This wasn’t actually the first time nanites had been a terrorist threat - some Islam terrorist group had been trying to release a variation of GDD.
All it did was convert people into corpses. By eating their brains. Nanozombies. Urgh…

They wiped out the threat with massive a massive EMP - electro-magnetic pulse. Huge success. Nanobots all wiped out. No deaths. Pretty much a first for the US. *giggle*

After GDD, they tried the EMP solution.

It… didn’t work.

GDD sufferers (or GDD… infectees. You cant say Brit was suffering much…) were able to be grouped into 6 major categories. The first was… the kind that led to depression and suicide. The people who never adapted to the new them.

This was a huge 88% of sufferers. Which meant… thought pause for calculation… longer pause to bring up calculator application… about 19300 people had been led to GDDDD. Gender Displacement Disorder Depression Disorder. Yes. They used “disorder” twice. *sigh*

GDDMDD is the same as the above… this was the same as the last one, but it had a “manic” in it. About 0.5% of people wound up like this. Gibbering wrecks. Plain denial. Flat-out insanity. So about 110 people.

10% were in my group, GDDAS… Gender disp-blahdyblah acceptance syndrome. The people who got THIS form became essentially transsexuals. People stuck in the wrong body. These people were supported by TG groups because - among OTHER things - they proved how mental gender was, and not accepting these people as who they were before was, you know, discriminatory, and people were finding it hard to define the difference between GDDAS sufferers (yes, sufferers. Acceptance, no more) and born transexuals…

Of the last 1.5%, 1% were like Brittany and Lisa, embracing their new gender and enjoying it much more than being a boy. A lot of these guys and girls were TG in the first place, which is why they like it, but a few of them never considered anything like it and just enjoyed it hugely. This one was called GDDG. I have no idea what the second G stands for.

0.495%… were about halfway between GDDAS and the happy folks. No, not leprechauns. Or Irish people. Whatever. Happier than they were before, but still feeling conflicted and kinda confused about their gender identity, which was called GDDSG - I think the “s” was for semi. Still no idea what the G is.

0.005%… on one person…

… the… nanobots messed up. They called them a GDDAHH.

Nanobots… or nanites, whatever you want to call them, are seriously dangerous things. It’s pretty scary what they can do. Not just rewrite a person, but rewrite anything. If a confused GDD nanite found itself alone, it would build more of itself, using ANYTHING it came across, and it would eat people, houses, earth, stone… anything… making more.

It wouldn’t kill, though. It finds itself in another living being, it does the normal thing.

Turns them into the opposite gender.

And a human.

We were lucky GDD was only confined to Australia. And that it’s soooo slooooooow. But since 2004, the population of Australia increased a lot. We’d been forced to expand into the desert, but all the GDD animals were so discriminated against that more than 80% of them were murdered. They had cults after them. Unfortunately successful cults, because the government couldn’t afford to protect them. Even so, Australia’s population had gone up 10 million in 5 years. Can you say “overcrowding”? I’d say they were a minority… but they weren’t. They were a majority. One in three people in Australia nowadays wasn’t human 5 years ago. If it wasn’t for the cults, Australia’s population would be around… seventy million. These “demi-humans” were treated like a slave race.

It was horrible.

We thought we’d got past that. But Australian society proved us wrong.

I was ashamed to be part of the country… at least, I think I was… the shame of being me might have drowned it out.

A stroke of luck was that the nanobots in GDD animals completely wore themselves out, dying completely. It wouldn’t spread and they’d be immune to it from then on.

In 2007, one person, though… he got a slightly confused version of GDD.

He was hybridised (holy shit, that’s actually a word).

He… got crossed with a wild fox.

GDD did what it was meant to do - or what it was known to do, anyway. He wound up a she.

But… aw, screw it… in short, he got turned into what looked like a Japanese kitsune. A fox spirit.

He… she… had gone a bit weird. Oh, she wasn’t superhuman or anything, she was just a bizarre fox/human hybrid. Lab tests proved it, basically - she was just a human with a tail and fox ears.

She’d… started a religion. Or a cult. And she’d decided she was the leader of the GDD’d people and animals. Convinced she was an avatar of a god, and all the GDD-ificated people were her… uh, harbringers, I think she said… she’d… worked something out.

She said she’d worked out how to control the nanobots.

She threatened to release them on the entire world, unless they converted to the cult.

This wasn’t actually the first time nanites had been a terrorist threat - some Islam terrorist group had been trying to release a variation of GDD.

All it did was convert people into corpses. By eating their brains. Nanozombies. Urgh…

They wiped out the threat with massive a massive EMP - electro-magnetic pulse. Huge success. Nanobots all wiped out. No deaths. Pretty much a first for the US. *giggle*

After GDD, they tried the EMP solution.

It… didn’t work.

Electricity in small amounts accelerates nanobots, which is why they used those little shocks to blast me into the next gender - in larger amounts, though…

There were two things that could happen to the GDD nanites. Both bad news for us.

First case scenario - nanites got on an electricity high. They ran around completely randomly morphing everything - not even into recognizable things. Just grey-y browny gunk. Everything… people, animals objects, landscapes… Lotsa death. Woo!

Second scenario - the nanites exploded. Host dead. Anyone near them dead. Anyone within 50 metres dead. Anything within 100 metres infected with more nanites. Anyone within 400 metres deafened.

This is when the game designers figured GDD had been tampered with - they’d been using nanites, but an EMP stopped their ones in their tracks. And didn’t explode.

It had become a law to avoid making nanites EMP-proof - it was theoretically possible, but…

An EMP on someone already through the transformation won’t explode them. It’s just a guaranteed horrible melt to death. And goop.

If the nanobots were dormant, it was because it hadn’t spread through their body yet. So you could save them the melt by amputating.

Urgh.

Okay, back one step. So the Kitsune nut said she had modified GDD nanites to her own personal changes… but still had the explodyness and meltification of GDD, so…

… the government called her bluff.

Sort of.

She’d… had some problems.

She’d managed one “controlled” transformation.

And as a result, the issue of whether Australia could ever have a female prime minister became a moot point.

And the second kitsune was born.

Oh, they captured the original kitsune, and she was given life in prison for terrorism, or something.

The PM stood down when he first heard of the transformation. He went into hiding - which was definitely a good choice, given what the mobs wanted to do the original kistune. His… deputy prime minister? Whatever you call the backup. She took over.

She proposed new housing for the GDD animals. She proposed increased animal rights, because the GDDificated animals showed how intelligent they actually were. She would have proposed a third thing… but the riot smashed down the doors then.

She was lynched. Oh, sure, the leaders of the mob were arrested, but the conservative opposition party smashed them in the 2008 election, because they’d managed to pass a bill banning GDD animals from voting.

Gender Displacement Disorder victims - animals and humans alike - had almost no rights. If we were killed… unless someone, an unaltered relative… pressed charges, there was no punishment. As a result… animal GDDers were constantly at risk, constantly abused, and murdered daily. They looked like normal people, but their voices were… accented. By their former species.

They were raped and slaughtered en masse.

Anarchy reigned free, so QQ was set up. From the outside, it seemed to be an experimental facility - it was actually set up by a group of left-wingers who decided to form a safe colony for all of these sufferers. The total population of QQ was about 4 million - only 15,000 of which were originally human.

QQ wasn’t a slice of Melbourne. It was an entire city.

The six-million or so “free” GDD animals were constantly at risk, but in QQ it was safe.

It had been about 6 months now since the opposition claimed power. Slavery had happened. The 20% of surviving GDD animals… were nearly all kept as slaves.

Neither my father, mother, or anyone I’d call a friend had any, but… there were people at school who boasted about their slaves.

It was horrible.

The strain (is that accurate for bots?) of GDD capable of mutating animals to humans was wiped out by a huge EMP bomb. About 800 GDD’d humans were killed, and infected another 2000 or so. But the insane population growth had stopped - because the strain was dead. Most of the untransformed animals it was in were killed, but the already-transformed animals lived.

At least that was what I’d understood from the PowerPoint show the 40s-ish woman (Melissa, I think she was called) had shown us.

Like I (think I) said, I was vegetarian, and I was actually really interested in meeting some of the GDD animals. But the genocide caused by the Australian government sickened me.

The other people - i.e. everyone except me, Brit, Mike and Lisa, came back partway through the PowerPoint. It took me a little while to recognize them… Rachel (now Richard) had some serious stubble. He… was really tall. But…he… looked so sad. I could see him holding back tears.

He… hated who he was. I remember when I first became a girl, it wasn’t that big a deal, and Mike seemed to act the same way. Brittany was freaking ecstatic with her change. But…

… I… felt really sorry for Rachel.

It was a “her” behind all the stubble. She… was part of the depressive 88%. I wondered why I hadn’t seen anyone else acting like that before - granted, Leeroy was freaking suicidal at first, but… she’d adapted already. I wasn’t happy with this, but I was comfortable, I suppose.

Tom and Sam were completely female now. Tomi and Sammy (so original!) were more in disbelief than depression. Steven (Stephanie, now… for fu- fudge’s sake) looked… not happy, I suppose, more… a little irritated. At a guess, she was in the depressive 88%, but more angry than depressed.

But… Rachel… she was scared.

Trying to see the girl I’d seen before was even harder than trying to see Aaron in Lara. I… didn’t know what to do. I mean, as a girl now, I could’ve hugged her or something, but… seeing as she’s a guy, she might think I’m coming on to her. Eww. Yeah, I was still into girls.

I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. But I could feel her pain.

I actually was getting slightly more comfortable with “girl talk” , even though I had NO EXPERIENCE AT ALL. I’d underline that a few times if I could be bothered… it would’ve been faster to underline it than write this… eh.

Lisa was throwing herself into this whole-heartedly - figures she’d try to leave Leeroy behind ASAP. Tomi was… silent. Sammy - who now looked more like a cheerleader than me - was… acting blonde, I suppose, which made sense because she was. Brittany had to pause every 30 seconds or so to answer a question Lisa had thrown to her. Her questions kinda became more and more sparse as Lisa and I learned about what it was like to be a girl.

There were still traces of Leeroy in Lisa, and as far as I can tell, I was still mostly Aaron, but you never would have guessed Brittany had been born a guy. Then again… she’d been hoping something like this would happen for years.

It would be strange, I suppose, to feel like you’ve been in the wrong body your whole life, only to suddenly be “cursed” better. I was coming from the other way, but I wasn’t scared, or depressed. I could live with this and I’d accepted I couldn’t go back.

Netherworlds.

What was it?

A basketball t-shirt I saw once reminds me of it - “Some people call it a game. I call it a way of life.”

Less than a week ago, all my worries were limited to slightly low frames-per-second and disconnection on the Area of Effect damage phase of Garrock Blackrend. Now I had to adapt to being an entirely new person, probably living in a new city I’d never seen before, people who wanted to LYNCH me for getting nanites shoved up my arse, as well as low FPS and the AoE phase of Garrock Blackrend in Netherworlds II.

It struck me, suddenly, that I hadn’t played Netherworlds for 3 days.

How much of the guild had quit? How much of the guild had transferred?

What the hell WAS Netherworlds II? And why was it only for GDD’d people?

“Lara? You alright?”

“Bwuh?”

I looked around. Lisa looked at me. I looked at her.

“You go like that a lot. Have you got some kinda inner monologue going?”

“Uh. No,” I lied. Maybe they should’ve put that as one of the symptoms of GDDAS… Maybe born TS people monologue this much.

“Alright now, children,” said Melissa, most of us wincing at the emphasis on the word, “Don’t expect that this will get you out of your education - on top of that you have certain … other things, to learn. Personal matters.”

“How personal?”

“Extremely so.”

/shudder

Uh… that’s a slash command. It’s how you do emotes in Netherworlds and a lot of other MMORPGs… I’ve been using them in writing and real life for a while, too… (real life pronunciation: slash shudder)

We were shepherded out of the lobby and we stood around in the humid (you can say “in the cold“, can’t you?), waiting for a while. Sammy was freaking bizarre now. You could see Sam in her, but… the ditzy blonde (he was blonde before, by the way) in front of me who had apparently decided to give up punctuation in favour of the word “like” was really weird - it’s like she had had the old Sam’s memories shoved into her apparently-empty skull. And - bizarrely - an American accent was shoved on. This - Melissa told us - was uncommon, but not unheard of - a total body-rewrite would have some unintentional ramifications. Some American kid had recovered from a stroke and come back with a cockney accent - and here we got an entire brain rewrite.

She hadn’t coped well, at all - and she was sitting there crying. Rachel seemed freaking brain dead - apparently “boys don’t cry” had already embedded itself into her head, but I could see her tearing up. Tomi, too, had given in to the crying epidemic.

Solution? Anti-depressants. I swear Melissa shoved a handful of valium down each of their throats, and they calmed down a little. Alright, a lot.

So no-one was really crying or talking, right up to the point where the bus came.