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Chapter 4: Awakening
There was a sensation of being drawn through a tunnel of bright lights, and Kate found herself waking up as if from a very deep sleep. Voices sounded from nearby, two of them, distinct from one another, but it took her a few seconds to begin parsing what they were saying.
She opened her eyes and, after giving them a second to focus and adjust to the brightly-lit room, found two people leaning over her, wearing medical scrubs and white exopacks. A man and a woman. They looked...strangely small.
"...How you feeling, Kate?" the woman was asking.
"Hey guys," she said. Her voice sounded strange; the timbre was different, softer, even though it was still recognizably her own voice.
The man chuckled. "Welcome to your new body, Kate."
She lifted her arms and looked at them. Sky-blue skin with faint stripes of darker blue and even fainter patterns of tiny whitish spots greeted her. The hands and fingers were slim and slightly elongated, with the palms a paler shade of blue.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Holy shit, it worked!
She flexed her fingers and wrists. It felt...normal, but in a markedly positive sense of the word.
"Good," the woman said, standing back from the bed slightly.
"We're gonna take this nice and easy, Kate," said the man as he also moved back so he wasn't crowding her.
She heard Norm's voice from her left and glanced that way, seeing his avatar—or, really, him in his avatar body—sitting up and talking with another pair of scrubs-clad technicians.
She started to sit up herself, no longer paying much attention to her own technicians. As she did, she instinctively started to raise her legs slightly to counterbalance herself.
Her legs. Holy fuck, she could feel her legs.
She sat up straight, flexing her ankles and toes. One of the techs was saying something, but the entire room may as well have not existed for all the attention Kate was paying to her surroundings. She could feel her legs!
Without even thinking about waiting, she turned, swinging her legs off the right side of the bed and set her feet on the floor. It was cold, causing her feet to reflexively tense up. She laughed, relishing the sensation; then laughed harder at the absurdity that something so mundane and normally unpleasant was now brining her joy.
Her laughter grew stronger until she started to double over, crossing her arms around her waist—then stopped with a gasp as she felt her own body through the hospital gown she was wearing. Her waist was much slimmer than normal. her breath caught in her throat as she patted herself up and down.
She looked around, suddenly needing a mirror. The closest thing she could see was the observation window from the link room, which was reflecting the more brightly-lit space she was in reasonably well; that would do.
Carefully, she tried standing up. Her legs were unsteady; in a way, she hadn't had legs for almost a year.
"Whoa, whoa," she heard Max say, his voice projected through a speaker from the link room. "Kate, listen to me. You're not used to your avatar body yet."
Determined, she stood up fully, taking one wobbly step only to be yanked back by the bio-monitor leads stuck to several points on her body. She frustratedly ripped them off before taking another unsteady step and lurching forward to lean against the window.
She looked into the reflection, and saw herself, confirming what she had felt a moment ago. Toned legs; wider hips; a slim waist, chest, and shoulders; breasts that might have almost been generous on a human, but were barely noticeable on this body's larger frame; and a face with smoother, softer features and huge, wide-set golden-yellow eyes.
She remembered the feminine form she'd seen in the tank, and it finally clicked that this was her body now.
She stumbled back, leaning against the bed as her knees grew weak. Her eyes burned and a choked sob escaped her throat. Less than a year ago, subjectively, she'd resigned herself to the fact that she'd never walk again, never feel anything from the waist down again, never be able to do anything that required the use of her legs again.
And now all of that was back, and so much more.
She felt a tear run down her cheek, and a touch on her shoulder. Sniffling, she looked to her left. Norm had turned around on his bed to face her, and was leaning forward, his hand on her left shoulder.
"Hey," he said, genuine concern on his face, "you okay?"
"Okay? You have no idea," she said, sniffling, between sobs of joy that she was trying to contain with only moderate success. "You can't possibly imagine what...what an understatement that is."
The techs were trying to get her to lay back down, or at least sit more squarely on the bed, but they subsided when Norm gestured them back, saying, "Just give her a minute, okay?"
- — - — - — -
It took a good minute or so before Kate was able to—mostly—compose herself, during which time the euphoria she felt had transformed from the emotional energy that wanted to turn her into a sobbing wreck into physical energy. She needed to move.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm her jangling nerves and clear her head. It helped a little, but less than she'd hoped. She stood up again, keeping one hand on the bed for support. She was still unsteady, but slightly less so.
The techs were getting agitated again, telling her to sit back down so they could run some tests, when something thwacked against her arm. She caught a glimpse of the thing as it withdrew, and when she spun to get a better look, it went with her, slapping the male tech in the chest and sweeping several tools and other medical implements off the cart next to him.
Her tail, she realized. She'd forgotten about the avatar body's tail. This realization sent her into another fit of giggles even as the techs were near panic.
Max spoke up again over the intercom. "Kate, you need to sit down. This is dangerous."
Kate looked at him through the glass, shaking her head. "This is great. This is fantastic." Her gaze swept the room. There were two doors on the far wall, both sized for avatars. One was bordered in red with a sign over it reading KEEP CLEAR; the other was bordered in yellow and said EXIT.
She made for the yellow door, taking wide, shaky steps. A commotion erupted behind her as she leaned on the release lever and shoved the door open, revealing a short corridor leading to an identical door. She stumbled down the corridor, her steps getting steadier as she went, and shoved open the second door, finding herself outside.
She stopped and squinted, momentarily blinded by the sunlight. Once her eyes had adjusted, she saw she was in a large open area, mostly covered in grass. Two humans in lab coats and exopacks were in front of her, clearly startled by the way she'd barged out of the building. Behind them, two avatars were playing basketball on an oversized court with the goals set at twice the usual height. Beyond that was a similarly up-scaled version of the same kind of physical training obstacle course she remembered from her early days in the Marines, and even farther out she could see a garden or small crop field with neat rows of plants.
Grinning, she took off at a slow jog, dodging around the pair shooting hoops and cutting between the rows of the obstacle course, nearly running over another pair of humans as she inadvertently cut across their path.
"Kate!" she heard norm call from behind her, having apparently followed her out of the building. "We're not supposed to be running!"
She paid him no heed. She needed to run.
She passed the climbing wall at the end of the obstacle course and almost ran into an AMP suit as it came into view, walking along a packed-dirt path between the obstacle course and garden. She dodged awkwardly at the last second, missing the AMP by inches and prompting a "Watch it!" from the driver, then recovered her footing and kept going, dashing between two rows of crops.
As she moved from the grass that covered most of the area onto the loose dirt in the garden, she instinctively started digging her toes into the soil with each step, giving her more traction to push through Pandora's thicker air.
She'd gone another fifty or sixty yards into the garden when she slid to a stop, the need to run mostly sated. She stood there for a moment, simply drinking in the sensations—the feel of the breeze on her skin, the smell of the plants in the garden and the trees beyond it, the texture of the soil under her feet. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, taking another deep breath and smiling. This was right.
"Hey, Marine!" came Grace's voice from...in front of her? Kate looked up to see a female avatar walking towards her from a large open-walled cabin at the far end of the garden. She was taller than Kate by several inches, and wore tan safari shorts seemingly made specifically for avatars and a burgundy Stanford University tank top that was clearly made for humans and fit the avatar like a crop top, leaving most of her midriff bare. A few locks of dark hair on each side of her head had been worked into thin braids ending in strings of beads. Her face, aside from the skin and eye color and apparent age, was a dead ringer for Grace.
"Grace?" Kate asked, hardly believing her eyes.
"Well who'd you expect, numbnuts?" Grace said, grinning. She plucked a large purple fruit from a nearby plant and tossed it at Kate. "Think fast!"
Kate caught the fruit and looked back up at Grace questioningly.
"Motor control's looking good," she said, gesturing to the fruit.
Kate grinned and lifted the fruit to her mouth, and took a bite. The rind gave way easily, spewing juice across Kate's cheeks and down the front of her hospital gown. The taste was unlike anything she'd encountered before. Delicious was the only way she could describe it.
"Kate!" Norm called from behind her as he caught up.
She turned as he slowed to a jog, slightly out of breath. Behind him, she could see two of the technicians still jogging in pursuit. "Norm, this is incredible. You were so right to be excited."
He smiled as he came to a stop. "I'm glad it's going so well for you," he said, pointing a thumb back the way they'd come, "but we need to—" He paused, noticing Grace. "Oh, hey, Grace. Didn't expect to see you out here so quick."
"No sense in wasting time," Grace said. "Max can handle everything on that end." She looked past them to the techs, who still hadn't caught up to them, raising a hand and calling, "It's okay, guys. I'll take it from here."
The techs slowed to a walk, clearly exasperated, and turned back toward the building.
Returning her attention to the two new avatars, Grace turned back toward the cabin, gesturing for them to follow her. "Come on, let's get you two properly dressed. We've got a lot to get through before nightfall."
The cabin was on stilts, its floor a good eight or ten feet above the ground, and was scaled for avatars. As she climbed the steps up to it, Kate noticed that the walls were actually solid for the first five feet or so, with the open area above that covered by shutters that were currently opened upwards, acting as awnings. The double-wide doorway had no actual doors, only manually-extended security gates like one might see on a two-hundred-year-old elevator. The interior had both electric lights and a number of gas-fed camping lanterns, and was mostly occupied by a dozen avatar-sized folding cots covered by mosquito netting. At the foot of each cot was a locker for personal item and equipment storage, a few of which had neatly-folded blankets atop them. At the far end of the room were two enclosed lavatories and a pair of curtained-off showers.
Grace directed them to the two cots at the far end of the cabin. "Norm, you're on the left. Clothes for your avatar are in the footlocker; you can use one of the showers to change. Kate, you're on the right." She stopped and looked at Kate. "The clothes in your locker may not fit you very well. We obviously weren't expecting...well..." she trailed off, gesturing at Kate's new avatar body.
Kate chuckled. "Yeah, that's fair."
"You can borrow some of my stuff for now," Grace said, turning to one of the other lockers and beginning to dig through it. "We'll get you sorted out properly in the morning."
- — - — - — -
The next four hours had been busy and tiring, but fairly enjoyable. Once Kate and Norm had gotten dressed, Grace gave them a rundown of a typical day's general schedule, most of which would be spent linked to their avatars. She then put them through a series of physical tests and exercises to make sure their avatar bodies were in good physical condition and there were no problems with the link. They'd had a meal just before dusk, then retired to their cots, where their avatars would remain overnight.
Kate was now sitting on her cot, staring at the tiny, anemone-like tendrils that were normally concealed within the hair at the end of her neural queue. When she'd pulled the queue around to look at it, the tendrils had started stretching and waving, as if searching for something to grab on to. "That's...kinda freaky," she mumbled to herself, entranced by the intricate patterns the tendrils formed as they waved.
"Don't play with that, you'll go blind," Grace said jokingly as she walked by, helping a few other avatars and a handful of humans tidy up before shooing the latter out of the cabin and locking the gate. "Alright, gang, lights out. See you at dinner, kiddies."
Kate laid back on her cot, draping her queue over her shoulder and across her chest. Today had been an amazing day. Grace turned out the lights, and the ambient sounds of the Pandoran evening quickly lulled Kate into a state of near-sleep.