Mosquito Morph

"So how do I acquire it without it acquiring me at the same time?" Prince Jake asked nervously.

"Don't be a big baby," Marco said. "Like you've never been bitten by a mosquito?"

"Never in cold blood," Prince Jake said.

It was several days later. My human friends attend school five days in a row, then do not attend for two days. They don't know why. But they try and arrange for missions to take place on non-school days.

We were in the barn, surrounding a transparent glass box. In the box were a number of small, fragile-looking flying insects.

"You need to catch one in your hand. Don't squeeze too hard or you'll kill it," Cassie said. "Like this." She stuck her hand in the box. After two unsuccessful attempts, she enclosed a mosquito in her hand.

She withdrew her hand, covered the box again, and began to focus on the mosquito. After a moment she opened her eyes. "Okay, who's next?"

"Just hand me your mosquito," Marco said. "It probably already bit you, so maybe it's not hungry anymore."

"We can't all morph the same mosquito," Cassie said. "Only females suck blood. Males are useless."

"Amen," Rachel said, then laughed.

"So what's that mosquito in your hand?" Marco demanded.

"Like I know?" Cassie said. "I don't have a magnifying glass that good. And even if I did, how exactly do you tell a male from a female?"

"That's easy," Marco said. "The males think loud belching is funny and the females don't."

"Is there any chance we could just get on with this?" Prince Jake asked.

<Yes,> I said. <I do not fear the bite of these tiny insects.> I put my hand inside the glass cage. I had some difficulty grabbing one of the creatures, though. Human hands are stronger and faster than Andalite hands. In the end, Cassie grabbed a mosquito and handed it to me.

<Thank you,> I said, and began to acquire the necessary DNA.

When we had all finished Prince Jake said, "Okay. Let's go."

[...]

Someday Andalite scientists will find a way to make the morphing technology totally predictable and logical. But for now it is often erratic, weird, and totally illogical. Especially when morphing bizarre Earth animals.

My hind legs had finished shrinking when they were still as big as an Earth cat's legs. Then they began to reverse and grow again. My hind legs thinned, becoming mere sticks, but their length became ridiculous. Longer than the rest of me all together!

My front legs became somewhat shorter stick legs and a third pair grew from my arms.

I was no longer on all fours. I was on all sixes. I was standing on insect legs, yet most of my body was still Andalite. A very small Andalite, but far too large to move around on insect legs.

My stalk eyes crawled forward across my head, down to a point just above my main eyes. They began to extrude. They grew like some horrible fast-sprouting tree. A long, bare stick that then sprouted new branches: short, stunted, twisted branches. Bulging round pods popped from my head at the base of these hairy sticks - these antennae - and began to move them around.

My main eyes were still functioning, but from the antennae I received a whole onslaught of new sensory input. Temperature! Wind direction! Sound waves from the rustling leaves, from the muddy, far-off voices, and sharp, disturbing sounds from the explosions of gunpowder and the impact thud of massive bullets all around me.

I was no longer worried much about the bullets. I was too small to hit except by the most amazingly unlucky shot. I was less than an inch long and getting smaller.

The dirt looked like a field strewn with boulders. The trunks of the bushes sprouting up from the ground were thicker and taller than any tree on Earth or my planet.

My nostril slits closed and began to twist and push outward. Two stubby, hairy palps appeared, and these immediately began feeding an entirely new set of data to my brain.

Smell! But not smell as an Andalite or human knows it. This was specific, targeted, directed smell. It wasn't smell that waits passively for whatever comes along. The palps were searching the molecules of the breeze, sampling, looking . . .

Hungry.

Gossamer wings rose from the melting flesh on my back. My body pinched into three distinct segments: a tiny head, a muscular thorax, and a swollen, vast abdomen. Overlapping armored plates clanked down the bottom of my abdomen.

And yet, through all this, a tiny, shrunken version of my Andalite main eyes continued to function.

I wish they hadn't. I wish I'd never had to see what happened next.

From my chin, from the place where a human would have had a mouth, it grew. A spear! A needle! Impossibly long. On the end were tiny, serrated teeth, almost like the teeth of a saw.

Inside the spear it was hollow. It was a straw. A tube for sucking blood.

A retractable sheath grew along with the spear. A sheath that would help keep the needle sharp.

Blood.

That was my goal. That was my hunger.

Blood!

I fired my gossamer wings and rose, unsteady and wild, upward, upward, to where my palps had located the scent they sought: the sweet scent of exhaled animal breath. The guidepost that pointed the way to food.

That's when my eyes stopped working. I was blind for a few seconds as the morph completed. I shrank some more, and suddenly from my forehead popped two bulging compound eyes.

Through them I saw a vision of reality shattered into thousands of tiny pictures. Thousands of tiny pictures, each different from the next, each a fragment of distorted light and eerie colors and nightmarish swirls of energy.

I never lost control of the morph. I mean, I never forgot who I was, or what I was, as sometimes happens in a morph you're doing for the first time.

So it wasn't that I lost my mind. It was simply that the hunger of the mosquito was so great, so powerful, so totally clear and forceful, that I felt myself going along with it. Accepting it.

I was flying, and knowing who I was, and yet as the mosquito's instincts cried, "Blood! Blood!" I answered, "Yes! Yes!"

Mosquitoes do not fly with the speed and acrobatic genius of a fly. Or with the precision and power of a bird. They fly wildly, blown by chance breezes. The legs dangle long and drag at the air. The wings are underpowered. But the mosquito gets where it's going.

It seems a harmless insect when you see it. But I have done some research. Mosquitoes transmit bacteria, viruses, and parasites. They carry the diseases encephalitis, yellow fever, and malaria.

Malaria alone kills two million humans each year. Mosquitoes are the greatest mass murderers on planet Earth.

<Ax! Ax! Talk to me,> Prince Jake called, and I realized suddenly that he'd been yelling for some time.

<I am fine,> I said. <I have morphed to mosquito.>

<Good,> he said. <Look, I know what you're feeling right now. Don't fight it. The hunger stops once you bite.>

<Follow the smell,> Cassie said. <That's carbon dioxide your palps are smelling. It comes off animals, including humans. Go for it.>

I rose, hungry, to the open window. But there I was confused. There were many warm, carbon dioxide-emitting creatures.

The one I was looking for was lying down. Lying still. I focused on the mosquito senses. I struggled to put together the sound waves from my antennae, the smell of carbon dioxide from my palps, and the shattered, lurid view through my compound eyes.

Huge, huge, vast beyond imagining, stretched my target. Hundreds of times my length, millions of times my weight, Hewlett Aldershot the Third lay prone, oozing attractive aromas.

I fluttered on gossamer wings and landed. I was on a rough, uneven surface. There were bumps and ridges of warm, pink flesh. Here and there, like lone trees scattered on a dry plain, hairs rose like curved spears from the flesh.

The flesh was alive. It moved slightly, causing me to rise and fall. The human was breathing. But more fascinating than the slow rise and fall of breath, was the Thump! Thump! Thump! of a drumbeat beneath my feet.

A pulse. The beating pulse of blood rushing through arteries and veins.

And then . . .

POP!