Starting College

Once the party was over, it was planning time. I needed to quickly confirm my class schedule. The college had several recommended schedules for first years and I decided the programming one looked fine, and called them back to register. For first years only, they would pick my specific class times and maybe even make extra sections of classes in order to accommodate schedules; in subsequent terms I would register for the next term before the previous term ended.

Making living arrangements was often even tougher than picking classes in college on Earth, but here it was pretty easy. There were dorms, and there was a single room for each person. There was no shortage of rooms; they knew how many openings they were going to have, and they allowed for 5% of the rooms to remain vacant so they had the ability to move people around and for unforeseen issues. The rooms had doors that could pair up adjoining rooms, and couples would be assigned an open pair while singles would get a room with this door locked. If I paired up with somebody later, we’d be able to move to a pair of rooms together somewhere.

Next, I had to figure out travel. This world had airplanes, but after much of the land area of the world had been made uninhabitable and everybody had consolidated down to two smallish continents, they had ceased using them for travel except in going from one continent to the other. There were basically four flights left, from the two biggest cities on my continent to the two biggest cities on the other. They had high-speed trains connecting all major cities, local trains within the cities, and commuter trains or in some cases buses could get you from any city to the nearby major ones. Since I was going from one major city to another, I only needed to take two local trains and a high-speed one, about 4 Earth hours total travel time to go 400 miles. You couldn’t do that on Earth with a flight - the actual air time for such a flight might have been an hour and 15 minutes, but all the extra time to reach the airport and prepare to board the plane made the total travel time longer.

But I wasn’t going to be living entirely on my own. There were going to be meals in a cafeteria, and there was even maid service in the dorm rooms once a week. So I would basically have to do chores I was already expected to do at home like making my bed and disposing of trash in the wastebasket. Also, buy things for myself, everything but food. As a college student, I was assumed to be a future productive worker, and, on top of having all my educational costs, housing, and food paid for, I would get some small pay from the Queen, less than even the minimum that jobs paid, but enough to cover the expenses I would have, if I managed it properly. And I would have to manage my own bedtime, trying to balance getting enough sleep with studying enough and having fun when that was possible.

But before all that was a reality, I had to make these train connections. I had taken the trains alone before, but only the local ones. And I had taken the trains before carrying bundles, but never a cart full of luggage like I had now. My parents got me down to the first station, and made sure I got on the train. It cost a coin, one which was the main unit of currency comparable to a dollar, though of course there was no meaningful exchange rate. For the sake of translation into English I am going to call it a dollar. At the time this was happening, a loaf of bread cost roughly one of these dollars. The high speed train had fares based on how far you were going, and for me, that would be 10 dollars, though I had a ticket for that purchased in advance. I’d use a dollar coin again on the other local train, and once I got off, I was sure to see other incoming students.

The high-speed train was set up for people traveling with luggage, but the local trains were not. There were, however, ramps for handicapped people in something they used here vaguely resembling wheelchairs to board the train, and a space without seats meant for them to ride in. Nobody was using this space on my first local train, so I parked my luggage cart there and sat in a nearby seat. The stop for my transfer was of course a major stop where lots of people got on and off, so once a bunch of people got out of the car, I followed some of the other departing passengers and made my way out. I still had 20 minutes until the next train left, enough time to find my way around the station and get there with time to spare, but not enough time to explore the rest of the station, so I just went directly there and got on my train when possible, storing all my luggage in a provided rack near my seat.

You might think, on a world where we went around in just skirts, that I’d have less clothing. Well, I probably had less clothing than a girl on Earth, but for cold weather we fully covered up, and it ended up reminding me of what I’d hauled to college on Earth as a boy when I first started. At least there wasn’t a computer in addition to everything else. My computer was pretty old by now and I was told we’d have up-to-date ones provided for us.

On this train, I had lots of time, and shared stories with the people sitting around me. Nothing of Earth, naturally; just Becca’s life. I told people I wanted to be an astronomer, or maybe an inventor, and this made people suggest maybe I’d build a better telescope. They had the same crude optical telescopes here that existed on pre-computerized Earth, the largest ones of which could see the other planets and some moons of those planets and quite a few stars, and they had learned a great deal about their secondary star as well. So it was quite possible I’d “invent” a better telescope by reimplementing something I knew from Earth. Once the computers here had caught up, of course. I was avoiding doing that; the only Earth technologies I wanted to introduce here were strictly those needed for me to make my communicator, and those would remain private. But if inventing something like a better telescope was what I needed to do to get into a career position where I could build the communicator, I’d do it.

It was no surprise that I encountered several of my soon-to-be classmates on the train. They were easy to spot, since every young adult hauling multiple suitcases was one of them. I would have thought “teenager” on Earth, but they did not have that word here or even a near equivalent, since our ages weren’t numbered in the teens. There were only 10 others from my school, but there were many from other schools in my city. There was one college for the whole district, what was formerly a country, and thousands of incoming students from all over.

After hours that passed quickly, and a late lunch, I and my new friends made it to our stop, and we all filed out of the train together and walked together, towing our respective luggage carts through the unfamiliar station to the local train that would take us to within a block of the campus. Even more students from other train cars joined us in this journey. We had to take an elevator to another level, which only held two of us and our belongings at once, so this took quite a while.

The local train was no picnic either. We all expected not to find much room for our stuff there either, so people went off in the pairs who shared the elevator to catch separate local trains, and this turned out to be the right thing to do.

I ended up on the elevator and train with a person I hadn’t met before, but who seemed to try to stick with me at the elevator. On the local train she explained why.

“Hi, I’m Carla.”

As always, I translate people’s names in my head into Earth names close to the phonetics of their actual name. If I was trying to translate this literally it would most directly be written as Carleh, stress on the first syllable, with the second one fading quickly into silence. This was a typical pattern with names here and so I replaced that final vowel with whatever made it closest to a familiar name. My name also followed that pattern, but the English version also falls off quickly after the K sound, so I didn’t really have to change it.

“Becca.”

“I couldn’t help but notice your TERRA art in your suitcase. What a clever technique, since it won’t mean anything to the locals.”

“Ah, finally! I tried this various ways back home and only concluded there weren’t any other ethertravelers there.” There was a mesh pouch on the outside of one suitcase and I had put one of my TERRA artworks that was painted on cloth in there so the TERRA showed.

I used the English word for ethertravelers, because they naturally had no word of their own for it here. It sounded odd in the language of this world. Carla did the same for Terra, saying the Latin word. But I was careful not to use too much English while I was where anybody else would hear me. They were touchy about people speaking anything but the official language here, so much so that the old languages were not taught in school. Everything else in our conversation was actually in the official language.

“I didn’t think of your trick, but I found no others either. Made any progress communicating with the homeland?”

“Not really. You probably know as well as I do that it will take a lot of doing. I’m glad to finally find a partner in this endeavor, though. It will definitely help to not have to do this entirely on my own.”

“Very true.”

I didn’t really need to ask Carla if she wanted to be my partner in calling home. It was clear by merely making contact that she wanted to do so, since the task we were asked to do in exchange for our travel here was so daunting. And by saying it the way I did, it was clear I was accepting her implicit offer.

The train soon arrived at our stop and we paused our conversation to get our belongings and ourselves off the train. The train stop was actually within the college campus, but the campus was big and it was a few blocks from there to the dorms. Another pair of students had gotten on another car of the same train, and when we arrived we saw a few others who had probably arrived on the previous train, almost done with their check-in, which was much like I would have expected anywhere, even on Earth: A confirmation for the college that we had arrived and a welcome for us. We were each given a packet with information including the room numbers and the keys for our individual rooms.

We took our stuff to our rooms, but Carla and I agreed to meet again for dinner at the spot where we parted to take our stuff to our individual rooms, which were in different dorms. The dorms were four separate buildings that extended out in an X from the central open area we were in, and a big chunk of the first floor of each was a dining hall. We could eat in any of the four, though they were meant to be conveniently located for the residents of each building. And they were big. Row upon row of tables for the tens of thousands of students who came here from all over the district to eat at.

The rooms were small but nice. The living space was about 8 by 10 feet with the bed against one end of a long wall, with a desk beside it, and the connecting door to another room at the back corner behind the desk. The other wall was completely occupied by closets and drawers for my clothes and other belongings, except in the back corner where there was a tiny bathroom, just a toilet and sink. The entire wall of the bathroom facing the room opened up as a folding door.

The desk chair and mattress were softer and more comfortable than I remember the ones in my dorm room on Earth being, but they were comparable to what I had had at home here.

I looked through the papers I’d been given, confirmed when dinner was served, and set up my clock with a reminder 10 minutes before it started.

I unpacked my clothes, finding places for everything. There was actually quite a bit more room for clothes than I needed, but maybe I would get more over time. The dozen or so skirts I’d wear most of the time went into the most obvious and easily accessible section, the long coats and such in the vertical hanging closet, and other types of garment each in their own drawers. There were several drawers left over which I had nothing for.

All of the school supply kinds of things I brought naturally went in or on the desk. There was a single drawer under half of the bed, which naturally contained bedding. I made the bed. The rest of the under-bed space seemed a good place to stash my now-empty luggage after I had packed smaller bags inside larger ones to the extent possible.

There was some setting up I could do. There was information in my packet to start using the computer, and for setting up the telephone system. The computer info was akin to getting your name and initial password for any computer system on Earth.

The telephone was a little different. They didn’t use numbers like the system on Earth does. They used to, before the war, and it was a big pain calling other countries because some used numbers, some letter-number codes, some names or whatever. Every international call required an operator to connect. The Queen got annoyed with this and had several telephones set up in her base of wartime operations, one on each system the allied countries used, so she didn’t have to go through operators. Once the urgent postwar operations to get people settled were taken care of, one of the first big projects was to expand the most advanced system to what was left of the world. This system gave people permanent accounts they could take with them, and register or deregister from any phone. Kids didn’t get accounts, so you just had to call their parents. Part of the process of getting enrolled asked if I already had a phone account, and since I didn’t, they set one up for me. A page in this packet gave me the initial password for it, and provided the instructions to register it on the phone here, in addition to instructions to make sure nobody else was still registered here. People moving out were supposed to deregister, but sometimes they forgot, and sometimes the administration didn’t catch it.

By the time I was through with all that, it was time to go meet Carla for dinner. I left much of the paperwork on my desk, taking with me a folder with paper maps and some other information about the campus, and also taking my key. She was waiting where we said, and we made our way into one of the cafeterias, got in line, picked some food, and sat and ate. Although the lines (two of them, one at each entrance to the cafeteria) looked long, each split into six lines passing on both sides of three buffet islands, and so actually moved pretty quickly.

We shared stories of our experiences here. She had two older sisters while I had one younger one, but otherwise we had quite similar experiences.

After dinner, we both went to her room and talked about things we could not talk about in public. Part of that was to share our thoughts about making an ether communicator in detail. The other part was to start spending enough time together to see if we’d be compatible and have our pouches retract. Carla was female now and not in her fertile period, so it wouldn’t work for her anyway, and mine didn’t do it tonight, but it was still our first day together.

The next morning, I sat at my desk and reviewed the rest of the packet I was given at registration. I had already read the first page, which told me my dorm room number, and formerly had my key attached, and on the back there was a small map of all the dorm buildings with my building marked, and a map of my floor with the room marked. And I’d read part of the second page, which told me everything there was to know about the cafeteria mealtimes. There was also info there about a store on the first floor of one of the dorms where we could buy other types of things, including supplies like pencils and paper. These were the pages I had carried with me in the folder last night.

The third page was the one with the account information. The fourth page told us where to get our textbooks, which could be several different places on campus depending on which classes we had, and I could handle that today along with learning my way around. The fifth page had my class schedule: course names, numbers, times, and locations. There was also a large three-page-sized fold-out map of the campus with an index grid very much like old maps on Earth that I had trained with as part of the pre-ethertravel experience. Each building was marked with an abbreviated name, the same names used in the textbook info and course schedule. The left page was entirely devoted to the index of building locations, with their full names, and the other two pages to the map itself. This also revealed the general campus layout. The campus buildings were roughly divided into four groups at the ends of the X that the dorm represented. The groupings were roughly, as we would have called them, science, engineering, arts, and liberal arts. The engineering included all my computer and circuits courses and math as well, but I would have some classes in the science block. And they tried to house people in the buildings facing their part of the campus, but having them centrally located made it reasonable to get to any section. I came in under engineering, while Carla, though interested in circuits, was actually admitted under physics in the science sector.

There were nature spaces between the arms of the X, for different purposes, as the back side of the map explained. One was mostly open fields and included space for both informal and formal athletic events. One was a wildlife preserve, fenced off for the protection of both the animal residents and the student neighbors, further divided into fenced sections for different species, some forested and others pastures with sparse trees and bushes. A bunch of species that had only lived in irradiated parts of the world were thought extinct now, as it was simply impossible to gather and ship out a bunch of wild animals when everybody here was busy saving the people. This had spurred conservation efforts for the surviving species, and there were fields of study (that for some reason were located with the liberal arts) about caring for wild animals, and those who participated in them cared for the ones here. A third was devoted to agriculture (the train tracks separated most of this part from the rest of campus), and the last was a forested area without dangerous or endangered animals, with nature trails through it and even campsites.

After the map, my folder of information included a packet from every class I was enrolled in, ranging from a single page to five double-sided ones. In my case, two of the classes used computers, and there were public computer labs where I might work together with other students in addition to the ones in classrooms and the private computers we each had in our dorm rooms. Of course, those weren’t laptops we could carry with us; they were not advanced to that stage yet. Each of these classes’ packets included a map of the building it was in, with the classroom location and nearby public computer labs marked.

After all the class-specific material, there were still more pages describing various services we had available. There were sports and athletic facilities I could use, academic counseling, mental health counseling, and a medical and health center. Also, several buildings had private penisbirthing rooms we could use if that happened to occur while we were away from our dorms. If we couldn’t even get to those, using any toilet stall was recommended, which was what my parents taught me. It was more comfortable in a bed, but if you needed to, you could lean back on a toilet seat, not using it the usual way, push out the birth, and use toilet paper to wipe up anything that spilled on the toilet seat.

Living with Carla

Carla’s next penisbirth occurred during the first week of classes and she used one of those rooms for it, and during that male cycle, she experienced the pouch fully retracting at times we were together. She promised me the experience was, in fact, all it was cracked up to be. I still hadn’t experienced it, nor did I experience it during the rest of the school year.

The next time Carla penisbirthed occurred during the break before second year started (the college using the same type of schedule with five years per term and two weeks off at the end of each year as the other schools used) and she invited me over to her room for it. It was actually during the biggest festival of the year, and all the other students were in the cafeterias celebrating. This was the equivalent of a woman giving birth during Christmas dinner, and while the birth is a lot smaller and less traumatic to the mother, the body is just as insistent to get it out when the time comes.

I was male at the time, and this time, seeing it happen, seeing the girl I had spent as much as I could of the last 12 weeks with fill her pouch with the sexual organ that so rarely got used here finally did it for me. My pouch retracted, I developed a full erection, and I felt it. Sexual pleasure. A person whose pouch retracts here experiences the equivalent of a human orgasm, but it’s continuous for the whole length of the retraction. This first time it lasted about two hours (roughly four Earth hours).

It didn’t happen for me every time we were together after that, but it happened sometimes, and more frequently as the next year went on. By our third year of the first term in college, we were both experiencing fully open pouches every time we were together, and both regularly wearing the erection-hiding underwear under our skirts during our respective male phases. So in the break after third year, we got engaged and moved into adjoining rooms. That was the rule here; if you wanted to live in adjoined rooms, you had to be married or engaged. By the time first term was through, our cycles had synchronized.

There was one more thing the classes hadn’t prepared me for. One day, shortly after I had turned female, I just felt uncontrollably horny. I stripped off my skirt, walked up naked behind Carla in her chair, and hugged her from behind, then moved one hand down and under her skirt to fondle her penis.

“Becca, you all right?”

I took a step back from the chair. “Just had a sudden urge.”

“The pouch-open feeling isn’t enough?”

“I feel like I want to jump you right now.” I said this in English, not having the words for it in the language of this world and knowing the literal translation didn’t carry the same meaning.

She turned and looked at me. “Oh, God!”

“What is it, Carla?”

“Your pouch is all the way retracted, back to the point your vagina is exposed.”

I looked down at myself and what she said was true. “Wow, this is the first time I have actually seen my vagina.”

“I bet it’s your ovulation.”

I counted days in my head. “Yes, I turned female 2 days ago, early in the morning.”

“They did tell us in the health class we’d sometimes feel mating urges. It makes sense that it occurs with ovulation, though I don’t remember them telling us that.”

“Same from my class. Surely they knew.”

“Maybe it’s not only at ovulation.”

“Oh, God, each of us might have 5 days like this out of the 40?”

Fortunately, it wasn’t. Not even every cycle, but it was possible anytime a female was fertile and with her partner to get such an urge. I had four more of them and Carla had three total before we finished college. From what they had taught us, though, I felt 100% certain I or Carla would have ended up pregnant if we’d given in to one of those urges, but we resisted.

We got married in the break after second term’s fourth year, traveling back home to do so, so that more of our families could be there. There was a ceremony for it, mostly with similar traditions to weddings on Earth. One unique tradition here is that the wedding couple and the wedding officiant, along with with their parents or other close family members, or friends standing in for them, all stepped into another room before they actually got married, and the couple got naked to demonstrate to witnesses that they could be fully retracted for each other. It was expected before a couple planned to get married that they were having pouch retraction regularly, had synchronized their cycles, and knew those cycles well enough to plan the event on a day when the current female of the couple was fertile and retractable. It wasn’t required to demonstrate an erection or the female equivalent of having the pouch so far retracted that the vagina was visible, but we had both, with me male this time. And Carla had those mating urges, her second time. Once that was through, we put our fancy skirts back on and went out and said some vows and made it official.

Carla and I took some of the same classes, but I focused more on the programming aspects and Carla more on the circuit technology, stronger areas for each of us, in hopes of being able to cover all the skills needed for our mission. We studied together for the classes we had in common, and had fun together.

Real Work

They were, to say the least, very accommodating for us as a married couple with college degrees. Because of the way the Queen, to a certain extent, ran everything, we didn’t have to hunt for a pair of compatible jobs; they found and/or made them for us. As far as everyone else knew, Carla was a circuit designer and I was a programmer for the same company, and we were married, and that was it. Everything about building an ether communicator happened when we were home, with no one else there.

It took time. We knew it was going to take time, enough so that we were going to be expected to have kids before we got it done, so we planned on that. And they made accommodations for us having kids, too. Carla could not really work from home, nor would it have been considered safe for her to work with a kid in the pouch, so if she’d gotten pregnant she would have had a leave of absence. On the other hand, I could work part-time from home with a kid in the pouch, so I agreed to have the kids for our family. Kind of ironic, since Carla was female and I was male in our first lives. We had them right back-to-back, as soon as we had cycles synchronized well enough for me to get pregnant again after the first kid dropped out of the pouch.

We worked slowly on our communicator plans, knowing that the world was changing around us and making the job easier. We didn’t actually start building it until both kids were out of the house, by which point there were build-your-own-circuit kits that let you print a pattern the size of a normal sheet of paper which got miniaturized in a chip-making machine. Some people use them like we effectively did, to build custom devices for our own use, while others use them to try to prototype new commercial chip designs, sometimes within companies and sometimes on their own, hoping a good design would land them in the driver’s seat of their own new company.

It worked for us. When we were about 260 of this world’s years, we sent off our brief report to Earth, telling of our success and some of the general characteristics of the people, telling Earth we were gender-alternators but not the details. Earth sent their acknowledgment. I had much better notes, due to my journals I’d kept since childhood, so I wrote up the detailed report, which is what you’ve just been reading, and sent it a couple years later. And this is the end of that report.