Unexpected Side Effects (Patreon)

Another old image rework and the story that goes with it.

Veronika was an absolutely normal young woman or so everyone thought. But it had not always been that way. When she'd been tiny, no more than a handful of cells in her mother's womb, there had been a problem. The gynaecologist who detected the problem with the latest genetic screening methods had the unenviable task of informing the parents of the terrible news.

"Mr. and Mrs. Findlay," she began. "We have the results of the genetic tests on your baby."
"Everything is well, I hope," Mr. Findlay stated, much as he would to an underling in his firm.
"No. I'm sorry. There's a critical defect in one of the developmental genes. Your baby will soon fail to develop and likely should be aborted."
"There will be no abortions in this family!" Mr Dinlay stated coldly.
"I doubt the baby will survive to term but it may put your wife to a lot of unnecessary stress to carry it any longer."
"There will be NO abortion. We have waited too long for this child and we won't kill it now."
"Is there no other option, doctor?" Mrs. Findlay asked timidly.
"Nothing that I can offer. A colleague in Ottawa has a very experimental program that might help."
"Then that is where we shall go!" stated Mr. Findlay.
"I should caution you that the process has never been clinically tested. It's lab only."
"Never mind the details. We will go to him and cure our baby!" 

Mr. Findlay had made his decision and Dr. Yoi knew from experience that little would or could change that decision.  Later that week, with Jerri (Veronika's mother) still in shock, the met with the doctor.

"Hi! I'm Karen Terashita," the young woman held out her hand. Gerald (Veronika's father) took the hand and shook it firmly.
"What have you for us?" he demanded.
"What I have is a gene transplant. The foetus is but a few weeks old. We can temporarily remove it from the womb, use carefully modified phages to replace the damaged gene, and then re-implant. The baby should develop to term normally."
"You sound less than certain."
"My team has had considerable success with animals but we've never tried it on people."
"And?"
"And we've never tried it on people. I only recently got the go ahead for clinical trials."
"I see. You feel these phages will cure the baby."
"I believe so. At least in the animal tests, we have had a good success rate."
"How good?" demanded Gerald.
"About 65%"
"That doesn't sound very good," Jerri offered. "What happens if the treatment doesn't work?"
"We can, if we start soon enough, make a second attempt. After that, the foetus will be too developed. Likely at that point, the foetus would be deformed enough that it would be naturally aborted anyway."
"When?" Gerald looked sternly at Dr. Terashita.
"We could admit your wife today and perform the extraction and treatment tomorrow afternoon."
"Then do it!"

That Jerri had no choice in the matter was a forgone conclusion. Gerald was a bit of a bully (as any of his employees could tell you) and Jerri deferred to his judgement quite often rather than protesting. The surgery went well though and, a week later, the genetic tests revealled that the phages had done their work. The damaged genes had been replaced and their long sought baby would grow to term and be born.

That baby had been Veronika. She was a beautiful child and grew, over the years, into a beautiful young woman. As she grew, she went to school, made friends (and enemies, too), fell in love, fell out of love. In short, did all the things someone did while growing up. Despite the fact that her parents weren't terribly interested in the outdoors, Veronika loved to be outside. When she was 18, she took went on many deep woods camping expeditions with friends. There was something about the forests and hills away from the city that held a particular fascination for her.

Because of her entirely normal appearance, no one thought to ask the source of the genes that had been implanted. There are many genes that are shared by all life. Some of these are critical to normal development of the creature regardless of species. It didn't matter whether the gene came from a person, a dog, a snail, an insect or even a plant. It was pretty much the same gene across all life. Dr. Terashita had selected the gene carefully from a common animal that had few differences from the missing human gene. Now you might think that would be a chimpanzee or a gorilla. That would probably have been a closer match. Unfortunately, Dr. Terashita's experiments were conducted on a small grant. The facilities to deal with primates were beyond her means. Instead, she extracted the missing genetic material from insects. They were common and the extraction process was easy when you could afford to kill several donors without anyone worrying the cost.

Those genes, though similar, were not identical. Veronika discovered the differences in her nineteenth year. She and a group of friends had gone off on an extended hike in the Appalachian Mountains for their Spring Break from college. It was beautiful and everything seemed to be more alive than it had ever been before. Veronika, after everyone had finished setting up their camp, had decided to take a quick hike to gather some firewood from the deadfall they'd passed just down the path. There was a delicious scent in the air, a wonderful perfume she'd never noticed before.

She paused, atop a rock, just to enjoy the view and watch the forest in its life. Without any warning, she felt a cramp in her belly. It was as if something were twisting her insides. She doubled over and felt wave after wave of dizziness pass over her. She closed her eyes in an attempt to control the spinning but to no avail. It was then she noticed bumps on her abdomen just below her breasts. She quickly removed her shirt and then her bra to get at them. They were growing, elongating, pushing through her skin. She half expected blood at the least when they broke through but nothing of the sort happened. Instead they quickly elongated, forming joints and then hardened. She knew she'd seen things like that before. There was no doubt she now had four insect legs growing from her abdomen. She reached down to touch them and discovered that she could feel them, they were real. What's more, she could feel things with them and move them, too!

A further twisting and wrenching feeling in her hips resulted in her hiking pants being stretched. Rather than risk tearing them, Veronika decided she'd best strip down until this strange development was finished. The extension at the base of her spine soon resolved itself into a long abdomen like that of a moth or butterfly. Growing it had been strenuous and Veronika was exhausted and breathing hard. She paused to catch her breath when the world swam before her eyes and the perfume intensified. She could see nothing new and dreaded what was going to happen next. What would Harold, her boyfriend, say and do? She doubted his love would extend to something half insect. As she turned her head, she noticed a strange shadow cross her vision. The reason for the increase in the intensity of all the smells was quickly discovered. Reaching up, she touched a pair of antenna, butterfly antenna to be precise, growing from a point just above her nose.

She felt a strong urge to stretch, to extend her arms as far as she could. She wondered whether it was just her muscles protesting the strain of carrying her backpack for 25 kilometres through the bush or something far worse. She fought the urge for a few minutes but soon it won out and she stretched. Within moments, her arms were gone. They'd been replaced by dark coloured sacks that pulsed strangely. The sacks expanded though and within ten minutes, Veronika discovered she now had beautiful blue butterfly wings instead of arms. She held them still as they dried, not because she had decided to but because something gave her no choice. It was as if this action was as solidly determined as any programmed instruction for a computer.

There she kneeled on the warm rock, part woman and part butterfly. And that's how her friends found her ninety minutes later after they'd searched the area. They had no idea what to do so they called Search and Rescue. The SARTechs didn't know what to do either so they arranged to have her transported to a hospital. It was a foregone conclusion that the ER doctors would never seen this kind of case before.  Karen Terashita happened to be Head of Medicine at the hospital. She'd seen many similar cases in her years of practice and knew the cause but her research had yielded no cure.

Photo Credits:
Woman: https://www.DeviantArt.com/DPADoc
Butterfly: Creative Commons
Background: Creative Commons