Butterfly Girl (Patreon)

Another of the stories from that discovered archive.

Stephanie had always loved butterflies. When she was four and five and six, her Halloween costume had been a butterfly. Later, she'd branched into fairies and princesses, but butterflies were still always her favourites. She could easily spend hours watching them. Where her friends (and particularly boys) would spend hours at the TV or on the computer, Stephanie (at least in the summer) could always be counted on to be dreamily sketching butterflies from the back deck of her house.

Growing up with such a passion presented a problem. Anyone with a more than average passion for anything other than the latest rock star or TV show was suspect and considered weird. Needless to say, Stephanie was one of these weird ones. By the time she reached high school, she'd received the nickname "Butterfly Girl". Although she professed that the name didn't hurt, the constant teasing did. Instead of conforming though, Stephanie worked harder. At school, she loved biology and everything to do with it. And because chemistry was an important part of biology, she soon excelled at chemistry as well.

She graduated a full year ahead of those in her junior high school who pestered her and, by dint of hard work, managed to complete a four year B.Sc. in Biochemistry in only three years. Her position as first in the class assured her of just about any research position she wanted for her masters. Of course, she chose to study Lepidoptera (butterflies ... what else?). She discovered a few new things about their social habits and breeding cycles, got herself published with her staff advisor's help (and name on the paper). Her Ph.D. branched into butterfly genetics. She was interested in the exact differences that made the different butterflies behave as they did.

Part of these experiments involved transferring bits of one butterfly’s DNA into another (while still in the egg, of course) and determining the resulting changes in development. It was finicky work and failed to take as often as it worked but Stephanie persevered. She became expert at the microsurgery necessary to transfer bits from one egg cell to another. By the time she was 28, she was working as an assistant professor at a Rain Forest Research Station in Columbia.

It was there she heard of the use of nanites to do the transfer. This seemed a much more reliable method as the robots did much less damage than even the finest glass pipettes and micro-scalpels. She took a leave of absence to learn the technique and returned from MIT with a whole new technique to try on her beloved butterflies.

At first everything went well. The nanites did make the task more reliably and she was able to track down a good deal of the developmental pathways that changed a caterpillar into a butterfly. She was usually extremely careful with her equipment, taking great pains never to make any mistake. Unfortunately, the Rain Forest Research Station was only a few kilometres from a native village. Usually, the difficult walk and the fence deterred the kids from even getting close to the main buildings but this wasn't guaranteed.

Just as Stephanie was about to transfer a loaded vial of nanites from her host butterfly egg into the subject egg, there came a crash of a ball on the window. It didn't break the glass but it startled Stephanie into poking the delivery needle through her latex glove and into her finger. When the nanites were nowhere to be found (Stephanie checked the entire syringe under the microscope) she decided that it shouldn't present too much of a problem. After all, without host tissue, nanites were programmed to self-destruct in 24 hours anyway.

That night, Stephanie couldn't sleep. She tossed and turned, woke up several times, and had a strange coughing fit. By morning, though, she finally managed to get to sleep. The sun, streaming in through the window, awakened her. She stretched her arms only to make a startling discovery: she no longer had arms -- she had huge wings, butterfly wings. She twisted out of her bed and landed on the floor on her stomach. There she made another discovery. She no longer had legs. They'd been fused together or replaced by a huge butterfly abdomen. She pushed herself up onto her hands (or what felt like her hands) and discovered yet a third change. She had six insectile legs to support her body now. The final change was discovered only when she tried to cry out for help. Her tongue, tightly packed in her mouth, expanded outward into the familiar spiral of a butterfly tongue.

Stephanie was hungry but she knew where there was food. The arboretum, where they grew all manner of flowering plants harvested from the jungle, had hundreds or even thousands of fresh blooms. Just right for a Butterfly Girl's breakfast.

Photo Credits:
Woman: https://www.DeviantArt.com/Herarip
Butterfly: https://www.DeviantArt.com/Panisetcircense