Body Surfing

like the way he’s looking at us!
    Jasper ignored his host.
    “Then why did you want to capture us? Why not just kill us?”
    “Do you still not understand? You, who have already experienced three bodies in as many days? Who have felt the rush of an entire mind, an entire life, added to your own in a nanosecond? For seventeen centuries I have been trapped in this single, finite corpus. I want out .”
    Jasper raised Michaela’s hands helplessly. “I don’t get it. How can we help you with that?”
    “Finally a pertinent question. Listen then: about twenty-five hundred years ago, it was discovered that the Mogran could occasionally be prevented from possessing a host by the use of the sigil. The original sigil,” Thomas added, pulling at his necktie. “Of course, no one knew why it worked. In such an ignorant, not to mention superstitious era, it was assumed that the shape of the design had something to do with it, or the words spoken while one held it before the demon. This was in keeping with the idea that the Mogran were supernatural entities rather than some form of energy that had yet to be discovered or quantified.”
    “Q. said that!” Jasper said, excited despite himself. “He said that he thought the Mogran were just a kind of electricity.”
    “He said it because I told him. And I believe it to be true. But the only way to be sure, and to explore the various ramifications of that information, is to put it to the test.”
    At last Jasper understood. “You want to experiment on us! Youwant to find a way to extract yourself from that body without having sex!”
    Thomas nodded his head eagerly, wincing slightly. “Still a little tender,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “But think about it, Jasper. We would no longer have to force our hosts to do things they don’t want to do, things they spend the rest of their lives puzzling over. Who knows, perhaps we can overcome our need for a human host altogether. Perhaps we can become a pure electronic intelligence, a true living computer, or be able to go back and forth between flesh and machine. The possibilities are extraordinary, Jasper, but we’ll never know unless we investigate them.”
    Jasper’s reaction to J.D. Thomas’s words was not what he would have expected. Not relief at the thought of being freed from the need to steal other people’s bodies, other people’s lives, nor alarm at the idea of a new and even more powerful wave of Mogran loosed upon the world. Instead he felt a strange, almost indignant sense of outrage, as though Thomas were attempting to contravene a fundamental law of the universe. Mogran and mortals had cohabitated for as long as anyone knew. Surely this wasn’t an accident. Surely there was a reason for such a state of affairs.
    Deep inside him, Michaela’s anxiety was palpable. Where are you going with this, Van Arsdale?
    On the lawn, J.D. Thomas was still speaking.
    “You understand there are other considerations as well?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It has been said that the twentieth century was the century of physics, but the twenty-first will be the century of biology. With the breaking of the human genome, not to mention the genetic decoding of virtually every other life form, a new era is upon us. New species of plants are appearing almost every day. It is only a matter of time before the same is true of animals.”
    Jasper repeated Michaela’s words aloud.
    “Where are you going with this?”
    J.D. Thomas laughed. “You sound so worried, Jasper! Don’t you realize this affects you too? Who besides the Mogran are better suitedto take advantage of these new technologies? With our control over virtually every bodily process, we can facilitate the merger of alien DNA with our own, augmenting our already prodigious physical abilities. Perhaps even more importantly, we may soon find a way to regain what we so foolishly removed all those years ago. Either through regeneration with the aid of stem cells, or transplant from another body, or assimilation of the same DNA sequence that allows salamanders to regrow their tails and starfish to regrow their limbs. One suspects the research would have been done already, had not the prudish forces of your conservative country held it up, as though altering the arc of human life were somehow playing God.”
    “Maybe they’re right,” Jasper said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. “What do they say? If God wanted us to fly, he’d have given us