CHAPTER 4: A Cool Change

 

Radio Alarm

The radio woke me up. Six AM, as usual. My bedside clock was an old clock radio, and I had it tuned to 94.7 WLS-FM – “Chicago’s Classic Hits,” and, it played mostly rock, pop, and dance music from the eighties nonstop – my favorite music era was the eighties. I guess I was infected by my dad’s tastes in music. He and Ma were in their forties – they had me when they were in their mid-twenties, so Dad’s favorite music was eighties music. Back home in our old house in DC, my clock was tuned in to 94.7 FM as well, but in DC, 94.7 was WIAD-FM, “94.7 The Drive.” When we moved to Chicago, I didn’t even need to hunt around for a different station.

Anyway, it turned out I was indeed able to fall asleep last night. But given how tired I felt, I guess I fell asleep late and whatever sleep I got wasn’t really good.

An old song by the Little River Band, “A Cool Change,” played on my radio. Good thing, since it wasn’t that loud a song, I woke up a little less violently than I would have otherwise.

I listened to the refrain. It went, “Time for a cool change - I know that it's time for a cool change. And now that my life is so prearranged, I know that it's time for a cool change.”

That sounded very appropriate. And my impending “transformation” would be a cool change, and in many ways, my life was now somewhat prearranged at that.

I took a few moments to just think a little bit about yesterday, and just laid there in my bed for a while, staring at the ceiling. But the day chased me from my bed. I turned off the clock radio and got up. I yawned bone-crackingly, got out a towel, and padded to the bathroom. There were three bathrooms in the new house – a welcome change from our old house, which only had one. So the three of us didn’t have to fight for bathroom time.

Ma was already up and was already preparing breakfast (meaning she’d already had her shower) – she’s really big on having a proper breakfast to start the day right, so she’d always wake up ahead of us. She was already cooking up what smelled like bacon. I also heard Dad’s shower going. That means I’m the last one up again…

Still, I didn’t want to be late, so I rushed to the bathroom. With my car, though, and even with the typical morning Chicago traffic, I’ll probably not be late. Still, I hurried.

I had to whiz pretty bad so the first thing I did when I got to my bathroom (or more properly the guest bathroom) was to go to the toilet and pull down my pants. But when I let go, I didn’t hear the telltale sound of water hitting water, and instead felt warm liquid squirt from, and trickle down between my legs.

“Yah!” I reacted involuntarily. I looked down. Where’s my dick?

Keeping Mum

I was very subdued through breakfast. Ma commented on it but I just shrugged.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Is the food okay?” she worried.

“It’s great, Ma,” I said and made a show of getting a piece of bacon and crunching it in my mouth, and then grinning.

Ma smiled. “Gross, Val,” she said.

I couldn’t really tell Ma and Dad about what happened in the bathroom because I was ninety-nine point nine-nine percent sure this was connected to my impending transformation. But then I haven’t been given the treatment yet – I mean, the “food of the gods” thing. So why this? And why this kind of transformation? Was this what Mr. Daimon was afraid of?

Anyway, I gotta talk to him first thing today.

And though I was trying to sound un-freaked, even if just inside my head, I was just on this side of actually losing it. I was scared out of my mind, literally. What was this shit about?

After peeing down my legs, I used the shower wand to rinse my groin and legs (I shivered a bit as the cold water hit unfamiliar places in my crotch, but it was more out of the new sensation of it than anything). I also rinsed my sweatpants, wrung them dry as best I could, and left them hanging on the shower curtain rod. I’ll just tell Ma later that the pants fell in the water.

After a verrry quick shower, with just a token wash down there (I was scared to touch things there), I dried myself with my big towel and examined myself, especially down there. As far as I could tell, I had girl parts now, but the rest of me – they’re still the same. I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel… down there, but I didn’t want to touch it, at least not yet. So toilet, showered, brushed my teeth (I checked and there was no need for a shave yet) and I finger-combed my shoulder-length hair. I then rushed to my room and got dressed.

I was extremely aware of my underwear as I got dressed, and I fancied that my briefs were a little loose down there. Probably just in my mind. But I deliberately didn’t make any changes at all to what I intended to wear. For example, I just wore my regular underwear instead of a tighter swimsuit. From the outside, I looked just like I always did, I’m sure, but I was worried that my folks could see something different.

We finished breakfast, and then the three of us left to start our day. I waved as my Ma and Dad drove away to work, and I got in my jeep and drove away, too.

When I got to school, I went directly to Mr. Daimon’s office, and I caught him just leaving his office for a class.

“Sir,” I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m a little busy now, Val,” he said. “I got a class in a few minutes. Shouldn’t you be getting to class, too? Ms. Cleo’s not gonna be happy.”

“It’s an emergency, Mr. Daimon,” I said.

He saw the expression on my face and decided. He brought out his phone. “Phoebe?” he said into the phone, “sorry for the short notice. Please find a substitute for my classes for the day. I have an emergency that I must take care of.” He gave me a look. “Also, please ask Dr. Griffin to meet me at my office, and tell Ms. Cleo that one of her homeroom students, Mr. Val Goodchilde, is with me. He’ll be in class as soon as we’re done with our meeting. I’ll give him a hall pass so he can go straight to class. Got all that? Thanks.”

He unlocked his office and ushered me in. He put away his briefcase, gestured to the chair I sat in just yesterday, and sat at his metal desk.

I sat as well, but before we could start, we heard the running clack-clack of heels out in the hallway. Someone knocked on Mr. Daimon’s door, and Dr. Griffin, the school doctor, rushed in.

Griffin was puffing, winded. “So?”

Mr. Daimon nodded to me. “Dr. Griffin, I’d like you to meet Val Goodchilde.”

She paused and looked at me, still puffing. “He’s the one?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Amazing,” she said and looked at me with interest. I felt like a side of beef being checked out by a tiger or lion.

“Amazing?” I asked. Does she know? I worried. “Why amazing?”

“Amazing that we have a student that scored 100,” she said. “Amazing…” She turned to Mr. Daimon. “Which code?”

“Number two,” the vice-principal said.

“Really…” she said in wonder. “Would he be like Erin?”

“I don’t know yet. I just did it last night. We won’t know yet, at least for a while.”

“But it’s confirmed? Number two?”

“Here,” the vice principal said and handed her his laptop. “Confirm it yourself.”

She opened the computer and logged on.

“Hey!” I said. “Stop that! Don’t talk around me! Talk to me!”

“I’m sorry, Val,” Mr. Daimon said and made a patting-down, placating gesture. “You said an emergency?”

“Well…” I suddenly became reluctant.

“It’s all right, Val. You can trust us.”

After much cajoling, I was able to tell them what happened.

The first thing that they did was that Dr. Griffin had me taken to the school clinic, and a full physical was done on me.

Maps

After several hours, Dr. Griffin said that, based on the tests, I was now actually fully female. A surprise, to say the least, especially when just yesterday, I was a guy. Clearly, something happened yesterday. What that was, I didn’t know.

And if I was female now, it wasn’t too obvious. I was the most flat-chested girl I knew, and at best my body dimensions could charitably be described as homely: my body was still androgynous – not too much muscular definition yet – still boyish, meaning someone looking at me might say I was a prepubescent girl. But my face had many feminine aspects. When I looked at my face in the mirror above the hand sink in the school’s clinic, I would say I was a cute girl. A very cute girl, actually. It’s funny that I never noticed that before – nothing’s changed, but I was just noticing that my looks were feminine. Maybe that explained the… attraction the boys had for me. Although girls seemed to be attracted to me, too. As a guy, I could understand how the boys felt even if I didn’t like it, but I didn’t understand the girl thing. I walked back to the examination table and hopped back on it.

Dr. Griffin looked at me appraisingly. “Despite appearances, “she said as she gestured to my chest, “You really are a girl now, physically speaking.” Even though my figure was as straight and as flat as a plank at the moment, I imagined her saying. “But your figure would eventually change into more traditionally feminine lines; and though you now have a AAA bra size, this would also change as well. Tell me, would you know what your mom’s breast size was?”

I embarrassedly said my ma had D-sized breasts.

“Well,” she said, “As you mature, you will probably have breasts of a similar size.”

Uh-oh…

Dr. Griffin then said that my spontaneous sex change was most definitely connected with my transformation. But they didn’t understand how.

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

“We’re sure it because of our experience with Erin Smith.”

“This was the girl from the Melbourne school that scored 85?”

“Yes. She also experienced a spontaneous sex change.”

I looked at them. “Is she okay now? How did she handle changing into a girl?”

“You mistake what I’m saying, Val. Erin changed from a girl to a guy…”

“What!”

“The good thing was that her name was a unisex kind of name, so that was at least one less thing to worry about, and her folks were able to change her papers legally and easily.”

“Erin is a unisex name?”

“Yes, it is. Just like Val is a unisex name.”

“Nope,” I said. “Val is a guy's name. You know? Like Val Kilmer? Val Morrison? Val Walker?”

“Who’s Val Morrison? Or do you mean Jim Morrison?”

“No – Val Morrison. He’s a famous actor.”

“Apparently not that famous,” she laughed. “And Val Walker?”

“A famous magician.”

“If you say so,” she grinned.

“So Erin just started changing into a boy all on her own?”

“Well, only after she got some ambrosia.”

“Ambrosia…”

“Surely Mr. Daimon explained about the ‘food of the gods?’”

“I haven’t had it yet…”

“Huh? You haven’t?”

“Actually, Val,” Mr. Daimon said, “You did… Yesterday.”

“But I never got an injection, or pill or anything like that…”

“I never said it came in pills or injections. Do you remember you had a Coke with your burger yesterday?”

I looked at him with my mouth hanging open.

Coca Cola

“You tricked me!”

“No, I didn’t. You gave permission.”

“How did you get it in the soda?”

“The food of the gods,” he said and brought out a little squeeze bottle with an eyedropper. “I laced your Coke. Give me your finger.”

I gamely proffered my finger, and he put a little drop of the ambrosia, or the “Food of the Gods” on it.

“Bottom’s up!”

“Won’t it be bad if I…”

“Nope – you’ve already had some. More won’t make a difference.”

“Okay.” I stuck my finger in my mouth. The ambrosia was pretty good, but not as good as what I imagined “ambrosia” should be. It looked like honey but it was thicker – just this side of the consistency of jello. It also tasted mostly like honey as well, but with a touch of caramel and what tasted like thick buttercream.

“Can I have some more?” I said.

Mr. Daimon laughed and was about to put some on my finger again, but Dr. Griffin stopped us. She got out a small medicine spoon and it allowed me to have a lot of it this time. Mr. Daimon squeezed the jelly-like syrup onto the spoon, and it made a lump like a heaping spoonful of sugar, or maybe molasses. He handed the spoon to me and I popped the jelly-syrup into my mouth. And with that quantity in my mouth, it felt like eating a Kraft Caramels cube, but one that melted in my mouth.

“You know,” I said, “if this wasn’t ambrosia, this would be good to put on a graham cracker.”

Mr. Daimon and Dr. Griffin looked at each other and chuckled. “We actually do that a lot,” Mr. Daimon said.

“What! You use ambrosia like it was a sandwich spread?!”

“Ambrosia isn’t all that difficult to make. You can make some from your kitchen using common ingredients. It’s the recipe that’s the key, but if you know how, it’s actually easy to make.”

“Where’d you get the recipe?”

“Where else? It was on the plates.”

“What happens when…”

“When regular folks have some ambrosia? Nothing at all. It would only have an effect for people who score 50 or above, and it will only work if the person is between fourteen and eighteen, and only if they haven’t had some before, and that was a problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“We didn’t know these things coming in, and only found this out by trial and error.”

“Imagine the problem,” Dr. Griffin said. “Firstly, we had to locate people that have high scores, which was no small feat. And then only after finding them could we give them the ambrosia. And it was only through trial and error that we found the magic window of age fourteen to eighteen, on average. It doesn’t matter for the older people since they’re already lost to us, but if we give it to kids that are too young, then we do lose them: if they had some too early, then they couldn’t transform anymore.”

“Earlier in the program, in the nineties, we had this naive idea of giving out ambrosia to the general public and assumed we would transform candidates without having to screen people. But we didn’t know about the age conversion window.

“In Sweden, for example, we marketed our version of kanelbullar – those are Swedish cinnamon rolls.

“Our rolls were laced, of course. And it became very popular. We weren’t surprised by that, of course - Ambrosia was pretty delicious - and we made a tidy profit from them. But after a year of production and distribution in the country, our numbers showed we were only able to get a hundred transformations, and we basically wiped out any other potential transformations: we lost the five million kids out there below the age of fourteen that were potential converts…”

“Five million?”

“That’s an exaggeration. From the data we gathered later, we estimate that there were around fifty thousand potential transformees from the five million kids in Sweden.”

“So,” Dr. Griffin said, “with the information we now have, we changed our strategy to screen people first, gather potential candidates within that age window together, initiate transformation, and then observe and test them afterward.”

That made me pause for a while, thinking that through. “So…,” I finally said, bringing us back to my situation, “is a sex change part of the transformation?”

“Not really,” Mr. Daimon said. “So far, it’s only been you and Erin.”

“So if a sex change isn’t ‘standard’ to the transformation, why did it happen to me?”

Dr. Griffin has a theory. Doctor?”

“Val,” the doctor said, “I think what happened to Erin was because of which Kodikos map she was matched with, coupled with her high score.”

“Which was?”

“She had an eighty-five percent match to the ninth Kodikos map.”

“Whose map was the ninth map?”

“That one was the DNA map for Ares.”

“Okay… If I remember right, Ares is Mars, the god of war.”

“That’s correct.”

“So I’m a match for the Ares map, then?”

“No.”

“But if I’m not a match for the Ares map…?”

“Ares was a male god…”

That made me pause again. “You mean, because Ares was a guy, Erin got turned into a guy?”

Dr. Griffin nodded.

“But what about the other transformees? Didn’t you get other transformees that had mismatched…”

“Well, we do get lots of gender mismatches – a girl matched to a boy-god’s map, and a boy matched to a girl map. Three of the Kodikos maps were female maps, so we have lots of boys that matched up with these female maps and lots of girls that matched up with male maps. But no gender changes. The only difference that you and Erin had was that you two had high scores.”

“Oh…”

Dr. Griffin reached out for my hand. “I’m sorry Val.”

I thought a bit. “You said there were three female maps. Which ones?”

“There’s the last map: it’s of Metis, the Titan goddess of cunning and wisdom; there’s the eighth - Mnemosyne, the Titan goddess of memory; and there’s the second map – Aphrodite.”

“… So, which was my match?”

“I thought Mr. Daimon would have told you already. Your match was the second one – the map of -,”

“…Aphrodite,” I said.

 

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