The Endless Dance Card : 3 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

The moment I woke, I knew what they’d done: they did a reset. I could tell because I felt different. I felt younger. I felt eighteen. Maybe you think that there’s no specific sensation to being eighteen, but let me tell you, there is. It’s a level of energy, a feeling of power, a sense, maybe, of being immortal. When you’re older, you can be sharp and quick and smart and all that, but it’s set in a different frame. When you’re eighteen -- and healthy, of course -- whatever is going on inside you, at least your body doesn’t get in your way. It’s like sitting in a brand new car, when every smell, every surface, every detail is still clean, perfect, and fresh.

I knew that I should be angry, or at least upset. After all, Dr Harcourt had stuffed me into that bed while I was unconscious -- but I had to admit that I felt better, amazingly better, than I’d felt since I came aboard the ship. That said, I knew that my brain chemistry got reset along with the rest of me, which made me exactly as calm and well-adjusted as the day when my med profile was taken, months before we left Earth orbit. That day -- my first day -- I was excited and eager. I was more likely to be open and accepting. I wouldn’t be reacting to anything the way I might have reacted a day or two ago.

As I sat up on the edge of the bed, I saw the doctor walking toward me. She was smiling at first, but as I lowered my legs over the side, her smile melted away. She stopped dead in her tracks. Her mouth fell open. She was stunned. I didn’t understand why, but it didn’t particularly bother me in that moment. I was still waking up. But I did look down at myself because I became aware of a missing sensation: my balls didn’t seem to get in the way as I was shifting and sitting up. My thighs didn’t seem to have the usual package between them. It was as if there was nothing there at all.

I looked down at my hips, and my jaw dropped, just as the doctor’s had: between my partly-opened thighs -- gone! There was NOTHING! Nothing between my legs! No cock, no balls, no scrotum, no willy! I didn’t even have pubic hair. Just a clean, flat groin with a slit in it. I had labia. I had a pussy!

I fainted from the shock and fell off the bed, all the way to the floor.

I came to almost immediately. My head hurt. I could tell I’d hit the floor with the left side of my forehead. My left elbow and knee hurt as well. Dr Harcourt was kneeling beside to me, holding me, looking at me with an expression contorted with worry and concern. “Oh, God, I’m sorry!” she whispered. “I hardly know what to ask you... Are you okay? How are you feeling now?”

I couldn’t answer. Frantically I groped at myself. My fingers jerked across my hips to the spot where my penis ought to be. Instead, they found nothing. It was smooth down there, unnaturally smooth. Smooth, like a soft pair of lips. Gingerly, tentatively, I pushed my finger between them. There was a whole new unfamiliar geography inside: I had folds inside of me, and a new hole: a vagina -- my vagina. It was frightening, as if I was exploring a deep wound that suddenly appeared in my body.

“Is it real?” I moaned. “Is this real?”

“Yes, hon, I’m sorry, it’s real. This isn’t a dream.”

I let out a mournful wail that grew louder and higher until I was shrieking uncontrollably. “No, no, NO!” I shouted. “It can’t be real! It can’t!” I screamed and cried. I balled up my fists and pressed them to the sides of my face. Dr Harcourt, who was equally frightened and confused, didn’t know what to say to me. She tried to hold me and console me, but I was frantic -- kicking and shaking. My arms and hands were out of control. The doctor had come prepared for another angry outburst, so she had a loaded hypospray at the ready. She pulled it out of her pocket and pressed it into my thigh. Once again, the world faded to black. I could hear myself screaming as my consciousness sank into the darkness.

When I awoke, everything was quiet. I was lying in a bed in a medbay. A sheet and a blanket covered me, and I could feel that I was wearing pajamas. Everything was soft, clean, and comfortable. Somehow, the room itself was reassuring. I knew immediately that I wasn’t in Dr Harcourt’s medbay. The colors and design were different. Even the sheets and blankets were different. The fact that I wasn’t naked was different.

A quiet man with a nice smile was sitting next to my bed. He build was stocky, like a football player. At the same time, he seemed soft and friendly-looking; jovial, like Santa Claus. The theme of this medbay is soft and reassuring, I told myself. I liked the man right away. I felt I could trust him. He was dressed in khaki pants and a blue checkered shirt. He showed me a spent hypospray and let me see him drop it into a bag at his feet. “Hi,” he said in a gentle voice. “I just used that hypospray to wake you up. My name is Dr Spencer, but you can call me Spence if you like. How are you feeling?”

“I feel pretty good,” I said, cautiously. “So.. how am I? Can you tell me?”

“I can tell you that you’re in perfect health,” he answered. “I’m sure that’s not a good enough answer for you, but at the moment, can we take it as a great baseline to start from? There’s a lot to tell you, and I promise I will cover every question you have. I won’t leave your side until you have all the information you want and need. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I touched my forehead experimentally. I found a little bump. It was only slightly tender. “I thought I hit my head when I fell,” I said. “I expected it to hurt more.”

“I’m sure it did,” he agreed. “But you’ve been out for eight days. Your head has had more than a week to get over that fall. Dr Harcourt sedated you initially because you were hysterical -- and who could blame you? Oh -- by the way, we can show you the footage if you need to see--” I shook my head in the negative. “Okay. Well, it’s always there, if you have any questions about how you’ve been treated. The first thing I want to tell you is that, in view of all you’ve been through, we thought it best to keep you under until we had some solid, actual data and explanations to give you. I’m sure that if you'd been awake, you would have suffered an extremely anxious week. It was three whole days before we began to see the root cause of all of this. Before that, we were utterly mystified.”

While he was talking, I moved my pillow against the head of my bed so I could sit up and lean against it. As I shifted and sat up, I felt once again the difference between my legs. Honestly, I felt different all over -- different from how I was used to feeling. I looked at Dr Spencer, my face filled with confusion and questions. “Yes,” he said. “You really did turn into a girl. You still look pretty much the same as you did at eighteen, when you first came onboard -- except for your genitals and the absence of facial hair. And, well, the absence of body hair, uh, generally. Your shoulders, chest, and hips are actually a little narrower, and your head is, uh, a few sizes smaller.”

“In other words, I’m completely different.”

“No, not completely,” he said with a slight smile. “I’m sure you’ll recognize your face in the mirror. The general picture of how you are right now is that, now, you see… well, developmentally, you’re still approaching puberty. You're not quite there yet. However, there is something we can do about that. In my opinion, I mean, what I’d like to do, is to give you some… well, some treatments to kick-start your… well, to bring you more quickly to sexual maturity.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“Because you don’t want to be a little girl. You’d have to be awake for anywhere from four to six years -- maybe even more -- to allow these things to happen by themselves. Puberty moves at its own rate for every person, and it’s fairly unpredictable. For some people, it happens quickly, and for others it’s agonizingly slow. With you in particular, we have no idea when it will even start! However, We have some ways, as I said, to kick-start and accelerate the process. In any case, you can’t go back to a sleep pod until you reach sexual maturity, because it would slow your development down to a crawl, and we don’t believe that’s safe. That’s why there are no children on the Kingdom ships.”

“I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean any of that. You’re right -- I don’t want to be a little girl. I don’t want to be a girl at all! There isn’t any point in accelerating anything here. You just need to change me back. I mean, come on, I’m a man. Why make me more of a girl? Just change me back to who I was. That *is* the plan, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you understood: We don’t have the technology to do that,” Dr Spencer replied.

“Yes we do! Our technology did this to me,” I pointed out. “So we do have the technology to change me back.”

“Yes, but what happened to you was entirely accidental. The odds of it happening in the first place were astronomical. The odds of it happening a second time, even on purpose -- well, I don't know if we even have a word for it! I mean, think about it statistically: suppose you were back on Earth, and you won the lottery. Could you make it happen again the next day? What would you do? Try to recreate the same conditions? Go back to the same store, play the same numbers? The odds were against your winning the first day, but even more so on the second.”

“I don’t feel like I won the lottery,” I told him.

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “That’s not what I meant. I’m just talking about incredibly unlikely, once in the universe, events.” He smiled to himself, then asked me, “Did you ever hear of the Flash?” I shook my head no. “He was a mythological hero... supposedly the fastest man alive. He became that way because of an accident: he was doused with a batch of random chemicals, then struck by lightning, and the reaction transformed his entire being. I think it’s a useful image, because you can imagine what it would take to undo that transformation. Think how dangerous it would be for him to even try to turn back to normal.”

I frowned. “Was he a real person?”

Dr Spencer shrugged. “It’s a myth, but the story couldn’t have come out of nowhere. There’s always some reality behind every myth, don’t you think?”

I shook off the question, and thought for a moment. “What if I came up with a way to turn myself back? Would you let me try it?”

“It depends on what your way consists of. I mean, if you plan on getting doused with chemicals and hit by lightning, then no. Of course, I don’t mean that literally. You know what I’m getting at. If it’s safe enough to try, then probably yes. But there is one big obstacle you need to know about: your original profile, the one that was taken before we left Earth, has been corrupted. It’s not useable. It’s beyond repair. Once you’re better, once you’re physically mature, we’ll have to take another one.”

“As a girl.”

Dr Spencer shrugged in assent. “We don’t have a choice there. We did take one while you were asleep, but we regard it as a temporary, in-case-of-emergency thing.”

“How did my profile get corrupted?”

“It was related to that sensor failure in your sleep pod. In fact, everyone who had that same defective sensor had their profile corrupted in exactly the same way. I don’t know the technical details, but one of the engineers will go over it with you when you feel ready. I’m not a technical person, but I can tell you in very general terms how it went: Obviously, it should be impossible for a sensor in a sleep pod to access and alter a profile, but it wasn’t as direct and clear-cut as that. I’m probably not saying this correctly, but imagine that the sensor corrupted the pod, and the pod in its turn gave corrupted communications about you to the ship. This bad data made its way through some of the ship’s routines relating to you. Finally, the ship, when it was trying to do something else, something unrelated, ended up overwriting part of your profile. It was the final step in passing garbage up the chain. The tech guys said it was a series of corner cases that no one could have ever foreseen. In any case, the exact same thing happened in the exact same way to everyone who had the same bad sensor. Ninety-five percent of the people onboard were NOT affected in any way, and no one but you and the rest of the five percent had their profiles corrupted. Thank God.”

“Did the other people with the bad sensor change gender the way I did?”

“No. Nothing happened to them. We just woke them up and took new profiles while that sensor got changed, and that was that. None of them had used a rejuvenation bed. You were the first, and only person onboard, who’s used a bed at all so far. Each time you did, you were exposed to effects and treatments based on your corrupted profile. Every time you climbed onto that bed, it tried unsuccessfully to make subtle alterations to your general state. Finally, the reset attempted to map a profile that didn’t fit your physiology. There was nothing wrong with the bed, or the diagnostic pod, by the way. It was only your profile. The subsystem that read your profile got bad data. Instead of stopping and complaining about it -- about the bad condition of your profile, the profile parser attempted to make sense out of it, and it found that the easiest way to resolve the conflicts was to consider you a pre-pubescent female.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Why pre-pubescent?”

“Good question. It’s because you didn’t have any of the secondary sexual characteristics that a grown woman has: no breasts, narrow pelvis, hormone levels… but most of all, your menstrual cycles hadn’t started… It all added up to a girl who hadn’t entered puberty yet.

“That’s what happened with the diagnostic pod. The rejuvenation bed, on the other hand, treated you to routines that are meant for women, not men, and that’s why they made you feel ill. When it did the full reset -- as I said before -- the only way it could resolve the conflict between your profile and your physiology was to read you as a pre-pubescent girl, and that’s what it ended up ‘restoring’ you to.”

“Oh, God,” I moaned. It all made sense -- or some kind of sense. "But... what happened to my genitals? To my penis and balls? Where did they go?"

"Um, ah, that's a great question," he replied. "And I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know. It turns out that we don't know a whole lot about how the rejuvenation beds work. Maybe an engineer could tell you."

"I'm an engineer," I reminded him. "but I don't know anything about those beds."

"Well, maybe another engineer will know," he ventured.

I shrugged. "Let's hope so!"

“You’ve been remarkably unlucky,” he told me, “but if it’s any consolation, you’ve potentially saved a fifth of the crew from going through what you've been through. Also, the software team is working on some safeguards for the management and application of the profiles, so the beds don’t mistreat the people using them and so the diagnostic pods don’t give bad conclusions.”

I was silent, taking it all in. Dr Spencer invited me to walk with him, and he brought me to a small lunch room. “How do you feel about fish and chips?” he asked. I nodded, and the doctor fiddled with the food fab.

As we ate, a question occurred to me. “Couldn’t we -- couldn’t someone take my corrupted profile and fix it? Or take one of me now and edit it, to change me from female to male?”

“We had a lot of discussion about that,” Dr Spencer replied. “But surprisingly, there isn’t a person or computer system aboard that’s smart enough to be able to do that. Our profiles are immensely complex. It’s everything that makes up a specific individual, starting from their general qualities like weight, hair color, and so on, all the way down to the composition of their individual cells. Not that there’s a list of every single cell, but the profile has to be as complex as a human being, and that is pretty damn complex.

“So, as far as editing your profile… Consider, first of all, that your corrupted profile isn’t you-as-a-female. It’s all messed up. There are portions that make no sense at all. It isn’t even bad profile data -- it’s random data that was thrown in there. It’s trash. In fact, you’re lucky that applying your profile didn’t kill you or deform you. Second, you can’t simply take a person’s profile and change the gender. There’s too much involved. It’s not like we have a male/female toggle, or a drop-down menu where you choose one or the other. Nothing is that simple. Think of all the changes involved: the composition and coordinates of all your inner organs; the layout of your blood vessels and nerves. It frightens me to think what would happen if you didn’t get a person’s spine right. You want to go in and mess with that delicate, intricate, hyper-complicated web of information? And then apply it to yourself? If that doesn’t frighten you, you don’t understand what’s involved.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling deflated. Again, it all made sense. But then, something else occurred to me. “Hey, isn’t there a plastic-surgery device onboard? Couldn’t we use that on me? To change me back?”

Dr Spencer wiped some oil off his lips. “It could change you, but basically it’s only soft-tissue changes. It’s not designed for the kind of deep, internal changes you’re talking about. Unfortunately, there is no equipment on this ship that is capable of sexual reassignment in any form.”

I waved my hands, as if I could erase his words in the air. "No, no -- that's not what I meant! I don't want sexual reassignment surgery. I want to change back. I want to be the real Fergus: Fergus the man, the original Fergus. That's the only change I'm interested in." He smiled and shrugged and shook his head. I told him, "You're wrong that there's no equipment that can do what I'm asking. You know that there is -- our equipment is exactly what changed me into this.”

“The change you underwent was an accident and is not reproducible.”

I fell silent at that. Slowly I ate my chips, some with vinegar, some with ketchup. I never could decide which condiment I preferred.

After I'd eaten my fill, I sat there and toyed with the rest of my food. The doctor didn’t seem to mind our sitting in silence, so we did that for a while. Then it occurred to me: I was taking all of this very calmly. Especially compared to my massive freak-out when I first awoke. “Doctor?” I asked. “Are you giving me something to keep me calm?”

“Not specifically, no. Do you want something to keep you calm?”

“No, I’m just surprised at how even I am right now. Shouldn’t I be more upset at what’s happened to me?”

“There might be a residual effect from the sedative. It could last as long as a day. Don’t worry, though. We’ll be watching and helping. You won’t go through this alone.”

In fact, the doctors and the psychs were extremely nice and supportive. They didn’t overwhelm me with attention, but I was always able to reach someone in an instant if I needed anything at all. In the beginning, a counselor came to talk with me three times a day. After three days, they came every morning and evening. Then it tapered down to once a day, then once a week.

With the medical folk it was much the same. At first, they’d check on me hourly, then four times a day, then daily, then every other day. After five weeks I was on a once-a-week schedule: Monday morning, psych check-in, Thursday morning, med check-up. It got to be very quick and very routine.

In the med check-up, we’d chart my passage through puberty, which turned out to be incredibly slow. As you’ll see, it turned out to be over a year before it even began. Everyone (especially me) decided against treatments to kick-start my development. The majority of doctors and psychs agreed that I had undergone such a violent and abrupt change, that it would be better to leave my body and mind to their own devices, and let them develop on their own timetable. In any case, I would have refused the treatment. I didn’t see any point in making myself more of a girl when I had no intention of remaining one.

The one thing I did ask for, and was willing given, was read-only access to the code and documentation related to profiles. Also, I was given a copy of my corrupted profile and my new temporary profile. I was also given copies of the other people who were affected: both the corrupted version and the new clean version. Copies of all the code, docs, and profiles were put into a virtual sandbox, where I could study and play with them without touching or affecting the actual code and profiles currently in use.

In the beginning, since I was relieved of duties for three months, I studied the material for hours every day. It was immensely difficult and complicated, and at times I despaired of ever understanding. After a month of staring into that hyper-complicated jumble, I was seriously thinking of giving it up. I quit for all of four days, when one of the developers came to talk with me. He was working on the changes to the profile-management code. He began by admitting that he knew virtually nothing about the profiles and how they were used. When I gave him the most general and elementary explanations, it was all new to him, and he actually took notes as I spoke.

After I (surprisingly!) answered all his questions, I had a question for him: “Why didn’t you go to the subject-matter expert onboard?”

He was taken aback by my question. “You are the subject-matter expert,” he replied. “I asked for the expert, and Qurakas told me to talk to you.”

I was stunned. How could such a vital system be without an expert? I contacted Qurakas and asked him about it. He looked a little irritated when he told me, “There are too many systems onboard to be covered by an expert in every crew. It’s impossible.”

“Are there other systems that aren’t covered by an expert?”

“Yes, of course there are. But none of them are essential to life or to our mission. If there was an issue, someone would have to study up, the way you’re doing now. If that wasn’t possible, we’d have to do without.”

“This stuff is so far beyond me,” I whined. “I can barely understand it. Isn’t there someone who could help me?”

“No,” he said. “At this point, no one knows more about profiles than you. If you wanted help, your first step would be to teach the other person the things you've learned -- which are things that only you know. Also, it’s not important enough for me to assign another resource. As far as everyone is concerned, this is no longer an issue.”

“Everyone but me!” I protested.

“Everyone but you,” he agreed. “Still, you have to agree that you’re alive and healthy. You’re fit and willing to work. The only loose end is to make you a new profile, once you’re mature. When that’s done, we’ll close the case.”

I huffed in response.

He looked at me, and I could see from the way his jaw was moving that he wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure if he should. “Spit it out,” I told him. “Whatever it is, I can take it.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “When you asked for access to the profiles and the code, I was against it. It was obvious why you asked for it: you imagine you can get back to the way you used to be, and you figure that screwing with your profile is the key. It’s not. You can’t do it. Nobody can. I didn’t think it was healthy for you to waste your time chasing a chimera. Clearly, I was overruled. The others felt that it would be a healthy way to channel your feelings and frustrations and all that bullshit.”

I fumed in silence for a moment, then said, “I’m glad you were overruled.”

He shrugged. “It is what it is.” He was about to end the call when he remembered one more thing. “By the way,” he said. “You ought to change your name.” Before I could reply, he closed the call.

“Bastard!” I shouted, to an empty screen.