Chapter 2.10

We arrived back at our home after our fun in the park. I had been right when I asked for it. At first, my sundress swirling around my legs reminded me how the wind was made, and that bothered me, but I soon got over it and had more fun. I started to realize that this was a day like that one so long ago, the difference being, it was the way I had wanted it to be.

As we got closer, we could hear a hard rock beat and bass coming from Frieda's end of the house. It was a song that we both agreed on from the ancient archives. The group had a lead singer with an incredible voice and a stage presence that was hard to imagine.

I listened to the music and tried to remember the group's name. I knew the lead singer had a name I would never forget. 'Freddy' and then the name of a planet. Oh yeah… Mercury. I hadn't heard the song for so many years. It had a throbbing bassline and electric guitar, but not much else. Somehow, Freddy Mercury pulled it off with just that.

We sat down and started talking. I wasn't sure what to say, but John remained open and just listened for the majority of the conversation.

He started it off, though. "Do you remember when you started to feel love for me?"

"Yes," I said quietly. "I was nine years old. You were ten. We were heading to that creek near my house to go fishing. There was a girl just down the street from you, a couple of houses, who had been crushing on you, and you were telling me how she didn't want to fish because it was gross. I looked at you and figured it was her loss."

He chuckled. "And that's when you fell in love with me?"

I laughed as well. "Just remember, John. You asked."

"Yes, I did." He pulled me close and I leaned on his shoulder.

"What really got me was the fact that even though I couldn't touch the worms, you didn't hold that against me. I had made the effort and went. You baited my hooks and we had a good time."

"You caught us lunch that day too Rose."

"I learned from the best."

"Suck up," he told me.

"Just giving praise where praise is due," I countered. "Besides, I only ever went fishing with you. I have a rather limited pool to choose good fishermen from."

"That makes me feel so much better," he laughed.

I looked at him with an impish expression. I'm sure he felt like sticking his tongue out at me, but he would never do that. I, on the other hand, had no such inhibitions.

I put my head down again, and he asked, "Did you ever think about telling me?"

"John, I rehearsed that particular talk so many times, I could almost quote it now. The long and the short of it is the ending was almost always the same." I paused and chose my words very carefully. "You told me earlier that you would have been happy to spend time with me if I had transitioned to a woman. I didn't think I could take that chance. I never had a rehearsal where we ended up together. The best I could think of was that we might have been friends afterward.

"I believe you, though. I was looking at it through the eyes of a young girl. By the time we were adults, I had decided that I wanted to be your friend for the rest of my life, and if that meant I had to remain a male, I would rather do that."

"Look at the harm it caused, Rose."

I hated to admit that my strategy didn't work but looking back at things I had to say it hadn't.

"John, I didn't want us to part company."

"Didn't you trust me to know I would never have given up your friendship because you wanted to transition?"

"If I had only wanted that, of course, but I wanted you as well. I couldn't help but think that it would be awkward. Remember Connie?"

"She wouldn't even try fishing!"

I couldn't help but giggle. He was doing a masterful job of keeping me on an even keel as we talked. His humor was one of the things I loved about him. I missed it terribly when we were under Willem's influence.

"You sent her packing," I told him.

"I loved fishing!"

"So did I! I wish we had a place to fish here. Would you still bait my hooks?"

He laughed at that. I got to thinking about the cruelty of children and was glad John and I never fished with anyone else. I would have been a sissy for not baiting my own hooks. Little would they know they were right. Or maybe I'm fooling myself. Maybe they would. John knew me better than anyone and he never suspected. Maybe they wouldn't. I was getting confused now.

"Do you think anyone knew what I was?"

He sighed. "Remember when I came over to pick you up when we were teenagers? We were going hiking and I had a black eye and that sore on my arm?"

I nodded, almost afraid of what he was going to say, but also elated at the suspected chivalry.

"Brad Gibson and Gene Osborne were giving me shit about hanging around with you. About hanging around a sissy. That's not to say they knew you were trans. Just that you acted a bit more girly than other guys."

"I see." My thoughts went back to that time. I saw the two boys in my mind. They were always giving me guff. I was someone who was different. A ready-made target.

"You know what bothers me most about that time?" John asked. "I was so pissed at them for calling you names, I fought them both… lost miserably, by the way, but I would fight them again if they continued. The problem was, I wanted to protect your honor, and I never bothered to think about your position. I thought I was defending you when if I had done a bit of thinking, I might have seen you for who you were."

I stretched up and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "Thank you for defending my honor."

We continued going through our lives until N21. There were lots to cover in those two hundred years, and we spent the rest of the day talking. I lay with my head on his lap most of the time. I was opening so many doors that had been closed.

Finally, I said, "I wonder how the nanites didn't know?"

"I think Willem wasn't the god he wanted everyone to believe he was. He needed us to react to his shit. He needed to have us be afraid, but how to do that? By that time you had forgotten your gender. All you remembered was your sex. We were made to fear anyone different than us. I believe that the mental state in regards to gender was passed on to the one touched, along with the biological sex."

"So if I had touched someone, they would be a person as messed up as me?" I thought about that for a bit, then something occurred to me. "Where is all this coming from, by the way?"

He would have hung his head, but that put him looking at my curious face. He seemed to struggle with that for a bit, then looked me in the eye. "I discussed it with Mara. I wondered about it myself. I wondered if it could be false memories."

I was shocked he would think that, but then I realized it was a valid question. It hurt, but I knew it had to be asked. "What did she say?"

"She has noticed this type of thing in the past where people were confused for one reason or another. She's also found other people where the nanites made mistakes. All of them were where people were confused."

"So she doesn't think it's false memories?"

"No she doesn't, and honestly, neither do I."

We spent about a year talking to Mara, and it was helping. What really raised my spirits was when Paula and Winston decided to tie the knot. We had known that he had proposed and she had said yes, so a few weeks later, we met in Paula’s house. She and Winston were already living together, most of the time. Winston didn’t have a house around Fredriksburg, but I had found out awhile back that Paula owned the steakhouse around the corner from Heaven’s Rose. She, Carla, and I had become very good friends, and many people referred to us as the three sisters. We had no problem with it, because that’s how we felt about each other.

When we sat down, Paula started going through who she wanted to take part in the wedding. Gina and Rhoda were also there. It was a forgone conclusion that Gina would officiate, but she had a serious problem deciding who was going to be her maid of honor. She looked at her ‘sisters’ and her daughter and told us that she was going to have Rhoda be her maid of honor, and have Carla and me be her bridesmaids. Both of us were absolutely fine with that arrangement.

We had the wedding two weeks later. Paula decided to wear white, even though, this was her second wedding. She looked radiant. Thankfully Rhoda, Carla, and I didn’t have matching dresses. They were pastel colors, but the style was the same. Mine was in peach, which was my favorite color, so I was rather happy with it.

We had a large dinner afterward, and it was at Heaven’s Rose. Of course, John was one of Winston’s groomsmen, so he couldn’t be the chef, and I couldn’t either. We had my best assistant chef cook the meal, and he did rather well. I was happy to taste the meal. It was really up to my standards. Perhaps not quite as good as what John or I could do, but I figured I would get Rik’s training up and eventually let him do more of the cooking. I honestly thought he might be able to take over from me at some point to let me cook just for my family and concentrate on my music more, he was that good!

We arrived at Alpha Centauri eventually and started scanning the surface. There was no sign of a civilization on the surface, and no sign of Centaurus either.

We scanned the atmosphere and found that there was a gas in it that was not really conducive to human life. It wouldn’t kill us, because of the nanites in our bodies. They would do something with the gas and keep us alive.

The problem was, any children before they had their first infusion of nanites. Nanites did not cross the placental barrier, because the were tuned to the mother’s DNA. It was very tough to decide that your children have nanites after what we’d been through. All we had for making nanites were the specifications for the same model that we had. Neo22 had developed a new model, and even when a child was born, and they had been infused with these, it was shown that they responded to the same signals that the old ones had. It was so hard to build a complicated receiver inside something that small.

A few days after we arrived, we were asked to come to the command center. Gina looked very solemn, and explained that they had been slowly altering our orbit to where we had a straight shot to the Kepler planet we were going to go to next. When it had been changed, we ran across some debris in orbit. It was supposed that it had started out at a much higher orbit because it hadn’t burned up yet.

Very quietly, John asked what it was.

“It is pieces of, if not Centaurus, a ship just like her,” Gina answered.

“No other ship was scheduled to be here,” Paula said.

“I know.”

“What would have destroyed her?” I asked.

“The only reason I can think of,” Rhoda explained, “is a miscalculation in their course. A planet this far away would be hard to pinpoint exactly. Just a fraction of an inch off at Sol’s system could end up being hundreds of miles difference here.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” asked Marc.

“No.”

“Why,” I asked.

“Because I entered the course.”

“No offense, Rhoda,” Paula said gently, “but you just said a fraction of an inch at home could yield hundreds of miles here. Even if they realized it, it would take just a tiny thrust to fix it. It would only take a millisecond to long, or short a burn to mess up.”

“This would have to be a too close flyby,” Rhoda explained. “I checked those figures about fifty times. One time a day, so I wasn’t too tired to go over them.”

“Could it have been anything else?” Gina asked.

“I really don’t know, Gina. It really doesn’t seem like much else would yield these results.”

“Are we sure there’s no life on the planet?” Carla asked.

“We’re as sure as we can be,” answered Winston. “We’ve scanned the surface many, many times. Nothing has come up.”

“What about underwater?” my ever imaginative husband asked.

“That’s a possibility,” answered Gina. “We can stay in orbit a little longer, and send some ships down to check it out.”

“That sounds good,” said Marc. “That makes a lot of sense. Thy could filter the air before it was used to pressurize their habitat.”

“Let’s check it out,” Gina told us. “Marc, and John. Can you set up some teams to go down in landing craft?”

“Yes, we can,” John answered. “We’ll bet on it right away.”

We left the command center wondering what we would find below.