There were more people in line than I expected for a town that size, more than we usually saw at the Brocksboro library on a weekday. Most were doing boring rejuvenations and improvements in each other’s appearance, as usual, but one couple venned each other into giant matte-black insectoids.
The last few weeks of the semester at Eastern Mynatt High, Meredith and Sophia were too busy to hang out with me a lot. Caleb was home from college, but working a lot, and hanging out with his friends most of the time when he wasn’t working. I wondered if he was still hanging out with Nathan sometimes, but he didn’t talk a lot with Meredith or Sophia where I could hear them. Meredith didn’t think she could rig up a curtain to let me read at night without her parents getting suspicious, but she let me spend the nights in her closet, where the overhead light was enough to read by. It didn’t feel claustrophobic at my size.
Memorial Day weekend, Meredith’s parents went off to the coast for their anniversary. As Meredith had told Carmen, we didn’t do much special, as my friends were busy studying for finals, but Meredith let me have the run of the house while her parents were on vacation and Caleb was at work; I hung out with her and Sophia while they were cooking, eating, and cleaning up, and explored the house while they were at work. And we watched a movie together Saturday night. That was the first time I’d seen the rest of their house, outside of Meredith’s bedroom, since that time Mom, Dad, Nathan and I had gone to the Ramseys’ house for a Christmas party... maybe when I was thirteen or fourteen? It was a nice house, seemingly not as big as Mom and Dad’s house though it was hard to tell at my current size, but prettily decorated, with furniture that looked comfortable (though I didn’t sit on it with a human butt until a long while afterward).
When I saw some of the older framed photos in the living room and hallway, I realized that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey hadn’t just made each other younger. They were in much better shape now than they’d been when they were in their mid-twenties the first time. Well, good for them.
After the school year ended, Meredith and Sophia started working more hours, but they still had more time to hang out with me. One evening when Meredith and Sophia were chatting with me in Meredith’s room, I broached the idea of us maybe going to a Venn machine — not the one at the Brocksboro library or the Catesville mall — and having them venn me into a humanoid form for a few hours.
“Sure,” Meredith said. “Let’s see.” She brought up vennlocator.com on her laptop and said, “Maybe we should rule out the Venn machines you used with Carmen, too, just to be safe? Not that High Point or Burlington are exactly convenient from here, anyway. Hmmm... maybe over in Reidsville. Or Danville, Virginia.”
“What is there to see there?” Sophia asked.
Meredith looked up Reidsville and Danville. Neither had any particular attractions besides a few historic buildings, but since the Venn machine in Reidsville was outdoors and the one in Danville was in a mall, we decided to go to Reidsville (which was closer) unless it was raining.
Not quite two weeks later, after Meredith and Sophia arranged their work schedules to have the same day off, I rode along with them to Reidsville. The Venn machine was at an intersection downtown, like in Burlington, with a theater on one corner, the Chamber of Commerce office on another, a barber shop, a pawn shop, and couple of nice murals. The corner with the Venn machine had a wider sidewalk with benches, a small bank of coin-operated lockers, and a small sign informing visitors of the county ordinances pertaining to Venn machine use — no identity theft, people waiting for cosmetic or recreational changes must yield place to people needing urgent healing, if you venned into an ordinary animal you needed a collar or harness labeled “Venned person,” and similarly for adults venned into children. There was an awning covering the Venn machine, the lockers, and the area where people would wait in line.
There were more people in line than I expected for a town that size, more than we usually saw at the Brocksboro library on a weekday. Most were doing boring rejuvenations and improvements in each other’s appearance, as usual, but one couple venned each other into giant matte-black insectoids.
Meredith venned me into a four-armed kitsune, and I venned her into the rabbit-taur from her history, tweaked to have lighter fur for summer. Meredith venned Sophia into a plant-girl, with leafy branches sticking up from her scalp and shoulders. We walked around the downtown shopping area and saw some of the historic buildings and monuments to early settlers in the area, and stopped to eat at an Italian restaurant — it was the first time I’d eaten food since early April. Having four arms was a fun novelty, and it took me a little while to get the hang of them — I spilled my drink while I was still working on that, apologized profusely to our waitress, and left her as big a tip as I could afford. Once I got used to them and stopped being klutzy, I felt like extra arms could be pretty useful for certain jobs. I wasn’t sure if they were me, though.
On our way back to the Venn machine, we passed a store with several TVs in its window, tuned to different channels. One of them was a news channel, and Meredith stopped to look.
“Oh, no!”
Sophia pulled out her phone and brought up a news video. It seemed that Mallory di Stefano, a pop musician who had recently turned actress, had been shot by an obsessed fan at a promotional appearance, and had been pronounced dead at the scene. (I won’t go into details, and I don’t recommend you look for videos. Most of them have been taken down, thank God.)
“That’s horrible,” I said, shuddering. None of us were big fans of her music, though Meredith liked it more than Sophia or me, and she hadn’t really had time to show off what she could do as an actress — her first big film hadn’t been released yet. But the news cast a pall over the rest of the day.
* * *
A few days later, though, one evening when I was reading one of Meredith’s Anne McCaffrey novels after a long study session, Meredith came home from work, burst into her room, and said “You’ve got to see this!” She had her phone to her ear as she said that, but once she had the door closed, she put it away — she hadn’t actually been on the phone with anyone, just using it as cover in case her parents heard her talking as she entered the room.
“See what?” I asked.
“Hang on a second.”
She opened up her laptop and un-hibernated it, then brought up Google News. The top headline read:
Murdered musician Mallory di Stefano revived by transformation technology
It seemed she’d been venned — the article didn’t say exactly what changes she’d made, just “correcting minor health issues and making cosmetic improvements.” And when her body was turned over to her relatives, they had put it into a Venn machine and gotten her back alive.
I’d heard of people venned into inanimate objects who’d gotten broken and been fine once the pieces were put in a Venn machine or their transformation timed out. And I’d heard rumors of people who had died while venned (usually into something highly vulnerable like an insect or other small animal) and been fine later, but this was the first time I’d heard it from a reliable source. The first time I’d ever heard the news media admit the existence of Venn machines, for that matter. The news articles and videos spent a lot of words explaining the Venn machines for people who’d never heard of them, which seemed (as the news cycle progressed) to be a surprising number of people in the big cities that didn’t have Venn machines yet. Maybe I was biased because of living in one of the first towns where the Venn machines had appeared, and then living in Greensboro but hanging out with friends who frequently traveled to nearby smaller towns with Venn machines. But apparently, if you lived in New York or some other big cities, you might have to travel for hours through megalopolis traffic to get to a town with a Venn machine.
The Venn machines were all over the news for about a week. There were stories about other, less famous people who’d died while venned and been revived, and whose revivals had been quietly covered up until now. Human-interest stories about people who venned long-term into unusual forms, including a thirty-second interview on the local Greensboro news with Guadalupe about her carbon-offset cyborg form. Stories about attempted crimes involving venned disguises which were foiled by the ubiquitous surveillance of Venn machine use. A couple of reality shows involving the Venn machines were announced. Sports leagues that hadn’t overtly taken notice of the Venn machines did so, forbidding their use in pro sports and the Olympics, but some new local sports leagues that had been around for a while finally got media attention — for instance, a swimming competition for merfolk, gladiatorial combat for venned creatures, and a multi-ball game where every time a player was disqualified, they got turned into another ball until there were more balls than the remaining players could keep moving... And then it all went quiet again.
The Venn machine didn’t vanish from the news, but they weren’t news in themselves anymore. It was minor news if a celebrity venned into something unusual, or a politician took a controversial stance on venning, but there was a lot less media attention for the nifty things ordinary people were doing with the machines.
But the next time Meredith, Sophia and I went on an outing, to Danville, Virginia this time as it was raining, I saw fewer old people around the mall than I would have expected, and a lot longer line for the Venn machine. The media blitz a few weeks earlier must have finally gotten through to the shut-ins who didn’t use the Internet. And there were a lot more people casually walking around in nonhuman forms, including the staff at the stores and restaurants, than I’d ever seen.
* * *
In early August, Carmen came over to visit one evening. After supper, they and Meredith hung out in Meredith’s room for a while, and I chatted with them for a couple of hours about what Carmen had been doing all summer (mostly working and catching up with TV shows they’d fallen behind on during the school year) and how I’d been doing, living with Meredith and Sophia. It was a good while after that before I saw Carmen in person again, though a few times during the following school year, Meredith called them and put them on speakerphone so I could join the conversation.
Sophia continued to interview me every month about how I felt about my animate-statue body. One evening just before school started back, she told me that her YouTube video series about how to venn someone into an animate doll or statue had reached ten thousand views. She’d made contact through that with several other people who had done long-term venns into bodies kind of like mine, and three of them had agreed to participate in her study, answering the same questionnaire she was using on me once a month as long as they stayed in those bodies.
“That judge at the science fair will rue the day he scorned me when I win the Nobel Prize,” she said, and tried out her best mad scientist laugh, which to be honest was not that great. I suggested she have Meredith venn her into a body with a more resonant voice, or maybe a wider vocal range, if she wanted to do that again. She scowled and Meredith laughed.
Sophia was deeply interested in what I’d told her about being able to concentrate better and read faster. She’d had Meredith or her friend Julianna turn her into animate dolls or statues, but rarely for very long; her job at the Dollar Tree didn’t allow her to come to work venned into a visibly nonhuman body, and Ethan, her boyfriend throughout much of her sophomore year, liked venning into furry bodies with her, but was creeped out by robots, cyborgs, or animate statues, or especially pure inanimate venns. They’d finally had a fight over it and broken up not long before this, and she’d been trying all summer to find a better job at a more Venn-friendly employer.
Finally, with just two days to go until the start of her junior year and Meredith’s senior year, she told us that she’d gotten a job at a restaurant a few blocks from the library. It was under new management, and the proprietor was encouraging the wait staff to always come to work venned — he would pay them for the time they spent waiting in line at the Venn machine before and after their shift, if they didn’t want to stay venned all the time, and meet up with them to venn them as needed. Having heard about that, she’d worn an animate doll body to the interview (similar to the one Meredith had worn to my birthday party, but life-sized), and her new boss had been delighted with it.
So after she’d talked it over with her parents, and her parents had talked it over with her manager, she filed a long-term Venn form with the school, and began attending classes and working as a life-sized doll. She didn’t sweat, so her body and clothes didn’t get dirty nearly as fast, but they did get dirty from external sources over time. She’d already been a good student, better than her older siblings, but her grades were pretty much perfect after that.
Since she was staying up all night studying or websurfing (her parents still wouldn’t let her stay out past midnight), I moved into her room. I still spent some time in Meredith’s room, when she was home and awake, but when Meredith went to bed, Sophia would take me to her room where I could read all night, or use Sophia’s computer when she didn’t need it, without arousing Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s suspicions. And though we spent a lot of that time separately reading, we also talked a lot in low voices, sharing cool things from the books or websites we were reading.
The first few days she spent in animate doll form, she pushed herself too hard, postponing the fugue state for a couple of days. That worked better for her than it would for a human trying to go without sleep that long, but after about three days, she fugued out during class; fortunately, the teacher didn’t call on her, but when the class ended and she didn’t get up to go, her friend Julianna spoke to her, then shook her shoulder, at which she “woke up.” She still felt a little out of it as she went to her next class, and during lunch (which she was spending in the library some days, since she didn’t eat) she took the opportunity to fugue out again for a bit longer. After she told me about that, I made sure to remind her every night to rest and stop reading or listening to podcasts for a while somewhere between midnight and dawn.
My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset etc. in a few months.
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