Jake Orca Morph

The contours of my body stretched! Shot out in every direction - up, down, forward and back, right and left.

My forehead poured out in front of me like gravel from a dump truck. My eyes migrated to the sides of my head. My ears were swallowed up in blubber.

Couldn't breathe! For a moment my throat closed. Then I felt cool, clean air again. Sucked in through the blowhole in the back of my neck.

My legs twisted around each other like a fat stick of raspberry licorice. A twenty-five-foot-long stick of licorice!

Just behind my blowhole a dorsal fin grew out of my spine and shot six and a half feet into the air. An enormous jet-black triangle, taller than my human self.

My belly was a vast expanse of smooth white. My back was as black as a wet tire. My mouth filled with teeth the size of a hammer's claw head.

I was sure I was going to fill the entire ocean before the morph was complete. For a panicked second my human brain wondered how something this big could float.

And then I felt the stirrings of the orca's mind. Instincts were activated. Senses alerted brain centers.

Threats? No. There were no threats. Threats could not exist. They were an impossibility. What could challenge my power?

But prey? Ah, yes, prey could exist. Anything in the vast, endless, unmeasured ocean could be my prey. Anything bathed in seawater was my meat.

I was bigger, faster, smarter, more dangerous than anything in the ocean. I was deadly, but not with the random, malevolent violence of the shark. I could plan. I could cooperate. I could think.

In my mind were the templates, like schematics drawn with echo images. I saw the patterns of a pod of orcas moving together, communicating, working together to snare the swift sea lions, to shove the seals off their ice floes, to leap clear up onto the beach to drag a walrus to its doom.

I saw all this, I the human. And I felt the shock of seeing the familiar in a strange place. Wolves work together, like the orcas. But the closest analogy to orca behavior was found much closer to home, among my own species.