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A Case Of The Hive
🕑 Added 2021-11-01 12:58:06 +0000 UTCWoman: Iron Wolves
Wasp: Creative Commons: Brian Gratwicke
The explosion at the Biogenetics Plant, ten kilometres away, was two years in the past now. Both the government watchdogs and the engineers at the site claimed the cleanup was complete. All the contaminated creatures had been found and destroyed. Biogenetics had specialised in creating custom lifeforms using a combination of nanotechnology and genetic engineering. The disaster could have been much worse, of course. Very few people had been exposed to the emission from the plant and even fewer had suffered any side effects. Those had been paid off, the contaminated land purchased and everything was slowly returning to normal.
Madeleine had lived most of her life in the city. Like many city girls she knew where food came from: the supermarket. When her grandmother became sick, she decided to help out and took a working vacation on her grandparent’s farm. She arrived, suitcases full of clothes suitable for a vacation, only to be met by a couple of cousins who fitted her out in old coveralls and floppy rubber boots. They gave her a quick tour of the farmyard before taking her to the farmhouse. Madeleine couldn’t believe the dirt and the mess of a working farm.
The farmhouse was cleaner, of course, but it still was dirtier than Madeleine’s pristine apartment. She wondered how she would survive the three weeks she’d agreed to help out. It turned out easier than she thought. What they really needed was a cook and house maid. Those were tasks Madeleine could do and she was soon into the swing of her sick grandmother’s life -- a farmer’s wife, making sure the menfolk and hired hands were fed huge breakfasts and suppers, packing lunches, tending the small garden after she got over her revulsion at the mud and dirt. Imagine that! Food grew in the ground. She helped nurse her grandmother, too. There was little she could do, though, besides keep her comfortable and make sure she got her medications correctly and on time. It was all appreciated by everyone on the farm. Without her help, the orderly cycle of chores and fieldwork would have been much harder.
Everything changed one afternoon. Everyone was out with the spring planting. They’d left in a flurry of diesel fumes and smoke one a half dozen vehicles early that morning, packed lunches in hand. Madeleine wrapped up her chores and cleanup and found herself at a loss after lunch. She’d completed everything on her to do list and found there was nothing she really wanted to do left. Sure, the garden needed weeding again but it had rained, turning the small plot into a swamp. Weeding under those conditions was hardly what Madeleine relished at the moment. After a few minutes surfing the relatively few holovision channels the farm budget allowed, she became bored. There was simply nothing on.
Madeleine was not the type to knit or do crafts. Her busy life in the city had never allowed for those kinds of pastimes. She decided to go explore the barn and other farm buildings. Her initial tour had been fast, far too fast. Now that her disgust of dirt and muss had been destroyed by the necessity of farm life, she decided she’d like a proper look around. The empty outbuildings, with their equipment, were just about as boring as the holovision. Mostly empty or containing such things as welding torches or collections of parts and tools, they were not the kind of thing Madeleine found interesting. Besides some of the equipment looked downright dangerous.
That left the barn. It too was mostly empty. The few dairy cattle the farm owned provided a steady, if small, income from sales to a specialty dairy in the nearby town. The cattle were, not unexpectedly, not in the barn. They spent the days wandering one of the pastures, eating grass and chewing their cud. The main level only held one sick sheep that Madeleine had been warned needed left alone. Not knowing the disease it had, she was more than a bit afraid it might be contagious. She gave its stall a wide berth as she headed up the steep stairs to the hay loft.
This was, not unexpectedly, half filled with bales of hay. Though the bulk of the hay was in the form of one tonne hay rolls in various covered storage sheds about the farm, smaller 100 kg rectangular bales had been hoisted into the hay loft by a winch and pulley. These were stacked in piles along both sides leaving about half the floor covered by little more than loose straw. Madeleine was soon covered by a fine dust. Clearly this place needed a cleaning, too, but Madeleine was not up to the task.
An odd buzzing caught her ear. There was a flurry of some kind of insects off in one corner. At first wary, Madeleine approached slowly. Some kind of ball of greyish paper was attached to one of the beams near a crack in the wood. Large yellow and black insects entered and left the ball from an opening at its lower tip. Madeleine had never seen anything like these in the city. She lived high up in an apartment building. Her tiny balcony barely had enough space for her and a chair. She wondered what these strange creatures were and what purpose they served on the farm. Everything else had a purpose, so these must, too.
Everything would have been well had she not accidentally tripped on a rake leaning against one of the beams. It fell, smacking the paper nest. Instantly, a swarm of very angry wasps boiled out, hunting their attacker. The rake received the bulk of their attentions at first but they soon began wider sweeps. Madeleine was, unfortunately, close enough to receive their attentions. It only took a single sting or two for Madeleine to run shrieking from the hay loft. Fortunately, , as soon as they’d driven the attacker away, the wasps lost interest and returned to their nest but not before giving Madeleine a painful collection of stings.
The pain was intense, far worse than anything she’d experienced before. Not know what else to do, she called her cousin’s cell phone and, nearly in panic, explained what had happened. He simply told her to get an anti-histamine lotion from the medicine cabinet, take some aspirin (or something like that) for pain and rest until they got home. Madeleine could do nothing else for it as they clearly weren’t going to come back from the planting to help a silly city girl who’d been stupid enough to attack a wasp’s nest.
The next few hours were the worst but slowly the pain subsided. She was left with a half dozen welts on her arms and lower legs. She decided to lie down on the couch, hoping for the release of sleep. This was not to be. She couldn’t find a comfortable position anywhere. When she sat up, her legs hurt. When she put her feet up, her arms hurt. Finally, she turned the holovision on. Even the boring programs were preferable to worrying about the poison the wasps had injected.
An hour later though, Madeleine began to feel ill. She made her way into the washroom, just in case, the nausea got worse. Here she made a discovery. Her clothing, at least around her waist, was unnaturally loose. She stripped off the coveralls and stood before the full length mirror. Her waist had shrunk, that much was clear. Never a small girl, she knew her measurements well. A quick check with a tape measure confirmed her fears. Her waist, once 70 cm, was now half that. Something was clearly happening. The wasp poison was doing something to her. As she stood there, puzzling what to do, she watched it shrink further. It began to change colour, becoming black, hard and shiny. This strange skin colour quickly spread upward and downward from her waist. She felt weak and soon found herself on all fours in front of the mirror. This stage didn’t last however. Her legs were shrivelling, retreating into her buttocks which had become huge. This stretched out into a yellow and black mass that looked just like the tails of the wasps. It even had the sharp point at it’s tip. Madeleine tried to move it and discovered it was part of her. It slid on the floor, and curled as she moved what she felt were still her legs.
The next change occurred at her sides. Four bumps appeared, on her stomach just in front of her impossibly thin waist. These began to grow, lengthening until they were as long as her missing legs had been. At first tiny, they soon stretched out and hardened as they reached their final form. Madeleine now stood on four wasp legs. It was difficult, but she discovered how to move them. At first, she had to imagine each joint and move it much as a puppeteer handled a marionette. But after nearly an hour, she could move reasonably quickly on them. The distraction of learning to use her new legs distracted her from other changes that were taking place. These she discovered only after she returned to the washroom.
Her upper body was now nothing like it had been. Her breasts had been encased in shiny black chitin and her upper body was rounder and bigger than it had been. She reached up with a hand to touch her new carapace only to make another discovery. Her arms, too, were encased in the strange material to the wrist and were unnaturally thin. As she watched, her hands thinned until on a single finger remained. This grew until it was as long as the rest of her arm. Each finger soon took on a yellowish hue becoming hard and shiny. Finally, from the very tip, a series of joints appeared. It looked exactly like the other four legs she could see attached to her tummy.
Madeleine wondered what would happen next and was now in a panic. She knew she shouldn’t bother the planters but could think of nothing else to do. The cell phone was beyond her six legs now. She simply didn’t have the coordination to open nor dial it. She’d never bothered to program the speech module, either, so she couldn’t simply voice dial. She began to panic, scurrying from room to room. Closed rooms were beyond her now as she could no longer grasp the smooth round handles. In the end, she lay in the centre of the living room, in front of the couch with the holovision droning its incessant drivel in the background.
The next change, she felt rather than saw. A pair of bumps began to grow from near where her shoulders had been. These quickly elongated into strange shapeless masses as long as her body. She felt the urge to push and in the distorted reflection of the holovision’s screen, she watched as the shapeless masses thinned and expanded into a pair of brown chitinous wings. The change spread from there, up her neck to the sides of her face.
Soon the world began to look strange. It was as if it were fragmenting and reforming every few seconds. Her field of vision began to grow during these changes until she could see nearly everything around her. The holovision screen provided the answer once again. Her reflection showed huge black facetted eyes in place of her brown ones. As she stared at the reflection, hardly believing what she’d become, a pair of buds grew from between those fantastic eyes. These quickly expanded into a pair of antennae and the world opened up. Scents were everywhere, aromas she’d never dreamed of.
But she couldn’t stay where she was. Something told her this wasn’t her place. She had to escape. Making her way to the back door, she managed to force it open. She was free. But free to do what? and where? As she paced on her six legs, she heard the noise of the returning farm vehicles. They couldn’t find her. The barn! That would be safe.
Without thinking she launched herself into the air and felt her wings catch. She was flying! She headed for the upper loft of the barn just as the first of the trucks came into view. Whatever her cousins had expected on their return to the farmhouse, a 150 cm long wasp was definitely not it. They piled out of their trucks and dashed into the barn. There they found Madeleine, more wasp than woman, on the wooden floor. She was frantically cleaning a space, a space for a nest.
“Aw shit!” Harry swore. “Best call those damned fools at Biogenetics. Their cleanup wasn’t nearly as complete as they thought.”
