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.
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!
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.”
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.