Darrell was going over his notes, about to underline a passage, when he noticed that his hand had changed shape. It was thicker. Fatter. More swollen.
He was at first thinking this was a histomenic reaction to the virus, but then he watched as his fingers lost their grip on the pen, which fell to the notebook, swiftly followed by his fingers, which wriggled and writhed like sausages. If sausages writhed, that is.
Fascinated and horrified at once, Darrell watched as new fingers extruded themselves, reforming, then just as swiftly dropping off, while the originals began oozing about, forming pseudopods and shifting features, and Darrell stared until his eyes popped out. Literally. One after the other. He saw the first land on the paper with a wet *SPLAT* then dissolves into viscous goo, then saw the paper coming towards him until the moment that the optic nerve detatched.
He was blind. For a second. Only a second. Then in his panic to see, he blinked and suddenly was seeing again. Then more and more, seeing from a hundred angles as eyes formed on the back of his head, and the top, and then everywhere, almost as soon shooting themselves from their new sockets like a thousand paint ball guns, spattering the walls of the cabin with living goo as Darrell tried to scream in horror, finding his mouth opening wider and wider until the top of his head fell off and he watched as a new one formed atop his neck, atop the torso, atop the chair, the arms already having fallen off onto the floor and everything dissolved into puddles of horrifying goo.
Darrell panicked, struggling against the virus, against the strange otherness in him, desperate to regain human form, to find a cure for himself, to not die. *Give me my arms back! Give me my eyes back! Give me my brain!*
It was like sinking into taffy, but not drowning, because he at long last realized he was the taffy. He opened his eyes then, a dozen of them, supporting himself with a dozen arms, looking about himself and seeing...
Himself. Several times over. Seven of him. Eight if you counted the one with two heads. There was also one with nine arms, but Darrel watched as one of those arms was reabsorbed back into the clone's body.
Another one of him, a larger, perfect looking one, gestured to him, then gestured to his own ears, his mouth opening and shutting wordlessly until Darrell realized he couldn't hear and just as swiftly remedied that, hearing everything as loud as a concert hall.
"Um, maybe just two?" one of him said. "You've got a few too many there.
Darrell heaved himself up, letting the extra ears and arms flow down into the mass needed for legs. It took a while, and he was getting impatient looks from the others of him, but at last he got himself together and was assisting the other Darrell's with going about to protoplasmic blogs and coaching them into regaining human shape.
"We merged with an amoeba," one of the other Darrell's explained, a slightly shorter one.
"Well duh," five other Darrell's said in chorus. Their voices were all high and piping, but Darrell found that he could hear them just fine.
In the end, however, everyone got together, an army of tiny Darrell's carpetting the floor of the cabin, ranging from the tiniest Darrell's of only a centimeter high to one massive one almost a full decimeter, who was assumed leader simply for visibility, if not actual superiority.
Darrell lifted up one of the tiny Darrell's next to him and set him on his shoulder so he could see, then felt the odd sensation as the smaller Darrell fused with his shoulder, the mass and the memories flowing into him.
"Okay," the big Darrell yelled. "I think we've got a plan here, but I'm about at the limit, and it's taking about all my..." He winced, an expression of intense concentration across his face, and then his face split into two faces, which both said, "about all my concentration to stay together." He then underwent full mitosis and the big two-headed Darrell became two slightly smaller Darrell's.
"Well," said a Darrell near him, "on the bright side, since we all appear to have the same intelligence, we have a lot more minds to put to work on the retrovirus as cure."
"True," said another Darrell, "but even if we manage to rid ourselves of the amoebic DNA, that isn't going to reintegrate us, and all we'd have left would be several thousand bite-size Darrells without the ability to merge and reform. See?" He grabbed two smaller Darrell's and stuffed them, screaming, into his mouths. One his regular one, the other one that had formed just for the occasion on his stomach. He grew slightly larger, then a pained expression crossed his face. "God, I'm such a dick. I just scared the shit out of myself. Twice." The mouth on his stomach then smiled, then reached out a long tongue and drew his penis in, beginning to suck himself off.
"I'm such a pervert," Darrel remarked, as the moment the thought occured to him, he found his body doing it until he orgasmed, melting into a pool of delicious jelly. Literally. His tongues lapped himself up until at last he tired of the pleasure his new form could give him and he drew himself back up into human shape, if not size.
"If you guys are finished with the orgy, could you try to figure out what we're going to do?" another Darrell asked.