Rat Morph

I focused my thoughts, forming a mental picture of the rat. And then . . . I felt the change begin.

I was shrinking. Shrinking very fast. For a human, I'm not very big. In fact, I'm kind of short. But I was a lot bigger than a rat, so it was a pretty big change in size.

My T-shirt and my jeans were suddenly very loose.

I looked at Rachel. Huge long whiskers were growing out of her still-human mouth.

The side of the cabinets beside me grew higher and higher. They had originally been maybe three feet high. Soon they seemed as tall as a three-story building. The grain in the wood looked like huge swirling patterns, like strange paintings the size of murals.

The one-foot squares of tan and green linoleum seemed to double and triple and quadruple in size, until each was as big as a parking space.

As I shrank, my clothes folded and billowed down over me like a collapsed circus tent.

My skin turned a sort of pinkish-gray, then suddenly sprouted white fur. My legs were shriveling. My arms were shriveling. My face bulged like a zit about to pop. My nose poked way out, farther and farther. My face became pointed.

And then, the rat's senses replaced my own.

On came the ears, like someone had thrown a switch. On came the nose.

And on came the rat's instincts, bubbling up in my human mind and carrying their messages of fear and hunger and more fear.

<Yikes!> Rachel commented. <Nervous little things, aren't they?>

The rat's eyes weren't any better than my own. In fact, they weren't quite as good. Like lots of animals I've been, the eyes were better at seeing movement than at seeing colors and shapes. Nothing was moving, so my vision was kind of, I don't know . . . kind of dull.

I could see Rachel well enough, though. We were made from the same rat's DNA, so were basically the same rat. I could see her long, naked pink tail. That tail is the reason people hate rats, but think squirrels are cute.

That, plus the fact that rats have been known to nibble on humans from time to time.

The rat's hearing was excellent, but it was its sense of smell that was really amazing. I twitched my little rat nose and the whole world sent me messages.

I smelled the chemicals in the cabinets. I smelled the lingering aromas of hundreds of different kids who had passed through the room that day. I even smelled the seeds and nuts in the maze, up on the table.

I felt the rat's brain beginning to surge more strongly up beneath my own. The rat instincts were coming out. Fear. Not the sharp sudden fear a human might feel. It was the eternal fear of a small animal in a world of great big predators.

And the hunger. The hunger of a tiny animal who will spend its entire life, every single minute of its life, searching for its next meal.

But there was also the intelligence.

When you morph an animal, its instincts come through. You don't get its memories, usually, but you do get its instincts. Its basic abilities are there.

This rat was very nervous. It was afraid of being out in the open. It wanted to be next to the wall so that enemies would have a harder time attacking it. I decided that wasn't a bad instinct.

<Maybe we should get somewhere safer?> I asked Rachel in thought-speak.

<Oh, yes, definitely,> she agreed.

The little rat legs powered up and we took off. Not fast, really, but it seemed fast because I was so low to the ground. My nose was just a quarter of an inch above the linoleum. As I waddle-walked along I saw huge walls looming over me - the sides of the lab tables. And I saw sparse forests of trees - actually the legs of chairs.

I scooted along the corner of the wall with Rachel right behind me.

<That is not an attractive tail,> Rachel said. <I mean, I'm a rat and I still think it looks bad.>

Then I saw the table where my maze was set up. The real Courtney was up there. I checked out the area.

<I think we can climb up my backpack onto the chair. Then onto my sweater, then jump to the tabletop.>

<I'm following you,> Rachel said. <Lead the way, Rat-girl.>

The rat body was amazingly good at climbing and scampering up to the tabletop. You wouldn't think that squat body and those stubby little legs would be good for climbing, but I really do believe that rat could have gone just about anywhere it wanted to go.