Mikhail Gregorevich was one of the many mad scientists on the Earth of the 24th century who tried outlandish things to extend the human lifespan. He developed a machine to transfer a human mind from one body to another. It worked, sort of. The first big problem with it is that the receiving body must not already have a mind. He successfully tested it by transferring the mind of a person suffering from a terminal disease into the body of a person who was brain-dead and being kept alive by machines.

The second problem with it was that it didn’t always work. Sometimes, even if we could not detect the brain activity with conventional readings, the person’s mind was in there. And it also might not work if the person became brain-dead because their brain was too damaged. But a fail-safe made it only perform the transfer if there was a receiving target brain of sufficient operational complexity. He’d managed to get it to work several times. The lack of consistency and lack of good targets had kept his mind-transfer device from becoming a real success. What’s worse, the fail-safe had not always worked. A few test subjects had simply vanished, transferred into nothing.

Late in his life, he developed a new theory that there was a brief span during pregnancy in which the fetus had the capability to hold a human mind but had not yet developed its own, and as a result was a valid target for his machine. He imagined that some of his failures were caused by a slight misalignment causing the transfer to miss the intended target but hit a fetus elsewhere, perhaps miles away. Support for this theory was that aiming the machine at random showed many apparent targets. But no young people had stepped forward to say they were the reincarnations of the lost test subjects.

“They may be confused, not expecting to be reborn in a baby,” Mikhail argued. “The baby’s parents may have unknowingly brainwashed them, punishing any claim that they were the reincarnation of another person, thinking that impossible.”

Later, he showed that aiming the machine at a fetus at this stage generated the same positive readings his fail-safe gave when aimed at a brain-dead body which then had a successful transfer. And when this story hit the news, a number of children announced that they were the lost test subjects, reincarnated in fetuses elsewhere by the use of the device. Most of them were not believed at first, but Gregorevich had had every test subject record some secret to allow their reincarnation to prove their identity, and some of the claimants were able to give the proof.

This caused more than a bit of chaos. There were far more people requesting the procedure than Gregorevich could possibly handle. There were poor people offering to bear children to host the minds of wealthy people seeking to undergo the procedure, for millions of dollars. Some parents whose children came out as the missing test subjects sued Gregorevich and the test subjects for stealing their children’s bodies. It was a big mess.

The wealthier test subjects had left trust funds meant to be transferred to their new selves. Gregorevich’s company continued to hold these funds, theoretically for the purpose of helping locate the missing transferees. He had justified continuing to use the funds to eliminate the problem of missing transferees. But none of the wealthy ones had come forward, probably for fear they would also be sued and lose the money anyway. To settle the law suits under a class action, these funds were now split up among the suing families, and Gregorevich was left only with his own meager funds.

He was able to secure a bit more funding and continue the work, improving its accuracy, but it still wasn’t working reliably enough. And still, about a third of the lost test subjects, even ones without significant funds to be sued over, never came forward. The process was deemed not ready for commercial use, and Gregorevich was seen as a failure.

Facing more lawsuits from the families of lost transferees, and knowing he did not have a lot of life left, Gregorevich publicly used the device on himself, aiming it somewhere where his fail-safe found a signal. “I’ll be reincarnated, but you’ll never find out who I am. I’ll never tell.”

And with those words, he activated the device and his body fell lifeless.

---

The device didn’t die. There were several working devices which various people, through uncertain means, had acquired, and it wasn’t clear whether they were all legitimate, but the first business that arose offered people the chance to be reincarnated, but into a random person and they could never tell and nobody would ever know if it was successful (other than the transferee, if it was successful). Needless to say, most people viewed this as shady, but still many wealthy and dying people paid large sums for the chance at another life, even if “you can’t take it with you” as all these companies advertised, meaning that you could not pass your remaining wealth to your new self.

In years to come, more researchers perfected the device. The key was that the fail-safe could report a brain signature of the target, and two, or for even more security three of the machines could be set up at different angles, pointing at the same target, using the signatures to confirm they were aimed at the same target at a known location, with one of the machines then transferring you across. The economy of elderly people paying others to raise them reincarnated as children became legitimate, though still controversial. Some religions welcomed the practice as a miracle from God, while others banned it, and some underwent schisms between those in favor of and against the procedure.

And it was no longer the case that “you can’t take it with you” as people were able to set up trust funds naming the unborn child of a certain couple as the beneficiary. A refinement of this technique used the mind signature of the person on the sending end of a device to verify identity. While they couldn’t interpret the memories they read from a person’s mind, they could match them against memories whose signatures were recorded from their previous life. They could also estimate the total number of memories; this distinguished a true infant’s mind from one that had been overwritten by the device. This enabled authorities to prosecute the crime of body theft, which, without the kind of agreement people signed with families to raise their reincarnations, was punishable by death. Anyone suspecting their child had been stolen by a renegade transfer could have the child tested to verify whether they possessed more memories than they should. This ended renegade transfers and limited reincarnation to those who could pay in advance for the costs of raising a child to adulthood.

So it came as a complete surprise some decades years later when a 1-year-old girl claimed to be the reincarnation of Mikhail Gregorevich. The fact that she could even say something like seemed proof that she was a reincarnation of somebody. There hadn’t been any lost test subjects for many years, though, and certainly nobody with the apparent 120 years worth of memories she was measured to carry.

The girl, Tara, proved herself to at least be someone knowledgeable by assembling a working mind transfer device given the parts for one. She wasn’t completely believed until she gave the rest of her story.

I’m an Eel

Ethertravel report #1, delivered in person February 5, 2410.

To my great surprise, rather than finding myself born as a human child to some family on Earth, after I beamed myself away in 2370, I became an eel-like creature on a watery world. I was certain from an early age that I had managed to beam myself completely off the Earth, as we didn’t have eels on Earth that built structures or had technology like theirs. We definitely would have discovered these shallow-water creatures, if we hadn’t simply killed them all by polluting the water.

The people there weren’t quite eels. At first glance, it was a good description, but these eels each had 6 prehensile fins which helped them do everything people do with their hands.

I went to school (no pun intended) and learned everything that the eel society taught their children. In some cases, having already learned the subjects on Earth helped, while in other cases, such as their language, history, and such, it did not, or not as easily, anyway. But I excelled, and when I got older studied their style of technology. It wasn’t like ours, being designed to work entirely underwater. Light, rather than electrons, provided circuit connections, moving through fiber-optic-like material that guided the light to stay within the devices in which it was used.

I was determined to rebuild my mind-transfer device and get back to Earth. If I didn’t, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind might go unrecognized! But it wasn’t going to be easy. Not only did I have to build it using a completely different type of circuitry, but I also had to find Earth! Fortunately for me, I was an amateur astronomer on Earth, and I remembered the relative positions and brightnesses of the stars closest to Earth. Also fortunately, being near-surface dwellers, they had astronomy of their own, and I was able to look up catalogs of the nearby stars.

That took some work, but ultimately I found Earth and its stellar neighborhood. I was 100 light-years away! But even before knowing that, just in having traveled to any other world, I knew something important. When I built it, I knew my device used quantum communication to establish its connection, but I didn’t realize that this communication was faster-than-light. But it had to be so! Otherwise it would have taken a lifetime just to make the connection in the first place! Now my discovery was doubly important. Not only had I found a way to travel to the stars that didn’t involve rockets and impossible amounts of fuel, but I’d also discovered faster-than-light communication. I felt certain that the channel my device makes could be exploited to provide two-way instantaneous communication between two compatible devices.

Eel lifetimes are shorter than those of humans. I was quite elderly by the eel people’s standards by the time I had a working device, and testing it wasn’t practical. Even if I found a test subject and a target pregnant eel, I wasn’t sure I was going to live long enough to figure out if the eel’s mind had transferred successfully. The only thing to do was aim at the Earth until I found a target and send myself across. Fortunately, it worked.

Ethertravel, Inc.

Earth’s astronomers had mapped all the stars out to that distance with even the slightest hope of supporting life, so details from Tara about the world’s star and the planet’s gravity and orbital period allowed astronomers to conclusively identify what was now dubbed the Eel World. And there was now massive interest around the world in exploring the other worlds with suitable life we could transfer our minds into. But we needed a few things to make this exploration meaningful.

At this time, there were six major companies in the world selling mind transfer to the public which were considered reputable, with a track record of known successes. They formed an organization to manage the exploration with a board containing 7 members, the heads of the six companies or their appointed representatives, and Tara. It wasn’t as strange as it sounds to have a 1-year-old on the committee. The establishment of controlled reincarnation in the intervening years had made it commonplace to accept youngsters as being equivalent to their past selves. They were still treated as children under certain laws, mostly related to their own safety and sex, but as adults under most other laws.

The group came to agree on a few basic points:

• First off, we had to have an effective way for the explorers to report back. If they went there but couldn’t communicate back with their observations, we’d learn nothing. So we needed to develop the theorized FTL communicator first.
• On top of that, the explorers we sent out had to be trained. They needed to learn how to make their own FTL communicator, from scratch, and perhaps on a world which had not yet developed electronics.
• They also needed to learn the star maps. At a minimum, each traveler would need to memorize about 30 stars and their coordinates, in addition to learning how to do the math to translate from the relative coordinates we used on Earth to absolute, galaxy-centered coordinates and back again. A few of the stars chosen were the nearest bright ones to our sun, while the rest were the ones with the greatest absolute brightness in the galaxy, which would serve as landmarks if an ethertraveler found himself much farther away than the 100 light years of the Eel World. We started the first candidates with lessons on building electronics completely from scratch and the star maps while we worked on perfecting the communicator.
• Finally, we needed somewhere to go, and to know where we were going. We had aimed mind transfer devices at the stars and found lots of targets, but because it was instantaneous, we could not use communication time to infer distance. So we couldn’t be sure whether we were finding that target near the star we aimed at or one hidden behind it, thousands of light years more distant. The triangulation system used to confirm targets on Earth wouldn’t work for traveling to the stars. We could never align two devices precisely enough to hit the same target, especially since most target worlds would be expected to have thousands or even millions of potential targets at any one time. But there was almost no incidence of targets in places where we did not know of stars. So we could place three devices far apart on the Earth, aimed so that they could not hit any human beings, and all aimed at the same star, and if all found a target, even though it was unlikely to be the same target, we could be reasonably certain we were finding the target in the system we thought we were aiming at.

We set up several dozen of these devices around the world aimed up at the sky, enough to ensure we had a few available to point at any area of the sky, and we went through the catalog of stars nearest Earth, the ones where a developed astronomy program would likely have spotted our sun, and thus ones where it would be easier for our explorers to find the way back home.

Although we knew where the stars were, we didn’t know about planets; since the late 20th century, astronomers had detected planets orbiting other stars by various techniques, but most of these were either giant planets or ones orbiting very close to the star and very rapidly. None of our detection techniques would have identified the Earth orbiting a star like our sun except at the few closest stars. So we simply tried all the close stars.

Most of them didn’t have targets, but quite a few did. Among the stars that were within a factor of 3 of the sun’s mass and radiant intensity, and at least half a billion years old, and with a spectrum similar to our sun’s, almost every one did. Those parameters ruled out a lot of stars, but we had identified thousands of stars across the galaxy within these ranges. We started testing all these stars with a high success rate. So we had plenty of targets!

Once Tara laid out plans for the communication device, it was constructed and confirmed to work in six months. It needed a live person running the machine because it used the quantum states of that person’s mind in the same way the ethertravel device did. It was simply looking for a different kind of target, another person using a similar device, rather than a mindless body receptive to a mind transfer. The target mind activated what would have been one of the failsafes on the mind-transfer device, the one that says the target already has a mind, and when it did so, the communicator sent across data that helped the target’s communicator establish a reverse connection, which confirmed the existence of a communicator at the target.

It was in one big way more reliable than the mind-transfer device; it was looking for an open channel from another device of the same kind, rather than a suitable mind-transfer target. Unless somebody else somewhere in the galaxy had managed to invent the same kind of device, or one of our travelers managed to find another traveler rather than Earth, there shouldn’t be any wrong targets. It could latch on to any device it found in the direction it was aimed and send its report.

This made secure transmissions impossible; people could set up rogue receivers, but we weren’t looking for security. We invented a secure version, used between points on Earth, but you needed to have the brain signature of your target. This couldn’t work for communicating with ethertravelers because they could not know what people would be on receivers at any given time, and while we theoretically could know the brain signatures of all ethertravelers if we recorded them as we sent them out, we couldn’t have the people manning the receivers looking for thousands of different signatures at once. So we set up a network of open communicators, manned 24/7 so they would be available to receive from our ethertravelers any time they were ready, enough of them to make locating one feasible for a traveler. The people manning them all had other duties, so we weren’t paying them to do literally nothing before the first real callbacks arrived.

We spent another two years trying to simplify the communication device down to its barest essence, the minimal device we could teach the explorers to construct from scratch on an alien world. In one meeting while trying to develop an explanation of the device, an analogy was made to the quantum connection being like the ether thought to permeate space in the early days of science. This analogy was badly flawed, and never used in any of our materials, but the name stuck because we needed a better name than “traveling to the stars via mind transfer.” This was how it became known as ethertravel, and the communication device an ether communicator. Still a mouthful, but only half as much of one. It was even adopted as the name of the organization: Ethertravel, Inc.

The brightest group of our students learned to build the minimal ether communicator in a few months, and they then were tested by building several more with a variety of different kinds of starting materials. They weren’t always successful; we conceded that it wasn’t always going to be possible for every ethertraveler to build an ether communicator in every world they might end up in. Letting groups of students work together had much greater success, so we would try to send multiple people to the same world around the same time with hopes they could find one another and among their group find all the skills to call home.

After seeing how these turned out, we also developed a crude communication code. There were two issues. First, we couldn’t agree on a precise timing scheme because timing is hard without some kind of absolute standard that is easy to establish, and on another world, that would be hard. And second, the encoding needed to be simple so they could remember it.

Fortunately, the communication device could send out positive, negative, and neutral signals. We decided positive bits would be 1, negative bits 0, and there would be a return to neutral state after every bit. And we’d use a simple 6-bit communication code: 0 is space, 1-26 is the lower-case English alphabet, 27-52 is the capitals, 53-62 is the digits 0-9, and 63 is a special character, nominally a period. When it was followed by a space, it would be a period. When it was followed by a letter, the letters up to the next period would name a symbol, so for instance you’d send .comma. for a comma. Ugly, but better than trying to remember the order of a whole bunch of symbols. We’d process the reports here into standard Earth encodings and could sort out the symbols at that time. We also allowed the more technically talented ethertravelers to overlay systems of encoding pictures and video on top of this. We didn’t expect that to be common, but we’d handle turning them into standard data formats when we received them.

It was just under four years from when Tara announced herself as the reincarnation of Mikhail Gregorevich that we sent out the first ethertravelers.

Receiving Reports

Naturally, we didn’t get anything for a while. And we received a few early reports that were hoaxes sent by people from Earth. But eventually we started receiving real reports from ethertravelers, and we established a group to process them. Some reports were brief, and just gave a general description of the planet and its people, and we added these to a growing catalog of descriptions of planets with targets.

Some ethertravelers wrote us longer stories, and we are working to publish them, converting them from the crude code into normal text, and editing them to correct spelling and grammatical errors and to expand abbreviations some ethertravelers employed to send text more quickly.

The Penisbirthers

Ethertravel report #71, received May 12, 2465.

I was Carlos Velasquez, among the first class of ethertravelers to be sent out at the start of 2413. My target was Epsilon Eridani. We knew there were giant planets here, and it was suspected there were inner, Earth-like planets but Earth didn’t have technology to detect them directly. Seeing the presence of ethertravel targets made that a whole like more likely, and I was one of several sent here to check it out.

Epsilon Eridani is a smaller, cooler, and less radiant star than Earth’s sun, but still within the range thought capable of supporting life. And now that I am here I can confirm there is a planet with abundant life!

Summary: I’m a purple bipedal creature, vaguely humanoid, under a pretty broad definition of that term, somewhat stouter and shorter than humans. I have two five-fingered hands and two five-toed feet. The planet is significantly colder than Earth, but livable in the tropics. The technology level is roughly early 21st century by Earth standards.

Infancy

When I first figured out what was going on, I realized I was in my mother’s pouch. There is sexual reproduction and pregnancy here, but it’s not quite the same as on Earth. The early stages happen in the womb, but when there’s a body that is starting to look the slightest bit like a miniature person, birth occurs. The new person doesn’t completely leave the mother’s body; she stays connected via the umbilical cord and lives inside a pouch, like a kangaroo has. Whether the cord bit is true for a kangaroo’s joey or not I have no idea; I studied a bunch of stuff before ethertraveling, but I couldn’t learn every detail about every animal. Eventually the child develops enough so she no longer fits entirely inside the pouch, and that is the point I was at in my earliest memories. I use “she” here, and female default in general, because it seems most appropriate.

The child in the pouch still receives nutrition and eliminates wastes via the umbilical cord, but as the child develops, her mother feeds her more and more externally and less through the cord. This continues for a while until the child grows so large that the pouch can no longer hold her. The cord keeps her from falling all the way to the ground, but this event triggers the placental separation that happens in humans shortly after birth. They don’t cut the cord; most of the cord withers and dies within a day, but a short piece which looks like a tail remains, and becomes the sole organ for excreting wastes.

When I first came loose from my mother, I was clothed in disposable diapers like ones which were a relic in stories of times past on Earth, before it was deemed impractical to continue generating huge amounts of plastic waste that way. By the time I was 7 of the short years here old, but no bigger than a human 2-year-old in relation to my parents, I was toilet trained. I needed a step-stool, but no booster seat, because there is only a small hole in the seat. We place the tail-like organ all our wastes come out of into the hole to use it. All toilets here are made that way. It’s cleaner than humans, certainly; that organ is the only thing that needs any cleaning, and then barely so. They have invented toilet paper here, but you actually only need one or two of those little sheets, and they come folded out of a little box like tissues on Earth.

And during this period, as I grew, I was fed food that did not need chewing until I developed teeth that could chew, and then gradually food more and more like my parents ate.

Also, I began to learn what this world is like. It has blue water and brown soil and green plants and various colors of animals, at least as I perceive them with the eyes I have here. I think the range of vision is slightly shifted toward the infrared compared to humans, but you’ll have to make do with my perception of the colors. The sun is orange, and as I mentioned, the people are purple. While the people here look clearly nonhuman, they have aspects in common with humans. Arms, legs, head, the basic body parts. There aren’t breasts; breast feeding is not a concept among the people nor animals of this world. And people have houses and vehicles of a sort and schools and well-developed technology.

In warm times, people usually do not wear clothes over the upper torso. A knee-length skirt is the only typical garment, and as with humans, it covers the excretory and sexual organs. Women with a baby in the pouch wear skirts with a slit that allows them to access the baby or lets the baby poke out, depending on how developed she is. There are various kinds of full-body coverings worn in cold weather.

Eventually I began to learn about the calendar, in part by my birthdays. The custom here is only to have birthday parties at ages which are multiples of 5 or 10; the individual year birthdays may be recognized, but that’s it. That’s because the year is only 91 days long (though it was not until after I started school that I could confirm that those units are really the years defined by this planet’s orbit around its star), so they come pretty quickly. Calendars here are 10 pages long, for 10 of the short years, starting in a year ending in 0, each year presented on a long page as thirteen weeks of seven days each. There aren’t divisions equivalent to months; there is not a large moon here with major influence on this planet. (There is a small one but its effects on tides and weather are minimal.) For some purposes, the years are used like months or quarters on Earth, and 5 or 10 year cycles (starting with a multiple-of-5 year) are used like years.

The language is, unsurprisingly, unrelated to any Earth language I am familiar with, and the names are likewise very odd to Earth ears. To make things easier, I am translating each name into something phonetically close to names people use on Earth. My name here is Becca. As it’s spoken here, the final vowel is very weak, weaker than in that name on Earth, and the rest is quite close. However, the language structure is typical, with features such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, plurals, tenses, and such. My own experience with language helped only a little; I had to learn it and learn to speak the same as any other child here.

As I learned more of the language, I came to understand my parents discussing certain periodic changes they were going through at the same time. I took note of this and saw that it happened on about 40-day intervals. But at this age I didn’t understand what the change meant; I thought it meant periods like with menstruation.

I also learned the time system and numbers here. It was pretty much all digital clocks, using a base-10 system, just with different digits than I had used before. You could find analog clocks on the sides of old buildings sometimes. There is a word that essentially means “clockwise” but it means the opposite way from on Earth. Of course they use different words for all these things, but the day is divided into what I think of as 10 hours, each divided into 100 minutes, each divided into 100 seconds. 100,000 seconds is a bit more than in an Earth day, but the seconds are shorter and even before I started school I was sure the overall day was a bit shorter than an Earth day.

Pretty soon I learned to write in their language, and in addition to my practice notebooks, I started a notebook of important things to send back to Earth when I was able. Parts of it were written in their language, and parts in English disguised among doodles when I wanted to write anything that might leak information about Earth if it was found.

School

I was age 22 (remember, in the short years of this world) when I started school. It runs on 5-year blocks which I’ll call terms, starting on the multiple-of-5 years, and we started in the first term after turning 20. And this was good, because I got to start learning more things about the world.

As I was preparing to start school, my parents explained more about not just time but also schedules, what it means to be a particular time. Just like on Earth, the day flips over in the middle of the night. The sun rises around 2.30 to 2.70 and the sun sets around 7.30 to 7.70, with a pretty small variation because we live close to the equator. They divide the world into 20 time zones to allow something close to that to be true everywhere, though half of them are not populated, and they don’t bend the zones around political boundaries, instead drawing many political boundaries along the time zones. School consistently starts at 3.10 and runs until 6.00 each day. Well, five days a week, because we have the same weekday/weekend setup which is common on Earth, and I translate their names of days of the week based on that. We go to school for the first 11 weeks of each year, and are off the last two weeks, which coincides with a number of religious and civil holidays. Each year is a separate lesson block within the system, and may have a different class schedule from other years in the same term.

I learned what the world looks like. They rarely use globes here because the world is colder than Earth, and everyone lives in the tropics, but you might see globes in a class that is teaching about the whole world. What would have been the temperate region on Earth is mostly iced over all the time, in addition to the poles, so a world map is usually a long narrow folded strip of the equatorial part of the world. If printed in a book, they usually only print the side of the planet within that region where everybody lives, across two pages. This along with the short year explains why there aren’t really seasons here. There is weather; we have warm and cold times, but not on set cycles.

The first two terms of my schooling took place in a school that was clearly designed to get kids used to the idea of being away from their parents for a time. I thought it was a bit like preschool and kindergarten, with some real learning but no changing classrooms during the day, except for a play period when we could go outside and play on nice days, and stay in and play games when the weather didn’t allow. There was a bathroom in a closet within each classroom, with lower toilets that we didn’t need step-stools to get onto.

So I was 32 when I started the 3rd term, what I thought of as first grade, in a regular school where we had clearly distinct classes, actual grades, homework, and the like. We could visit the non-gendered restrooms between classes, which looked like any women’s restroom on Earth, as the only kind of toilet they ever use here is just like the one at my home, with a small hole to put your tail organ into.

I was at this school for five terms. Those terms were incredibly useful to me to learn about the strange world I found myself living in. The math was easy and mostly unenlightening. The language classes helped me fill in lots of stuff I had missed trying to learn the language on my own and the limited amount my parents had taught me. There were some filler bits like art and music, which, while different from the art and music of Earth, I am not sure helped me a lot. I did do one thing with the art. Whenever I made a painting, a sculpture, or one of the other forms of art, I designed the shapes of letters spelling TERRA in it somewhere. Except the T (which made an M sound here), these didn’t look like the letters or numbers of this world. It wouldn’t mean anything to anybody here, but if another Earthling saw it, they’d know one of their fellow ethertravelers was here. It might be easier to build the communicator if I could find others; we were not in competition with one another. Of course, I had no direct way to contact the others or even know if they had made it here successfully. This didn’t get any response, but I vowed to myself to keep doing it.

Other classes taught me about the history and geography of the world, and of the people, and there were lots of nuggets in there. Somewhere along the way, the phrase I’d heard my parents use and had wrongly interpreted as referring to menstruation came up in conversation at school, and I learned it properly meant “changing sex”. One of the other kids explained it to me. They do have sexual reproduction here, as I thought, but the part I didn’t understand was that the adults alternate between being male and female. At the first opportunity, I asked my parents about it.

Lisa, my mother, answered (the dialogue is all translated very liberally, but capturing the essence of what was said), “Hmm. You’re only 40, and probably still too young to understand it all, but yes. When you become an adult, a little over twice a year you will change, becoming male if you were female or female if you were male. Joan and I alternate, so one of us becomes male when the other becomes female, within a day or so.”

That was the end of the answer, and further explanation was deferred “until I was older.” The word for female here is a derivative of the word for baby, literally “baby-bearing”, and the word for male is exactly the same word with a negative prefix attached. The language has gender for all nouns, as you might find in Spanish, but literally all the words for people are female except those specifically describing males. Because I have come to think in this way, you’ll see me generically use female pronouns, Queen, etc. throughout the report. The Queen is always referred to as a Queen and never with male descriptors except in a statement such as “our previous Queen was the father of the current Queen” (which is true), and even then, only in “father” and not either instance of “Queen.” Male pronouns are pretty rare, and only used together with one of those male-specific words, or certain animals. You could say “The Queen fathered her first child 40 years ago” and “he is the father of Princess Rona” with both pronouns referring to the same person, regardless of what sex that Queen is now.

Both the schools I’d attended to this point were a few blocks from my house, and I usually walked to school when weather allowed. The first term, one of my parents pushed me to and from school in a stroller because they thought it was still too far for me to walk. The next few terms we walked together, and starting in 5th term (3rd grade in my mind) I walked alone to school. I was also allowed to, with permission, visit the houses of my other school friends in the neighborhood on my own. They were pretty open with what we did, like a more innocent era that is sometimes told about in old Earth stories but was centuries gone on my Earth due to crime. And during these visits, we did kid things. The ways we played were not much different from the way kids played on Earth, and where things were different, it was often like ways kids used to play on Earth before parents got scared of one problem or another.

By seventh term, having failed to find another ethertraveler, I concluded there wasn’t one in my school, and I allowed myself to become best friends with a student in my class named Sarah. That really just meant that we visited each other more often. It wasn’t exclusive, and she wasn’t a “girlfriend.” They had a term comparable to that but it didn’t apply until we reached sexual maturity.

Big Kids’ School

For eighth term, which is sixth grade by Earth standards, I started at a new school, and like in the usual system back on Earth starting in 6th or 7th grade most places, at this school we followed individual class schedules and switched rooms by ourselves. We had the same schedule of 2 hours and 90 minutes for the whole school day, with 5 classes of 45 minutes each and a lunch period after either the second or third, and four minutes between classes.

And I still walked to school, though it was farther, with one of my parents walking with me both ways the first couple weeks. This was a larger school, but not like the mega-schools with over ten thousand kids that some big cities on Earth have. There were about a thousand kids in the whole school, and they all walked except on bad-weather days. They didn’t have the concept of school buses here. If the weather was too bad for walking, a parent took us to school and picked us up in a vehicle. Sometimes there were car pools on those days and I’d go with another parent and some other kids from my block, but by this point we knew all the neighbors involved. It was still innocent; nobody worried that one of the neighbors was going to kidnap us.

While we had the same classes for a full term in earlier terms, now we could have different class schedules each year within the term. But we had physical education as a class all five years of each term, for eighth through eleventh terms. Changing was simpler. We pulled on tight shorts under our skirts and then took the skirts off. There were lockers to store our clothes in, but no showers. The people here do not sweat like humans do. Instead, each such class includes “panting breaks” to rest and recover energy after athletic activity, usually in the middle and at the end of class. And there were no gendered locker rooms, because there was only one gender; everyone at this age was the same.

In addition to that, most people took math, language (a common world language), and history as classes that ran for the first four years of each term, and two different sciences as two-year classes in the first two and next two years. Fifth year allowed us to take minor sciences we didn’t need as broad a coverage over, like geology (this world’s version, which was actually quite similar to Earth’s because the conditions were similar and created the same kinds of rocks). There were a lot of elective classes in fifth year as well, like art. And in eighth term specifically, everybody was required to take the health class in fifth year.

Foreign language was notably absent, but my history classes explained why. There used to be many other languages, but there was a great war that happened about 400 years ago. One nation tried to conquer the whole world, and nearly did. Some terrible weapon, which they said made the area where it was used unlivable (which suggests to me nuclear weapons) was employed to stop them, and it succeeded. However, the enemy also deployed the weapon, not as successfully, but it killed many people. In all, over 90% of the population of this world perished, including for all practical purposes the entire populations of the aggressor and several other nations. Other nations lost significant population as well, and none of the remaining nations was able to survive on its own. They came together, resettling in unaffected parts of the world, and merging their languages into a common new one.

They wanted to avoid the kind of conflict that had allowed the war to start by bringing everybody together under a common culture. Part of that was a common language, an artificially constructed one based on elements of the other languages, but meant to be as easy to learn as possible. That’s why the language was completely regular and spelled strictly phonetically. The generation who started school during or after the war almost exclusively spoke the new language; they were not taught the old languages, though they still picked up bits of the old languages in the street from older people. The generation after that basically only knew the new language, and I was somewhat at the start of the following generation, when for almost everybody this is the only language even remembered. It is still permitted only for advanced history scholars to learn the old languages in later schooling similar to college, but it was only meant to be used to understand old records.

Religion had undergone similar treatment. The attacking country had taken advantage of religious differences between their people and others to bolster support for the war, and had assigned troops who held one or another tenet more strongly to fight against countries where that tenet was largely contradicted. Religious differences had also hindered the other countries from banding together, at first. And some of the religious differences seem trivial to me, including (this is an actual example) whether a certain sacrament should be performed with the left or right hand. The new religion took permissive attitudes, such as that it didn’t matter which hand was used to perform the sacrament, while reinforcing the basic religious laws against murder and theft which had been disregarded by the attackers.

Checking Time

By this time I was starting to think about time, and the school calendar, and all those units I was guessing at the sizes of. I looked up in the library the necessary figures to do the unit conversions in detail:

• I knew the speed of light was (to 3 significant figures) 300 million m/s. They had computed the speed of light here in their units, and this let me convert velocities.
• I knew it took 6.022 x 10²³ atoms to have a mass equal to that atom’s atomic weight in grams. I found the corresponding constant here, which let me convert masses.
• Some of the other constants I knew were based on the gravity or atmospheric pressure on Earth. While it seemed similar here, it’d be only guessing, which I had done before. To compute them more precisely, I remembered that the density of water was close to 1 gram per cubic centimeter, and this varied a little but was pretty constant to 2 significant figures over the range of conditions suitable for life in which water was liquid. This meant I could get within 1% estimates of the volume units, which let me figure out the distance units, which combined with the velocity let me figure out the time units.

So for the first time I could say that the adult people here are about 4 to just under 5 feet tall, but stouter. They have about the same mass as humans, but with a bit less weight because of the lighter gravity.

And I could quantify the “faster seconds” I commented on at the beginning of my report. I found that one of what I was calling the second here is about 0.71 of an Earth second, which means that 10000 of them, or one of this world’s hours, is 7100 Earth seconds or just a little short of two Earth hours. That means that the ten hour day here is just under 20 Earth hours. People here are adapted to sleeping on this schedule, so less gets done in a day than on Earth. This is why we only have 5 classes in a school day instead of 6 or 7 which is common on Earth.

With 1/4 as many days in a year, each 5/6 as long, the 5-year intervals they use for some things are almost exactly the same length as Earth’s years. More precisely, the 5-year cycle has 5 x 91 = 455 days, each of 100,000 seconds, or 71,000 earth seconds, which is 32,305,000 Earth seconds. A mean solar year on Earth is 365.24 days, each of 24 hours, each of 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds, which is 31,556,736 seconds. So it actually makes a lot of sense to use 5-year cycles here the way Earth uses years. They are almost the same length.

As far as schooling, a 4500 second class is 3195 Earth seconds, or about 53 and a half minutes, while on Earth schools often have 55 minute classes allowing 5 minutes between classes for an hourly cycle. But we have only 55 of them per year while, through grade 12, the Earth standard is 90 class days per semester, so it means they could fit only about half as much learning into one class. As a result, classes that run two or four years are pretty close to one and two semester classes on Earth.

Taken overall, a 5-year school term here consists of 25 courses each meeting for 55 days of 3195 seconds each, or 4,391,125 seconds of class time. A 180-day school year on Earth with 6 classes each 55 minutes long is only 3,564,000 seconds! We get 23% more class time! However, we also go to school for one year less, starting from the beginning of what I feel is regular school in third term; thirteenth term, which I equate to eleventh grade, is the end of it. Taken that way, we get only 13% more class time.

Health Class

Knowing that I had the fifth-year health class during eighth term, which includes full details about how reproduction works for people here, during the class break before that year, my parents tried to explain everything to me. Coming from the otherworldly background I did, it sounded crazy to me, but considered another way, it is amazing how similar they are. So I accepted the story, knowing I was going to get confirmation at school soon. The classes confirmed their story 100%.

Women on this world do not menstruate. The part of this course that on Earth would have involved periods, pads, and tampons, instead described penis-birth. Women here ovulate basically like human women do. But the egg always develops, fertilized or not. If it is fertilized, it grows into a new person. If not, then it grows into a penis. Technically, it is the complete male reproductive system, but the penis is so much larger and more visible than the rest that people commonly apply the word for penis to the whole thing. Even the technical word they use for the process here is literally a compound of the words for penis and birth.

In either case, at the end of the 40-day female period (so, about 32 days after the egg started growing), the woman gives partial birth to whatever was growing inside her, baby or penis. Partial, in that it stays attached via the cord, and is only birthed into her pouch.

They described the pouch next. It starts like what I had always had up to this point, what they call the cap, which is a tiny bulge that can’t be opened at all and is only big enough to conceal a fingernail. They told me I was going to start notice this growing, so that by the end of tenth term it would have just reached the size to contain a fingertip from the last joint, and by some point in twelfth term, twice that big in diameter and thickness. That is the adult size when there was nothing inside it.

Usually during thirteenth term, the last term of regular school here, around age 83 to 85, people experience their first ovulation, which can never be fertilized because the pouch hasn’t opened yet, so it always forms a penis. When it is born, the cap opens at the top/front, forming the pouch, and along with the penis, the cap grows upward along the body to about twice its original length. The tip of the penis just barely emerges from the slit of the pouch, and it sometimes slides back inside.

Then they explained how sex works. Sex is something people here do only when they want to get pregnant. Sex almost always results in pregnancy!

It’s also only possible when you are with someone you really love. The reason for this is that a person’s pouch retracts only in such a circumstance; without retracting, the organs are too covered by it for sex. In males, the retraction allows the full length of the penis to be exposed. In females, it exposes the vagina. There’s not enough room to force a penis into a vagina of a person whose pouch has not retracted, and the penis isn’t long enough if the male’s pouch has not retracted. Furthermore, the pouch only retracts during a person’s fertile period. The male is fertile from about a day after penisbirth until about a day before the penis withers and detaches, preparing the person for her next period as a female. But the female is only fertile during a period of about 5 or 6 days, which starts about 2 or 3 days after the penis separates.

A female can literally only have sex when she can get pregnant, and we’re super-fertile and practically always get pregnant if we do. That’s why sex almost always results in pregnancy.

In the health class they showed us some videos, one of an actual penisbirth, sped up by a factor of 10 until near the end, because it takes an hour and there isn’t much to see until it is almost over. There were also animations of what it looks like inside the body. There was also a sped-up video of the penis withering and separating. The pouch retracts only partially at that point, back to the size it was before the penisbirth, which is the normal female size. They didn’t show us a video of actual sex, but they showed us still pictures of exposed penises and vaginas, and of the male pouch retracted far enough to reveal the scrotum, which you wouldn’t recognize because the temporary 40-day testes are tiny. It’s rare for the male pouch to retract that far. Another picture showed the female pouch retracted to nearly nothing so the entire round opening of the vagina is accessible. There were also animations of how far into the vagina a penis goes during sex, which seemed about human standard, though to a kid just learning this, it seems shocking, and there were more than a few gasps among my classmates during this.

The time spent as male can vary. Normally it’s the same 40 days. But when a compatible couple lives together, one for which both partners’ pouches retract, if the penisbirth occurs in one partner while the other is male, the partner’s male period ends sooner. This tends to align them so they end up as opposite genders almost all the time.

So, I wondered, why isn’t the world completely overpopulated with people?

Well, there’s the thing we learned about where 400 years ago (in this world’s short years, so some children from that time still live) 90% of the population was wiped out in a war. But also some people never really find their true love, and that means they don’t even get the opportunity to have sex. This is so common that there’s literally a government program to help loveless people find partners. Some of the people who do find partners are happy with 2 or 3 kids and don’t want to have a massive family. My parents only had one other kid, 20 years after me.

And it turns out that sex isn’t the pleasurable part. It’s the opening of the pouch which sparks pleasure in people, so they get a lot just by being with their love, and it really encourages couples to stay together. It tends to be a life bond, and in the rare cases where people find they can no longer love each other and their pouches no longer retract, it’s generally considered grounds for separation, for each to look for another partner. My parents confirmed that their pouches are indeed open that far every day they are home together during their fertile periods, and it is a big incentive to be together.

The government encourages people to have more kids. The program to help loveless people find partners comes with a commitment of having two kids if you are matched up through the program. Of course, they advised us not to have any kids until after we finished school, if we were so lucky as to find a compatible partner before we did finish, not that we can even do that until the last term.

Whether through that program or otherwise, potential couples have something like an engagement, followed by a period of living together. Usually, if they do not both experience the pouch opening within 2 years, it is deemed a failure and the engagement is canceled, but in some cases, especially if one partner achieves pouch opening, they may continue up to 10 years before giving up.

Ninth Term

My class schedule was much the same the next term, with more recent history and different science and fifth-year classes, including fifth-year astronomy. By the time I completed this term, with the level of knowledge in the intro classes for each science and a computer class, I understood the level of technology and what I was up against.

This world has computers. They have advanced beyond the toy computers of the first generation of home computers, and at this time were basically at the second generation of computers at the end of Earth’s 20th century. This was in a period of rapid advancement in computing power on Earth, and it seemed to be here, too; It had been about 100 years since the first home computers here, about 20 Earth years, which was about as far past Earth’s first home computers as the technology level was here.

They have some telescopes that can see well beyond any reasonably perceptible visible light, but they are not yet at the point where they can make images of planets around other stars. The cutting-edge telescopes were post-war developments, set up in the cold, unlivable spaces far from light pollution. There are no space telescopes yet.

They did land on the moon, just years before I was born on this world. The moon here is much smaller and farther from the planet than Earth’s, and was perhaps less tempting and more difficult of a target than Earth’s, which we landed on within a decade of sending a man into space. Here, it took 150 of the much shorter years, about 30 of Earth’s years.

The moon here barely has any gravity, and it’s a huge chunk of lithium, beryllium, silicon, and other metals useful for electronics, with a pretty minor layer of dust over it because the gravity there is too small to collect much. I could easily see them someday mining it, but there were likely more easily accessible resources in the cold parts of this world that they’d exploit first.

The limit of their subatomic theory is quarks. And they are at the stage where quantum theory is at odds with the macroscopic scientific laws, without understanding why.

I hoped that by the time I tried to contact Earth, the state of the art would have advanced, but even with significant advancement, what I would be doing would be utterly beyond explanation to any of the people here. The classes I took before leaving Earth should allow me to build an ether communicator, but I knew it would take a lot of time. But I was determined to study the capabilities of this world’s technology and take advantage of as much of it as I could in this endeavor.

One World Government

In addition to the core math, language, and physical education classes, in 10th term I took Computer Programming for four years, second-level Biology and second-level Physics for two each, and Government and Logic among my 5th year classes.

The Government class was interesting in that the government here is nothing like anything I am familiar with. I’d gotten some basic parts of this system from civics class years ago, but that class was very broad. Now I got the whole system in detail. Some of the countries of the world ceased to exist after the war, and the ones that remained formed a union. Surprisingly, that union is a monarchy, even though some of the constituent countries were and are democracies. The former countries, now called by a name I am going to translate as districts, each choose a representative to royal court by a method defined by law within that district, many of them in a general election. But these are not voting representatives, just courtiers to plead for the needs of the people they represent. The Queen is an absolute monarch, and imposes some strict rules and has a lot of power over how districts operate, but they all also have their own individual laws and governments. The one language rule and others that define the post-war unified culture arose from the first Queen’s edicts.

The class explained how this system came about as the world was imperiled by war. Seeing themselves all threatened by a common enemy, but not being able to get their separate militaries to agree how to proceed, they united under whom they saw as a temporary leader in order to put up a unified fight. Once the war was over and the world was in shambles, they again needed a world leader to direct resources worldwide to save as many people as they could. And once people were living stable lives again, people wanted to avoid any possibility of the differences in language, culture, and such among the different parts of the world from ever letting that happen again.

There hadn’t been a succession system set up; the original Queen was meant to be a temporary role. But the Queen realized there was going to be an issue if she didn’t make plans, and with her absolute authority, she did so in a way everybody could accept. Since her children had all been killed in the war and she was past the age to have more, she adopted an heir from the Destroyed Countries and dictated that the position would thereafter be hereditary. The first Queen was very good at coming up with compromises like this, setting up a neutral situation from which people worried that the alternatives might be worse for them, so they went along with it, and she taught the same to her heir.

I should point out that this adoption was a bit of a formality, to make the heir legally the Queen’s daughter; she was already an adult and had been a diplomat before the war. There was also a lot of adoption of children in the immediate post-war era, some of them rescued children whose parents died in the fallout and some children living in safe areas whose parents who had died fighting. Destroyed Countries refers to regions, and specifically whole former countries, which are now unlivable due to the nuclear fallout. During the immediate post-war period, the survivors there were relocated to parts of the other countries, which themselves lost many people due to conventional fighting in the war, so there was plenty of need for them.

The heir was initiated into government in the role of Representative for the Destroyed Countries. Though the survivors voted as members of their new districts, this role ensured that they were treated as equals in their new homes. So she traveled a lot, to every district, seeing how people lived, and getting to know all the regions of what would in the future be her realm. There was a second Representative for the Destroyed Countries during the second Queen’s reign and a bit into the third, but once there were few survivors of the Destroyed Countries still living, the position was abolished.

There is some sort of constraint on the Queen’s powers. Supposedly, if she tries anything too repugnant, it is expected that the courtiers will depose the queen and install one of their own as the new Queen. I’ve never seen it stated whether this is some sort of formal vote or a coup or regicide or what, except that it is a collective action. But despite the extensive measures she has taken, this has never actually happened. In fact, there have only been three Queens, the one who led the country during the war and 100 years thereafter, stepping down when she was in too ill health to continue; the chosen heir; and the current Queen, the heir’s daughter. So it was that the Queen followed a “benevolent dictator for life” role.

Effectively, everybody works for the Queen, regardless of whether they are in the Queen’s Company or a private company. The Queen’s Company is an umbrella term for direct government employees, from the military to district governments to the people who maintain the roads and handle garbage. Private companies exist by the will of the Queen, and can be given specific orders when needed, but unless she has good reason to do otherwise, the Queen generally lets private companies do what they want. During and shortly after the war, though, the Queen exercised this power many times. For instance, there had been dozens of companies devoted to mining, smelting, and recycling steel during the war, and afterwards, some of the mining and smelting companies had been directed into either recycling (to reprocess war equipment for other uses) or mining for different materials.

The Queen appoints a set of regents to watch over the districts in more detail. It is their job to determine what issues most need attention within each district, and she takes the responses from these regents in combination with the requests from district representatives in making her decisions. She might choose to move some members of Her Company to operate in another district where they are more needed, or retrain some of them to do different jobs. The Queen might likewise issue orders to private companies to support the representatives’ requests. The Queen can disband underperforming companies, scale back their efforts, direct them to abandon specific projects deemed not worthy, or pick up other projects within the general purview of a specific company.

Everybody is paid for their work, somewhat in proportion to the importance of their job, but unlike capitalist systems on Earth where the leaders of large companies sometimes get more than 1000 times the pay of the lowest paid workers, here the difference is only about a factor of 2. Salaries for different levels of work are defined in the law. The lowest paid workers can afford to eat well if they skip all but the necessities, or they can eat cheaply and still get some other nice things. The history class explained how before the war it was more like Earth’s capitalist systems. During the war, highly paid executives were forced to give their excess pay to support the war effort. After the end of the war, the funds were needed to help victims of radiation poisoning, help relocate people from unlivable zones, educate people in the new unified language, and later to prop up declining populations, and other causes. In more recent times they have gone into education and public works projects. At some point, instead of levying the heavy taxes, they just reduced the high salaries. Successful companies pay their excess profits, which might have otherwise been given to executives, directly to the Queen to support those programs, while unsuccessful companies are downsized, disbanded, or reassigned, in some cases receiving some of this money to help them reorient their businesses.

One thing I learned in the earlier classes was that a rather small number of people go to jail, about 0.0006% of the population (1 in 160000). I don’t have the exact numbers for Earth, but I know every country at the time I left and for much of recorded history had incarceration rates orders of magnitude higher than this. This is because the laws are respected here, and there were also very few crimes defined in the law. The crimes defined in their religious text are also defined in the law; this includes murder, theft, doing harm to a person, and deceit. Doing harm to a person could broadly encompass assault and other physical injuries, but note that the nature of the reproductive mechanisms of the people here make sexual assault simply nonexistent; if there was a way to do it, it would fall under this clause. Deceit encompasses fraud, perjury, slander, false advertising, and similar crimes built upon lies. An additional crime is theft from the Queen, which means taking for yourself anything that was meant to belong to the people in general. It didn’t mean taking personally from the Queen. But that’s it.

Other crimes defined in the religious texts, largely ones prohibiting following other religions, were ignored, both in the unified religion and in the post-war law. Although the old religions had been forcibly combined during wartime, there wasn’t anything saying you had to follow this religion nor that you couldn’t make up another one. While not everybody believes in the religion, nobody has made another religion that attracted enough followers to even become known as a fringe cult. The one religion basically exists for those who want religion and is ignored by others.

There are district and local laws as well, but people don’t go to jail over those. A lot of them are focused on zoning, where you can or cannot operate certain businesses, and violating one might mean your business gets shut down or is forced to move to another location.

The broad application of these few laws and harsh sentences, along with no jury system, discourages the people here from committing crimes, or even anything that might be construed as a crime. It works as a deterrent much, much better than the laws of any country on Earth. Or maybe there is something different about the nature of the people here. It clearly hasn’t always been that way, since they suffered a world war worse than any of Earth’s history.

The law against theft from the Queen allows for the existence of things like public loaner bicycles. In large parks it is common to find racks of unlocked bicycles each marked as the property of the Queen. People can take them and ride around the park and nearby areas, but they have to return them to the park when they are done. And they do.

There isn’t, for instance, copyright. Writers, artists, musicians and the like are encouraged to publish their works, and those liked by the public are supported by the Queen to produce more, while the makers of unsuccessful ones are, after some number of attempts, asked to try something else. You can make copies of any of it yourself, or incorporate other works into your own, but the Queen’s Company manufactures and sells these items broadly at rates that make individual copying uncommon, except where people are making derivative works.

Computers and Biology

The computer programming class I took tenth term began with a short history of computers on this world.

Interestingly, they developed nuclear weapons on this world (indeed, two countries did so separately) even before they developed the vacuum-tube computers. That was all done with the equivalent of abaci and slide rules, while Earth had room-sized computers with vacuum tubes and relays and such large-scale circuitry. They seemingly never built such large devices here. The vacuum tube era produced refrigerator-sized calculators, which were only used at all because of the ease with which they could produce high-precision calculations. Few jobs needed such high precision, so the few produced were used to develop miniaturized electronics, the transistor and the integrated circuit. This led to hand-size calculators, a real product people actually found useful, so after that point there was no lack of support from the Queen. They then made the toy computers and game machines, then the first computers sophisticated enough to store small databases, like the IBM PC, and onward from there. They are still hopelessly far behind the ones I knew, but they are on the technology curve.

Software followed a similar development cycle as well. They skipped the punched card era since they never had the room-sized computers that used them, but they had the equivalent of BASIC and assembly programming on the early computers before they developed more sophisticated procedural languages which are in use now. It was fortunate that the intro programming class everybody took in school by my time on Earth covered the basic concepts. That helped those who had the right knack learn how to program, and once you know those basics, you can relearn them quickly in any language. There are conditional statements, there are loops, there are ways to branch to a another part of the program, and there are ways to label where to jump to. There are ways to define and set variables and arrays, and to perform calculations. The more challenging part was the dreadfully ancient (by my standards) computers. Most of the assignments took trivial time to run, but they came up with a couple later in the class where it was important to be efficient.

The second biology class also gave me important insights. They knew about DNA and genes here, which were the same basic structures known on Earth, but I remembered enough cellular biology from Earth to know that much of the other internal cellular organization of the creatures here works differently.

And I was pretty sure by this point that there were no other ethertravelers in my city. I’d established good friendships with several of my classmates, including Sarah, who I’d been good friends with for a while. Some of them might, when we sexually matured, turn out to be compatible mates. It was clear to me that it would not be acceptable in this society to stay single. You either found somebody compatible, or you participated in one of the programs to match up everybody else, so I went along with that.

Eleventh Term

This term I took second-level and third-level computer programming occupying the main science slot. I also took third-level chemistry third and fourth years, and history of science and atomic energy fifth term.

The mere existence of the “atomic energy” course was surprising to me. They were only just introducing computers to the masses, but they were teaching atomic energy to high school students? The class only actually taught the most fundamental aspects of atomic energy, the theories they had for why heavy elements were radioactive, and the principles behind nuclear fusion and why they had not managed to harness fusion as an energy source. I knew well that fusion was a tough bugger to get right, and until they had much more advanced computers here they had no chance. For that matter, even though they had atomic bombs 80 years before computers, it seemed like they had only started employing nuclear reactors on a large scale around the time I was born, well after they had computers. The nukes they used in the war were probably very crude, slam two sub-critical-fission masses together and let it blow up. Those weren’t terribly efficient (though still far stronger than conventional weapons), but they were also were very dirty and distributed not just radiation but a lot of radioactive matter around the areas they struck, which explained why so much of the world is still uninhabitable today. The class also covered the theory of relativity and other concepts to support the main ones. The presence of this class in the standard curriculum suggested that the Queen was pushing hard to figure out fusion, or figure out how to clean up and use radioactive wastes in the wild making much of the world unlivable, or some agenda item of that sort.

One thing I looked for and didn’t see were academic competitions. It was part of the noncompetitive nature of this world to not have those, I guess. They would have been a way for me to meet up with bright students from other schools and other cities, which might have given me a chance to find another Terran. But it didn’t seem like these programs existed.

There was one thing that was a sort of competition. There was something comparable to college here, all paid for by the Queen, which approximately the brightest 7% of students were invited to. There was a series of standardized tests covering every subject which were used to determine who got in. You didn’t have to do well on all of them, but you had to do well on enough of them to qualify on one of several tracks, perhaps broader than the college majors I was used to. One of the tracks dealt with all things even vaguely related to computers: programming, circuits, physics, chemistry, and more. Of course I wanted to get on that one.

You have to be at least in twelfth term before you can start taking these tests, and there are several opportunities. Once a year, so five times per term, there is a weekend during which you can take two subject tests. They told us about these when we were planning our schedules for eleventh year so we could make sure we took any classes we wanted to use to prepare ourselves for these tests. I was already on a plan to take just about every class I could want for all the tracks I was even remotely interested in, so I didn’t adjust my class schedules any.

There was a lot of advice available for those taking the tests, too. Three main strategies were offered: If you wanted college but didn’t have any idea what track, take all the tests once, and use the final two sessions to retake ones you want to improve on, or some for your top track if you’ve picked one by then. If you wanted one of a set of related tracks with some overlap, take all the tests for those tracks twice. And if you knew your track, you could take most or all of the tests for that track three times, or everything for the track twice and some related ones as backup to make you eligible for other tracks. And if you aced some tests the first time, you could skip out on re-taking them and take something else. I was going to use that last strategy, flexible but targeted.

Sarah realized this year I was on the college-bound track. She wasn’t, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be together. Keeping compatible couples together was such a big thing that they had something like married housing in college for those who’d found compatible partners. The way she mentioned that, and other things she said and did, made me realize I was her only choice. While I had other friends I could consider, for her, it was me or one of the programs to find a mate. I thought at one point she might be an ethertraveler who was strongly concealing it, but she showed no reaction to my TERRA art, and just looked confused when I dropped references to things from Earth into conversation.

Twelfth Term

Twelfth term, I had more computer programming, a second-year circuits class, statistics, and a couple classes whose names do not translate well and whose subject matter was a collection of things that would have been taught in other science classes on Earth, or which I wouldn’t have gotten until college. With no phys ed this term, I had an extra slot to take other classes.

From the first opportunity I started signing up for college tests at each opportunity, starting with classes whose curricula I had already completed such as chemistry and physics. The tests were tough and quite thorough, and I know I missed some questions. The usual attitude of assuming students were not cheating, which seemed the norm at the schools here, did not hold for these exams. There were multiple proctors in the room watching us, and while we could study between test sections, there was a box we had to put all our notes in, and a proctor locked them for each row of tables at once as we were getting ready to start each round - two rounds per test, with one test before lunch and one after. I got back a score of 740 out of 1000 on chemistry, which was considered good enough unless you wanted chemistry as your primary focus. Physics I aced with an 890; such a score was generally considered good enough for any program. I progressed through other subjects, retaking the chemistry one and improving to 760, and taking the language test twice with scores of 660 and 680, not great but not likely to hold me back.

Sarah had figured out some ideas for nontechnical jobs she might do after graduation. There were a lot of jobs at the college that paid the minimum but it was a way to get started. We didn’t actually know for sure we’d be compatible, but Sarah was banking on it.

In the last year of the term, on a Saturday morning, Sarah excitedly called me and told me it was time. I knew from all she had talked about it that it meant her penisbirth was starting and she wanted me there to witness it, so I rushed over. She was a little young for that, but it wasn’t unheard of for it to happen that soon.

One of Sarah’s parents, Micah, answered the door, told me Sarah was expecting me and said to go on upstairs to her room. When I got there, Sarah was half-lying, half-sitting in bed, naked. She had a towel under her butt and legs, and her legs were spread a bit. Her other parent, Liz, was there too, and said, “Good, you came. Sarah wanted you here for comfort while she goes through this.”

“It’s not supposed to be painful, is it?”

“No, but she’s feeling a little traumatic over such a fundamental part of her changing, and a lot anxious over whether she and you will be compatible.”

“Yeah, I have figured that out. I wasn’t surprised I’m the one she invited over to witness this.”

Sarah who had so far not said anything, though she was breathing heavily. “How it is, Sarah?”

“It’s just not happening. I can feel it, but it’s not coming down.”

“Maybe you need to get up and move a bit,” I suggested.

“How?”

“Let’s dance. Right here in your room.”

“OK, I suppose.”

I helped her out of the bed, and Liz spread the towel out on the floor for her to stand on, then left and came back with two more towels to give us a space to move. We did a little dance, holding one hand and then the other, spinning her and then me around, and after a few minutes of this, Sarah exclaimed, “Oh, I felt it move! This is working! Thanks, Becca!”

We kept dancing vigorously, and it took about 20 more minutes, by which time I was feeling rather tired, when Sarah yelled, “It’s here!”

Liz put one of the towels back on the bed and helped Sarah get back on top of it. Sarah pushed and pushed, and I could see the bulge coming from her vagina, stretching out her pouch. That process took about 15 minutes, and at the end of it, the tip of her penis just protruded from the opening of the pouch. Sarah was overjoyed.

It was still going to take a day or two before her pouch would be able to retract, but our families arranged to be together the next afternoon and evening. That meant most of them did family things together, and Sarah and I spent most of the time in her room, doing things romantic couples did here. There were cuddling sessions much like people on Earth, and games that wouldn’t be thought romantic activity at all on Earth. There wasn’t kissing here. There was, however, a thing couples did where they stood back-to-back, naked, arms spread. The idea was to take steps together to turn a full circle with the arms remaining in contact but without our tails ever touching. If we felt the tails touch, we had to start over. We managed to accomplish that after several tries, but Sarah’s pouch didn’t retract that evening.

Thirteenth Term

I took that final programming class, and a variety of others, including a couple well off my charted path but which were required for graduation.

Along with retaking the tests I’d scored lowest on last year, I took the history test first year, scoring 720. I took the programming test second year, near the end of my last course, and got a 955, which was considered outstanding and should make it a sure thing for me to get into college as long as I did well on my math test. I took that third year and got an 860, also excellent. Fourth year I took the logical thinking test, the last required one for my track, which I scored a 950 on. It was the one I’d been least worried about. I retook the math and circuits tests the last year and managed to improve my scores slightly, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t needed.

Early in the third year of this term, I had my penisbirth one evening, and invited Sarah over to watch. My other close friends had penisbirthed and established partnerships already, so if I couldn’t make it work with Sarah, I was going to end up going to college single. That was still OK, as it turned out, but most people tried to have already found partners.

Even when she first arrived, clothed, the way Sarah’s skirt poked out in front told me she had a massive erection and her pouch was retracted, allowing it to fall away from her body. There were undergarments some people wore during male phase specifically designed to prevent that, and Sarah clearly wasn’t wearing one.

My penisbirth was easier than hers, and we celebrated a bit. Sarah and I got together most weekends after that when I wasn’t taking tests, usually with time alone together naked, and while Sarah frequently had a retracted pouch, it didn’t happen for me.

Three days after the end of classes I got a phone call confirming my acceptance into college. I got official notice of my graduation from school the same day. There was no ceremonial march here as was customary on Earth, just a notification that you’d passed. My parents already had a graduation party scheduled the following day, and I was going to Sarah’s the afternoon I got the news, during which I told her. I was male at the time, and we had also agreed that this was also our last chance. If my pouch would not retract, then we’d stop trying and look for other mates. And it didn’t happen. I was sad, but Sarah was dreadfully upset, but still, we hugged and said our goodbyes. I invited her to come to my party, but she chose to stay away, sad over this event.

The party was, well, a party. There were five families on our block with graduating kids and we all got together to celebrate.

Starting College

Once the party was over, it was planning time. I needed to quickly confirm my class schedule. The college had several recommended schedules for first years and I decided the programming one looked fine, and called them back to register. For first years only, they would pick my specific class times and maybe even make extra sections of classes in order to accommodate schedules; in subsequent terms I would register for the next term before the previous term ended.

Making living arrangements was often even tougher than picking classes in college on Earth, but here it was pretty easy. There were dorms, and there was a single room for each person. There was no shortage of rooms; they knew how many openings they were going to have, and they allowed for 5% of the rooms to remain vacant so they had the ability to move people around and for unforeseen issues. The rooms had doors that could pair up adjoining rooms, and couples would be assigned an open pair while singles would get a room with this door locked. If I paired up with somebody later, we’d be able to move to a pair of rooms together somewhere.

Next, I had to figure out travel. This world had airplanes, but after much of the land area of the world had been made uninhabitable and everybody had consolidated down to two smallish continents, they had ceased using them for travel except in going from one continent to the other. There were basically four flights left, from the two biggest cities on my continent to the two biggest cities on the other. They had high-speed trains connecting all major cities, local trains within the cities, and commuter trains or in some cases buses could get you from any city to the nearby major ones. Since I was going from one major city to another, I only needed to take two local trains and a high-speed one, about 4 Earth hours total travel time to go 400 miles. You couldn’t do that on Earth with a flight - the actual air time for such a flight might have been an hour and 15 minutes, but all the extra time to reach the airport and prepare to board the plane made the total travel time longer.

But I wasn’t going to be living entirely on my own. There were going to be meals in a cafeteria, and there was even maid service in the dorm rooms once a week. So I would basically have to do chores I was already expected to do at home like making my bed and disposing of trash in the wastebasket. Also, buy things for myself, everything but food. As a college student, I was assumed to be a future productive worker, and, on top of having all my educational costs, housing, and food paid for, I would get some small pay from the Queen, less than even the minimum that jobs paid, but enough to cover the expenses I would have, if I managed it properly. And I would have to manage my own bedtime, trying to balance getting enough sleep with studying enough and having fun when that was possible.

But before all that was a reality, I had to make these train connections. I had taken the trains alone before, but only the local ones. And I had taken the trains before carrying bundles, but never a cart full of luggage like I had now. My parents got me down to the first station, and made sure I got on the train. It cost a coin, one which was the main unit of currency comparable to a dollar, though of course there was no meaningful exchange rate. For the sake of translation into English I am going to call it a dollar. At the time this was happening, a loaf of bread cost roughly one of these dollars. The high speed train had fares based on how far you were going, and for me, that would be 10 dollars, though I had a ticket for that purchased in advance. I’d use a dollar coin again on the other local train, and once I got off, I was sure to see other incoming students.

The high-speed train was set up for people traveling with luggage, but the local trains were not. There were, however, ramps for handicapped people in something they used here vaguely resembling wheelchairs to board the train, and a space without seats meant for them to ride in. Nobody was using this space on my first local train, so I parked my luggage cart there and sat in a nearby seat. The stop for my transfer was of course a major stop where lots of people got on and off, so once a bunch of people got out of the car, I followed some of the other departing passengers and made my way out. I still had 20 minutes until the next train left, enough time to find my way around the station and get there with time to spare, but not enough time to explore the rest of the station, so I just went directly there and got on my train when possible, storing all my luggage in a provided rack near my seat.

You might think, on a world where we went around in just skirts, that I’d have less clothing. Well, I probably had less clothing than a girl on Earth, but for cold weather we fully covered up, and it ended up reminding me of what I’d hauled to college on Earth as a boy when I first started. At least there wasn’t a computer in addition to everything else. My computer was pretty old by now and I was told we’d have up-to-date ones provided for us.

On this train, I had lots of time, and shared stories with the people sitting around me. Nothing of Earth, naturally; just Becca’s life. I told people I wanted to be an astronomer, or maybe an inventor, and this made people suggest maybe I’d build a better telescope. They had the same crude optical telescopes here that existed on pre-computerized Earth, the largest ones of which could see the other planets and some moons of those planets and quite a few stars, and they had learned a great deal about their secondary star as well. So it was quite possible I’d “invent” a better telescope by reimplementing something I knew from Earth. Once the computers here had caught up, of course. I was avoiding doing that; the only Earth technologies I wanted to introduce here were strictly those needed for me to make my communicator, and those would remain private. But if inventing something like a better telescope was what I needed to do to get into a career position where I could build the communicator, I’d do it.

It was no surprise that I encountered several of my soon-to-be classmates on the train. They were easy to spot, since every young adult hauling multiple suitcases was one of them. I would have thought “teenager” on Earth, but they did not have that word here or even a near equivalent, since our ages weren’t numbered in the teens. There were only 10 others from my school, but there were many from other schools in my city. There was one college for the whole district, what was formerly a country, and thousands of incoming students from all over.

After hours that passed quickly, and a late lunch, I and my new friends made it to our stop, and we all filed out of the train together and walked together, towing our respective luggage carts through the unfamiliar station to the local train that would take us to within a block of the campus. Even more students from other train cars joined us in this journey. We had to take an elevator to another level, which only held two of us and our belongings at once, so this took quite a while.

The local train was no picnic either. We all expected not to find much room for our stuff there either, so people went off in the pairs who shared the elevator to catch separate local trains, and this turned out to be the right thing to do.

I ended up on the elevator and train with a person I hadn’t met before, but who seemed to try to stick with me at the elevator. On the local train she explained why.

“Hi, I’m Carla.”

As always, I translate people’s names in my head into Earth names close to the phonetics of their actual name. If I was trying to translate this literally it would most directly be written as Carleh, stress on the first syllable, with the second one fading quickly into silence. This was a typical pattern with names here and so I replaced that final vowel with whatever made it closest to a familiar name. My name also followed that pattern, but the English version also falls off quickly after the K sound, so I didn’t really have to change it.

“Becca.”

“I couldn’t help but notice your TERRA art in your suitcase. What a clever technique, since it won’t mean anything to the locals.”

“Ah, finally! I tried this various ways back home and only concluded there weren’t any other ethertravelers there.” There was a mesh pouch on the outside of one suitcase and I had put one of my TERRA artworks that was painted on cloth in there so the TERRA showed.

I used the English word for ethertravelers, because they naturally had no word of their own for it here. It sounded odd in the language of this world. Carla did the same for Terra, saying the Latin word. But I was careful not to use too much English while I was where anybody else would hear me. They were touchy about people speaking anything but the official language here, so much so that the old languages were not taught in school. Everything else in our conversation was actually in the official language.

“I didn’t think of your trick, but I found no others either. Made any progress communicating with the homeland?”

“Not really. You probably know as well as I do that it will take a lot of doing. I’m glad to finally find a partner in this endeavor, though. It will definitely help to not have to do this entirely on my own.”

“Very true.”

I didn’t really need to ask Carla if she wanted to be my partner in calling home. It was clear by merely making contact that she wanted to do so, since the task we were asked to do in exchange for our travel here was so daunting. And by saying it the way I did, it was clear I was accepting her implicit offer.

The train soon arrived at our stop and we paused our conversation to get our belongings and ourselves off the train. The train stop was actually within the college campus, but the campus was big and it was a few blocks from there to the dorms. Another pair of students had gotten on another car of the same train, and when we arrived we saw a few others who had probably arrived on the previous train, almost done with their check-in, which was much like I would have expected anywhere, even on Earth: A confirmation for the college that we had arrived and a welcome for us. We were each given a packet with information including the room numbers and the keys for our individual rooms.

We took our stuff to our rooms, but Carla and I agreed to meet again for dinner at the spot where we parted to take our stuff to our individual rooms, which were in different dorms. The dorms were four separate buildings that extended out in an X from the central open area we were in, and a big chunk of the first floor of each was a dining hall. We could eat in any of the four, though they were meant to be conveniently located for the residents of each building. And they were big. Row upon row of tables for the tens of thousands of students who came here from all over the district to eat at.

The rooms were small but nice. The living space was about 8 by 10 feet with the bed against one end of a long wall, with a desk beside it, and the connecting door to another room at the back corner behind the desk. The other wall was completely occupied by closets and drawers for my clothes and other belongings, except in the back corner where there was a tiny bathroom, just a toilet and sink. The entire wall of the bathroom facing the room opened up as a folding door.

The desk chair and mattress were softer and more comfortable than I remember the ones in my dorm room on Earth being, but they were comparable to what I had had at home here.

I looked through the papers I’d been given, confirmed when dinner was served, and set up my clock with a reminder 10 minutes before it started.

I unpacked my clothes, finding places for everything. There was actually quite a bit more room for clothes than I needed, but maybe I would get more over time. The dozen or so skirts I’d wear most of the time went into the most obvious and easily accessible section, the long coats and such in the vertical hanging closet, and other types of garment each in their own drawers. There were several drawers left over which I had nothing for.

All of the school supply kinds of things I brought naturally went in or on the desk. There was a single drawer under half of the bed, which naturally contained bedding. I made the bed. The rest of the under-bed space seemed a good place to stash my now-empty luggage after I had packed smaller bags inside larger ones to the extent possible.

There was some setting up I could do. There was information in my packet to start using the computer, and for setting up the telephone system. The computer info was akin to getting your name and initial password for any computer system on Earth.

The telephone was a little different. They didn’t use numbers like the system on Earth does. They used to, before the war, and it was a big pain calling other countries because some used numbers, some letter-number codes, some names or whatever. Every international call required an operator to connect. The Queen got annoyed with this and had several telephones set up in her base of wartime operations, one on each system the allied countries used, so she didn’t have to go through operators. Once the urgent postwar operations to get people settled were taken care of, one of the first big projects was to expand the most advanced system to what was left of the world. This system gave people permanent accounts they could take with them, and register or deregister from any phone. Kids didn’t get accounts, so you just had to call their parents. Part of the process of getting enrolled asked if I already had a phone account, and since I didn’t, they set one up for me. A page in this packet gave me the initial password for it, and provided the instructions to register it on the phone here, in addition to instructions to make sure nobody else was still registered here. People moving out were supposed to deregister, but sometimes they forgot, and sometimes the administration didn’t catch it.

By the time I was through with all that, it was time to go meet Carla for dinner. I left much of the paperwork on my desk, taking with me a folder with paper maps and some other information about the campus, and also taking my key. She was waiting where we said, and we made our way into one of the cafeterias, got in line, picked some food, and sat and ate. Although the lines (two of them, one at each entrance to the cafeteria) looked long, each split into six lines passing on both sides of three buffet islands, and so actually moved pretty quickly.

We shared stories of our experiences here. She had two older sisters while I had one younger one, but otherwise we had quite similar experiences.

After dinner, we both went to her room and talked about things we could not talk about in public. Part of that was to share our thoughts about making an ether communicator in detail. The other part was to start spending enough time together to see if we’d be compatible and have our pouches retract. Carla was female now and not in her fertile period, so it wouldn’t work for her anyway, and mine didn’t do it tonight, but it was still our first day together.

The next morning, I sat at my desk and reviewed the rest of the packet I was given at registration. I had already read the first page, which told me my dorm room number, and formerly had my key attached, and on the back there was a small map of all the dorm buildings with my building marked, and a map of my floor with the room marked. And I’d read part of the second page, which told me everything there was to know about the cafeteria mealtimes. There was also info there about a store on the first floor of one of the dorms where we could buy other types of things, including supplies like pencils and paper. These were the pages I had carried with me in the folder last night.

The third page was the one with the account information. The fourth page told us where to get our textbooks, which could be several different places on campus depending on which classes we had, and I could handle that today along with learning my way around. The fifth page had my class schedule: course names, numbers, times, and locations. There was also a large three-page-sized fold-out map of the campus with an index grid very much like old maps on Earth that I had trained with as part of the pre-ethertravel experience. Each building was marked with an abbreviated name, the same names used in the textbook info and course schedule. The left page was entirely devoted to the index of building locations, with their full names, and the other two pages to the map itself. This also revealed the general campus layout. The campus buildings were roughly divided into four groups at the ends of the X that the dorm represented. The groupings were roughly, as we would have called them, science, engineering, arts, and liberal arts. The engineering included all my computer and circuits courses and math as well, but I would have some classes in the science block. And they tried to house people in the buildings facing their part of the campus, but having them centrally located made it reasonable to get to any section. I came in under engineering, while Carla, though interested in circuits, was actually admitted under physics in the science sector.

There were nature spaces between the arms of the X, for different purposes, as the back side of the map explained. One was mostly open fields and included space for both informal and formal athletic events. One was a wildlife preserve, fenced off for the protection of both the animal residents and the student neighbors, further divided into fenced sections for different species, some forested and others pastures with sparse trees and bushes. A bunch of species that had only lived in irradiated parts of the world were thought extinct now, as it was simply impossible to gather and ship out a bunch of wild animals when everybody here was busy saving the people. This had spurred conservation efforts for the surviving species, and there were fields of study (that for some reason were located with the liberal arts) about caring for wild animals, and those who participated in them cared for the ones here. A third was devoted to agriculture (the train tracks separated most of this part from the rest of campus), and the last was a forested area without dangerous or endangered animals, with nature trails through it and even campsites.

After the map, my folder of information included a packet from every class I was enrolled in, ranging from a single page to five double-sided ones. In my case, two of the classes used computers, and there were public computer labs where I might work together with other students in addition to the ones in classrooms and the private computers we each had in our dorm rooms. Of course, those weren’t laptops we could carry with us; they were not advanced to that stage yet. Each of these classes’ packets included a map of the building it was in, with the classroom location and nearby public computer labs marked.

After all the class-specific material, there were still more pages describing various services we had available. There were sports and athletic facilities I could use, academic counseling, mental health counseling, and a medical and health center. Also, several buildings had private penisbirthing rooms we could use if that happened to occur while we were away from our dorms. If we couldn’t even get to those, using any toilet stall was recommended, which was what my parents taught me. It was more comfortable in a bed, but if you needed to, you could lean back on a toilet seat, not using it the usual way, push out the birth, and use toilet paper to wipe up anything that spilled on the toilet seat.

Living with Carla

Carla’s next penisbirth occurred during the first week of classes and she used one of those rooms for it, and during that male cycle, she experienced the pouch fully retracting at times we were together. She promised me the experience was, in fact, all it was cracked up to be. I still hadn’t experienced it, nor did I experience it during the rest of the school year.

The next time Carla penisbirthed occurred during the break before second year started (the college using the same type of schedule with five years per term and two weeks off at the end of each year as the other schools used) and she invited me over to her room for it. It was actually during the biggest festival of the year, and all the other students were in the cafeterias celebrating. This was the equivalent of a woman giving birth during Christmas dinner, and while the birth is a lot smaller and less traumatic to the mother, the body is just as insistent to get it out when the time comes.

I was male at the time, and this time, seeing it happen, seeing the girl I had spent as much as I could of the last 12 weeks with fill her pouch with the sexual organ that so rarely got used here finally did it for me. My pouch retracted, I developed a full erection, and I felt it. Sexual pleasure. A person whose pouch retracts here experiences the equivalent of a human orgasm, but it’s continuous for the whole length of the retraction. This first time it lasted about two hours (roughly four Earth hours).

It didn’t happen for me every time we were together after that, but it happened sometimes, and more frequently as the next year went on. By our third year of the first term in college, we were both experiencing fully open pouches every time we were together, and both regularly wearing the erection-hiding underwear under our skirts during our respective male phases. So in the break after third year, we got engaged and moved into adjoining rooms. That was the rule here; if you wanted to live in adjoined rooms, you had to be married or engaged. By the time first term was through, our cycles had synchronized.

There was one more thing the classes hadn’t prepared me for. One day, shortly after I had turned female, I just felt uncontrollably horny. I stripped off my skirt, walked up naked behind Carla in her chair, and hugged her from behind, then moved one hand down and under her skirt to fondle her penis.

“Becca, you all right?”

I took a step back from the chair. “Just had a sudden urge.”

“The pouch-open feeling isn’t enough?”

“I feel like I want to jump you right now.” I said this in English, not having the words for it in the language of this world and knowing the literal translation didn’t carry the same meaning.

She turned and looked at me. “Oh, God!”

“What is it, Carla?”

“Your pouch is all the way retracted, back to the point your vagina is exposed.”

I looked down at myself and what she said was true. “Wow, this is the first time I have actually seen my vagina.”

“I bet it’s your ovulation.”

I counted days in my head. “Yes, I turned female 2 days ago, early in the morning.”

“They did tell us in the health class we’d sometimes feel mating urges. It makes sense that it occurs with ovulation, though I don’t remember them telling us that.”

“Same from my class. Surely they knew.”

“Maybe it’s not only at ovulation.”

“Oh, God, each of us might have 5 days like this out of the 40?”

Fortunately, it wasn’t. Not even every cycle, but it was possible anytime a female was fertile and with her partner to get such an urge. I had four more of them and Carla had three total before we finished college. From what they had taught us, though, I felt 100% certain I or Carla would have ended up pregnant if we’d given in to one of those urges, but we resisted.

We got married in the break after second term’s fourth year, traveling back home to do so, so that more of our families could be there. There was a ceremony for it, mostly with similar traditions to weddings on Earth. One unique tradition here is that the wedding couple and the wedding officiant, along with with their parents or other close family members, or friends standing in for them, all stepped into another room before they actually got married, and the couple got naked to demonstrate to witnesses that they could be fully retracted for each other. It was expected before a couple planned to get married that they were having pouch retraction regularly, had synchronized their cycles, and knew those cycles well enough to plan the event on a day when the current female of the couple was fertile and retractable. It wasn’t required to demonstrate an erection or the female equivalent of having the pouch so far retracted that the vagina was visible, but we had both, with me male this time. And Carla had those mating urges, her second time. Once that was through, we put our fancy skirts back on and went out and said some vows and made it official.

Carla and I took some of the same classes, but I focused more on the programming aspects and Carla more on the circuit technology, stronger areas for each of us, in hopes of being able to cover all the skills needed for our mission. We studied together for the classes we had in common, and had fun together.

Real Work

They were, to say the least, very accommodating for us as a married couple with college degrees. Because of the way the Queen, to a certain extent, ran everything, we didn’t have to hunt for a pair of compatible jobs; they found and/or made them for us. As far as everyone else knew, Carla was a circuit designer and I was a programmer for the same company, and we were married, and that was it. Everything about building an ether communicator happened when we were home, with no one else there.

It took time. We knew it was going to take time, enough so that we were going to be expected to have kids before we got it done, so we planned on that. And they made accommodations for us having kids, too. Carla could not really work from home, nor would it have been considered safe for her to work with a kid in the pouch, so if she’d gotten pregnant she would have had a leave of absence. On the other hand, I could work part-time from home with a kid in the pouch, so I agreed to have the kids for our family. Kind of ironic, since Carla was female and I was male in our first lives. We had them right back-to-back, as soon as we had cycles synchronized well enough for me to get pregnant again after the first kid dropped out of the pouch.

We worked slowly on our communicator plans, knowing that the world was changing around us and making the job easier. We didn’t actually start building it until both kids were out of the house, by which point there were build-your-own-circuit kits that let you print a pattern the size of a normal sheet of paper which got miniaturized in a chip-making machine. Some people use them like we effectively did, to build custom devices for our own use, while others use them to try to prototype new commercial chip designs, sometimes within companies and sometimes on their own, hoping a good design would land them in the driver’s seat of their own new company.

It worked for us. When we were about 260 of this world’s years, we sent off our brief report to Earth, telling of our success and some of the general characteristics of the people, telling Earth we were gender-alternators but not the details. Earth sent their acknowledgment. I had much better notes, due to my journals I’d kept since childhood, so I wrote up the detailed report, which is what you’ve just been reading, and sent it a couple years later. And this is the end of that report.

Ethertravel report #247, received January 12, 2481.

I was Martin Dreyer on old Earth before I volunteered to ethertravel to a new world. By having somebody sit in those machines and scan the sky, they had identified thousands of possible targets, but they had only sent people to a few hundred of them and only gotten reports back from a few dozen. The goal was to send enough people to each planet early enough that we could get reports back from those where it was possible, but send them in groups so we had a better chance of them finding one another and cooperating to build ether communicators and report back.

As a ninety-year-old with terminal cancer, I could imagine nothing better than getting to live a new life starting from infancy, even if it was as some weird alien being. As a well-educated man still able to learn new things, I was a candidate for the program so long as I could survive long enough to be sent. I had to take two years of classes to learn how to build an ether communicator from scratch, from literally nothing but dirt and a few bits of metal if necessary, to maximize the chance I could report home from any kind of planet at any level of technology. Getting stuck on a “dirt and metal” world might mean it would take dedicating my entire life there to build a send-only communicator. Fortunately, my world was not that primitive.

The darkness, warmth, and sounds where I arrived told me I was still in my mother’s womb. Naturally, before long, I was born. And this is my report.

The People

This world features a blue sky, and an atmosphere I eventually learned is similar to Earth’s. And there are people who look... not quite human.

I was reminded of the term “uncanny valley.” When somebody tries to make a human-like robot, or a realistic but fake video of a person, or if they merge two photos of different people together, sometimes the result is something that looks sort of like a person but there’s just something off about it that gives you the creeps. That’s the uncanny valley: The gap between, say, a caricature of a person and a photograph of that person, where it looks like it’s trying to be a photo of a person but is messed up in some way. The people here look like that. The faces are downright ugly by human standards, with wide noses, a big gap between the nose and mouth, and huge mustaches. Every adult has a mustache and they cut them just above the mouth so everybody has hair about an inch and a quarter long right above their lips.

Nobody ever wears any clothes here, except when needed for protection, so I got a good view of the anatomy pretty quickly. Every adult has two bulging, female-human-style breasts a bit lower on the chest than in humans when standing upright. While this (despite the mustaches) made me think of them as women, it’s not right to call them either men or women; there are no different sexes here, and every person has the same parts.

The arms are short and thick, while the legs are longer. The hands and feet... you might call them all hands, or all feet, or both. There are 6 dexterous fingers on each limb. Well, four fingers and two opposable thumbs, one on each side of the hand. All four hands are capable of grasping things, but the two thumbs make for a very different type of grasp from what humans have. Imagine holding something like a baseball bat. You have the thumb on top, the four fingers curled around the other side, and then a second thumb curled around the same side as the first thumb.

People walk bipedally, in an uncanny valley imitation of a human walk, but run down on all fours, with butts high in the air. Running is the common mode of transportation for moderate distances; the bodies are capable of getting up to horse-like speeds. For such trips, they have a kind of shoe they wear on all four feet.

People here have both lungs and gills, or their equivalents, and can survive unlimited time underwater. It’s assumed that all life here developed in the water, where the temperature is more stable. All the land-dwelling animals have kept their gills to allow them to live in water during times of extreme heat or cold. But the norm for the people here is to live out of the water during the day and sleep in water at night. Instead of beds, people have oversized bathtubs, big enough to completely immerse their bodies in, temperature-controlled to near body temperature, and filtered to keep clean. It’s common to have several of these in one room, which are the only fixtures in the room, and they serve both for bathing and for sleeping. In my infancy and early childhood I had a smaller one and my caretakers put me in at night and took me out in the morning and dried me off.

People pee and lay eggs from holes between their legs. The eggs are a combination of actual egg and solid waste disposal; there’s a real shell, and but the interior is filled mainly with bodily waste rather than what you’d find in an egg of an animal on Earth. The normal way to dispose of these is in something like a compost pile which you can find outside every home. Food waste, yard waste, and other organic waste is dumped there, but people also pee there and lay their eggs there. They use a poker provided near each compost pile to crush up the eggs and push them down into the compost.

Adult eggs are slightly smaller than a chicken’s egg. Even as a baby I made eggs like these, but they were smaller. They wrapped me in a thing sort of like a diaper, which collected my pee, but it had a rigid cup in it to collect the eggs. By the time I could walk on my own, I was expected to use the compost pile.

People here commonly sit in a style of chair where the butt is far back but the legs angle upward, so they can have their hands and feet up on a tabletop to write, draw, and do other detailed things with all four hands. As a child I had a miniature one of these chairs with a desk attached. The length of the legs and the position of the desk were adjustable for use as I grew. As soon as I was able to get paper and pencils (or what passes for them here) I started writing out my observations, in English, which of course nobody here could read. I decorated the pages with intentionally bad drawings of the plants and animals and people here so they would not think I was totally crazy, just creative. And as I learned the language I added the local names.

Infancy to Starting School

From just after my birth, I was cared for in a facility with a number of other infants by four wet-nurses, any one of whom might breast-feed me. When I got a bit older they started feeding me pureed food to supplement the breast milk. They also replaced my diaper and put me into and took me out of the tubs. I learned later that they weren’t my parents. People do not raise their own children here; this was a full-time job for the people caring for me.

Not long after I was able to walk upright I was transferred to another facility. This one was more like day-care for toddlers, except that I lived there all the time. I was no longer breast-fed, and quickly graduated from pureed food to soft food to smaller portions of the same food adults eat. There were lots of toys, and simple educational things to teach the beginnings of language, but just like toddlers on Earth, I had no set classes and the time not dedicated to the tub or meals was free time. I was taught to use the compost pile on my own upon first arriving here; it was in an area behind the building enclosed by a roof and screens, and when it was cold they would pull down solid shades all the way around it so that the area could be heated.

There were four caretakers here, and a varying number of kids. There were 24 tubs for kids, but I don’t remember there being more than about 18 at one time. Kids arrived individually as they were deemed not to need infant care, but they left in groups to go to the first actual school. I was labeled as age 17 when that happened, though I had been in the place for what I thought of as about 4 Earth years; I hadn’t learned the calendar system here yet. At the time I left, four of us left at once, and the others went to the same school, but they weren’t in my living group so I didn’t commonly see them again.

At my first school, we lived in suites with up to 18 kids and two caretakers each. The one I was in actually had 17 kids. Each suite had a sleeping room with 18 small tubs, but larger ones than I had used before, and two adult-sized tubs placed sideways compared to the others, for the caretakers. There was a play room, where we spent our free time. And there was a classroom. The caretakers made sure we were there at the right times, but there were separate teachers who came in to teach us classes. A physical education teacher would come to us but lead us outside on most days, and sometimes we would put on shoes for this.

There was also a pee pad in one corner of the play room. We were taught upon entering the school that these took the place of the compost pile in larger buildings. There was a bumpy rubber pad on the ground that you squat down and pee on. The pee goes into slots in the pad and you spray some water to wash it down someplace that handles it. There was also a chute nearby for you to put eggs into, which is also used for food waste. We didn’t see it, but we were told a machine down below grinds everything up.

We had three meals a day at this time, and before each meal, one of the caretakers would go somewhere and bring us back packages containing prepared food. Each of us got a pre-filled, covered tray with different foods in different sections and utensils for eating it. Any uneaten food went in the chute, and the empty trays and utensils went back in the bags and one of the caretakers would take them away, presumably to be cleaned and reused.

In one of my classes there in the first year, they taught us about the calendar, which was based on the planet and its sun. This planet orbits its sun quickly, a smaller sun which produces significantly less energy than Sol, but is much closer. Our years are 115 “days” long, with days of a length similar to those of Earth. The planet has a 75 degree axial tilt, which means most of the surface has several days at a time with no sun. The poles get too cold to live in, but people live in places that have up to 6 days in a row with no sun and it gets quite cold during those times. Where I grew up, the most was 2 or 3 days without sun. Naturally, they also have air conditioning for the periods where we get multiple days in a row of sunlight.

The year is broken into 23 five-day weeks. The last day of each week had no classes, and there was a week in the middle and two weeks at the end that were also breaks with no classes. There were also 5 holidays in some of the 20 weeks with classes, always on the first day of the week, which left 75 actual class days out of the 115 days each year. Of course, we were together all the days of the year, so on the holidays we did things to celebrate why those were special days. There were various activities for us to do on the one day off each week, including sometimes activities outside with the other kids from the other rooms, practically the only time we saw the other kids.

There were levels or “grades” as the term is used on Earth, but we spent three years in each grade. Kids start at this school when they are 16, 17, or 18 of these years old at the start of a year. This school has five grades, so I was here for fifteen of the very short years, and left it when I was 32. The same group of 17 of us stayed in the same suite, with the same other kids in nearby suites who were the same age as us, for all five grades, though most of the teachers changed each grade.

Reproduction

In our last year at the first school, we were educated in how reproduction works. People have an orifice on their stomachs which I had taken to be a navel. This class explained it is actually best described as a vagina. There are no penises and no body-to-body mating here, though. No passionate coupling, no sex drive. Clearly there must have been something of the sort at some point for the species to have developed, but somehow this has been bred away, and now mating is only a duty.

The eggs we usually discard as waste are actually used for reproduction. When someone wants to have a baby, she opens up the vagina and inserts another person’s egg through it into what is effectively a womb. You have to purposefully open your vagina to get an egg inside; otherwise it stays shut tight and any attempt to force an egg in will only crush it. And we weren’t old enough to open them yet, but we would be soon. In the coming few years we would reach puberty, and our breasts and mustaches would start to grow, and we would be able to open our vaginas. Just like any sex ed class on Earth, they taught us not to, for now.

After we reach puberty, every egg we make, in addition to containing solid bodily wastes, contains an unfertilized egg cell. Inside the womb, it gets bathed in material from the mother containing tiny cells which can perforate through the eggshell and wastes. If one of them reaches this cell, it will fertilize the egg, which develops into a larva.

The larval form lives on the matter in the egg for the first few days. Even though it’s bodily waste for us, the larva feeds on it. Once that is used up, the larva undergoes a metamorphosis in which it turns into something actually resembling a tiny person, which then lives on nourishment provided by the mother’s body. If the metamorphosis or attachment fails, or the egg fails to fertilize, about 5 days after its introduction into the womb it is expelled. If it survives, after that point it’s like a human pregnancy and birth, although shorter and with the baby born much smaller. There isn’t the equivalent of a menstrual cycle here. The process in the womb is triggered by the introduction of an egg, and is available whenever the womb isn’t busy with another egg, larva, or fetus; at such times the vagina will not open.

There are also certain, not entirely known genetic restrictions on who can successfully mate with whom. They don’t have DNA analysis here, and since people don’t live with their parents, most of them don’t know their family history. In olden days, they only knew you could never mate successfully using your own or a full sibling’s egg, Modern studies have led them to believe there are several classes of people, and you can never mate successfully with an egg from your own class. Parents of a given pair of classes always have children in the same classes, sometimes a different one from either parent, and some pairs of different classes also can’t mate. Two people at random are a bit over 50% able to mate. Even with eggs from pairings which can mate, the mating is not always successful. The standard is to try three times with any potential partner; three failures is taken to be a sign that you are incompatible.

Each adult is expected to give birth to one child at some point after they finish school, except the child care workers, who are forbidden, and certain people who are selected by some process to have a second. It’s generally assumed each adult contributes one or two eggs to make children, as well, but this is less strict, and especially in cases where someone has trouble finding a compatible partner, they can seek eggs from those who have already contributed to other children.

Milk production begins in the mother before birth, but simply being around infants is enough to stimulate milk production. This is why the system I have described was set up. It is inconvenient for those without infants to feed to have their breasts full of milk, so infants are isolated and cared for only by the wet nurses who are expected to be forever producing milk.

Secondary School

After the first school, we moved to a secondary school for four more grades (12 short years). On the move-in day, our caretakers helped us pack up our protective clothing and school supplies and such, and with each of us carrying it all in a backpack, we marched together to the school, with one caretaker in front and one behind like the parents of a group of goslings.

Students at this school were expected to be able to care for themselves; there were no live-in caretakers, though there were still plenty of adults to help us out. There was someone like a maid who came by to help us clean up, but she acted more in the role of helping us learn how to clean up after ourselves rather than just doing all the cleaning. Other than that, usually nobody else came into our suite unless somebody reported a problem or one of us didn’t show up for class.

Instead of the large suites I lived in before, this time we lived in smaller suites with room for only 4 people each. Again, they spread out the vacancies so there would be some with only three people living in a space made for four. Each suite had a main room, a shared sleeping room with 4 tubs, a closet for each student for those clothes worn when it was cold, a pee pad, and two study rooms with two desks each. The building had three floors, with a large cafeteria and other services occupying the entire first floor. The other two floors each had ten wings, 5 on each side of a central hallway. Each wing had 25 of these 4-person suites and 5 classrooms which corresponded to the five classes we took indoors. Each hallway had a sign at each end giving the floor number and one of the first ten letters of their alphabet to identify it; they were otherwise identical. One class was physical education which was either outside or in the nearby gymnasium which had an enclosed path to reach it during bad weather.

This building was entirely occupied by people in my grade, and our teachers, who lived in rooms at the ends of the main hallway and between the wings. There were three other similarly sized buildings, one for each other grade. During the two-week break at the end of each grade there was a designated moving day, in which we gathered up all our stuff in our backpacks and moved to the same room number in another building. You got to know your roommates really well, because you had all your classes together and stayed with them as you advanced in grade levels.

Early on at this school, they told us about the next school, where we would end up in one of six or seven “tracks” that determined the kind of career we might end up in. At the start of our last year in this school, we’d apply to two or three out of six tracks, specifying an order of preference. There are actually seven tracks, but the child care track was treated as a punishment or default place for poor students who couldn’t learn other skills, and wasn’t offered as a choice you could apply to. The tracks are:

• A science-oriented one
• A technical one where you learn a trade like building or repairing equipment
• A creative one for artists and musicians and writers and the like
• One that is broadly speaking medical but encompasses a lot more than merely doctors and nurses
• One that covers a variety of subjects not fitting into any of the above, including history and law
• One that focuses on education, specifically for producing the teachers for various levels of school
• One that focuses on child care, which only produced wet nurses, day care workers, and the caretakers at the first school

There are many specialties within most tracks, and these descriptions only loosely cover them. When you finished that school, based on your track, specialty, and grades, you’d be assigned to some job. It was possible to move between different kinds of jobs over time, but a lot of people stayed in the same field and only advanced in seniority and the amount and importance of work they did during their entire careers. So getting in the track you wanted was critically important, and the grades in certain classes in this school would be counted toward your eligibility for each track. That’s why they were telling us so far in advance.

They gave us lots of information about the tracks, the specialties within them, the selection process, and statistics from previous classes. The selection process tried to give the better students their first preference, the less good ones their first or second preference, and the passing students one of three preferences, based on filling a quota within each track based on the expected jobs needing to be filled many years from now when we graduated. If you didn’t make it into one of your preferences, but your grades in some group of classes were good enough for it, they might assign you to a track you didn’t select which didn’t have enough people accepted.

If you didn’t make it into any of the six tracks, you would get trained as a child care worker. This was considered a failure and the worst possible result, though some people actually like the work. The second-worst result was to make it into one of the six tracks, but fail. There were other low-skill jobs you could be assigned in such cases, such as a deliveryman.

Apparently some kind of fairness law required them to provide us with statistics from the past ten graduating classes on the size of each track and how many people got into it as a first, second, or third choice, the minimum averaged grade over the relevant classes among those accepted for the track, and more. This was supposed to help us include in our decisions for tracks to try for the level of competition for the tracks.

The general advice seemed to be, for students with average or better performance, pick what you most want first, what you next most want second, and what you least hate from the rest third, or no third choice if you really want one of the first two and you’re sure your grades are good enough. Generally speaking, those who did consistently well in the classes for their first preference got it. For the weaker students, the advice was to take one or two choices you most wanted, as long as you weren’t clearly unqualified for them, and fill the rest with one or two out of the two or three other tracks with the greatest ratio of acceptances to applications which you were best in classes for, leaving out the one you were least qualified for.

It was clear pretty quickly that I needed to get into the science-based track to understand what the state-of-the-art was here and how I might construct an ether communicator, based on the materials and technology available on this world. It was surely beyond what they were capable of here, but they had some rudimentary electronics, so it was definitely possible. But this gave me a set of classes to focus on. It would also really help to have some allies, because some of the stuff from the trade school might also be useful. I would, for instance, not be likely learn how to solder a circuit together in the science program (or whatever technology they used for hand-building circuits here). We could split up the effort and focus on different areas. If not, I would just have to try to take the right trade classes.

But they hadn’t invented the equivalent of the Internet on this world yet; they barely had computers. And I couldn’t exactly make up a T-shirt to advertise myself in a way only ethertravelers would recognize, since people usually didn’t wear clothes. There was one thing I could use, though: a visor.

It was common, on sunny days, for people to wear something that looked a lot like a visor from Earth - a hat that strapped around the head, open on top, size adjustable in back, with a flap that extended out over the eyes, and for exactly the same reason - to help keep the sun from shining directly in your eyes. And sometimes those visors were decorated. I just had to figure a way to either have a custom visor made, or get one I could draw on.

In this school, we were on our own on the days without classes. There were a number of activities set up during those times, and we were free to go to any of them, as well as do other things. One of those things was to visit the store on the first floor. We weren’t given actual money, but we had credits: Each student was allowed one coat, one set of shoes, one visor, and some other things each grade, a replacement backpack once during our whole time here, and several credits at the start plus two per year for school supplies and other things.

As soon as I got a chance after starting school, I went out and found a customizable visor. It turns out that’s actually a thing here. They sell visors that you are meant to decorate, along with markers that work on them and a sealant to protect the image when you are done, and I got the set for a visor credit and two school supply credits.

So after doing a rough sketch on paper onto which I’d traced an outline of the flattened visor, I drew my design on the visor. There was a common sort of creeping vine around here that sprouted flowers here and there. It looked sort of like a morning glory, though unlike a morning glory, once each flower opened it stayed open until the flower wilted and fell off after a few weeks. I drew flowers at the ends and intersections of the lines in the letters and drew vines spelling out TERRA between them. At each end of the word, I drew a round pond with what people would take for some of the common pond plants around here, but I drew them in the shape of the Americas on the left, and of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia on the right. Anyone from Earth would see unmistakably the Latin name for our planet and depictions of it. Everyone from here would just see a nature scene. There was a common soil around here that was a pale orange color. I used that color to fill in the rest of the background. Once I had it looking good I sprayed on the sealant. I wore the visor whenever I was going outside and it was sunny, which meant to some phys ed classes and lots of things on the non-class days. A lot of kids had visors of one sort or another that they wore the same way, though most had the generic solid-color ones or ones with various pictures or designs.

Eleven of the short years here passed, and no other ethertravelers identified themselves to me, despite circulating among every kind of activity and trying everything once. So I assumed I was alone in this endeavor, and I listed my preferences as science, trade, and nothing because none of the other tracks would help me at all. I got into the science track, so that much was good.

Tertiary School

The tertiary school was like a college, where students would individually go to their classes at potentially different class times and in different buildings. Each track had a separate dorm which was located near the buildings for most classes in that track. You might still go to another part of the campus for certain shared classes and electives you could take a limited number of from other tracks. There weren’t official grade levels here, but the programs were designed for you to complete them over eighteen years, the equivalent of six grade levels at the other schools. And we stayed in our same room with our same roommates the entire time.

Within the sciences, there were electives within every program, which allowed me to take a class in astronomy, critical to help me find the Earth in the skies here, and a little physics, while mainly focusing on electronics and the rudimentary computers which, if their progress was anything like Earth’s, would become vastly less expensive and more capable over my lifetime here.

I was able to get into basic electronics repair from the trade track to learn how someone on this world would actually assemble circuits from resistors and diodes. That was approximately plan D for building an ether communicator, but at least I wouldn’t have to mine for my own circuit elements. While I was in this class, I drew out from memory all the circuits I would need.

I kept wearing my visor at every reasonable opportunity as well. By this point, since I’d had the opportunity to get one each grade, I had some spares and I was on my third actual decorated one. But I never found anyone.

Moving on Past School

During my last year in the school, I got several job offers. All the companies were owned by the government, but there were still people within them who made significant decisions on their own, and I was basically being offered first choice among several jobs based on my good grades and class choices. There was an offer from a company looking to build space exploration telescopes which seemed perfect, and I accepted. After I finished school, I moved into an empty space in company housing, a group of 6-person homes that was dedicated to housing people who worked at this company and located within the same block.

There were some down sides. Just like on Earth, the telescopes were built in remote places where light pollution was low. This meant that I was out on the fringes, where I’d have spans of 6 days of complete darkness and 6 days of continuous sun, and even then, I was out in a tiny neighborhood where we didn’t use street lights, to minimize the light pollution. But it was only a few minutes walk to the local train where I could get anywhere in the city, such as it was. Because of people with similar interests to mine living around here, there was actually an electronics store in the city, though I think everything cost about 50% more than it might have near where I grew up.

The price was actually competitive with ordering it and having it shipped, at the exorbitant shipping rates to get stuff here, except for the shipping time. There was no air mail on this world. It would come up here the same way I did, on a train, and then it would get hauled from the train station by a pull cart. The train network is extensive; you can get practically anywhere by train. There are long-haul trains that go across the continent (and via underwater tunnels, to the other continent which, combined with this one, make up about 90% of the land area and essentially all of the inhabited land of this world). From there you can take regional trains and then “connector” trains that can bring you into any city in the world. They are called connectors because they connect with the local rail within each city that can get you into individual neighborhoods, from which you can walk to your destination. And that’s why it might take 10 days to get something like that delivered.

Because of this, most people and even companies don’t use motor vehicles. The few I typically saw were electric carts used by disabled people. The delivery service, which handles everything from letters to appliances, uses a kind of cart that people can pull in 4-legged running mode. There’s a yoke that extends out from the top of it with a harness, two straps you’d fasten across your chest, one above the breasts and one down low close to the legs. A person could easily move two or three other people that way, but the carts are not used like that. They are only used for moving goods. The entire set of deliveries for one city coming off the train each day is loaded on one or more such carts and taken to a nearby sorting facility, where they are divided up into individual neighborhood routes, and typically loaded on similar carts that go out, via the local trains, to the equivalent of neighborhood post offices near each station. There, they’d be divided up into individual carrier routes, usually hauled by backpack by the individual carriers who would deliver them, but packages might still come on one of these carts.

I got an unlimited clothing allowance for dealing with cold weather, and I didn’t even necessarily need to, because the people here also got an extra construction allowance and people had shared theirs in the past to build an underground network of tunnels. There was basically a second front door on our house in the basement which opened into a public tunnel that followed the path of the street above. The tunnels have heat and lights, and they connect all the streets in my neighborhood with the handful of workplaces here, and to the local train system, which can get you to other parts of the city and, in many case, their tunnels.

The basement was only otherwise used for our home’s heating system and storage, and my housemates were fine with me claiming a part of it to set up my project. This took time, and lots of trial and error, but I tested each component. At the same time, I had access to some of the best astronomical data available on this world, and I spent hours poring through it to find Earth. By the time I actually had an ether communicator ready to test, I knew where to aim it, and I only had to wait for this planet to be on the right side of its star. That gave me time to finalize this report.

Indeed, when the planet was in position, I aimed into the right sector of space and found Earth. I sent a short message, and got a response, then I sent the full report and considered my duty to Earth complete.

Ethertravel report #1247, received September 20, 2504, and followups.

I was Tyler Jones, a retired computer programmer on Earth. The story of Mikhail Gregorevich returning from his ethertravel adventure was in the news when I was young, when I was just old enough to remember the event, and the research program to explore other planets had been a thing all my life. While it let the ethertravelers get there instantly, the fact that they had to grow up from childhood and reinvent the communication device meant it took decades to get results. At the time of my retirement, we’d gotten responses from a handful of planets, and it was now possible to be reborn on one of those worlds. They didn’t want to flood them, though, so there was a waiting list, or rather, you could pay a decade’s wages to get on the short list which made it actually possible for a retiree to get sent before his or her death. Of course, people could pay that money and get reborn here, too, and still have the chance to be reborn more times, but some people thought things were starting to go downhill on Earth and were interested in taking a chance elsewhere.

Or you could sign up for the research program and pay nothing, but you’d go to an unknown world, and you were expected to try to report back if you did. If you couldn’t, no big deal; it would eventually get marked as a mystery world where people are unable to report back, and presumed to be at such an early stage of technological development that a report back is impossible. But they subjected you to a battery of tests to try to identify people who were genuine about this, because way too many people were otherwise interested in living a new life, even if it was on an alien world as an unknown species, only knowing it’s got some minimum mental capacity which only humans satisfied on Earth.

I didn’t have enough money to send both me and my wife through the short list. I might qualify for the explorer program, but my wife didn’t have the technical skills to do so. I worked out an agreement with my wife Lorena that I was going to try out for the explorer program, and if I succeeded, she’d have enough money left to get on the short list and go wherever she wanted and still have enough money to live cheaply until her turn came. If I failed, then we’d figure something else out. I succeeded, and spent the couple years in training to learn all that humans had learned about ethertravel and the kinds of things we might find on the target world, and of course, how to build an ether communicator from raw materials.

So I ethertraveled. Short story: I’m a horse-like creature with the ability to stand on my hind legs and use my front legs as hands. But my parents are centaurs! Here’s my report.

Earth Archivist’s note: Tyler sent several reports and those reports have been combined here for your convenience.

Childhood

The first thing nobody told me in training was that I’d remember being born. Nobody had reported it yet, but I awoke to warmth and darkness, and before long, a lot of pressure which was my birth into light and relative cold compared to where I’d lived my first day or two after gaining consciousness. There wasn’t any real way to measure the time.

I had been born, butt-first, from the rear end of what I originally took to be a horse-like creature. Pretty soon I saw that centaur was a better description. The four tall legs of my mother led to a long, horizontal torso with four teats from which I could drink milk. There was no tail, but the end I came out of was clearly the rear end. The front end of that torso had a long penis which was used for urination. Above that end was a second, vertical torso leading to two arms and an elongated head with a snout. The eyes were further down the snout than those of a horse, about halfway down. The arms were very long, with two elbows, allowing them to reach any part of the body with two hands that have 6 fingers and two thumbs each. The entire body was covered in short, light brown fur, apart from the genital areas, the nipples, and the hooves and hands. My father was gray but otherwise of similar anatomy.

I, on the other hand, found myself to be more horse-like, with four legs and merely a head attached to the front end of my torso. My fur was yellowish; you’d call it blonde if a person had such hair. My neck was quite flexible, allowing me to turn my head almost a full 360 degrees horizontally and more than 180 degrees vertically.

I soon learned, from seeing my brothers and sisters, that my front feet were actually hands. They curl up to serve as hooves, with tough skin on the side you walk on, but I can open them to make hands with three fingers and a thumb. My siblings also stand sometimes on their rear legs and walk erect, but I was not able to do that at first. But I could sit and use my hands from a sitting position, with my knees bent and propping up my body.

I was taught to use the toilet within days of birth, though. The toilet was sunken into the floor, only protruding a few inches above the ground. The seat was hinged in two pieces; it could open fully, forming a large round bowl to urinate into while standing in front of it. It could be covered slightly, forming a seat that my parents place their rear ends on for defecation. Or it could be more than half covered, forming a narrower seat that I and my brothers and sisters sit on for defecation and (for my sisters) urination.

Since clothing seemed not to be invented here, I quickly identified the differences in the sexes. I am male and have a penis, between my rear legs in a horse-like configuration. My sisters do not; they urinate from a hole in their body with a bare patch of skin around it, somewhat like human women, but in time I learned that this hole is not inside the vulva, which they also have, but above it. And naturally I did not have a vulva. Both my parents had both penises and vulvas, though, and I learned through my siblings that my father was actually the mother of two of them. My parents had taken turns being the mother.

I eventually learned to walk in the two-legged way; we all still ran or trotted on all fours when we were going longer distances. I started learning the language here, which had some different sounds from human languages because of the elongated shapes of our mouths.

Apart from mother’s milk in the first year or so, we were vegetarians. We lived on a farm which we shared with three other families, and we grew all our own food, a good variety of grasses, fruits, and some root vegetables. There wasn’t one set planting or harvest season; we grew different crops that were planted and harvested at different times, including winter crops that could tolerate the cold weather with occasional freezes once or twice a winter. When there was something to harvest, the older kids helped out on our days off from school and for a short period after school. Otherwise that time was free for us. We actually grew about six times the food that the four families needed, and we sold the rest to pay for other things. So clearly there were other lives available here. That was good if I was going to report back to Earth.

My brother, the oldest sibling, went to school everyday from when I was born, trotting in the 4-legged fashion to get there, wearing what they called literally a backpack in the language here, but it was divided in two and hung down the sides like saddlebags when walking 4-legged. As they got older, my three sisters started school in turn, and finally I did as well.

I should say we went to school almost every day. They measured time in 8-day weeks and there was a single day off at the end of the week, but we went to school for less time each day than was typical on Earth. There were breaks between school terms after 10 weeks, so 70 school days per term. There were three such terms a year, with two extra weeks off between terms, to fill out the year of 288 days. Well, the year was 289 days. The last day was a holiday, with no school or work, and it fell in the middle of one of the terms, so that one had a single day off within it.

One thing I had to learn before starting school was about pubic restrooms. There weren’t separate men’s and women’s restrooms on this world, not exactly. Instead, they had a kind of urinal which boys and adults could use. It was like a long trough and you could just step up to it anywhere and pee, with plenty of space behind it for adults to be able to back out and turn around. There were urinal restrooms and toilet restrooms. So for the kids in school, those were mostly boys’ and girls’ restrooms, except when the boys needed to poop. In the toilet restrooms there were partitions but no doors. Naturally there was no need for privacy when people walked around naked all the time.

The Talk

During the break at the end of my fourth year of school, my parents gathered all five of us for a talk.

My father started, “Today we are here to talk about something that’s happening to Fred soon.”

My brother’s name wasn’t really Fred, but the sounds in the language are too different from human languages, so I’ve just substituted a name to have something to call him. Same for the other names I use in my report.

“Sylvia already knows, because her turn at this isn’t too far away, and we would have told Sally this break anyway so she can start looking for a partner, but the other two of you don’t know at all unless you’ve heard it from the kids at school, and don’t need to go talking about it unless someone brings it up.”

I had heard some of the kids talk about older siblings going away, but that was all I’d heard.

“When you reach a certain age, your body is ready for a transformation. This transformation is going to result in you having a shape like your parents, rather than the shape you have now. It’s a required thing; your body will die if you don’t do it. You can put it off for a little over a year once your body is ready, and school has a two-year break at Fred’s age to allow everybody to get it done and adjust to their new situations.”

I had certainly wondered about that, but it was a subject they simply didn’t talk about around little kids around here. So this was my first glimpse of how it happened.

“The pairing is always one boy and one girl. Polly from Appleton Farm, which you probably know is two streets over from here, is going to be Fred’s partner. They have agreed to pair, and that the pairing is going to take place at her farm. We don’t know when it is going to happen yet. Both Fred and Polly have to be ready, but when they are, they’re going to do it quickly, possibly as soon as the day after both are ready. You’ll have a little notice, as their bodies will start to undergo separate transformations before they are ready to pair, but those transformations can complete in 3 to 7 days, and the exact day might not be known until the day before. Fred won’t be completely gone; he will still come here sometimes, in his new form, and Fred and Polly may both visit before they pair.”

I was a bit confused. It sounded like they were mating. Was that necessary for Fred to complete his transformation?

My parents whispered something for a moment, and my mother took over, using a picture book to accompany what she had to say. The first picture was of a horselike boy and girl, with an arrow pointing to a picture of a centaur-like adult.

“The short story is that Fred and Polly are going to merge and become one adult person. In some ways they won’t be Fred or Polly any more, and in some ways they will be both. But I’m going to show you how the merging happens so you don’t have any questions. If you do have questions at the end of it, you can ask them then.”

Crap! I’m going to merge with another person? How’s that going to work with my knowledge of Earth and goal to report back there? It was a pretty alarming thing even if you didn’t have this secret; every kid has secrets, right? So I hoped any alarm I showed only looked like that.

Fred and Sylvia clearly already knew, and moved behind us and sat patiently, while my other sisters and I were fully focused on my mother, creeping up closer waiting for whatever it was she was going to say. How did people merge here? We all wanted to hear that answer, even if the prospect of doing so was scary.

“When Fred, or any boy, is ready, a part of his back opens up. It’s right here, above his hips when he is standing, and near the end of his back when on all fours. When it starts, it will expand quickly.”

She flipped the page to show us some other pictures.

“Here’s a boy in his first day of the transformation. Here’s one on the third day. And here’s one on the fifth day. This last picture is after seven days and is what we expect a boy to look like when he is ready to pair.”

The four pictures were two to a page on a pair of facing pages. Each one showed the back of a boy from his shoulder blades to the top of his buttocks with a growing hole in his lower back. The final picture showed a deep crater in his back big enough to put a bowling ball into up to its widest point, and it appeared to expand further upward into his body. Then she flipped to a page that had two diagrams showing internal organs.

“The first part of the change happens a day before the impression on his back becomes noticeable. His spine and spinal cord branch. At this stage the branches merge down in the pelvis. The opening runs between the branches. By the time it’s fully open, as shown in the second diagram, the split runs all the way to the end. Any questions about this?”

It no longer looked like mating in the least. I figured what this meant, now, given the fact they were merging and what the finished product looked like, even if it still sounded crazy, but I didn’t want to jump the gun on asking about it. But since I was the only boy here learning, I figured this part was mainly for me, so I asked, “Does it hurt when this cavity forms?”

“It doesn’t really hurt, but it’s a little uncomfortable. Imagine having a pumpkin strapped to your back with a tight band that presses it against your body for several days. That’s the best way I can explain the feeling to someone who hasn’t experienced it.”

Not actually a pumpkin, but a similarly large fruit we have here. When there were no more questions, she went on with the explanation of what happens to girls.

“For girls, it’s different. Your arms are going to retract into your body a bit, and merge with the sides of your neck and head. You won’t be able to walk on them or use them for any purpose anymore, and pus will ooze from them sometimes. Any questions?”

And she showed pictures of this too.

Jenny said, “I’m not worried that’s going to hurt, just that it’s going to be super yucky! And about what comes next!”

Sally asked, “How do they pick each other? I mean, how did Fred and Polly join up?”

That was a good question, since as far as I know, Fred hadn’t gone on any dates. I wasn’t sure dates among kids their age were a thing here. But I knew about Polly, barely. I was too much younger than her to be involved in the same social activities, but I knew of her as one of the kids in the neighborhood.

Fred spoke up to answer, “These transition states are pretty uncomfortable, and the girl is essentially disabled until the pairing. We picked each other partially because our birthdays are only a week apart. This makes it likely our transitions will start at about the same time, minimizing the time I have a hole in my back and Polly can’t use her arms. But we’ve committed. If it goes wrong, and I have to live with that hole in my back or Polly has to live without arms for, say, two school terms, we’ll wait it out. The other part is that we like each other.”

My mother added, “It mostly comes down to friendships. Unless you were born at the very start or end of the school year and might pair with somebody from the other year, you’re very likely going to pair with one of the other kids you know from your grade in school. And if you can’t decide between two candidates, some people at Fred’s age gather in foursomes, two boys and two girls, and agree not only to form two pairs but also to marry after doing so, sometimes not deciding who pairs with who until the transformations start and then the first boy and first girl among them will pair. They can’t actually marry until after finishing high school, but it’s a promise to do so, a promise which is sometimes broken if they feel differently about each other after the pairings.”

“They go back to school?” I asked.

“Yes. The school system provides two years off to allow everybody to complete their pairings and adjust to their new combined minds and bodies, but then there are three more years of school for Fred-Polly after they merge. They will take some tests before they start at the new school to help determine their skill levels, which are usually always at least as skilled as the better of the two before the pairing, and are sometimes enhanced beyond either in certain areas. People sometimes look for a person with similar interests and skills for compatibility in a pairing, but the most ambitious people look for someone whose skills complement theirs, in hopes they can be good in all areas. There’s one important factor for some people. About a third of people have already made up their mind before pairing that they either definitely want to be a mother someday or never want to be a mother. It seems that boys and girls get these opinions in equal numbers, and with an even split among the two extremes. People are usually pretty upfront about this, so a definitely-mother will never pair with a never-mother. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with such a pairing; the combined person will choose one way or the other. They aren’t going to fall apart after pairing over something like that. Pairing is forever.”

Jenny asked, “What if you can’t find somebody? There aren’t exactly the same number of boys and girls in my class.”

“Well, there’s another school whose kids will join with you when you get to middle school. And if you do end up left out, we can call around to the other towns, to find somebody of the other sex who got left out. If you haven’t found a partner by the time you start your transformation, the town puts you on a waiting list. If there is somebody of the opposite sex already on the waiting list, you’re matched up. If you use the waiting list, you don’t get a choice in a partner, but it’s better than dying.”

My sisters had some pretty quizzical looks. I could understand. You’re going to merge your mind and body permanently with this person, and you get assigned someone at random! But only if you can’t find someone else to agree to pair with you. I thought it was reasonable. They let the kids decide, but nobody gets left behind. My mother went on.

“If you’re still on the waiting list a year after your transformation, they’ll send you to another town that has the opposite sex on their waiting list. If they really can’t find you somebody even in another town, which rarely happens, there is a drug they can give you in the big cities which reverses your transformation. A girl taking the drug will have her arms separate and develop the cavity in her lower back, and a boy taking it will have the cavity close and his arms merge. This will allow that person to merge with someone of the same sex. It doesn’t reverse your sex; you will end up as a person with two vaginas or two penises. Those people still manage to get married, because there are people who only want to be a father or only a mother and just don’t care, or they’ll marry another same-sex pairing from another year when the other sex was in excess. But those are really rare and you may never see a same-sex adult.”

Sally asked, “Do you really die if you don’t pair?”

“Yes, you really die if you can’t find a partner to merge with after a while, a bit over a year. It never happens anymore because of technologies I explained. But for a long time, since the introduction of telephones, it has almost never happened, because people could find towns with an excess of the other sex and go there. There are old stories from the time before phones about kids who had nobody in their small town to pair with and started traveling looking for someone. The boys traveled and the girls stayed put because of the way waiting girls are impaired. If you’re curious how that worked, I’m sure you can find some of them in our library, There was one I read in middle school, which may still be in the curriculum, called ‘The Last Journey,’ which is fictional but based on the kind of journey that really happened in the time it was written.”

Fred confirmed that he did indeed read the story while in school.

“Before the drug, it still happened about once a generation that there was so much excess of one sex that somebody died due to being unable to pair, usually several someones because of an imbalance in the sexes of the births that year.”

There were no more questions, so my mother flipped another page and continued.

“The last day before the pairing, the girl’s family will leave the pus on her arms and head. It helps the merge happen. When they get together, she’ll push her pus-covered arms and head into the cavity on his back, as far as she can, and he’ll help by pushing back against her. Because the cavity goes up inside his back a little, there’s enough room for her entire head and forearms to go inside. That will start the pairing and their bodies will do the rest on their own.”

There were four pictures on different pages of a couple pairing, from just touching until her entire head was gone inside his body, and Mom flipped back and forth to let us compare all the stages.

“Now, does that hurt?” I asked.

“Actually, no. The pairing is actually a bit of a relief compared to the discomfort of the transformations. However, pretty soon after this point, the couple will pass out. You pass out shortly after pairing because your mind is busy merging with your partner’s mind. Yes, the minds really merge. You won’t be entirely yourself afterward, nor will you be entirely your partner, but a blend of the two. You will remember being yourself and being your partner growing up. It is kind of paradoxical, and trying to resolve that paradox is one of the things your minds are doing until you finally wake up as one combined mind.”

“How long does that take?” Sally asked.

“Usually they will be asleep for two to two-and-a-half days, and some time on the third day the paired couple will wake up. They will still be pretty disoriented as their new body finishes putting itself together and their merged mind sorts itself out. Around the fifth day, the brain and digestive and urinary systems are connected and the merged person becomes very hungry. They can’t really move the new body yet, though, so they must be fed and use buckets for their excretory functions. On the seventh or eighth day they become able to walk and mostly use their new body. The combined arms are still forming for several more days, though, so they will need help with certain things.”

“If one of a couple dies after pairing, can the other live, or do they both die?” Jenny asked.

“After pairing, there’s really only one person. When a paired person dies, the whole person dies. I heard of cases when one of a couple dies very early in pairing, in the first day. In those cases, the other person survives but still needs to pair. That happens even less often than people used to die due to not being able to find partners, and basically only if one of the couple is dying from not pairing for too long at the time they attempt to pair. Once paired, they are more resilient, because they have redundant organs. If your heart stops now, you die, but if one of the hearts of a paired person stops, the other keeps beating, and they can still live long enough to get help and maybe restart their other heart.”

This was the end of that series of questions.

“Pictures don’t really show the rest of the process well because it mostly happens inside their bodies. So there are diagrams instead.”

And she flipped to the first two.

“Where their skin touches with the pus between them, some of it dissolves, and organs migrate through the body. Her hands and forearms move as shown here and form the third segment of arms you see on adults, as well as the extra fingers. This takes the entire transition time to complete and the third arm segments are the last parts to fully form, after about 15 days. Her brain and skull moves into the cavity of his pelvis, and connects at the bottom of one branch of his spinal cord. The other branch connects to her spine and spinal cord, allowing the two nervous systems to combine into one. Her brain serves to coordinate the actions of the legs, even though two of the legs were his, before, while his brain controls the arms and upper body. But they won’t notice that, because in terms of thinking and doing, it’s a combination of the two acting together. You won’t be able to say Fred did something or Polly did something after they are merged. It will be the newly combined person who does it.”

She flipped the page. The new page was hard to follow, with many lines and arrows.

“Her upper arms and other parts of her head and neck get transformed into various tissues and bones, mostly ones used in combining the two bodies.”

Next page.

“The other systems of the body combine to form single systems. The blood circulates both bodies with both hearts contributing to pump it. The digestive tracts join. Both stomachs merge into a single larger stomach. The intestines join to form a longer intestine and her anus serves as the exit for the combined digestive system. Both sets of kidneys remain in their respective bodies, pulling wastes from different parts of the bloodstream. Her urinary bladder migrates to and merges with his to form a larger one, which receives urine from all four kidneys. Her urinary opening closes up, as does his anus, as they are no longer needed.”

“Good riddance to this female body’s stupid lack of a penis,” Sylvia interjected as my mother was turning the next page. My mother didn’t respond to the comment, but had a facial expression that suggested she appreciated Sylvia’s comment.

“This is the part you are mostly likely to have heard about at school because it’s what kids talk about. His penis will remain functional for urination, but it will also start to grow, and eventually to have its sexual function activated. Her vagina and internal female reproductive parts, which until now have done nothing, will grow and eventually become active as well.”

“How long does that take?” Sally asked.

“I hope you’re not impatient to have sex. It doesn’t happen immediately. The sexual organs don’t develop fully until about 3 years after pairing. When you first pair, your penis and vagina will be the same sizes as Fred’s and Sylvia’s are now. You can’t see much of the vagina because it’s inside. Just trust me that it grows in proportion with the penis. Both organs start growing after the pairing. Once your organs reach their full size, you’ll gain the ability to have erections. I’m sure you have seen adults with erections, though most of the time it doesn’t happen unless you’re engaging in foreplay, which generally means you or your partner is playing with your penis. There is foreplay that gets the vagina ready as well, by manipulating the outside of it. It’s normally pretty small, but it opens up wide enough to let the largest erect penis inside. You won’t be able to see it because it’s behind you, but you’ll feel it and your partner will see it.”

She was right. Because nobody ever wore clothes around here, I had seen how big size an adult’s erection could get; it was every bit as big as a horse’s on Earth, and I think even bigger around. But it was more prominent, because it stuck out in front of the person, rather than lying close to his belly.

She turned the page. There wasn’t a photo of adults actually having sex; this was a diagram, too. The diagram showed the size of erection I’d seen, and that the female parts were wide and deep enough to accommodate that.

“The merged adult will be able to have sex with other adults using either set of organs. Sex occurs when the potential father inserts his penis into the vagina of the potential mother, after some foreplay prepares the organs, as I described. The father ejaculates into the mother. A fluid comes out of his penis which isn’t urine, and it goes deep into the mother. The mother captures this fluid in an internal organ, and can hold it for up to two years. When she wants to become pregnant, she combines it with a special cell from her own body, and this starts creating a new person inside these organs, which occupy the lower torso of the merged body. Any questions about sex?”

Jenny was the first one to jump in and ask the familiar question, “Does it hurt?”

“Sex doesn’t hurt, and in fact it’s pretty pleasurable for a lot of people, and some of them do it as frequently as once every few days.”

I asked, “You said the fluid goes somewhere in the mother and she can hold it. Can you explain that? It sounds pretty important.”

“When your receive your partner’s ejaculate, it goes into a small sac at the end of your vagina. You usually won’t be able to feel that it exists except when there is something in it, and you’ll figure out how to empty it when you do. If you are in a standing position when you empty it, it will go into your womb and will most likely get you pregnant the next time that is possible. If you empty it when you are in a sitting position, such as sitting on the toilet, it will exit the way it came in and go into the toilet, and you won’t get pregnant. Be sure to clean yourself up afterward. And if you don’t do anything with it, the sac opens up into the vagina the next time you get vaginally aroused, regardless of your position, but usually this means it will spill out before you have sex again.”

Next page. Birth.

“Who remembers being born?”

I didn’t raise my hand at first, fearing it was a trick question and people here didn’t usually remember being born, but when I saw Sylvia and my mother do it I followed suit. I looked around. Fred and Jenny had also raised their hands; my father and Sally were the only ones without a hand raised.

“The baby develops inside the mother for about a year and a half, and then it’s born by exiting through the same orifice where the penis went in, which stretches wide to allow this to happen. It’s often the case that the baby becomes conscious a few days before the birth and remembers being born, but it doesn’t happen for everybody. Some only become conscious the moment they start breathing.”

Sally asked, “Does it hurt?”

“Birth sometimes hurts the mother a little, but the mother’s body changes during pregnancy in ways that make birth usually painless. You’ll feel a lot of stretching but your body will handle it. Those changes take a while to revert after the birth, so it takes about a third of a year after the birth for the mother to be able to have sex again that way normally. She can still have sex as the father during this time, though, and it’s possible for two parents to both be pregnant by the other at the same time. We didn’t do that with you, but you already know we alternated. I’m the mother of Fred and Sally and Tyler, and the father of Sylvia and Jenny.”

Next page.

“The nipples on the male body migrate to the lower torso during the merger, but all four of them only become active after the mother gives birth. They produce milk to feed the baby usually for about the first year of its life.”

She closed the book.

“That’s the end of the story. Any other questions?”

Sylvia asked, “Do you and my mother still have sex?”

“Sorry, I’m not going to tell you that.”

“It’s all right, honey, you can tell them,” my father responded to that comment.

“OK. We still have sex sometimes, but I’m the only one of us capable of having an erection anymore, so I have to take the father role when we do it. That is one reason some people stop having sex. The mother parts can get hard in old age to the point it becomes painful for a person to have sex that way, but that usually happens later in life than we are. But if neither of these things happens, it is possible for a couple to continue to have sex and bear children until they die. Usually, though, people have all the children they want within 8 to 16 years after getting married and then only do it as long as they both still enjoy it.”

There were no more questions, so my mother ended with, “Feel free to come ask me questions about pairing, sex, pregnancy, or birth at any time.”

Thinking

This talk gave me a lot to think about. By this point I had figured out that, while some of the details might not be exactly the same, the major organs in our bodies at least corresponded with those in humans and most mammals on Earth, with the exception of things related to the pairing. I had assumed until this talk that to become an adult I was going to undergo a metamorphosis where I grew another torso and a vulva, but now I learned I am going to get those parts by merging with a girl here. Almost certainly a normal one, since I’ve had no real chance of finding another ethertraveler. At least I had seven years to try to choose someone, with perhaps three years in which I could be asking potential partners.

There was no question I had to do it, and the person I merged with was going to know my secrets. I wasn’t going to live to adulthood without it. We weren’t supposed to reveal our Earthly origins publicly, but we were allowed to reveal them privately to limited numbers of people if needed to achieve our goal, and this clearly qualified. Though I could not guarantee that the combined me would still feel obligated to call home.

I could look for someone whose skills complemented mine with respect to building an ether communicator. But would I even know? The school here was divided into three levels, eight years of elementary, three years of middle school (where it appeared kids learned about pairing upon entering), and three years of post-pairing high school. I don’t think I’m going to get to the relevant classes before having to choose. So it probably meant doing well in school and seeking out a similarly strong partner. A free thinker, one with fantasies. One who would not shy away from an encounter with aliens. They had science fiction here, including stories of encounters with aliens from other worlds. As far as I could tell, they were just stories, just like Earth’s were always thought to be before ethertravel was discovered. It’s probably a natural result after people figure out there are other planets, and other stars which may also have planets, that they hypothesize some sort of people living there. But ethertravel was actually Earth’s first confirmed contact with aliens.

And we knew why. Actually sending living people far enough out in space to encounter alien beings was a monumental undertaking, and would have required multiple technological breakthroughs on top of the many Earth had already experienced, if we had not stumbled into a shortcut.

Probably the most important thing for me was finding a way out of this little farm town. They clearly had advanced technology here, how far advanced I couldn’t tell at this stage, but the people in this town only used limited amounts of it. We had electricity, television, and pocket-sized computers (or they would have been, if anybody had invented clothes to have pockets in). Trying to escape by being the leftover person who couldn’t be matched with a girl here was an extreme longshot. Was there a way I could arrange a pairing with a big-city kid? I asked Fred and Sylvia about that, thinking that the subject might only be discussed where kids of their age would know. And it turns out, yes!

The Program

Fred told me about a program that tried to make geniuses by pairing the smartest kids, even from different towns or neighborhoods. To get in, you had to do very well in school, and you had to pick an alternate partner to pair with if you didn’t make it, and that person also had to qualify. If you did, then you’d both go pair with the members of a similar couple elsewhere. So now I had my goal. To be among the best in my class, and somehow pick someone else who was also going to be among the best.

So I had a plan, to do the best in school. I would spend as much time in the library as I could get away with, learning more about this world from whatever material I could read, under the guise of studying, while I actually used my first-life knowledge to breeze past some of the math and (to a lesser degree) science subjects. And I could tell anybody else that I wanted to be the best, and pair with the brightest girl in school seven years from now, or say I wanted to get into that program, after I was old enough to have learned about it normally.

Fred and Polly had their pairing, and the combined Fred-Polly lived at Polly’s family’s place more than at ours because Polly was a last child. All her siblings had already paired and most had moved out, so there was more space over there. But they still came over here frequently.

When I was getting ready to go to the middle school, materials they sent out included a mention of the program, and parents to were asked to ensure their kids understood the essentials of pairing. There wasn’t a class in school that covered it specifically, but some class lessons would expect us to know about it. This meant I got a repeat of the lesson presented 4 years earlier, just for me.

I told my mother, “Go ahead and refresh me, but I am pretty sure I remember it. I had, after all, been wondering from as soon as I could think such thoughts how I was someday going to change from the four-legged or two-legged-and-two-armed body I have had all my life into the four-legged-and-two-armed body you have. My best guess was there was going to be some point in life when I was going to grow two more legs, and I’d been watching my brother and sisters for any sign of it. So I was watching it closely, even while studying.”

“It is sometimes hard to tell. Some kids are really intrigued by the idea their parents have two more limbs, and some don’t seem to care. Even the studious ones can turn out oblivious to something as major as that.”

She repeated the talk, with the same book. I asked a few questions to show my interest, but I knew the answers already.

“Are you interested in that program the flyer mentioned?”

“Maybe,” I hedged. “I’ve spent more time studying than actually looking for a partner, though I’ve noticed a few candidates. I have not asked anybody yet, understanding some of them might not yet know about pairing, though they should be getting it now. I do like the idea of the big city and advanced technology we don’t have here.”

There was an afterschool meeting for the program the second week of classes, and naturally I showed up. It turned out to be a pretty small group. There were four other boys and three girls there, with one boy and one girl I knew, and two other boys I thought I recognized from the classes I had only been in for a week. We all picked up packets of several pages of printed material as we came in.

A teacher explained, “To ensure the best opportunities for our students, we participate in an exchange program to allow some of our students to pair with bright students from larger cities near us, in particular to give them the chance to get into technology programs we don’t have here. But only the best can participate. We usually send one or two pairs of students from our school each year, and we only send the best to ensure they stay interested in participating with us. What they get out of it is more bright pairing partners and different outlooks on the world from what they might get from pairing with other big-city kids.”

She projected a slide on a screen, something very like the 20th century Earth technology where the slide was printed on a transparent film and light shone through it. The teacher continued her explanation.

“To qualify for the program, you need to keep up consistently good grades. In addition, there is a qualifying test. We choose who goes, and we’ll weight your grades more than the test, but if grades are similar, or there is a large difference in the test scores, it may be the test scores that determine who goes.”

Another slide had three columns of small text listing all manner of subjects.

“Each participating school provides a portion of the test questions, over every kind of subject but limited to those which students your age can reasonably learn. They may cover subjects not taught in school here, or not in the classes you choose to take, but in theory all the answers can be found in our library, somewhere. Your packet contains a list of subjects that have come up in the past which is longer than what you see on the screen now, as well as a list of specific books we keep multiple copies of which are recommended reading. Beyond that it is up to you.”

Another slide was blank except for a date almost three years off.

“You’ll take the test in the break before the last term in eleventh grade, so you’ll have almost all of middle school to prepare.”

She flipped to another slide, with silhouettes of a boy and a girl, the penis visible in the boy’s silhouette to make that clear, with an arrow pointing to the silhouette of one of the centaur-like adults. This looked almost exactly like the first picture in the book my mother had used (twice!) in teaching me about pairing, except the pictures had been reduced to silhouettes.

“One important requirement is that we send an equal number of boys and girls. This program is for pairing. Your parents all explained that to you before this school year started, I hope.”

All the students in the room indicated that they had received this education.

“If selected, each of you will be paired, in the merging sense, with a student of the opposite sex from another city, so we need equal gender numbers in the entire group. Because we don’t want you to get left out and paired with a random person if you end up not qualifying, we require that you pick partners and sign up in opposite-sex pairs. Both members of a pair will be selected, or both rejected, and if rejected, you’ll have this partner to fall back on for pairing, which we hope will still work out well for you. You’ll test separately, though, and both your individual grades will be considered in the decision.”

At no point did she say we would study together to help each other learn class material, but she also didn’t say we wouldn’t, and I took it to be a given that candidates would pair up early on and study together the entirety of middle school, both for standard classes and for the test.

“Now you don’t have to register today. In particular, since we have too many boys here, we couldn’t register all of you. You have all school year to find a partner. Registration will be open during the last two weeks of second term and all of third term. You and your partner must be present together to register. If you miss it, you can sign up during the same period next year, or the following year during the two weeks immediately before you would take the test. You may register with someone else who isn’t here today. Feel free to pick up extra packets to share this information about the program with others; everything I’m telling you today is in there. But we are going to give you a chance today to get to know each other a little better, since we know that the few of you here today are at least interested in the program, and some of you might select one another as partners.”

Her last slide was a bunch of generic pictures of written documents, paintings, sculptures, etc.

“We’re meeting in an art classroom today because it has materials available for you to express yourselves in many different ways. These materials are spread all around the edges of the room. You have 20 minutes [this was stated in local time units, approximately 20 minutes] to write, draw, sculpt, or otherwise express yourself in a way that might help the others here decide if you’re the right partner. Each of you will have a few minutes to share your writing or talk about your artwork for the rest of us when this is through. Go!”

Talk about putting us on the spot! I guess thinking fast was a useful skill. But what I was thinking was that if another ethertraveler landed in my town and was born at around the same time as a result of this planet being on the exploration program when I came, this moment was the best chance I had of finding one. I remembered the story from one of the first successful reports from the program, which was shared with all of us, where one ethertraveler had found another by hiding TERRA in Latin letters in a piece of art, and I chose to do the same.

I grabbed some blank paper and art supplies, and I drew a scene from science fiction, an alien and its spacecraft in a style commonly depicted here, along with a centaur adult from this world. I put five rows of little windows on the spaceship in black or yellow to suggest some of them were illuminated, and the illuminated ones spelled out TERRA in crude letters. They wouldn’t look like anything to the natives.

Pretty soon we were all sharing our work. My picture, which I had titled “Aim for the Stars,” included an inset in a top corner, explaining that one of the tiny stars at the top of my picture represented this world’s sun, with our planet and the other lifeless ones here circling it. My research had shown they did know or strongly believe the other planets in the system were lifeless. I actually got reactions from one girl and one boy from it. The girl’s was stronger, though. She’d shared with us a short science-fiction story about traveling to a world that sounded suspiciously like Earth with its unfurred people who walked on two legs their entire lives and didn’t merge. The boy had written something more academic about inventing machines.

After the last presentation, the teacher invited us to go talk with one another in private groups. The girl who had written the story came to me and whispered in my ear a description of what was undeniably ethertraveling, and I responded with my recollection of the original TERRA story. But I made sure we talked to the boy also; we met him together.

“Good job, you two. I love science fiction but I didn’t think to write or draw some. I don’t know if you’ll have the grades, but I know I missed out on one potential partner from this group.”

It didn’t seem like he knew anything about ethertraveling, and she confirmed he missed her attempts to locate ethertravelers from her prior school. He was just a science-fiction fan. My partner and I made plans to meet up the following weekend, the one day we didn’t have school.

As it turned out, she lived on the other side of town. There were two elementary schools, and she had gone to the other one, but at this level we were all in one school. But the town wasn’t very big, even with farm plots, and our four-legged running mode made the trip of 4 miles each way between our homes reasonable to do once a week if we wanted to.

Her Earth name was Cynthia, and that is the name I use in this report because, like mine, her name here is not readily rendered in English letters. I shared with her my name Tyler as well, and we basically agreed to help each other qualify. Even if we ended up pairing with non-ethertravelers, we’d have better resources to eventually build the ether communicator, and there’d be two of us to share the work. So throughout middle school we met frequently, often at the school, since the library was open on weekends even while the rest of the school was closed, perhaps specifically for us. Most of the students I saw there were those I met at the program meeting, or, as I came to know them, were program candidates who registered in the previous two years and would take the test before us.

My brother and sisters didn’t make their pairing choices until tenth or eleventh grade. In fact, Jenny, who was starting eleventh grade now, hadn’t chosen someone yet when I introduced Cynthia to the family. They understood, though, when I explained that we were trying out for the program. While the others had done fine in school, none of them had had the particular ambition to try this.

So I got to know Cynthia quite well, and we learned a lot about the state of technology on this world. It was surprisingly advanced, but somehow they’d never developed anything like the Internet, so little farm towns like this one lagged far behind. We also studied up on culture, such as what movies were popular, since we had no idea if we were really getting it all here, and really anything else we could learn about life in the big cities.

The intervening years passed quickly, and test day came. There were just six of us in the testing room, including five of the original group who had attended the meeting. I can’t say we got everything right, but Cynthia and I both felt we did well. I had to laugh at there being two farming questions on the test, stuff city kids probably wouldn’t know, which no doubt came from our town or another farm town participating in the program. Were those kids studying farming stuff in their libraries?

A few weeks later, we were contacted. Cynthia and I had been selected for the program. We finished the school year, and enjoyed the two-week break with all the other kids, with our two families throwing a small party. Most people wouldn’t start their transformation soon, so there was no rush. And since people didn’t wear clothes, there wasn’t a whole lot of packing to do for our trip, either.

The same day that other kids who hadn’t just finished eleventh grade went back to school, we traveled to Crystal City to meet up with the other program participants. There was a train station, with trains very much like Earth trains riding on fixed rails, which mostly saw use to carry our excess food to be sold in other towns and to bring other goods here, but once a day there was a passenger train, though it was a single car, which went to Crystal City and other places beyond.

They had allowed that day for travel, and provided a block of rooms for us at a hotel. Most of the people on the train were paired centaur-form people and the seating was made for their centaur forms, long narrow compartments on either side of a wide aisle and completely open to the aisle, with a low seat near the back of the compartment. But the conductor pointed out to us where each compartment had a second seat folded into the wall opposite the one fixed seat, so that the two of us could share a compartment. Obviously, it wasn’t unheard of for unpaired people to be on the train, and nobody questioned the two of us traveling together without an adult.

The city had local trains as well, and we changed trains once and then walked what was a pretty short distance for us, but within unfamiliar territory, to get to the hotel where the whole program meeting was going to happen. When we got there, there was a pretty obvious place to check in for the program, and they also provided us with rooms. Perhaps to limit culture shock, they provided me and Cynthia with a room on the ground floor, though we saw there were ramps and elevators to reach other floors. My siblings had all had dividers between our beds growing up, so we would sleep not seeing one another, but we were in a room with two beds and no divider between them. They clearly didn’t think it was weird to put a boy and a girl together, since we were expected to have gotten to know each other well and these unpaired forms weren’t sexually mature. And after all, we were here to choose partners for a pairing most of us would do within the next year. We were all soon going to get to know the organs of the other sex intimately, even before those organs were ready for sex.

The second day of the school term for other kids, we all met up. After a brief formal session in which we learned each person’s name and which city or town they were from, along with marking their locations on a map, there were several different icebreaker games and some informal time to mingle.

By dropping TERRA and other references, we eventually learned there were three other ethertravelers in the program, all girls, all from different places, two of them from big cities and one from another farming town, out of 14 total pairs. There were five farm towns in the program, one town sending two pairs and the rest one each. There were also three cities, two of which had sent three pairs each and the third city two. They were pretty much letting us make our own matches provided none of the small-town kids got left out and was forced to pair with another small-town kid, and that nobody was forced to pair with someone from their own city or town. Since we could only make one pair among our Terran group, it was decided I would pair with Linda, the big-city girl from the place with the best tech opportunities for our goal. Cynthia, and the other two girls (who were both men in their first lives named Dean and Stacy) could pick whoever they wanted, yielding four of us who might or might not mate in pairs later in life, but we’d all keep in touch, whatever happened. Nobody seemed worried their non-ethertraveling partners would steer them away from the idea.

The program ran for five days, at the end of it our pairings being decided, with the administrators not having to change anybody to meet the program requirements. We made arrangements for where we were going to live, in each case with the family of one of the members of the pair. Because we were making pairings across different cities, we weren’t going to be able to visit both families frequently. So the plan was we’d spend one week with the family we didn’t expect to live with all the time, and then switch over to the other family until our pairing. For the pairs which included a small-town kid, that was always the big city’s family, as that was where we expected to go to high school.

Living with Linda

So it was that Linda and I made our way back on the train to my family’s farm for a week. I’d had to make a concerted effort to remember the name of our station, and our town, was Lakeview (the equivalent words in their language, of course), because we rarely used the name in town. It was just “Town.” I knew the names of other towns better than my own!

She marveled at how simple the life was there. She knew from descriptions, but it was her first actual visit. But she got to meet all my family, including all my paired siblings. We were the only unpaired people there, and everybody wanted to tell us about how pairing was and no two of them agreed. They said it was great, it was uncomfortable, it was weird, it was exhilarating, and it was something we only did because we’d die otherwise.

Then I saw what her family’s home was like. It was nothing at all like the farm; she lived in a very modern high-rise building. But that wasn’t too surprising; I understood that the big cities had a generally higher technology level than the farms, which for the most part didn’t do multiple stories at all. Town Hall had a second floor which you could get up to via a long ramp or an elevator big enough for two adults to enter and turn around inside without having to back out, and I’d seen, but not used, similar constructions during the trip to the program group. At Linda’s building, elevators were the only choice. The only ramps were a sort of fire escape.

But it was more than that. I quickly realized that Linda’s city didn’t have a generation’s advance in technology compared to the farms. They had a century’s worth, if not more. Something was wrong, and at the first convenient opportunity, I asked Linda privately.

“Oh, of course. They could not have taught you about the automation famine. It would have violated the exclusion law.”

“Yeah, I never heard of any of that.”

“I can tell you, but you must swear not to reveal it to any of the rest of your family.”

“Linda, I’m going to be sharing a body and mind with you in... whenever we’re ready. Likely less than a year. I’m going to know your secret and I’m also going to know the reason I’m bound to keep the secret. And I’ve been keeping a much bigger secret from them all my life, the one we share as ethertravelers.”

I rendered that last word as space-travelers, which was the closest we could come in the language here and how our group of 5 had agreed to say it when we were speaking. It was also innocuous; if somebody overheard it, we could claim we were referring to science-fictional space travel in spacecraft like the one from my artwork. We could easily claim that it was the goal of our small group of friends to travel into space for real.

Making a gesture that the people here used when swearing oaths, or at least the version of it possible in kids’ bodies, I said, “I’ll keep your secrets. So I swear. Tell me the secrets.”

“When they tried to do mechanized farming, artificially produced food, and the like, people died. It look a long time before it happened. That sort of food was introduced gradually, a whole generation knew about it and had eaten it without problems. Sure, a person or two here or there died mysteriously, but they never tied it down to anything. It was when they increased the production of food this way, when it reached the point that somebody might eat only machine-made food, that people started dying in larger numbers. Two hundred mysterious deaths in one year, eight times as many as any previous year, which was enough to make people wonder. Twelve thousand the next year, and people knew it was a serious problem. They still didn’t know why. Seventeen million people died the next year, primarily in large cities. There was so much death in one city they had to close down parts of the city. There weren’t enough people to run things.”

“Oh God. Seventeen million.”

I should pause here to explain the number system. With four fingers (three fingers and a thumb) on juvenile hands and eight fingers on adult hands, they used a base-eight number system here. So what I translated as two hundred was three eight-eights, or 192, as an approximation of the death toll with basically the same meaning. The other numbers were similarly close round numbers in base eight.

Linda continued, “Kids and adults died equally. And while there were a lot fewer people living on farms, they’d had no such deaths on the non-mechanized farms and few in the areas still primarily fed from such farms, so they figured out it was something to do with the food supply. They rushed shipments of natural food to the areas mainly eating mechanized food, and the deaths slowed to nearly none. They tried to figure it out, but they never could. It didn’t affect animals. They could not test it on lab animals because the lab animals could live entirely on artificial food with no ill effects, for the normal duration of their lives.”

“They never pinpointed a cause?”

“The deaths were weird, and not all alike.”

She located a book on the subject and let me read. People suffered cascade heart attacks, where one heart stopped and then instead of feeling numb in the extremities as the other heart suffered under the load of trying to pump the whole adult body’s bloodstream, and being able to seek help, the second heart failed also. They suffered brain death, which is usually also not fatal to adults here, as either brain alone can control the whole body, but that cascaded as well and both brains died. They suffered multiple kidney failure. Double liver failure. Internal bleeding. Loss of lung function. Random organ failures over all systems, including ways that were very rare for people to die. People in the same family who ate the same food died in different ways. They had lots of corpses to study, and they could identify various nutrient deficiencies in one person or another but it was inconsistent. They had lots of survivors to study, who didn’t have the same nutrient deficiencies that killed their family members. They couldn’t very well ask a bunch of people to eat the machined food, condemning them to death, especially when they were so far from pinpointing a cause. The only conclusion they could agree on was that something about the machines poisons food in ways that causes a variety of different deaths in different people, and only in people.

“So they just stopped making that kind of food? Bet that caused problems.”

“Well, yeah. They had started using the machines to improve crop yield, and reduce the amount of manual labor that was needed, but it didn’t work. So they had to roll back all those plans. Shut down the machinery, pull up and burn crops that had been planted that way, and go back to older ways. You can use a tractor to till the soil, but then nothing more than a seed-sower that a man pushes along each row of crops one at a time. Similar style of reapers.”

“Yeah, I know. I lived that life. I saw my family do those chores, helped with them sometimes. There’s no actual hand-farming except weeding, but we use simple, hand-operated machines to perform all work dealing with crops, like you said.”

“At first, they had to send a bunch of city folks out to farm the land, and they hated it. But they found that there were people who hated technology, and by specifically recruiting people like that, and having retired farmers train them, it worked. They made enough food and the weird deaths stopped. But they were still terribly afraid it would happen again. The level of technology involved in our food production could never be allowed to increase. That meant the population could not increase, unless we increase the amount of farms.”

“Was there land for that?”

“There was. They had to do a lot to make it work, but they did. Some of the places where whole cities died, if the area was good for farming, they turned them into farmland. They concentrated the cities more, making these tall towers like the one we are in now, and put more farms on the outskirts. Every city has its own collection of farming towns. And they limited the size one city could be, which is why we have the other nearby cities here. The space between and around them allows enough farmland to feed all the people.”

“And tell me about the whole secrecy thing.”

“They were worried crafty farmers were going to redevelop mechanized farming and cause mini-famines among the people who ate their food. So the whole system is designed to make two classes of people, those who permanently live in the level of technology you grew up in on this world, and the unlimited technology of the cities. The exchange program lets the brilliant minds who might become inventors come to the cities and invent things safely, and in the process pair with city people who know the history and the reasons for it. They’ve slowly increased certain levels of technology in ways they think are safe. For instance, you’re one generation of television behind what we have, but the programs aired on that generation are governed by censors who ensure things farming people aren’t allowed to know don’t go out. You have powerful pocket computers but they are locked down to only run approved programs. And you can’t have the Internet. There simply wouldn’t be any way to control the information.”

“How close are you, really? How far is the technology here away from ethertravel?”

“The people here could have already built it if they were interested in that kind of thing. With four adults working on it, I say two years past college, tops, to call home. Perhaps as little as half a year.”

“Tell me about college here. In the farm towns, it’s just some mythical thing that happens in the cities.”

“Yeah. Farm people don’t need college, so they don’t get any, but it’s available here in the city. All your doctors are city-educated people sworn to maintain the secrecy, and they get Internet to do their jobs. Most other college people stay in the cities. But it’s a four-year boarding school covering every field you’d expect from your experiences in your first life.”

“So you think two years after we finish college we can call home. Two years of our pairing period, three years high school, four years college, and then the time to make the communicator, so about eleven years. And the first thing we tell them is stop sending people here.”

“Probably, yeah. The testing system should handle it. If six couples from one town ace the exam, we’ll bring them all to the city and find enough here to pair with them. But they’ll notice. They’ve got decades of getting about the same number of brainiacs getting in every year. One year with extras could be a fluke. Several big years in a row with three or five times as many as the norm, they’ll know something is wrong and worry some tech has leaked.”

“Right. That sort of situation was what I was thinking of. At least they can catch the people and not have a bunch of also-ran ethertravelers go into renegade farming tech and kill people. Is there some way we can put the towns on extra alert without revealing ethertravel to the whole world here?”

“Probably. We can brainstorm those ideas as a group and come up with plans. There are a few other privileged people in the towns. Learning the extent of the secrecy program was a required middle-school class for us. Mayors and certain town officials including the test administrators for the program are told the history of the automation famine and how the towns are being kept back on technology on purpose to avoid a repeat. The basic idea behind the test is that any farm kid who aces it gets in, regardless of grades, how many there are, or how their partner did. Usually it’s hard enough that nobody will. It’s a lot easier for city kids, though we have to study materials about your lifestyle to answer townie questions.”

“I recall thinking exactly that, that city kids weren’t going to know the farming answers unless they’d specifically studied them.”

“There’s a different attitude in the cities. The ones who want to join the program are the outcasts, the dreamers, those who don’t fit in, but not necessarily because they are super-bright. There’s a certain minimum in grades and then they take the top test scores, enough of them, after the towns report how many they are sending, to have a few more city kids than townies. If they really want it, they’ll study, including farming, and at least do better than the others, which is all they need.”

The Pairing

Over the next half-year I learned how a lot of devices in Linda’s family’s house worked, modern technologies comparable to things I knew on Earth in my past life. They measured time by the same terms the schools used (which were the same here as in the farm towns), counting the post-term breaks as belonging to the preceding term. It was week 9 of second term that year when my back started opening up, and three weeks later, in the last week of the term, when Linda started her transition.

Once she could no longer feed herself, her family members and I helped feed her, and it was the last day of the term when she had progressed far enough.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked Linda.

“I’m ready,” were the last words she ever said with her body’s mouth.

“Ready,” some of Linda’s family members said.

Linda’s torso was perched on top of a small table with a pillow on it, with her rear legs on the floor and her front legs stuck to the sides of her head in preparation for the pairing. I’d seen a similar arrangement used three times as my sisters paired. The table provided support as our two bodies fused.

I backed up in front of her, looking behind me and aligning our bodies, knowing she had limited movement. Because of the table, she couldn’t push much, but she could do fine alignments while I pushed back against her. Her mother was there and helped steady us as we joined. Linda turned her head and forearms upwards into me as more of her entered my body, until they were all the way inside, and we stopped.

Figuring I could not get any more of her into me, I stopped, and we rested on the table. I felt the process begin almost immediately, as nerves established connections between her brain and mine. Initially, our minds remained separate, but we could send thoughts to each other along the new connections.

“Linda?” I probed across the newly formed connections.

“Tyler!”

“It’s hard to believe this is really happening. It’s one thing to have your mind beamed across the universe into an alien being, and yet another to have your mind actually merge with another.”

“Yeah. But as ethertravelers we were trained to be ready for anything, anything at all. We could have been plants, or ethereal beings that float in space. I know it’s going to be really weird for the guys the others merge with, who don’t even know about ethertraveling.”

“Couldn’t be avoided, though. Cynthia told us just over a week ago her change was starting. She must have already started her pairing. When we are ready to communicate with the world again, she’ll be done.”

“When my head was going into you, there was a scary moment when I realized I couldn’t breathe, and your intestines were getting shoved into my mouth. But I felt the connections start. My blood is linked to your blood now and you are breathing for both of us.”

“The same moment was scary for me when it felt like you were going to eat me from the inside. It shows how much trust there is in pairing people. I know the intestines are supposed to go there. Eventually they have to link up with yours.”

“Of course.”

We had lots of thoughts like this. After the more intense changes started and we weren’t conscious to the world around us, the thoughts were more about our lives, both the ones on this world and those on Earth. Time passed, seemingly slowly, as the connections between our minds got stronger and faster. My mind was reading Linda’s memories, and hers reading mine, as the minds got closer and ceased to be two separate entities. But in no particular order. Linda was going to her high-school prom on Earth. Linda was a toddler here. Linda was taking her test to get into the program. Linda was writing some kind of technical document on Earth. Linda was learning to use the toilet by herself on Earth. And then the same thing here. Linda was signing up to be an ethertraveler. Linda was falling down and skinning her knee as a child on Earth. Linda was here with me right now, reading my memories. An overwhelming mass of Linda’s memories came into my mind, and at the same time I could see a similar amount of my memories were going into hers, and we both passed out.

When we were next aware of the world, there was no boundary between Linda’s mind and Tyler’s. There was simply our mind. We were hungry. There were strange sensations coming from parts of our combined body. Some of those were due to it being different from what we had before. Others were due to changes that were still happening. I could feel both of our hearts beating in sync, all four legs, two arms still developing, and other aspects of both our bodies.

While we were out, Linda’s family had removed the table, and placed buckets at both ends for us to pee and poop into. Not having eaten anything since the pairing, I didn’t actually have anything to eliminate, but I flexed the relevant muscles. I could feel Linda’s anus at my rear end, and Tyler’s penis up front. How did I know it was Linda’s anus, and not Tyler’s? I knew what both of them felt like. It felt like hers. And after a moment I realized it was because Tyler’s was accompanied by his nearby penis, while Linda’s was next to her vulva. And I could feel that part too, though it didn’t feel like much.

I called out for food, and Linda’s mother brought some. She had to feed it to me, because my arms were still undergoing changes and not usable now. This was repeated for the next several days. After that point, my hands were fully formed and I practiced using them to pick things up, including my food, though the arms were still changing and I relearned the arm movements a couple times until the change was complete.

It was a whole day after my first meal as Tyler-Linda before I peed, and two days before I pooped, both using the provided buckets. That first pee was a little weird, because my two bladders hadn’t fully merged yet. So I emptied Tyler’s bladder, and then with a different muscle action, emptied Linda’s bladder into Tyler’s, and then emptied Tyler’s again. By the next time I peed, they were merged and there wasn’t a need for that.

The third day after my first post-pairing meal, I started practicing walking around with all four legs. It was different, walking with what were, compared to what I was used to, essentially four hind legs. It was not the same as the juvenile all-fours method which used the arms as legs. But the fourth day after my meal, I was able to make it to the toilet and pee and poop in the adult way there, using the bowl in different ways for each function, but the same as any other adult here. And by the next day, my changes were complete except for the growth of the third segment of each arm, which took another week to complete.

It wasn’t too hard to get used to my new name, since my combined mind was used to both parts already. The way they named adults here was by concatenating their two names, with the male name first. So Tyler-Linda really was the best way of describing my name now, though of course what people here called me was the concatenation of our names from this world. (As an aside, what distinguishes male and female names here is that male names end with a vowel sound. Just as with many names on Earth, there are male and female versions of some names which add a final vowel, like Carl-Carla, except it’s the male version with the extra vowel. This allows male and female names to be joined smoothly, where two female names might have an awkward consonant cluster in the middle. Tyler-Linda is OK, but try to say a name like Max-Priscilla and you’ll understand.)

There were surnames, too, but not like the ones on Earth, and before long I had to deal with that. Juveniles used matronymic surnames, a prefix that meant “child of” prefixed to just the female part of the name of that person’s mother. This meant that while growing up, Tyler had the same surname as two siblings, and the other two had a surname based on the female part of my father’s name. But surnames were rarely used, mostly only to distinguish two people who had the same name. Linda’s family, on the other hand, had kept the same roles for all their children and they all had the same juvenile surname.

In the farm towns, adults simply didn’t use surnames, and most people only knew their own. In official records, we had our male half’s matronym followed by our female half’s matronym, but most people’s only encounters with such records were when they got paired and when they got married. Surnames didn’t change for marriage, but the official marriage record might say something like John-Catherine O’Kelly O’Bess married Peter-Lisa O’Della O’Catherine, with those being two different Catherines from different generations, of course.

In the city, as it turned out, adults did have surnames, because there were enough people it was likely there was another Tyler-Linda. But rather than try to mash something together from the surnames of the parents, we got to choose our surnames, made of a short phrase based on two or three normal words, usually in forms like “of the green mountains” or “rain-bringer.” Based on the way I found Cynthia during our intro session for the program, the most obviously relevant memory in either Tyler’s or Linda’s history here, I chose the surname Star-seeker. Of course, those words in the language here.

And the record-keeping was online in the city. In my home town, the way this would have worked is when I chose my pairing partner, we’d go over to Town Hall and register that we were going to pair, and when we were successful, we went over there again and told them we did it. Here, when Linda and I chose each other in the program, officials from the program registered us as a prospective pairing couple, and sent Linda a link to use to confirm the pairing was completed. They would have sent me one too, except as a farm town resident, I didn’t have network access, so they just sent it to her. But when I followed the link to confirm, I did see how Tyler was listed as Tyler O’Sarah of Lakeview in the pairing description, to mark him as someone from outside the city, and to tell anyone looking it up they’d have to contact Lakeview to find his birth record.

The next order of business was to contact Cynthia. Well, a brief note to all the kids from our program group, but then a pretty long conversation with Cynthia to find out about her pairing.

“Well, now I’m called David-Cynthia Furless-walker.”

“Heh, I’m Tyler-Linda Star-seeker. I love that we both named ourselves based on our presentations from when we were first applying to the program. But tell me how David took it!”

“Of course, he was absolutely stunned to find out he paired with an alien, and scared at the same time, but he knew there was nothing to do about it but live with it. There’s no unpairing. And now there’s no David, only us. David expected to be merging with a farm girl who, though bright, was naive to the real ways of the world and as a result expected his experience to be guiding our paired self. Instead, it’s Cynthia’s goal that dominates.”

That was of course a way to say building an ether communicator in the language here.

“Tyler and Linda both shared your goal, so there was no shock in our pairing. It was pure planning.”

“And you know we all expect you to lead our group because of that.”

“And I don’t know for sure it will end up that way, but I’m ready to lead by default if that’s necessary.”

“How are you liking your new body? I am loving it. It’s impossible to explain how good it feels to somebody who hasn’t experienced it. We move fast, think fast, are very strong and very agile.”

“I haven’t reached the very agile point yet. Give me another week, I guess! But otherwise, yes to all that.”

We made plans to go see our farm-town families in Lakeview, and David-Cynthia and I spent a few days there, staying together as we visited both families. And I visited David’s family, and David-Cynthia visited Linda’s. It was all very much like something that two of the adults on this world who were going to marry would do, and we hadn’t officially decided that we were, though we knew that our group of four ethertraveling pairs from the program would marry in two couples somehow, and it seemed likely with Tyler and Cynthia’s connection that we would be a couple.

Eventually the others also paired, and they had stories similar to David-Cynthia’s. Both male, non-ethertraveling partners were amazed, and doubted they were getting true memories until immersed in the stream of a lifetime of memories of Earth and ethertraveling.

The four of us all got together once, and communicated online a lot. We wanted to make plans, but what our investigations told us was that we didn’t need much of plans. They had the parts already here. We just had to put them together, remember how it all worked to do it right, and finally to locate Earth. All of us were going to take astronomy in high school or college in order to understand how they measured things in space and to figure out how to locate Earth’s sun, which we knew would have looked like one of many dim, unremarkable stars visible in small telescopes from here.

Communication

We went to high school, and to college, and we all got jobs in Crystal City, not all with the same company. We got together weekends to work on our device. We had already written down all the theory by that point, checked each others’ work, and we’d also located Earth, all before finishing college. It was only a matter of building it.

It only took us one school term to finish the device. It was common for people in the city to get time off work matching school breaks, and we did all have the time off together, so we got together to test the device and locate Earth. This was successful, and we sent the customary short message including the request to stop sending people here. Earth responded, and confirmed they had already paused sending people here to give the ones here a chance to report, and were now stopping entirely based on our request. So then we wrote up and sent our detailed reports.

Earth was shocked to hear of the way people paired here, and one scientist in particular was interested in the evolution that could have led to such a thing. We didn’t get that from farm-town school, but those from the cities did, and we sent them an additional report:

Since ancient times the people here wondered why we paired the way we did, somewhat like a small, common lizard-like creature does, while the other animals didn’t do so. Other animals still reproduce sexually, but without first pairing. The lizards were revered as avatars of the gods in some cultures. Eventually, one other animal was also discovered to pair. As actual science developed here, a lot of the work in biology focused on these two animals.

The second animal discovered to pair is a small monkey-like creature which pairs into a centaur-like form, as we do. They don’t die if they don’t pair, but they never reproduce if they don’t. In the wild they almost always pair, though. They don’t have sexual dimorphism in the pairing; both males and females develop the back hole, and when one enters another, their back-hole closes up to prevent further pairing. Double-male, double-female, and mixed-gender pairs in both combinations are all known to exist commonly in the wild, all in similar proportions. While any two of our paired adults can (apart from sexual disorders) always mate, two random adult paired monkeys have about a 7/8 chance of being able to mate in at least one way, which is almost as good.

The first animal is a smaller lizard-like creature, and their pairing has a number of differences. They don’t have to pair, neither to live nor to reproduce, but they can pair at will once they reach adulthood, and they can pair in larger groups than two. Paired individuals retain the ability to pair with others, sometimes forming long snaky beasts of 8 to 20 individuals. The lizards have been well studied, so their behavior and method of pairing is well known.

When the lizards pair, the opening occurs at the end of their short tails, encompassing the anus. Lizards can open it at will. No preparation is necessary by the partner inserting the head. The pairing isn’t sex-linked, and they can pair in any combination. Only the head is absorbed during the pairing. All the legs are retained, so a group of 2 paired lizards would have 8 legs. A group of ten would have forty legs. Imagine a centipede the size of a garter snake and you have a good idea of the approximate size and structure of such a group.

They don’t have to pair to mate, but when they pair, each segment retains its sexual organs, and can bear or father children separately. It’s possible, in chains of at least 3 lizards, for parts of the chain to mate with other parts. There must be at least one lizard between the two mating to provide enough flexibility in the body to join the organs.

When they pair, they gain in mental ability and strength, while giving up some maneuverability due to the longer body they are permanently stuck with. They seem to understand this instinctively, so they pair when they feel threatened or trapped. For instance, you can make them readily pair by putting two together in a cage. However, they learn, and the 2-unit chains are smart enough to have figured out that pairing didn’t get them any closer to getting out of the cage, so they don’t pair further. If you put many of them in a cage together they will only form pairs.

To get longer chains, you have to put them in situations where the extra length actually helps them. The classic example is the slippery-sided pit. Place several of the lizards in a pit or well with vertical sides which have been lubricated with an oil that prevents the lizards from being able to climb out. They will join up to about 20 individuals in an attempt to get out of the pit by scaling the wall, with the ones remaining on the ground being able to push the others up the wall. If their chain reaches the top then the ones outside the pit will help to pull the other ones up.

The limit of 20 seems to be because there are diminishing returns of the joining, and they cannot push strongly enough to compensate for the extra length and weight after this point. However, one experiment showed that the lizards will sometimes exceed the limit. Especially when joined in longer chains, they show altruistic behavior. If you put three 10-unit chains in a pit that requires two of them to join to get out, once one 20-unit chain gets out, it will lower itself back into the pit and attempt to let the remaining group escape by climbing up its body. If this also doesn’t work, because the backs of the lizards have been greased either intentionally or by falling against the walls while attempting to escape, then they will join with the remaining 10-unit chain to make a chain of 30, which will be able to escape with the front end already out.

Like us, paired groups retain the memories of their constituent individuals. If two individuals were taught different skills and then paired, the pair would know both of the skills, even though each skill was only taught to one of the two, originally.

The fact that paired individuals can learn from each other and become more intelligent than individuals, and keep a mate permanently available, was seen as an evolutionary advantage in support of the theory of evolution, but the fact that lots of other animals didn’t do so, even though it would seem advantageous to do so, was considered evidence against it. But it was generally accepted, and people assumed that there were simply details they didn’t understand which explained the oddities.

In time, with genetics, fossil research, and other techniques, they figured out the evolution chain. The lizards evolved from worms who developed the ability a long time ago, in a form similar to what the lizards use now. Larger forms of the lizards developed to be better adapted to certain habitats, specifically mixed habitats where small forests are scattered among large grasslands, and during this process, based on another evolutionary pressure that is still debated, pairing was reduced to two members only and linked to the activation of reproductive functions. The one place in the world today the monkey-like creatures can still be found is believed to have once had terrain like this, and now it is the other way around, a jungle with numerous small clearings. But at one time these animals covered the entire world, and in harsh climates they evolved to larger forms.

One notable feature of all these creatures is that merged beings are genetic chimeras. Each section retains the genes it had before merging, including relocated tissues such as the arm sections of the females of our people. During pairing, the immune system is put into a state in which it relearns what is acceptable, and the blood, including immune system cells, is shared throughout the combined body. An interesting consequence of this, as applied to the reproductive organs, is that when both parents in a family of our centaur-like beings bear children, if the 4 individuals who paired to form the parents were all unrelated, so are the children born from one mother different from those born from the other. They have neither the same maternal nor the same paternal genes.

The leading theory behind pairing becoming limited to two individuals is that some quality of better developed minds can only support merging two minds at a time, and adding a third drives them insane. They did manage to use a variant of the drug that changes how people merge to create 3-way and 4-way mergers of the monkeys, and they either didn’t survive the additional pairing or committed suicide shortly thereafter. Though perhaps ill-advised, they did try to make 3-way and 4-way pairings of our people using the drug, but it never worked. Even if you get 3 or more bodies arranged with head inserted into back holes, no one body would go on into the next stage of pairing on both ends, and you’d end up with only merged pairs and unmerged singles.

The leading theory about it becoming linked to activation of the reproductive functions is related to survival of the young. In a situation where the added intelligence of pairs was needed to keep the young safe from predators, having unpaired individuals able to generate young they could not protect is a disadvantage.

And the leading theory about pairing becoming mandatory and male-female only is that the larger, paired forms were better adapted for survival during an ice age when food was scarce, and it kept the population in balance. Letting the excess males or excess females die was better for the population. It’s thought that this developed in our immediate ancestors and made the difference between us surviving and related species dying out. The surviving monkey species did so in areas not frozen during the ice age.

Afterward

With our primary mission accomplished, we could focus on another goal: contacting other ethertravelers. The contacts were easy enough; they didn’t have much concept of data privacy here, so we could look up the records of everyone else who entered the program, including in other parts of the world, and what they studied in high school and college. Either by what they’d studied or what they’d written in their profiles, most ethertravelers were pretty obvious to us. It looked like Earth had flooded us with ethertravelers for two Earth years, which ran across parts of three years here, and that was it. So they were all in college or recently finished. But we’d been unusually lucky to get five in one district in one year; most had one or two.

We sent a sort of coded message with one of our TERRA art pieces to the most likely candidate in each program district each year, and to the second-best candidate afterward for the few cases where we didn’t get appropriate responses. Through them we established connections to what we believed were all of the ethertravelers who’d made it here, at least, the ones were trying to achieve their goal and who succeeded in getting into the program. Three other groups had already called home, and we saved the following two years’ classes the work and sent Earth a summary notice of all the ethertravelers we’d located and recruited into our group, and maintained an ongoing dialogue afterward. We set up an organization supposedly dedicated to learning more about the stars, but actually serving more as a contact point for other ethertravelers, and as guardians of our ether communicators.

There was also the obvious thing about the food. There was something specific in the processed food that harmed people here, and they had been so afraid of what was happening that they hadn’t ever bothered to figure it out properly. After some discussion, we decided that this didn’t need to be the work of our group alone, nor should it be. The subject needed to be brought up publicly. Scientists here now have the ability to study what goes on in every bodily process at the molecular level, and the similar ability to study what is in food at the molecular level, and what molecules are produced when it is eaten. It needed to be accepted over a period of time politically that this could be allowed to be studied, and farming could then be allowed to advance to exactly the level of automation which was safe, with checks on the food supply to ensure nobody was cheating and employing more automation and poisoning the food supply.

About three years later, this idea had taken root (no pun intended) and they started the program. They set aside certain small fields to grow test crops on, and hand-built machines based on museum models comparable to what was used during the famine. It took many years, longer than we had expected. There was nothing in the mechanically produced food that wasn’t in ordinary food. It was a matter of degree.

Specifically, the food crops grown here contain certain long-chained structural molecules. Cutting them breaks the chain and leaves loose ends with what Earth chemists would call free radicals. These radicals react with other molecules in the food over time, creating growing quantities of a chemical which is safe in moderate amounts but becomes a poison to us in high amounts. If they had bothered to test the monkeys and lizards that merge, they would have found that all of the animals that merge are vulnerable to this poison. Other groups of animals have developed a greater immunity to the poison.

In food produced the way it is traditionally made here, by the time these levels become dangerous, other modes of breakdown have led to the food appearing to be rotten, and it is discarded and not eaten. In food harvested by mechanized reapers, rather than merely being cut, the long-chained molecules are shattered into many pieces, making about 20 to 30 times the amount of free radicals. This results in the poisons building up before the other processes give the appearance of food being rotten. Chewing the food also breaks the chains in this way, but only minutes pass between the chewing and digestion within the body, not giving enough time for the poisons to build before the food is digested.

Effectively, this meant they had to harvest food by hand. Mechanically reaped food was only safe for about 2 or 3 days, but that time would pass before it was distributed and consumed. Hand-reaped food was safe for 6 to 8 weeks, which allowed for distribution time. They could use mechanical sowing machines, but no reapers. This meant limited changes in the lifestyle of the farming folk.

In artificially produced food, the long chains never built up to the degree they did in natural food. This meant there were more chains with more ends, and the result was comparable to the mechanically reaped food, so it had similarly short lifetimes. But for all food, they now had tests which could determine both the level of poison and the level of free radicals, which could be combined to label food with a lifetime. It became standard to take samples from each batch of food to test and label the batch with a lifetime.

So we did make changes, but less than we hoped for because the problem was actually worse than we hoped. And the people here had a new safeguard against getting poisoned by their food. Once we achieved the better understanding of why the automation famine happened, we let Earth know they could start sending people here again, but in limited numbers. We decided no more than 2000 people worldwide per year would be appropriate.

Completing Our Lives

Only at this point did we get around to really living. Which meant marrying and having kids. Marriage was associated with a bit of a party here, but it wasn’t as big as on Earth. Usually it was just adult family members, which meant 4 pairs of parents, some of the parents’ siblings and parents, and some siblings of the people getting married. For people like us whose families were from different cities and towns, it was common to have separate parties in each town rather than expecting the guests to travel. In this case, adult meant graduated from high school, and it was sometimes the case weddings happened the month after graduation so a younger sibling could be included. But I had missed all Tyler’s siblings’ weddings due to being either too young or away at college; I had attended one wedding of a sibling of Linda’s.

And it was adults-only because the marrying couple was expected to have sex during the event. Apparently the idea was to ensure they understood how; it’s one thing to hear this when you are an unpaired boy or girl, and another to do it after you’ve got a very different body. If they had any trouble, any of their parents would coach them through it. This was practically the only time you ever saw people having sex here. They didn’t have much in the way of porn here. How could they, when nudity was the norm? There was a kind of dance show in which the performers would engage in sex during part of the show, but it wasn’t normal sex; they’d do it in positions the people here normally wouldn’t and most couldn’t. Those shows were available both in the cities and (periodically, when troupes visited) in the towns and were always adults-only, and that was the only kind of porn.

So it was during our weddings that all four of our pairs first had sex in these bodies. Because of the arrangement of the organs, sex was almost always done standing, with one partner directly behind the other. Because of the size of the organs, sex was a more intense experience than with humans; it was also interesting that we experienced male and female sexual excitement separately, to a large degree.

Because of the way kids had to merge, each couple needed to have 4 kids just to maintain the population, so large families, by Earth standards, were the norm, and families who never had kids were almost unheard of. The ethertraveler families from our district’s program chose to alternate bearing children, as Tyler’s parents had done, as opposed to the way Linda’s parents had kept the same roles for all their six children. It was an interesting experience all around.

Being pregnant occasionally put me through some uncomfortable periods, but no more so than with humans. Giving birth was actually pretty easy and almost painless; the bodies here seem better adapted for it. The main sensation was simply one of stretching, and it reminded me of the start of the pairing, but in reverse. I saw David-Cynthia giving birth and I know for a fact she opened up wider than any human woman ever could or would while giving birth. Having a newborn sucking at my teats was wonderful; there was a really satisfying sensation from that, though it wasn’t sexual (or it was yet a third kind of sexual stimulation that didn’t get either set of my genitals going).

We kept our origin secret from our kids. The foundation we established was a bit of a club for the elderly by the time the next generation started coming of age, and that group came with no obligation whatsoever, mostly the people who wanted to live a life as a centaur. But we had some very public TERRA displays which were just art to the natives and symbols of the scientific company that discovered the true cause of the automation famine and ended the exclusion clause, while to ethertravelers they were a beacon that said “come join us, if you like.”

Ethertravel report #1902, received June 1, 2534.

I was Lisa Carter, a successful programmer years ago, but at the age of 112, I had run out of my retirement funds, and chose to continue my life as an ethertraveler. As you will read, I was definitely not typical on this world, and I ended up changing the world in a way, but don’t worry; I didn’t tell them about ethertraveling.

Childhood

I was born as a male here with a name that is approximately Joe, phonetically. We are vaguely humanoid people with gray skin, and hairless. We have a bit more distinction in size between males and females than in humans, but we reproduce and raise children in ways similar to humans, except that the females are only fertile once a year, but super-fertile then.

However, that appearance is only superficial. Internally, we are very different, the biggest difference being that we are silicon-based life forms. Don’t think of the Horta from Star Trek. We aren’t made of rock or glass; we are about as flexible as humans. But there is a lot of what people on Earth would think of as mineral matter in our diet, including other silicon-based life that grows here.

One weird consequence of this is that our excretory system is different. We have liquid waste and solid waste, but all the junk is in the liquid waste. The solid waste, which has the consistency of clay, is made of incomplete body cells, mostly the intracellular material present between the organelles in our body cells. There is a small amount of our equivalent of DNA (different chemistry but same function) also in this material, and this is critically important, because it keys each bit of waste as belonging to the person whose body created it.

They invented toilets here, and most people, most of the time, dispose of the solid waste that way. It mixes with the water and everybody else’s wastes and becomes part of the ground. But we don’t have to do that. The solid waste is clean, and we can keep it and use it like clay to build things. What’s more, if we keep it clean, and don’t let anyone else’s cells or any foreign matter besides a little water to get into it, we can actually animate the things we make from it as extensions of our bodies.

If you think that sounds like a powerful ability, it is. But it’s limited by the need to keep the clay clean, so people mostly make small things. Imagine having a tiny screwdriver you can drop in a hole and loosen or tighten screws at the bottom of the hole without needing to have a long tool to reach down there. Or, for that matter, to find the screwdriver, because we get certain sensations from the things we have animated. You can keep all your tools in a big bin and then just pull the screwdriver out of it by thinking you want to raise that tool.

We start out as kids making toys that way. They don’t have commercially produced toys like on Earth because it’s more fun to make your own things you can animate. They do, however, sell little kits with paint and accessories to decorate your toys, and these are previews of the kits used to seal and preserve the tools and other devices people make as adults.

One of the things each person gets as a child, not long after you learn to use a toilet, is a clay catcher. This is a little device that fits over the back of a toilet seat and catches your clay rather than letting it drop into the toilet. The first thing you do when you get one is line the cavity with your own clay, animate it, and seal the clay. This identifies it as yours so it can’t get mixed up with those of any other people you live with. Unless it breaks, you’ll keep the same one all your life; all toilets everywhere are made to the same standard shape to support them. We do have plastic here and there are plastic bags and sealable bins people use to collect more clay than you can deposit at one time to make larger things.

I wasn’t unusual in making little “action figures” which, unlike the ones on Earth, actually acted. I could stage little mock battles with them, and later when I got more ambitious, make houses and cars for them. The ability to manipulate these things was somewhat limited; even though one person might have many tools or toys, you could only manipulate so many at once, and at this point for me it was 3 or 4.

It isn’t simple to make such elaborate toys; there are a series of steps to go through. First, you have to save your clay. For larger projects you might need to save clay over a period of time. You can’t make clay faster just by eating more; your body only processes it at a certain rate, and you’ll feel stuffed and unable to eat more if you exceed that rate. Then you need to shape it. We have a variety of tools we use to shape the clay, much like someone on Earth would use for building with clay. For simple things you can animate it once the shape is complete. We have a gland that produces a special substance that is only used for this purpose. The gland is in the mouth, so it looks like spitting on it, but it’s not saliva, not chemically nor in function. Finally, for most purposes you would apply one of several coatings to it to protect and preserve the clay and make it last essentially indefinitely. One kind of coating makes it into a hard, still object, while another kind allows it to keep the flexibility inherent to clay.

If you are building something with movable parts, it’s more complicated. You have to animate those parts separately as well as the matter that holds them together. So to build a car for my action figures, I had to animate separate axle assemblies with wheels, coat each of those with the hard coating, and then later make the car body including parts that go around those axles. If I wanted to build the equivalent of an Earth action figure I’d have to build each movable segment separately, such as a head, torso, forearm, upper arm, pelvis, thigh, and lower leg, and then put in little pieces to join them. That would take a long time. Also, all those parts would be separate pieces, and while you might not need to manipulate every one to move the figure, it wasn’t easy to move several of them at once to simulate real walking. So I did as people usually did; I just built the whole figure in one piece but left it flexible, so it could bend different ways; the result was less realistic, but much faster to build and easier to animate.

This is considered so universally useful here that everybody takes one or more sculpting classes in school, where you are asked to bring in your own clay to build things. And I excelled in these classes and got into the more advanced classes where I learned to make more complex models.

One of the things I realized while playing with these toys is that there is a kind of second sight. Effectively, I can see a three-dimensional view of things near the toy or tool I am manipulating. With tools, it lets me see down in small crevices, provided there is any light in there to see by. I can only use one of these at once, but if it isn’t blocked by anything I can have a 360-degree view around it. More than that; up, down, every which way. When I mentioned it in class, they said not everybody gets this, and some of them get a weaker version of the effect than others. Some of them can look any direction but only one direction at a time, and may have a lag when switching between objects. But this was why, for both the soft and hard types of coating, clear was a popular option. It was specifically a clear that didn’t impede this vision. You could hear through this connection as well, but unless you were manipulating one at a distance, you wouldn’t notice because you’d hear the same things with your real body.

This made me wonder about using one as a second body. It would take a lot of work, a lot of skill, and a lot of clay to do it, but I wanted to try. For my final art project in high school, I made a foot-tall bodybuilder statue using one week’s clay. I combined a few parts to make him more animated. Two extra pieces for the fingers (combined) and thumb on each hand let him grasp things, and the arms swiveled at the shoulders. The gray color of the clay is close to the gray color of skin, so I only painted the few details of our bodies that are other colors and used the clear sealant on the rest. It was common enough to do this sort of thing that there were doll clothes you could buy, and I found some to fit him. Combined with my ability to move him around the room, swinging from the bars under desks and tables like some kind of jungle gym, I got an A+ on the project. But I still hoped to do something better someday.

College

They have the basic equivalent of college here, a boarding school with continuing education that not everybody does. I enrolled into a science program at a college whose name I can roughly translate as Rockheart, in a city which was literally named River City in the language here. I hoped to be able to make an ether device someday, but even in such a program, everybody took art at some point. There were several levels of classes available for clay-sculpting open to everybody, as well as classes for working in other media for which only the intro classes were available for non-majors. I ended up making an art minor so I could get into some classes, including anatomy for artists, which taught details of the body form, including even some internal details like bone structure because it could be helpful to understand in depicting the external anatomy.

For my final college art project, I was determined to make a full-size animated clay statue. I started saving my clay a year in advance because I realized I needed a lot. I decided to make a female body, not because I wanted to be female, but because it was smaller, and I started saving clay too late. I figured I’d need three-quarters of a year’s worth of clay to make a full-sized female body, and twice that for a male. (Not nine months; there weren’t months on this world because there wasn’t a big obvious moon like on Earth. We have 8-day weeks conventionally with six days of work or school and two days off, with days a little shorter than Earth’s, and a 352-day year. Longer time spans are measured in multiples of weeks or in 88-day quarters.)

During the first half of my final year, after proposing my project, I spent a quarter planning how it was going to go. One of my classes actually gave me a detailed table of various body dimensions corresponding to standard sizes. Naturally, just like humans, people here don’t always come in exactly the same proportions as one another, but there are ideal proportions for males and females that the standard sizing system is based on, and which most clothes try to follow, apart from ones specifically designed for people outside the norm such as shorter or taller. I used one of these sizes as the basis for my sculpture’s design.

In order to make it behave more realistically, I made the bone structure first, shaping each bone and sealing it to keep it separate from the body that was going to enclose it. This was also going to allow me to use up some of the clay, since the storage was an issue. By midway through the year, I’d shaped but not sealed most of the bones. Next I carefully animated each bone and then coated it with hard sealant. Then I used a bunch of wire and temporary supports to build the entire skeleton. I presented it as a checkpoint for the project. My professors were impressed; enough of them knew enough anatomy to realize I’d made a very faithful female skeleton, and I could move specific bones to make it dance. And I practiced a lot with that as I continued building; moving those bones was how I was going to move the whole body when it was assembled. I developed my ability to move up to about 10 parts at once, and the ability to quickly switch from one part to another, which let me do pretty realistic things with it.

The more difficult part was still to come. I had to cover the skeleton in more clay, carefully shaping each section from toe to head, and keeping all unfinished surfaces covered with plastic so they would not get contaminated. Usually, the sequence was sculpt, animate, and then seal, but there was a kind of sealant that I could apply to parts of the clay I was done sculpting before animating it, without having it soak into the clay, and leaving the clay somewhat flexible. So it worked for me to seal each section as it was finished.

There were some other tricky bits. One of the goals I had envisioned was the ability for her to speak. Our speech is not exactly the same as that of humans, but it is quite similar; you pass your breath over a resonator and shape your mouth to vary sounds. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to breathe, except for this. I built a mockup of these parts without the whole body to test the idea. Five of them, actually; it had taken me three tries to get it right, and then I had to test to see how it worked before it was animated so I could be sure that when I made it part of the body and animated the while thing it would work correctly. I really needed that to all be one piece, because breathing depends on the whole torso moving. Of course, when I was testing that it worked, that didn’t mean I could talk using it, just make sounds. When I had her whole body together, the whole mouth, especially the tongue, would work together with this apparatus to manipulate those sounds into speech.

When I was nearly done I bought her clothes in that size. The clothes here aren’t exactly the same as people on Earth wear, but they are close enough for me to say I bought something equivalent to a dress. A nice one, since it was to be part of an art project. Nobody thought it was weird when I bought the dress and the other clothes that went with it. They just assumed I was buying a gift for someone. I suppose for an art project I could have made a dress myself, but that wasn’t the kind of art I was doing, and I documented in the papers I submitted about my sculpture that the clothes were purchased.

There was one last thing. She needed a name, both as a body I intended to use like an extra person when this was over, and as a piece of art now. While she was not really based on the appearance of my body on old Earth, since we don’t look like humans, I chose to use the name I had had as a woman, Lisa, or at least the closest approximation to that name here, because of an interesting discovery I had made. While the name most like Lisa here didn’t normally look like TERRA when spelled out, I had doodled a way to make it look like Lisa to people here but undoubtedly like TERRA to any ethertravelers. So I got some wide ribbon to use as a sash, and painted Lisa/TERRA on the sash in this way. I hoped people would see this, and someone would notice the TERRA.

On turn-in day, seeing me walk in with my girl, having her dance with me and do other very realistic things, I got an instant A+ on the project, subject only to them checking to make sure it was not another student pulling a prank acting as my art project. That only took a day, but Lisa was declared one of the best projects of the whole school, so she was placed in the exhibit with the other best art for the remaining two weeks through graduation. This was what I’d been hoping for with the sash. She got publicity.

The time she was in the exhibit was a bit weird. I didn’t have to be looking through her body all the time, but I was curious, and I did so a few times each day. Her skin was all one piece, in terms of how it was animated, so when I used its vision, I got a view in every direction from the parts of her not covered with clothes. The head, most of the arms, parts of the legs... I would not have seen much more if she’d been left naked. Sometimes there was nobody around, and sometimes there were lots of people admiring the art. Three times I caught somebody peeking under her dress - yes, she is anatomically correct down there, at least externally, and yes, I did put clothes on her to cover that. Three times... and I was watching maybe 1% of the time she was there while people were in the exhibit hall. So I assume people peeked under her dress 300 times! I was a woman before, so I knew some guys would sneak a peek whenever they thought nobody was looking, but with what they thought was a statue, it was much more often they thought nobody was looking. Good grief, I traveled across the galaxy to an alien world and found a place where upskirting is still a thing!

I was kind of surprised by this, because another thing that is different about the people here compared to humans is we cannot have sex all the time. Males only get an erection in the presence of female pheromones released at a mating time about once a year, and the female reproductive cavity only opens at that time. Even then, people usually don’t have sex because we are super-fertile during those periods and sex is very likely to result in pregnancy, but various kinds of foreplay or mutual masturbation are typical.

Going Home with Lisa

The day after graduation, all the artists were invited in to reclaim their works. Since the art took every form, there was art the creators simply picked up and walked out with, large works that needed two people to carry, and heavy stone sculptures carted away with something like a forklift. But I had the only art there that could follow me out of the gallery.

That was the moment where everything changed. For the rest of my life, I had a very realistic looking female body available to use 24/7 in addition to my own body.

My parents had stayed in a hotel overnight for the graduation, and helped me get moved out the next day. After I let them know I got Lisa back, they drove their vehicle to the parking area near my dorm and the four of us (with both of my bodies) helped load all my stuff. And Lisa helped again unloading.

“Joe, now that Lisa is home, what do you plan on doing with her?”

Yep. Mom asked the $64,000 question the moment we were done getting all my stuff in the house.

I didn’t have hard plans. I really hoped some other ethertraveler had seen the exhibit, and would offer me a job as a way of getting together to work on calling home, but by the time I left there was nothing, so I just went home with my parents. I hadn’t given up hope yet.

“Whatever. Chores. Extra things I don’t have time for, or things to give me more time with my real body.”

Mom sighed, seemingly with relief. “Oh. OK. You think you can do that at the same time as you do other things?”

“As long as the other things aren’t too mentally taxing. So while I’m taking a test or doing intense studying, no, Lisa sits idle, but while I am riding the bus somewhere, or reading, or doing chores myself, Lisa can definitely be doing other chores. Having her body and mine both moving things while getting my stuff home was no issue at all.”

“OK. I’m going to want to see that, but if you are going to be using Lisa all the time, she’s going to need more clothes. Even if clay bodies don’t sweat, the clothes still get dirty over time, and other people will find it weird if they see her wearing the same clothes all the time. So we are going to have to go clothes shopping for Lisa, along with finding some place to store them.”

“Actually, I think we need to wash her and her stuff already. Even though Lisa doesn’t sweat, there were a lot of people in the exhibit hall those two weeks who did.”

“OK. I’ll lend you my robe for Lisa to wear until her clothes are clean, and you go take her in the bathroom and shower her, and I’ll do a washload with whatever else is around.”

It’s not really sweat, and not exactly some of those other things, but equivalents. I’m taking some major liberties in this section to describe things in a way people from Earth would understand, but I did wash her the way a person would wash herself.

Even though Lisa had been naked, in some sense, in my dorm room for more than a quarter while I was finishing her, being in her and showering her body seemed somehow much more intimate than that. She wasn’t animated before, so it was more like I was constructing a piece of art. This time, it was like I was in the girls’ locker room, except I was one of the girls. I got through it remembering how, in another life that seemed impossibly far off though it was really only 20 or so years ago, I was a woman and did exactly this daily. But I’d been male those 20 years and just as on Earth, segregated away from anywhere naked women were visible, except as depictions in art. I dried Lisa’s body off, and put on the robe while I waited for her clothes to be returned.

Clothes shopping happened the next two days, and it had some of the same complications as I remembered from shopping for clothes as a woman on Earth. My parents also got me some extra furniture to store the clothes; it wasn’t quite as bad as having a roommate in my bedroom, but I did need some extra storage space.

“Is Lisa going to need a bed?” Dad asked me.

“No,” I replied.

Dad frowned, so I explained, “Lisa wouldn’t use a bed. When I stop using Lisa, she becomes a statue in whatever position I leave her in. As long as that is a position that is not going to topple over easily, she could easily stay there overnight or for days if necessary, as she stayed for two weeks in the art exhibit.”

“OK. I am just glad you didn’t say she was going to sleep in yours.”

Yes, Dad was worried I had made Lisa to be my girlfriend, sex doll, or whatever. And I suppose it was possible; there was a hole there. But no, not really, without the pheromones. With a real girlfriend it would have been possible for one short period of a few days per year; with Lisa, zero days.

After the two days of shopping and setting up stuff, I got to start taking advantage of having an extra body. Lisa could do all my chores, while I applied for jobs and then had fun playing games or whatever. But Mom actually assigned me extra chores, with the excuse that when I was away I was going to have to do all the chores, ignoring the fact that I’d already been at college where I had to do most of my own chores already. I think it helped, though. At the end of the week, I was feeling adept at everything I tried with Lisa, including speaking.

Inventor School

I got offers of a sort starting the day after the shopping was done, and going on for a few weeks, but not from other ethertravelers, as far as I could see. There were several kinds of school you might go into here after college, and they all worked differently, so it was a bit of chaos. If you were going into medicine, there was medical school that you’d apply to the last year of college the way people would on Earth. For advanced technical training, or to become any sort of educator, you’d get hired first, and your employer would pay for you to get the training they thought you needed. And then there was the kind of offer I got.

It was basically inventor school, and it was part business school, part tech incubator, with the two parts working together to help you develop your idea into a viable product. You don’t apply to this school at all; the school makes offers to people they think have interesting ideas, based on exhibits like Lisa had been in and other ways things were exposed to the public. And there was no particular schedule or requirements; they make offers to people who haven’t finished college and in some cases haven’t started it, as well as to people who’ve been out working a job for some time.

People still invent things here, but if you “invented” say, a specially shaped tool that people could make from their clay, people would just make their own. At best, you could sell how-to guides about it. People ended up with toolboxes full of special tools they had built at some time or another, instead of ones they bought. But there were plenty of inventions that were either too complicated for people to easily make from clay, or had to be made of some other material to do what they did. Even then, some of those were sold as kits containing the non-clay parts to be combined with something you made from your clay, but there was something to be sold. Figuring that out was the point of this school.

So I got several dozen invitations to these inventor schools from all over, on the basis of selling the service of helping people build realistic-looking clay dolls like Lisa. This wasn’t entirely novel; some people here had built life-sized dolls that they could use, for instance, to help move things, but they were made with only a few parts in simple shapes, and usually built over a frame so that the whole body wasn’t solid clay. But they weren’t meant to be lifelike, and they weren’t. They were better described as robots, and they usually had limited functionality, often meant for a single repetitive job. Likewise, a few people had sculpted full-sized people out of their clay before, but if they let them be soft, they were too floppy, and if they made the whole thing hard, it became simply a statue and the fact that it was made of his clay only made it easier for the sculptor to move. I don’t know why nobody had ever hit on the strategy I came up with, using soft “flesh” clay over hard “bone” clay, but the responses made it seem that nobody had. Perhaps it was because of the amount of time and clay needed.

Some of the offers I got seemed to assume that making sex dolls, as my dad had suggested, was the primary market for them. I eliminated those early on, but I still kept in mind the idea that on a world as sex-happy as this one apparently was, that was at least one market for them, though I still wasn’t sure how the men were expected to use it.

I contacted several of the other schools to check how much I’d be limited strictly to developing ways for other people to build their own Lisas. It was obvious from the invitations that that would eventually have to be part of my activity there, but I wanted to make sure I got a chance to study other things I’d not gotten to in college. I had, for instance, no practical experience on this world assembling electronic circuits. This was pretty necessary to build an ether communicator to tell Earth about this place. And this was tricky, because I didn’t really want to talk about Earth stuff with other people. But it was possible to imagine making the things with some embedded electronics that made movements easier, for instance, by moving some bones in the hand in response to you moving one of them, to make actions like grasping easier for people with weaker command of their clay. I could use that as an excuse for wanting to learn this.

My parents didn’t do such a thing as this inventor school, but they did at least know it existed. So they were proud of me but mostly let me make decisions.

There was some interesting economics behind it. There was no up-front cost. If I and my advisors determined there was no way to make money off my invention, then I’d walk away, owing nothing, but committed to pay them back if I ever figured out a way to make money off the invention. If I did make profits, 30% of them had to be paid back to the school up to a pre-arranged amount, the real price of the school. It was possible the cost of materials during development would get tacked on to this, but there was a certain allowance for expected material costs within the school’s fees.

These costs varied among the offers, as did my freedom of choice regarding both classes and developing the invention. Eventually I picked one of the offers which I thought gave me the most on different sides of this trade-off. I made arrangements to move there and start classes once their term started.

Mom committed herself to preparing me for this, but she also started talking more about Lisa doing this and that around the house to help out. I had to interrupt her, as the suggestions were going out of reach of reality. I wasn’t planning to donate Lisa permanently to the family to help out around here!

“Classes start at the end of the usual summer break. When I go off to this school, Lisa will go with me. They will expect to see Lisa, and I want to use her to help do errands and such. This is why I wanted to live in an apartment rather than in the dorms. The dorms are coed, but having Lisa in the same room with me and probably another roommate, since most rooms are doubles, was sure to cause trouble. It was tough enough swinging a single last year; it looked impossible to do at a new school. Even though I am sharing an apartment, I’ll have my own bedroom, and I can make space for Lisa in there.”

“Ah, smart. I had never connected those two things, but I had never realized until I saw her that you were going to be able to use Lisa like this. I just assumed you wanted more space to sculpt, or something. Not to mention a place to keep your collection of clay.”

I continued practicing speaking with Lisa and was getting better every day. It took only three weeks after graduation before I could hold a normal conversation with somebody using Lisa, and after another three weeks I could speak as well with Lisa as I could with my own voice. Since I could only produce some simple tones with the sample voice assemblies I had made, I couldn’t really tell how Lisa’s voice was going to turn out, but I chose a design which gave somewhat higher tones than Joe’s voice, and it worked out OK. Her voice was lower than some female voices, and lower than mine had been on old Earth, but within the normal range for females here.

Everything seemed to be going well, and then my whole plan got run over by a truck. Literally; an accident on a nearby highway sent a truck similar to a semi off the road, and it ultimately stopped after crashing through some fences and the back of my family’s house. It smashed through my parents’ bedroom and part of mine. I awoke, in incredible pain, unable to move, and not understanding what had happened, but I found Lisa and switched to her. Though her 360-degree sight was not as dependent on light as human sight, she still needed some light, and there was nothing. I kept a night light on but it was out, and on memory I maneuvered Lisa to the light switch but it also failed to bring any light. So I assumed whatever happened had knocked out the electricity.

After a few minutes with Lisa, I felt my way around in the dark (harder than it would have been for a person, as I get a more limited sense of touch feedback from her than I do from my own skin) and found a flashlight. And I saw what happened. We had something like a telephone, but it was under the truck somewhere. Having no way to get help in the house, I ran to the house of a neighbor with lights on. They’d been awakened by the crash and had already called for emergency help, but I gave them more details from what I’d seen with the flashlight. It was a good thing Lisa could speak!

The emergency response was similar to what you would have expected on Earth. It took about 10 minutes, and they brought this world’s equivalents to two ambulances and a fire truck. I came out and met them, and one of them talked with Lisa while the others went in the house.

In order to get at the bodies, they pulled the beds out from under the sides of the truck. They loaded my badly mangled body into one of the ambulances and took it away while they worked to retrieve my parents bodies. They found my father’s body, but he was declared dead on scene. They didn’t find my mother until hours later, after they removed the truck, and then they only found parts of her.

Lisa remained on scene, and using her, I helped an investigator with the details I could about the accident report, but there wasn’t much I could provide but identifying information. He was fascinated to learn Lisa was a clay doll, and I gave him a lot of my story. He had taken testimony from clay dolls before, so it wasn’t unprecedented, but he was used to them being either clumsy robots or small dolls, and in either case he expected them to have to write out answers rather than talk.

We finished both the report and my story and then he said, “I’m guessing you want to be back with your body.”

“Yeah, might be good. For a little while, at least. I’m still awake, but they think I’m unconscious because I’m fully focused on being Lisa. Normally it’s not a problem to operate both bodies, but my body is in so much pain right now that I am not able to. So if I let my real body become conscious, this one will just become a statue. I can probably only make it work if we’re together and I’m looking straight at her.”

“OK. You don’t worry about your house for now. My team will be here and we will keep the place secure. Nobody’s going to come loot the place.”

“OK.”

I went with the officer to the hospital. And I put Lisa in a sort of on-guard position outside the door to the room I was in before I switched back over to my body.

“Aaaaaah!”

“Oh, good, you’re awake.”

They gave me some pain reliever and a doctor explained that both my legs and one arm were completely destroyed. The other arm and some other bones were broken, but I’d heal, apart from the lost limbs.

I was thinking about making fully clay limbs to replace the ones I lost, though it would take a while. But the next day they explained to me that the way they help people who have lost limbs is to provide stainless steel prosthetics which can be attached with clay joints that would let me control them. It would take a quarter of a year to ensure all the broken bones were fully healed, and another quarter to fit the prosthetics together and let me learn to use them, and by then I was already supposed to be in school.

I was sure I could postpone it, but I instead called them and asked about the possibility of sending Lisa to school in my place. They hadn’t ever heard of anybody doing something like that, but they also hadn’t ever heard of anyone having such a functional clay doll. They encouraged me to do it, figuring that the spirit of wanting to proceed despite the challenge would be good for me mentally, and maybe help me recover faster.

They put me in casts the next morning, and after about a week the pain was down to where I only needed to be on over-the-counter level of pain relievers. At that point, Linda started working with me; she was something like a social worker, and helped me deal with the paperwork and other issues.

The trucking company had insurance that was going to pay for all the damage to the house, personal possessions, and my medical care, and an additional amount for the deaths and loss of limbs. My parents had their own insurance that was also going to pay a good amount for the deaths and my loss of limbs. My body was in no condition to sign, but Lisa could, and Linda produced a form that Lisa could sign, I could mark akin to a person signing with an X, and Linda signed as a witness, affirming that Lisa was me and could act for me for all purposes, and so Lisa signed all the paperwork. I hadn’t really practiced writing with Lisa and it was a bit sloppy but much better than I could do now with my one remaining hand. But since the form was usually used with toy-sized dolls, that was better than most did.

One day Linda took Lisa over to my house to survey the damage. The clothes in my closet were ruined, and I only had a few outfits in a hamper that could still be used. Lisa’s clothes were in the part of the room that wasn’t damaged. A good deal of clay I had saved, almost half of another Lisa worth of it, was also safe. Everything in my parents’ bedroom was destroyed, but they wouldn’t be needing it anyway. I was happy to accept a cash payment for it. And there was significant structural damage to the walls in that part of the house, but much of the rest of it appeared intact. The contents in other parts of the house were OK, including my paperwork about my upcoming school.

Together, we assembled a list of the possessions within the house that were lost, and approximate replacement values, and this was sent to the trucking company’s insurance firm as a statement of some of the damages done. An inspector verified the other parts of the house were OK, and figured an amount for the repairs.

The one other thing that was needed before work could start was removal of the personal items I wanted to keep. Linda arranged movers and a place to store the things I wanted to keep, and sale or disposal of things I chose not to keep. I really wanted to pare down to just what I could take with me to my apartment at the school, and sell the house once it was repaired. There wasn’t a reason to come back here with no family. I contacted the school, confirming I would attend using Lisa, and they helped me contact my roommate. I had already explained to him about Lisa, but now I had to explain to him that I was only going to be sending Lisa at first because of the accident. The rules for behavior we had arranged still applied, and I would still pay for half the rent. Lisa would arrive with some things needed for school and some of my possessions that wouldn’t be used until I got there.

When the construction company started, the first step was a cleanout of all the damaged walls and debris. Linda arranged for Lisa to be there during this stage so she could accept any more valuables discovered during the cleanout, and they did find some jewelry. A separate construction company was replacing fences destroyed in the accident and Lisa was asked to approve the replacements. But once this part was done, Lisa didn’t stay to supervise it all. I needed to have her at school before long, anyway.

Before she left for school, mostly using Lisa, I built a 12-inch clay doll from some of my clay. This was just the basic kind lots of people had, but it would help once Lisa was gone.

Lisa rode a bus like a person would, found the apartment, got my key, and picked one of the bedrooms arbitrarily and set up the stuff she went with - just basic school supplies, school paperwork, and her clothes. The rest followed on a truck the later that night.

My roommate Jack arrived a short while later and was fine with the choice. He had arrived with all his stuff, so I helped him get things into the apartment, and he spent a couple hours unpacking enough of it to make himself feel at home, which I let him do on his own, knowing how personal the layout of things can be.

“I’m going to go get some food. You want something?” Jack called out after a while, then realized his mistake.

“Oh, right, you’re just the clay doll. The way you were helping me move stuff in earlier, it was easy to forget that. I’ve never seen a clay doll as large nor as realistic nor as genuinely useful as you before.”

Jack left to find food. My truck showed up while he was out, and the men were helping me unload my stuff into my room when Jack got back.

Jack came home and ate, and I came out to join him at the dining room table once the movers were gone even though I didn’t eat anything, and I told him the detailed story, both of how I made Lisa, and the accident. That took most of the night, and I didn’t worry about unpacking my stuff. Most of that stuff wouldn’t be needed until my real body showed up, and none of it until classes started for real.

Orientation Day

In the morning, it was first impressions time. I was about to meet a bunch of my classmates. So I got out Lisa’s nice dress, the one I bought for her as an art project, and the associated items. And once Jack was out of the shower, I went in, cleaned myself up, dried off, and put on the outfit. After depositing the towel and my previous clothes in my room, I joined Jack at the table where he was eating breakfast.

“That dress looks really nice.”

“Thank you. These were the first clothes I bought for Lisa, what she wore when I turned in the project. It wasn’t until I took her home with me later that she had any other clothes, and I never anticipated I would be using her this way, so all her other clothes are pretty basic, not meant to impress but just to cover her. I’m going to have to buy some better clothes for her, but for today, when I meet my classmates for the first time, I’m wearing the best I’ve got.”

“Damn. I bet some guys would pay a lot of money for something like Lisa.”

“That is pretty much why I’m here, to figure out how to help people do this, and to figure out how best to make money from it.”

Once Jack finished his breakfast, we got ready to go. I carried what would serve as my school bag, with mainly just the paperwork in it. This reminded me another thing I needed was proper school supplies; I had a bare minimum. Jack had an actual notebook with his stuff in it, and the map was clipped to the outside. And like that we set out for the place on campus where this orientation was to begin.

When we got there, we found signs for different numbered groups were spread around the area, and Jack and I were in different groups so we parted ways.

As I approached my group’s sign, I heard a few whistles, and a few shouts of “clay doll” or “River City doll.” It’s clear some people recognized me; I wasn’t aware Lisa had become that much of a celebrity, but then, I did get offers from this school and a number of its competitors, and I was wearing the outfit people saw in the publicity photos.

I walked up to the girl sitting at the table the sign was attached to, gave her my number, and she pulled out a name tag with my name on it. Frowning slightly, she read my name as a question, “Joe?” Just as Joe is a male name on Earth, my name here was a male one, and so she was not expecting a girl to show up with this number.

“Yes, sort of. I’m actually Joe’s clay doll. Joe is laid up in a hospital back in River City after a truck crashed into his bedroom while he was sleeping.”

“Oh, the clay doll guy, right! They told me you were in this group, but they didn’t tell me you were sending the clay doll instead of your physical body. Sorry to hear about the accident, but glad to hear that you are finding a way to attend school anyway.”

“I see you have some blanks there. Can I have one of those?”

“Sure.”

She handed me a blank name card and a marker. Using the two cards I labeled myself JOE’S CLAY DOLL LISA. Seeing that I’d made a two-card name tag, she handed me another of the plastic sleeves when I gave back the marker. I arranged the tags one above the other on the flat part of my dress, and joined the group standing behind her.

I answered the same questions from members of this group several times over. After several more people arrived, the girl determined her whole group was present, and introduced herself as Carly.

“You all are here because you’re enrolled in the robotics and electronics program.”

Nobody, including Carly, thought I was out of place; building a life-size clay doll was close enough to robotics that it seemed a natural place for me to be. They didn’t know I was actually going to study significantly on the electronics side of that program, but even if they did, they probably would think I wanted to be able to use electronics to replace bodily functions I couldn’t do with clay. And I might do that.

Carly lifted the sign, which was apparently separate from but supported by the table somehow, and continued speaking. I also noticed it had the same color and writing on both sides.

“I’m going to lead you on a tour of the campus covering the parts everybody uses and the parts you, as students in robotics or electronics, are likely to use. Look for the sign if you lose sight of me.”

Naturally, since each group was going to see a different selection of campus sights, other groups who were also leaving at this time took off in other directions, though throughout the tour there were usually other groups visible except when we were inside the buildings for our department. She showed us around the core part of the campus, some monuments that were no doubt known to all students, and eventually to a cafeteria where the group stopped for lunch. Since Lisa didn’t eat, I wandered the place, looking for familiar faces, initially among the groups that had arrived before us. And... it was pretty terrible. I got cat-calls, offers to go on dates, and worse. If possible, it was worse than what women faced on Earth.

I eventually ran into Melissa, a girl I knew from Rockheart, and she was surprised to see Lisa, and I had to tell my whole story again.

I eventually saw Jack, who had arrived later than I did. Someone else from his group had clearly barely restrained himself from the kind of responses many of the other guys had made. It suggested to me that I was dressed up too well. I think a combination of only having lived as a guy here and a woman on Earth, and the different ways sex worked, had blinded me to some of the things I would have gotten as a normal child here. I only saw Lisa as “a nice-looking woman” while a bunch of the guys saw her as super-attractive. But maybe the plainer clothes in the rest of Lisa’s wardrobe were really all I needed.

But at that moment Carly was calling our group to leave and continue our tour, so I had to say goodbye.

The next stop was in our department, where we split into smaller groups and got packets of info about the classes we might take and the research programs. After that, we saw several buildings where people might take general classes shared with people from other tracks, including the large business school where almost everybody here was going to take some classes. Eventually, we made our way out to the stadium, which had lines on the field for some sport I’d never paid attention to before, but there was a platform on it facing the side of the field where everyone was assembling, each of our numbered groups having an assigned section.

Music was blasting out of speakers as everyone assembled, but shortly after it seemed no more groups were coming in and the final groups were getting to their seats, the music stopped and the president of the school came out onto the platform and started to speak. Her speech would have been totally unremarkable except that she called me out.

“Our incoming class includes the first student to ever attempt to attend classes entirely via clay doll. You may have heard of the River City Doll, an art project built by a student over at Rockheart last year which is a very realistic looking statue of a woman, but made of his own clay so that he can walk it around like a real person. This statue was built to precise anatomical standards, so when she walks, she looks exactly like a real woman would walk, and she has replicas of some internal organs, allowing her to speak. This student suffered serious injuries in an accident over the summer and is still hospitalized from it, but through a stroke of luck his art project was not damaged, and he will attend classes here at the school of electronics and robotics this term entirely via the statue. Some of you might meet him, or her, in your classes here.”

This mention came in the middle of a segment in which she called out a number of remarkable students in the entering class, so I was not the only one singled out, but everybody was going to know I was here.

The speech in full was about 45 minutes long, and as it concluded and we were dismissed, the music started up again. And it was pretty much chaos at that point. While each of our groups had been led in by our tour guide and directly to our section, we’d all been told the tour was over and we would just go back to wherever we were living, or whatever else we wanted to do after the speech ended, and everybody was trying to cram through the exits all at once. I had seen Jack’s section, but it was quite some distance from mine, and there was no easy way to get beyond the aisle leading to the nearest exit, so I followed the crowd out and then, unable to locate Jack in the huge mob of people going every which way, I headed for home, pulling out the map as a guide.

It took me about 45 minutes from the end of the speech to get back to the apartment, most of that just trying to get out of and away from the stadium, and Jack was another 45 minutes later due to having stopped to pick up food, having realized how inadequate what he picked up yesterday was. He went straight to making himself dinner, while I reviewed the documents I picked up today and my research plan, since I’d be meeting with my advisor in the morning.

Meeting My Advisor

In the morning, I needed to go into my department, meet my advisor for the electronics program, and get registered for some classes. My advisor had one other incoming student who arrived first, so he was talking with that student while another student showed me around the labs. At 10 I got in to see him while the other student got the tour.

He’d heard my story from the president, privately, before she mentioned it to everyone at the stadium, so I didn’t have to go over it all with him as I had done several times yesterday, but I did fill in some of the details, including how I expected my real body to be here for the second half of the year, but I might still attend some classes as Lisa even afterward, depending on circumstances.

I also gave him the story I had prepared about why I was going to focus so much on the electronics part of this program, which was the idea about using electronics to help those less coordinated with moving multiple clay tools at once to manipulate the doll more easily.

“I want to make it so that they can just move one tool to move the arm, one to move the hand, and no more than two tools to walk. Speech is probably going to be beyond the capabilities of customers like that, but the ones who can manage the arms and legs of the one I have now might be able to manage some sort of electronic voice. We’ll have to have test subjects with different degrees of ability with clay tools to test different varieties of the doll.”

“That all makes sense,” he replied. “I can help find suitable candidates who are willing to give the sort of feedback you need in exchange for your service in helping them build doll components and ultimately a complete doll.”

I pointed out, “There’s one important thing. These test subjects are going to need a lot of their clay and significant skill with building things with it. The clay requirement is non-negotiable, but the building skill requirement may be overcome in time with molds and tools.”

“Understood. When we sell these things, it’s going to be a major purchase for the buyers and they are going to have to invest significant amounts of their own time both to build and learn to use the doll.”

“Correct. And there’s one other matter I’d like to discuss with you discreetly.”

“Is this matter of a sexual nature?”

“Yes.”

He led me to a special padded room with a table and a few chairs, and securely closed the door behind us. A red light came on just above the door.

“We have a law about conversations involving such subjects. Nobody else will be able to hear us here. Our conversation will be recorded, but that recording will be private and only available if there is some accusation that something illicit occurred. When we discuss such subjects, it must always be in a room like this one.”

“OK. Good to know. I think I had a more sheltered upbringing than some of the other students here. Or maybe my libido is just a bit less. But I’ve come to understand that a lot of men can’t look at Lisa without thinking about sex. So some of my research might need to be done discreetly, and carefully to avoid violating any school rules, and I’d appreciate your help in that regard.”

“Yes, that subject area is not out of bounds here, but you are correct that some of your work may need to be handled delicately.”

I pulled out a picture of Lisa and showed it to him.

“You’ve probably seen this, how Lisa looked at the exhibit at Rockheart. She was at that point an art project, so I chose what I thought were clothes that were going to make Lisa look nice. I wore this outfit yesterday, without the sash, and a number of the male students here behaved as though I was the hottest woman in the world, in my fertile period.”

“You aren’t alone in your way of thinking, It’s just some men, and particularly men of the age of many of our students, who behave that way. I think any woman here who dressed like you did yesterday would get some of that, and what you’re wearing today is a much better choice.”

Lisa was wearing what I perceived as more businesslike attire today, and it was the nicest of the other clothes I had hurriedly bought for Lisa so she had different outfits for every day of the week. But I got back to my point of being here.

“At some point I’m going to need to figure out whether those men are viable customers. Are they willing to devote hundreds of hours of work and save their clay for most of a year in order to make something like this?”

“Part of your work here should be to figure out how to reduce the time and clay needed. The entire body probably doesn’t need to be made of clay.”

“Understood. But would they actually be able to use it? It’s my understanding that what they want is only available in the presence of a fertile female, and each female is only fertile for one period of a few days each year.”

“Since you say you had a sheltered upbringing, you probably didn’t learn about this, but there is synthetic female pheromone which such men can use, and sex toys designed to release an appropriate dose. And yes, it’s expensive.”

“That’s the thing I was missing! And clearly my dad knew, and didn’t tell me, perhaps to avoid having me turn into one of those guys.”

“That is common today. When we market this we’ll have to work within laws that restrict how we can advertise anything having to do with men’s use of female pheromones. So only men who already already shop for pheromones will hear about it.”

“But that’s OK, because they’re the only ones who could use it in that way, right? And we can still do other advertising that doesn’t mention sexual function, right?”

“Correct on both accounts.”

“So the question on the sex version will be whether these men find the doll appealing enough to expend significant additional effort and cost compared to whatever other sex toys they are using.”

“Correct. And I’m inclined to think that some of them would. A minority, to be sure, but the ones who are willing to devote additional money and time to get the most out of it.”

“More than a dozen of your school’s competitors were convinced enough that they would that they extended me offers assuming that these men would be the primary market.”

“No doubt those were from schools with men like that in positions of power. But they were able to make the offers because they see you as a sure thing. Even if few of those men have the money and are willing to invest the time to make one, or even if there are none at all and you can only sell to the people who would use them for nonsexual purposes, you would not have to sell many to pay off the school. The only way you can fail is if you grossly overestimate the market, and make parts for millions of the things when only hundreds are able to be sold. So my advice is to only prepare to sell hundreds. Make the first run large enough to pay the school’s bill if you sell out. Once those sell, you’ll have actual demand figures to help you tell whether the next run should be hundreds, or thousands, or even more.”

“Thanks.”

We left the special room and continued our discussion. He described the business account I would have. Basically, the school was going to set up a business for me later today. The account would start in the red by the school’s fee. Any materials I needed to buy beyond what the school typically kept in stock or any external services I needed to purchase would be billed to the account as well. Money from sales would go to pay this debt back. When it was all paid off, and I had enough funds to continue operating, they would sever the agreement that had the school managing the business’s finances and turn it all over to me. If it looked like I wasn’t going to succeed, the agreement would be suspended, meaning that I could no longer buy supplies through the school without first reactivating it. This could mean I quit business, and never needed to pay back the rest of the debt. If I still had inventory available to sell, the proceeds would go against that debt, and if I made more product independently, I’d have to pay 30% of my profits against the debt until it was paid off. But he seemed pretty sure I was not going to get into that situation.

Finally, we talked about classes I would take.

“There are some business management classes you’ll need to take before you leave here as a successful student, with two options depending on whether you expect to manage the finances yourself or hire someone to do so. You don’t have to take them right away, and you can sign up for pretty much any other classes you want. Those other classes should be to aid in your research on the project, though we will give you wide latitude in determining that for yourself. Of course, I’m your advisor and I can offer anything from hints to a full program of classes depending on how much advice you want. There are no prerequisites, because students come here from a variety of backgrounds and often with real-life experiences that can substitute for the learning from other classes, but what might have been prerequisites at your last school are written as recommendations here. There are grades. If you fail a class, we may ask you to take the recommended courses before trying it again.”

“That’s good to know. Thanks. I already have some ideas about courses I might take this term but I’ll ask you if I have any questions.”

After this, he directed me to a business office where they set up the business account for me. I had the rest of the day to go pick up books and supplies and explore where there were stores for clothes and food (which I’d eventually need when my real body was here) and other things.

Jack’s Mix-Up

I was alone, reading about the courses I had just enrolled in, for at least an hour when Jack arrived back at the apartment. I asked him how his day went, just trying to be friendly, and he told me his horror story.

“It took until just now to get things straightened out.”

“What happened?”

“There was another entering student named Jackie, same last name, and they got her records all mixed up with mine. She was having the same nightmare, and eventually we found each other, and we stood together in my department’s office and afterward in hers and had them correct every wrong piece of data.”

“Oh, no!”

“My department was actually expecting a girl to show up.”

I laughed. “Some of the people I dealt with were expecting a man to show up, because I am one and they didn’t hear about my accident. But the story about my art project was covered widely enough in the news that once I pointed out that’s who I am, there was no problem.”

“Sure. The university president called you out in her speech to all the incoming students. She probably made sure everything was right for you!”

“Maybe so. Fame isn’t always a good thing, but it sometimes helps.”

Jack continued, “My department had my name, her sex and picture, my ID number and educational history, and her address and departmental mailbox. Her department had the other pieces. Someone recognized which department that mailbox was for, and called over there and found my records. Then we were able to start getting things untangled, but that wasn’t until after lunch.”

“Oh, my. Is everything correct now?”

“In the department records, yes. But we think the university records are still messed up, and we couldn’t get properly registered for classes as a result. When our departments tried to register us, all the classes went on both of our records, so we each have a double load right now. But we have an appointment with the head registrar, tomorrow morning at 9 to make sure all our records at the university level are correct.”

“Good luck.”

“So how was your day?”

“I didn’t get mixed up with any other students, and you’re right about the president talking with at least some people; my advisor had most of my story, though I added some extra details on my motivations that helped him understand why I am here studying electronics rather than robotics or art. I was done before noon and I went out and got some more clothes, since I arrived with a pretty small wardrobe.”

“Oh. Wanna show me?”

“Sure, why not?”

I put on each new item as part of an outfit, modeling 5 new outfits for Jack, and staying in the last one as he prepared his dinner. I sat with him at the table when he ate, even though of course Lisa did not eat anything.

“I see what you are doing. Less sexy, more businesswoman. You probably got hit on too many times yesterday in that dress.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I bought that dress to make Lisa look nice when I turned her in as an art project. Mom later helped me buy some plainer clothes for her at the start of the summer. I thought I should make a good first impression on my classmates, but it was too good an impression for some of those guys. So today, to make a good impression on my advisor but not quite so much, I wore what you saw me wearing this morning. And I thought it worked well. The problem was that my other clothes are too plain. I hadn’t really planned the rest of my wardrobe for Lisa and just bought casual around-the-house stuff because I didn’t plan to be living full time as Lisa and going to classes as her. So today I bought more like what I wore this morning, a bit nicer but less sexy. I did such a good job of giving Lisa a good body that I have to practically hide it behind the clothes to make her not look excessively sexy.”

“Just from what I have seen of Lisa, I think that’s a good analysis.”

The classes didn’t start until the second day after that, and Jack told me his story the next evening.

“We got everything sorted out. The ultimate problem was they had somehow given Jackie and me the same ID number, leading to all our other records getting mixed up. They solved this by giving us both new ID numbers, and then together we went through and assigned every item attached to the old ID number to her account or mine, including the classes. The old ID number is now flagged to send errors if anybody tries to record anything against it, so if there are any other systems not updated, they’ll be caught and can be updated.”

I got started in my classes with no problem, and the more businesslike clothing seemed to do the trick, so I bought more the next weekend. I also made Lisa a sign saying “in another body” on a sheet of paper. When I left her focus, I had her hold it in her hands. Since she went all statue-like, she would keep hold of it. It was still too much for me to move Lisa and the small doll at the same time, and I definitely couldn’t use both sets of vision.

Linda took my small doll out to inspect the progress of work at the house while they were not there working on it, and just their foreman was there to make sure Linda and I didn’t fall in a hole or something. They had rebuilt the outside wall, and were starting to paint it. Inside the house, everything in those two rooms including the carpet had been removed, and the destroyed wall between the rooms had been framed up. But it was progress.

The next week, it was back to class normally, and pretty uneventful. I was being treated like a normal person in this choice of clothes.

My Prosthetics

I’d been in classes for several weeks when it was time to get my casts off. Over two days, they removed all the casts, took several X-rays, and determined all my bones had healed properly. The same day that finished, they brought in a doctor trained in molding your clay onto prosthetics. Based on my measurements now and estimated size before the accident, they had already ordered these prosthetics and now they were all here, initially mounted at hips and shoulder onto a metal frame rather than my body.

The doctor molded clay around each of the joints to serve as the muscles to move the pieces. I still had parts of both upper thighs and my arm by my shoulder attached and movable, so they were going to attach the prosthetics to those pieces. I’d use my body’s own muscles to move the limbs at those joints, and the clay to bend at the elbows, knees, and so forth.

The doctor worked inside a plastic cover with active air filtration to try to make a space even cleaner than my hospital room to protect the integrity of the clay as he worked. It took a week for him to apply the clay to all three limbs, and after he completed each one, he activated it with my spit so I could test moving the limb and all its parts. One knee did not seem to work right, so he had to take all the clay off and start over with fresh clay. When each one was proven to work, he covered it with the flexible sealant and I tried again to confirm the movement.

Three days after that was my surgery day. The idea was to bond the ends of the prosthetics onto the broken ends of my bones. The doctors told me they would normally put me under complete anesthesia for the level of operation they were doing, but because I could go totally into Lisa, they said if I wanted to do that, they would apply only local anesthesia on each part of my body as they went. It was going to take 7 hours, which was longer than I’d normally expect to be able to stay away from my body, but I knew it was being cared for, and it meant I wouldn’t have to miss classes for a day. They came in when Lisa was watching Jack eat breakfast to wheel me and my limbs into the operating room and get the equipment set up, and Lisa was in my first class when everything and everybody was set up. I told them, “OK, out for 7 hours,” and, confirming the time via Lisa, I made a note when to return. When I did, I found them still doing something on one leg and my body in a lot of pain, so I got out quickly and gave them another half hour. By then they’d finished whatever it was and were cleaning up. There was a bearable level of pain.

“All done?” I said this time, and the clay-molding doctor came over to speak with me.

“Yes. There was some difficulty on your right leg, where the flesh had grown back over the bone more fully than it normally does in these cases and we had to cut more than expected in order to attach the prosthetic. If you returned sharp at the 7-hour mark you would have seen us still operating.”

“I did. There was pain and I took off.”

“Well done! It should all be working now, and I don’t want you to get up, but I’d like you to move each limb, the hands and feet, and the fingers and toes. Let’s start with your arm.”

We went through each motion I would expect to be able to do with the new parts, and everything moved like it should. The doctor was impressed with how easily I was able to figure out how to make all the motions, but I was probably the best patient on this world for being able to do that due to my experience. They got me detached from the things I was not going to stay attached to, and wheeled me back to my recovery room (which was simply the room I had been in for the past quarter-year). The frame my limbs were no longer attached to had been removed.

The next morning, the clay doctor introduced me to the physical therapist. She explained she was going to be coming in daily to get me used to operating the limbs. At first, it was more of what I had done in the operating room, moving the limbs and their parts separately. The second day, some other people came in and took a bunch of detailed measurements to make the covers that would go over my prosthetics. The fourth day, she had me grabbing hold of objects with my hand and moving them about. The sixth day, she had a helper and they got me out of bed and standing on my new limbs. With them holding me to make sure I wouldn’t fall, they had me take my first steps with the new limbs. This was a lot harder than simply moving them about, and they did have to grab me to keep me from falling once, but it wasn’t terribly different from the experience I had with Lisa, with my then-intact real body there to help me with the same steps with her.

A couple days later they fitted me with the covers for each limb, and I started repeating all the exercises with the covers on. Sometimes they had me do them with the covers off as well, since I would take them off sometimes. I made good progress. Two weeks later, I was walking and using my arm without difficulty. By the end of the class term, I could remove and reapply the covers on my own, and I was running and dancing with the covers on. They moved me to a different room at this point, one without the machines and only with a display that connected wirelessly to a monitor strapped to me that checked my heart and breathing. I could use a bathroom and eat the meals they brought to me all without assistance. I was going on daily walks in this wing and a garden outside (with a coat they had provided me, since it was winter now).

Eventually they got me driving my parents’ car (which was now my car, of course). I had driven it before the accident. There was a licensing process similar to what I was familiar with on Earth, but I had to re-test with the new limbs. Linda helped me get that done, too.

This was still during the class break, so I had Lisa take that bus trip back here, this time with just a few changes of clothes, to help me get going. On the day after she arrived, they discharged me from the hospital. The house had been finished a week before, and Linda drove me over there to make arrangements with the real estate agent who was selling it for me. It sold quickly, and everything including the money transfer was done by the second week of classes the next term.

Meanwhile, Linda drove both my bodies back to the hospital, where my car and all the belongings I still had here were located. And then I hit the road!

Attending School in Person

I had a few days after I got there before classes started, and I used them to get out, me and Lisa together, and go clothes shopping for me. The prosthetics were designed to match the size of what I’d lost, so my sizes were the same as before, but I wanted to try some things on. I picked up enough clothes to make 2 weeks’ worth on this trip. Also food shopping, since I needed food, unlike Lisa.

Jack had spent the break with his family, and got back the day after I did, so we finally got to meet in person. He was worried that with both me and Lisa there, the apartment would be too crowded, but I showed him my setup.

“When I sleep, Lisa’s just going to stand there where she is now. We’ll have to share the bathroom, but Lisa only uses it once a week to shower and that will usually happen when you’re not here. Lisa doesn’t eat or drink and you won’t even see her much except when she is doing chores, or the first couple weeks when I’m taking her with me to classes. I don’t think I’m really going to have a problem with the prosthetics, but it’s just in case, and also to help people associate me with Lisa.”

Jack and Jackie had started dating, after their weird encounter upon entering the school had resulted in them learning way more of each others’ personal information than two students normally would. Jackie had already met Lisa during one of their dates. We set up a chance for her to meet me, and after that I let them be on their own.

I didn’t actually have any trouble with the prosthetics, and once I felt like I had introduced myself to everyone I was likely to run into who had met Lisa, I stopped bringing her with me, except when I started experimenting with electrically controlled limbs for the idea of making a version of Lisa that was easier for people to manipulate. I was using Lisa as the actual size model as well as to help hold things I was assembling.

But this got me wondering, and the next time I had a chance to speak to my advisor, I asked, “The prosthetics are really good, easy to control, and require only a moderate amount of clay. Why hasn’t somebody already made a full body kit using them for people to make their own Lisa?”

He took some time to research it, and came back with this answer: “The prosthetics are easy to control, but still have a learning curve. That learning curve is easier to handle when it’s your only way to get around and you’re doing it for everything every day. It’s more difficult when you still have your own body and you’re trying to do something extra that’s not required to live. Also, the prosthetics have only been made available to medical services, and they are custom made for every patient, making them too expensive for ordinary people. People who lose limbs have them covered by medical services, but if you had to pay the actual cost for your three limbs, it would be more than the cost of a typical house around here.”

“The last part is not a good reason; they wouldn’t have to be custom-made if we were selling people personal assistant robots. They could be mass-produced in one or a few sizes.”

“I agree. The first part is why nobody’s done it. It’s too hard for the common person to use, and that prevents mass-production from bringing the price down. What you’re doing with the electronics is going to close the gap to make it possible.”

Making Robots

The electronics needed turned out to not be very complicated. Basically, pulling a lever using your clay was going to need to activate small motors to make specific movements in several parts at once. It wasn’t anywhere near the level of what I needed to do for the ether communicator. With respect to that goal, it was only good practice for the actual assembly of the electronic components available here. The mechanical bits were actually much more of a challenge.

Going from the model of the prosthetics, I designed a system where there would be metal “bones” but with joints controlled by the electronics with small amounts of clay. There would then be plastic covers put over these, and optionally for a lifelike finished product the users could mold a thin layer of their clay over them to make something that looked nearly identical to our skin. Less dedicated users could just use the plastic covers without additional clay. Because the plastic covers weighed a lot less than a real body, I’d mount metal weights in them to make up the difference; if the users were going to cover the plastic with clay, they’d remove some of these weights.

Each time I made a new leg assembly, it took a week’s effort, the part of a week I wasn’t busy with other classes and could work on this, to build the metal parts that made up the assembly and sometimes new plastic covers to put over them. I’d have plenty of new clay in that time to make the control mechanism with. But by the end of the term I had a pair of legs and a pelvis to attach them to that I could walk around easily enough. I had intentionally not sealed my clay on these to make it possible to remove; the plastic covers kept the clay clean. After some careful cleaning, they were ready to be offered to a test subject. In fact, I did this three times over for different testers. Given advance preparation of a suitable amount of clay, each of them were able within one day to get clay applied and learn to walk with them well enough to walk across campus with the legs. Once the walking was established, it wasn’t too much harder for me to add in running, jumping, climbing, and sitting. By the end of the summer break, we had decided this part was good.

Arms were more difficult. They did a much greater variety of tasks, and it was hard to combine the motions in ways that would be generally useful. Grasping as a combined motion with each hand was one obvious choice, but even that has variations. Ultimately I ended up with a whole-hand grasp for holding something like a ball, a three-finger grasp for small items, a one-handed throw, a pushing/pulling motion with the arm which could be executed with the arm and hand in different positions to accomplish different tasks, and a climbing motion which could be executed alternately with grasping motions on both arms and climbing moves in the legs; this would be a challenge for some even with the help. It took all of my second year to sort this out.

Third year I worked on the head. The class of users I was targeting wouldn’t have the skill to speak in the normal way, so the idea was to put a speaker inside the head and give you a way to make a phone call into your robot to speak for it. Unlike the other parts, the head was always expected to be covered in clay to give users a way to receive sight and sound back from the robot. By the end of first term third year, I was able to put a whole robot together and we started getting our first test subjects for whole bodies. At this point I built parts for several full robots to allow longer tests.

In the middle of this effort during third year, I finally heard from another ethertraveler. Or a group of them. Apparently there weren’t any other ethertravelers at this school, nor at Rockheart, but a group of them had found each other, and they had seen photos from the exhibit at Rockheart but it had taken them this long to figure out where I went. They had more skill in the area of finding Earth, and hoped I could provide electronics know-how when I got done here. I told them the electronics I have been working with are rudimentary compared to what an ether communicator would need, but I’d try.

The full-robot tests proved somewhat successful, with the testers saying you needed to be dedicated to use them, and only half the testers saying they would continue using them, but half was fine. That was a market.

So next was the discreet searching for testers who would use them as sex dolls. I made more whole robots for these testers, under the expectation that I wouldn’t want to take them back if they actually managed to use them as sex toys. And I had to ask a tough question, another one that we used the recording booth for: Could I expense female pheromones for research purposes? This basically meant I would be buying them against my business account, to be repaid in the future when I was selling the robots. I felt like, in order to design this aspect of the robot correctly, I needed to have first-hand experience with what my customers would be doing. And my advisor agreed with me that, for this aspect of the research, yes I could, and yes I should.

So I, er, learned some effective techniques, in several senses, but most usefully, in how to make a device which provided pleasure. It didn’t seem that the electronics were at all useful here; the movements of the doll that worked based were simply a sliding motion that worked best by moving the entire doll, and applying gentle pressure all around inside the chamber, both of which were among the very basic motions that anybody with enough control of the clay to use it at all would be able to do. So while I could do this, the electronics I was studying were not especially useful for it.

The survey results were also rather negative. Out of 100 males who owned and at least a few times a year used a sex toy with female pheromones to masturbate, only 13 felt they were interested enough in the idea to consider even testing a clay doll for sex, when we were giving them the parts and guidance on building it for free. We surveyed another 300 such males because 13 positive results didn’t seem statistically solid enough to trust the results, and the rate was about the same in these. Less than half of these positives said they’d consider it at likely price points.

We picked five of those with responses making them seem like the best testers, and near the start of my fourth year, we delivered them the parts, the guides for assembly and sculpting of the clay, and basically everything we could offer to help them make this thing, including all the electronics for movements. By term break, we had all the responses. Three of them thought the thing was completely overkill. These three gave similar suggestions for a doll made with no clay outside of the chamber itself, and which was simply posable into different positions. It would be a lot cheaper from not needing all the electronics and a lot less work to assemble, and it would work just as well for the way they used it. One appreciated the ability to move the doll with clay tool powers, but found it tedious sometimes, and also maybe better as the simpler version. And the fifth one was actually using the whole robot, going out on fake dates with her, and so forth; this one had followed the optional instructions to coat the entire exterior of the body in clay to make a more realistic looking person, and was clearly in the target audience for the regular robot as well.

So I decided I could make two versions, a cheaper version for the other men, and a sex add-on for the main doll for those who would actually use it for other things.

We surveyed some females as well, but there was no interest. They had dildos, either made entirely from their own clay or by coating a plastic form with clay. They only needed them once a year. They didn’t need moving parts. The only responses that were remotely positive were among our main audience for those who would use the robot for other purposes.

The only bit left was effectively the final exam here. Bring a product to market, and generate sales to at least begin to profit (that is, start paying the school back). It was easier to bring the simpler doll to market where the customers would only line the chamber with their clay, and use the learning experience from doing that to figure out how to market the more elaborate product. And the simple doll was incredibly successful, and there was a massive waiting list for it, so I ramped up production quickly, and actually paid the school off with only that product in a year. Those schools that just wanted me to make sex dolls were right after all, only I had to make a different product from what I had been thinking about. And that kind of learning was what I was supposed to get out of the program. So I quickly took the courses for the finance certificate so I could finish up.

Jack finished what he was doing here, and it was a good time for me to move on as well. I moved to where the other ethertravelers had gathered. I hired a finance manager and set up an agreement where we could order runs of the simple doll at a factory. The manager monitored demand for the simple doll and inventory so we didn’t overproduce it. Meanwhile, I worked on building and selling the more elaborate product. At first I only made 100 of those, with a cost within the profits already made from the simple doll, and they sold slowly, but they were definitely selling. Even though I sold a lot fewer of them, by the time I sold them all, I was making almost as much money from the more expensive product as I made from the cheaper one.

Pretty soon, I was done with that. I had a stream of income to support me, and let the manager run things. I was now free to work on the ether communicator, and this report. That took years, during which time I also settled down with one of the females among the ethertraveler group to start a family. In the end, I developed a working device and we called home.