Not sure why I'm still going with this daft idea but heyho 🙂 also, yeah, I know, that fat-ass snake is like 100% the width of a regular human being.

One last shot of vodka for courage. Smile for the cameras.

Don’t think about Laika. Keep smiling.

"What I do today, I do for all of Russia."

Helmet on. Don't think about Laika.

In a few minutes, he would be either a hero of the Russian people (the first man to successfully traverse a planck portal to another world) or dead. Or worse, a mindless snake

Green vapor filled the suit interior, obscuring the visor. He inhaled the aerosolised plasmids deeply. They were flooding his cells with snake DNA, female specifically, in the hope that the revised body plan would be slender enough to fit.

The suit was thickly padded to stifle the groans and retching, and to hold his insides together for the cameras in the event that the gene-resequencers turned his body into cellular mush. His right femur crunched beneath him. The entire leg started to warp into a thick tube of muscle, the left leg melting into it.

It would have made more sense to perform the transformation in private, far in advance. But there were still sceptics of the 1960s moonlandings, before photoshop and CGI existed, and so everything had to be done live, in front of a billion eyes of the world, to prove its veracity. It would be a propaganda coup for the state - a Russian flag planted on distant world. The American portal program was years behind.

Across Russia, cities went dark. Nuclear reactors roared to full capacity. Electricity poured into the portal generator. One perversion of science suddenly became a sideshow of another, as within the aperture, a perfectly circular tear in space began to form - an inch wide, then two... then three.

There was no telling how long the grid could sustain this. He wriggled free from the deflated transformation rig, slithering quickly across the cold steel floor, focusing on the mission. His vestigial limb nubs faded into his serpentine torso. He reared up, estimating the scintillating portal with the width of his limbless form. He would just about fit! He darted forward, and-

- suddenly he was breathing the air of an alien world! Strange stars wheeled overhead. And then -

- halfway through the portal, a jolt. Something was wedged. He turned, feeling the cold russian air and the eyes of seven billion people fixated upon his lower half. His ass was stuck.