Ethertravel report #1902, received June 1, 2534.

I was Lisa Carter, a successful programmer years ago, but at the age of 112, I had run out of my retirement funds, and chose to continue my life as an ethertraveler. As you will read, I was definitely not typical on this world, and I ended up changing the world in a way, but don’t worry; I didn’t tell them about ethertraveling.

Childhood

I was born as a male here with a name that is approximately Joe, phonetically. We are vaguely humanoid people with gray skin, and hairless. We have a bit more distinction in size between males and females than in humans, but we reproduce and raise children in ways similar to humans, except that the females are only fertile once a year, but super-fertile then.

However, that appearance is only superficial. Internally, we are very different, the biggest difference being that we are silicon-based life forms. Don’t think of the Horta from Star Trek. We aren’t made of rock or glass; we are about as flexible as humans. But there is a lot of what people on Earth would think of as mineral matter in our diet, including other silicon-based life that grows here.

One weird consequence of this is that our excretory system is different. We have liquid waste and solid waste, but all the junk is in the liquid waste. The solid waste, which has the consistency of clay, is made of incomplete body cells, mostly the intracellular material present between the organelles in our body cells. There is a small amount of our equivalent of DNA (different chemistry but same function) also in this material, and this is critically important, because it keys each bit of waste as belonging to the person whose body created it.

They invented toilets here, and most people, most of the time, dispose of the solid waste that way. It mixes with the water and everybody else’s wastes and becomes part of the ground. But we don’t have to do that. The solid waste is clean, and we can keep it and use it like clay to build things. What’s more, if we keep it clean, and don’t let anyone else’s cells or any foreign matter besides a little water to get into it, we can actually animate the things we make from it as extensions of our bodies.

If you think that sounds like a powerful ability, it is. But it’s limited by the need to keep the clay clean, so people mostly make small things. Imagine having a tiny screwdriver you can drop in a hole and loosen or tighten screws at the bottom of the hole without needing to have a long tool to reach down there. Or, for that matter, to find the screwdriver, because we get certain sensations from the things we have animated. You can keep all your tools in a big bin and then just pull the screwdriver out of it by thinking you want to raise that tool.

We start out as kids making toys that way. They don’t have commercially produced toys like on Earth because it’s more fun to make your own things you can animate. They do, however, sell little kits with paint and accessories to decorate your toys, and these are previews of the kits used to seal and preserve the tools and other devices people make as adults.

One of the things each person gets as a child, not long after you learn to use a toilet, is a clay catcher. This is a little device that fits over the back of a toilet seat and catches your clay rather than letting it drop into the toilet. The first thing you do when you get one is line the cavity with your own clay, animate it, and seal the clay. This identifies it as yours so it can’t get mixed up with those of any other people you live with. Unless it breaks, you’ll keep the same one all your life; all toilets everywhere are made to the same standard shape to support them. We do have plastic here and there are plastic bags and sealable bins people use to collect more clay than you can deposit at one time to make larger things.

I wasn’t unusual in making little “action figures” which, unlike the ones on Earth, actually acted. I could stage little mock battles with them, and later when I got more ambitious, make houses and cars for them. The ability to manipulate these things was somewhat limited; even though one person might have many tools or toys, you could only manipulate so many at once, and at this point for me it was 3 or 4.

It isn’t simple to make such elaborate toys; there are a series of steps to go through. First, you have to save your clay. For larger projects you might need to save clay over a period of time. You can’t make clay faster just by eating more; your body only processes it at a certain rate, and you’ll feel stuffed and unable to eat more if you exceed that rate. Then you need to shape it. We have a variety of tools we use to shape the clay, much like someone on Earth would use for building with clay. For simple things you can animate it once the shape is complete. We have a gland that produces a special substance that is only used for this purpose. The gland is in the mouth, so it looks like spitting on it, but it’s not saliva, not chemically nor in function. Finally, for most purposes you would apply one of several coatings to it to protect and preserve the clay and make it last essentially indefinitely. One kind of coating makes it into a hard, still object, while another kind allows it to keep the flexibility inherent to clay.

If you are building something with movable parts, it’s more complicated. You have to animate those parts separately as well as the matter that holds them together. So to build a car for my action figures, I had to animate separate axle assemblies with wheels, coat each of those with the hard coating, and then later make the car body including parts that go around those axles. If I wanted to build the equivalent of an Earth action figure I’d have to build each movable segment separately, such as a head, torso, forearm, upper arm, pelvis, thigh, and lower leg, and then put in little pieces to join them. That would take a long time. Also, all those parts would be separate pieces, and while you might not need to manipulate every one to move the figure, it wasn’t easy to move several of them at once to simulate real walking. So I did as people usually did; I just built the whole figure in one piece but left it flexible, so it could bend different ways; the result was less realistic, but much faster to build and easier to animate.

This is considered so universally useful here that everybody takes one or more sculpting classes in school, where you are asked to bring in your own clay to build things. And I excelled in these classes and got into the more advanced classes where I learned to make more complex models.

One of the things I realized while playing with these toys is that there is a kind of second sight. Effectively, I can see a three-dimensional view of things near the toy or tool I am manipulating. With tools, it lets me see down in small crevices, provided there is any light in there to see by. I can only use one of these at once, but if it isn’t blocked by anything I can have a 360-degree view around it. More than that; up, down, every which way. When I mentioned it in class, they said not everybody gets this, and some of them get a weaker version of the effect than others. Some of them can look any direction but only one direction at a time, and may have a lag when switching between objects. But this was why, for both the soft and hard types of coating, clear was a popular option. It was specifically a clear that didn’t impede this vision. You could hear through this connection as well, but unless you were manipulating one at a distance, you wouldn’t notice because you’d hear the same things with your real body.

This made me wonder about using one as a second body. It would take a lot of work, a lot of skill, and a lot of clay to do it, but I wanted to try. For my final art project in high school, I made a foot-tall bodybuilder statue using one week’s clay. I combined a few parts to make him more animated. Two extra pieces for the fingers (combined) and thumb on each hand let him grasp things, and the arms swiveled at the shoulders. The gray color of the clay is close to the gray color of skin, so I only painted the few details of our bodies that are other colors and used the clear sealant on the rest. It was common enough to do this sort of thing that there were doll clothes you could buy, and I found some to fit him. Combined with my ability to move him around the room, swinging from the bars under desks and tables like some kind of jungle gym, I got an A+ on the project. But I still hoped to do something better someday.

College

They have the basic equivalent of college here, a boarding school with continuing education that not everybody does. I enrolled into a science program at a college whose name I can roughly translate as Rockheart, in a city which was literally named River City in the language here. I hoped to be able to make an ether device someday, but even in such a program, everybody took art at some point. There were several levels of classes available for clay-sculpting open to everybody, as well as classes for working in other media for which only the intro classes were available for non-majors. I ended up making an art minor so I could get into some classes, including anatomy for artists, which taught details of the body form, including even some internal details like bone structure because it could be helpful to understand in depicting the external anatomy.

For my final college art project, I was determined to make a full-size animated clay statue. I started saving my clay a year in advance because I realized I needed a lot. I decided to make a female body, not because I wanted to be female, but because it was smaller, and I started saving clay too late. I figured I’d need three-quarters of a year’s worth of clay to make a full-sized female body, and twice that for a male. (Not nine months; there weren’t months on this world because there wasn’t a big obvious moon like on Earth. We have 8-day weeks conventionally with six days of work or school and two days off, with days a little shorter than Earth’s, and a 352-day year. Longer time spans are measured in multiples of weeks or in 88-day quarters.)

During the first half of my final year, after proposing my project, I spent a quarter planning how it was going to go. One of my classes actually gave me a detailed table of various body dimensions corresponding to standard sizes. Naturally, just like humans, people here don’t always come in exactly the same proportions as one another, but there are ideal proportions for males and females that the standard sizing system is based on, and which most clothes try to follow, apart from ones specifically designed for people outside the norm such as shorter or taller. I used one of these sizes as the basis for my sculpture’s design.

In order to make it behave more realistically, I made the bone structure first, shaping each bone and sealing it to keep it separate from the body that was going to enclose it. This was also going to allow me to use up some of the clay, since the storage was an issue. By midway through the year, I’d shaped but not sealed most of the bones. Next I carefully animated each bone and then coated it with hard sealant. Then I used a bunch of wire and temporary supports to build the entire skeleton. I presented it as a checkpoint for the project. My professors were impressed; enough of them knew enough anatomy to realize I’d made a very faithful female skeleton, and I could move specific bones to make it dance. And I practiced a lot with that as I continued building; moving those bones was how I was going to move the whole body when it was assembled. I developed my ability to move up to about 10 parts at once, and the ability to quickly switch from one part to another, which let me do pretty realistic things with it.

The more difficult part was still to come. I had to cover the skeleton in more clay, carefully shaping each section from toe to head, and keeping all unfinished surfaces covered with plastic so they would not get contaminated. Usually, the sequence was sculpt, animate, and then seal, but there was a kind of sealant that I could apply to parts of the clay I was done sculpting before animating it, without having it soak into the clay, and leaving the clay somewhat flexible. So it worked for me to seal each section as it was finished.

There were some other tricky bits. One of the goals I had envisioned was the ability for her to speak. Our speech is not exactly the same as that of humans, but it is quite similar; you pass your breath over a resonator and shape your mouth to vary sounds. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to breathe, except for this. I built a mockup of these parts without the whole body to test the idea. Five of them, actually; it had taken me three tries to get it right, and then I had to test to see how it worked before it was animated so I could be sure that when I made it part of the body and animated the while thing it would work correctly. I really needed that to all be one piece, because breathing depends on the whole torso moving. Of course, when I was testing that it worked, that didn’t mean I could talk using it, just make sounds. When I had her whole body together, the whole mouth, especially the tongue, would work together with this apparatus to manipulate those sounds into speech.

When I was nearly done I bought her clothes in that size. The clothes here aren’t exactly the same as people on Earth wear, but they are close enough for me to say I bought something equivalent to a dress. A nice one, since it was to be part of an art project. Nobody thought it was weird when I bought the dress and the other clothes that went with it. They just assumed I was buying a gift for someone. I suppose for an art project I could have made a dress myself, but that wasn’t the kind of art I was doing, and I documented in the papers I submitted about my sculpture that the clothes were purchased.

There was one last thing. She needed a name, both as a body I intended to use like an extra person when this was over, and as a piece of art now. While she was not really based on the appearance of my body on old Earth, since we don’t look like humans, I chose to use the name I had had as a woman, Lisa, or at least the closest approximation to that name here, because of an interesting discovery I had made. While the name most like Lisa here didn’t normally look like TERRA when spelled out, I had doodled a way to make it look like Lisa to people here but undoubtedly like TERRA to any ethertravelers. So I got some wide ribbon to use as a sash, and painted Lisa/TERRA on the sash in this way. I hoped people would see this, and someone would notice the TERRA.

On turn-in day, seeing me walk in with my girl, having her dance with me and do other very realistic things, I got an instant A+ on the project, subject only to them checking to make sure it was not another student pulling a prank acting as my art project. That only took a day, but Lisa was declared one of the best projects of the whole school, so she was placed in the exhibit with the other best art for the remaining two weeks through graduation. This was what I’d been hoping for with the sash. She got publicity.

The time she was in the exhibit was a bit weird. I didn’t have to be looking through her body all the time, but I was curious, and I did so a few times each day. Her skin was all one piece, in terms of how it was animated, so when I used its vision, I got a view in every direction from the parts of her not covered with clothes. The head, most of the arms, parts of the legs... I would not have seen much more if she’d been left naked. Sometimes there was nobody around, and sometimes there were lots of people admiring the art. Three times I caught somebody peeking under her dress - yes, she is anatomically correct down there, at least externally, and yes, I did put clothes on her to cover that. Three times... and I was watching maybe 1% of the time she was there while people were in the exhibit hall. So I assume people peeked under her dress 300 times! I was a woman before, so I knew some guys would sneak a peek whenever they thought nobody was looking, but with what they thought was a statue, it was much more often they thought nobody was looking. Good grief, I traveled across the galaxy to an alien world and found a place where upskirting is still a thing!

I was kind of surprised by this, because another thing that is different about the people here compared to humans is we cannot have sex all the time. Males only get an erection in the presence of female pheromones released at a mating time about once a year, and the female reproductive cavity only opens at that time. Even then, people usually don’t have sex because we are super-fertile during those periods and sex is very likely to result in pregnancy, but various kinds of foreplay or mutual masturbation are typical.

Going Home with Lisa

The day after graduation, all the artists were invited in to reclaim their works. Since the art took every form, there was art the creators simply picked up and walked out with, large works that needed two people to carry, and heavy stone sculptures carted away with something like a forklift. But I had the only art there that could follow me out of the gallery.

That was the moment where everything changed. For the rest of my life, I had a very realistic looking female body available to use 24/7 in addition to my own body.

My parents had stayed in a hotel overnight for the graduation, and helped me get moved out the next day. After I let them know I got Lisa back, they drove their vehicle to the parking area near my dorm and the four of us (with both of my bodies) helped load all my stuff. And Lisa helped again unloading.

“Joe, now that Lisa is home, what do you plan on doing with her?”

Yep. Mom asked the $64,000 question the moment we were done getting all my stuff in the house.

I didn’t have hard plans. I really hoped some other ethertraveler had seen the exhibit, and would offer me a job as a way of getting together to work on calling home, but by the time I left there was nothing, so I just went home with my parents. I hadn’t given up hope yet.

“Whatever. Chores. Extra things I don’t have time for, or things to give me more time with my real body.”

Mom sighed, seemingly with relief. “Oh. OK. You think you can do that at the same time as you do other things?”

“As long as the other things aren’t too mentally taxing. So while I’m taking a test or doing intense studying, no, Lisa sits idle, but while I am riding the bus somewhere, or reading, or doing chores myself, Lisa can definitely be doing other chores. Having her body and mine both moving things while getting my stuff home was no issue at all.”

“OK. I’m going to want to see that, but if you are going to be using Lisa all the time, she’s going to need more clothes. Even if clay bodies don’t sweat, the clothes still get dirty over time, and other people will find it weird if they see her wearing the same clothes all the time. So we are going to have to go clothes shopping for Lisa, along with finding some place to store them.”

“Actually, I think we need to wash her and her stuff already. Even though Lisa doesn’t sweat, there were a lot of people in the exhibit hall those two weeks who did.”

“OK. I’ll lend you my robe for Lisa to wear until her clothes are clean, and you go take her in the bathroom and shower her, and I’ll do a washload with whatever else is around.”

It’s not really sweat, and not exactly some of those other things, but equivalents. I’m taking some major liberties in this section to describe things in a way people from Earth would understand, but I did wash her the way a person would wash herself.

Even though Lisa had been naked, in some sense, in my dorm room for more than a quarter while I was finishing her, being in her and showering her body seemed somehow much more intimate than that. She wasn’t animated before, so it was more like I was constructing a piece of art. This time, it was like I was in the girls’ locker room, except I was one of the girls. I got through it remembering how, in another life that seemed impossibly far off though it was really only 20 or so years ago, I was a woman and did exactly this daily. But I’d been male those 20 years and just as on Earth, segregated away from anywhere naked women were visible, except as depictions in art. I dried Lisa’s body off, and put on the robe while I waited for her clothes to be returned.

Clothes shopping happened the next two days, and it had some of the same complications as I remembered from shopping for clothes as a woman on Earth. My parents also got me some extra furniture to store the clothes; it wasn’t quite as bad as having a roommate in my bedroom, but I did need some extra storage space.

“Is Lisa going to need a bed?” Dad asked me.

“No,” I replied.

Dad frowned, so I explained, “Lisa wouldn’t use a bed. When I stop using Lisa, she becomes a statue in whatever position I leave her in. As long as that is a position that is not going to topple over easily, she could easily stay there overnight or for days if necessary, as she stayed for two weeks in the art exhibit.”

“OK. I am just glad you didn’t say she was going to sleep in yours.”

Yes, Dad was worried I had made Lisa to be my girlfriend, sex doll, or whatever. And I suppose it was possible; there was a hole there. But no, not really, without the pheromones. With a real girlfriend it would have been possible for one short period of a few days per year; with Lisa, zero days.

After the two days of shopping and setting up stuff, I got to start taking advantage of having an extra body. Lisa could do all my chores, while I applied for jobs and then had fun playing games or whatever. But Mom actually assigned me extra chores, with the excuse that when I was away I was going to have to do all the chores, ignoring the fact that I’d already been at college where I had to do most of my own chores already. I think it helped, though. At the end of the week, I was feeling adept at everything I tried with Lisa, including speaking.

Inventor School

I got offers of a sort starting the day after the shopping was done, and going on for a few weeks, but not from other ethertravelers, as far as I could see. There were several kinds of school you might go into here after college, and they all worked differently, so it was a bit of chaos. If you were going into medicine, there was medical school that you’d apply to the last year of college the way people would on Earth. For advanced technical training, or to become any sort of educator, you’d get hired first, and your employer would pay for you to get the training they thought you needed. And then there was the kind of offer I got.

It was basically inventor school, and it was part business school, part tech incubator, with the two parts working together to help you develop your idea into a viable product. You don’t apply to this school at all; the school makes offers to people they think have interesting ideas, based on exhibits like Lisa had been in and other ways things were exposed to the public. And there was no particular schedule or requirements; they make offers to people who haven’t finished college and in some cases haven’t started it, as well as to people who’ve been out working a job for some time.

People still invent things here, but if you “invented” say, a specially shaped tool that people could make from their clay, people would just make their own. At best, you could sell how-to guides about it. People ended up with toolboxes full of special tools they had built at some time or another, instead of ones they bought. But there were plenty of inventions that were either too complicated for people to easily make from clay, or had to be made of some other material to do what they did. Even then, some of those were sold as kits containing the non-clay parts to be combined with something you made from your clay, but there was something to be sold. Figuring that out was the point of this school.

So I got several dozen invitations to these inventor schools from all over, on the basis of selling the service of helping people build realistic-looking clay dolls like Lisa. This wasn’t entirely novel; some people here had built life-sized dolls that they could use, for instance, to help move things, but they were made with only a few parts in simple shapes, and usually built over a frame so that the whole body wasn’t solid clay. But they weren’t meant to be lifelike, and they weren’t. They were better described as robots, and they usually had limited functionality, often meant for a single repetitive job. Likewise, a few people had sculpted full-sized people out of their clay before, but if they let them be soft, they were too floppy, and if they made the whole thing hard, it became simply a statue and the fact that it was made of his clay only made it easier for the sculptor to move. I don’t know why nobody had ever hit on the strategy I came up with, using soft “flesh” clay over hard “bone” clay, but the responses made it seem that nobody had. Perhaps it was because of the amount of time and clay needed.

Some of the offers I got seemed to assume that making sex dolls, as my dad had suggested, was the primary market for them. I eliminated those early on, but I still kept in mind the idea that on a world as sex-happy as this one apparently was, that was at least one market for them, though I still wasn’t sure how the men were expected to use it.

I contacted several of the other schools to check how much I’d be limited strictly to developing ways for other people to build their own Lisas. It was obvious from the invitations that that would eventually have to be part of my activity there, but I wanted to make sure I got a chance to study other things I’d not gotten to in college. I had, for instance, no practical experience on this world assembling electronic circuits. This was pretty necessary to build an ether communicator to tell Earth about this place. And this was tricky, because I didn’t really want to talk about Earth stuff with other people. But it was possible to imagine making the things with some embedded electronics that made movements easier, for instance, by moving some bones in the hand in response to you moving one of them, to make actions like grasping easier for people with weaker command of their clay. I could use that as an excuse for wanting to learn this.

My parents didn’t do such a thing as this inventor school, but they did at least know it existed. So they were proud of me but mostly let me make decisions.

There was some interesting economics behind it. There was no up-front cost. If I and my advisors determined there was no way to make money off my invention, then I’d walk away, owing nothing, but committed to pay them back if I ever figured out a way to make money off the invention. If I did make profits, 30% of them had to be paid back to the school up to a pre-arranged amount, the real price of the school. It was possible the cost of materials during development would get tacked on to this, but there was a certain allowance for expected material costs within the school’s fees.

These costs varied among the offers, as did my freedom of choice regarding both classes and developing the invention. Eventually I picked one of the offers which I thought gave me the most on different sides of this trade-off. I made arrangements to move there and start classes once their term started.

Mom committed herself to preparing me for this, but she also started talking more about Lisa doing this and that around the house to help out. I had to interrupt her, as the suggestions were going out of reach of reality. I wasn’t planning to donate Lisa permanently to the family to help out around here!

“Classes start at the end of the usual summer break. When I go off to this school, Lisa will go with me. They will expect to see Lisa, and I want to use her to help do errands and such. This is why I wanted to live in an apartment rather than in the dorms. The dorms are coed, but having Lisa in the same room with me and probably another roommate, since most rooms are doubles, was sure to cause trouble. It was tough enough swinging a single last year; it looked impossible to do at a new school. Even though I am sharing an apartment, I’ll have my own bedroom, and I can make space for Lisa in there.”

“Ah, smart. I had never connected those two things, but I had never realized until I saw her that you were going to be able to use Lisa like this. I just assumed you wanted more space to sculpt, or something. Not to mention a place to keep your collection of clay.”

I continued practicing speaking with Lisa and was getting better every day. It took only three weeks after graduation before I could hold a normal conversation with somebody using Lisa, and after another three weeks I could speak as well with Lisa as I could with my own voice. Since I could only produce some simple tones with the sample voice assemblies I had made, I couldn’t really tell how Lisa’s voice was going to turn out, but I chose a design which gave somewhat higher tones than Joe’s voice, and it worked out OK. Her voice was lower than some female voices, and lower than mine had been on old Earth, but within the normal range for females here.