Zoey's blood burned hot within. A part of her mind screamed to pull back. It was the part that remembered Shelly giving her food while in the cage. Another part of her mind remembered that she had a life, going to classes, dating, clubbing and that this woman was responsible.
Let her have to deal with the same problem, she thought to herself. Zoey slammed the door shut.
"NO!" the Doc screamed. "You stupid bitch! Let me out of here! This room hasn't been cleansed!"
Stepping away from the chamber, Zoey snarled at her. Her stomach grumbled, and instinctively she went and devoured more of the janitor. The sound of the computers nearby started to wind up. After another shot of pain, she dug her claws into the stomach wound and yanked out the bullet. It hurt, and she bled, but at least it was out.
"Listen to me!" Doc yelled. "If I die from this nobody is going to be able to help you."
The creature blinked and paused in its eating. Goddamn it, Zoey thought. She went open and tried to pull open the door. It wouldn't budge. The hell? She pulled hard on it. Unfortunately, as she was calming down, her more wolven features were diminishing. Even her privates were reverting to female.
The Doc, Shelly, rolled her eyes. "You have to cancel the process at the computer. Type 'killall transport_sequence'. Underscore between transport and sequence. All lowercase. Hurry!"
Almost completely human again, Zoey dashed to the console and typed as quickly as she could. "Shit," she cursed to herself. She started to get nervous and saw her fingernails pause in their retraction from claws and start to shift back again. She saw text flying by on another window. Something about scanning and detecting one lifeform, initializing AI biological corrections, and crap. She finished the line and hit return.
Her heart sank.
The terminal read:
-bash: kill: all arguments must be process or job IDs
-bash: kill transport_sequence must be process or job IDs
"Shit," she said again. Her mouth beginning to shift back and forth slightly in its midway form. "No. Nonononono."
"What happened?" the Doc asked, now appearing very frightened.
Not sure what she did wrong, Zoey reached behind the computer and yanked the power cord out, hoping to stop it.
"NO!" the woman yelled. "You needed that to be hooked into the servers!"
Zoey plugged it back in. The computer started going into a recovery reload screen for the OS. "SHIT!" Zoey dashed over to the door and tried prying it open again. She needed strength. She tried to force the monster out. She had to save her. The Doc was her only hope. She was always kind. She fed her while in the cage over the last several days. FOCUS! she mentally yelled at herself. She felt herself growing back into the monstrous form. "I need to get in," she said with difficulty. "I nreed tu git een." The mussel was making it impossible to speak, but her own mind was screaming it. "I need to get in!" The servers all appeared to be active now.
I NEED TO GET IN!
Bang.
Suddenly, Zoey found herself standing inside of the chamber, looking down at a shocked and surprised Doc. The door behind her was still closed.
"Oh no," the Doc said.
*flash*
______________________________________________
It was early morning when everything within the entry chamber vanished. The AI instantly detected a number of irregularities. Large amounts of metal were present along with the "single" lifeform it had initially scanned, but that was an easy separation. Next there was smattering of biological material on the floor of the chamber. No problem. That can be added back to the transfer subject. However there was suddenly a large amount of biological material in the transfer that was not in the initial scans. In fact, the mass was more than twice initially what was scanned.
The AI was very good at making adjustments based on irregularities. It wasn't a self-conscious intelligence. It was more akin to being one of the smarted "video game AIs" ever made. However, in the end it adjusted things based on the assumptions Shelly had programmed into the system. One assumption the code made (not explicitly, but just from how things were written) was that once the door was shut, the number of lifeforms in the chamber would remain constant.
So an exception was thrown. The exception was then caught by another subroutine that quickly analyzed the error and ran through a checklist of possible explanations. Only one came up.
The initial scan missed some of the biological material of the single lifeform in the chamber.
One thing to note is that this exception occurred several thousand times each teleport. The scan wasn't instantaneous, and any living thing was made up of bits that were always moving. It was, in fact, the reason why Shelly had so much trouble doing the teleports on living things. Sometimes bits were missed, and didn't teleport, thus causing structural damage; or everything teleported, but the animal ended up being dead and still - just as if the entire body instantly halted all at once.
Shelly had corrected for that. She made sure that tiny bugs and things like that would be noticed and excluded. Regardless of Zoey's earlier comment, she had see The Fly... or at least the remake from the 80s.
However the AI had analyzed the blood on the floor and all of Zoey and determined those things were not the usual parasites, internal or external. So... it had to be part of the subject of the transportation. Shelly.
That said, merging that much mass into a single organism while holding to a self-sustaining shape would be difficult and take a lot of processing. The AI continued to run for days on end, chunking data and merging things together as to fill in possible gaps made by the initial scan in a best-fit manner. Shelly would had been proud of her code. It ran without an fatal errors.
Unfortunately, Zoey left some bloody footprints out in the hall. The remains of the janitor were found. Police were called in. The area was sectioned off as a crime scene. The chamber doors were solidly locked, but everyone who looked inside could plainly see nothing was in there. So samples were taken and facts were cross-checked with the police-officer who had confronted Zoey in her apartment. He had claimed she attacked him and that's why he discharged his weapon. Internal Affairs became convinced he was hiding something, especially when he initially claimed he didn't hit her (due to there being no blood at the apartment), and yet the bullet was found in the campus labs. The police came to realize Shelly was also missing, and they began to suspect the doc was a victim of some sort. Her car was at the lab, but she was missing. The police put the women's descriptions out. They were to be brought in for questioning.
All the while, nobody bothered to turn off the servers. With the exception of some people who removed the test animals from the lab for the time being, nothing else in the lab was touched for days. Then the floor and door were cleaned. The hallway was mopped up. And things went back to normal.
Roughly one month later, just before the administrators were to meet together to figure out what to do with the lab and Shelly's research, the AI finished its work.
________________________________________________________________
*flash*
*clink* *clink* *clink*
There was no fire this time. That was good. A bunch of keys and coins fell to the chamber floor to one side. The untested AI protections had actually worked, she thought. She looked down at her hands. They looked... different. Odd. They were vastly human hands, feminine. She was happy for that. Still, they were shaking. Taking a breath, she reached her hand out to the wall and steadied herself. Staggering, she pushed the door open. It had unlocked on its own.
"Thank God," she thought as she stepped out. Glancing behind her, she looked to double-check to see if the other one had teleported in with her.
No one was there.
Then, blinking, she tried to clarify in her mind who she was thinking of. She had been in the entry chamber when she teleported. "I was trying to open the door to get myself out," she muttered to herself. Feeling a little dizzy, she went over to the back room to make herself some coffee. To her annoyance, somebody had taken the coffee maker. "Assholes," she muttered. Her eyes passed over a mirror. A tall amazonian sized woman was in there, but it was one she did not recognize.
Stepping closer, she looked at the woman's features. It was familiar. She looked like she could had been related to her, maybe. Her hair was dark red, almost black. Her facial features were sharp, almost wolfish. Still they were similar to her own, and Shelly's.. no.. Zoey's... There might even be a slight touch of hispan... wait....
"Oh shit," the woman looking into the mirror said, coming to a realization. She tried to remember what happened before the teleport. "I was in the chamber. I had slammed the door on her. I couldn't get out. So I ate more of the janitor, while I screamed for her to.... Holy shit." She could remember being both Zoey and Shelly. She could even still remember being the wolf in the cage. Not the janitor though.
"That makes sense. It was only his blood in the chamber," she muttered.
Looking around, she found a measuring tape. She measured herself to be near eight feet tall. "Our masses were merged." She gave a laugh. Although she could remember all three lives, there was no real dissemination in her thoughts. She was all of them put together. "Whatever happens, I'm not calling myself Zelly or Shoey." Looking at her clothes, she could see they were the same as what Shelly wore, just thinned out to account for the larger size.
Sitting down, she thought to herself. "Is there a way to separate myself?" She paused again. "Do I want to separate myself?" She's already a genius. She's no longer a short weakling others think they can step on. Hell, at this size, she could make herself an alpha and take whatever mates she wanted.
She paused for a moment. "Okay, maybe there is still some dissemination that is needed."