Afternoon of April 4, 2009

Fred (Alpha), as told to George

From my earliest memories, I grew up in two different houses, with two different mothers, two different fathers, two different sets of toys, two different kinds of clothes, in two different bodies... with two different sexes. I slept on a regular nightly cycle even at a young age, but every day I woke up in the other body. And during those sleeping times, I never had the kind of dreams most people have. Instead, I dreamed, at high speed, all the experiences of the initially unknown other person who ran each body while I wasn’t in it, before then waking up in that other body.

As a result of this body-swapping, I got to do everything twice, once in each body, but only driving each body half the time. Learning to walk, to speak, to write, to go to the bathroom, to dress myself. Although the constant swapping sometimes confused things, I think having the opportunities to learn everything twice in different environments helped me learn fast. There was another aspect of my power that helped me learn that I didn’t realize for years later, though.

I had just turned four (both of my bodies did) when I first made contact. I left a note for my other self. In my boy body, I wrote:

Dear Other Self,

I know that you must be doing the same as me, changing each day. Dreaming each night what I did in your other body. Let’s send notes this way.

And I left the note, with pencil on top of it, where the other could not miss it near the bed. Of course, the other would remember writing the note in the “dream” before waking up, so it almost didn’t matter where I left it, but still, I wanted to make it obvious to my other self. I made a similar note the next day in my girl body, and when I was the boy again, I found the response below my first note:

Yes, I figured out you had to exist, too. It’s weird, because I think other people don’t do this. They live in the same body every day.

And I wrote back:

So you think we’re the weird ones? Let’s watch for any signs of this, that anybody else lives like us.

The other me agreed, and of course as four-year-olds we didn’t discover much, so we made no progress on that goal for a while. But while we didn’t always have anything to say, it became a habit and we got used to writing a little each day. When we turned five, celebrating a year of communicating like this, and neither of us having observed any sign that other people did the same thing, we decided other people probably didn’t do this. We agreed to still keep watching for evidence, though.

Later that year, both of us had a chance to see our birth certificates when our parents enrolled us in kindergarten. Both of us were born precisely at 2:27 PM on January 30, 1970. We thought that was interesting but didn’t know what to make of it. It spurred us to learn about the calendar, though, and within the year, we had learned what we needed, including about leap years, and also some basic math. We determined how many days we’d been living, and that, if we had in fact changed every night since birth (a fact we could not verify, though it had happened consistently since we had understood it), I was born as Frieda and he as Fred. We started marking day numbers in our notes back then, and while we no longer need to exchange notes that way, we still keep the day count in our heads. Today we turn 14,309 days old.

We assumed that we had swapped since birth, though whether we had actually done so didn’t matter, as we were then and as far as we know forever locked into being both Fred and Frieda. Though we were both in Normal, we weren’t in the same school, so at that time we continued communicating only through these notes.

Before long, I proposed naming our two minds, or whatever it was that was swapping bodies. In my girl body, I wrote:

I know this body is named Frieda and the other one is named Fred, and we both use those names as we live in each body. But we should have names for our SELVES. I made contact first, so I propose that I’m Alpha and you’re Beta.

And the response to that was:

How about I’m Omega? Just because you thought of the idea to exchange notes this way shouldn’t make me secondary. Instead think of me as your opposite.

So I wrote:

A: Fine. I’m Alpha and you’re Omega.

This was shortly after we turned 6. A couple months earlier, I’d encountered the Greek alphabet when one of our parents had left a dictionary open to the alphabet table, and like everything else, we’d committed it to memory. We learned the Hebrew alphabet too, but the Greek one was what we’d seen used a few times. But having decided on the names and working from my precedent, Omega started prefacing all her, um, his or her writings with Ω: and we eventually went back and labeled all our other writings to the very beginning that way, in addition to adding the day numbers.

Sorry, pronouns are weird! Most of the time I’m OK. But for me to tell another person our story, since each of us is male half the days and female the other half, I end up stumped trying to apply a pronoun to Omega generically over time. When we wrote to each other it was only “me” and “you” and there was no problem, and when I’m referring to a specific event I use whichever pronoun applies at the time of that event, so most of the time I don’t notice the problem.

We were 8 when Fred’s dad figured out what was happening. Omega was in Fred when it happened, but I got the conversation in full that night, of course.

“Fred, can you sit with me for a moment? I want to ask you about something.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Do you experience anything strange? A presence in your head on certain days? Or maybe something stranger than that?”

“Yes, Dad. Maybe ‘stranger than that.’”

“Can you describe it for me?”

“Every night, I swap bodies with another person, a girl who lives somewhere else in Normal. Before I wake up in her body, I see what she did the day before, and before I wake up in this body, I see what he did in this body the day before.”

“Oooo-kay. That was not what I was expecting, but it does explain what I have noticed.”

“What did you notice? We thought we were the only ones doing this, and we were looking for signs it was happening to anyone else.”

“Wait. You communicate with this girl, the other who is sometimes in your body? This body, I mean.”

“We’ve been leaving each other notes since we were four, though the body-swapping has been happening as long as we can remember.”

“OK. I guess that makes sense. Well, I can help, maybe. Although our town’s called Normal, it’s rather abnormal. Sometimes people here develop powers.”

“What kind of powers?”

“A bunch of different kinds, no two exactly alike. Some of them are like comic book heroes. Some of them are weird ones, nowhere near as useful as those powers. Some of them are downright harmful to the people who get them and leave them essentially disabled, but with disabilities that are unique to Normal.”

“You think what Alpha and I have is a power?”

“Alpha? The girl’s named Alpha?”

“No. The girl’s named Frieda. But Alpha and Omega are names we chose for our minds, while Fred and Frieda are the names given to the bodies. She’s Alpha because she was the first one to first think to leave notes they way we’ve done regularly ever since then.”

“Well I have a power too, a psychic power. But it’s a pretty weak one, and I’m not really able to use it effectively. I just sense things once in a while that don’t come through any of the normal senses. So I live like the majority of people in Normal, the ones without powers, in mostly the same kind of life people live everywhere else in the world. You can tell just how weak my power is since it took me 8 years to figure out this has been going on with my own son.”

Fred’s dad contacted NANA, who said not to talk to Frieda’s parents yet, because they were outsiders who moved to Normal as adults and didn’t know about powers. NANA set up what they considered a proper way to inform them about the powers in general as well as our specific power, or what they knew of it.

After that, they arranged a combined testing session, two days long so they could test both of us in each body. We didn’t have any other powers they noticed, except for photographic memory with near-perfect recall. They said that might not even qualify as a power at all, because some people outside Normal have that ability, but the way it occurred with us together with our body-swapping, they considered it part of our power.

In one test, we were given 30 seconds to examine the sequence of cards in a deck, and then we then had to guess the cards in that same sequence. Over several full decks, each of us got about 95% of them right. If we were given only a few seconds to riffle the deck, we’d only get about 20% of them right, clearly better than random but probably not enough to effectively cheat at card games. If we repeated the same deck we’d already guessed one card at a time and been shown our errors, we’d get it 100% the second time, every time, and we’d still be able to remember it perfectly the next day in the other body.

A more powerful psychic than Fred’s dad was able to confirm the body swap, and physical testing showed differences in the way each of us controlled each body. Essentially, we had learned to walk, throw, etc. in slightly different ways and so we continued to do so. Neither of us was better or worse in those physical actions; each was better at some things in each body. Neither of us was significant better at any of those physical activities than a normal person. Even our handwriting was different, but it took a handwriting expert and large samples to tell the difference; nobody could see a difference between the way I signed Fred’s name and the way Omega did.

We got Alpha and Omega as our code names, so they became official, in a sense.

They gave us experiments to try later. What happened if one of us tried to stay up the whole night while the other slept? The answer was that the awake one could only last a couple hours beyond the other getting to sleep. And we figured out that the change happened right then; if we woke up immediately after the second one was pulled into sleep this way, we’d be in the other body and we’d have the whole day’s memories from the other body rush through us all at once. If we went back to sleep quickly after waking up, that didn’t swap us again; there was a minimum awake time as well. By varying when we went to bed, we could vary when the change occurred, and we figured if we tried we could eventually shift around a whole 24 hours, but we never did.

Doing these experiments also helped us understand better how our processing of memories happened. As soon as we changed bodies, we had access to the memory of what happened in that body, but it wasn’t integrated into our minds, Alpha’s and Omega’s minds, yet. We could still, if something suggested to us to look for it, find any event that happened during the body’s previous day and basically read that memory. What took time was making the mind aware of all those events, and the time asleep after we changed usually provided that time. If we didn’t become aware of an event during the day in the body where it happened, we wouldn’t have access to it when we were in the other body. And even with a full night’s sleep, we didn’t get every detail without consciously reviewing the memories, but we usually got enough to allow us to focus on the important moments.

After this point, our families started spending a lot of time together so that we could be together. Some of that time was free play-time, but there were more serious moments. After one shared dinner, we got the birds and bees talk, together, both sets of parents explaining the boys’ side and the girls’ side to both of us, since we clearly needed both. Our four parents occasionally argued about points, but when they did, they quickly came to an agreement. After one of these momentary disagreements, they told us they had agreed they were going to tell us the truth as much as possible, and not get preachy about it (as some parents do), but tell us seriously about the risks of pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and the kind of emotional effects that having had sex with someone can lead to. They acknowledged it was going to be weird for us, even weirder than it is for most teens, because of our daily swapping, and we were going to have to chart our own course, but they wanted us to do so in possession of all the facts they could tell us.

At first, Omega and I agreed only that it was going to be weird and difficult for us, and, for the time being, to simply wait. We weren’t going to be like certain other kids we knew who had declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend in fourth grade. There was no need; we had time. We had a pretty short discussion in our diaries at that time. (By this point, we’d both graduated from random scraps of paper through spiral notebooks and then to diaries with dated pages for the discussions we had by written notes.)

But it didn’t take long before we were going into middle school and realized we needed to start thinking about it more seriously. Who did we like? Did I like boys or girls? Did I like girls when I was Fred and boys when I was Frieda, or was it the same all the time? And all those same questions for Omega. And wouldn’t it be incredibly awkward if we didn’t like the same kind of person as the other did when we were in the same body? So far, we’d managed to maintain the same friends, but romantic partners are much more than friends. And to tell the truth, neither of us were sure about the answers to any of these questions, so we decided, again, to wait, even though some of the kids were going out on some sort of dates at this age.

We were also now starting gym classes where we were going to be changing and showering with other naked boys or girls, depending on which body we were in. We still hadn’t told any of our classmates about our changes, but most of the teachers and the gym coaches knew. The boys’ and girls’ coaches pulled us aside once each during the first week of classes, and basically told us that what we were doing already was going to continue as long as we personally could handle it. Fred would shower with the other boys, and Frieda with the other girls, and nobody would think anything special of it. Neither of us would stare too much at the other naked people around us, which was actually the way most of the kids behaved. That was a pretty simple rule, and we both agreed.

Soon we noticed the changes in our own bodies, the beginning of erections and the voice change for Fred, breasts and training bras for Frieda, and all the other changes that came with them. Frieda’s periods wouldn’t be far off. And here’s where our stories are a lot alike. Just like you had to do with Samantha, Omega and I came to an agreement about sex and masturbation and such. At this point, we decided masturbation was OK, and would help us each learn what we liked, and sex with other people was off limits. We were still not going to date other people, but we could look, and identify people we might want to be with, assuming they would accept us, and assuming both me and Omega would accept the same person, and we’d discuss it later.

Once we were in high school, we still hadn’t gone on dates, but we accepted that we had to think seriously about it once Frieda had gotten asked for dates a couple times. Clearly it was possible for Fred to ask girls for dates as well, but should we? We decided we would do a few dates to have the experience, but the whole thing was so awkward... was it OK for one of us to plan a date, or accept one, on a day the other would have to go out on it? We decided to discuss all of these things, preferably face-to-face, before we did them. And we’d also go out on some dates with each other. We were, after all, more than friends, though not in the way some people use that phrase!

Just trying to figure out what to do was awkward, but I let Frieda go out on a date first, with one of the guys who asked her. I used the experience, what the guy did that seemed right, what he did that seemed too touchy-feely, what he did that seemed like he was ignoring me, etc. to help guide me on a date as Fred. I can’t say that entirely worked, but it wasn’t a complete failure, either. But neither Fred nor Frieda ever dated the same other person twice.

Part of the problem was I just wasn’t interested enough. I suppose for most girls and boys, a ritual that was a prelude to getting to see someone of the opposite sex naked was interesting, at least for the novelty of it. There was nothing novel for me! Within any span of two days I saw a naked boy and a naked girl. Much more than saw! I had the sexual urges other teens had, but the unknown and the curiosity for finding it out wasn’t there.

The dates when I went out with Omega were the best. We weren’t very romantically interested in each other, but we felt comfortable being with another person who understood our nature, our problem, our difficulties in being with a normal person who lived in the same body all the time. We could just be normal and not worry that we were going to forget something we should know about our date that happened when the other of us was in control of the body, that we were going to reveal we knew something that we shouldn’t, that out nature was going to be exposed, or some other weird thing was going to happen. Together, we knew that if something weird did happen, we’d understand, keep it secret between us if possible, or else one of us would help the other make whatever it was right.

I didn’t know anybody else like us who experienced being both male and female; there were others, as it turned out, but they were less common than today. Of course, we planned those dates so that each of us got to wear both bodies on dates, as equally as we could. For that and for the practical reasons of us necessarily living part of each others’ lives, by the time we were finishing high school, we had decided we were sticking together.

Then we were thinking about college, and certainly about going to college together. Throughout middle school and high school, Fred and Frieda were in the same classes, except for a few electives where we had intentionally taken different classes just to learn a few more things. We aced most tests due to learning the same material twice. But it would be a lot less practical to have Fred and Frieda take the same classes in college. There’s no college in Normal; it would mean going outside, and not having the cooperation of administrators who understand our unique situation. It was explained to us, and I am sure, George, that you’ll soon get the same explanation in school, that Normal never built a college because it would draw in more outsiders than we wanted, and more problem cases. Imagine how many college kids would develop powers and either be unable to explain them to their outside families, or have to bring their whole families in on our secret. We had enough people who randomly ended up here as it was.

It would also cost two students’ worth of tuition when it seemed like one was enough. We learned those electives fully well enough with only one body taking the classes. Sure, we’d get scholarships to cover a lot of it, but even then, we’d be having to apply for all those scholarships twice, and possibly competing with each other for some of them. And it would be real money. Here in Normal, people with powers sometimes do things for others which are easy to do with powers but hard otherwise, at a great discount off what it would cost normally. No such discount would apply to college.

A lot of our college decisions were locked in after people from NANA contacted us during our senior year with a future job offer. They needed a historian, someone to manage all the records, organize them, and get them into computers. With my ability to recall anything I’d ever read, I’d easily be able to determine what documents were missing from searches, though that ability would help later on, as first I needed to get them all in.

At that time, they basically had one computer file, a database of the powered people in Normal, their code names, powers, addresses and phone numbers, and a reference to where their paper files could be found. They knew that a lot better than this was possible, and by the time I finished college our computers were expected to be much more powerful, and even more would be possible. So I was signing up for a degree in library science. That was the most common degree for jobs like this, to the extent that any job was like this one, and would cover both the organizational techniques and the computational ones. They’d made clear they’d be hiring me to make their records available through a computer system, and not to simply memorize all the records and provide the answers myself, though the latter was a side-benefit of picking me for the job.

The solution we found for attending college, one which allowed us to be together and yet not pay redundant tuition, nor confuse ourselves by taking different classes, was to get married. Since we’d already decided we were committed to each other, it was only a question of getting married then or later. At colleges where we were applying there was married student housing, effectively apartments sized for two people, reserved for married students. They were most often used by graduate students and what they called non-traditional students, meaning those who attended college later in life rather than directly out of high school, or returned after dropping out. But any married student was eligible. The housing cost a little more, but it cost a whole lot less than taking two sets of classes. So Fred would go to college, and Frieda would stay around the apartment and do housewife-type things, meaning that Omega and I alternated those roles, and we both learned our skills. This way, later on we’d be able to handle the job the same way. We planned we’d have kids someday and whoever was Frieda each day would take care of them.

The standard for this sort of job was a master’s degree, so I enrolled in a program that would get me the bachelor’s degree after year 4 and the master’s degree after year 5. Though I’d worried about the costs, between the other scholarships I earned on merit and one which NANA gave me, my tuition and fees and rent for the first four years were completely covered, and our two sets of parents were able to provide money for food and other expenses. I had a little debt the 5th year since a lot of those programs only covered four years, but I knew I’d easily pay it off in two years of my job. And I did!

Computers did improve a lot in those five years, and light-years since then. I realized I was going to have to keep up on advances in technology to do my job well. That occasionally meant taking online courses to acquire new skills, but NANA paid for me to take those during working hours as a part of my job. And the system was redesigned several times before I got all the records in. At first, we were just scanning all the documents, storing them on a network server, and providing links to the documents in the records of the people they belonged to. Later the server became a web server, and NANA members outside our headquarters could still access the data (with appropriate security in place). And we added OCR to read the text of the documents. And better OCR later to fix all the errors in the first application of OCR. I’m working on a system now that applies natural language technology to help locate the remaining errors, and hopefully next year we’ll have essentially perfect digital records going back to the start of powers.

But I long ago succeeded in my first goal, so that all the researchers at NANA have a computer system with which they can easily search for any records they need. I’m still going to be employed, improving the technology and keeping everything running, though I might be more involved in the research that many people do at NANA after that time.

Now you might think that with the viewpoint provided to me by my powers, I would also be valuable for my ability to compare how things are for men and women, whether that’s based on society’s treatment or on the sexual functions. I did do that, early on. But since then, we’ve had plenty of other people to fill that role, yourself included, George. And of course I know who all of them are, but that’s only to be revealed for official business.

Omega and I had agreed that once we started the job, we’d also start having kids, but we stopped after the two, Fritz and Felicia, who you met at lunch. Whichever one of us is Frieda takes care of the kids, and whichever is Fred works, much like we split the studying and chores during college, including sometimes informing the other in the evening of big work news rather than letting it pass overnight our usual way.

That’s the end of the story, or at least the end so far. Fritz and Felicia haven’t started showing any powers yet, and definitely not like ours, but they are just at the age where it’s common for powers to show up. And I see my family coming back now to remind me it’s time to tell the history again for a new group of visitors.