Historical Changes

Later in high school, I had a chance to choose a 20th-century subject for a paper for history class, and I chose to research and write about the impact of the Change on the clothing industry. This was a way I could incorporate studying the Change in my schooling while maintaining long-term focus on making the ether device. Some of it was predictable given what changed, but it was interesting nonetheless. I’ve included a version of it here, just slightly edited for an Earth audience.

The Change caused chaos in the clothing industry. Overnight, most men’s shirts became too small for them, and going up a size was only a short-term solution; those shirts were the wrong shape. So men started raiding women’s clothing departments for shirts that fit their new bodies, especially the plus-size departments, since men tended to be larger than women. Most of them also needed bras, and again the plus-size departments were heavily hit. An average sized woman might wear a 34C bra, but for a man a more typical size was 42D.

A month or two after the change, it was impossible to find bras, women’s T-shirts, women’s fitted shirts, and women’s suit jackets in XL or 18 or larger sizes, or any W size, anywhere. Stores had completely sold out and were back-ordered for months.

Meanwhile, there were piles of men’s shirts and jackets that could not be sold, since there were no longer people who fit into them. They could not be easily adapted to fit, because the difference between a shirt designed for a flat-chested man and one for a body with breasts that protruded by 3 inches was a completely different shape to the parts that made up the front of the shirt. It would have required cuts and inserted pieces across the front of the shirt. Still, for shirts in solid colors, local tailors did this anyway, using one garment to provide the extra pieces needed in three or four others, to make clothes available sooner to men who needed them.

The clothing manufacturers worked hard to retool their production lines to make clothes that would fit the new men, but it typically took a month to get the changes in place, another month to make a reasonable supply of clothes, and up to a month to ship them out to stores. So after the change in August, 1966, it was not until November that supplies of the new clothes were widely available. Many men made do with less than a week’s supply of whatever they could get their hands on until proper supplies became available.

It didn’t end there, because many of the men found the new clothes they had back-ordered didn’t fit well. Bras were generally good, since they were sized in actual inch measurements with adjustable straps. T-shirts, which were made of stretchy fabrics and sized in S-M-L-XL type sizes, usually fit OK. However, the fitted shirts and suit jackets were based on arbitrary size numbers loosely based on women’s dress sizes. Different manufacturers’ garments differed by as much as two inches in some dimensions for the same size number. While women had put up with this for generations (and what’s more, the definitions of the sizes changed over time), men put an end to this. New sizing was introduced early in 1967 with “B” sizes (for bust) based on the circumference around the bust, the limiting factor in such clothes. The neck size (for collared shirts a man might wear a tie with) and sleeve length were also given as secondary measurements. With an easy conversion from bra size to bust measurement available, women quickly accepted the new sizing.

Another small change made at this time was a standardization of the bra cup sizes above D. For some manufacturers, DD was a half-size above D; for others, it was a full size up, equivalent to E. There were similar variations with DDD and EE, which might or might not be equivalent to F. The few manufacturers who had regularly made bras in sizes larger than F were already using the rule that each letter was an inch difference between bust and band size, and this was adopted to be the universal system. If you wanted to make a half-cup-size bra, it was labeled D½ if it was a half-size above D, which was a strange notation but an unambiguous one. The only exception permitted was that AA was retained for the half-inch size smaller than A of some training bras, since A½ meant one-and-a-half inches.

Men’s pants were pretty much unchanged, but women’s penises kept them from wearing the most fitted styles. Skirts and dresses weren’t affected, but women’s pants and panties were designed for the flat front of women’s pelvises before the change. The penis ruined that in two ways: It interfered with the smooth look, and it possibly protruded above the waist of very low-cut styles. The low-cut pants were out, but they made up a small fraction of the clothes available. So while women had to discard some of their clothes, most had enough to get by, and the existing stocks sufficed in most sizes. However, the next generation of pants and panties were made with enough space for a woman’s penis.

The sizing changes carried over to pants as well. Women complained that if manufacturers can label our tops with measured sizes, they should be able to do the same for our pants. When the new styles with more penis space came out, they were sized by waist and hip measurement, as well as inseam length, much like men’s pants except for the extra hip measurement. Even skirts and dresses adopted the new sizing by 1968, abandoning the single dress size number and using new measured sizes based on whatever part of the body they were most fitted around. A B number indicates a bust size, T indicates a torso size (the same measurement called band size in bras, but with a T to be unambiguous), W a waist size, and H a hip size, along with N for the neck size, S for the sleeve length, and L for the inseam length of pants.

There was a long term impact as well, as a result of cultural changes stemming from the Change. While women still tended to own more clothes than men and more often follow changing fashions, a greater number of women opted for more practical clothes, and fewer of them. It also became acceptable for men to wear dresses, particularly in styles which accentuated the breasts. In the mid 1970s manufacturers tried making dresses specifically for men, but they did not sell well; instead, men opting to wear dresses simply shopped for them in plus-size women’s departments, focusing on styles which were not fitted around the waist and hips. As a result of these trends going in opposite directions, the fraction of the clothing market attributed to clothes bought to be worn by women was reduced from 74% in 1965 to 62% in 1980. However, due to the men buying plus-size women’s dresses, the fraction of clothes sold in women’s departments was 71% in 1980, barely a change.

I had a page of citations from various books, newspapers, and magazines, which had me learning how to use odd technologies like microfiche, which prints newspaper or magazine pages at tiny scale on little transparency sheets each about the size of a paperback book page, with maybe 15-20 newspaper pages or 50-60 magazine pages per sheet. An entire magazine is reduced to only a few of these sheets and a newspaper to 10-20 of them. A reader projects light through them and magnifies the image onto a built-in screen to read them at something close to the original size. It’s also possible to print them. The whole technology would go obsolete 20 to 30 years from now if we followed the path of old Earth, when the pages were digitized into computer files accessible on the Internet from anywhere. I got an A on the project, and also helped fill in my understanding of the Change.

Half a dozen other kids also did work on the Change, and my teacher put us all in contact with one another since it was clear we were all interested in it. We traded papers around and got to read everybody else’s work, and I actually made copies of all the other students’ papers at ten cents a page. We had computers now, but still pretty crude ones and nothing I’d consider reliable enough for me to base a life-long record-keeping system on them. And I didn’t have a computer with a scanner hooked up anyway. So for now, it was still paper records. And before I distributed my paper to this group, I attached an extra page with a copy of a picture of one of those 70s dresses designed for men, upon which I’d replaced the original caption with “Mikhail Gregorevich design of 1974” on the off chance one of my fellow ethertravelers was among this group. Things had changed so much here already that there were any number of famous names I could drop from old Earth who weren’t known at all here, but it was better to use a name that would be prominent in the mind of every ethertraveler. But I got no comment on it.

One kid wrote on how the Change had caused the Vietnam War to end abruptly. In history class, we had glossed over this, only saying that a peace settlement ended the war in 1966. His paper gave the details we’d missed: The soldiers, who were all men on both sides, couldn’t fit into their gear anymore! Starting the first day people had changed, there was an effective cease fire as a result. But each side was afraid the other would get new gear first and run roughshod over them before they were ready! So in late August 1966 the two sides made a quick peace deal to let each side control whichever land they currently controlled, dividing up contested lands. He commented, prophetically, that were it not for the Change, the war might have gone on many more years, and I know on old Earth it lasted nearly another decade.

Another reported on rape. Before the change, rape was the problem it had been on old Earth in this era. It was now almost unheard of, and when it happened, a woman was usually the rapist. Reports of men forcefully implanting eggs into women were exceedingly rare, in part because it required specific timing, in part because they would have had to be penetrated by women first, and in part because most of the ones who might have done it got swept up in that National Guard action of 1966-67 and similar actions in other countries.

And another reported on surrogates. Unwanted pregnancy had dropped considerably after the Change, so the pool of potential adopted children had also shrunk. This led to what they now call adoptive surrogacy, in which women who are unable to bear their own children for one reason or another would pay to have the eggs of desirable couples implanted into them, keeping the child when it is born. “Desirable” usually meant either that they had a similar appearance to the receiving family, so that the children would look like they fit in, or they had what they considered “good genes”, though at this time they didn’t have the kind of genetic knowledge that would really ensure that, and it simply meant they were tall, muscular, or good looking. There was also what they considered standard surrogacy, in which a woman who is able to impregnate a man but is unable or unwilling to carry and birth the child pays to have another woman to do so, taking the child from the surrogate after its birth. It was possible, but rare, to do both, to pay a couple to create a desirable egg and pay another woman to carry and birth the child.

While I was doing the research, at one point I stopped to look up the anatomy and figured out what was happening with the egg in my butt. The male penis/ovipositor was designed to latch onto the cervix and push its egg through. When it was inserted anally, it latched onto the sphincter which separates the colon from the rectum, and pushes the egg up into there. That was why I had such a hard time getting it out; I was having to push it back through there in addition to pushing it the entire length of my rectum and out my anus, which was a similar sort of sphincter. I’d gotten better at it over time as I learned to open that sphincter better.

College

Eddie and I kept dating and fucking through the end of high school, but we were going off to different colleges, so we agreed to end the relationship at the end of that summer.

Grayson College was a prestigious school, one that had been renamed in 1966 for one of its students, Linda Grayson, after she had been brutally murdered by her boyfriend. Previously it was named for its founder, but a descendant of that founder who bore the founder’s name was Linda’s murderer. Suddenly nobody wanted to have that name! Another side-effect of the Change.

At one time I was trying to list all the things that changed because of the Change, but it was too much. I encountered dozens of such changes every single day, and in every new place I visited. I couldn’t even consider changes happening now relative to the Earth I knew. Things have changed so much that even what they are changing relative to has already changed. While large-scale things like the countries of the world are still mostly the same, to a large degree my world was gone. The history I learned was worthless for comparing with the world today. They elected a woman as US president here in 1972; it took my Earth several decades past that to do so.

People had done away with the terms “coed” and “coeducational school” around 1970. It was now assumed every school would admit men and women. But they still kept us segregated in different dorms here, even now in 1990, though I know that wasn’t the case at some colleges. As an incoming freshman I was assigned a roommate, a girl named Carla, and she was an E cup, so I was attracted to her from first sight, though I didn’t speak about it the first day. Our first night going to bed (in our separate beds, of course!) we set an alarm for 6:00. There were no classes yet, but there were a bunch of activities planned.

At 6, we woke up, Carla shut off the alarm, and for a moment our eyes locked. I was staring at her boobs, only barely concealed under her nightgown, and she was clearly staring at me, maybe not necessarily at my boobs, but more than an innocent glance. I continued staring and licked my lips. She licked hers as well.

I lost track of the exact sequence of events, but we were together in the middle of the room kissing, fondling each other’s breasts, dropping our nightgowns, and finally sucking from each other’s breasts, pleasantly surprised to find we both were lactating in quiescent mode.

At 6:20 we realized we had done nothing productive but get out of bed, and we broke our make-out session, found our robes and shower gear, and went down the hall to the shower. We completed that without incident, came back, got dressed, and went down to breakfast.

We sat next to each other, and while we engaged in idle conversation and introductions with other students, Carla and I were passing notes to each other under the table. I revealed I like big boobs, whether they were on a man or a woman. She revealed she likes good-looking women, but it had to be women, because she likes sex in her vagina. Of course, the way men work in this world, they can’t do much of anything there on a regular basis, and not at all if you don’t want to get pregnant. Condoms existed before the change, but they didn’t help now because the ejection of the egg was forceful enough to break them, and that was also true for the substitutes they tried. The ones that worked were so thick that nobody used them.

Unsurprisingly, before bed that night I was fucking her that way. Make that every night, always my penis in her vagina. Same for the breasts each morning. She’d had a girlfriend from the time she started producing milk until she left for school here, so, like me, she’d kept her breasts from going dormant. We called this milk our pre-breakfast. It worked for me, though after a couple weeks of drinking each other dry every morning, our breasts went fully active, and we had to put a limit on it because there was too much milk.

A side effect of this was our breasts got larger; I had to switch to a D cup and Carla to an F. I didn’t mind my girlfriend having bigger boobs! We went bra shopping together Labor Day weekend. It was a lot of fun getting to go into a little room with my girlfriend and having both of us topless while trying on bras, especially since her boobs were the feature I liked the most. No sucking, though; we couldn’t let any milk get on the bras. They actually issued us small disposable nipple pads when we went in, with a ring of adhesive around the edges and absorbent material in the middle. Apparently it was common enough that breasts leaked that it made sense for them to do this. I know similar things existed on old Earth, since some women who were breast-feeding did have this problem, but I don’t think they gave them out when you were trying on bras.

Three months in, one night Carla was telling me about the number of times she had been hit on by guys. Only a couple girls, but easily two dozen guys already by that point.

“It’s because of your boobs, girl! Even though these guys have had their own since you had yours, guys still love boobs, and your F cups are near the top of the scale on girls who aren’t fat.”

“I guess you’re right. I see every girl on our hall naked in the shower at some point or other, as well as my whole PE class, and while I don’t go comparing them on purpose, and excluding, as you suggested, two fat girls, I think there isn’t one as busty as me among, what, 70 girls in that group?”

“Yeah. That’s what I was saying.”

“Crap, I didn’t ask to be this way! What do you want me to do?”

“Maybe you can invite one of them over, but tell him he’ll have to share. You could fuck him while I’m fucking you. If he happens to have an egg to lay, I’ll take it in my ass.”

“In your ass?”

“Yeah. My high-school boyfriend did that and I enjoyed it. The pooping it out afterward wasn’t so great, but the feeling popping it in was amazing.”

“Wow. I never even thought of doing that.”

“Well, you didn’t have a boy to lay eggs for you.”

“True. OK, so I’ll try to find one of these boys who’s not completely objectionable and invite him over with that caveat.”

It was a month before she found one that passed her tests, but that was how I met Fred.

By this point, usually on nights before school days we sucked nipples in the morning, and before bed we did that again along with sex until I came in her vagina. Weekends, if we didn’t have some event going on (which happened more often than not; there was no lack of social events in college), I’d hold back my come as long as I could and we’d have three or four sessions of up to a half hour each over the evening. But one Saturday, she’d invited Fred over.

At 7:30 Carla went down to let Fred in. They didn’t allow outsiders to roam the dorms freely, even students who lived in other dorms. He showed up on time, so a couple minutes later she was back with him.

“Fred, I’d like you to meet Jessica, my roommate.”

“Oh, uh... Hi, Jessica!”

I extended a hand, but Fred didn’t come in. Carla practically had to drag him in behind her, and then I was finally able to shake his hand. “Hi, Fred. Nice to meet you, and welcome to our room.”

While I was doing this, Carla closed the door, and Fred jumped back.

“Oh!”

“No need to be alarmed, Fred,” Carla reassured him. “We have to have privacy, after all.”

“We’re going to do it in here? With Jessica here?”

“I told you you were going to have to share me, Fred.”

“Oh, but I thought you meant with another guy.”

“So innocent. That’s why I liked this one, Jessica.”

“Where did you find him? Did he really ask you out?”

“He did! Tell her, Fred.”

He stuttered for about 30 seconds before finally saying, “I passed her a note in Calculus.”

“You did!” Carla confirmed. “It said ‘I think you’re really pretty and I’d like to go on a date with you. Fred’”

“And how did you respond, Carla?”

Before she could answer, Fred pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It read, “OK, but you’re going to have to share me. Saturday, 7:30, Forster B entrance. Carla”

“So, you did tell him he was going to have to share. But he doesn’t know. Fred, what do you like about Carla?”

He stuttered for a bit.

“Hey, we’re all friends here,” Carla said encouragingly. “You can say anything about me, and whatever it is I am sure will be fine.”

“C- C- C- Carla, it’s your, your b- boobs.”

“Well that makes two of us then!” I responded.

“R- really?”

“Well, I met Carla because we got randomly assigned to be roommates. But we got involved because what I like most in a partner, man or woman, is big boobs. And Carla sure has them!”

“OK. I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

Carla laughed, “I get somebody new asking me out 2 or 3 times a week because of them!”

“H- How many of those guys did you date?”

“None of them. I tried dating both guys and girls in high school, and found what really gets me off is sex in my vagina, and only girls can regularly do that for me.”

“So why did you agree to date me? I’m not a girl, and I don’t have boobs as big as even Jessica’s, so I am not sure I have anything to offer either of you.”

“Jessica encouraged me to give it another try. And I wanted to find a guy who I thought I might be able to actually like as a guy. Too many of them are trying too hard to impress girls.”

I chimed in, “Also, I would love it if you lay your egg in my ass once Carla fertilizes you.”

“Wh- what? In your ass?”

“Well, yeah. I don’t actually want to get pregnant. I had a boyfriend in high school who did that and I found it was the best feeling ever, and he enjoyed doing it every two weeks.”

“Ev- every two weeks? Oh, yeah...”

“Did you ever have a girlfriend before, Fred?”

“Sort of. My parents set me up with a date for the prom, and we had sex afterwards because it seemed like it was traditional. But she moved away after graduation, so we only actually had sex one other time, and I laid eggs most of the summer after she was gone. Every two weeks.”

“Do you remember when you laid them, Fred? What day of the week?”

“Um, if they didn’t come out Sunday night, I woke up with a stiff dick Monday.”

“And you didn’t have a girl helping you with it, so that’s when the egg forced itself out?”

Fred nodded.

“That’s good. The egg’s actually ready two days before that, so you should be able to lay in me Saturday nights.”

Fred seemed to gulp at that.

“Don’t worry, that’s future stuff. Let’s just get you fertilized tonight.”

I started taking off my clothes, and that prompted Carla to do the same, and Fred realized he should follow along. In a few minutes we were all standing there naked, and it didn’t take long for me and Carla to get erect and for Fred’s vagina to open up.

“So, how do we go about this?” Carla asked.

I jumped up on my bed.

“I’ll lie against the wall here. Carla, you get up here in front of me, facing away, and I’ll fuck you from behind.”

That was a position we had used, so she didn’t hesitate to join in.

“Now Fred, you get up and face Carla.”

He had done this before, even if only twice, and at this point he seemed to overcome his shyness and join right in. There wasn’t a lot of room on the bed, but there was enough. He held onto Carla, which was a lot of fun for them both as their boobs rubbed together. Carla had to be the one to do most of the movement, moving back and down onto my dick at the same time she pulled out of Fred, and then into Fred and off me, while Fred and I tried to hold our positions.

It took us a while to really get into it, and it made for a slower style of sex than Carla and I usually practiced, so it was almost an hour before I finally came, which spurred Carla’s own ejaculation. Usually she didn’t ejaculate during these sessions, as her penis was not getting stimulated enough, but she did sometimes. Fred, meanwhile, had been getting the best of it; it was clear he’d had more than a dozen orgasms during this session.

There was a session of playing with and sucking breasts after this, and we got together for another fuck at the end of the night. We toweled off our sweat and cleaned ourselves up, and we thanked Fred for coming over. He left, and we went to take showers before bed.

This became our new norm. We tried to arrange a session like this every Friday or Saturday night. Sunday afternoon worked if we missed those. Four weeks after the first session, Fred did turn up with an egg-laying erection, and he laid it in me before we started. Inconveniently, our restrooms were down the hall, but I’d learned I rarely poop much actual poop along with the egg, so I did it on paper towels there in the room, and set it aside to crush later. Fred was also a freshman at this point, and the three of us stuck together all through college.

Calling Home

I didn’t locate any other ethertravelers during college, and Carla was too much of a liberal arts major to help, but Fred, my shy partner, had turned out to be quite the computer programmer, while I had gone more on the circuitry side of things, and as we neared graduation, I worked out a plan. First, I proposed marriage to him. We hunted for jobs where we could stay together, even if not at the same company, and succeeded. Though a lot of things were different, including the names of every successful company relevant to me in this field, Silicon Valley, or Silly Valley, as it was sometimes called back on old Earth, was still the tech center it was back there. Finally, and only at this point, I revealed the ethertravel secrets to him and engaged him as a full partner.

Fred definitely didn’t believe me at first, but he was perfect for the role. He was willing to humor me as, over ten years past college, I wrote and shared with him the equivalent of two physics textbooks of theory not yet developed here which led to the principle of the ether in the end. And at the end of all that, he believed me. And there was still no way to build the thing. The technology in 2000 was roughly comparable to that on old Earth at the same year. It would have taken a whole house of electronics to make the device, and we never could have aligned it precisely enough.

But we knew what we were doing, and Fred began work on the software components, while I designed the complex chips we did not yet have the technology to build. By 2010 we could purchase powerful enough computers to run a full scale simulation of what we were trying to do. We did, and showed it would work, IF we managed to build the device with suitable precision. 3-D printing was starting to become a thing, but it wasn’t precise enough, either. We needed 3-D microprinting, I realized. That would let us make one-off chips at the required precision. So we worked on that problem first, and made a fortune when our printers worked.

It was 2025 before we managed to produce a working ethercommunicator. I was only 53, younger than I thought I would be when I accomplished it, but I developed some novel techniques. We sent off our signal, and Earth confirmed receipt.