Chapter 3

There was no light bulb moment that I was ready for my power to reach the next level, it was just when I looked again at the foreign virus DNA that was incorporating itself into Chris DNA and wanted to change it, my gift agreed with me. It wasn't as simple as just deleting it, my DNA needed certain base pairs to be in certain points or the complex DNA folding that occurred on a macro and micro level would go wrong. My understanding was sufficient to change the sequencing to nonsense whilst keeping the overall structure.

Most importantly, I knew I could make the changes without creating damage and interestingly, as soon as I made the first change, I felt some weird potential come to life. When I quizzed my power I worked out that after I made a change I had the ability to activate the DNA either on a small scale or over my whole body. I chose a small section in my arm, no more than a hundred cells and watched as they renewed themselves which did... nothing. Not surprising really, since I was taking out junk DNA which didn't have an active purpose.

I still thought it was a good idea to do, so I carried on eliminating all virus caused junk DNA and correcting any damaged DNA which did require me to look at other human DNA to compare. When I had finished I checked my changes by activating a small section of my thigh muscle and when nothing went wrong, I decided to activate my whole body.

A wave of tiredness swept over me. Fortunately, I was in bed lying down, but it happened so quickly and so irresistibly that my last thought before succumbing was to question whether I would wake up.

When I did wake up I was confused. I seemed to be in a hospital bed with someone holding my hand. I followed the hand to its owner and found my daughter sitting next to the bed slumped and half asleep. I squeezed the hand to wake her up a bit and when she looked up, I smiled at her to let her know that I was alright.

I didn't know what was going on, but I felt amazing. By the time I was in my sixties I had all sorts of little aches and pains that you get used to and ignore. They were all gone. I didn't want to move in case that would bring them back and just revelled in the painlessness. The absence of pain was bliss.

“Don't scare me like that!” Talia said with a broken voice, tears streaming down her face.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Shouldn't I be asking you that?” she said with a slightly aggravated tone. “All I know is I found you unresponsive on your bed and nothing I could do would wake you. I called an ambulance and they brought you here. All their checks suggested there was nothing wrong with you, you were just in a deep sleep and when they noticed you changing they set you up in this room.”

That was when I noticed I was lying naked on the bed and there were a few cameras set up around me. Acute embarrassment rushed through me.

“Do you think you could get me something to cover up?” I asked quietly, shifting my other hand to cover my junk.

To add to my embarrassment a stream of three doctors entered the room, two male, and one female.

“Can I have something to preserve my dignity?” I called out as my embarrassment started transforming into anger.

“I do apologise, Mr Heaven, it's just not every day that someone regresses in age from near seventy to late teenage and does so where it can be monitored. I'm Dr Brown, by the way.”

“I'm still naked here,” I reminded them.

When I taste DNA, especially human DNA I do get a sense of how old it is which I think is related to the telomeres. A quick check confirmed my DNA now read as age 17. Just after puberty had finished. Wow.

A sheet was brought that I was allowed to cover myself with and the questioning began. To be blunt, I told them as little as I could. Yes, it was a superpower, one that I had managed to develop from passive information to being active and able to regress my age. No, I couldn't do that to someone else. I didn't know that at the time but didn't want to suggest otherwise and it turned out to be true when I tried with Talia later.

On the plus side, I had absolute evidence that I was Chris Heaven, even if I now looked like his grandson. I had also lost about five kilograms in weight and since I was still a good twenty-five kilos overweight, I still looked fat.

I spent the next week sending off paperwork in conjunction with the hospital to get a new passport and driving licence. It would still look weird as they didn't change my age, so I looked like a young teen but my age was listed as sixty-eight. If supers didn't exist I'm sure I would have been questioned more. I was hounded a bit by the press as there was a rumour from the hospital which was now confirmed with paperwork that was supposed to be confidential. The story being that I was the first super who had the potential to be immortal, age-wise at least. There were regenerators who looked like they would be healthy and look young to the limit of the human lifespan but tests showed the cells were ageing.

I kept my life as boring as possible and they seemed to give up. It wasn't much of a story. I had no great powers and would never be on a super team. If I couldn't apply my age regression to anyone else it was only mildly interesting. Of course, I was only just getting started. The first thing I did was try to eliminate my genetic weaknesses. Weakness is probably the wrong word. I could compare my DNA to all the other DNA I had been subjected to and find the best version for a particular sequence and use that. Funnily enough, that process was a lot easier than my original quest to get rid of leftover viral junk DNA because all I had to do was cut and paste from existing work whereas removing the evidence of viral damage required higher knowledge to replace it with my own created version. The difference between plagiarism and creating my own work.

I also used the process to lose weight. Each time I used the full body activation I would go into a deep sleep and wake up after about sixteen hours about five kilograms lighter and almost all of it was fat loss. I believe my ability was a type of micro telekinesis, and I was able to branch out slightly to pick up and move immune cells to where I needed them to be and stop blood from leaking out of a burst capillary. If I concentrated I could speed up healing and even cause cells to die and be excreted which I used to eliminate a build-up of non-degradable artificial chemicals. Nothing outside of my body though. I tried very hard in the hopes that I would be able to help Kalie. I made another appointment with 'The Catalyst' in the hopes of getting more advice. Again Stormdancer was willing but only gave me a one-word message, cloning.

Chapter 4

I looked into cloning research and if Kalie needed a new heart I could see how it might help, but you couldn't replace a brain. Could I clone Kalie? I thought I probably could. I would have to turn myself into a female version, release an egg and change the DNA to match Kalie's DNA. Suffer nine months of pregnancy and give birth to an identical genetic copy of Kalie, but it wouldn't have her memories and what about her spirit or soul? And what if Kalie woke up one day? It would look like we replaced her.

In the end, I decided it wasn't my decision to make. As much as the idea of turning myself female, becoming pregnant and giving birth frightened me, if it would help heal my daughter, I would manage. Somehow. Lord help me.

It took a week after my message from Stormdancer before I was prepared to face my daughter. Nervous, stressed and probably a dozen other emotions were going through me, but I was also determined. We were both sitting at the dining room table. I was sipping a hot chocolate and Talia had a cup of coffee in front of her.

“You know I spoke to 'The Catalyst' last week,” I started.

“Yes. You told me you received another clue that might help you just needed to work out how.”

“Quite so. I am going to be blunt here, I know you haven't held out much hope that I would be able to help and neither have I. I've explained what I can do and without being able to influence anything outside of my body there is no way I can help Kalie,” I said before reaching across to stroke Talia's hand that was holding her coffee as it tightened up while her head dropped as more sadness rushed through her. “However the message I received did suggest something unexpected.” She looked up with sudden hope. “Remember I can change my body to look pretty much how I want and I can also manipulate or replicate any DNA that I have been exposed to.”

“You're saying you can look like Kalie?” Talia asked looking very confused.

“No... well yes, I suppose I could but what would be the point. No, what I meant was I believe I could clone Kalie. I think I could create a DNA identical baby Kalie. She would have none of Kalie's memories and if souls exist, unless Kalie deliberately shifted across, it would have a different soul.” I moved closer so that I could hug her around the chair. “I don't know whether it would be a good idea or not and I don't want you to decide right now. Just think about it and we can talk about it later.”

I then changed the subject and Talia let me.

Two days later she approached me and wanted to know how I would go about it so I explained how I would have to change to a female and use an egg and replace my partial set of DNA with Kalie's full DNA and implant it into my womb. I believed I would be able to solve the usual issues with cloning because of my DNA manipulation. Talia swallowed that information and again we left it for her to think about.

The next morning as we sat down to have breakfast together Talia questioned me again. “You're prepared to become a woman, get pregnant and have a baby?”

I laughed nervously. “I can't say the idea doesn't terrify me. For you. For Kalie. Yes, I would do that and a lot more. I would need a hell of a lot of help though.”

She looked me in the eyes almost convincing herself of my sincerity. Then she gave herself a small nod, took a deep breath. “Please,” she said and then burst into tears.

I held her in my arms until she calmed down.

It was then my turn to take some deep breaths.

“We need to be organised about this, go and fetch a pen and paper,” I told her. I didn't want to say anything but my legs were feeling a bit weak. I felt like I had just made a life-altering decision, but I needed to be strong for Talia.

I wasn't going to look anything like me for most of a year so I needed to set everything up so that my physical presence was not going to be required. With so much done online these days, that wasn't difficult. The biggest issue was going to be having a legal female identity. I would need that for Dr visits and eventually, the hospital maternity ward.

We thought about me pretending to be Talia, but she was now thirty-three years old and I didn't have the ability to chose the age of the person I copied and I would need her to accompany me. Although I didn't like explaining my talents I did approach my lawyer, but she couldn't think of a solution without revealing my ability. The only option she could come up with, was for me to pretend to transition, have my legal documents changed to show I was female and then move out of state before my bump showed so no one would question how I could get pregnant. It would still show that I was sixty-eight years old, however, my recent passport already had a section showing that I was a super and my ability listed as age regression. The biggest issue would be I couldn't really transition back without revealing more of my ability than I wanted to. It didn't worry me too much as I rarely needed to use my identity.

Of course, it wasn't that easy. I needed a psychological assessment to sign off on it. Both Talia and I were seeing a psychologist to help us cope with grief, but I am a terrible liar so I had to tell her about my ability to change sex. I don't think she believed me but I offered for her to be present during my change as I couldn't think of another way to prove my words.

Next, I needed to design my new woman body. The simplest thing would have been to use my X chromosome that already had all the information I needed to turn me into a woman, but my biggest fear was labour and delivery so I wanted to cheat. One of our friends who had children at the same time as my wife had the easiest childbirth I had ever heard of. She didn't notice most of her labour because the pain was so mild and if she wasn't in a hospital having a check-up I think she would have had a home delivery. The check-up showed she was eight cm dilated and the child was born less than an hour later. On the other hand, she really struggled with milk production, but another of our prenatal group had a terrible childbirth story but produced so much milk she donated to the prenatal ward at the hospital. I wanted the best of both worlds whilst using enough of my DNA to look like a female version of myself.

I had lost contact with those families but I had their names and with a bit of investigation, I was able to find out where they lived. I didn't want to disturb them and I didn't need to. I knocked on the door to deliver flowers, picked up the DNA that I needed and moved on. They didn't recognise me. I would have been surprised if they did as I was now biologically seventeen years old and I had known them when I was in my thirties.

Other details needed to be hashed out before I made the big change. The biggest one was about whose responsibility the cloned Kalie would be. Essentially, who was going to be the mother? Legally I would be, but I was doing this for Talia and considered myself a surrogate. I would carry the baby, give birth and provide breast milk for six months hopefully. I say hopefully because I was aware that I might start suffering from gender dysphoria according to our psychologist. She also said I could be just as happy as a girl and decide to never change back. Male pride was unlikely to be maintained through pregnancy and childbirth.

Talia agreed to be the mother but warned me that the whole experience might leave me too emotionally attached to back away and if that happened we would both be her mother or I could become her father although we would probably need to move to another state again. We also didn't think it would be a good idea to keep the same name 'Kalie'. We wanted something similar so we settled on Katie. The rest was just logistics. Rent or sell my house? I decided to rent it out. Where do we move to? We decided the Gold Coast would be a pleasant location since we didn't need to go to work. Me because I had retired and Talia because she had received a large settlement from Tom's life insurance.

On the advice of Susan, I had a weeks holiday in Thailand. I just relaxed in the hotel and lazed around the pool with occasional massages. People would presume I had been to Thailand for a sex change and other feminising surgery.

3 days after I returned...

I was nervous. The change night had arrived. I had worked out all the DNA changes. None of the read-only files that would alter who I was were affected and keeping all the corrected DNA, just changing to a female form that would hopefully have an easy time with pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, plus a few vanity features suggested by Talia. No hair below my eyebrows, long eyelashes and strong nails. My psychologist was going to observe my change but had agreed to keep my ability confidential as well as sign off all the paperwork if I proved I wasn't lying.

I lay on my back on my bed, naked except for a blanket that was preserving my dignity. Talia was sitting on the bed cross-legged holding my right hand and our psychologist, Susan was sitting in a chair on my left. I knew she would be peeking occasionally, but had agreed to not take any recordings. I would be too deeply asleep to care.

“Ready?” Talia asked me.

“Ready,” I said with an unintentional waver to my voice. “Here we go.” I closed my eyes, confirmed one last time that the DNA was what I wanted it to be and triggered whole body activation. The tiredness swept over me quickly, but I had done this multiple times now so I wasn't worried and gently allowed myself to drift off.