You woke up on a metal bed and sat up. Dr. Vergunstein said something to you, but you were still too groggy to know what was going on. You closed your eyes and took deep breaths for a while waiting for the headache and dizziness to go away. Surprisingly, whatever drugs she had you on wore off fairly quickly and you became more responsive after a brief moment.
"Vuns again, kahn you hear me?" she asked. "Uh, yeah," you answer. She smiles. "Good, patient is responsive," she says into a little tape recorder. "Are you in any pain?" she asks. "Not much," you answer, "it seems to be going away."
Gripping the edge of the metal table you're sitting on, you suddenly remember why you are here. "Oh, Lucy," you say, tears coming to your eyes again. "Can you help her? Will she be okay? And ... did I need an operation of my own?"
"Post-operative memory function adequate," she logs in the recorder before answering. "Ja," she responds, "you und Lucy vill bof be better than ever in a few veeks' time." Relief and joy flood through you, you thought you had lost her forever, you knew Vergunstein could do it! "Oh, thank you, doctor!" you exclaim, suddenly feel a sharp tapping sensation behind you and hear something firm pounding against the metal of the table you're sitting on. Still a tad loopy from the waning sedation, you giggle at the funny feeling even though pounding the hard metal with your spinal column kind of hurts a little bit. Your also too thrilled with doctor's prognosis to care too much, but you're still curious enough to look back and lucid enough to know that something about it feels unusual. Seeing a brown-furred retriever tail wagging and thumping the table is funny at first and makes you think of Lucy, until your sobering mind processes the fact that there's no dog in here, and the expressive appendage has in fact been stitched onto your own lower back. The tail stops wagging.
An odd motion in your ears makes you reach up to discover two broad, triangular flaps that feel to be about the same size and shape as Lucy's ears. "I, I don't understand?" you say to the doctor.
"Have you ever heard of Dr. H. Georges Moreau?" she asks with fondness in her voice. "Uh, yeah, I guess, from local history"--you blurt out--"some freaky mad scientist from over a century ago, vanished without a trace I guess." Her smile fades. You guess that isn't what she wanted to hear.
"Dr. Moreau vas a visionary multidisciplinary anatomist," she defends. "He vas too far ahead of his time for many of his peers, but he continued his verk in private on a little island not far from here. He understood how humans could improve animals, and how animals could improve us. I have his notes, my family has continued his research. He was my grandfazer."
"Ok? Glad you had a genius grandfather? What's that got to do with me having Lucy's--"
"I could have brought back your poor broken doggy fohr a few days, maybe even a veek, as she vas. Her body vas still broken, ze pain too much, ze bones and organs failing. But you sacrificed yourself to give her a new life, a better life. You vill be her new body, her new life, and she vill be yours. You already have ze only parts I could save from her dying body. But I saved some stem cells to clone her new parts one at a time. Every few days, when you adjust to each part, I vill give you another, make you a little more like Lucy. In ze end, you vill be like her, but wis ze smarts and speech of a human. My grandfazer's vision--human and animal living in harmony, each wissin ze ozer, man in beast and beast in man. A masterpiece of natural beauty."
She's gonna surgery you into some kind of part-human clone of Lucy? It didn't sound very much like beauty to you, and it sure as heck didn't sound natural! You bounded for the door with, ears and tail flopping with your steps. "No, you can't do this. I've gotta get outta here, let me GO!" Suddenly a deluge of electric tingles floods your body and stops you in your tracks. You fall to the ground, groaning, and it stops. You reach up to rub your neck where the collar has been fastened and turn to see her holding a remote with a red button.
"Please try not to resist too much," she says coolly. "It would be a shame if I had to sedate you for ze whole experimental process. I hoped you would love to watch and to see more of Lucy taken shape wissin yourself, witness ze masterpiece you are becoming, forged from your beloved pet's DNA. But I can just as easily leave you unconscious."