BALLET MÉCANIQUE
A woman experiments with the bizarre new possibilities afforded her by uploading her consciousness into a mechanical, non-anthropomorphic feline body
BALLET MÉCANIQUE
An electric beep followed by strings of data racing through her brain was her cue to wake up. The problem wasn't that her brain was still foggy, still searching for information. The problem was that all the information came racing to her at once. She was aware of every sound and smell around her and every pinprick detail in front of her eyes. She was aware of the movements of each part of her body. She was aware that this body wasn't the right body, that every part of her was the wrong proportion, the wrong angle, the wrong structure to what she was used to day-in-day-out. Information was still streaming through her head, reassuring her that all her systems were functional. That was the one part that was most confusing her, because she didn't remember ever having systems, let alone this voice inside her mind giving her status updates on them
At first she was confused, bounding back and forth in a mad panic. Not scared exactly, but definitely confused. Every part of her body felt alien and yet seemed to be exactly as it should, her senses were telling her things they never had before, but they were missing those vital gaps: why did her body seem so strange and why the hell was everything in the room so big?
"Okay, she's awake," said a voice from above. She spun around to see a familiar figure, albeit ungodly huge all of a sudden. Normally she towered over the mole
"Phil, what the fuck?" she demanded. Or rather, she thought. What she heard coming from her mouth was a bizarre yowl, stopping her in her tracks
"Alright, settle down Kara," the mole said as he picked her up and set her down on the table before habitually smoothing out his labcoat. Kara would've rolled her eyes, but they were practically watering from the mole's aftershave. She never liked his taste in it to begin with, and it seemed like he must've poured the entire bottle on himself today. "Sorry about the voicebox," the mole began explaining. "We tried to get the body as close as we could to an actual cat's, it does mean you might not be able to convert your natural speech patterns into, well, speech I guess"
Kara pondered this, settling down on her hindpaws. She settled so naturally that she'd almost forgotten she used to have a rather more anthropomorphic torso. "I'm a cat?" she thought aloud, managing to produce a more harmonious mewing sound this time. "I'm a cat!" She leapt up excitedly as the realisation hit her. The details of the experiment were beginning to creep back. She bounced around and looked through the large glass window to where she could see the dalamatian she was familiar with from the mirror laid out and unconscious on a laboratory table, wires and tubes attached to her, monitoring her vital signs. It was an eerie sight, but at the same time she found it weirdly amusing. As the organic side of her mind fully focused she understood she wasn't just a cat now but a robot
"Don't worry about her, she'll be just fine," Phil added for reassurance. "Come on, I want to show you something else that I think you'll really love!" The mole made to pick up the cat, but she skittered backwards and batted a paw at him, giving him an unimpressed look-and-meow combination before gracefully leaping off the table onto the floor. It felt good! She'd never felt so naturally athletic before as she nodded for the mole to carry on. Phil shrugged. "Okay, that's fair enough," he said as he led the way out of the lab
Kara was enjoying the bizarre and otherworldly sensations her new body and enhanced senses were affording her. Each step taken was like a ballet, four paws working in unison, body lithely flexing as she went. She was simultaneously aware of her new feline grace and of the gears and joints and gyroscopes working feverishly inside her body, the nanotechnology allowing her to feel the smooth, cool laboratory floor on her bare paws. She purred happily at the strange thought, mentally singing "Sex Machine" to herself
They didn't walk for too long, Phil leading her into another room where a greyhound was settled at a monitor, watching the computer processing raw data. "Oh! It worked then? Looking good Kara," the greyhound said as she turned to look at her visitors. Kara meowed again in acknowledgement, leaping up onto the table and pausing to marvel at the fact she could do something like that so easily now. She didn't consider herself unfit normally but her natural self could never have jumped onto the table, and in any case this was more the equivalent of the familiar dalmatian hopping over a ten-foot wall
"Is she good to go, Anne?" Phil asked. Kara turned to look at him, puzzled
"Yeah, lemme bring her out..."
The cat watched as Anne opened up a stainless steel case, carefully lifting out what Kara at first thought, a little disgustedly, was a dead pigeon. As the greyhound set it down on the table with the cat, she realised it was another robot. It looked almost real, but its feathers and beak had something just a little off, something synthetic about them. She hadn't followed Phil's development process very closely, having her own projects to work on, but she could imagine exactly how the thought process went: officially it would be to differentiate the robot from a real pigeon, to stop it getting lost in the wild. That's what Phil would've told the directors. Unofficially the mole was just addicted to robot aesthetics. Kara had never met the mole's wife but if she'd turned out to be a robot the now-cat would've been totally unsurprised. Between these thoughts and an overwhelming curiosity about how it would feel to lick her paws, she only barely noticed as Phil inserted a thin electronic tool into the pigeon's neck
Kara's attention was grabbed simultaneously by two things. The first was another electric beep inside her head, whilst the second was the pigeon standing upright. Almost immediately after this everything became momentary chaos as new streams of data started flooding her mind, new bodyparts suddenly became known to her and her senses became doubled. In the resulting confusion she flew straight up into the ceiling, knocking herself back down onto the table with an undignified thud
"Shit! Are you okay?" Phil asked as he and Anne looked over her, worried. "I'm sorry, I sprung that on you and I really should've warned you it was coming." Kara opened her eyes to look at the mole. She couldn't quite fathom why she was looking at both his face and the back of his head. It took a moment more, but the dawning realisation came that now she was looking out of both the pigeon's eyes and the cat's
The pigeon cooed as she got herself upright again. At the same time the cat mewed, both of them trying to convey Kara's state of mind through their new vocabularies. Phil and Anne stepped away to let Kara admire herselves. It was the first time she'd properly seen herself as a cat, examining the svelte feline body with those just-slightly-off robotic stylisations that Phil had added. Her fur was a dark and shiny grey, like graphite, similar to her pigeon-self's more varied range of tones. Both robots stalked up to each other curiously. "Oh this is interesting," Kara thought to herself. Immediately she realised that what she thought as a cat, her pigeon-self heard like speech. She smiled and meowed excitedly. "Hello birdy"
"Hello yourself, kitty," the pigeon replied. Cat-Kara purred and then leapt forward as Pigeon-Kara flew into the air again, spinning around in the air and marvelling at how it felt to be off the ground even as she was bounding back and forth on the lab table watching her own display
"I actually can't believe she can do that," Anne said as she and the mole watched also, almost drowned out by the excited racket of cat and bird chasing each other
"Well she's a bird, she's supposed to be able to fly"
"I mean being the cat and the bird at the same time"
"Oh, that. Well, the brain's a fairly complicated computer and we've basically hooked it up to another extremely complicated computer, so uh, yeah." The mole trailed off, too distracted by Kara's acrobatics
For her part Kara was fully aware of her labmates' conversation, having two sets of ears now and considerable processing power to absorb it, but she was more interested in the feeling of flight, the way the air felt around her as she flapped and spun and looped and dived and generally made a fool of gravity. At the same time the thrill of being a cat was as strong as ever, her body leaping and bounding and flexing as her two sets of eyes admired each other. She didn't care if she was being narcissistic, she was feeling beautiful and she was in a unique position to enjoy the view
"Okay," Anne clapped her hands together, "girls... girl... uh, whatever. Shall we take this to the garden? Before one of you breaks something?" Kara reluctantly came to a halt, nodding as she followed the greyhound and mole out of the room. Anne was right of course, she needed a bigger space to stretch those exciting new wings
===
The lab's garden was a large square bounded on all four sides by the building itself, for security reasons. The instant the door was open Kara dashed out across the lawn, feeling it against her paws and smelling its sweet scent as she flapped and raced almost vertically up into the sky to dive back down again. "Careful how far you go with the bird," Phil added as he watched her. "The cat's the command module, if you take the bird more than uh, about two hundred feet or so away from the cat you'll break your connection." Kara the cat sprang around to look at him with a cocked head, a little concerned by his words. "Oh don't worry," he reassured her hurriedly, "you're not going to get split in half or anything. All your mental processes would revert back to the cat, and the pigeon will switch to homing mode. She's designed to home in on the lab when her connection is broken, unless she comes back into range of the cat on the way." That was good enough for Kara, who returned her attention to enjoying her environment. She whirled in the sky above her before sinking back down to settle in the branches of the tree at the center of the garden. As a cat, she smiled to herself and stalked up to the tree, climbing it easily to attempt to pounce herself. No such luck of course
"Come on, let's leave her be," Anne said as she turned back to the door
"I don't think we ought to-" Phil began to protest, but Anne raised a hand to silence him
"Phil, she's a forty-year-old woman, it's not like she's going to fall in the pond and drown. She doesn't even need to breathe"
The mole nodded, a little embarrassed by his concern, and they went back inside the building
Left to her own devices, Kara was having a whale of a time. She dashed through the flowers inhaling their potent scent, splashed her paws in the pond, spooked the fish and took in the whole scene from twenty feet above. The feeling of being an animal, of sprightly movements she could never hope to make when she was her usual 5'7" self, was only intensified by knowing and feeling also that she was a machine, capable of feeling and tracing every function going on inside her body. She was completely transformed and it was more intoxicating than anything she'd ever experienced. Cat and bird chased and fluttered and bounced after each other, Kara discovering that when she was going full-throttle it became impossible for her two selves to second-guess each other, her thought processes too consumed by the excitement and energy and pleasure and the feeling of wind through fur and feathers and the cheerful cacophony of meowing and yowling and cooing and chirping. It was almost as if she were two people, able to surprise and startle herself, swooping down close to the ground and leaping after herself, the bird daring the cat to catch her
As she frolicked, Kara was beginning to find herself growing excited in more ways than one. Everything about her state of being was so sensual, the thrill of being a cat, being a bird, being a machine, being in these exotic bodies with their limitless new possibilities. Deep-seated fantasies were being stirred up, things she'd never thought she'd experience, and she didn't want to stop. The pigeon settled on the lawn and was soon sprung upon by the cat, Kara gleefully ruffling her own feathers as she licked and tasted her birdy self, feeling the new sensation of feathers against her tongue and tongue against her feathers and shivering a little with excitement. She didn't want to eat herself, she wanted something else as she pressed beak and muzzle together in exploration and then nuzzled herself
She knew exactly what she wanted. Her thoughts turned inwards for a moment as she checked her internal workings to see if she really could do this, bird and cat both chattering happily as she saw that she could. She nuzzled her pigeon-self again and slinkily made her way to the pond, now openly flirting with herself. The cat stuck its muzzle in the pond and slurped up some of the water, enjoying its clean taste before going back to the bird. Again they nuzzled, the cat settling on the lawn and wrapping her front paws around the pigeon to embrace her whilst she waited
It wasn't a long wait. "Ready to go, birdy?" she asked herself with a low, sensuous purr
"I am if you are," she answered with a coo
The cat rose again, and the bird lay on its back on the grass. It wasn't easy to get into position, but she managed it. Even without real lungs she could feel herself breathing heavily, her mechanisms emulating those natural subtleties with an amazing beauty. With her pigeon-self laid back, her cat-self strode over the bird and got into position. She closed her feline eyes, sighed to herself and let go
Kara purred deeply to herself, her private passion blending with the blooming image of herself as a true cat, scentmarking her territory as she pleased. It wasn't a perfect simulation, it didn't have the taste or the scent or the warmth of piss, or at least only the slight warmth given by her machinery that she could detect only because she WAS a machine. But it was enough for her to live out the fantasy, pigeon-self trying to coo through the stream and instead blubbing merrily as it splashed over her feathers and into her beak. And who knew how Phil could improve the technology if she asked for it in a future test-run? She shivered and shook at the thought, feeling herself going over the edge as the tidal wave of new sensations finally completely overcame her. Cat flopped down onto startled bird as the orgasm pulsed through them both, rolling off her to sprawl on the grass by her side, reaching out to embrace the bird again between her paws as they came
"The wonders of science," she sighed inwardly to herself as cat and pigeon curled up together on the lawn, feeling a sense of peace that she couldn't remember last experiencing as a regular person. It saddened her a little that she'd have to go back when the experiment was up, but at least she'd make sure to treat Phil to a five-star meal as thanks. Maybe a bottle of a less pungent aftershave whilst she was at it
===
In the lab, Phil sat watching the security camera feed from the garden. He rested his head in his hand and sighed loudly
"What's up now, gloomy-guts?" Anne asked as she handed him a cup of tea, "jealous you're not getting laid on company time?"
The mole rolled his eyes and took a sip. "Charming, Anne. You know, I make time machines, advanced cybernetics..." he looked from the security feed to displays showing him the vital signs from Kara's body and her transplanted alpha-waves inside the robotic cat and added to the thick stack of notes he'd already taken, "...I honestly think I could design a neutron bomb and it would *still* end up with people urinating on themselves for kicks"
"Never mind," Anne chuckled. "At least you know the connection works. Next test you could bluetooth her to everything in the lab"
"Nuh-uh," the mole replied with a sideways glance, "I'm not risking her having sex with the microwave"