Maximum Warp
Chapter 3: Strange New Worlds

So, I’d lost all of my hair: top of the head stuff, body hair and pubic hair. Hell, I’d even lost my eyebrows. And my best friend Janet wanted me to talk about my dreams? What the hell! “You can’t be serious,” I sputtered.

“Try me,” she responded, spearing another piece of sushi. She was unimpressed with my look of professorial stupefaction and sheer dumbfoundedness. Admittedly, it works better on undergraduates than it does on grad students, and other full professors – like Janet – are often immune altogether.

She said, extremely calmly, “Remember what Sherlock Holmes would say.”

“Elementary?” I asked, stupidly.

“No, the other thing,” she responded. “‘When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ So, we know spiders and mushrooms don’t cause people to get shorter, or lose all their hair, much less grow all new hair in a different color. Nothing else interesting happened to you, other than getting caught out in a thunderstorm like a Cub Scout. So what does that leave?”

“I thought your specialty was 19th Century American literature,” I grumbled. Mostly I was just buying time while I thought about what she had said.

In any event, she waved my objection away. “I read BritLit for shits and giggles. There’s some great stuff there. You should check out that Shakespeare guy. Really top notch.”

I couldn’t help it; I giggled.

“Okay,” I said. “But when I tell you about my space alien dream, I think you’ll agree that it was probably the residue of psilocybin mushrooms.”

“Like I said before,” she responded, “Try me.”

So I did. For all it was crazy, it was vivid, and I remembered even more detail as I started to relate it.

Throughout my recitation, she just continued to grab pieces of sushi, dip them, and chew them thoughtfully. She made no sound and asked no questions until I concluded.

When I had, I picked up my chopsticks and tried to catch up while she did her impersonation of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

“Welllll,’ she finally said, drawing out the syllable, “I can certainly see why you were inclined towards the magic mushroom explanation. I mean, what with the bad dialogue from 60s and 70s TV, the Cronkite suit and Mary Tyler Moore shoes, the Starship Enterprise and weapons-grade uranium. But – no offense, James – I don’t think your brain could generate that much camp, even dead asleep and on psychotropic drugs.”

I found myself perversely offended. “Are you saying I lack imagination?” I asked indignantly.

“Ahhhh,” she said cautiously, “James, you are without a doubt the most linear thinker I know. It’s actually difficult to argue with you, because your thinking is always so clear and your lines of logic are always so easy to follow. But the flip side, dear man . . . .”

“Is that I’m boring?” I asked.

“That’s far too strong a word,” she responded soothingly. “And too negative as well. Try ‘dependable,’ ‘grounded,’ ‘sensible’ . . . .”

“Spare me the entire thesaurus,” I suggested dryly. “I get the picture.” I drummed my fingers on the table while Janet sat, looking a bit embarrassed. I wanted to be annoyed, but I couldn’t really manage it. Truth is, she was right. I didn’t have much use for flights of fancy. That made me very inclined to dismiss my dream, of course. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it might also decrease the likelihood that my mind would have generated such a pile of nonsense in the first place. It’s true that most dreams I was ever able to recall were pretty prosaic. In my dreams, a cigar is always just a cigar.

Finally I said, “Oh, come on, Janet. Do you really think that what happened to me was caused by space aliens?”

She shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility out of hand. When are you seeing the doctor?”

“I haven’t heard back from Quibble’s office,” I said. “But if I don’t see him tomorrow, it’s going to have to be next week. No way he's open over the weekend.”

She nodded and said, with a sentiment I thoroughly shared, “Doctors!” She thought a few more minutes. “Look, I’ll run you home now. If you want, I can take you out to the Berkshires to pick up your car on Saturday; I’ve got some commitments tomorrow. Why don’t you sleep on it, and keep monitoring to see whether anything else happens to you. I mean, if you got a shot that’s supposed to make you young and good-looking, it’s got a ways to go yet.”

The day’s indignities, it seems, were far from complete. I buried my head in my hands.

“I’m sorry, James,” she said contritely. “That didn’t come out very well, did it? But . . . just in case it is space aliens, what’s ‘young’ in this context? Thirty? Six? Or, for that matter, what’s ‘good-looking?’”

I thought about that for a minute, with my head still buried in my hands. Then I wished I hadn’t. “Oh, Lordy,” I said, raising my head. “I didn’t really say anything about how young 'young' ought to be! For ‘good-looking,’ I suggested that they check out People Magazine. They had a tap into the internet while they were here.”

Janet was looking at me funny. I mean, appalled funny, not funny funny. Not like she was about to laugh. Not at all.

“What?” I asked.

“James,” she said carefully, “most of the people who people People are . . . ahh . . . .”

This was very unlike Janet. “Young, certainly” I finished. “And also good-looking. Right?”

“Sure, sure. Of course. But also . . . ah. Girls. Women. Female . . . people. I mean, they do have pictures of men too. But it’s gotta be, three, four to one. You know that, right?”

I was thunderstruck. “No, I didn’t know that! Why would I know that?” I asked. “I don’t actually open People Magazine, for God’s sake!”

“Not even for the articles?” she asked, innocently.

“No,” I said with more force than the inquiry demanded. “I just see it on the rack at the supermarket. I knew it had lots of pictures of Hollywood types. And British royals.”

“British royals?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “You mean, like Prince Charles? Prince William?”

“Uhh . . . . I don’t remember seeing them, specifically,” I said a bit lamely.

“No?” she asked, clearly determined to make her point. “Which British Royals do you recall seeing? Specifically?”

“Ah. Kate. And Meghan. Diana, for some reason, even though she’s been gone for decades . . . .”

“Uh huh,” she said.

I just looked at her. “They wouldn’t change my gender though, would they? I mean, why go to all the trouble? Men can be young and good looking too!”

“Of course they can,” she responded. “But, aliens might not understand that it’s a big deal. I mean, if they’re rearranging your whole DNA, what’s a chromosome here or there? You might have been more specific.”

“But . . . I just thought they were going to find a good looking young person, not turn me into a good-looking young person!” I protested.

“You didn’t think it was important to suggest a specific gender for this hypothetical good looking young person they were going to pick up?” she challenged.

“Hire,” I said firmly. “And no, I didn’t. A woman is just as capable of being a go-between to a new species as a man. Maybe more . . . .” I stopped myself from finishing the sentence, but the blood drained from my face.

Janet looked at me with real compassion in her eyes.

Which, of course, made me far more terrified than I had been before. Janet was a wonderful woman with a razor-sharp wit and a virtuoso's gift for repartee. If she was feeling sorry for me – sorry enough not to deliver the coup de grâce – I must be in very deep shit indeed.

“Let me take you home now, James,” she said kindly. “Like I said. Sleep on it. Take some measurements. See if you notice any changes. And let me know about Saturday, okay?”

I nodded silently.

When we got back to my condo, she parked the car and helped me get my gear up the stairs and into my unit. When we got inside, she looked around and asked me for a pencil. When I got her one, she grabbed a book, then had me take off my boots and socks and stand against the door frame into the guest bathroom. “Stand up straight now,” she ordered. Then she put the book on my head and made a mark on the molding. “Here you go; that’s your height as of 9:30 tonight. As good a place to start as any.”

I walked her to the door, where she surprisingly turned and gave me a hug. I don’t think we had ever hugged each other. But I found myself returning the hug with an urgency I had never felt in my life.

“It’s okay,” she said softly. “I’m here for you.”

That’s when I knew I was screwed. Exactly how screwed and in what specific way . . . those were just details. Things to add to my obituary, as it were.

* * * * *

I collapsed into bed and had prosaically awful dreams which featured variations on me dying. Car crash. Drowning. Falling out of an airplane. Subtle, it was not. I got up around seven and grimly marched into the bathroom, determined to have as normal a morning as circumstances would allow.

The first thing you see in my bathroom is yourself, like it or not, since the sink and the mirror are right across from the door. I was shocked to discover that yesterday’s stubble had already given way to something that looked a bit like a military haircut, or even something that might push up against Steinbrenner’s edicts for guys who want to play for the New York Yankees. And Janet was right – it was a nimbus of spun gold. I reached up and touched it – a gentle and disbelieving motion. It didn’t even feel like my hair. It was silky soft and fine; it would probably take four of these gold hairs to approach the thickness of one of the gray hairs that had fallen out just a day ago. But there seemed to be a lot of them.

My eyebrows were growing in again too, or at least there were some hairs there. A narrower band so far. Overall, the hair change made me look significantly younger. Maybe more like mid-forties than sixty. Or, was it just the hair?

I looked at my image more closely. My skin looked better too. Tighter. Maybe not quite as weather-scoured. I looked at the back of my hands – the place it’s hardest to hide the changes of time. And, sure enough . . . the age spots which had started to appear in the last few years were flat-out gone, and my veins were not quite as prominent.

I found myself feeling a bit light-headed. To avoid passing out, I stumbled over to the porcelain throne, sat and put my head down. Janet was right. I was getting younger, my hair was changing color and growing ridiculously fast, and those changes simply could not be ascribed to known causes. But really? Corny alien smugglers?

I fished out the family jewelry and did my business. I examined them with more care than I had in years. Were they smaller, or was I imagining things? Everything seemed to be working properly . . . .

I decided I wasn’t going to think about that. I stripped, got in my shower, and started soaping up. Remarkably, my rashes appeared to be completely healed. Like they had never happened. My ankles now matched – the left was no longer swollen. Although the hair on my head was growing back quickly, I saw no sign of any other hair returning.

As the soap glided over one of my nipples, I got something like an electric shock. That was certainly weird. I decided not to think about that either.

I dried off and went to get dressed. Janet was right as far as height was concerned as well. It wasn’t just an issue with the clothes I had taken with me on the hike; every pair of pants I owned was too long. Not by all that much, but it was significant. The bottoms almost touched the ground in back when I put on a pair of sneakers. And the sneakers were loose too. I was, very definitely, shrinking.

That, too, supported Janet’s hypothesis, although it wasn’t all that significant to the gender question. Half the actors in Hollywood weren't exactly tall – even such classic heartthrobs as Paul Newman and Robert Redford had only been 5’ 10.” I didn’t know as much about the current crew, of course. But I was – or had been – 6’3.” I had a few inches to spare, if I was being turned into whatever was currently fashionable in People Magazine. Of course, shrinking was equally, if not more, consistent with the other possibility. Resolutely, I put that from my mind.

I called Quibble’s office at nine and got a machine. Again. So I spent the morning doing laundry, cleaning all my hiking gear, and worrying.

When I still hadn’t heard from the Quack’s office by one o’clock, I did a deep dive in my closet and located a pair of sweatpants I hadn’t worn in years. They fit well enough. Then I put on a sweatshirt, a pair of sandals and my new cap (“Go Badgers”). I grabbed my keys and got all the way to the garage area before I remembered that my car was in the Berkshires. Dammit. I had nothing in the condo to eat, since I had cleaned it out for the summer.

I trudged back to my unit and got my phone. “Hey Siri – call Pizza Amore.”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I didn’t get that!,” she-it responded chirpily.

“‘You’ll love it, James,’ they all said,” I grumbled. “‘It just takes a while to train it,’ they said. Bastards. Why do they torture me?”

“I can’t answer that, Jim!,” she-it said, without any apparent regret.

“Pizza Amore! Call Pizza Amore!” I shouted.

Unperturbed, Siri responded, “Would you like me to call Amore Pizza at 370 West 58th Street, New York, New York?” I ground my teeth in frustration. After a moment, she-it piped in with, “I’m sorry, Jim. I didn’t get that!”

“Do I look like I’m in New York?” I demanded.

“I couldn’t say,” she-it responded.

“Why Not? Aren’t you connected to the frickin’ GPS?” I was getting more frustrated the longer we pretended to converse. Siri’s response, predictably unhelpful, caused me to give up. “Cancel,” I ground out.

“Would you like me to cancel?”

I screamed an affirmative, and she-it said, “canceling order.”

“Hey James,” called my neighbor Rodney Dent. “Thought you were gone for the summer. You got Siri all trained up yet?” It occurred to me that my neighbors had witnessed too many of my efforts to communicate with the Borg.

I wanted to cheerfully flip Rodney off, but I could use his help. So I put on a smile instead. “Hey Rodney! I had to pop down for a couple days to deal with something. But my car’s stuck in the Berkshires. Any chance I could borrow yours for a quick run to the store?”

“Sure,” he said easily. He pulled a set of keys from his front pocket and tossed them to me. Then his eyes popped open and he said, “Wow!! Dude – You’re dyeing your hair? You? I think I may be witnessing the end of days!!!”

The urge to flip Rodney off was growing stronger by the minute, but . . . I did need his car. “It’s kind of a prank. Certainly nothing I’ll keep when classes start!”

“You better not,” he laughed. “You’d have co-eds falling all over you!”

“You know no-one uses that word anymore, right?” I growled.

“Easy, man! Just jokin,’ just jokin,’” he said. “You’re the expert on words. I’m just an accountant!”

“How could I ever forget, what with your sparkling wit?” I thought as I drove off. But I managed – just barely – to keep the thought from passing my lips.

Two hours later, I was back in my condo having some late lunch, with enough food in my fridge and pantry to last a few days. When I was done, I gave Janet a call to take her up on her offer to drive me out to get my car.

“Sure thing, James,” she said. “What time should I pick you up?”

“Whatever time causes you the least inconvenience,” I said. “I’ve got no plans for the day, as you might imagine.”

“Let’s go with 9:00,” she said. “You hear back from Quibble yet?”

“I haven’t even talked to a real person yet,” I said. “Nothing new there.”

“Anythin’ new anywhere else?” she asked.

“Ummm,” I responded. “My hair’s growing back pretty quickly. Other than that, nothing I’ve noticed.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, I look forward to seein’ how you look with golden hair. I can’t picture it. See you tomorrow!”

We ended the call and I glowered at the world. Well, I was indoors; all I could see of the world was the inside of my condo, so I glowered at that. What had I been thinking, going off for months leaving it looking so shabby? I’d tidied it, but . . . man. It could use a good cleaning. I decided that would take my mind off of other topics, so I got my cleaning supplies out and went to work.

* * * * *

The alarm went off at 7:00. I lay in bed a few more minutes, reluctant to face the mirror. But the body has demands of its own, so eventually I hauled myself out of bed and opened the door to the bathroom, filled with trepidation.

My hair was almost as long as it had been two days ago, but it was positively bursting with golden vitality. My eyebrows were restored, but they were thin – nothing like my formerly formidable set that had intimidated generations of undergrads. How would I impress anyone with these?

I sighed heavily and trudged over to the pot to do my morning’s business. The body was more than willing, but the plumbing . . . Shit! the plumbing was GONE! I choked out a strangled-sounding “Noooooo!!!!!!” before the world went black.

The first thing that registered, as I slowly regained consciousness, was the cold of the bathroom’s smooth ceramic tile against one cheek. I blinked to clear my vision, and found that I had collapsed on the floor with my pajama bottoms around my ankles. Charming.

I maneuvered myself into a sitting position, kicking off the pajamas in the process, and leaned my back against the vanity. Inexorably, my eyes were drawn downward. There was no visible evidence of either bat or balls. With deep dread, I brought my right hand over to figure out whether they were, somehow, just playing hide-and-seek. I whispered, “Alle, alle auch sind frei.”

No joy.

If they were hiding, they had used a very convenient slit that had appeared at the base of my pubis to make their escape. A slit that had its own lips – lips which, I discovered, were absurdly sensitive to the touch. I groaned.

I brought my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around my legs and put my head down. Okay. It was frickin’ clueless space aliens after all. And, they had decided to make me female. How much worse could this get? That wasn’t a rhetorical question, either. I’d better prepare myself for future unpleasant surprises, or I'm going to be spending a lot of time admiring the hexagonal tiles on the floor of my bathroom.

The most obvious drum major for my personal parade of horribles was the possibility that the aliens would interpret “young” in an aggressive way. I would be useless to them as a five-year-old, but they might not know that. I’d be useless to myself as well, but they wouldn’t care.

A distant second was the possibility that they might completely screw up on the physical side. Just for example, my component parts might be perfectly fine, but their proportions might be all wrong. They were aliens and had no concepts of human aesthetics. Quite possibly no concept of aesthetics at all. But . . . ugly wasn’t the end of the world. No one had ever called me good-looking. Not that I’m bitter.

Contemplating my totally rearranged future, I discovered, was not resolving my most pressing issue. Pressing, that is, in the most literal sense.

I still needed to pee.

I glared at the toilet, as if all of this was somehow its fault. Then I sighed and got myself to my feet, moving like a man who is facing the executioner. I looked down at the bowl and cursed. That didn’t help either; I didn’t even feel better. Then I snarled something truly vile, dropped the underseat like a guillotine, then turned around and sat down with a decisive thud. “Fine,” I thought. “Now what?”

It honestly took me a bit to figure out that I needed to spread my legs apart and try to relax the urethral sphincters in order to get some action going. Relaxing, it turns out, is hard when you are as tightly wound as I am. It took time, and my bladder sent numerous signals of its growing impatience with my ineptitude. But eventually the flow started. And damn, did that feel weird.

When it finally "petered" out – not with a bang, but a whimper – I faced the next hurdle. I couldn’t exactly wag the area dry, now could I? I thought it through and decided I’d better dry the area off anyways. Damp was never pleasant, and hygiene is important. Should I use a towel? Surely women didn’t do that. There would be no end of messy towels everywhere if they did. Someone would have noticed, and said something.

Okay, it’s obvious. But it wasn’t intuitive to me, anyway. I’ve never actually lived with a woman. Not even in the same house, at least since my mother passed away when I was ten. I had to think a minute before it dawned on me that women had an additional use for toilet paper. I groaned again. I know nothing about being a woman. Less than nothing!

How was I going to do this? How could I do this? I felt tears welling up, blurring my vision, and a lump rising in my throat.

But I steeled myself against my panic. I closed my eyes tight to stifle the tears. I clenched my teeth. “Enough, old man!! You are an adult, for the love of God. A scholar. You fucking live to learn. You didn’t want to learn this? Fine. Too bad. You need to. Stop wallowing, get off your ass, and start figuring out this strange new world.”

It was a turning point, of sorts. I’d gotten old and ill-tempered. I’d allowed myself to develop bad grumbly habits, bitching and moaning as the world started to pass me by. Well, it looked like the world wasn’t quite done with me after all. It was time to revive the habits of mind that had allowed me, in earlier years, to face the world as it was and delve into its secrets. I had a very strong sense that I would need that mindset again, and soon.

I got up, went into the shower, and got cracking. This time, when contact with my nipples sent shock waves to my brain, I slowed down and repeated the experiment. Yes, my nipples were definitely sensitive as all hell. Sensitive, as it happened, in an extremely pleasant way. Okay. Good to know. File that piece of information away. Another data point.

By the time Janet arrived at 9:00, I was reasonably calm. I was going to get through this, somehow, now grimly determined to find a way. I asked Janet to come in, which surprised her. She had assumed that we would hit the road right away. I suggested we have coffee and croissants before we got underway.

She took a bite of her croissant. “Oooh, you got these from the Hungry Ghost, didn’t you?”

I confirmed it.

“Well, I certainly appreciate the effort, James. But you didn’t need to go to the trouble. I don’t need to be bribed, ya know!”

I smiled. “No, I know that. But . . . you’ve been a big help, and I’m afraid this weird journey of mine is just starting. I thought it was the least I could do.”

She gave me a thoughtful look and said, “Okay, so . . . it sounds like you are moving towards the crazy alien hypothesis after all. Did all of that fluff on your head convince you?”

My hair was pretty striking, especially to anyone who had ever known me before. But I shook my head and took a gulp of coffee. Here goes nothing!

“No, I was still in full denial until this morning. But . . . there’s no doubt at this point. There’s no other possible explanation. It’s not just the hair, you see. I’m definitely becoming female. The . . . ah . . . most important bits rearranged themselves overnight.”

She dropped her croissant on the table. “Holy macaroni, you’ve got lady parts?” Then she blushed like a tomato.

I chuckled ruefully. “Yeah, I’ve got lady parts. I’m damned if I know what to do with them, but I’m just gonna have to work on figuring all of that out. Half of the species has found a way; I suppose I can too.”

She stared at me blankly, then a chuckle bubbled up, gurgled into a stream, and developed into a full-blown river of merriment. It was funny just to watch her, and before long I was joining her in peals of laughter, though mine might have had a touch of hysteria mixed in. Still, I was very glad I had gotten up early enough to get through the worst of my emotional reaction well before Janet arrived. I could still laugh – even at my own predicament.

When we finally both subsided, she reached over with both hands and grabbed one of mine. “You’re taking this very well. Better than I ever could have imagined. But it’s . . . it’s gonna be hard, James. Harder than I think you can imagine, right now. You will need help, and . . . And I’m happy to help any way I can. I want you to know that I’m here for you, okay?”

I had gotten through the morning’s shocks, had even managed to steel myself enough to give Janet my secret, knowing that her ribald wit would be unable to resist some sharp sallies. But this, apparently . . . I had no defense against this. Against kindness. I teared up, overwhelmed with emotion, and my personal dam burst like it had been hit by a missile. “Thh-thh-thanks, J-ja-anet,” I got out between sobs.

What was worse, she did not look alarmed. She looked understanding. She got up, came ‘round the table and stooped over to give me a hug. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re gonna have to get used to being a bit emotional, I’m afraid. Comes with the package.”

No-one had called me "honey" in probably fifty years. I should have been indignant, but I wasn’t. It was comforting. And that, of course, was scary. What on earth was wrong with me!

“Y-y-you’re not emotional all the t-t-time!” I managed to stammer, while pouring tears into her shoulder.

“You don’t know that." She stroked my silky new hair with one hand. “Girls develop coping mechanisms, same as boys do. But they’re different ones, and you don’t have ‘em. We learn ways to hide our emotions, and around whom. Distinguished professors, just as a random example. Not every girl is super emotional. But I’m starting to think you might be. Imagine the flood of hormones that must be running through your system right now!”

“I’m gonna be crying forever?” I cried, appalled.

“No, Honey,” she soothed. “Not forever. But sure as hell, for often. Better get used to it.”

Oddly enough, that was a bigger blow to my ego than the loss of my family jewels. My equipment was hidden, private. Crying all the time? There was no way to hide that. What indignity!

“I wanna DIE!!!!” I said, forgetting both proper grammar and my stoic resolve in the misery of this new revelation.

“I know, Honey,” she said. “That’s part of the package, too.”

– To be continued. But you prolly guessed that.