BS. Bimbo Syndrome. The real name was something like sex-reconfiggerwhatsit. But it’s been called Bimbo Syndrome since it was first released, back when it only affected guys.

She had it. My best friend was about to become a guy.

Netherworlds
Chapter 1
By Taveena

---

 
Author's Note: This story is just an example of "Write what you know best." And I know about online gamer addicts. Sorry about all the intertubez speak, but, you know. It's gotta look natural. And this is natural for a nerd. Also, I tried to fix up the perspective errors...
 
 
I wiped the rain out of my eyes, panting heavily. Again, my father had forgotten about me, probably looking at my younger sister’s work. And once again, I had to run home.
This wasn’t exactly the most desirable of circumstances. I was 15, very unfit, with an acne and pimple scarred face. I was a geek - and a compulsive Netherworlds player, like the other 4 million people I shared the virtual world with. I didn’t fit into any stereotypical group - not smart enough for a nerd, not bulky enough for a football jock. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose, and kept running.
The journey home, from Kurawulla High, was painful at best. Not only were there no tram, bus, or train lines anywhere near my house, but my parents were divorced, so it changed so much I never got used to it. My divorced parents weren’t like other parents I knew. Other divorced ones, anyway - I heard stories where the two parents fought for their children’s love. They did that - for Kara, anyway. my younger sister was stunning, smart, and popular - and still managed to play video games often without being teased. Not surprisingly, I was jealous.
My parents almost ignored me - that had certain advantages, at least. I got a lot of Netherworlds time, and frankly, my parents didn’t care what happened to my grades. I was failing school pretty badly, I felt neglected. I didn’t have a fun life.
So I coped better with Netherworlds. My guild - founded by my only real-life friend, Sarah - was quite large, teaming up regularly to down huge dragons, elementals and demons for "phat lewtz". Sarah was equally miserable at school, but at least her parents cared about her. They’d been dragging her to a paediatrician every few days, and huge guild groups for dungeons (you know, pretty much anywhere you need a group for) had to be cancelled as a result. Some of the members were getting sick of it, and leaving. This wasn’t having a great effect on my ego.
I looked at my house. I was lucky to have my own room, and my own computer - even if they were both tiny. my father doted on Kara, and almost forgot about me.
I walked into the door, soaking wet and depressed. my father, a huge, balding man named Steven, barely glanced at me, but my sister...
I glanced over at the couch, where Kara had her Xbox plugged in and was relaxedly holding onto the controls, expertly piloting what looked like a helicopter.
"Hey, Aaron. Can you come over here and teach Albert here how to play? We’ve been through, like, 6 rounds, and he’s been owned by the first tank we see every frikkin’ time," said Kara, grinning at her boyfriend, Albert. Albert looked kind of embarrassed.
"Kar, you know I’m no good at that kind of game. I play, you know, online games," I replied. Albert was a 15 year old “football jock”. Pretty much my opposite.
"Pfft, you’d be better than him."
Albert grinned nervously. "C’mon, Kara, give me another chance."
Kara sighed. "Alright, fine. But seriously, you just twist the controls like _this_..."
Despite my jealousy, I liked my sister, and she liked me. She played her consoles pretty often - when she wasn’t reading, writing, going out with friends, staying in with friends, browsing online, dating online, flirting on-
My train of thought was interrupted suddenly by my father.
"Aaron, go pick up the dogshit. It’s been out on the lawn for a few days now, and you STILL haven’t picked it up."
"Da-ad! It’s pouring out there and we’re out of bags-"
"I don’t care. The rain’ll wash the shit right off you."
Joy. I trudged slowly outside.

As I picked up the miscellaneous pile of brown gunk, I felt like I was going to throw up. I tried to take my mind off the horrible job of lugging the dog’s doings (we didn’t even own a dog. I was beginning to think that my father was TRYING to get dogs to crap there) around the back of the house, to the bins. So I thought of Netherworlds. If my father didn’t get too angry and pull out the modem cable, then my female human priestess, Liara, would be among the 29 other guild mates trying to kill (or "down", as we called it) Prophet Tharik’lor, the serpentine final boss monster of the epic Crumbled Tombs.
I dumped the... sludge... into the bin at the back of the house, then turned on the hose and tried to spray the disgusting goop off him. Turning round, I looked at the dingy two-story house I called... well, not home. Home wasn’t on any map, for me. But it was where I slept - every second week, anyways.
I tried to sneak upstairs, without my father noticing. I succeeded, for once - my dad was usually turning round and glaring at me about now. And then, if I didn’t take the hint, yelling. About something. I usually tuned out. I got up to the top stair, and walked towards my room.
I dumped my bag on the floor, and launched up the gaming computer I usually played Netherworlds on - a relatively cheap second hand gaming computer. It had totally been worth it, Netherworlds ran incredibly smoothly on it, and I lost track of time as I became totally immersed. After launching the client, I groaned as I saw that it couldn’t connect to the internet. Obviously my dad wasn’t in a good mood.
I was glad I had a second hobby. Well, not hobby. Even so, I was going to have to let Sarah know.
I pulled my phone out of the front pocket of my bag, and quickly dialled in Sarah’s number.
She picked up on the third tone.
"Mate, don’t call me while I’m in a dungeon!" squealed Sara.
"’Mate’?" I laughed.
"Look, it’s what all the guys do. I’m just trying to fit in. But seriously, don’t call me! You know how the ringtone comes out in voice chat," she said, reproachfully.
"Look, Sarah, hearing a retarded ringtone is kinda necessary right now. I’m not gonna be able to make it to TAT tonight."
"What? No, you have to come! You’re the best healer we have - the next best is Taveena, and she can’t tank heal for shit," said Sarah, "we _were_ gonna put her on group!"
"Wait, what about Kitten?"
"Funeral. I said she could have it off, it seems fair enough..."
"Sarah," said I, "Taveena’s gonna have to tank heal. I can’t make it, and I’d rather you guys had another tank come along than some newbie healer we randomly picked up."
‘Tank’ was the in-game term for a player who’s job it was to soak up damage and hold the monster’s attention. Healers kept them alive. Damage dealers had a pretty obvious job.
"So we got one healer, and 29 freaking damagers?"
"Wait, no tank?"
"I can’t make it tonight either - you’re a great healer, I thought we could pick up a tank somewhere. You’re good enough to heal a complete noob through Doom Plateau. But a pickup healer and a pickup tank? Not going to work."
Doom Plateau, or DP, was the home of the most difficult bosses in the game - if even one player makes a mistake there, the entire group of thirty or so players died. It wasn't true, but I let the compliment stand.
"I’m sorry, Sarah... guess without either of the guild leaders there, we’ll have to call it off."
Sarah sighed, coming out my end of the phone like a wave of static.
"Look, I’ll be at my mum’s tomorrow - she always lets me on. We can finish Crumbled Tombs off then," I said.
"Alright. The guild won’t be happy, but..."
"Tharik’s days are numbered. She’s going down... soon," I said.
"Alright. See ya soon, Liara," sighed Sarah, calling me by my character’s name.
"Laters, Tauro’thon," I replied, responding in kind.
I knew she winced. She always did, whenever anyone called using her bulky male human warrior’s name.
"Seriously, save that for the guild."
"I will when you do, milord," I teased, and hung up.
The two of us played on a role-playing server, and because of the game’s bizarre fixation on relationships, our characters were married for the convenient bonuses in a tank/healer combination. Because of the gender bonuses to intelligence for females and strength for males, we’d both wound up playing characters of the opposite gender.
I grinned, and lay back on my bed. After getting bored of that, quickly, I had another look at the positions for the Tharik fight. So, my second hobby was basically the same as my first. It's not like I had anything better to do.
Homework doesn't count.

I blearily opened my eyes. It... was another day.
Wow.
There’s a surprise.
I slammed my hand down onto... the alarm clock...
... waaaaiiit...
... where’d the clock go?
I blinked, and my room swam into focus.
“Urgh... what the...”
I slumped out of bed. my alarm clock was lying on the floor.
I set it back up... and noticed the time.
I had about 10 minutes to get to school. my father had already left, as had my sister.
Crap.
I more or less jumped out of bed, grabbed my clothes from yesterday, and pulled them over my head.
...wait.
... I blinked again. I was really feeling messed up today.
Then I realised I had my pants on my head.
I scrabbled around until I got the clothes in the right places, and the right way around.

I burst into my English class, panting heavily. Even though he’d sprinted there, I was still about 2 minutes late for class. The teacher, old Mr. Norton, glared at me, but reneged to comment and I apologized quietly and sat down in my normal seat next to Sarah.
Where Sarah would be, anyway. It didn’t look like she was here.
Damn.
About 10 minutes later, she stumbled into class. Mr. Norton, angry at being interrupted, didn’t hesitate to give her an after-school detention. I winced - this means, once again, they’d be without a tank for Tharik. The dungeon would reset if we didn’t manage it tonight - on the positive side, this meant that we could clear out the lower bosses again for loot. On the downside, it meant we’d have to start the whole dungeon again, and therefore be set back further.
She passed a note underneath the table to me. I discreetly unfolded the crunched up paper.
sorry kept zoning out weirdly
What? I wrote, on the small piece of paper, and handed it back.
just kept getting confused dunno why
I kept getting confused when I was getting ready. You mean like a little moment where you forget where you are?
ye i guess so
Urgh, damn. Maybe we’re coming down with something.
good more time for Tharik.
Seriously, use some grammar.
grammr is for n00bs
So is spelling, apparently.
shh
“...daisies?” finished up the guy at the front of the class. I dunno who I was. Some guy. I mean I knew my name... but...
... hold on.
I looked to my left. I couldn’t focus on anything, but Sarah.
She noticed my stare. I felt kind of embarrassed, but at the same time, sort of not.
I suddenly doubled over in pain. It was... strange, like my bones were trying to grind each other into dust. Like my stomach was trying to turn itself inside out. And then the whimpering started.
I couldn’t make out what the voices were saying. This was probably a good thing.
Then it all snapped back into place.
My hip hurt.
A lot.
The table on top of me wasn’t helping. My pelvis had two desks on it. So did my head.
I groaned.
Mr. Norton stood up from behind my upturned desk. my eye was twitching. Both of them.
I crawled out from underneath the desk. My hip hurt. So did my head.
Sarah had a widening circle of people around her.
“Urgh. What... What just happened?” I groaned. People glanced at me, but they weren’t paying much attention.
The focus of the attention was Sarah. This seemed reasonable, seeing as she’d just gained about 15 centimetres (6 inches, or something) in height, and lost a fair bit in other areas.
I noticed something in the teachers eyes. Something I hadn’t seen before.
Fear.
“Seriously, what happened?” I asked again.
“You should know. You were watching with the rest of us,” said Gary Fletcher, a somewhat nerdy boy a few months older than me.
“Okay, assume I had my eyes closed. Or that I got amnesia. Whatever - because I DIDN’T SEE WHAT HAPPENED.”
Gary glared, but answered anyway. “Sarah here suddenly went apeshit. And she picked up those fucking tables and threw them at the teacher. Then a couple of people tried to hold her back, you included, she thumped them, and then picks up a couple of tables and drops them on you. And then you said “What just happened?”
“Wait, SARAH did this? My friend?”
“Yeah, the little nerd chick. Looks like she had a gorilla in her ancestry,”
I glanced at Sarah, but she was staring at the floor.
This had looked like a normal day until now. Now my best friend turns out to be a mini-hulk. Hurrah.
Sarah coughed, nervously, and began dragging the tables back together
“Ms. Khan,” said Mr. Norton, either sarcastically or patronizingly. Dunno which, I’m not good at words. “I would be obliged if you could go to the principal’s office and explain WHAT THE BLOODY HELL YOU WERE DOING!”
“I… uh… I…” she stared at her feet. She gulped, blinked, and looked up at the teacher again.
“The… the…. Uh. The…” she said, and she sprinted out of the classroom.
I blinked. This was really weird.
School passed relatively uneventfully after that. I heard a couple of people talking about Sarah. Not nicely, of course. I didn’t hear much of it, but I heard the word “dyke” used once or twice. It was odd. I didn’t know any Australians used the word.
Anyway, it happened more and more often later on in the day. In the end, I couldn’t stand it. I had to know what was happening. What seemed so blindingly obvious I was the only one who couldn’t see it.
Eventually, I got one of the guys in my maths class to tell me. He looked at me, genuinely surprised. But then again, this was the kind of guy surprised when 2 followed one.
“Dude! You serious? I thought you were her best friend!”
“Look, I didn’t see any of it. I was K.O’d the whole time.”
“You’re such a nerd.”
“Look, what happened?”
“She grew a dick.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“You heard me. She’s a dude now. She’s got BS.”
BS. Bimbo Syndrome. The real name was something like sex-reconfiggerwhatsit. But it’s been called Bimbo Syndrome since it was first released, back when it only affected guys.
She had it. My best friend was about to become a guy.

BS started around 2003. Pretty isolated incident - an attempt to make a Virtual Reality sense-set. Not just changing what you see, but what you hear, smell, taste… so it felt like you were fully in-game. Or movie, but who gives a shit about that?
It was bloody dangerous stuff they were messing with. They tried to cut off all nonessential signals from the brain - you know, everything except breathing, and stuff - and pump it all into the Vbox, Sony‘s next attempt at a console. The VBox pumped the virtual world back. And you could reconnect and disconnect yourself really easy.
It looked set to rock the world. They started selling it late 2003. Or they would have, if a test demonstration hadn’t gone horribly wrong.
So, this kid was around 13. I was 10 at the time, and puberty seemed a long way off. Me, Kara and Mum had gone to the shopping centre - I think we were getting the first Netherworlds expansion. We saw the crowd, we went and had a look. The kid went up on the stage, put on the headset and complicated suit, and slumped into the chair he’d been given. A lot of people gasped in shock/horror at that, but he was fine. So far.
Anyway, this kid was just going into puberty. The genius with the VR system was that it actually made the senses you were feeling. So if you smelt dog food in the game, it was because tiny little dog-food particles were going up your nose. If you touched something, the suit you had to put on became rigid in that area and took on an appropriate texture. It was genius. They even had a screen showing what he was seeing.
The catch was, none of the testers before this kid were in puberty. The problem wasn’t anything to do with BO, or growth spurts, or anything. It was urges.
So the kid was trying TombRaider. He was playing as freaking Lara Croft, when he notices - hey, I’m a chick ingame, right? So he does what all teenagers do.
He had no idea that an entire crowd was watching him masturbating. It was kind of creepy.
About now, the machine sped up. It was a brilliant piece of work that you plugged the suit into, and - damned if I know how - it made tiny little particles out of the air. Probably with some Large Hadron Collider bullshit, or something. I’m swearing a lot now. This story makes me kinda angry.
So it goes and tries to make him feel like he’s Lara Croft masturbating. It’s creepy and disgusting and absolutely typical of teenagers.
And he started moving in the chair.
This hadn’t happened before, even when he’d been running around the tombs and stuff. But his hand moved, and now not only was Lara Croft playing with herself on screen, he was doing it in public too. Figure, a lot of people turned away. I didn’t know what was going on, so I kept watching. I thought his pants were itchy, or something.
At this point, the tiny AI in the VBox goes into a panic. It hadn’t prepared for this. It didn’t know how to deal with sexual gratification.
So, the VBox has a little train of thought now.
Boy masturbating = Lara Croft masturbating. Tick!
Boy Pleasure = girl pleasure. Cross!
So the VBox goes insane, and fires off this huge cloud. And then the boy woke up, as though hundreds of people hadn’t been watching him masturbate. And it’s declared to be a huge - if slightly disgusting - success. It wasn’t as big as they’d hoped, the VBoxs were expensive, and anyway, it was just pre-order list.
A few days later, the boy was pulled out of school because he appeared to be going through puberty backwards. His voice was going higher, he was shrinking, and his penis was shrinking too. They put him in to hospital.
And there, they found out it WASN’T going through puberty backwards. He was still going through it. Just a different one.
And 3 days later, he’s turned into a girl entirely. His brain hadn’t changed, but all the female hormones were making him angsty, and, as it turned out, suicidal.
It turned out the VBox made all the changes with incredibly fast breeding bacteria, that genetically modified themselves to form the terrain. It was a brilliant piece of microbiotechnology.
But the bacteria got confused. It only understood simple instructions from the VBox - “tall here, thin there”, “blue there, green there”, and when it was asked to tell this kid to pleasure himself female-ly, it overloaded. The VBox blows off all the microbes at him. And they rewrote him entirely, except his brain. Every one of his cells had a little XX in it, even the almost untouched brain.
It was bizarre. Australia’s foremost biologists were at a loss to explain how game designers managed this.
So the poor kid died. But around 30 or 40 had already been sold, and around 20 of the owners had the same problem. It was alright for a while. Some of the infected continued to live normal lives. Some became recluses. One or two, like the first kid, committed suicide.
Unfortunately, one of the people had their strain of the microbe mutate. This one could survive in air.
The four thousand infections that followed had scientists gasping. It was terrible. Eventually they built a complex for them, which was essentially a large quarantine. They were supposed to be treated well there, but no-one uninfected could go in.
The people in the quarantine lived fairly content lives, but were confined and it was a cheerless place.
The scientists found out what had happened later on. The only way the VBox could properly recreate the effect of female masturbation was to turn him into one. So the happy, little, VR bacteria did that. And completely fucked up the boy’s life.
The bacteria, now living in the air, was a threat. It didn’t actually have any adverse affects, but considering the prejudice in society, it could completely screw up the power balance. So they isolated the infectees.
Or so the news said.
I hadn’t been paying much attention. The first major outbreak was in Queensland. Victoria seemed safe enough for now. Queensland’s 4000 or so infectees were kept safe out of town, away from prying eyes.
It looks like it’d spread to Victoria now. And my friend had become the first victim.

Shit.

 

---

 
To Be Continued...