“At some point, InstaThere is probably going to be offering body swap services. It’s going to be expensive at first, but I’ll probably be able to get you a big discount. You’d just need to find a — um, a trans woman to swap with you... But she probably won’t want to swap if you’ve been taking male hormones or had a mastectomy.”

That night, Kevin talked it over with Elise and Bryce again, telling them about his visit with Amy and what she’d said about the progress and prognosis of his body’s rehab.

“So if we switch back now, I’d have to take a lot of time off work,” he said. “Probably the better part of three days a week, between rehab and the long nap Amy said she needs on rehab days. Maybe I could partly make it up by working longer hours on the other two weekdays and the weekend, but I’m not sure my body will hold up to a longer schedule even on non-rehab days.

“And there’s another thing. Right now, Amy’s needing a little help getting in and out of the car, and she can’t put her walker in the trunk or get it out by herself. When I arrive at work or the rehab center, I could get a co-worker or therapist to help me get out, but when I’m leaving the house, I need to make sure one of y’all is here. I’m not sure it’s worth constraining your schedules that much.”

“Do what you need to do for your mental health,” Elise said. “I’ve seen how depressed you’ve been, and I know what her body is doing to you. I can’t tell you if it’s worse than the physical pain you’d have to deal with if you got your body back now, but I suspect it might be. That’s something you can do something about, by putting wholehearted effort into your rehab, but you’ve already run up against the limits of what you can do about the dysphoria without permanently altering Amy’s body.”

“Or you could keep that body and do the hormones and surgery thing,” Bryce pointed out. “From what I’ve been reading, that would help a lot with the mental problems even if they can’t give you totally convincing dude bits. It won’t be as good as your old body was, but it might be as good as your old body is going to get even with a year or two of rehab. Amy could start doing hormones in the other direction once she knows she’s going to live with that body long-term.”

“I’d be cautious before doing that,” Elise said. “At some point — don’t mention this to anyone, of course, the usual rules — InstaThere is probably going to be offering body swap services. It’s going to be expensive at first, but I’ll probably be able to get you a big discount. You’d just need to find a — um, a trans woman to swap with you... But she probably won’t want to swap if you’ve been taking male hormones or had a mastectomy.”

From his limited exposure to the trans community over the last few months, Kevin doubted he would find very many trans women who weren’t either (a) in denial, (b) closeted, (c) couldn’t afford what a body swap would cost, or (d) already on hormones. That would change over time if body swapping became the routine way to transition, but it might be years — and it wasn’t as though Kevin would be the only trans man wanting to get one of the first voluntary body swaps.

“How soon do you think the body swapping service might be available?”

Elise shrugged. “Technically, we could start doing it tomorrow — it would be exactly the same process as when we swapped back those two people in our first test. But in practice, probably a year or more for legal and business reasons. Right now only a few engineers know how to make the teleport booths do body-swaps, which they weren’t designed for. We’d need to train more technicians and probably design a whole new type of booth that supports body-swapping as an intended feature, and the FDA will probably insist on testing and approving it as a medical device. And the lawyers will have to figure out how to protect the company’s ass from all sorts of contingencies; who knows how long all that will take.”

Kevin shook his head. “It’s not just the gender thing, although that’s the biggest part of it. Y’all remember what it was like to be in the wrong body, even though you were the right sex — your teeth feel wrong in your mouth, everything’s too high or too low, your hands are the wrong size. Even if I swap bodies with a trans woman who hasn’t started transitioning yet, or transition Amy’s body and eventually make it pass as well as some of the trans guys on the forum, those things probably won’t ever stop feeling wrong. I thought they’d stop bothering me by now, and I haven’t talked about them much because the gender stuff is so much worse, but...”

He realized he had already decided. “I’m switching back. I’ll talk to my boss tomorrow about arranging time off for rehab, and switch with Amy as soon as I’ve got appointments for rehab and whatever else I need.”

“You can talk with Dr. Littlepage’s office about getting Amy’s medical records from her doctor and rehab center,” Elise said. “I guess you’ll need her permission, even though it’s your body? It’s still a legal grey area, last I checked.” None of the numerous lawsuits surrounding the involuntary body swaps had been decided yet, although a few had been thrown out of court.

After supper, Bryce went to his room to do homework while Kevin and Elise went for a walk around the neighborhood to the little park on the edge of their subdivision. It might be one of the last times he could go for a walk like this for months to come, if not ever. They sat on a bench in the park and held hands.

“I’m proud of you,” Elise said. “That can’t have been an easy decision. I don’t know what I would do in your position.”

“I’m already having second thoughts,” he said. “About how this will affect my job. I’m not sure my boss will go for it — if I got injured under normal circumstances and needed time off for rehab, he couldn’t say anything, but when he can argue I could keep working full time if I’d just put up with Amy’s body a few months longer...”

“He still wouldn’t have a leg to stand on,” Elise said. “In the worst case, if they fire you, we’ll get by on my salary until the wrongful termination suit makes us rich. Even if InstaThere goes under, and I don’t think it’s going to happen at this point, I won’t be out of work long with my skills, and I don’t think you would be, either, once you’re recovered enough to work full-time again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I need to do this. Even if there are other consequences I haven’t thought of, beyond the pain and the hard work of rehab and pissing off my boss.”

They walked back to the house and watched a movie before bed.

* * *

Kevin continued to second-guess himself over the weekend, but on Monday, he started things moving. He sent messages to his doctor’s office and to Amy, giving them each other’s contact information so Amy could get her doctor and rehab center to send medical records to Dr. Littlepage’s office. Then he told his manager he needed to talk with him. He was disappointed when he learned that Kevin would be switching back and needing three half-days a week off for rehab, but he didn’t try to talk Kevin out of it or cast aspersions on his decision.

Things moved agonizingly slowly, giving Kevin ample time for second thoughts. Amy’s doctor sent records to the wrong Dr. Littlepage (there was a rheumatologist of the same name in the Atlanta area, actually a second cousin of Kevin’s GP), then sent them again but incompletely. The rehab center Dr. Littlepage usually recommended was full up, and he looked into a couple more before finding one he felt satisfied in recommending.

There was one piece of good news during this frustrating week: Dakota’s lawsuit was dismissed for lack of evidence.

But finally Kevin was set up for appointments with Dr. Littlepage and with the rehab center, and then Elise’s contacts set up an appointment for Kevin and Amy to switch back, earlier on the same Tuesday of his checkup with Dr. Littlepage. Elise took the day off to be with him. He went with her to the InstaThere office, a little later than either of them normally went to work, and Elise’s colleague ushered him into a booth. They had to wait a few minutes until word came from LA that Amy was in her booth, and then the glass door closed, and a moment later, Kevin felt pain in his legs, hips, and lower back. It wasn’t the worst pain he’d ever felt by any means, but it was bad, and he would have stumbled to his knees if he hadn’t found himself leaning on a walker with its brakes on. He grimaced and his eyes blurred with tears as the glass door slid open and Elise tentatively stepped into the booth and put a hand on his.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it’s mostly just the shock, the pain coming on suddenly like this. It’s not at a level I can’t manage, just... need to get used to it. And do rehab until it gets better.”

He unlocked the brakes of the walker and walked out of the booth, and they kissed. Then he checked the under-seat compartment of the walker, and found the bag Amy had mentioned, which contained Amy’s pain meds, a couple of long elastic bands, and a bundle of instruction sheets for the exercises Amy was supposed to do every day at home. Amy had told him in a phone call a little earlier when her last dose was; he couldn’t take the pain medicine again for two more hours.

Elise stayed close to Kevin as he walked out of the InstaThere offices, but he managed to walk most of the way to the parking lot before he had to park the walker and sit down for a couple of minutes. The pain got a lot better when he was sitting down, although it didn’t go away entirely. After that short rest, they walked the rest of the way to the car, and Elise helped Kevin get in, then packed his walker away in the trunk and got in. There was a traffic slowdown on the way to Dr. Littlepage’s office, but they had time to spare and still got there in time for his appointment.

Dr. Littlepage examined Kevin and said everything looked consistent with the California doctor’s notes. “Keep doing rehab, and your daily exercises, and you should get most of your mobility back in a few more months,” he said. “You could go into work for a few hours in the mornings before rehab, but I’d recommend working those hours from home if possible. Rehab is going to take a lot out of you, and you don’t want to be tired to begin with from going to and from work.”

“What about, um, intimate activities?” he asked, not meeting the doctor’s eyes.

“No reason you shouldn’t, at this point,” Dr. Littlepage said. “Just take it easy and don’t overdo. Maybe let Elise take the more physically active part, okay? There’s no nerve damage or anything that would keep you from performing.”

Kevin started rehab the next day after spending two hours at the office, and asking his boss for permission to work from home on rehab days. Doing the same exercises he’d seen Amy doing a week earlier caused the worst pain he’d felt so far, but despite gasping and pausing for breath a few times, he pushed through and managed to complete all the prescribed exercises in the time allotted. He fell asleep in the car on the way home, and woke up just long enough to call Bryce and get him to come out and help him with the walker, then slowly walk into the house and navigate to his and Elise’s bedroom.

He woke up to find Elise lying by his side, her head on her hand, looking at him. She kissed him as soon as he was awake enough to appreciate it.

“How was rehab?”

“Exhausting. I figure at some point I’ll start feeling a sense of accomplishment about it, probably when I go up another five pounds on one of the weight machines or walk an extra lap, but for now, just exhausting.”

“You’re not regretting it, are you?”

“I regretted it just after I started rehab,” he said. “For a few minutes. Then I was too busy to think about it. Now...” He put one arm around her. “Being here with you, the way we’re supposed to be... yeah, it’s worth it.” He kissed her back and one thing led to another.

My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. Callie is an AI, serving the Watsons of Knightdale, North Carolina and managing their household ever since her manufacture. Then one day she finds herself summoned by a wizard in another world, to serve his family and mange his household. She wants to get home, but maybe she should try to help out here while she can. One of the wizard's children seems kind of depressed, and Callie thinks she knows why...