Q DAY
Laika Pupkino ~ 2011

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I woke up. It was January 1st, a little after six in the morning. Whoop de doo, a new year…

I hadn’t stayed up with my folks to see the new year in. We were pretty mad at each other, and I wasn’t in any mood to watch the official arrival of 2011 broadcasted live from Times Square. I’d figured that it would manage to get here without my help, and had gone to bed even earlier than I normally did.

I’ll spare you the long version of why I was miserable, another MtF transgender kid coming to that point in life where she’s feeling desperate about her "self" not matching the sex she was physically or the male role she was expected to play in life. A feeling like something in her brain or soul was about to give way...

And yeah I’d told my parents. It hadn’t gone well. They had refused to hear another word about it, and I’d refused to be silenced on the subject of what was the biggest source of unhappiness in my life. I'd tried and tried to make them see what this meant to me, but I wasn't getting anywhere at all!

And since they’d always prided themselves in never being physically abusive---only psychologically---their solution to my stubbornness on this had been first to withhold my allowance, and when that didn’t phase me I was grounded for the whole Christmas break. Like I had done something wrong. Barbarians! (Although I would come to forgive them for this, and fairly soon…)

So this morning I was in the second day of my hunger strike, and it looked to me like they were starting to bend. Like gee, maybe this was something serious to me, and not some weird way that I'd chosen to act out. Although I sure was hungry. I wished I had one of those “The Works” omelets they made down at the IHOP; and a side of hash browns, only cooked more thoroughly than that white greasy glop they served. Maybe some onions mixed in-

And suddenly there it was on the desk next to my computer. Just like I’d imagined it.

And some good OJ, I added, causing a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice to appear. I didn’t think one whole day of fasting was enough to make me start hallucinating, and it all tasted real enough when I tried it.

I had shoveled down about three bites when I thought, "WAIT A MINUTE!"

-and turned myself into a girl. Like the male I'd been born but a bit shorter and a lot cuter. The me I’d always imagined…

This was crazy, but I wasn’t complaining. I gave myself a nice nightgown, and some pink fuzzy slippers because the floor was cold, and then a whole wardrobe in my closet I would look at in a minute, right now I was busy eating---just one more bite here!---and checking myself out in my new floor length mirror. So obviously I was still dreaming, but damn, these eggs and all the goodies imbedded in them sure tasted real.

Replacing whatever was in there, I filled my whole bedroom dresser with spending money, several million in twenties. It was a good thing too, because my family would wind up needing it after the inflation caused by all the other people doing this plunged the global economy into a recession, but I’m getting ahead of my story here.

When I heard my mom screaming in the bathroom I went running in there, forgetting all about how I’d changed myself. She was blonde, and gawking at herself in the mirror.

“Mom! Are you okay?!”

“I don’t know,” she said, sounding stunned. “I was just thinking about changing my hair and I-”

Then she saw me, “Oh dear …….. You too?”

“Yeah, Mom. And that’s not all, look!” I said, and suddenly there was a big bouquet of flowers in my hand. Roses, her favorite, in all the shades they come in and a few they don’t. I handed them to her, grinning, “Apparently it’s anything we want. I just wished up a really nice breakfast, and there it was. A person could go totally nuts with this!”

She smelled them, “Oh Jimmy, thank you. But we can’t have this! We can’t!"

Suddenly I was a boy again.

“Mom! What are you doing?” I yelled, and turned myself back.

“No, honey. You’re not a girl!” she said, and ~POOF!~ I was Jimmy again.

“Am too! And I told you my name’s Jamie,” I hollered, turning myself back again. Then I made another wish.

“But your father'll have a fit if he sees you like this,” she said, and tried to change me back. A confused look came over her face. “What did you do?”

“I wished that no one could turn me back into a boy, ever again,” I grinned. Gotcha!

“So this what you really want, huh? I don’t understand, but I guess there’s worse things you could turn yourself into. Like those crazy ‘furry’ people I saw on Montel. I hate to think what they're doing to themselv-” she started to say, when suddenly she looked very scared, her eyes opening wide.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, but then I saw what it was. Her tits were growing. In another second they were Dolly Parton size, and still growing!

“Jimmy, stop that!” she screamed, “I told you you could stay a girl ...... STOP!”

“It’s not me, Mom! Just wish them back!”

“Oh, right,” she said, and did. “But if it wasn’t you, what did that?”

We both flashed on who the culprit had to be at the same time. She marched out of the bathroom, “Come on, Jim- Uh, Jamie. I always knew he had this little ...... predeliction; But he always says I'm perfect just the way I am. I guess what he says and what he fantasizes...”

I nodded, "Two different things."

Out in the living room my father was sprinkling salt onto one of his low sodium tortilla chips as he watched one of those talky sports shows that start hours before the actual game. The Rose Bowl in this case.

He sort of turned in our direction but must not have really seen me, “Morning you two. Hey Patti, as long as you’re up could one of you go get me a beer?”

Mom and I looked at each other and grinned. She said in this theatrical and sweetly subservient voice that wasn’t her at all, “I am the genie of the lamp! What brand of beer doest thou wish for, oh my Master?”

“A genie? Okay, whatever ….. Coors, since that’s what’s in there, but what I really wish I had was- Whoah, SHIT!” he yelled as an ice cold Corona appeared in his hand. Startled, he dropped it, and it rolled across the rug spewing out yellow beer and white foam.

Then he saw the bottle and the stripe of dampness it had left on the carpet disappear like they’d never been there as I cleaned up his mess. It must have been Mom who put the new one in his hand, which he managed to not drop, but gulped at like he really needed some alcohol right now. He turned to us, “Uh, what’s going on here?”

“I’m not terribly sure,” said my mom, “But there’s somebody I’d like you to meet. James, this is your daughter Jamie…”

“Hi,” I said, feeling very shy. I really didn’t want him to hate me for this.

“Okay, what’s the gag? Is that supposed to be Jimmy?” he asked. Apparently the magic beer trick hadn’t convinced him of how strange reality had suddenly become.

"But it is me! Everything's turned, like ...... magic!"

He stared at me; probably thinking that whoever this girl was, she did sort of look like his son.

In the past hour my new breast had given my brain a lot of new sensations to process, most of which I was very happy with. But suddenly they felt a little heavier, and now a lot heavier. I looked down-

“Ewwwwwww, Daddy!” I cried, and changed these insanely massive boobs I’d sprouted back to ones that seemed normal on a human girl.

Mom looked at him like he was a pile of vomit, “Oh ghod, James! What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” my father protested, “I don’t even know what happened!"

“How could you?!” screamed Mom, “she’s your DAUGHTER!!”

“No, Patti, listen! I didn’t …… I would never act on something like that, I mean a girl that age; I was just- I swear! Just a thought. Like a man has sometimes. I mean he sees a cute girl like this; and I never had a daughter, and I wasn’t thinking ‘daughter’, or about who this was; I’m not like that! Believe me, I would never- I mean I just-”

It was awfully creepy to find yourself suddenly turned into some kind of pornographic cartoon woman by your own father. I shuddered and hugged myself, “Daddy, that’s just sick!”

I’d seen him do this before, trying to deflect the blame when he was caught doing something wrong, but this was the worst, hitting me where I was most vulnerable: “I’m sick? Well what the hell are you doing turning yourself into a girl anyway?!”

"I've been telling you about this all week! Maybe if you ever listened to me you'd know why!!"

“Come on, Jamie,” Mom said. And I followed, not knowing where we were going but glad to be getting out of there.

“No wait, Stop!” Dad begged, and suddenly there were jailhouse bars across the room’s entryway. He stammered, “We need to just- to just talk about this, please! This is all so crazy!”

“And this is how you ‘talk’? Holding us prisoner?” she spat, pointing accusingly at the bars blocking our exit, then blasted them away like some pissed off witch in a movie. As we stepped through the jagged smoking portal she told him coldly, “We’ll call you…”

We would wind up forgiving him, especially after what he did next. Even really decent people occasionally have some weird and not very nice impulse, something that’s only temporarily a tiny, tiny part of the whole “them”, and that they would never act on. It was this magic that was turning these fleeting thoughts---terrible beasties from the secret back rooms of that id thing they say is a part of each and every one of us---into reality.

Which was exactly what the Zirconians were counting on…

“I’m sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he whimpered, and then groaned, “Oh God, I wish I was never born!”

I don’t know why I was still standing there after he disappeared, since I now didn’t have any male person who had contributed to my being born---(a classic case of that “Grandfather Paradox” the science fiction nerds talk about)---but there I still was. It’s just another of the million or so mysteries from that horrible messed up morning.

“James?” asked my mom, like she expected the empty chair to answer her.

Suddenly, from someplace outside came a terrible blinding white flash, and a second later there was a booming sound that rattled but didn’t quite break all the windows in our house.

Not thinking that this was probably the last thing we should be doing, Mom and I ran out onto the front porch, and saw the mushroom cloud roiling up into the sky over to the west of us, about fifteen miles away. Crabby old Mr. Jervis down the block had often said he wished he had a nuclear bomb, that if he did he'd sure show those jerks in our city council a thing or two.

From the size of it, it didn’t seem like a very big nuke, but it sure did a number on our city's downtown. It will be safe for redevelopment in about 97 years.

“We better go back inside,” said Mom.

“Good idea,” I said, and we did. I really wished we wouldn’t get any radiation poisoning.

The football show was no longer on the TV (the game was cancelled anyway after one of the teams had been turned into giant chickens), but instead there was a CBS Special Report about the disappearance of every Palestinian Muslim in the Middle East. It seems that some Israeli had wished for it before one of them could wish this about the Jewish nation. Reports were coming in from the region, none with any explanation…

Then the camera went all cockeyed, pointing up at the ceiling as some enemy that the cameraman had there at the studio wished him dead. Someone else took his place, pointing the camera back at the distinguished looking anchor…

This man had seen a lot of strange and ugly things over the course his career, but today he was shaken enough to drop his whole professional newscaster act and speak to us like a human being, “I don’t know what’s going on here folks, but I’ll tell you I’m scared. I really wish I’d taken that early retirement. I could be on my yacht right now-”

And then his desk was empty, and everyone in the studio had fled or been wished into oblivion, because that view of the empty desk stayed on the screen....

My morning, which had started out so good now seemed like it was going to be the end of the world. Mom and I were hugging, almost afraid to think anything, like that scene in either the second or the third Ghostbusters movie where they tried doing this to keep the monsters away, but one of them thought of the Stay-Pufft Marshmallow Man and he showed up twenty stories tall to wreak havoc on New York City.

And now the newscast on our TV was coming in from some other city, more and more reports of terrible unexplainable things happening all over the world. I wished my dad was here to hold me too---something I thought of just in time---and now here he was, and we were all hugging and crying, saying "I love you" and forgiving each other.

Apparently you can forgive a lot when you’re right in the middle of Armageddon (And in all the years that would follow I never caught a whiff of anything weird, unfatherly or wrong about his love for me, so he really wasn't being some big incest perv when he made my boobs that way...); and I just wished whatever was making all this happen would just ……… go away!
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I don’t know if I was the one who saved the world, or if somebody else had thought this a split second before me. A lot of people were claiming it was them. Somebody in the media dubbed this weirdest day in human history "Q Day", after that obnoxious jerk with godlike powers who could just wish something and make it happen, and was always showing up to cause trouble on the different STAR TREK shows, and the name stuck.

My turning into a girl was hardly noticed in the aftermath of that morning, because a lot of people got turned into a lot of things. When school started again a few months later everyone said I seemed a lot happier. My friends I told the truth to, with others I just shrugged like I didn't know who had wished this on me but, my, wasn't I coping with it well?

Mr. Jervis from down the block was a lot less quick to say mean things about people after this. He tried to confess to his act of nuclear terrorism, but the president had declared a jubilee pardoning anyone of any "wishing crimes" they'd committed on that horrible morning.

His critics all said he was just protecting himself after turning his wife into a man. Mike Obama (well, he quickly went back to his maiden name after the divorce…) apparently had been asleep through the whole thing, so he wasn’t able to turn himself back into Michelle. Working closely with the Farnsworth Institute, Mike became a crusader for the rights of the involuntarily transformed…
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Twenty years later, when the emissaries from the League of Planets showed up with an invitation for us to join, they explained what had happened. That there were rules against any world invading another and the League’s fleet was bigger than that of any one planet or regional alliance, big enough to put a stop to any interplanetary aggression fairly quickly and punish whoever tried it...

But for a while there were no rules against sharing technology with a less developed world, since DIRECTIVE #1 had recently been repealed as a paternalistic measure that promoted an imbalance of technology and power in the galaxy. They'd decided it was not the business of any one group to dictate what was the proper rate or means of technological growth for any other, or who gave what to who. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

So the Zirconians who had wanted the metal in the Earth’s core had simply encircled our planet with one of the galaxy’s best inventions, the Universal Reality Editor, which makes a swell gift for any civilization. Except that they’d conveniently removed all the safety and idiot-proofing software from it before delivery, and "forgot" to give any of us the instruction maual for it. (There was no real reason for their chosing New Year’s Day for this, nothing symbolic or poetic or ironic about this; it was just happened to be the day it arrived here on after its long trip down the galactic arm; and in fact in some parts of the world it wasn’t January First during those few crazy hours.)

The Zirconians have been strongly censured by the league and are making restitutions to the people of our planet. I got $27,000, enough for a down payment on a nice Durango hovercar.

A lot of people have their stories about what happened to them between 6 a.m. and 8:37 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on January One 2011. This was my story about what happened to me on Q Day. What’s yours?
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Yes, it's a story universe anyone can write about, as long as the
wishing-for-anything only occurs on the date & hours I specified.
Just tag it: Q Day Universe

And no, I don’t believe President Obama is Gay, and wouldn’t care if he was. It’s just a spontaneous bit of silliness that came to me as I knocked out this experiment in unoutlined one-draft story writing…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FCT2SDacpU