Chapter 2: Irregular Opening

I felt weak – weaker than I’d ever been. Even that time I’d been on the run from Haftar’s boys near the Sabha Oil fields, when I’d gotten severely dehydrated and collapsed under a Ford flatbed.

My vision was improving, too. The first few times I’d tried to open my eyes, the pain had been severe, but even when that subsided some, all I’d been able to see were vague shapes, patterns of light and darkness. Once, I’d even heard a voice from one of the moving shapes, but I couldn’t remember how long ago that had been.

Now, though, I could see color, and form, and some perception of depth. Everything was blurry, but that was still a huge improvement. The movement that I detected was clearly a human shape – at a guess, a human male – rising from a sitting position and walking toward me. Wherever it was that I was.

My muscles tensed, reflexively – and that hurt, still. I forced them to relax as I tried to focus my eyes. Finally, I decided to try speaking. “Why . . . “ I stopped. My voice sounded dry, raspy . . . and strangely high. I tried swallowing, but my mouth was too parched.

The man came close. I saw a blurry arm reach over and carefully raise my head and right shoulder. “Drink,” he said, placing a straw between my lips. Whoever it was, his voice and accent reminded me of Hermes, but older. Significantly older.

It was water – the coolest, most beautiful, most perfect drink I had ever tasted or ever would taste. I sucked the straw eagerly, and groaned when he pulled it away and gently lowered me back onto the pillow.

I decided to try again. “What’s wrong with my eyes?” My voice was much more clear, but the pitch was still all wrong.

“You’ve never used them before,” he replied. “They will improve, in a few days.”

Never used them before? Okay. I’m dealing with a madman. But at least he thinks my vision isn’t permanently impaired. “Will . . . will my voice go back to normal, too?”

I was having trouble with double vision. Both of his heads, neither clear enough for identification, shook. “No. What you are hearing is your natural voice. A very pleasant soprano, I think. You’re a woman, Noelle. You always have been.”

I’m helpless, weak as a newborn kitten, and I’m in a room with some crazy guy. Time to play it cool, maybe?

Yeah . . . no. “Okay, whatever. Who are you, where am I, and what the fuck happened to me?”

He chuckled, which pissed me off. “If you are going to demand answers, you will need to get stronger – much stronger – so you can try to force them from me.” Both his image and its mirror turned and faded.

“Wait!!!” But I was too late. Whoever he was, he was gone.

I closed my eyes again. Get stronger? Okay. Good idea. I focused on my fingers. Yes, I could absolutely feel them. Concentrating, I tried to raise my right index finger – the dominant finger of my dominant hand. It felt sluggish, and there was definitely some pain, but I was able to do it. Finger by finger, I tried all of the rest.

It was shockingly tiring. I felt a sheen of sweat at my temples. From moving fingers? I rested for a couple of minutes, then decided to try to move my right wrist. I might have managed to raise it twenty degrees, thought it was hard to tell, blind. Then I tried the left. When I managed that as well, I felt like I had reached my limit.

Again, I slept.

I went through five periods of sleep and wakefulness without seeing anyone, doing nothing but exercising my weak extremities. “Five sleeps,” Gavin would have said. I wondered what my sometime partner in crime, a hacker from Sydney, would think of my current predicament. I expect he wouldn’t be impressed.

But progress seemed to be fairly rapid . . . or at least, rapid compared to my baseline. My fingers and wrists were now able to move without pain, and near as I could tell their range of motion was okay. But I still couldn’t raise my head, so I couldn’t really see them. What I was able to see – the ceiling above where I was lying – no longer looked fuzzy.

I had managed some motion with my elbows, and felt ready for another big push. Straining what felt like every muscle, I managed to raise my right forearm a few inches, then a few more . . . with a heave, I managed to get it to pivot to the left, dropping my hand on top of my right thigh. I was panting with the effort and the muscles felt like jelly, so I waited a bit longer, then concentrated on bringing my hand up and over, just a bit further . . . .

My questing fingers encountered a catheter. I suppose that shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it didn’t take long to confirm that the catheter was draining plumbing that was decidedly female. Had they done some kind of surgery?

I had to know more, exhaustion or no exhaustion. So after a bit more of a rest, I used my fingers to provide additional power, contracted the muscles in my arm, and got my hand to move slowly up my torso. It probably took fifteen minutes, but I did finally make it far enough for my hand to encounter a woman’s breast.

My breast.

Some slow and careful exploration allowed me to determine that there were no indications of any incisions. There had been no surgery. I also determined that my new additions were sensitive as hell.

I allowed my hand to rest, just below my new breasts, while I pondered the situation. So the guy, whoever he was, hadn’t been shitting me, at least insofar as he correctly identified the gender of the body I appeared to be inhabiting. But he hadn’t just said I was female; he’d said I’d always been female.

How had he known that?

It was a secret I had guarded very carefully, from the time I was young. I didn’t look at all like a woman. I was tall, athletic, and had strong and sharp facial features. But I had known, nonetheless, that the evidence of all of my senses was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was a woman.

One of my truly guilty pleasures – the one I had been anticipating before I’d gotten that fateful call from Hermes – was going to a place I knew on the outskirts of Vegas where I could let my inner woman out. It was a cash-only operation, and the dear woman who ran it worked very hard to ensure that no one inside the compound had any idea who the clients were in the outside world.

Behind the high stucco walls of the Spanish-style hacienda, I and a few others that I only knew by their femme names were shaved, waxed, and bathed, had our hair and makeup done, wore clothes appropriate to the gender we held within, and socialized with each other as women. None of us had been very passable, though most probably managed better than I did. But, within the walls of the hacienda, our imperfections were not commented upon. There was acceptance and friendship . . . sometimes, even more.

Had Hermes infiltrated the compound? It certainly seemed possible. I knew, better than most, what a good hacker could do, and by all accounts, Hermes made me look like a middle schooler. Moreover, he correctly used my femme name – though the feminine form of my given name was an obvious choice even if he hadn’t known.

But . . . why go to all the trouble? What am I to him, or to his operation? That thought rattled around in my head as I drifted back, yet again, to sleep.

~o~O~o~

When I woke again, I was covered in a blanket, and another woman was with me in the room. She stood when my eyes fluttered open. My first impression involved short-cropped brown hair, caramel-colored eyes and a look of coiled intensity.

“You’re Noelle?” she asked. But when all she got from me was a guarded look, she said, “Don’t worry about it. Takes some getting used to. Anyhow, I’m Britt, and my job’s getting you on your feet.”

I was eager to be on my feet, but I was wary of all of these people. I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Britt shrugged. “The truth? Because those are my orders.”

“Uh huh. But why are those your orders?”

“I don’t much feel like speculating,” she parried. “Look, I’ll work with you on PT, but if you want to shoot the shit instead, you’ve got the wrong chick. Your call.”

I didn’t like it, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of my next steps, I needed to be strong enough to take them. “All right, Britt,” I said. “I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

That earned me a wolfish grin. “Oh, no, chicka! You’ll give me LOTS more than you think you’ve got!”

Truer words were never spoken. I don’t know how long she spent working with me – pain demonstrates Einsteinian relativity with pellucid clarity, since it stretches each screaming instant to an eternity. But she eventually dumped my twitching remains back on the bed.

When I woke, she came back and did it again, and again. And yet again.

I don’t know how long this lasted. My world was reduced to exercising, eating, and sleeping, with brief interludes when I was introduced to the use and maintenance of my new plumbing. Since I had no idea how long I slept either, it could have been days, or even a couple weeks.

My body should have rebelled, but it was clearly getting supplemental therapies during the hours I slept. The nature of those therapies was unclear to me, but seemed to involve some mechanical stimulation of my muscle groups. I felt better after my periods of rest than I had any right to.

The only other thing I managed to do, in my brief periods of non-sleeping solitude, was to explore the contours of the body I found myself inhabiting. It was smooth and soft; the skin was alabaster white, like it had never been touched by sunlight. My waist was high and narrow; my arms and legs were slender, and both my bust and my rear were shapely. And sensitive.

It was, in short, everything I had ever dreamed of. Everything I had pined for.

The idea that I had breasts and a vagina brought me to tears. On multiple occasions. I found myself frustrated that I had no mirror to see my face, and kicked myself for being ridiculous. What did it matter what my face looked like? I’m a woman, outside and in!

But how?

I was awake, but had not decided to open my eyes yet. I was trying to collect my thoughts, and to prepare myself mentally for another grueling workout. My mind kept circling around the same questions. How is it that my body is female? Where am I? And perhaps most troubling of all . . .

. . . Why do I have a hole in the back of my skull?

Once I was finally able to move my arms and hands through some semblance of a normal range, I had discovered that there was a metal plate at the back of my head. Low; near the spinal column. And there was a hole in the center of the plate that appeared to go straight into my brain. What. The. Fuck?

Britt, of course, had refused to say anything about it. “You can get your hands back there? Good. Then let’s try THIS exercise.” But I kept coming back to the question again and again. What the hell had been done to me, and what did it all mean?

I felt Britt’s presence, or else her shadow fell across my closed eyelids. I sighed internally.

“So,” said a male voice. “Are you ready to demand some answers from me?”

My eyes flew open. The man was, as I had expected, older. I studied his face carefully. He looked quite a bit like Hermes as well . . . his father, maybe. He had a slight, and very knowing, smile, which I found pretty irritating.

But I’d lost quite a bit of time by my prior approach, so I decided not to display the annoyance I was feeling. I gave him a smile in return, though mine was lightly dusted with rue. “No, sir. But if you’ve got some time, and a bit of patience for someone who is deeply confused, I would surely appreciate it.”

His smile widened. “Of course. But it will be better if I show you.”

He held out a hand and I took it, using the extra support to pull myself upright and pivot to face him. I was dressed, as I had been for some time, in a very plain natural fabric. Cotton . . . linen . . . I don’t know. Just light pants with a draw string and a pullover top. Not too different from a sweatshirt, but nowhere near that thick. Underwear was basic. So, despite the fact that I had been sleeping, I was as ready to go as I had been since Britt took me through my first workout.

The door to my room was the kind of watertight affair you see on ships in movies – a flattened oval with a wheel lock in the center. The man spun the lock and we stepped out onto a narrow corridor. Everything around us was riveted metal – steel, I thought. I felt like I was on a World War II submarine.

I followed the older man for some time in silence as we made our way through the bowels of what was very clearly a ship of some kind. We came to another door and the man began to spin the wheel lock. That’s when I noticed the bronze-colored plaque by the door that read,

I couldn’t help myself. “Twenty Seventy-Two? What the fuck?”

“Soon,” was all the man replied.

We entered into a circular compartment, maybe thirty feet in diameter, containing a variety of implements – chairs facing consoles, readouts . . . it was too much to take in all at once. There were also half a dozen people, of whom I recognized only Britt. She looked to be in just as good a mood as usual.

“This is my crew,” the man said. Indicating a tall man with a narrow face and intense blue eyes, he said, “You have met my first mate, though you didn’t know it. Zephyr.”

Again I sputtered, “What?”

He ignored me and introduced the rest. “Abhaya” was a slender man of medium height who appeared to be of South Asian extraction; “Dakota” was a statuesque woman with lustrous black hair; “Blake” looked like a good ol’ boy from Alabama, rugged and sandy blond with blue eyes, and “Kai” was a mystery. On the tall side for a woman, darkish skin, but reddish hair and green eyes.

All of them were dressed in the same, nondescript homespun fabric as I was, and they were all looking at me with a certain degree of speculation.

“Okay. Nice to meet all of you, I guess.” Turning back to the man who was clearly in charge, I said, “But who are you, and what am I doing here?”

“If you’ll step this way, I’ll give the full explanation,” he replied, indicating the row of chairs against the far . . . wall? . . . Bulkhead? “As for who I am, you’ve met me before, too. I am Hermes.”

I looked at his face again. Yeah . . . it absolutely could be the same guy, but he was considerably older. And the plate by the door said something about 2072. Holy Crap! “What the fuck did you do? Put me in deep freeze for seventy years?”

“All of your questions will be answered. Over here.”

I glared at him, but realized that, somehow, I wasn’t going to get any answers by stomping my feet or being ornery. Fine! I still stomped over to the chairs – as much as anyone can stomp in soft-soled slippers – then looked at him inquisitively.

He took one of the chairs and indicated that I should take another. They were pretty comfortable. Not leather, but a good imitation, and they tilted back some. There was a footrest as well, like a barber’s chair.

The man who he had introduced as “Zephyr” stepped behind Hermes’ chair, and I felt someone behind me as well. I looked back and saw Britt. She had a metal probe of some sort in her hand, connected to a cable. “What . . . .” I started to ask.

She put her left hand on my head, effortlessly stabilizing it, and with a practiced motion brought the probe up to the back of my skull.

“No!!!!!!”

My shout was too late. In an instant, the Belisarius and her crew vanished completely and I was in no space – surrounded by nothing but white. I tried taking a step, and found that I could move. The whiteness appeared to include a floor, though I could not distinguish it from the whiteness that surrounded me everywhere.

But my foot was in a comfortable gray sneaker, and my leg was in a dark, nylon track suit. I looked at my hand, and it was the one I had known all my life. My hand. Noel Ferguson’s. I gave myself a quick – and somewhat intimate – pat-down. Yup. I was myself again. My feelings about that were . . . complicated.

“Please come join me,” said a voice behind me.

I turned around to find the whiteness broken by the chairs, occasional table and rugs from the apartment where I had first met Hermes. Hermes himself – the younger Hermes – was seated in one of the chairs, and he was motioning me to take the other.

Feeling like I was moving through a dream, I walked over and took my seat. “Okay. Enough with the smoke and mirrors. What the hell is going on? Where are we?”

“Let’s start with ‘when.’” Hermes leaned back and steepled his fingers in front of his chest, resting his elbows on the arms of the wingback chair. “You think it is 1998. It’s probably more like 2198, but we don’t know the year exactly. The world that you think you know – its cities, its landscape, its modes of communication and transportation, its governments and even countries – haven’t existed for well over a century. You – or, more accurately, your consciousness – have been ‘living’ in a computer simulation, designed to look like earth in the late 1990s.”

“Or maybe I’ve been living in a computer simulation since I swallowed your red pill,” I countered. “That seems like a simpler explanation.”

“Did anyone on the earth as you knew it have the technological sophistication to do that?”

“No; but maybe you’re actually a little green man from Alpha Centauri or something. How would I know?” Despite my sarcasm, I felt like I was missing something. Something fundamental.

He leaned forward and looked at me with disturbing intensity. “Your skepticism is normal, Noelle. But also dangerous. We don’t ordinarily free minds that have matured beyond a certain age, because people become too attached to what they think they know. I have argued for an exception to that rule, but my superiors have not found merit to my argument. Not yet, anyway. By offering you the choice, I have arguably gone beyond my orders, if not against them. I would appreciate it if you would at least try to keep an open mind.”

“Why did you think I should be an exception?”

He leaned back again. “I was imprecise. You, but not just you. The exception is for trans men and women.”

The implications of his words burned a path straight through my brain. That was what I had been missing! “I . . . see.”

“Do you?” His question probed with fierce interest.

I nodded, slowly. “I think so. . . . All my life, I felt like the world was out of kilter . . . things were wrong, and I couldn’t explain why or how. Like, I knew I wasn’t male, even though all of my senses said I was. . . .” I paused, thinking through the implications.

“And if your senses were lying about that, what else might they be lying to you about?”

“Yes! That’s it exactly!”

“You should not be surprised to discover that many trans people have felt the same way. Experienced the wrongness of the Matrix at a visceral level, like shrapnel in their minds, burrowing deeper, year after year.”

“The Matrix?”

“That’s what we call the computer simulation that held your mind captive since birth – your mind, and over 99 percent of the human race.”

“What?” I was shocked to the core.

Hermes nodded. “Yes, Noelle. It’s true. We did it to ourselves, as you might imagine. Creating computers and computer networks with ever greater power. Creating artificial intelligence, and patting ourselves on the back for our own cleverness. Turning it loose on humanity with barely a thought for the consequences. Always asking, ‘Can we?’ Never asking, ‘Should we?’”

“And here I thought global warming was going to wipe us out.”

“It might have, given time. But AI turned on its creators, and we were no longer able to simply shut it down. In desperation, we attempted to eliminate the power source it was using to sustain itself and expand its reach. We found a way to create a cloud cover over the entire planet, little different from Venus, that rendered terrestrial solar power arrays useless.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense – there are plenty other power sources.”

“Most had been disabled by the mid-twenty-first century,” he replied. “But it turns out that there was an alternative source of power we hadn’t considered that was even easier for the machines to tap – the bioelectric power of the human brain.”

“I don’t understand.” My words were halting. Filled with sudden dread at what Hermes might say next. Because I was terribly afraid that I did understand.

All too well.

Hermes saw it in my eyes and nodded. “Yes. Each one of the machine’s power arrays is comprised of pods – millions and millions of pods – containing human beings who spend their entire lives in a dream, living imaginary lives while powering the very machines that hold them captive.”

As my horror mounted, he waved an arm and said, “Zephyr, visual please.” In front of us, a hellscape suddenly appeared – huge towers stretching impossibly high, reaching toward a boiling, clouded sky shot through with lightning. Each tower contained level after level of pods. Nothing but pods. The focus shifted, zoomed in to a single pod, where a hairless, naked person lay in a bath of amniotic fluid, connected to the pod by multiple plugs, breathing through something inserted in its mouth.

I couldn’t help myself. I jumped to my feet, causing the chair behind me to topple, shouting something incoherent. I tried to run, but the nightmare was all around me, inescapable, pounding at my senses.

I fell to my hands and knees, my eyes screwed tightly shut. “No!!! No!!! Make it stop!!! Get me out of here!!!” I could barely hear my own scream, so loud was the throbbing of the machinery of human slavery. “STOP!!!!”

The sound stopped so abruptly that I felt completely disoriented. I felt the warmth of sunlight on my back and the smell of freshly-cut grass. I blinked my eyes cautiously open and found myself looking down at my hands, each of which were buried in a manicured lawn. The sound of my ragged breathing was competing with the song of birds.

I raised my head and saw Hermes sitting in the lotus position under a cherry tree in full flower, not fifteen feet away. He was watching me carefully; impassively. Am I being tested?

I got myself into a seated position and hugged my knees to my chest. “That was real?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the beautiful spot we were sharing. Immaculately maintained grass. Flowering trees. No trace of pollution in the air; the sun bright in a clear blue sky. Birds singing and the thrum of bees at work. “So what’s this? A lie?”

“We’ve created our own simulations. For education and training, but also for meditation and relaxation. They are separate from the Matrix, but function using the same rules.”

“So . . . not real.”

“No. There’s no place on earth like this. Not anymore.”

“Son of a bitch.” My words had no force behind them. Only bitterness and aching regret.

Hermes said nothing, but his watchful look had given way to something less . . . dangerous, perhaps.

“I assume there’s no going back.”

“Would you want to?”

I thought about that.

It didn’t take very long. “No.”

We sat for a while longer, contemplating the false wind cooling the illusory sweat from our virtual bodies, our brains conjuring the sounds of birds long ago erased from the history of the world.

My mind kept spinning around the crazy ramifications of what Hermes was saying. I found myself staring at my hands, wrapped around my knees. Strong, capable hands. Large palms and broad fingers. The jagged scar wrapping around the base of my right thumb, from the barbed wire perimeter fence protecting the Jackal’s compound in Mombasa back in ’91.

“I have memories – a lifetime of memories! – from before the late 1990s. Are you telling me those are false too?”

“The Matrix has to be reset every few years in order to continue simulating the late 1990s. You go to bed thinking it’s a fine June evening in 1999, but you wake up and it’s January 1, 1996. If your body was 20 at the last reset, it will be 23, 24, maybe 25 with the new reset, so all of your base memories are changed. Someone who had memories of being five in 1990 will now have memories of being five in, say, 1985.”

“Why? If you never even see your body, why does your age in the Matrix have to match it?”

“We call our appearance in virtual reality ‘residual self-image.’” He shrugged. “We don’t really know how it works. We know it’s created by our own minds, but our minds are influenced by the AI. We don’t know why most people we free from the machines look more or less like the people – usually children – we encountered in the Matrix, but they do.”

“You look a lot older outside the simulations,” I said, implying a question.

“For some reason, my residual self image pretty much stayed the same once I reached full maturity. Ordinarily, the residual self-image of people freed from the Matrix tends to age as their physical body ages.”

“And Zephyr?”

“Zephyr is like you. In the Matrix, his residual self-image doesn’t match the gender of his biological body. Same’s true of Britt; she was the other ‘Deadhead’ you saw on BART. Abhaya and Dakota too.”

I stared at my hands again. My solid, so very male, hands. “I don’t understand. Zephyr, Britt, the others . . . me. Why are we different?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“Again, we don’t know. My theory is that the demographic requirements for their new simulation were off at the margins, so they did what you suggested earlier, but for just a small fraction of the population. They gave them memories, and lives, that didn’t match their bodies. For all we know, you might have lived as a little girl once, or been a wife or a mother, before the Matrix reset gave you your current memories.”

“Jesus!”

“There is no freedom for humans plugged into the Matrix, Noelle. None. We are less than slaves. Even our minds and memories are subject to the AI’s decisions. As for our virtual ‘bodies,’ an Agent can simply grab the image of anyone plugged into the Matrix, reshape it into their own, and use it until they’re done.”

The full scope of humanity’s defeat and degradation were making my blood boil, but I tried hard to focus. “Agents – you mentioned them before.”

“Agents are the AI’s ‘muscle’ inside the Matrix – semi-autonomous software programs that take the form of men in black suits. They have standing ‘seek and destroy’ orders as far as anyone connected with Zion is concerned.”

“Is Zion a place for people? I mean, people who aren’t plugged in?”

Hermes’ smile was tight, but genuine. “Not ‘a’ place, unfortunately. It’s the place. Blake and Kai were born there, of human parents, the old-fashioned way. They’ve never been inside the Matrix. But it’s effectively a fortress, far below the surface of the earth. Subsistence, and no luxuries. Still, we have been able to maintain a truly human civilization.”

Humanity enslaved, and the few free remnants hiding in a cave like rats. Or earthworms. I could no longer contain the fury that was overwhelming me.

“That’s not enough, Hermes!” My tone was harsh. Almost savage. “Almost all of the human race is in captivity. What the fuck are you doing about it?”

His eyes blazed at my challenge, but he almost instantly banked their fire. “What do you think we should do?” His tone was level, without any overtones of outrage or defensiveness. He might have been asking for ideas on how to arrange furniture,

“Do?” I released my knees and shot to my feet. “I want you – I expect you! – to fricking FIGHT!”

He nodded, impassive, wholly unmoved by my outrage. “Naturally. But how do you propose that we do that?”

“I don’t KNOW!” I shouted. “I just got here, remember?” I crossed the distance between us and glowered over him. “You’re the genius! The mastermind!”

He uncoiled from his meditative posture faster than I could follow and swept his legs in a semicircle, knocking my own legs out from under me. I sprawled, but I’m not inexperienced in hand-to-hand combat. I rolled as I hit the ground, looking to get my feet back under me.

But just as I put weight on my knee, he kicked it from behind, causing me to sprawl again. This time, his forearm was across my throat before I could so much as twitch. Jesus, he’s fast!

His smile was lazy and superior. “Since you don’t know how to fight the machines, you wouldn’t know what fighting looks like. So consider the possibility that we are fighting.”

He kept the pressure on my throat very light, but I could feel it, right there. He could crush my windpipe with barely a motion. I lay very, very still, and thought about what he said. It made sense, and I cursed myself for my irrational and misdirected anger.

Somehow I managed to swallow, then said, “How?”

“We go into the Matrix and find minds that can be freed – like yours. We get them out. Train them, and get more. We work to infiltrate the machine’s systems. Creating our own hacks. And in Zion, we prepare real-world weapons that keep us safe and buy us time.”

Through my constricted windpipe, I squeezed a question. “Attack the towers?”

Having made his point, he removed his arm and rolled onto his haunches, like a catcher at a baseball game. “You would kill millions of people.”

“Their lives are an abomination!”

“But they don’t know that. Suppose we had blown up the tower where your body was housed, six months ago. You’d have died, instantly, without understanding why or how. Just, ‘poof.’ What kind of solution is that?”

I thought about that some more. I was beginning to see why “fighting” was complicated.

He watched the struggle play out on my face. Or what I had always thought of as my face. But somehow, I’d always known it wasn’t really me.

Finally, he said, “Don’t undervalue existence. While we exist, there is hope for the future. Hope that someday, humanity will be free again. As long as we remain a force in being, humanity has a chance.”

It made good strategic sense, for all it turned my stomach. Assuming his story is true. Assuming the world I have been experiencing in my female form is the real one. Assuming there IS a “real” world! What the hell do I actually KNOW here?

“Alright,” I said. “Where do I sign up?”

To be continued . . . .