Brachyura

Let's get the important things out of the way first. At the moment the world changed, the people in the area I was in were initially almost unchanged. Since very few people were driving vehicles, and those who were doing so were traveling slowly nobody was killed.

All our hair, on our heads, everywhere else did immediately fall out. It just fell away; beards, head hair, body hair. We were left completely smooth.

Those of us near to the main village at the time heard the crashing of a passenger aircraft into the sea many miles away, and that was our queue that something had happened. Those working in the hills were just stunned at how smooth their skin had become.

My skin was the smoothest substance I'd ever felt - since my fingers were also smooth it was as if I had been coated in some kind of plastic. Along with Tom and Mary I was at the factory working my shift, and all of us just looked at each other and stared. Mary's long red hair was plaited that day, and her whole plait fell to the floor, her eyebrows and eyelashes cascaded from her face like rain and landed in her lap. And so it was for all of us. Naturally the work we were doing was immediately forgotten. We did all feel the urge to remove our clothing - it simply felt right to do so, and were unashamedly stepped out of our garments, leaving the body hair in our clothes.

On that first day none of us had changed physical appearance particularly, we just had smooth skin and no clothing.

I did not feel the draw of the sea very strongly on that day. None of us in the factory did, but those who were close to the sea felt it very strongly. Randolph was on a boat in the harbour, and was first to enter the water - he drove his boat back to the dock, tied it up, took off all his clothes and entered the blue and clear ocean, and ducked under.

We all knew what to do when any kind of crisis happened - with only 12 people living on the island we knew to go to the island hall. After a couple of hours we'd stopped what we were doing and all had gathered there. All our experiences were the same, and we sat around in the hall, broke out the emergency tea and sat about in the sun. We were worried about Randolph and were about to send out a search party when he walked up the beach and we were shocked to see what had happened to him.

"What happened to you?" Katy asked. It really doesn't matter what Katy, or indeed any of us did, or how old we were, the change was so profound when it came.

He told us about that happened when he went for a swim.

The water felt differently wonderful, it was like swimming in liquid silk, and he had been in it for 90 minutes just lost in his own thoughts. He spent most of the time lying on his back on the sand,water lapping over him, looking up at the sky and not really noticing the changes that were happening. By the time he felt ready to get out of the water, things had become different. On that first day, and for all of us immediately after our first session in the water two main changes happened - our fingers fused together, and our toes fused together. It did not hurt, it just was inconvenient to pick anything up and hold it.

The eleven of us looked Randolph over, and he was fine with letting us feel his skin. He did look odd without his hair. His hands felt like they were in mittens, the skin of his fingers had grown together.

Beth was the first to suggest that the rest of us went to the beach, and so we did, and all experienced the silky satin feeling of the water. Whatever was happening to our bodies seemed to be accepted by our minds, because it was not traumatic - we just laid back and enjoyed it.

"Mary, I feel stiff" is what I wanted to say, but my jaws and lips were very stiff to operate.

I had just woken up, the glimmer of the early morning sun painted a hue in the East and I raised my head with great difficulty to see the view from our bedroom window.

"Oh, so do I".

Movement was difficult, and I was able to reach over and press the light switch on the bedside lamp.

Every movement was hard. My hands had changed overnight. The lamplight fell on changed hands. My thumb was bigger and more pointed, and my fingers larger and no longer articulate - from wrist to fingertip the movement was frozen in the unmistakable shape of a crab claw. It was the same for Mary. With a lot of effort I sat up, in a cascade of white powder.

Both of us struggled to a kneeling position. At every joint, as we moved, our skin cracked and fell away like talc. It took great effort to move against what felt like a hardening plastercast. It felt like every joint was stiff and we needed to break the crust. All feeling was gone from our - well it was hard to describe it as skin - shell, except at the joints where we could still feel pain. Our faces were also covered in a hard shell, and only by exercising our jaw muscles against the stiffness did we regain full speech. Having broken the crust we could talk.

Mary's breastplate followed her female figure pretty exactly, and she said the same way that I was feeling, it was like wearing a body cast.

I moved to the edge of the bed and then the next change became clear - there were no human feet at the end of my legs - my feet had become pointed, a vestigial nub showed where my big toe had once been , the rest of my 'foot' was a long thin hard appendage ending in a spike, about three times as long as my foot had been.

"Is it even going to be possible to walk on this?" I asked out loud. It was the same with her feet - long sharp spikes.

It turned out not to be possible to walk as a biped. We could get about using our claws and spikes on all fours, and so practiced 'walking' around the room - powder still falling from us where we were using the joints in a new way. Our upright walking knees were not helpful on that first day as they worked in the wrong direction for walking on 'hands' and 'feet', or as we started calling them 'claws' and 'spikes'.

Fixing breakfast was difficult just because movement was awkward - the claws had good feedback to help know how hard something was being held, but manipulating a cereal box, bowl, a plastic milk bottle was difficult. Eventually between us we had food in our bowls and were sitting at our kitchen table, spikes on the floor in as conventional a manner as we could muster. We had not thought through how to eat it, as claws are good for holding things that go directly in the mouth, but are not good at holding cutlery. We figured the easiest way was to hold the bowl and eat from the side. It was a bit messy, but at least we had human teeth and tongue.

We wondered if it were possible to make love - and now, looking back, I have no idea what gave both of us that idea because with all the changes going on it seemed to be a weird thing to think about. Nevertheless we gave it a go, and while it was difficult, and there was a lot of dust produced as exoskeleton was cracked off to make way for skin, it did work. It turned out that only about half of the island had that idea, and that's how we ended up with two slightly different tribes.

Mary was bothered about the bodycast, and wondered if it were possible to crack it so that spinal movement and twisting were possible. Since she had always been quite flexible, she began working on it and after a while there were cracks appearing in her torso, flecks of shell began to fall away and after an hour of intense workout she had segmented her body armor into four plates; a breastplate and three sections around her waist. I truly wish I had made the effort, but I did not feel such strong willpower at the time so I sat about and watched. I now have a solid and rigid bodyshell, and she has a much more flexible torso.

Later in the day we made ourselves slowly to the hall, where we'd agreed the previous day to meet for lunch. Mary was having an easier time of it that I was, simply because of the additional torso movement she'd gained.

Everyone was in the same stage of change - apart from Randolph - he was a couple of hours ahead of us and had already been to the seaside. He had changed colour. His shell was taking on the dark red and brown of a crab, his claws had turned black and his 'skin' at the joints was jet black. He encouraged us to the water and we slowly made our way to the shore and into the water. The weightlessness was a relief, and the water felt really good. Using the spikes in the sand and pebbles made perfect sense - they are adapted perfectly in the waters of the shore, and Kate was first to catch live seafood which she reported to be delicious. We all began to scavenge for food. I found a sea crab, and while it felt slightly wrong to tear it to pieces and pick out the flesh, the drive to eat it beat my revulsion of eating 'one of my own'. I was changing colour, as were we all.

We also did not notice as we moved about in the shadows that our legs were rearranging themselves. When we came out of the sea later that day our legs moved correctly for our bodies. Yes we had firmly lost bipedal movement, and now moved on four limbs. And we retained the shape of humans - there was no denying that we were originally human.

Those couples who had 'human' sex on that first day became a different species to those who did not. We were able to continue to enjoy face to face - as it were - lovemaking with recognisably human organs. Those who did not discovered in time that they reproduced the way that sea crabs reproduce, which is quite differently.

Our colouring continued to change, we all became darker that evening, and our shells continued to harden. Having made our way back to our house, Mary again did her exercises and continued to work on her flexibility - inventing completely different, non human exercises to maintain a supple body. I followed her lead, but it was too late for my bodyshell, it had hardened beyond my, indeed our ability to break it.

The next morning, and for a couple more mornings after that we woke up stiff again, and had to repeat talking, movements, exercises to break the shell - the powder now sloughing from us a dark brown. Our skin was leathery and thick at the joints, and whatever was going on underneath the joint was a hybrid of our original joints and the exoskeleton. No longer thinking of it as walking, traveling on land became more instinctive, and it did become easier to move sideways than forwards and backwards. Each day in those few days we would meet as a cast at lunchtime and forage together for live food around the island - we were faster in the water, and one of us caught a fish on the third day which was shared.

We all very much still liked living in our houses, on our beds, and we adapted our homes to suit our new situation. We transitioned to eating exclusively from the sea, and spent time arranging ourselves to benefit from our slightly divergent talents.

Tom had exercised more than I had, and was much stronger, flexible and had much more patience than I did. He became head hunter. His ability to stay stationary for long periods of time made him an extraordinary catcher of larger prey, and he became our cast leader.

Mary was fast - our fastest and could react incredibly quickly, catching fast prey sometimes apparently instinctively.

Randolph was able to take his boat out into the bay, soon the diesel would run out and there was no more to have, so he anchored it a way off shore and we used his ropes to make a ropeway that we could pull ourselves along, allowing us a deeper platform for catching food.