Orientation
Part 1- Patch-job

Ethan slicked his hair back while running his other hand, damp from the water of a running faucet, across his face, wiping away any errant smudges and flecks of dirt that may have survived previous attempts to dislodge them.

“How do I look?” He asked, smoothing out the wrinkles of his button up shirt.

“Like a million bucks” his friend Zeke responded, shoveling a handful of chips into his mouth.

“Ethan relax” a female voice sounded from across the room. It’s owner, a svelte young tiger-lady in a T-shirt and oversized, belted up trousers crossed the room holding a soda she had retrieved from the fridge. “It’s not like you’re going in for another interview. It’s your first day on the job, if you start agonizing about all these little things you’ll just end up making more of an ass of yourself than usual”

“Thank you, for the vote of confidence Noah” Ethan sighed “I just wanna make a good first impression”

Noah shrugged and started sipping her soft drink “Just remember to breathe”

 A bizarre incident that occurred a few weeks ago had resulted in a radical shift in gender and species for one of Ethan’s closer friends Noah. Despite her utterly different physique, Noah had insisted that she was still one of the guys and she hadn’t been female nearly long enough to be sensibly offended or put off by their usual shenanigans. Of course, that hadn’t stopped her from laying Ethan’s brother out cold when he tried to grope her. Noah always did have a hell of a right hook. 

Noah was still adjusting to the more radical shifts in her physiology. After her initial full display of her newly striped curvature outside of an electronics store in little Japan, Noah had taken to wearing hefty clothing, masking the more feminine aspects of her body under ruffled cloth. She had yet to return to work since the incident and was still currently swamped with the paperwork and appointments that came with altering all of her ID and documents. Ethan and Zeke had offered to look into support groups that dealt with cases like hers, which she always turned down. It certainly didn’t help that Zeke kept mixing up his pronouns around her, referring to Noah by both masculine and feminine terms with equal consistency. Noah acted like it didn’t matter, but Ethan had a feeling that beneath the veneer of nonchalance, his friend’s new body was affecting her a lot more than she let on.

At least Ethan was open about his emotional stress. This wasn’t a stock position, or cashier spot at a grocery store he was headed towards, this was his first day on the job as an assistant manager at the local Amalgatech factory. To the young man’s credit, he was fully in his right to be nervous. Amalgatech had its own reputation, it didn’t hire just anyone. The massive, multinational conglomerate was the leading line of some of the most cutting edge developments on the planet and Ethan had just happened to have been hired to work at their primary western branch. Most of the stuff turned out by that place belonged in a sci-fi movie and Ethan was left wondering what exactly he was going to be left in charge of. The man at his interview must have seen something in Ethan that told her that he was the kind of guy who could take the rigours of working and supervising in that kind of bizarre and flat out dangerous environment. Ethan just hoped he could live up to the expectations that the company apparently saw in him.

“I’m off!” Ethan called back as he stepped out the door.

“We’ll hold down the fort” Zeke answered from within.

Ethan promptly shut the door behind him and headed for his car.
Noah sniffed and glanced over at Zeke. “You feel like getting up today?”
“I dunno” said Zeke “Do  you?”
“Not much to do out there” Noah answered, lying through her pointed teeth. She had plenty that needed doing. She just didn’t feel like facing any of it today.
“You know, I could cut a hole in a pair of sweats. Maybe then your tail could poke out ”
Noah considered letting her new appendage dangle behind her, equating the concept to  a man forgetting to wear underpants while leaving his fly open “I’m comfortable with it down my pant leg ”
“You don’t look comfortable”
“Hey” Noah offered “What’ on TV?”
The two continued to jabber as Ethan sped towards his new job.

The front gates of the factory towered over Ethan’s tiny station wagon as he flashed his ID card to a bored security guard at the front gate. 
“Um, I’m here for the job orientation” He stammered to the lone sentry.
“I guessed” The Guard responded.
“It’s pretty cool. I’m going to be a manager”
“You don’t say”
“Hey, maybe I’ll be your boss” He attempted to joke.
“Maybe”
“Okay” Ethan muttered. The boost of nervous energy he got from seeing the factory was withering fast in front of this man’s indifference. “I’m gonna…go”
“I’ll be here when you get back”
The gatekeeper watched the young man haphazardly park a few meters away with a bemused look on his face. Hidden from view, his serpentine lower half undulated within the confines of the security booth. “I wonder” the guard muttered, bearing a slight fanged smile “What state you’ll be in by the end of the day…”

Ethan passed through the large central doors into a sizable lobby. He was surprised to see a trio of other people waiting for him. None of them were wearing very formal clothes, or any kind of uniform, so he assumed they were all new recruits like him. Wondering if these were some of the people he would be in charge of, Ethan gravitated towards the person closest to him, a thin, tall man wearing a white button-up shirt.

“Hi” he smiled, shaking the man’s hand “I’m Ethan. Are you new here too?”

“Yup” the man replied “I’m Walter. This is Megan-“ he motioned to a petite blonde girl on his right who gave Ethan a friendly wave “And Wanda” Ethan looked behind Walter at a bored looking black woman that glanced sideways at him before returning her gaze to the ceiling. She seemed to be putting a lot of effort into not socializing.
Silence hung in the air for a few seconds until Walter asked “So, what opening are you filling?”
“Um, yeah” Ethan stumbled out “I’m going to be the floor manager”
At this, everybody turned. “Which floor?”
Ethan paused for a moment. “…production lot 19” 
The other three looked among each other
“Guess you’re our manager” Walter smiled.
Before Ethan could act on this information, the doors at the end of the hall swung wide open and a young woman strode into the room purposefully moving towards the group with a stack of clipboards under her arm. Dressed in a neatly picked out business wardrobe and her auburn hair wrapped in a loose bun, she treated the collection of new employees with a warm smile and started handing out pens.
“Welcome to Amalgatech. My name is Cassandra Himura” Her eyes flickered between the four new recruits in front of her. “If you would please fill out these forms, we can commence with the tour” Her narrow features carried the distinct angles of a Japanese lineage, coupled with at least a generation or so of western parentage.

“Tour?” Megan raised an eyebrow.

“Of course” Ms. Himura replied, swiveling on her toe and striding back towards the doors she entered through. “You’re going to get acclimatized to your work environment and learn about what you’ll be doing here. Have you filled out your waivers yet?”

“waivers?” Wanda inquired, looking up from her form. “Waivers for what?”

“Oh, just a little insurance in case of workplace incident. Not to worry, we’ve gone years without an accident” Ms. Himura replied.

“How reassuring” Ethan muttered, writing his initials and signing it in all the right places. On his left, Megan signed it immediately while Walter and Wanda perused it more thoroughly.

“Um” Wanda raised a hand “I think I might have filled this out wrong…”
Without a moment’s hesitance, Ms. Himura snatched the clipboard from the hapless girl and handed her the spare.
“Do get it right this time.”

Tapping her foot impatiently, Ms. Himura sighed. After five minutes, Wanda and Walter were still examining their contracts. “Alright, you two just follow us and tell me when you’re done”

Diligently, the four followed their hostess through the double doors and into a large elevator. Once they were all piled in, Ms. Himura pressed the requisite button and they were off like a shot.

The doors of the lift were clear plexiglass and Ethan strained to get a good look at the numerous rooms whizzing past outside. He saw flashes of production facilities, wide and empty rooms, large chambers filled with pumping machinery and endless long hallways lined with doors. Suddenly, the elevator shuddered and came to a stop.
“The floor directly below us is undergoing some…modifications, so we’ll be taking a brief detour though processing floor 9 to another lift” Ms. Himura apologized. “This way”

The group spilled out of the elevator and marched through the industrial complex. Ethan gazed up at the high vaulted ceiling and dimly wondered how all of this could fit in one building. Either they were deep underground or Amalgatech had mastered a method of space management previously reserved for Time Lords. Ms. Himura was going on about something or other, but most of her words were drowned out by the sounds of pumping machinery. He managed to make out the words “Dismemberment or incineration are possible if you-” Anxiety seized the young man as he scuttled closer to get a better listen.

Meanwhile, Walter was lagging behind as he struggled through the amazingly dense wording of the contract he had yet to sign. After realizing he had read the same sentence eight times, he sighed resignedly and contented himself with scrawling his signature on the dotted line.
“I suppose they aren’t asking for much” he muttered “It says they’ll cover any medical costs in the event of the worst scenario. Ms. Himura, my-“

The future maintenance man looked up and to his dismay, noted that his colleagues had disappeared from sight. He must have wandered in a completely different direction while scanning the form.

“Hello?” he called out, but again, the racket of machinery drowned out his calls.
Grumbling, he set off in a random direction, hoping to intercept the group. His eyes fell on the various constructs around the room. All around and above him were complex arrays of gears and pistons, transferring kinetic energy from one end of the space to the other. With the massive hunks of metal slamming together and churning away all around him, Walt felt like a character in a Looney Tunes short, that any second he would fall into the machinery and be sliced up, melted down and smashed to a pulp, left to be processed into who knows what. To his right was a wall of tightly meshed cogs that would probably make a watch maker dizzy and to left lay a covered conveyor belt, transporting an unknown material into what looked like a colossal blast furnace.

 On one side of the cylindrical container, Walt noticed what looked like a loose panel, seemingly held in place by a thick, foamy substance. He arched an inquisitive eyebrow, checking the sealant more thoroughly. It looked like some sort of caulking epoxy. He jabbed it with one finger only to find it was still moist, very spongy and a bit sticky. He withdrew his wayward digit, rubbing the damp off between his fingers.

“Hey” Ethan made a full circle on his feet “Has anyone seen Walt?”

“Who?” Megan inquired. “You mean the tall guy?”

“Yeah” Ethan looked around, trying to locate his missing colleague. “Did he wander off or something?”

“Oh, not to worry” Ms. Himura shrugged, “He is the new maintenance man. Maybe he’s found something to patch up”

Walt paused for a second; leaning on a pillar that he was fairly sure he had already passed by a dozen times before. Something was up with his gut. He coughed slightly and tried to swallow, but found no moisture in his throat. All at once Walt’s search objectives shifted from his group to a water fountain.

In less than a minute, Walter started feeling weak at the knees and he had considerably more trouble breathing. His fingers seemed to be sticking together, but he was the opposite of sweaty. His skin felt…tacky and rubbery, like semi-dry paint.

All at once, Walt felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Not in a metaphorical, butterflies sort of way, but a genuine sensation of his intestines melding in with his belly. His organs were melting together, becoming uniform in composition.

Walt was dumbfounded, was this some sort of allergic reaction? God help him if his throat started to swell up. What had he done to cause this? Was it something being processed in the factory, some kind of fume he had inhaled? He remembered the foamy substance he had touched earlier and he let out a groan. He should have known better than to have come into direct skin contact with some unknown substance, it could have been some sort of fiberglass insulation for all he knew, and now it had gotten under is skin.

Then his throat swelled up.

Walt gasped, or at least tried to, as his windpipe sealed itself. He started to panic, realizing if someone didn’t find him, and soon, he has going to asphyxiate. Hoping in vain that he might be able to break through the layer of membrane stretched across his trachea, he inhaled with all of might.
In return, he was greeted with the bizarre sensation of air entering his body, but just not via his mouth or nose.

A strange coolness washed over his body as air started to rush into him, through his skin. But it wasn’t leaving. His shirt and pants started feeling tighter and all at once, his midriff snuck into view as his shirt untucked itself. Walt pressed at his expanding belly and felt a chill of the unnatural as his hand sunk in up to the wrist. Pulling it out with an audible *foomp*, Walt paced backwards, his head reeling. At an unpleasantly alarming rate, his midsection inflated into a spherical shape, the back and front expanding at an equal pace.

Walt tried to all out for help, but even if he could still speak, his words would have been drowned out by the roar of machinery around him. The steadily bloating man attempted to waddle towards some kind of salvation, but his  limbs started to expand slightly slower than his torso, going from pipe cleaners to balloon animals in seconds. He started to mouth panicked profanities, until his tongue swelled up like a great fat slug and his expanding cheeks forced his lips closed. The sphere of his abdomen was swiftly overtaking his chest, transitioning his entire torso into a round ball. The edges of his ovoid form started to fold over Walter’s now sausage-like arms, which began to vanish into his central mass like sinking ships. He struggled to turn his head and witness the same thing happen to his fingers, the creases surrounding his plump digits an indication of their inevitable disappearance into his bloated arms. Walt’s mobility was rapidly diminishing, but he still struggled to move forward, what was left of his limbs frantically thrashing as though they were drowning in the ocean of the rest of his body. Some part of him was still fighting what was happening to his body, as though it her some strange suit he was wearing. His brain still couldn’t wrap around the idea that this bloated, gummy substance that had melted his organs together, sealed up his throat and rendered him a barely moving blob was actually himself.

With a profile now associated with a gummy bear, Walt struggled to stay on his rapidly rounding out feet. It didn’t help that his crotch had enveloped half of his legs. Finally, he fell backwards into his bloated, round backside. The alien sensation of a cold floor on his curved, formless bottom slowly shrank as he grew rounder and less of his body came in contact with the ground. Walt could do nothing but rock back and forth as the distinction between hand and arm disappeared, nothing but rounded ends to his limbs. His pants, which had fallen around his ankles ages ago, finally slipped off, leaving him in an overstretched pair of briefs and a shredded dress shirt. He let out a sorrowful, bewildered moan as the last of his arms and legs disappeared into his gigantic mass. He had to be at least eight feet in every direction. 

At long last, his head was enveloped and even Walt’s muffled moans were silenced. Gradually, darkness was replaced with a hazy vision of his surroundings. He could still see, but how exactly, he had no idea. He rocked there slightly, a ten foot tall sphere of grayish flesh colour and rubbery to the touch, The last of his overstretched clothing having fallen off long ago. Nothing to distinguish him as a former human save a small, deep navel.

The more Walter fought to move some part of himself, the more the reality of his situation sunk in. Even the smallest action was impossible. All he could do was sit there and wait for someone to find him.

A pair of footsteps entered the Walt-blob’s range of hearing as two employees rounded the corner, dressed in full coverall, gloves, hard hats and gasmasks.
“Whoah, what’s this?” one of them froze, taking in Walt’s enormity.
“Think it’s an employee?” the other asked, walking up to the giant ball.
“Huh, probably. You know how it is. You get careless for five seconds around her and BAM, different species. You hear about Jill upstairs?”
“Yep, they’re installing handholds in her office so she can get around without her legs. It looks like a giant jungle gym in there”

Walt was dumfounded by their utter nonchalance at the thought that this amorphous mass in front of them might have once been a human. What was more worrisome was that they were neither seeking help nor even attempting to communicate with him.
 
 One of the two faceless workers gave Walt a poke. “Hmm, feels like some kind of glue. Kind of sticky”
The other patted the ball in front of him. “Hey yeah, it’s caulking!”
“What?”
“Caulking. You know, that stuff in those big syringes repairmen use to seal up cracks and leaks. It’s like rubber cement and it expands on contact with air”
The inquisitive one nodded in recognition. “Right, I heard Mitch talk about that. Apparently the company’s testing a new batch of this “caulking” on this floor. He said you REALLY shouldn’t touch it.”
“I can see why” The worker knocked on Walt’s side.
“So what are we gonna do with this one?” He gestured towards Walter.

“Please, find a doctor. A scientist. Someone who can reverse this.” Walt thought outwardly, praying that they could somehow comprehend him.
“Welp, You say he’s for patching up cracks now, and we’ve got this BIG leak a few meters that way” One of the employees motioned behind him.
“Good idea”

Panic gripped Walt-caulk again as they both took position behind him and gave a hard shove, slowly rolling his body across the factory floor. His two new friends started to chat again.

“Glad we found something to seal up that leak, it’s left this big puddle of hazardous chemicals just lying there. It already melted two of my co-workers”
“No kidding, what happened to them?”
“Well, of course the cleaners bottled them up, made sure nobody was mixed with anybody else and now they’re sitting on a shelf somewhere. Management says they’re going to put them into some new hydraulic systems”
“It’s nice that the higher ups always find a niche for us to fill, even if they are a little unconventional.”

Walt felt his side impact with something flat and spread across it’s surface slightly. Then, the two workers moved to either side, pulling at his body with their hands and stretching it over what he guessed was the busted vat that was spilling chemicals. They worked quickly and soon, he was less of a sphere and more of a stretched out dome, being held in place by his skin’s adhesive quality.

“Done and done” One placed his hands on his hips, surveying their work”
“Yeah, that should hold” the other replied.
They turned to go, their conversation turning to the pros and cons of extra limbs as Walter lapsed into a state of acceptance. Either someone was going to take note of this and do something to fix it, or he was stuck like this.
Oh well, at least he got to repair something on his first day.