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“I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

The voice was unnaturally far away from Agent Spears when she spoke. At least it was her own voice, though. She’d been worried it would become distorted somehow.

“Are you in any pain?” the question came from the head of R&D, Kurt Besso. He was a short, balding man who rarely spoke to anyone in the department unless it was connected to his current projects.

Agent Spears took a moment to perform a self-examination. It was complicated since she was having to keep track of two bodies now.

“My body feels fine but the host is hungry,” she said at last.

“Ah, of course,” Kurt said and one of the techs brought over a small bowl of kibble. “Try this.”

Agent Spears recoiled from the food.

“Are you kidding me?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you just feed the cat before I hopped inside?”

“You’ll need to care for the host for however long your in there,” Kurt replied. “That means eating what it eats.”

Muscles along the top and sides of Agent Spear’s head tensed and her ears lay flat against her scalp. A mewling growl rumbled in her chest and throat and her claws dug into the padded mat she was standing on.

“Oh,” Kurt perked up and came closer to note the changes. “Are you doing all this consciously or is it more like an instinctual response?”

Even Agent Spears was caught off guard by how well the host was responding to her input and her anger quickly subsided. The host body immediately relaxed in kind.

“Fascinating,” Kurt remarked quietly. “Now, how about some food, eh?”

He slid the dish closer to Agent Spears and, reluctantly, she took a small bite. She was unused to how the host should eat besides the most basic things of getting a mouthful, chewing it, and swallowing. The teeth were all different, as was the tongue.

“It’s hard to shift the food around to chew it properly,” she said. “I feel like I should just swallow it whole.”

“I imagine that in the wild the host would do just that,” Kurt agreed. “Bite off a chunk, maybe masticate it a little to soften it up, then down it goes.”

He stretched out his hand and began scratching Agent Spears behind the ears. Both the host and Agent Spears had strong reactions to this new development but they were at odds with one another. Agent Spears tried to recoil from the unexpected touch whereas the host tried to begin purring and wanted to rub up against Kurt’s hand. The end result was Agent Spears twitching and falling over.

“What are you doing?” Agent Spears demanded.

“People pet cats, Agent Spears,” he said. “You’ll need to learn to either avoid them or get used to it.”

“I’m going to be running reconnaissance, not getting a massage,” she stated flatly.

“True,” Kurt agreed, “but we selected a kitten as the host for a reason.”

“I know, I know,” she groaned. “Everyone loves a kitten and they’re small enough they can get to most places we need access to.”

Kurt nodded and tried to resume petting the host. Agent Spears swatted at his hand, though she kept the claws retracted.

“Very good,” Kurt said with a satisfied nod. “Just don’t be so aggressive that you make them want to kick you. Kittens are fragile and each host is worth a small fortune.”

“Understood.”

She finished eating the kibble, ignoring the fact that the flavor wasn’t all that bad, and then began looking around. As a cat, she couldn’t see red, which showed up as either dull grays or else as shades of other colors, depending on the precise hue of the object. Bright objects, and anything that moved was especially eye catching for her and she often felt the instinctual urge to go chasing after them. Her hearing was particularly sharp and it was somewhat of a struggle to parse out the different noises. Walking was a whole other affair, too, as she had to sort out each leg and paw and make sure she didn’t try to step with both left feet at the same time.

“You look like you’re adapting well,” Kurt said after a half hour of Agent Spears stumbling around the small enclosure. “How’s the host?”

It took a bit of concentration to tap into the host’s feelings.

“Thirsty,” she said after a few moments, “and tired. I think it needs to take a nap soon.”

“Cats do sleep about two-thirds of each day,” Kurt nodded. “More when they’re young and growing. Let it fall asleep and see if you can still take in any sensory information. Being able to spy on your surroundings even while the host is asleep could be very useful.”

As directed, Agent Spears let the host find a soft spot to curl up on and within a few minutes it was drifting off to sleep. She couldn’t force the eyes to open and felt as if the host would reawaken if she tried to make it move while asleep.

“I can still hear pretty well,” she said. “It’s a bit harder, though. I have to concentrate otherwise it fades away.”

“Mmm, let’s see what happens when it starts dreaming.”

It didn’t take long for the kitten to begin twitching as it dreamed.

“I’m getting flashes,” Agent Spears said as she tried to explain what she was experiencing. “Not really images, more like the idea of things. Hunting something, I think. Running, pouncing. There’s a smell, and sometimes sounds but nothing specific. It’s making it really hard to tell what sounds are real and which ones are in the dream. Even people talking becomes just noise sometimes.”

Kurt replied but Agent Spears didn’t catch what he said.

“Could you repeat that?”

“Testing the range,” Kurt repeated. “Leaving the host where it is and moving your body further away at five meter increments. Let us know if hear the bell.”

“Understood.”

A short time later she heard a bell and she let them know. They repeated the process a number of times before, abruptly, she was back in her own body.

“Oh, I guess we reached the limit,” she said from the gurney.

Her body was strapped down, albeit loosely, in case she moved at all during her possession of the host. Kurt and a few assistants were flanking her on either side as they walked her further away from the host, although they’d stopped when she spoke.

They were almost on the other side of the massive hangar where they were conducting the experiment.

“Just over three hundred meters,” Kurt said, looking impressed. “And that’s without any signal relays. How are you feeling?”

Now that she thought about it, she didn’t feel that good.

“Slight headache,” she said, “feels like it’s going to get worse. My heart’s pounding a bit.”

A nurse was already checking her blood pressure.

“There’s a weird taste in my mouth and I’m a little nauseous.”

“Can you describe the taste?” Kurt asked as he noted down her symptoms.

“Tastes like, I don’t know, bad meat or something?”

Kurt noted it down.

“Let’s take a break for now and see how your symptoms go. We need to let the kitten rest anyway.”

Agent Spears nodded as she was unstrapped and allowed to sit up. They brought her a drink and she sipped through the straw, swishing the taste out of her mouth. She was about to take the pain killers for her headache when an alarm began to go off on the other side of the hangar.

“What’s that?” she asked as Kurt turned and frowned.

“It’s the host,” he replied. “The strain must have been too much for it.”

“You mean it’s dead?”

Kurt only nodded.

“The process isn’t perfect,” he admitted. “Sometimes the implanted neuron controllers overwhelm the system. It’s…

His lips kept moving but the sound that came out was gibberish to Agent Spears. It was as though he were talking underwater. Or as though she were the one underwater. Pressure was certainly building in her own ears to the point where it was in competition with her headache for pain. She tried to take the pain killers but her hands were shaking too much and she just ended up dropping the pills to the floor.

“What’s wrong with me?” she said, or she tried to say. She honestly couldn’t tell if she’d said anything out loud or if it was all slurred.

Hands were helping to guide her back into a lying position. Spots in her vision began to flash and she thought she could hear popping or crackling sounds nearby. Kurt was still speaking to her but the pressure in her ears was too much and all she could hear was the rushing of her own blood.

* * *

Kurt Besso watched Agent Spears die. It was yet another set back. One he was not particularly eager to explain to the higher ups. Losing a host was one thing but losing the human controller was something else entirely. And he’d already lost three. If it came to it, he had offers from a number of other countries who were far less concerned about such costs, but those places tended to also be a lot more difficult to work with in other ways and he liked his current living situation. Still, if it meant the difference being able to continue his research or being shut down, he’d choose his research. Perhaps he should remind the ones who were supervising his work that they were not the only ones working on this technology and that the costs would be worth the reward. Some of them were reasonable and would listen to him.

“Take her away,” he said to his assistants. “Let’s get an autopsy and compare it to our ape trials and see if we can figure out why the apes all worked but nothing else.”

It was strange. In every experiment, if either the host or the controller died, they both died. All or nothing in every case. They had a dozen apes running around inside of dog bodies and were all healthy as could be.

“We’ll figure it out,” he assured his team. “Don’t you worry. We’ll figure it out.”