Seventeen Percent
Remember what I said about luck? This would be the appropriate moment to reconsider it.
Yes, I had been lucky. Spectacularly lucky, depending on how charitable you were feeling. I fled home without a destination and found an abandoned laboratory containing exactly the sort of technology I needed. Its computers still worked, its genetic archives were readable, its serum-production equipment was largely intact, and its cryogenic systems had preserved samples for decades. I had even found research describing the biological principle I needed to overwrite the rabbit conversion.
Very lucky. There was, however, a small complication. The laboratory also contained an immortal psychic spider abomination and several thousand children. Luck is rarely distributed evenly.
I was still watching Spider Three's feed when something touched my mind. There isn't a better word for it. Touched.
No sound. No image. No voice whispering inside my skull. At first there was only pressure, and I assumed it was another rabbit panic response. My heart accelerated, my ears flattened, and nausea tightened my stomach. Then the sensation changed. Fear usually came from inside me. This felt external, a slow pressure pushing against something I hadn't known possessed an outside.
My thoughts became difficult to hold. Not confused exactly. They felt observed. That was worse.
I pulled my hands away from the terminal as though the keyboard had shocked me. On Spider Three's feed, the Matriarch still had one hand pressed against the containment field. Electricity burned across her fingers in brilliant blue threads, tissue charring and splitting only to reconstruct itself almost immediately. Around her, thousands of Progeny remained motionless in that horrible shared stillness. Waiting. Listening. The pressure increased.
Something brushed against the memory of the coyotes. For an instant I smelled blood and limestone again. Then Mom's kitchen. Then Kira laughing while I lay paralyzed on the carpet with marker across my face. Then Dad. That frightened me enough to turn fear into anger.
Leona: "Get the fuck out."
The presence withdrew slightly. It wasn't gone. It felt interested.
I didn't know whether the Matriarch understood the words. At that point I didn't even know whether what I was experiencing qualified as communication. Arcadia's researchers had called it tele-empathetic broadcast, which was an impressive scientific phrase meaning something gigantic was touching your emotions and everyone involved hated it.
I killed Spider Three's audio feed. Nothing changed. I blanked the video. Still nothing. The pressure remained. So it wasn't traveling through the drone. Wonderful.
I reopened the Chimera archive. If an experimental creature was crawling around inside my mental personal space, I wanted the manual. The final report was signed by Dr. A. Meridian and dated October 23, 1998. I'd already read parts of it while searching for useful biology, but now I read it properly. Not as an engineer looking for tools. As potential prey looking for a warning label.
// PROJECT CHIMERA - FINAL REPORT
// DR. A. MERIDIAN
// DATE: 10.23.1998
PHASE III testing has proven a catastrophic failure.
Subject Zero, designated "The Matriarch," has achieved
unexpected levels of bio-integration. Arachnid sequences
have not supplemented host biology. They have subsumed it.
Regenerative capacity exceeds all projections.
Observed growth remains exponential.
Subject has developed a rudimentary tele-empathetic
broadcast producing severe psychological trauma in
research personnel within effective range.
Standard dampening protocols ineffective.
Subject has demonstrated asexual reproduction.
Offspring, designated PROGENY, display coordinated
behavior and apparent hive-directed cognition.
Initial containment has failed.
Sub-Levels 03 through 05 are sealed.
I swallowed. The presence shifted again, and this time something came with it. Hunger. Not ordinary hunger. Not the empty-stomach irritation I'd experienced after hours of walking. This was vast, deep and directionless, something that had been hungry so long that hunger had stopped being an inconvenience and become part of its identity. Then it vanished.
I gripped the edge of the desk and kept reading.
Termination is no longer considered feasible.
Conventional ballistic trauma regenerated within seconds.
Incineration protocols failed.
High thermal exposure appears to accelerate aspects
of recovery.
All remaining personnel are ordered to evacuate.
The on-site geothermal generator has been rerouted
to permanent containment.
As long as the generator remains operational,
Subject Zero and surviving Progeny will remain isolated.
If containment power fails...
May God have mercy on whoever finds this place.
I stared at the final sentence for longer than I should have. Scientists generally avoid putting God into technical reports. That's usually a bad sign.
I opened the power system. The display refreshed almost immediately.
EXTERNAL POWER: OFFLINE
GEOTHERMAL PRIMARY: FAILURE
AUXILIARY CONTAINMENT RESERVE: 16%
CONTAINMENT LOAD:
ELEVATED
Leona: "Sixteen."
The Matriarch had dropped the reserve by an entire percentage point in minutes. That didn't necessarily mean sixteen minutes remained. Battery discharge wasn't linear, load varied, reserve calculations changed depending on consumption, and emergency systems usually kept conservative estimates. Unfortunately, none of those facts made sixteen percent larger.
I restored Spider Three's video. The Matriarch had removed her hand from the field. Good. Then she placed both hands against it.
Leona: "Oh, come on."
Blue-white electricity exploded across her arms. The containment system screamed through half a dozen monitoring channels as the field increased output. Her flesh burned, regenerated, burned again, and each cycle seemed to teach her something. The presence in my mind deepened with it. Curiosity. Pain. Hunger. Then something almost childish. Attention.
She knew something new had entered her world. Me.
I found myself wondering how long she'd actually been down there. Twenty-eight years since the final report, perhaps longer if the earlier phases of Chimera had already kept her isolated. Decades underground without sunlight, ordinary people or anything except her own offspring and the machines designed to imprison her. For one dangerous moment, I felt sorry for her. The next psychic pulse contained enough predatory hunger to kill that sympathy almost immediately.
Leona: "Nope."
I minimized the feed and opened Spider One's camera outside. The search party had moved much closer. Wolves were spreading across the slope beneath the ruined fence, their flashlights cutting between trees. One officer had stopped near what remained of Arcadia's old surface signage, while two others searched along the exposed concrete.
Kira followed behind them. Her orange tail moved slowly over the limestone, scales briefly catching the flashlight beams. She was speaking to one of the Authority officers, but Spider One was too far away to hear clearly. Then she stopped. Lowered her head. Smelled the air. Fuck.
Lamias weren't wolves, but they weren't exactly deficient in chemical senses either. Kira knew what I smelled like, probably better than anyone alive. She'd spent ten years living with me. And I had walked directly to Arcadia while bleeding from several places.
Leona: "Double fuck."
I changed windows again. Containment: sixteen percent. Search party: approaching. Electric Black Widow simulation: incomplete. My choices had become remarkably concise.
I could stay and continue testing. Scientifically, that was the smart option. I needed hours at minimum, preferably days, to model every interaction before allowing a serum to rewrite my skeleton, nervous system, organs, muscles and immune response. Staying also meant Kira would find me. The Authority would take me home. Arcadia would probably be seized. My work would be examined, the facility sealed again, and somebody might notice that the recently classified Domestic rabbit possessed enough hybrid-engineering knowledge to be extremely valuable in one of those wonderfully economical government technical programs.
I could run instead. In my current body. Past Authority wolves. Past Kira. Across rough Texas hills after a night without sleep, three dead coyotes, bruised ribs and several damaged drones. That plan had the technical advantage of being impossible.
Or I could use 'Electric Black Widow'. Now.
I stared at the unfinished simulation.
PROJECT Electric Black Widow
INTEGRATION CONFIDENCE: 71%
PREDICTED MAJOR SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY:
ACCEPTABLE
REGENERATIVE CASCADE:
UNVERIFIED
NEURAL LOAD:
CRITICAL
MUSCULOSKELETAL RECONSTRUCTION:
CRITICAL
HOST SURVIVAL PROBABILITY:
UNRESOLVED
Seventy-one percent confidence was terrible. For a bridge, unacceptable. For a vehicle, criminal. For something I intended to inject into my bloodstream and allow to redesign almost every important structure in my body, seventy-one percent was the biological equivalent of Russian roulette with additional paperwork. I needed more time. Twelve hours would help. Twenty-four would be much better. Three days would allow repeated simulations and corrections. A week might even have made me comfortable enough to pretend I wasn't terrified.
I had maybe an hour before Kira found the entrance. Maybe less. And somewhere beneath me, sixteen percent stood between Texas and whatever Arcadia had spent decades trying to bury.
My hands started moving. Not because I'd stopped being afraid. Because the decision had already been made.
Leona: "Okay."
I opened Electric Black Widow's final architecture and began locking sequences. Adult human proportions. Blonde hair. Blue eyes rebuilt around predatory low-light structures. Human external phenotype, with four retractable Latrodectus-derived limbs anchored around a reinforced thoracic spine. Electrocyte nodes. Feline explosive musculature and reflex architecture. Reinforced retractable claws and fangs. Neurotoxic and paralytic venom. Silk production. Bioelectric perception. Electrical and toxin resistance. Beneath all of it, a stabilized regenerative cascade designed to keep the entire construction alive while the rabbit genome was crushed under dominant replacement. Every confirmation produced another warning. I confirmed anyway.
Regeneration had to come first in priority. If it failed, every other design choice became irrelevant. I tied regenerative activation directly to trauma markers generated during conversion. Damage would trigger repair. Repair would allow further conversion. Further conversion would create more damage, which would trigger more repair. A controlled biological feedback loop. The word controlled was doing dangerous work in that sentence.
I added tumor suppression, growth limits and metabolic throttles. Then more stop conditions. Then redundant stop conditions for the stop conditions. Chimera had taught me what happened when regeneration forgot when to quit.
I ran another simulation. Sixty-eight percent. Worse.
Leona: "Fuck you too."
I changed two pathways. Seventy-three. Another. Seventy-six. Neural collapse remained the largest problem, so I borrowed a synchronization sequence from one of Arcadia's feline reflex projects and integrated it with the arachnid distributed motor architecture. Seventy-nine percent. Good. Not actually good. Better.
Spider One transmitted voices. I opened the external audio.
GHCA Officer: "...old structure here."
Then Kira answered.
Kira: "Leona likes old structures."
I closed my eyes. Of course she fucking knew.
GHCA Officer: "You think she'd enter something unstable?"
Kira: "Yes. Absolutely."
A short pause followed.
Kira: "She'd probably call it interesting first."
I almost felt offended by how accurate that was. Then her voice changed. Less sarcastic. More frightened.
Kira: "Leona!"
Even through the drone microphone, I heard the strain.
Kira: "If you're out here, stop being a fucking idiot and answer me!"
I froze. For a moment Arcadia disappeared. Kira was ten again. Orange tail too large for the room, pointed ears new, angry at everything because anger hurt less than grief. The little sister who bit me because I wouldn't stop playing with those ears, then decorated my paralyzed face with marker. Still a jerk. Still mine. I almost answered through the drone.
The containment terminal chimed.
AUXILIARY RESERVE: 15%
At that exact moment, the psychic pressure hit me hard enough to blur my vision. For perhaps two seconds I wasn't completely certain which emotions belonged to me. Fear, hunger, pain, curiosity, loneliness, rage. Thousands of faint impressions moved beneath one enormous presence, overlapping until I couldn't distinguish individual minds from the thing connecting them.
Then an image entered my head. Not from Spider Three. Not mine. White coats. Glass. Bright surgical lights. Hands pinning down arms that weren't mine. Needles entering flesh. Something cutting. Someone screaming. Then darkness. A darkness so long it felt less like an absence of light and more like a place. Then a hunger.
I tore myself backward from the desk and hit the floor.
Leona: "GET OUT!"
The pressure snapped away. I lay there panting while Spider Six walked toward me and stopped beside my hand, its red optic staring down.
Leona: "I'm fine."
I was arguing with a robot while a telepathic biological disaster tried to share life trauma with me. Fine had become flexible. I dragged myself upright.
There was no time left to understand the Matriarch. No time to determine whether whatever remained of the woman beneath Chimera could think, remember or communicate. No time to perfect the Electric Black Widow struture, build the generator I'd imagined, convince Kira I wasn't insane or run another hundred simulations. There was only the next problem. Survive.
I opened Arcadia's cryogenic inventory. And the miracle continued. The core samples were still there. Latrodectus sequence banks, Electrophorus electrocyte lines, Felidae reinforcement strains, Reptilia stabilized regeneration, toxin-resistance suites, neural integration catalysts, growth regulators and carrier proteins. Most had been preserved inside an isolated cryogenic system powered by a century-rated source independent from containment. Of course they were. Luck. Fucking luck.
I ran for the chemical analysis lab. My ribs objected violently, my legs were already exhausted, and I ignored both. The room came alive in sections as I routed power from a non-containment maintenance battery. Stainless counters reflected failing fluorescent light while robotic arms woke from decades of inactivity and the synthesis system filled its displays with enough yellow warning messages to resemble a small sunrise. Operational. Mostly. Good enough.
I loaded the first samples.
LATRODECTUS BASE: VIABLE
FELIDAE 7-B: VIABLE
REPTILIA 4-A: VIABLE
ELECTROPHORUS DERIVATIVE: VIABLE
CARRIER CATALYST: DEGRADED / ACCEPTABLE
Leona: "I'll take acceptable."
The machine began assembling the serum. Far too slowly.
I watched the first sequence build while keeping Spider One's external feed in one corner of the display. The search party had reached the ruined fence. Kira stopped near the exposed hillside, looked toward the vegetation covering the maintenance entrance and went perfectly still. Then her head turned. Directly toward the hatch.
Kira: "There."
One of the wolf officers approached. His flashlight crossed the rusted steel I'd failed to conceal properly.
GHCA Officer: "Found something."
Leona: "Fuck."
The serum synthesizer chimed. Twenty-two percent complete. Containment reserve: fifteen percent.
The Matriarch touched my mind again, softly this time. Anticipation. That somehow frightened me more.
I watched the synthesis percentage climb. Thirty-one. Thirty-seven. Forty. Each number represented another piece of the thing I had designed being assembled inside the machine. Outside, metal scraped against metal. They were clearing the hatch.
Kira's voice came through the drone again.
Kira: "LEONA! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!"
My hands trembled. Forty-six percent. The machine requested confirmation for a compatibility deviation in the feline reinforcement sequence and recommended aborting synthesis. I overrode it. Fifty-two.
'Electric Black Widow' began collecting in the output chamber drop by drop, blue and faintly luminous beneath the laboratory lights. My serum. My chosen body reduced to liquid. Sixty-four percent.
The psychic pressure sharpened. I could feel the Matriarch beneath me now without looking at the camera. Maybe she sensed the electricity inside the machines. Maybe the biological activity. Maybe she recognized pieces of Chimera's research being assembled into something new. That possibility was deeply unpleasant. Seventy-eight percent.
Above me, the hatch groaned. Someone had reached the manual release. Of course Kira had brought tools. Or Authority personnel had. Or my sister was simply angry enough to open steel through personal spite. Eighty-six.
I prepared everything Arcadia's conversion protocols recommended. Injector. Pain suppressants. Cardiac stimulant. Anti-seizure medication. Fluids. Monitoring leads. None of it was enough. There was no surgical team. No anesthesiologist. No geneticist. No emergency physician. Just me and Spider Six.
I looked at the drone.
Leona: "Congratulations. You're promoted to medical staff."
Its optic focused on me.
Leona: "Try not to let the responsibility change you."
Ninety-three percent. The hatch finally opened somewhere above. The sound traveled through the facility. Then came voices. Kira's voice first.
Kira: "LEONA!"
The Matriarch reacted. Every containment sensor spiked simultaneously. My head filled with a psychic shriek so intense that my knees gave out. Spider Three's surviving feed became a blur of moving chitin and electrical light as thousands of Progeny suddenly broke their stillness at once. The Matriarch slammed against the containment field, and the reserve display dropped again.
CONTAINMENT LOAD: CRITICAL
AUXILIARY RESERVE: 14%
The synthesizer chimed.
PROJECT 'Electric Black Widow'
SYNTHESIS COMPLETE
WARNING:
FORMULATION HAS NOT COMPLETED
FULL HOST-SPECIFIC VALIDATION.
ADMINISTRATION NOT RECOMMENDED.
I stared at the vial. Then toward the ceiling. Kira was inside Arcadia. The Authority was behind her. The Matriarch was waking. Fourteen percent remained. And the machine wanted more testing. I laughed.
Not because anything was funny. Sometimes reality gives you enough bad options that laughter becomes the only vote left. I removed the vial from the machine. The glass was warm. Blue light shone through my small white fingers. This was the serum I'd wanted days to test, maybe weeks. Instead I had minutes. I filled the injector. My hands stopped shaking.
That surprised me until I realized the decision had removed the only thing that could still paralyze me. Uncertainty.
There was no safe choice anymore. If I stayed rabbit, Kira caught me. If I tried to run rabbit, the wolves caught me. If containment failed, none of those problems mattered. And if the Electric Black Widow serum killed me? Well. At least that outcome was straightforward.
I pressed the injector against my arm.
Leona: "Do or die."
Then I hesitated for one last second and thought about what those words actually meant. My bones would lengthen. Muscles would tear apart and rebuild around new attachment points. My nervous system would rewrite itself while I remained inside it. Four new limbs would construct themselves along my spine. My teeth, eyes, glands, organs and metabolism would change while a regenerative cascade desperately tried to repair the damage caused by the transformation itself. Rabbit biology would not leave politely. I intended to murder it at the cellular level.
This was going to hurt. Not hospital hurt. Not coyote hurt. Something new. Something I'd designed personally.
Despite everything, I smiled.
Leona: "Mostly do."
Above me, Kira shouted my name again. Below me, the Matriarch screamed without using a voice. And I pressed the injector trigger.