inside ripped black and red clothes. My limbs look longer it seems to me; they are swollen with animal energy - so fierce and terrifying, so compelling that the part of me that is still human, curls up inside myself and merges with the animal completely. I drop down from the couch, onto the floor and start prowling towards The Doc. He is still smiling as he backs away, (smile is fear, I think) still preparing the injection, which will shut my mind like a sledgehammer, and forever. An end to my freefall consciousness. My legs and arms ripple silver haired and I am in a dark, earthy, luminous forest, the scents and tracks of other animals, swirling in the air around me like dancing ribbons whirled by invisible hands. My eyes follow the twisting scents, ears pricking for the slightest sound of a footfall. A cracking twig, a bird shriek, an animal call. I must remember, I designed this.

The Company doctor runs from me, thin and naked. On padded feet, I lunge after him. I want to eat. He stumbles and I’m staring at his flaccid stomach, thin spindles of drool spewling softly from my now elongated jaw.

On the dark earth of the forest floor, I feel the transformation complete. Dropping again to all fours, I let the fierceness seize my brain like a fit. My eyes beating red, his eyes wild, the pulse is hunger. Eat or be eaten. Sinews bulge; pursuit along the pathways the velvet track ways the grass parted like the hair of an ogre, rocks bulge like his nose and mouth. Howl. Howl. I sink my incisors into his neck. Long sharp teeth I’ve got, and the blood tastes of metal. Then I see the needle. With insect determination, he thrusts it into my leg; a proboscis. His chemicals are inside me. His smug face glides superior. I feel myself fading, fading, into the earth.

The last programme I was working on – Wolf Creation - kicks in, in what’s left of my mind.

Before any man existed, in a black, black forest at the edge of the world, there existed a pack of the fiercest wolves imaginable. Grimpner was one, and Hari Black another. A Hell Wolf and a Heaven Wolf, for the Green Wolves were not yet here.

Their eyes were paler and more baleful than the loneliest autumn moon; their fur shimmered black and silver and purple; their ears were alert to every woodfall. By night they would retire to a warm Urth, which Hari Black had made with one swipe of his giant paw; because before any man existed, a wolf could leap to the end of the universe in one mighty bound. The Urth was lined with feathers and leaves and fur, and the warm dry red earth from under the forest...

The wolves liked to curl round in the Urth, in the warmth of each other’s arms, and their sweet musky smell would permeate upwards through the forest floor. Hari Black would go there, but he really preferred the forest floor. The trees in that forest were over a hundred feet high, their trunks dark, their foliage green and verdant. Because wolves are the cleverest, during the day, the gods would send beautiful twisting scents which the wolves perceived as lines of luminous colour flitting like grass snakes around the dark trunks of the forest and around the entrance to their Urth. The wolves became very wise, and in future times, when some of them took a human shape, they still remembered these beautiful prayers of love, which whispered over the mossy earth floor. One wolf, her name was Shera, was young and beautiful, pure black was her glossy coat. She was cleverest of all the wolves, and would spend days on her own, going off on a hunting trip, or following these geisha scents, right up to the edge of the forest, where she would let the cool, silver blue waters of the mountain stream tickle between her long, hairy feet. She was the most beautiful; all the other wolves desired her. One night, as she slept, the gods grew her sleek, lithe silver limbs, like a lady, and paws became hands. And she was the first wolf that walked upright.