Ethertravel report #2, received February 12, 2417.

I, Johnny Tavaros, am an ethertraveler. I went out in one of the early groups in 2416.

I arrived into the world in a confusion of darkness and pressure. Was I not born yet?

I wanted to be born, and then I was. I burst out of what I realized had been an egg. I looked at myself and was surprised to see that I was myself. That is, I was still the human Johnny Tavaros. I arrived in the world fully clothed, in clothes I had owned on Earth. How was this possible?

I was in some kind of building, standing in what might be a sandbox, though there wasn’t much sand in it. There was a bipedal creature near me. It had a bird-like torso, topped with an almost bird-like head except it had a snout more like a dog’s. It had what looked like a rhino’s legs, and arms that looked like what a rhino might have had if it had hands with fingers suitable for grasping. It didn’t have any clothing.

It spoke, “Ooh, a strong one!”

Except it didn’t say that. It spoke in some other language. But I could somehow understand it as if it had said those words.

“Oh, boy. What is this place?” I responded.

“Ooh, and a smart one. You are going to do well, my son.”

This creature, I learned, was my mother. She didn’t answer my question, but I felt like she understood it.

A father showed up later in the day. He looked basically like a scarecrow, if you had neglected to put any clothes on it and just bound the bundles of straw together with twine. None of it made any sense. How could those two creatures possibly have mated and produced an egg... much less an egg that had a duplicate of my body from Earth in it?

Some time later, Mother made a meal for us. She had a bin full of some kind of powder, and she was grabbing handfuls of it, doing something to them between her hands that I could not see, and turning them into pieces the size of corn kernels or peas. Each handful made pieces of a different color, shape, or both from the others, and after several such handfuls she had filled two plates with them, placing both at opposite sides of a table. There was what looked like a stone bench on one side of the table, and from somewhere she pulled a bundle of wood which somehow folded out into a stool which she sat in front of the other plate.

“Come and eat,” she said, again in some other language but I understood it as that.

So I sat on the stool, she sat on the bench, and when she picked up and ate bits of the food with her hand, I followed suit with the food on my own plate. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either. It had a taste to it, each color and shape of piece different from the others, but none of them specifically tasted like anything I knew. It was much like traveling to some foreign country whose food you aren’t familiar with and having only their food to eat, but food that they enjoyed.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what the customs might be here, but figuring it could not hurt.

The response was more “Enjoy your food” than “You’re welcome” but I continued eating.

When we were half through, Father came and joined us, just standing next to the table. His meal was different; it consisted of small leaves and twigs. But he opened a mouth which cut through the vertical pieces of straw making up his head, and ate them just the same.

About the time I felt like I couldn’t eat any more, I discovered that there wasn’t any more on my plate.

Mother took her plate and mine away, while Father continued eating until he had cleared his plate, and he put his own plate away.

They weren’t very talkative, but a little while later Mother said something I understood as “Time for bed.” She led me into a single large bedroom, which had a bed of stone I assumed was for her, one covered in leaves for him, and a notable empty space. Father came behind us carrying a large bundle of wood, and he laid it in the empty space and somehow arranged the pieces into a large, flat, solid platform of wood. Clearly this was my bed.

We all got into our respective beds, and I didn’t see how it was done, but the light in the room dimmed to almost nothing. After several minutes my eyes adjusted and I could see Mother’s form lying on the bed next to me and a bit of Father beyond her.

My hard wooden bed wasn’t very comfortable, and I found myself wishing it was softer, and after a bit it felt like it was, and I fell asleep.

When I awoke the next morning, I discovered why the bed felt softer. It had transformed into a proper Earth bed with a mattress and box spring. Had I done that? I must have; I can’t imagine the natives knew what an Earth bed looked like. And indeed, when they discovered my new bed, Mother and Father both got very excited, and they basically told me to keep doing what I did.

What did I do? I wished myself a better bed, apparently. So I can just wish myself stuff here? Not exactly, as it turns out. What I can do is transform things into other things.

This is why mother started with a pile of dirt or sand for making the food. We can’t make stuff out of nothing, only transform things into other things.

When they gathered for their first meal of the day, this time while Mother and Father made their own meals, they gave me an empty plate and a bowl of the stuff that looked like dry sand.

Mother said, “Why don’t you try making what you would like to eat?”

Seeing how they didn’t use any utensils here, I tried making a burger and fries. The burger came out way too small and with all the parts mixed together, and they saw from my reaction that it wasn’t what I wanted.

“Don’t worry, son, you can just crumble it up and try again.”

I picked up the burger-thing and squeezed it in my hands several times like you might do with a lump of clay, and this time I made just the burger bun, two properly formed pieces of thick, soft bread, and laid them side-by-side on my plate. I liked hot sauce on my burgers rather than ketchup or mustard, and I wondered how that was going to go. Maybe I could learn how to make a bottle of hot sauce I could pour onto it, but for now I just grabbed a smaller bit of the sand and made a glob of hot sauce which stuck to my hands. I wiped most of it onto the buns and licked off what was left over.

I repeated the process to make the burger patty, lettuce, tomato, and onions, put the top bun on, and then made a pile of fries to go next to it. It looked pretty good. They had their food already and we went to the table to eat. Surprisingly, it tasted good, too. Just like the real thing.

We ate our meals, and put the plates away. Then they took me outside for the first time.

Outside

There was an amazing landscape, but it looked like a hundred different artists had each made their own little section in their own style. Up in the sky, the colors above each plot merged into a uniform light brown. There were likewise as many different styles of people as there were people, each one of them seemingly made out of a different material or combination thereof. The buildings were actually more uniform, in that each seemed to be made of several slabs of stone which had been cut to precisely fit together except for arbitrary overhang on the roof, though each slab was unique and it was still the case that no two buildings looked alike.

They led me through a town, and I noticed signs labeling the roads, which I memorized. They were again written in some foreign language, I think different languages, but again I could somehow read them as if they were all written in English, with simple English names like Meadow Street and Rock Lane and such. Those roads were just well trod dirt paths, but the signs indicated they were clearly thought of as official roads, nevertheless.

Finally we stopped at a building with a sign on it, labeled (in some language) Registry, and went inside. There was a couple apparently being served and I followed the lead of Mother by sitting in a chair to wait. Just like everything else, there were about a dozen chairs made of different materials. Father didn’t find one he liked, though, and put his hands on one that appeared to be made of rattan and turned it into one made of tree branches and with the seat and back covered in leaves.

When the other family left, Mother and Father led us to where a baboon-like person who apparently worked here had been helping the other family. The baboon stood behind a counter that looked like something you might find in any government office that served people, if the people working here had had to make it themselves out of whatever materials they had at hand.

Mother said, “We are here to register our son, who was born yesterday.”

She pushed me forward so I was standing directly in front of the ape, while they each took a step back.

“Welcome to the world,” the ape said, in a different language but nevertheless one I understood.

He pulled a sheet of blank paper from under the counter. I was sure it was blank when he started holding it up, but he held it between his hands in front of me and then there was a picture of my face in the middle of the page, and some lines above it.

Then he said, “Mother’s name?”

Mother said, “Geera.”

The ape had pulled out a pen, and dipped ink from an inkwell, and wrote the name on the page, again in a language that I could somehow read. I thought it was the same language as the Registry sign, though I wasn’t sure how I knew that.

“Father’s name?”

Father, who I hadn’t heard speak at all so far, made a rustling noise which I somehow heard as “Harvietto.”

“Child’s name?”

Mother said, “Go ahead and choose a name for yourself.”

So I said, “Johnny.”

“Address?”

Mother said, “Twenty Garnet Road.”

When the ape finished writing, he pulled out something that looked like a big ink pad, and he led me through placing my entire hand against the pad and leaving a big hand print at the bottom of the page. Then he switched something on the ink pad, had me place my hand against it again, and all the leftover ink came off and stuck to the pad. He flipped the paper over and had Mother and Father come up and make their own prints, which only looked like hand prints in that they had a palm and a set of fingers.

The ape put the paper aside and asked if we needed anything else and Mother said no, and we left. Mother led us back home.

When we were back home, I asked Mother about the different languages.

“A long time ago, people could only communicate with people who could speak the same language. Everybody had to learn one of those languages and it took years, and then they could still only communicate with some people. About 200 years ago somebody invented a translator. It allowed people in his city to automatically understand any written and spoken language. It was very popular and he made more of these devices so that everybody in the world could use them.”

“What happens when they break?”

“Every city has a backup and when one breaks, he remakes it.”

“The same man? He’s still alive?”

“People don’t die unless they want to. Somebody near us did and we were chosen to have a child to replace him, and that’s you.”

“What would happen if the translator maker decided to die?”

“We don’t let him. We know the translator is important for our life, especially since it allowed us all to speak our own natural languages and still be understood, so we keep him happy. It’s a tradition that every person gives him a gift after they figure out their own life. You will someday make a pilgrimage to visit him and give him your gift.”

“What kind of gift?”

“It could be anything. Painting, construction, an original invention of your own. Whatever makes you unique and is something you can give away.”

“Does he have a line of visitors every day giving him gifts?”

“No, it’s only once per lifetime, and we only make new people here to replace ones who die, so he only gets about 10 gifts a day. It’s enough.”

That was the end of that conversation, and they gave me a bowl of sand to make what I wanted out of. I guess they expected me to make toys or something, so I did.

Changing

Awhile later, Mother announced it was time to change.

“Change what?” I asked, seeing that they didn’t wear any clothes, so it wasn’t that.

“Change our bodies. We have to change our bodies once a day to renew them.”

Without further explanation, Mother demonstrated by example. She stepped into a big sandbox, bigger than the one I had been born in and with a lot more sand in it. She picked up two handfuls of sand, twirled around, shimmered, and changed into a more fully birdlike shape, including the legs and wings, though she still had hands at the end of the wings and a doglike snout. She shook herself a bit and shook out lots of sand, which I estimated to be about three times the amount she had picked up.

Then she said, “This is my traveling form. In this shape I can fly long distances. I used this form and another similar one to fly to his home far from here. It took 3 days of flying each way.”

“What was your gift?”

“I made a necklace with a pendant that seems impossible.”

“Impossible how?”

“It looked like you could see through the center, but it was upside down.”

Well I knew how that could work with lenses, but I asked, “How did it work?”

“A special kind of glass.”

Right. She discovered lenses.

Father went into the sandbox, and grabbed sand in his straw-hands. He didn’t spin, just sort of made a cloud of dust for a moment, and changed into a form which looked more like a tree. He had two roots for legs, two stout branches for arms, and above his face the trunk split quickly into many small branches covered in leaves. I had seen trees that looked somewhat like this during my walk, but the leafy part of those trees was much bigger.

“So you like plants, Father.”

“Yes.”

This was only the second time I heard him speak, and he only managed one word each time. But now it was my turn to change.

“I can make any kind of body?”

“There are some limits. You can’t be too small or too big. You can’t have more than four limbs, one head, or one tail. As you have seen with us, most people pick a theme that they are comfortable with. You do not have to stay with the kind of body you were born in, though. Feel free to experiment. Also, when you change size, you either pull the sand beneath you into your body, or spill extra sand out at the end, but it’s normal to pick up two handfuls of sand to ensure you replace some of your body material, even if you are becoming smaller.”

One thing I had noticed was that I was the only person wearing clothes, or at least obviously so. The others were made out of whatever material, such as rock, grass, animal flesh, and so on, but unless they had a natural covering of leaves, fur, hair, or feathers, they were not covered at all. One thing they didn’t have, though, were genitals. Some of the bodies I’d seen would very clearly have had something there if they had anything, and they didn’t. So I decided my next form was going to be a naked man. I put genitals on him because that was part of my image of a man, but I added enough pubic hair to hide them, and a typical amount of hair that someone would consider hairy elsewhere. And I made him strong and muscle-bound, because I could.

I stepped into the box, grabbed all the sand I could, and with a clear mental image of what I wanted to become, willed my body into that shape. This body was much more massive than my old one, and I felt the sand flowing up from the box along my body as I changed. When the sand settled, I looked down at myself and it looked like it had worked.

“Nice one, son.”

Mother took me out later in the day, nowhere in particular, but showed me around the neighborhood. Rather than heading quickly for a destination, as in my first outing, we seemed to wander, and I had plenty of time to look around. I learned the names of all the nearby streets, and got more time to examine the people. In addition to the kinds I saw before, there were people who seemed to be made of metal, clay, dirt, gemstones, and still more materials. Those with ordinary flesh were based on a great variety of different animals, many of which I couldn’t positively identify, but I could still loosely associate with some animal I knew.

There weren’t any stores. But when you could just make anything, who needed stores? Apart from the registry, the only buildings I saw all seemed to be houses where people lived, unless you counted the sand pits. We passed two open spaces, like somewhat parks but with a lot of exposed dirt in addition to grassy areas. Each had some three-sided structures, open on one side and the top, where piles of the same dry sand which we used to make both our food and ourselves were kept. The structures were each about the size of one room of our house, but only half as tall, so I was able to see over them in this body. It seemed obvious this was a storage area to help anyone who ran out of sand, and possibly a place to dump excess.

We had another meal later. I tested and confirmed I was able to make the sand into a metal fork and knife, so this time I made myself a T-bone steak with some grilled veggies on the side. And yes, the steak with bone came out all in one piece. When I was done eating, my mother realized the bone and utensils weren’t meant to be eaten, and suggested turning them back into sand over the food supply bowl, which I did.

Soon after that it was time for bed again. Apparently they only ate two meals a day here. Mother, now in a form much more birdlike than before, remade her bed into a giant bird’s nest, looking a lot like it was made of Father’s body from the previous day.

The Third Day

The next morning, realizing that it was possible to make composite materials and that perhaps the burger was just too complicated for me, I made a plate of rice and then packets of orange sauce which I opened and poured over the rice. I recycled the packets along with more sand as I made the pieces of duck meat and veggies to add to the meal, and again a fork which was recycled at the end of the meal. Not chopsticks; though I enjoyed Chinese food, I wasn’t any good with them.

When it was time to change, Mother returned to something similar to how I first saw her, and Father turned into a dense bundle of vines which was shaped like a person.

I figured that since I had already made an ideal of masculinity, why not an ideal of femininity? It would help me explore how far I could take a single change. I pictured in my mind a voluptuous, shapely woman, with large, firm breasts, and of course pubic hair covering her genitals. Though I had not made her excessively skinny, she still weighed a lot less than the man, so when I turned into her, there was a cascade of sand falling from where the male body had been, and I was now the woman I had pictured.

Of course, this was my first time actually being a woman, and the feel of the body was quite different, but I grew used to it quickly. And the people here had never seen a female human before, so any awkwardness I had with the body wasn’t noticed. The breasts were also something the people here didn’t have, naturally, since they didn’t breast-feed their children, but neither my parents nor any of the other people we saw outside looked at me in any way strangely for walking around with them exposed.

I talked with Mother later about the egg and got her to explain how it came to be.

“I think I told you that we were selected to have a child after someone died. Someone from the registry picked us, among the other couples living here who had not had a child yet, to be parents to a person to replace that one. After that it was up to us to actually produce the child. Anyone can do so, but it’s a law to only do so when selected because there is only room for so many people.”

That was enlightening. I had only seen a part of the town that I lived in so far, but apparently they thought the town was full.

“The forms I like are better suited at making eggs, so I became your mother and he became your father,” she continued, pointing at Father.

“So you could have done it the other way?” I asked.

“Yes, but he would have had to have chosen a different form, because grass and leaves do not lay eggs.”

She went on to describe the sexual organs they both had to make, without using a single term more sexual than “organ,” and the mating process, and somehow made it all sound dull. But it worked just like it seemed, however unlikely that looked. If I and some partner were selected to have a child, I’d choose one of the forms like I had today and yesterday, and my partner would choose a form of the opposite gender, and we’d mate in the way that I’d expect. The mating was always done just after changing. The mother would have to choose a female form again the next day, one well suited for laying a large egg, because before the second day was through, she would lay the egg, if the mating had been successful. If not, they would try again the next two days. If it failed a second time, one or both parents would choose a different form for the mating until it worked. She’d lay the egg, and it would incubate for several days and then hatch into a new person.

That was clearly why they had to restrict it. It was way too easy to make more people here.

Another thing that I picked up from this description is that they indeed usually didn’t make sexual organs, and as a result weren’t gendered at all, except when it came time to mate. I was getting male pronouns from the translation, but that was the generic male. “He” could apply to any person here. I wrote my description using the pronouns which felt right to me.

I wasn’t sure I could make truly genderless human bodies, but I could omit the sexual organs. It was clear I was only going to need them for very special occasions, and the other excretory organs located next to them in humans were not used at all here. The people here dispose of their wastes by remaking their bodies once a day.