Ethertravel report #2310, received May 17, 2580.

I was Carl Rains. By the time I went out as an ethertraveler, we knew there was a phenomenon of Djinn Worlds, copies of an Earth from the past apparently made by a supernatural being who made one big change to let history play out differently. It was pretty obvious early on that I was on a Djinn World, and also what the change was. I wasn’t born as a baby boy or a baby girl. I was both!

Everybody on this world is born as a pair of twins. But only one is active at any time. One body is sleeping at any given time. When one body falls asleep, the other wakes, but it’s still you.

As a baby, my bodies slept and awoke whenever. These periods of wakefulness started out very short, but increased in length quickly. When it became time to start school, it was still the same way, with the exception that if my current body had been awake for a while already, then in the morning my parents would make me go to bed so the other, fresher body could go to school and stay awake long enough to last the entire day. A few years later, I established a regular pattern; the schools didn’t impose any particular pattern on us, but asked us to adopt a pattern so that on average both bodies went to school half the time, to ensure they both got exercise.

By the age of 5 or so I had figured out another weird thing about my bodies: they are linked in certain ways. It does not matter which body eats, only that the two bodies combined eat about as much as two not-very-active people their age would. Maybe one and a half normally active people. Each one sleeps half the time, so they are less active than people on old Earth. People here normally eat 4 meals a day, which they call breakfast (despite the fact there is no significant fast before it), lunch, dinner or supper, and midnight (which probably came out of the idea of midnight snacks being expanded to become a whole meal). Also, there is no concept of waking up to go to the bathroom. Whichever body is awake handles that function. You know how sometimes when you poop, you can tell when certain foods came out because they don’t get digested fully? Beans, corn, and the like. I noticed that my girl body pooped food that only my boy body ate recently, and vice versa. Likewise for peeing after eating beets.

A lot of stuff here is surprisingly much the same. There are still men’s and women’s public restrooms, for instance, and you use whichever was appropriate for whichever body you happen to be in at the time you need to go. The same sorts of clothing styles typical for men and women are worn here, but colors and patterns men would not have worn in the world I first grew up in are considered acceptable, and it’s a little more common to find men wearing kilts. Also, by my time, they had done away with gender-specific names. Anybody can be a Carl or a Carla, and people generally use the same name with both bodies.

As you might expect, puberty was weird with this going on. Puberty is always weird for everybody, but doubly so when you are becoming a young man and a young woman at the same time! And I have to confess, I had sex with my other form. As far as I could tell, this is something everybody does at this point in their life, and to a limited degree throughout their lives. They call this “self-incest” and it is discouraged in general and strictly forbidden to cause pregnancy this way, but it is kind of like masturbation on Earth. People do it, almost universally, though the frequency may vary, and it just isn’t talked about.

Instead of your parents giving you a box of condoms and explaining how they are used, you get pointed to where the house supply is located and told to use them when needed to keep anybody from becoming pregnant. Sex was explained with the caution that I shouldn’t be doing it yet, with a wink and a nod. At this point in my life, I switched 1-2 times a day, and once I understood sex, for years, almost every time I switched, the body going to bed would bring a condom, put it on my male body’s dick, and go to sleep having sex with my other body, and then that other body would wake up and finish the deed, toss the used condom, and clean up both bodies’ sexual parts. That meant I went through a lot of condoms, but my parents did not seem to care. They just bought more.

In high school, as part of our history classes, we had a segment on the change. The actual wish was captured on video, and watching this was apparently part of everybody’s education. A woman got the wish, and she asked for “men to understand what it means to care for a woman’s body.” Upon being told the wish had to benefit everybody, she added “and vice versa” to the wish, and it was accepted. Aside from this, though, we studied some of the ways society worked before the change (the way the world I remembered worked) and after it (the way things work here now). With my experience, I aced this unit.

When the change happened, about a century prior to my arrival, it changed society a lot. At the moment it happened, everybody’s second body was created, asleep, wherever they were when they last woke up. For most people, this meant at home, but there were some confusing encounters in hotel rooms and the like. That much, at least, was sorted out quickly. If they were asleep at the time, the other body was created awake beside them. About a third of the world’s population experienced it this way, waking up in the opposite sex beside their own sleeping body. As confusing as that was, they were the vanguard who informed the rest of the world what was happening.

Every pregnant woman became pregnant with twins; if she was already pregnant with twins (or more), they changed into one set of twins to work in this way. And every woman who got pregnant thereafter had such a pair of twins. Er, I should say every female body who got pregnant, since everybody had one now and, with rare exceptions for fertility disorders, every one in childbearing ages was able to get pregnant.

Since approximately the entire population of the world was awake at every moment, 24 hours a day, lots of things immediately shifted into 24-hour mode. Instead of it only being certain pharmacies, restaurants, gas stations, and emergency services which were open 24 hours a day, quite a lot of things are open all night, at least some nights. No longer could it be assumed that middle-of-the-night hours were sleeping hours when few people would be out and about.

Also, everybody is now male and female. Geneticists studied these twins and found that they were caused by a change in the way zygotes are formed. Normally, there is a step in zygote production where the usual diploid chromosomes (two of each per cell) split apart to make the haploid zygotes (one of each chromosome) which fuse at conception. This still happens, but the two zygotes produced stay together, and two linked sperm fertilize two linked eggs. The X and Y sex chromosomes in the sperm split in the same way, so each pair always has one male and one female body, genetic abnormalities aside.

The mother’s body rejects the pregnancy if either or both fertilizations fail. This actually reduced the rate of certain abnormalities, since they usually result in failed pregnancies now rather than children with missing or extra chromosomes. Also, certain couples in the past could only have children if a certain gene was not present in the child; these now could not have children at all. But society adjusted to that. Fertility clinics could already test for the presence of the relevant genes; what was different now was the diagnosis.

What really mattered about everybody being male and female, though, was society. Everybody spent time, and this meant serious time; usually a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 18 hours a day, living as a male, and the complement of those hours living as a female. “Women’s issues” were now important to everybody. And by adjusting their sleep schedule, people could decide which sex to present to the world during the day. Most people did, except when intentionally switching presentation, set themselves to wake up each morning the body they wanted to appear as at work, the same body each day. Whether they switched immediately upon coming home from work, after dinner, or later in the evening to begin their “night shift” was each individual person’s choice.

The First Generation

Immediately after the change, almost everybody switched at their normal bedtime and at a normal wakeup time in the morning, living their lives as they normally had except that while their original body slept, they were awake in a body of the opposite sex. Some of them did nothing at all with the other body, just sitting and watching TV, listening to music, etc. Others were at least somewhat more active, playing online games where nobody could tell they were using another body, or doing chores inside the house they sometimes failed to find time for in their main body, but the other body never left the house.

Right after the change, people didn’t have any proper clothes for their other body. Single people sometimes left the other body naked, or clothed it minimally with whatever of their own clothes as would fit. This meant a lot of men had female other bodies wearing ill-fitting men’s briefs, shorts, and T-shirts (and no bra), and a lot of women had male other bodies wearing sundresses, going commando under them, as their other clothes were often too small. This was better with heterosexual couples, as they either provided some of their clothing for their partner’s other body, or bought some, if theirs didn’t fit, approximating the sizes based on how much too small their own clothes were, which was a lot easier for them since they had experience buying clothes of that gender.

This was especially an issue for people on vacation, who had last slept before the change outside their home. If they were married and traveling with a spouse, or someone else of the opposite sex, they might borrow that person’s clothes, but those traveling alone or in single-sex groups now found themselves traveling with a body of the other sex and no appropriate clothing. Generally, the clothed body was able to go get something, and it may not have been a perfect fit, but at least something that worked to get the other body home. Of course, that other body lacked ID, tickets, etc. but as this was happening the world over, people were accommodating. Airlines added extra flights, and in most countries, government grants provided free return trips for the second bodies of anybody whose travel spanned the change.

The worst case was the people who’d already left their vacation site that day before the change happened, and ended up with another body stranded there. They usually fashioned the bedsheets into makeshift clothes until hotel concierges found clothes for them. Both in this scenario and in the one where the other body bought something, it was usually a sundress and underpants, or sweatshirt and sweatpants with a drawstring that could be tied, just as a way to keep them covered with a minimum of sizing issues. Women’s bodies too big to go without them would add sports bras, and they’d have a coat in colder climates. But even with these alternate bodies having some set of clothes to get home, once they made it there, it was normal for these travelers to leave them at home.

Over time, this attitude changed somewhat, as stores handed out free sizing guides to help people measure their other bodies, and so single people were able to at least get some basic and properly sized clothing to make the other bodies decent, possibly having them delivered. Not all did, and most who were already adults or teens at the time of the change never really took their other bodies out into the world, even if they did clothe them.

Likewise, most people did not have extra sleeping space for the other body. When it was time for one body to go to bed, they’d either slide in beside their other self, or lift that body out of bed and put it on the floor, in a chair, on a sofa, etc. if there really wasn’t room. Waking up the sleeping body wasn’t an issue, because that’s not how waking up worked anymore. Wherever they put it, it was going to be awake as soon as the currently awake body got to sleep, so they were never too concerned about the moved body being comfortable.

Most of the people of this generation felt revulsion against having sex with their other body, or indeed in doing anything sexual with the other body. Those who engaged in sex with their sleeping body discovered that body had a sort of memory of the event, and found this so distasteful that they did not do it again. They were the ones who branded the practice “self-incest.”

An exception to the basic pattern of only using the other body during usual sleeping hours was for the people who actually wanted to be the other sex, the transgendered, though it was barely an exception. Many of them switched over once and then adopted the customary pattern of other people, relegating their original body to night-time activity. In their case, they bought a new wardrobe for the body they now mainly used, and each body could wear proper clothes, and they weren’t afraid to let the other body occasionally go out. However, the number of such people was small.

A group several times larger than the transgendered was curious what it would be like to live as the other sex, and went out on occasion to try it out. These people bought at least one full outfit for the other body to wear. Most of them didn’t continue to do so on a regular basis, but might occasionally do so. But maybe as many as a third of this group did let their other body out semi-regularly. Some married people couldn’t tolerate their spouses doing this, and it led to a significant number of divorces; the first full year after the change saw the largest number of divorces ever recorded. Both partners of such divorces typically remarried with other like-minded people. But even so, these curious people were not true switchers; they still interacted with the world primarily through a single body. There were hardly any switchers at this time who gave both bodies equal time.

Atrophy, and Later Generations

Although the parents in the first generation resisted using their other body, most of them educated their children as being free to use whichever body they wanted, though mostly they suggested picking one to use daytimes and the other to be used while the first slept. But within a few years of the change, what people noticed was that those who didn’t use their other body saw that body atrophy. It had plenty of nutrition, since nutrition was shared between the bodies, but when the muscles were not used because all the body did was sit and watch TV or do other sedentary tasks, they eventually became so weak they could barely stand.

This started an education campaign to make sure you exercised both bodies. The adults who had seen the atrophy in their other body understood they needed to exercise that body, but it was exercise they did at home while their main body slept. But children were encouraged to become switchers, to attend school at least some of the time as a boy and some of the time as a girl. Those among the curious who enjoyed their time as the opposite sex also tended to become switchers.

There were several patterns switchers used:

• One type of switcher used one body by day, during the morning/breakfast routine, and all day at school or work, and either just before or just after dinner, put that body to bed, and had the other up all evening and night. Over the weekend, they used longer shifts to rotate the two bodies, so the other body went to work or school the following week. This was the pattern used by the most reluctant switchers; they could, if they no longer wanted to switch, easily fall back into a routine like the first generation using whichever body they preferred, and did so during longer school breaks.
• Another switcher strategy used 3 long shifts every 2 days, waking up one body at, say, 7 AM, staying up 17 hours, and putting that body to bed at midnight. The body which woke up then would stay up, go to work the following day, until they got home from work, perhaps 6 PM, an 18 hour shift, and immediately go to bed. Then the first body awoke after work and would go to bed at 7 AM, a 13 hour shift, so the second body would go to work a second day in a row, but this time fresh after waking up, restarting the 3-shift cycle in the other body. This meant a switcher would go to work two days at a time in one body, then two days in the other body. These switchers usually tried to keep up the pattern over the weekend, but might adjust it depending on what they were doing.
• Another switcher pattern used short cycles: About 12 hours for the body going to work, and two short cycles of about 6 hours each, splitting the home time between both bodies. This type of switcher would follow the same schedule every day, but alternate days as for which body would be awake in each phase of the day.

The generations who switched usually did not feel revulsion against having sex with their other body. Indeed, not only did most of them learn masturbation as teens or pre-teens using their other body as a sex toy, but they did so in both bodies, and in doing so learned which kind of sex they liked more. Some of them grew out of this as adults, but many continued doing it until they started living together with a potential spouse, confirmed bachelors (a term which was now not gender specific) doing so all their lives. It was hard for me to find this information because people tended not to talk about it, but I found sources which documented the behavior.

As people replaced their furniture, bunk beds were more common (even for adults). There were bunk full, queen, and king-sized beds for married/engaged/otherwise cohabiting couples (4 bodies), and traditional twin-size bunks for single people. You could still buy single beds, but they fell into various niche markets: the poor (who naturally ended up with poorly made beds), single full-sized beds for single people who slept beside (and it is assumed often had sex with) their other sleeping body, and the rich who had enough space for their two selves to have separate bedrooms.

As you might well expect, dating was weird now. Any person could theoretically date any other person, if they aligned their changes so they were in their preferred forms together. But there were a lot more types of preferences. Some people only wanted to date while they were male, others while they were female, and some only wanted to date males, others only females. Still other people dated in both forms, most of them looking for someone aligned to the opposite sex. Some people dated in both forms, but would only have sex in one form. Some didn’t care, and were happy to engage in both same-sex and opposite-sex dates and sex. And there were still gays, who wanted to date someone while they were the same sex.

But even the ones who only wanted to date in one form appreciated the fact that if they started living with someone, they would live with them in both forms. So the custom among those who lived in one primary sex is that if they enjoyed two dates enough to keep dating, they’d have a third date in the other forms; for many people, this meant that date would occur in the middle of the night, because overnights were the only time those used those other bodies, but that was OK now.

When the second generation started dating, a system of cues developed to help people identify compatible partners. People wore colored ribbons to indicate both that they were looking for a partner, and to give some idea of what they wanted and their switching behavior. Male bodies wore it pinned to a lapel, and female bodies usually tied it in their hair.

• White ribbons were for those who stuck with a single gender most of the time and only used the other overnight, and weren’t interested in doing anything romantic with that other form.
• Blue ribbons indicated one-day switchers, who generally tried to sleep the same times each day, but with 3 switches a day, alternated which form was awake in those sessions.
• Green and red ribbons indicated two-day switchers, who did 3 switches every two days on long cycles; the two colors indicated what phase they were in (green if they were about to sleep after the date, or red meaning they just woke up).
• Orange ribbons indicated weekly switchers who swapped gender over the weekend.
• Violet ribbons indicated those who wanted “switcher dates,” longer ones where they’d both switch before the date was through.
• Black ribbons were people only looking for a one-night stand in their current form.
• Yellow ribbons were open to different options, and were usually bisexual in at least one form.
• There were still gay and lesbian bars, but outside of such places, people who wanted to engage in sex only or primarily in sex-same arrangements identified by using a rainbow ribbon in the place of the white one, or wearing a rainbow pin along with one of the other ribbon colors.

A ribbon sporting a checkerboard pattern (black and one of the other colors) meant somebody who switched outside the typical patterns, or irregularly. If you were such a person or were going to date such a person (they usually dated one another, so both of these conditions applied to the same people), it meant you accepted you would sometimes be living with your date’s same-sex form and sometimes with their other-sex form. The color code was altered in this case:

• White meant you only dated/had sex in the form you were currently in, and green meant you used both forms, both with a rainbow pin if appropriate.
• Blue meant you only wanted to date or have sex with a partner while she was a woman, and red meant you only wanted a man, though you’d date and/or have sex with them in both your forms.
• Yellow meant you were open to either gender, in either form, a complete omnisexual.

For the most part, people looked for people of an appropriate gender wearing the same type of ribbon. It helped everybody avoid wasting time on people whose sexual or switching practices didn’t agree with what they were looking for. Certain combinations of different colors were compatible, depending on how strict each person felt about their behavior. But of course, love conquers all. If you happened to find the perfect mate except that your switching practices didn’t sync up in a way that partner could accept, you might change those switching practices to make it so.

Times changed, mainly in the world better adapting to more things, including dating, being a 24-hour thing and so possibly happening during the traditional working hours, overnight, etc., but the ribbon code mostly persisted.

My Life

From my teen years onward, I was a checkered-yellow type. I might go out as a guy or a girl, pick up a guy or a girl, have any kind of sex, and depending on whether I went to my date’s place or brought my date home, I might also have sex with their other form or in my other form. The only thing I didn’t do was the violet ribbon behavior of bringing your other body with you in the car, so that both me and my date could swap one or more times during an overnight or weekend-long date in order to try sex in all combinations. In part, I did that to also try looking for another ethertraveler, but not having found one, after a while I settled down with and ultimately married another checkered-yellow. We had three (pairs of) children, one borne by me and two by my mate.

I started working on an ether communicator, but I got distracted from that mission when the scientists here discovered something even the people of Earth didn’t understand, the principles behind quantum tunneling, and how it scaled up to the macroscale. Every single person here has quantum tunnels connecting their two bodies, arising from the connections between the two sperm and two eggs which incompletely separated and formed their two bodies. They found a way to visualize the tunnels.

And in fact there are 46 of these tunnels! Each chromosome pair, during the critical cell division which makes the linked-haploid sperm and egg cells, forms a quantum tunnel between them. As the paired fetuses develop, these tunnels shift around to various parts of the body. The bodies don’t need 46 separate connections, so many of them get deployed redundantly, allowing the bodies to continue to live in their shared way when a small number of them fail. Indeed, when they started analyzing people, they found that on average, starting around 30 years of age, a person loses one of these connections about every 10 years. A 50-year-old could be expected to be short 2 or 3 connections. A 70-year-old might lack 4 or 5 of them, but because the losses are typically scattered among various areas and not all in the same place, things still work. “Sleep discontinence”, the condition in which a person’s two bodies stop sharing wastes and each body would sometimes urinate or defecate while asleep, was explained as being due to the loss of all 4 connections transferring urine or all 4 transferring feces, which this theory expected would happen to 0.014% of people by age 80, and 0.05% by age 100, and this was pretty close to the actual rate. There were more than a dozen connections of the bloodstream, and a similar number in the brain, so loss of connection in these areas was astronomically rare.

The quantum tunnels grew along with the bodies, from the moment of conception, and it actually took considerable energy both to grow them and merely to keep them from collapsing. Each tunnel needed a continuous feed of energy from both ends to continue to exist, and it was thought to be momentary failure of this feed which caused the connections to fail. At the moment either body died, all the tunnels connecting the bodies collapsed, and the remaining body lived on, in the way a normal person would have before the change, sleeping about 1/3 of the time, eating and excreting only for itself, etc.

With careful nanoscale work, scientists figured out how to build artificial tunnels of this sort, and feed them at both ends to keep them alive. This allowed them to create faster-than-light communications, and only communications at first. The tunnels were just big enough to basically send a wire through. You could have run liquids through it, but slowly. They figured out how to scale them up, but the power required to build them scaled up with the fourth power of the diameter, and the power to maintain them scaled up with the cube of the diameter. Since the throughput only went up with the square of the diameter, the body was actually being more efficient by keeping multiple tunnels open.

They made them into human teleportation devices by basically having you stand inside a loop, and a device raised the hoop at the same time as a hoop at the other end of the tunnel was raised so you basically went from one platform to another just like it, but in another city. These teleporters took about as much energy to maintain, per tunnel, as flying a jumbo-jet once a day between the cities, but while that plane could transport maybe 150 people and their luggage, the teleporter could transport one person and their luggage every minute, or 9 times as many people when operated 24/7. It was much faster, even allowing for waiting time. Over my lifetime, these replaced airplanes as the primary means of long-distance travel. Just like with airplanes, you might need to make connections since they did not put transporters from every city to every other one, but usually you could get between major cities directly, and everything was located in centers that took the place of the old airports, so connections did not take long.

City pairs without a lot of travel might have only a single hoop used to send people both ways, but more commonly you had one for going to and one for coming from the same city. Smaller cities would have connections only to the nearest large cities. Large cities would have teleportation hubs that were large facilities, with connections to many nearby smaller cities and multiple connections to other large cities around the world. They added more as needed; they also could temporarily change some normally outgoing ones to inbound or vice versa to relieve travel loads. But instead of having to get to the transport center at a specific time when your flight was leaving, you could literally go any time and rarely wait in long lines.

But of course, travel around the world was not the only application. Pretty soon they were sending transporters to the moon, and sending supplies through to make the land there livable, as well as backup power sources if the ample solar cells and batteries failed. They were looking to do this on Mars as well. As long as they could keep it powered, they only needed to send a small craft to Mars with a teleport hoop attached to an airlock and a solar power station, and once it got there they could send all the other stuff through. But trying to figure out how to make Mars livable was a bigger thing. They sent one of these to Mars anyway - far fewer than they would ultimately want - to aid in research, and to test the viability of the delivery system for the transporter.

This was fascinating. Einstein’s theories allowed for the possibility that the speed of light could be surpassed on an overall scale by distorting space on the small scale. Quantum theory provided two ways to do that: quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement. I’d now seen both of these used and neither worked the way anybody might have predicted: Quantum tunneling was used by ether communication and ethertravel, allowing the transmission of data and of what it was that made up human consciousness over a distant connection to a suitable receiver (a specially crafted antenna in the first case, and a sentience-capable being prior to its acquisition of sentience in the other). Despite the name “tunneling”, macroscopic matter could not travel in this way; only subatomic particles, and they’d only been able to transmit what amounted to data. Quantum entanglement was a phenomenon people thought would only be capable of sending data, but on this world, it was found capable of creating wormholes which could, with suitable effort, be expanded to allow macroscopic matter to travel through them.

By getting involved with the people working on this quantum theory, I found other ethertravelers, and in a few years, when I was 40, I sent my report. I included details of the quantum teleportation technology used in hopes someone elsewhere can use it.