Lane Carter was a cargo bay drone pilot scraping by and spending all his...rather her time in the Virtual Reality game created by the Zenith Company. He was a playtester on their first serious fantasy setting on the neural link head set and now steps into playtesting their new full body pods and Vala their account became something more and more.

Command track, private bunks for each of us and it’s literally us walking in through this archway and we see not cots but like these crafted cubicles that are open with no roof to them but like a four foot privacy wall and there are other cadets there hanging out.
Well hanging out or waiting.
There’s more people watching, even coming over to watch as we’re getting assigned and taking our bunks by the numbers.
I hear them say hushedly. “The Apollo.”
And I can feel eyes on me.
Not just us but on me.
And people whispering. “It’s her.”
Oh dammit.
People know who I am?

Misplaced anger, miscommunication. Bad combination.

Autumn’s story had started a chain reaction. Pretty soon everyone in the room was taking turns talking about what had led them into becoming the women they now were. Not everyone spoke about it, so far two women had declined, but most of them did. And as they did, Natalie’s suspicions were slowly but surely confirmed. They had all been men in a past life, and each had varying levels of remembrance of it.

When they returned, Jada was a cyclopean llama-taur and Steph was an octopus-taur. She was riding on Jada’s back, having apparently gotten tuckered out on the way back — she was surprisingly fast on her tentacles, but they’d tired after walking a third of the way across campus.