Chapter Two
That Was Easy
Doctor Rhodes' Perspective:
I woke up with a jolt. For a brief moment I was struck by a wave of disorientation before I remembered where I was. I was in my office at the clinic. The same place I'd been for nearly a week and a half.
My neck and back cracked and protested as I stretched. I must have fallen asleep at my desk again. Not surprising. I hadn't been able to convince myself to have a proper lie down since this all started.
I looked down at the report I had been reading. Teddy's latest chromosomal test. By comparing it to the tests from before, during and after the transformation, we were able to determine with reasonable certainty which of these new genetic structures were likely the equivalents of X and Y chromosomes. The latest test confirmed what we had already suspected. There were no longer any traces of Y chromosomes. Heck, if Doctor Mills was correct, Teddy even possessed a fully functional, healthy uterus and ovaries. She could, hypothetically, get pregnant.
I yawned and rubbed my eyes. Over the last nine, no, I glanced at the date on my computer, ten days, I'd felt like I was in the middle of a crazy sci-fi movie. If we could figure out what was going on here it could revolutionize almost everything we knew about science. The field of gender reassignment alone would be advanced by decades. If not more.
I closed the file and looked down at my watch. A little after seven. Time to go check on our patient. Lots to do today.
~~~
Life giving coffee in hand, I approached the nurse's duty station outside Teddy's room. 'Morning, Frank. How's our patient?'
Nurse Redmond looked up and fidgeted. 'Um, Doc, you might want to check on her. Teddy's been… busy.'
'"Busy?"' I set my coffee down. I didn't like the sound of this.
'Oh, there's been no change in his… her condition, but…'
'But what?'
'Well she asked for all sorts of stuff over the course of the night. Note paper, records, test results, a phone, another two laptops. She's been in there working flat out. I'm pretty sure she hasn't slept.'
'Argh. Of course.' I took one last, long sip of my coffee and made for Teddy's room. 'It would seem a unicorn is officially less rare than a cooperative patient.'
I knocked on the door. 'Teddy, are you awake?'
'Hm?' I heard keys clacking from inside the room. 'Oh, yeah. Come on in.'
I opened the door to find Teddy sitting on the bed amidst a nest of open files and scribbled notes, typing away on one laptop while the other two were open and running. One was displaying a news site, the other was playing some sort of cartoon show on mute.
'Morning… Teddy. Nurse Redmond tells me you haven't slept.'
Teddy didn’t even glance up from what she was doing. 'Sure I did. I took a five year nap. Woke up feeling a little hoarse.'
I entered the room and closed the door behind me. 'I was under the impression yesterday that you wanted to rest.'
'This is how I rest. I find work very zen. Besides, I had stuff I needed to do.'
'Such as?'
A cell phone next to one of the laptops began to vibrate.
'Oh, one sec, Doc.' With her teeth, Teddy deftly removed a pen from one of her universal cuffs, replaced it with a stylus, and tapped the phone. 'Mrs Henson. Thank you for getting back so fast. Well, what have you got for me?'
What sounded like a middle-aged, female voice answered on speakerphone. 'Well, we gave the list you sent us to our in-house investigators. Other than some unpaid parking tickets and one instance of public indecency during a frat party in college, they all came back clean.'
Teddy frowned. 'Are you sure? No notable debts, ties to foreign governments, investments in pharmaceuticals, or tech start-ups, no cults?'
'No. Nothing of the like. Two are immigrants, but they're both from allied nations, and both acquired their citizenships through proper legal channels.'
'And the facility itself?'
'Perfectly legitimate. Been operating since 1912.'
'Huh.' Teddy looked at some of the notes on her bed, scratched a few lines out, then turned back to the phone. 'Thank you, Mrs Henson. That was a huge help. I'll have everything you requested sent over as soon as possible.'
'My pleasure, Teddy. We'll be in touch.'
'Thanks. Talk soon.' Teddy tapped the phone again then, finally, turned to look at me. 'Sorry about that, Doc.'
I sat down in the seat by the bed. 'What was all that about? And what's all this? When I suggested you do some catching up, I meant read the news, maybe catch a documentary or two on Netflix, not write a thesis.'
'That kind of thing can wait. I had some important business to get out of the way. You might want to check your emails.'
I frowned and pulled out my phone. Sure enough, at the top of my inbox was an email from "shenson@wollhensonandcox.com"
'What's this?'
'That is an email from my lawyer. Not that I didn't want to take you at your word, Doc, but I don't like taking chances. I called them last night, informed them I was awake, and gave them a rundown of my situation. You'll find an NDA attached to that. Mrs Henson will expect it to be signed and sent to her, along with copies of all test notes, documentation, and recordings you've taken by the end of the day.'
I felt my mouth go dry. 'What? This is ridiculous.'
Teddy cocked her head. 'No, it really isn't. I'm not going to risk being disappeared. Change or not, I'm still an American citizen with rights. Those are my medical records and I'd like my legal representatives to have copies of them. I checked. You have no legal right to withhold them.'
'We're not "withholding" anything, but Teddy…'
She held up a hoof. 'Mrs Henson is my emergency contact. She should have been informed the second my condition changed. But when I called, she hadn’t heard from here in months. Oh, and Mrs Henson would also like a list of everyone any of you contacted regarding me. They'll need NDA's too.'
‘Teddy, don’t you think this is a little excessive? We were in quarantine. We were scrambling to deal with a never before seen phenomenon. Yes, we should have notified your emergency contact. That was an oversight on our part. But there’s nothing sinister-‘
‘Doc.’ She frowned and gave me a hard stare. ‘I am happy to cooperate, within reason. But from now on, nothing happens without going through me or my legal representative first.’
‘Teddy…’
‘Look, Doc. I’m not stupid. I shapeshifted from one species to another. My muscles went from atrophied to perfectly healthy in a matter of days. My brain activity went from years of near zero to fully active just as quickly. I changed gender! Not just superficially, but at the genetic level. I could think of a dozen different ways to exploit this situation off the top of my head. Don’t tell me you haven’t.’
I felt my hackles rise at being called out, then deflated. ‘It occurred to me that understanding this condition could have beneficial applications.’
‘Like a Nobel prize?’
‘I…’ I slumped in my chair. The thought had occurred to me.
Teddy’s expression softened, and she gave me a small smile. ‘Hey. If you could actually figure out how this happened through medical means, you’d deserve one.’
‘So, what now?’
‘Until everyone’s signed their NDA’s and passed along all their research to Mrs Henson, nothing. As soon as everything’s in order, you can start testing again. Hey. Consider it a break. No offense, but you look like you really need one.’
I rubbed my temples and fought to dismiss the cotton wool in my head. ‘You’re not wrong.’ I picked up one of the notes on the bed and glanced at it. ‘So what’s all this? Legal notes?’
Teddy grinned. ‘Research!’
I cocked a brow. ‘On?’
‘Me! Obviously.’ She reached around, grabbed a stack of very familiar files in her teeth and dropped them in front of her. ‘Nurse Redmond was very helpful getting me everything I asked for.’
She opened up a few of the files and waved at them. ‘I’ve gone through all of your test results so far. While I am passingly familiar with bloodwork, most of this was over my head. But it was helpful in other ways.’
‘Such as?’
‘Eliminating possibilities. You know I was just starting out in the police before the accident, right? Investigation was kind of a specialty of mine.’
I examined another scribbled note. I would have said the handwriting was illegible, but considering no hands were involved, it was a decent effort. ‘And you think a police style investigation can uncover answers that medical and scientific research can’t?’
She shrugged. ‘Can’t hurt. And I actually think I’ve been making progress.’
That caught my attention. ‘Do tell.’
‘Well!’ She jumped up and started pacing back and forth on the bed, ignoring the fact she was trampling all over her own notes. ‘First of all. As of five minutes ago I can now confirm that this is a legitimate clinic, and nobody working here is shady. So this isn’t some sort of black ops or big pharma thing.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I’m so relieved.’
‘Second.’ She leafed through a pile of scrap paper. ‘I’ve gone through the list of all the medication I’ve been given since being admitted here. I had to do a lot of googling, but it all seems to track with my injuries. Even the stuff I’ve been given since my transformation started seems logical under the circumstances. So there’s no reason to assume they were the cause.’
She tapped a forehoof on the stack of test files. ‘Third. You guys have been thorough. Really thorough. I mean, gene therapists, biochemists.’ She snorted and chuckled. ‘Did you really get an expert in nanotech to take a look at me?’
I threw my arms in the air. ‘We’d been hitting nothing but dead ends and were grasping at straws. It was no more outlandish than any other theory.’
‘True. True.’ She nodded. ‘But the point is, you seem to have exhausted every scientific avenue of explanation. So, what’s left?’
‘Enlighten me.’
A, slightly unnerving, manic grin spread across her face. ‘Magic!’
I just stared. Maybe we ruled out brain damage a little prematurely. ‘Teddy… While I applaud your enthusiasm, I think you should really get some sleep.’
‘No, no. Hear me out.’ She pushed her files and papers to the side and sat facing me directly. ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Right? Even if you take the Arthur C. Clarke approach and assume magic is just advanced science we don’t yet understand, can you honestly say we aren’t firmly in that territory right now?’
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. ‘We still have tests we can run-‘
‘On a previously assumed mythological creature with genetics unrecognisable by any existing scientific database?’
‘… A lot of tests.’
‘Face it, Doc. Science can’t solve this one. If you come up with a logical explanation, I’ll be all ears. Until then, I’m rolling with the magic theory.’
I stood up and paced to the far side of the room, trying to stretch the stiffness out of my arms. ‘Even if we abandoned logic and went with magic as an explanation. Where does that leave us? Do we call Hogwarts and ask for a wizard?’
She gave a very horsey snort, rolled her eyes, and chuckled. ‘I hope not. I don’t need people thinking my blood is the fountain of youth.’
‘So, you think someone used magic to turn you into a unicorn. If that’s the case, someone on staff’s been holding out on me.’
Her ears splayed and she frowned as she looked over her shoulder at the muted cartoon still playing. ‘Actually… I have a theory. I don’t particularly care for it, and I was hoping to be wrong. But Mrs Henson’s call confirming you were all clean kind of eliminated the last potential obstacle.’
I turned to face her. ‘What’s your theory?’
‘I… don’t think I was a man who got turned into a pony. I think I was a pony who got turned into a man, and whatever did it just wore off.’
‘You think you were a unicorn first? Teddy, we have your medical records, including your birth certificate. You were born human. Not to mention, unicorns aren’t real.’
‘He says to a unicorn.’
‘It’s quite a leap in logic. What led you to this conclusion?’
‘These.’ She pointed to her facial scar and broken horn. ‘And this.’ She pointed to the cartoon.
I cocked a brow and nodded for her to go on.
She closed her eyes and her brow knitted in concentration. ‘If I was human originally, and this was done to me by artificial means, then this is far too specific a form to be random. There had to be some sort of template the process was working from. But if this form was based on a template, why do I have a scar? Why is my horn broken? It isn’t just underdeveloped, It’s broken. The rest of me is pristine. So why deliberately pattern a defect? Answer? You wouldn’t.’
She turned the laptop playing the cartoon so I could see it more clearly. It appeared to be about… ponies. ‘This is “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,” a show about colourful, talking ponies, including unicorns, living in a magical world. I am a colourful, talking unicorn, just like them.'
I nodded. 'I know it. I used to watch it sometimes with my granddaughter. I had actually theorized about that myself. I think after my third day without sleep.'
She nodded and waved a hoof for me to go on. 'Yes?'
I rubbed my eyes. 'About halfway through your transformation, you had enough recognisable features that the show came to mind. I stopped thinking about the "how" for a moment and considered the "why."'
'And?'
'Billionaires do crazy things. And this show was really popular a few years ago.'
Teddy frowned. 'A few days ago, for me. I bet the convention circuit's all dried up by now.'
'And.' I pressed on. 'I thought "what if some billionaire super fan of the old show with more money than sense and a few screws loose developed a way to turn people into ponies, and decided to test it on coma patients?"'
Her grin could have split her face open. 'Exactly my initial thoughts! But there's a problem with that idea.'
'Other than it being batshit insane?'
She rolled her eyes. 'Yes. Other than that.' She pointed at herself. 'I watched the show. I was a fan. And I've never seen a pony that looks like this. I even trawled through the mlp wiki, one character at a time. There isn't even one unnamed background character that even slightly looks like this. If this was done by a crazy fan…'
I nodded. 'Then they wouldn't waste so much time and, presumably, a fortune turning someone into a pony nobody would recognise. They'd have changed you into a main character.'
'Exactly!' Teddy jabbed a hoof at me and was practically vibrating with excitement. 'My next thought was about the whole gender thing. I thought, "maybe the process wasn’t so targeted as to turn people into specific ponies, but just ponies in general." Like, pony versions of themselves. The head injuries I received during the car crash might, at a stretch, explain the broken horn, but not the scar or the gender change.’
'It also doesn't explain the radical overhaul of your genes. If this was a man-made process, you'd expect, at least, some recognisable markers.' I added, frowning to myself.
Teddy hopped off the bed, showing a level of deftness she lacked yesterday, and trotted over to me. 'Conclusion? This pony isn’t some fictional character. She isn't an artificial pattern. She’s a real person. These scars are evidence of a real life lived.’
My mind buzzed as I tried to take it all in. As utterly outlandish as the theory was, I had heard worse trains of thought. After so many dead ends, I was, I think, ready to entertain a little absurdity. I rubbed my moustache and leaned forward. ‘That… is an impressively reasoned argument. But if that's the case, where did she come from? And why did you turn into her? Unicorns and magic aren’t real. We’d have known about them if they were.’
She sat down beside me and stared up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes for a good, long minute before answering. ‘I had a dream just before I woke up. It was so vivid. I was this pony. I was alone in a desert, when all these monsters, things that could have been straight out of Lovecraft, appeared out of nowhere and attacked me. I can still smell it. Sweat, copper, and ozone. But I fought them off. I heard a scream. I followed it, but when I got there, all I found was Discord. A kind of chimera thing. A monster with the ability to warp reality to his liking and spread chaos wherever he went. I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. He said something to me. A poem. "For five score divided by four. Your memories removed, your body confused. For your insolence you must pay. Cast off to a land far far away. To scatter the six, just the start of my tricks. Your mind shall be weak, your outlooks all bleak. Forget everything and live like a fool. You’ve lost, ponies. None can stop my rule."'
I exhaled. I hadn't realized I had been holding my breath. 'Then what?'
Her ears wilted and she hugged herself. A very human gesture. 'There was light and pain. More pain than I’d ever felt in my life. Then I woke up.’
‘That sounds like quite the nightmare. But I don’t see what it has to do with anything.’
‘It was too vivid to have been a nightmare. It felt real. I’m certain it was a memory.’ She jumped back up to her hooves and pointed at the laptop still playing the cartoon. ‘Discord is a character from this show. He was a villain the main characters thought they’d reformed, only to reveal in the last episode that he was faking the whole time. He had brought the monsters. The show ends with him making the protagonist disappear. I thought, maybe, I was remembering a scene from that last episode. But, like I said, no character who looks like me ever appears in the show. I rewatched the finale twenty minutes before you came in, to be sure.’
‘Maybe your imagination was blending that finale with your current circumstances?’
She cocked her head and pointed at herself. ‘But I hadn’t seen this face until I woke up. How could I have dreamt of being a pony that I’d never seen before?’
I was at a loss. ‘I… I don’t know… Some of us used dictaphones to record our findings. Maybe you heard one of us describe you and your subconscious integrated it into your dream?'
Teddy snorted and shook her head. 'Again, it was too vivid. I didn't bear a passing resemblance to this pony, I was this pony.'
She trotted over to the bed and, in one impressive, fluid leap, hopped up. She laid down, facing me, and crossed her forelegs. ‘Here’s my idea. Equestria, the magical land from the show, is real. Maybe it’s on a parallel Earth, or a different dimension or something. The characters from the show, the ponies, the monsters, Discord? They’re all real. I don’t know if the show itself is accurate in general, but what if the events of the finale happened? What if Discord didn’t make the protagonist disappear, but instead, banished her to another world? This world. If he did it to the protagonist, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume he did it to others.’
‘So this… cartoon chaos monster, Discord, banished a pony and they, what, possessed a human?’
She shrugged. An impressive feat for a creature without proper shoulders. ‘Maybe.'
I flopped back down into the chair with a groan. I was too old for all this. 'But if that's the case, then the timelines don't line up. "My Little Pony" has existed for years. You only started changing days ago.'
She frowned and scratched her chin. 'Hmmm…I actually think I can account for that. I started changing on May first, right?'
I nodded. 'As far as we've been able to determine.'
'On my twenty-fifth birthday. Remember the first line of Discord’s poem?'
I frowned and tried to think back. '"For five score divided by four?"'
'Which equals?'
I took a second to remember what a "score" was, but then it clicked. 'Twenty-five.'
She nodded. 'According to the poem, this pony was cursed to banishment in a land far away with no memories for twenty-five years. Well. Twenty-five years have passed.'
'And…' I met her gaze as it finally clicked in my head how she reached her conclusion. 'Now that it has, the curse has broken.'
She gave a small half smile and pointed to me. 'Bingo. This isn't a possession scenario. It's reincarnation. If it worked this way with me, then it probably did with the protagonist too. Perhaps they were reborn, grew up with what they thought was just a vivid imagination, and turned it into a cartoon. Who knows how many ponies got the same treatment?’
I rubbed my head, trying to process. ‘That’s… a lot of straws you’re grasping at, Teddy.’
‘I agree. I could be wrong.’ She sat up, turned back to the laptop she had been working on when I came in, and resumed typing. ‘Go. Sign your NDA, Doc. Then we can get back to looking for a scientific answer to a magical problem.’
I opened my mouth, perhaps to try and reason that we couldn't afford the several hours delay reading, signing, and submitting dozens of NDA's would cause, when the door was thrown open and Nurse Redmond burst in. 'Doctor! We just got news from the Pediatric Clinic over on fifty-sixth and South. Sir. I think we have another one.'