It was one hour to Midnight and the Full Moon beamed intensely
on the abandoned human habitations.
In one house sat Jeff,with a old still functioning Chronivac
and in another nearby house in a bedroom with a view onto
Jeff's room sat his sister Jane with a equally antiguated Metamorfivac.
If things went as planned,come Midnight,
Jane and Jeff and possibly 49,998 other
surviving humans on Earth would be transformed into reptilian female animals the ancients had called dragons.
*************************
In the end what humanity hadn't counted on was a defective gene
that only humans had and that animals didn't.
A defective gene that had threatened
to bring about a earlier then expected
extinction of humanity as climate change warmed up the Erth to
temperature extremes the human body could not survive.
The old Chronivacs had been deactivated long since because of the
freaks and monsters its users had tended to turn themselves into
sooner or later.TransDem had mothballed 50,000 still
functional units and turned its efforts to building the
Life Arks the Earth's organized governments had built to send humanity to a orbit around Mars for a century or three till they could figure out how to survive on the changed Earth.
After that the remaining million or so humans who had the means
had fled Earth aboard jury rigged spaceships that still had life
support.
The last of those Billionaires Club Life Arks had left a half year earlier with TransDem aboard.
As a final parting gift to the doomed 50,000 humans who had been unable to get aboard the last Life Ark TransDem had distributed its
50,000 Chronivacs and Metamorfivac knock off clones to those
50,000 including Jane and her brother Jeff.
With perhaps 4 to 6 weeks before they went extinct the 50,000
Chronivac users had desperately turned to these machines
hoping to edit out the defective gene in them that doomed them.
Alas although the machines had been reactivated by the
departing TransDem technicians
there wasn't enough power left in the machines to do much more
then do some cosmetic changes such as lengthening the fingernails
or darkening or lightening skin and hair colour.
***********************************************
It had been a week earlier that Jane and Jeff had got the message
from a fellow Chronivac user somewhere in old Iceland.
The fellow had told his 49,999 fellows and ladies that
he had cracked into a old transformation subroutine that
had been sealed by TransDem a half century earlier.
Basically 50 years earlier someone with a obvious death wish for their continued human existence had created a female dragon monster under the influence of the Full Moon.Basically the
death wish addict had turned him or herself into a flame breathing four footed feral winged western dragon the size
of a big draft horse or a small elephant with a enhanced taste for
consuming human flesh,driking human blood and burning down
human villages.
The kind of monster usually found in a cave with a hoard,the bones of its victims and in need of a slaying by the local hero
with a sword plunged in its black beating monster heart.
Definitely not something to go to a furry convention as .
The Icelandic user ,with nothing to lose since she'd be dead anyways in about 4 weeks,had investigated the possibility of
tieing all the Chronivacs and Metamorfivacs power grid together
to create a mass transformation into this monster.She'd done
the numbers and figured out that with the Full Moon and the
Midnight Hour there'd be enough juice for one big mental and physical
species change.She'd also sent all 50,000 the DeActivation Key
any one who'd opted in to become a Monster could input before
Midnight and the Full Moon in case they wanted to opt out of the transformation.
She'd also stressed the point that if that DeActivation Key wasn't
entered by the Day and Time well then you just better get used
to having wings,laying eggs,breathing fire and living in a cave
filled with the gnawed bones of your prey,be that human victims or the run of the mill cattle,sheep ,goats and deer.
So for the previous week there had been intense discussion
on the Metamorphosis Highway Net about the pros and cons of
avoiding death by essentially dying anyways.
So folk,such as the Icelandic girl had said that on the appointed
day she was going to be in a Icelandic cave,well away from her Chronivac
so that even if she did have seconds thoughts by the time she
got back to the machine she wouldn't be human anymore and
in no mental state to remember or care less what a DeActivation Key was.
**************************
So brother and sister sat in separate houses.Jane could see her
brothers shadow pacing in hos room in the other house,obviously growing more nervous as Monster Hour crept closer on both of them.
Though Jane would never know it he had felt
the same change of heart about a permanent transformation into a monster as she,mere minutes before the fated time,3 minutes to be
exact.
Frantically typed the DeActivation Key into
her Metamorfivac and felt the icey fear grip her heart as the
Chinese built knockoff ground slowly through its program
and its was a bonechilling 11:59:50 timestame before the machine
confirmed her transformation into a monster had been terminated by the user....