The Endless Dance Card : 1 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

I stood staring at my body as I lay there, unconscious in my sleep pod. I've been doing this a lot lately, but I can't stop myself. It's not that I admire myself, it's just that it's so freaking weird to be able to act like I’m awake: to walk around, talk with the rest of the crew, and carry out my ship duties, all the while knowing that I'm just a kind of hologram, and that the real me lies in stasis in a sleep pod.

It took me about a year to arrive at feeling this sense of dissociation, of unreality. Well, subjectively, it seems like a year, but objectively, by the calendar, it's been twenty years.

If my math seems puzzling, you have to remember that each Kingdom ship has twenty full crews. In the olden days, each crew would take turns being awake and working while the other crews slept. This meant that each person would spend three months out of every five years awake.

My ship -- the ship I’m on -- is a third generation Kingdom ship, and a third-generation ship doesn't need the crew to be physically awake any more. Each crew in turn would be connected to the virtualizer so we could function as immaterial avatars. We see the real, physical ship. We can "touch" it and "feel" it. We do everything the old crews did, but we're only mentally awake. Physically, we're still inert. We're all still in stasis.

As you'll see, an avatar can't do everything that a physical person can do, but for the most part it works just fine, at least from the ship’s point of view. The maintenance, the monitoring, all the things that humans need to do, we can do. For the most part. And if there’s something that can’t be done through the virtualizer interface, somebody gets woken up so they can physically complete the task.

However, as great as that is for the ship, and as great as it is for the mission, and as great as it is for my personal longevity, I have to say that being a ghost has begun to seriously bother me. It’s weird. It’s unnatural. Everything I “feel,” I don’t really feel. It’s all manufactured for me by the ship, and pumped into my sleeping brain. It’s not MY feelings and sensations. They’re all artificial, imported, and even though I know that my nervous system works the same way, and even though I know that what I see and do is objectively real, subjectively it’s all fake and false on a very fundamental level. The only thing that’s really real for me is my body, and that’s why I slip away and look at it whenever I have a chance.

It’s a very zen, empty-mind experience when I stand there. I do nothing but look at myself, my real self, there in the box. I never touch my sleep pod, because I know that my tactile sense isn’t real. (Please don’t point out that my visual sense isn’t real, either. That’s one step too far.) I always feel better after spending time with myself -- at least, I feel better for a while.

Today, as I stood there, my mind empty, gazing at myself, an alert window popped up in my field of vision, in the upper right corner. It read: REPORT TO LT DONALDSON'S OFFICE. It was followed by a nav code with his office's location. I couldn't imagine what he'd want with me, but being called to any office makes me a little anxious anyway.

It took a full fifteen minutes to trudge up there. I took the stairs to make the trip longer. The message didn't convey any sense of urgency, so I didn’t hurry. If there was one thing we had a lot of on the Kingdom ship, it was time.

Lieutenant Donaldson was sitting behind his desk. He gestured me toward a chair. I sat, feeling the oddity once again: the entire act of “sitting” was a huge technological fiction. It was a mass of programming and sensor readings that made us able to pretend that we were both occupying chairs in an office, while in objective reality we were both deeply asleep.

Donaldson gave a brief friendly smile and said, “First of all, Fergus, you’re not in any trouble whatsoever. I just called you here to give you a heads-up about something. We're going to revoke access to the sleeper pod bays. For everybody. Starting at zero-one-hundred tomorrow, nobody’s going to be allowed near the pods. This is for both avatar and physical modes. There’s going to be a general announcement later today."

Before I could ask why? Lt Donaldson went on. "There are two reasons for the change: one is for reasons of privacy--"

"Privacy?" I echoed, not understanding.

"Yes, one of the women caught a group of men--" he paused, as if searching for a phrase. "Well, let's say they were leering at her sleeping body. You can use your imagination to fill in what I really mean; I’m not going into details. It’s enough to say that those men are being disciplined and that we don't want that or anything like that happening again." For obvious reasons, we’re all naked in the sleep pods, and the cover-door is transparent.

"But I haven't--" I began to protest. Donaldson cut me off with a hand gesture.

"I know," he said. "The first reason has nothing to do with you whatsoever. The second reason is the one that concerns you. We found that a number of people have been visiting their own sleep pods. After a great deal of discussion and study, the psychs have decided that it isn't a healthy thing to do. In fact, they've labeled it morbid behavior."

I opened my mouth to speak, but didn't know what to say. Donaldson glanced at his tablet for a moment, then went on.

"They say that this activity is very similar to visiting a graveyard, and they're believe that it leads to dissociation and eventually to depression. They're afraid it could even lead to violent activity."

"But I never!" I exclaimed. "I-- I just--"

"Look," Donaldson said in a gentle tone, "if they thought there was a problem with YOU specifically, it wouldn’t be me who was talking to you: it would be one of the psychs. So this is not a warning or anything negative. It’s just a casual heads-up, so you’re not taken by surprise. And, FYI, you’re not the only person I’m speaking to about this today. All of you have one thing in common: You spent a lot of time in front of your own sleep pod.” He looked at his tablet. “Did you realize that you've stood in front of that thing for an hour at a time? An entire hour? Just staring, not moving?"

I didn't know what to say.

"But as I said, this isn't about you, and I really mean that. We actually have a number of cases of acute depression that seem to have started with frequent -- and you might even say, obsessive -- sleep-pod visits. The psychs aren’t saying anything about cause and effect, but the facts are what they are. It’s serious enough that the psychs are actually discussing whether we should go back to the old-fashioned way, and have each crew physically wake up for its duty cycle. Honestly, I don't think that will happen, but it shows how seriously they're taking this."

We chatted a bit longer, but that’s essentially what was said. Then, so we didn’t end on a weird note, Donaldson talked about some recent ship events, asked whether I knew some of the (harmless) ship gossip, and then I was dismissed.

As soon as I left Donaldson's office, I got another alert: REPORT TO MED BAY. This was a day for alerts! It was followed by the nav code for a bay on the other side of the ship. I notified my duty officer and started walking. I hoped this wasn't related to my sleep-pod visits.

When I arrived, I was surprised to find Dr Harcourt in person. I mean, she wasn't an avatar, she was her true, physical self. She had me take a seat. "I’m afraid I have some potentially bad news for you, if it’s true -- which I strongly doubt. The sensors in your sleep pod have detected a very rare disease in its very early stages. Unfortunately, because this illness is so very rare, we're going to need to wake you up to run some tests. Frankly, I’m not convinced that you have this disease at all, so first of all, we need to verify the diagnosis. Then, if you do have it, I’m confident that you'll heal successfully, but I'm going to have to manually administer the treatments, and you'll need to physically come here each day for an entire month."

"What is it?" I asked. "Is it something that I would have heard of?"

"Yes, maybe," she replied. "If you know any history, you might have heard of it. The diagnostic computer says that you have what they used to call pancreatic cancer. But again, in its very, very early stages."

"Cancer?" I echoed. "Wasn't that eradicated in the 19th century? Like the plague?"

"No," she replied with a slight smile. "The plague was way back in the 14th century. Cancer was eliminated in the early 21st century, although sporadic cases do appear, in the same way that measles is sometimes seen."

"Measles?" I repeated. "What on earth is that?"

"It doesn't matter," she replied. "It’s another ancient disease. You can read about it if you're really interested. What matters now is that we’re going to wake you up and get you in here right now. I'm going to run the tests immediately, and if they’re positive, we’ll start the treatments right after. Okay? I’m going to kick off your wake-up protocol now, so don't be surprised when everything fades to black. I'll meet you at your sleep pod in a half hour."

She punched a code into her pad to disconnect me from the virtualizer. Just like the doctor said, the room and everything around me quickly faded to black.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up. Really waking up, stretching my physical arms and legs, wiping the gel from my face. Dr Harcourt handed me a face towel, and as she did, I caught her glancing at my penis. I pretended to not notice.

She told me, “When I was looking at you, before I woke you up, do you know what I was thinking? IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK GLASS.” She chuckled to herself. I gave a polite chuckle, even though I didn’t get the joke.

I stepped into the nearest shower and rinsed the gel from every part of me. Dr Harcourt's face kept a neutral expression, but she never looked away. Then, I saw her drop the gel-covered face towel into a recycle chute, and I realized that she hadn’t brought me any clothes to wear, except for a pair of disposable slippers. At that thought, I got a large and immediate erection that bobbed and swayed in front of me as I cleaned myself. I’m no prude, but I did feel a little -- well, not embarrassed exactly, but very exposed. I guess the word is vulnerable, but it wasn’t as though I was in any danger from the doctor. Honestly, she was young and very attractive. I liked her. After the jets of drying air, I opened the shower door, and the doctor bent down to set the slippers near my feet. Seeing her head, especially her brown ponytail, so close to my cock, made me draw a quick deep breath. I slipped my feet into the slippers and the doctor gestured for me to walk down the hall ahead of her.

She followed two steps behind me, and I knew she was studying my butt. I had never been in this situation before, of -- for one thing -- being naked in front of a clothed woman, and for another, to have a woman so unabashedly looking me over. When we came to an intersection, she went so far as to put her hand on my ass to indicate that we were turning left.

When we finally arrived in the med bay, she closed the door and activated the privacy protocol. Then she smiled at me and gestured toward my cock with her chin. “First let’s take care of that swelling, shall we?” and she quickly undressed.

The sex was explosive. I could see that we both badly needed the release. I’m sure the whole business of her watching me in the shower and walking down the hall naked added to my pent-up need. While I was still panting from the first orgasm, she leaned back and spread her legs in a high V, and boom! I was ready to go again. After three incredible, unexpected orgasms, Dr Harcourt cleaned up and dressed herself, and gestured to a sink where I washed myself off.

Then I sat on a table and the doctor ran an intense and very complete battery of tests. She explained that for various reasons, none of them could be run inside a sleep pod. As she worked, she often glanced at my penis, which was stimulating and a little disconcerting at the same time. I’d never been treated like a sex object before, and realized that women are often put in this same position. I don’t mean being naked, exactly. I mean this feeling of having less power and control.

Once Dr Harcourt completed the tests, she sat at her desk and worked at her computer. She had me sit in a chair next to the desk. I was still stark naked, and at one point I crossed my hands over my crotch. Without turning her head, she said, “Keep your hands on your thighs,” and I moved them. Later, without thinking, I crossed my legs. She reached over and pulled on my upper knee. “Keep both feet flat on the floor,” she instructed, “and keep this distance between your knees.” She placed her clenched fist horizontally between my knees to show what she meant. Then she returned to her typing, as though her instructions were perfectly natural and normal. After what seemed like a very long time, she stopped, smiled, and looked at me.

“You’re not cold, are you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good. Just a few more minutes, and I’ll have the results.” She stood up and rubbed her hands. “Hey, you know, before I called you this morning I did a lot of reading on cancer and other aspects of early 21st-century medicine, and I found a surprising number of references to one particular test that I’d like to try. Are you up for it?”

I shrugged, a little helplessly. Honestly, I was having a hard time resisting anything she told me to do.

She had me climb back on the table, but this time she had me lie on my side with my knees bent. Then she put on a thin glove and picked up a bottle of lubricant.

“Um, what kind of test is this?” I asked, a little nervously.

“Don’t worry!” she said with a laugh. “This was a very common test, way back when. It was often mentioned in comedy routines of that era, so I’m sure that it doesn’t hurt at all. In fact, from what I read, some men quite enjoyed it.”

“What about the women?” I asked, and my question made her laugh. “Oh, they never did this test on women. There wouldn’t be any point.” I heard the bottle of lubricant gurgle behind me, and she spread some of the cold gel around my anus. “Okay, here we go!” she said, “Take a deep breath and slowly let it out.” When I began to exhale, she thrust her finger deep inside my butt.

“Holy Smoking Jesus!” I shouted in surprise, though I don’t know why. It’s not something I ever say. But then again, no doctor had ever shoved their finger up my ass. She was working her finger in and out of me as though she was searching for something, and I found myself with a big, hard erection once again.

When she finally pulled her finger out, I asked, “What the hell was that?” She actually laughed. “It’s a prostate exam,” she said. “The prostate is a little gland that surrounds your urethra, and it’s accessible through your anus. Women don’t have one, which is why this exam was only done on men.”

“Hmmph,” I said. “So how is my prostate?”

“It’s fine,” she replied. “But I knew that already from your sleep pod readings.”

“Then why did you do that?”

She smiled and pulled the glove off with a snap! “After some of the videos I’ve seen, I thought it might be fun to try.”

“Fun for whom?”

“For both of us,” she replied, and gave me two pats on the butt. Then she gave my butt a squeeze and said, “You’re a really good patient, you know that?”

Just then her terminal gave a soft ding! “Results are back,” she announced in a sing-song voice, and went over to look at them. I got up slowly and found some soft paper so I could wipe my butt clean. “Hmm,” she said after a few moments. “Just as I thought: you’re fine. You don’t have cancer at all. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re a perfect physical specimen, in perfect health. Congratulations!”

After all my anxiety about the illness, after the unexpected sex, and after experiencing Dr Harcourt’s -- well, her dominance -- it was kind of anticlimactic to hear that I didn’t have cancer. I knew it was great news, but didn’t feel relieved; I felt like I’d been hit by a train several times in the space of a couple of hours. And, in spite of the fact that Dr Harcourt and I had had sex together several times already, she was still an almost complete stranger to me.

“So what happens next?” I asked. “Do I just go back to sleep?”

“Oh, no! Certainly not!” she exclaimed, resting her hand on my naked thigh. “We need to figure out what’s wrong with your sleep pod. That’s one of your skills, isn’t it?”

“Um, yeah,” I admitted. “Among other things, yeah, I’m a sleep-pod tech. I can do that.”

“Excellent!” she said with a big smile. “Now, let’s settle one thing, so we can keep things simple: since we’re both going to be awake for a while, there’s no reason for either of us to sleep alone.”

“No, yes -- I mean yes, that would be great. I’d like that.”

“My quarters are right upstairs,” she told me. “Do you feel like having something to eat?”

Right on cue, my stomach gave a loud rumbling noise. She laughed and nodded. “Okay, then, follow me.”

She walked to a door in the side wall, which opened to her touch. I followed her up a narrow, winding staircase, and watched her lovely ass moving right in front of my face. When we were halfway up, the door below hissed shut, and I realized with a slight alarm, that the door wouldn’t open for me, unless… “Hey, doctor -- can you program the door to open for me, too?” She stopped on the stairs and looked down at me. “No, of course not. That door is for medical personnel only. If you need it opened, you can ask, and I may open it for you.” Then she turned and continued to climb.

Her quarters consisted of two rooms that were pretty large by ship standards, and her bed, to my surprise, was queen-sized. As I looked around, I realized once again that she was fully dressed while I was still completely naked. Add to that, we were going to be sleeping together, but I was still calling her “doctor.” So I asked, “What is your first name?”

“My first name?” she repeated, as if surprised by the question. “You don’t need to know that. You will call me ‘Doctor’ or ‘Dr Harcourt’.” Then, as if the topic was settled and closed, she turned away and walked into the next room. I could tell from the beep tones that she was using her food-fab.

When she returned, I saw that she had left her pants and underwear in the other room, but she still wore her top. Smiling, she placed a pillow on a counter and bent over it, so that her naked derriere was pointing at me. “Come here,” she said, looking back at me over her shoulder. “Take me this way.” And she reached back with both hands to spread her cheeks.

I couldn’t resist. I walked over and slid inside her. After a few minutes, I heard the food-fab beeping in the next room. “Keep going,” Dr Harcourt grunted, reaching back to pat my thigh. Soon after, we both exploded with soft moans and gasps. As our orgasm subsided, she reached back and pushed my hips away from hers, then straightened up and went to fetch the food. I could hear that she was cleaning and dressing herself, and then I heard her put the food on the table. As I was cleaning myself, I heard a sound that hadn’t heard in a very long time: a wine cork popping. “Wash up and come in here,” she called to me. “Dinner’s ready.”

She had ordered the same dinner for each of us: a steak, a huge baked potato, and a pile of green beans. She poured two glasses of red wine from an actual bottle into real wine glasses. “Where did you get these?” I asked, meaning the wine and glasses.

She smiled slyly and told me not to ask too many questions.

The food was excellent, and the wine was smooth and delicious. At one point in the dinner I picked up my napkin and wiped my mouth. Then, out of habit, I spread the napkin over my lap. Without saying a word, the doctor moved my napkin so that it rested only on one thigh, so that my cock was still visible.

I want to say that I was taken aback, but that’s much stronger than what I actually felt. I mean, she had taken over, made all the decisions, made up rules, never gave me any choices -- she had even chosen my dinner without asking me! Each time she did one of these things, I felt caught short, sort of the way you feel when someone corrects your pronunciation. I didn’t seem able to protest or disobey, and I didn’t understand why. And I didn’t understand why it didn’t bother me. Still, I had another question.

“Doctor, when can I get some clothes?”

She stopped cutting her steak and looked up in surprise. “Clothes? Why do you need clothes?”

That stumped me for a moment, but then I said, “Well, you’re wearing clothes. Why shouldn’t I?”

“That’s not a very good argument,” she replied. “Our circumstances are quite different. I have to interact with patients and other doctors. You only interact with me, so you don’t need clothes. In fact, it’s better if you don’t wear any clothes at all. Do you understand?”

“Well, honestly, no, I don’t understand.”

She smiled and gently asked, “But you know that you’re not going to be getting any clothes, don’t you?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but at first no words came out. At last I nodded. Then I was able to say, “For how long?”

“As long as we’re both awake, silly,” she replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I struggled to understand what was going on. “I don’t get it. Why do I do whatever you tell me?” I asked her. “Why do I feel like I have to obey you?”

“That’s a good question,” she replied, “and we could talk about that for a long time. The simplest and shortest answer is that you and I fit together like a pair of gears.” And she linked the bent fingers of both her hands as if they were gear teeth, and she rocked them to show how two gears moved together.

Then, as if that topic was closed, she poured more wine and said, “Now we need to talk about how we’re going to fix your sleep pod.”

The Endless Dance Card : 2 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

After dinner, the doctor and I worked out our plan for fixing my sleep pod. First, we’d compare the sensor readings from my pod against other pods to see if any individual sensors were abnormally high or low. That could be a quick way of finding the problem, if the problem was simply a bad sensor.

At the same time -- and even if we did find a bad sensor -- we also needed to run through the whole path between the sensor readings and the final diagnosis to make sure that there weren’t other problems that caused or contributed to the bad diagnosis.

None of the troubleshooting was complicated; it was only tedious. Luckily we didn’t have to do it all ourselves. We scheduled a call with the on-duty medical and engineering staff for later in the day. Then I got a head start on the most obvious steps.

I accessed my sleep pod from a terminal in the medbay and kicked off a deep backup. This would record the state of virtually every element in the pod as well as the sensors’ history. The doctor gave me some clothes so I could go physically inspect my pod. I couldn’t move it to my lab yet: there were a lot of forensics to do before we changed anything. The backup was an obvious first step, but I needed the okay from the other pod techs before I ran the deep diagnostics or kicked off a reboot. The reboot would change the state of things and might destroy some useful clue.

While I was off doing the physical check, the doctor was requesting a diagram of the decision tree used by the medical diagnostic software. She also invoked the “second opinion” feature, which I’d never heard of. It was a separate synthetic intelligence that acts as a sanity check: basically, it challenges a diagnosis. As a first step, it tries to disprove the original diagnosis. Then it searches for alternative diagnoses. The doctor also kicked off queries to get more background on the illness itself.

I have to say, it was great to have something serious to do for a change. Usually all of our work is maintenance and monitoring. Finally I had a puzzle to solve.

Also, before, during, and after each step and each activity I mentioned above, the doctor and I had sex, at least once, but usually multiple times. I didn’t think I was capable of it, but somehow being with the doctor brought it out of me. I actually and honestly lost count of how many times we did it. I’d never had so much sex before, and all of it was outstanding. Soul-searing, blinding-light, screaming-hot orgasms. It was amazing. It was great. It was life-giving, and it seemed endless. Just when I’d think we were done, she’d drop her pants and we’d start all over again. At every chance -- even when there was no chance -- we’d interrupt anything to go at each other, to try yet another position. There was no thought involved. We’d just glance at each other, and that was all the stimulus, all the planning, needed.

The only time we had to actually control ourselves was during the meeting with the medical and engineering staff. Before the meeting, we checked each other carefully to make sure there were no clues to our intimate involvement or most recent efforts, and we kept our hands on the table so we didn’t touch each other beneath it.

Dr Harcourt and I were the only physically-awake people at the meeting. Everyone else attended as a hologram. It was an active, animated meeting. Everyone was happy to be involved. The medical staff were very excited by this issue, since most of their work is done for them by sensors and massive synthetic intelligence systems, so here they had a big chance to challenge and improve the automatic health systems.

The engineering staff was equally invested, even if they acted more prosaic, more nuts-and-bolts, about it: they wanted to understand all the causes, whether they were primary, secondary, contributing, additional -- however you wanted to classify them. Qurakas, the head engineer of turn, was quite pleased with the plan Dr Harcourt and I had drawn up. He added several other lines of enquiry, including some peripheral systems that I hadn’t thought of.

Then he told me that once the deep backup was complete, I should run the deep diagnostics, reboot the unit, do another deep backup and deep diagnostics, and THEN move the unit to the lab.

Also, Qurakas had beaten me to the punch on the sensor comparison: “I already ran a comparison of your sensor readings against other pods, and there is one sensor that is way off base. I’m sending you the report, Fergus. After you get the pod into the lab, I want you to pull that sensor and see what you can understand from it. Maybe it’s just broken. Maybe it only needs a tweak. Of course we have spares, but we need to know what’s up with that sensor. I’ll divide up the other work here until you have some free work cycles. For you, that sensor is the prority. Okay?”

When the meeting ended, the doctor and I fell on each other and started kissing and groping. Soon we were having sex once again, and afterward -- no surprise! -- I ended up naked while the doctor was fully clothed. She stood behind me, her head next to my right shoulder. “Don’t mind me,” she purred. “I’m just admiring your derriere,” and she ran her hand slowly over my ass. Then suddenly she stopped. “Oh! That reminds me! I’ve got a surprise for you!” She gave my butt a sharp, affectionate slap, then quickly moved toward one of her cabinets. Before she got there, a timer sounded, telling me that my second backup and diagnostics were complete.

“Sorry,” I said, “I need to move the pod.” She nodded, and tossed me a coverall and some slippers.

Once I moved the pod to my lab, I took a look at Qurakas’ report. Then I set to work to extract the offending sensor. I had to jack up the pod and get into it from underneath. Once I had the sensor in my hand, I took a good look at it. It was an unusual size and shape: it was an ovoid lump with a lot of pins in back. The pins plugged into an oval pad fixed inside the pod. What was also unusual was that the sensor was made by Herman’s Human Sensor Company -- a supplier I’d never heard of. Most of the pieces in the pod came from well-known manufacturers. I checked the pod’s part list, and it turned out that there basically only three parts-suppliers for the sleep pods. There were a dozen or so special pieces that came from somewhere else, but all from companies I’d heard of. This sensor was the only part supplied by Herman’s Human.

I located the spares and took a box of ten to my workbench. I sprayed a red mark on the bad one, pulled the related docs, and sat down to test. Two hours later, I had some interesting findings: nine of the ten spares worked as advertised. The tenth spare worked as badly as the one from my pod. The doctor called me to dinner at that point. It was a good stopping point: I already had quite a bit to think about.

We had sex again, before *and* after dinner. We couldn’t resist. Then I hurried back to my lab. I was anxious to get back to testing. I had an idea that I hoped wasn’t true, so I had to check it out. I set up 10 test rigs so I could check an entire box of spares at a time, and started banging away at it. The results confirmed my fears: one of the spares from the second box was defective in exactly the same way as the one from my pod. I set up some more test rigs, and worked into the night. I slept a few half-hours here and there as the tests ran, then I went back to the medbay for breakfast and more sex. Then back to the lab. I scheduled a meeting of the engineers for just after lunch, and kept pounding away until I’d tested all the spares. A solid 5% of them were defective, all in identically the same way. That’s 150 bad sensors, coincidentally the size of one of our twenty crews.

Qurakas kept his cool during the meeting, but he was clearly boiling mad. “We’re supposed to have 100% reliability on replacements,” he said in a tight voice. “All of them should have been tested before we left Earth orbit. This is unacceptable. Good work in uncovering this, Fergus.” He took a deep breath. “Now, we have a clear priority: we have to assume that at least 5% of the Herman’s Human sensors current in use are defective. They will have to be located and replaced. Since you’re already awake and practical in this, Fergus, it’s going to be up to you. You’ll need to stay awake until this task is complete. You know what I mean: don’t return to your sleep pod, but make sure you take all your regulated breaks; get a good sleep each night. But don’t return to your sleep pod.”

“Not a problem, sir,” I replied, and the image of Dr Harcourt’s naked body came immediately into my mind.

“Okay,” he replied. “Here’s the situation: Our current diagnostic doesn’t identify this defect, so, Fergus, I want you to put the bad sensor back in your pod. Hook it up to the test network and I’ll get a team to work up a diagnostic to spot this specific defect. That way, we’ll be able to find all the pods that need a replacement.

“In the meantime, take a break, Fergus. You’ve done some great work, but now you need to take a day or two off. Honestly, you look like shit. Eat, sleep, do something fun. Maybe you and that hot doctor can hook up, who knows?” I chuckled politely and ended the transmission. Qurakas was right: I really did need a break. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I was utterly worn out. Exhausted in a way I’ve never been before.

I went back to the medbay and updated the doctor. I quickly realized that she felt as tired as I did.

“We really overdid it on the sex,” she told me. “I know you pulled an all-nighter last night that was actual work, but the endless sex has done us both in.”

“Looks that way,” I said. “I’ve never had so much sex in such a short period of time.” Right at that moment, I had absolutely zero desire.

“Look,” she said. “I’m going to authorize you to use one of the rejuvenation beds. That’ll fix you up.”

“Uh, I don’t know about that,” I replied. “I’m not ready to turn into a teenager right now.”

She scoffed. “It won’t turn you into a teenager! That’s not what the beds do.”

“They take years off,” I protested. “I don’t have that many years to take off.”

“No, no,” she replied. “They can do that. That’s the reset function. The usual function, the default function, is more like a spa visit. It removes toxins from all your body systems. It takes the lactic acid from your muscles. It balances your brain chemistry. That’s what it does. It will make you feel better.”

I was still doubtful. “But it messes with your DNA, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t ‘mess’ with it,” she countered. “Fergus, do you know how aging works? When your body needs new cells, it copies existing cells. As you get older, your DNA starts to fray at the ends. When it’s copied, the copies aren’t as good. Consequently, the new cells don’t work at 100%. The bad-copy effect accumulates and gets worse, and pretty soon every cell in your body has crappy DNA. What the rejuvenation bed does is knit up the ends of your DNA so you don’t get corrupted copies. In any case, you’re too young to worry about any of that. Your DNA is just fine.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you going to use one of the beds, too?”

“No,” she sighed. “I’d like to, but I can’t. As a doctor, I can prescribe one for you, but I can’t do it for myself. It’s like writing myself a prescription. And I don’t feel like confessing to another doctor that I’ve fucked myself silly. I’ll just have to get over it the old-fashioned way: time and rest.”

“Has anybody else on the ship used one of the beds so far?”

“No, we haven’t been out long enough. But you must know that they’re safe. They’ve been in use on every Kingdom ship from the very beginning. Back on Earth, Dr Idlewild's been using one for over 200 years.”

So, we walked to the nearest rejuvenation bed. I climbed in, and Dr Harcourt hit the START button.

Ten hours later, I woke up, dead tired, and a mass of aches and pains. I dragged myself to the medbay. It was so bad that on the way there, I lay down on the floor for ten minutes just to ache and gather my energy. I felt incredibly bad: worse than I had before I climbed into the bed. Dr Harcourt was astonished. “How can you have aches?” she asked. “This is one of the things the bed specifically fixes.”

Convinced that I had done something wrong, the doctor led me a second bed, examined the settings, and told me to hop back on. As soon as I did, she hit the START button, exactly like before. Ten hours later, I woke up aching, exactly like before. Well, “exactly” except that this time I was aching even MORE than last time. Every muscle hurt, even my hands and feet. “I feel like I’ve fallen down a long flight of stairs,” I told her. “And then I got hit by a truck and fell down the stairs again.”

“No way!” Dr Harcourt exclaimed. “This is not right!”

“It’s the damn bed,” I muttered. “It’s defective. It’s got to be.”

“No,” she insisted. “It can’t be. We tried two different beds. They can't both be defective.” She led me back to the lab. “I’m going to take a baseline.” She had me climb into a diagnostic pod. I was so wiped out that I immediately fell deeply asleep. None of the machine’s prodding, poking, or fluid collections woke me. Once the diagnostic was complete, Dr Harcourt didn’t wake me. She wheeled me back to a THIRD rejuvenation bed, slid me onto it, and hit the START button a third time!

Ten hours later, I woke up with a raging fever. The doctor said I was burning up, but I felt so cold, my teeth were literally chattering. My entire body shook uncontrollably. There wasn’t any part of me that didn’t hurt. It was like the worst case of influenza you can imagine. Her face was full of concern. She brought me on a stretcher to a patient room in the medbay. This room had a normal bed, like on Earth. She helped me into the bed, and she gave me something warm to drink. It tasted of lemon, honey, and spices, along with some medicinal aftertastes. Once I’d downed it all, she pushed me onto my side, and slid a white thing about the size of a large bullet into my ass. I sighed. “What was that?”

“Old fashioned medicine,” she replied. “An aspirin suppository.”

“Aspirin?”

“It’s a salicylate. Ancient medicine, but effective against fevers and aches. It’s also anti-inflammatory.”

“Couldn’t I have just swallowed a pill?”

“Sure,” she confessed with a smile, “But this way was more fun, wasn’t it? You know I adore your sweet little butt.” Then she covered me with three warm blankets, kissed my cheek, and I sank into a deep, dreamless sleep. When I awoke, I was drenched with sweat. My fever had broken, and my aches were gone. I felt drained and empty, and weak as a kitten, but I knew I was well. I was finally normal again. I lay there for a few minutes in that pile of warm, wet blankets and sheets, looking up at the pale white walls and ceilings. I not only felt normal, I finally felt real again. That disconnected feeling I used to have, was gone.

As I lay there, I may have I fallen asleep and woke again; it was hard to tell. Then I felt something else: the call of nature. My bladder was full, and the bathroom was a few meters from my bed. I listened as closely as I could, but I didn’t hear anyone nearby. There was a call button attached to my bed, but I didn’t press it. I wanted to get to the bathroom under my own power. So I sat up, and my head started spinning. I expected the spinning to pass, but it didn’t. I closed my eyes, and the world began whirling faster. It was darker behind my eyelids than I had ever seen before. I clutched the bed with my left hand and held onto the bedside table with my right. I did my best to take deep, even breaths and concentrate on my breathing. After a short while, the spinning stopped. I was still light-headed, and I knew it would be prudent to call for help, but I pressed on. I tried to stand, but I saw spots in front of my eyes. I wasn’t dizzy though, so I looked past and around the floating spots and concentrated on standing up.

I took one step, but that was all I could manage. With the help of my bedside table, I sank to my hands and knees and crawled my way to the bathroom. After slow and patient efforts I arrived at the toilet. With the help of a bar attached to the wall, I managed to climb up and sit on the toilet. I sat there, wobbling uncertainly and clutching the sink. I peed like a loud and fragrant river. Then I carefully lowered myself to the floor and crawled toward my bed. I was nearly there when a woman appeared in the doorway. “Careful, there!” she called in a gentle voice. “Let me give you a hand.” She slid her arm under my arm, and with her help I was able to stand upright. I was about to get back into bed, but she stopped me. “Wait -- it’s all wet. Here… hold on…” She guided me to a chair, and on the way she deftly grabbed a dry blanket. She threw it around me, wrapping my body completely and covering my head like a hood. After settling me in the chair, she stripped the bed, throwing the used bedclothes in a corner. She wiped down the mattress with a disinfectant, and flipped it over. Then she fetched clean sheets, fresh pillows, and warm, dry blankets.

As she made my bed, I looked her over. She was a lot shorter and curvier than the doctor, and though she wasn’t fat or heavy, she somehow seemed denser than the doctor, as if she was made of more earthy, robust elements. If the doctor was light like wicker, this woman was strong, like oak. Her hair was blonde, a thick, yellow blonde.

“Okay,” she said, as she made the final tuck and smooth. She smiled and rubbed her hands. “I know your name is Fergus. Mine is Vara. I’m pretty sure that you need two things right now: some food, and a good washing up. Which do you want to do first?”

“Washing,” I said. “Can I take a bath?”

“No,” she replied. “That would lower your blood pressure, and you’re already weak. You can take a shower.”

“Can I sit on the floor?” I asked. “I don’t think I can stand.”

“There’s a seat in there,” she replied, “And I’ll help you.”

She wheeled me to a large bathroom with a big open shower. There was a ledge inside that served as a seat, and the room was pleasantly warm. She stripped off her clothes, explaining with a smile, “It will be easier if I’m naked, too. That way, I won’t have to worry about getting wet.” I was so exhausted that I just gaped at her nakedness. I didn’t have the energy to be subtle. Her body was quite fit and athletic. Her waist was trim, and her hips were narrow, almost boyish, but her breasts were high, round, and firm. She smiled as she watched me take her in. “You can look all you want,” she told me. She bent down to put a pair of non-slip shower shoes on my feet. She unwrapped me from my blanket and walked me into the shower. With a hand-held wand she sprayed soapy foam over my back, neck, and legs. She hugged me to keep me on my feet, and rubbed the back part of me with a soft cloth. Then a warm spray removed the foam, and she sat me on the bench and took off my shoes. After carefully washing my face and hair, she sprayed the foam over the rest of my body, from my neck to my toes, and began to massage me, first with the soft cloth, then with her fingers. It was wonderful to be cleaned and touched all over in that way.

As her hands moved up my legs or down my belly, her fingers inevitably brushed against my penis. She was quite casual about it. Then, after washing every other part of me, she ran her hand under my balls and stroked my groin. She grasped my cock, and at that moment I realized the depth of my tiredness. I didn’t have the energy to be aroused.

“I can give you a happy ending,” she whispered, as she cupped my balls with one hand, and pumped my cock gently with the other. “If you want it.”

“It feels really nice,” I admitted, “but I am so beat that I can’t get it up.”

“That’s okay,” she replied. “Do you want me to stop?”

I looked into her eyes. Her face was two inches from mine. We held the gaze for a moment, and then she kissed me. It was a warm and sexy kiss, but it was all I could do just to sit upright. There wasn’t any response from my cock, even as her warm tongue explored my mouth and her soapy hand pulled on my limp member. She backed off from the kiss to exclaim, “Wow, you really are exhausted, aren’t you!” She rinsed the soap from me, dried me off, and wheeled me back to bed. Then, as I lay under the warm covers, she stood next to my bed, where she dried herself and put her clothes back on.

The dinner she brought consisted of soft foods. There was some kind of green smoothie that she insisted I drink first, then mashed potatoes, mashed avocado, soft cheese, and warm soft rolls with butter. I felt so hungry, I fell to, and Vara had to remind me several times to take my time and eat slowly.

I asked her when Dr Harcourt would come. Vara replied, “She’s taken a few days off. Apparently she’s been working nonstop for several days on a project about the sleep pods and now she needs a break.” I nodded in response, suddenly feeling very tired, and soon I fell asleep again.

After three days, I was well enough to walk in the hall accompanied by Vara, and on one of my walks, the doctor appeared. She looked well rested, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t know how much I could say in front of Zara, since Zara appeared not to have known that the doctor and I had worked together on the sleep-pod issue. But the doctor’s appearance made me realize something: for my entire convalescence, I’d been utterly naked, and in fact right now I was standing naked in the hallway. For about a week, I’d either been lying in bed under covers, or so tired that I hadn’t noticed, but seeing the doctor somehow put a spotlight on the fact that, while the two women were fully clothed, I was standing there without a stitch. I looked at the doctor. My eyes automatically traced the form of her body beneath her clothes, and my penis stood to attention, stiff and pointing upward.

“Hello!” Vara said with a grin. “Someone’s feeling a LOT better!”

“Pleased to meet you,” Dr Harcourt joked. She took my erection in her hand and gently moved it up and down, as if she were shaking my hand. Vara giggled.

“I’m glad you’re up and about,” the doctor said, without any hint of a double meaning.

“And how are you, doctor?” I asked. “I heard that you had to take some time off.”

“I’m fine,” she replied in a dismissive tone, looking at her tablet. “I’m always fine.” She continued to fiddle with her tablet as Vara and I stood there. She appeared to be mulling over something. At last she looked up and said, “Do you think you can walk another fifty meters? I’d like you to hop into the diagnostic pod again. You had some unusual readings last time, and I’d like to see how they are now. I’m hoping they’ve gone back to normal.”

I nodded, and the three of us slowly made our way toward her lab, the doctor leading the way. “Unusual readings? Is it something I should worry about?” I asked, a little anxiously.

She didn’t answer right away, and she didn’t turn back to look at me. She only replied, “First let’s see what your readings are now. If everything’s normal, there’ll be nothing to talk about.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “It’s not that cancer thing again, is it?”

Dr Harcourt huffed in exasperation. At the time I thought she was irritated by my questions, but now I know she was quite concerned, and not sure how to tell me what was happening.

Since I didn’t understand, I began to worry. My heart rate kicked up. Vara noticed my anxiety. She smiled at me and gave my arm a squeeze. I began to walk a little faster, and once we reached the lab, I climbed into the diagnostic pod without any prompting. After what seemed like an exceptionally long cycle, the doctor had me climb out. Vara wrapped me in a light blanket and sat me in an armchair.

“What is it?” I asked, my heart in my mouth. “Please tell me.”

The doctor scratched her head. “I can’t explain this,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of these readings.”

“What are they?” I demanded, growing more frantic by the minute. “What do they say?”

“Okay,” the doctor said, obviously stalling. She clearly didn’t want to tell me. She drew a deep breath, rubbed her face, then finally came out and said it: “You’re in exceptionally good health, Fergus, but… well... the machine says that you’re... female.”

“What!?” I exclaimed.

“The machine says that you are a female. As I said, I don’t know what to make of it. I’m going to have to consult my colleagues.”

“Wait -- obviously the machine is defective. Let’s try a different machine!” I suggested.

“This *is* a different machine,” she replied. “When I saw these readings earlier, I also assumed the machine was defective, so I swapped it out with another. And we ran diagnostics on both machines. They’re fine.”

“No,” I said. “No. Obviously, they’re NOT fine. They’re defective. And -- just as obviously -- I’m male. The machines are defective.”

The doctor and Vara glanced at each other.

“You don’t believe this crazy diagnosis, do you? You didn’t believe my sleep pod when it told you I had cancer. You did other tests and you proved that the machine was wrong! Why don’t you do the same thing now? Just because it mistakenly says I’m female doesn’t make me female! If it told you that my skin was indigo, would you believe it? No -- of course not! You’d look at me and know that the machine had messed up!”

“Look,” she said. “I told you twice already that I don’t know what to make of this. I also said that I need to consult with my colleagues. Any test I could or would do, the diagnostic pod has already done. Twice. Your blood work and other tests say that you’re female. At the same time, anatomically, externally, you’re obviously male.”

“Right!” I exclaimed. “The machine is messed up!”

The doctor made some subtle sign to Vara, who nodded. Then to me, she said, “I think I should give you something to help you calm down. How does that sound?”

“I don’t need to calm down!”

“You’re obviously very upset. You’re shouting.”

I stopped talking and tried to find a different tack. “Listen: I’m betting that if we look at the parts list for that machine, we’ll find that there’s something from Herman’s Human Sensor in there, monkeying things up. And by the way, I have the same suspicion about the rejuvenation beds -- at least the one that I used. There’s something wrong there as well.”

The doctor sighed. “I think you’re getting carried away here. I can see that you’re not female. I know that you’re not. But I must believe that this machine has a reason for saying that you are, and we need to find out what that reason is.”

“It’s simple!” I shouted. “The stupid thing is broken! The rejuvenation bed is broken! There is NOTHING wrong with me.”

“Fergus, I’ve told you several times that I know that you’re a man. And yet, the machine says otherwise. This is a puzzle we have to solve. As far as we know, there’s nothing wrong with either machine--”

“AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH ME!” I shouted. “How many times do I have to say it: the machines are defective! They’re defective! You’re not listening to me!”

The doctor bit her lower lip and paused for a moment before replying. “And you are not listening to me. You ought to examine your attitude here, and maybe talk with one of the psyche team. This is clearly a delicate moment for you. I know you used to stare at yourself in your sleep pod, and you expressed a strong mistrust of the rejuvenation bed well before you used it. You’ve gone from certain feelings about your sleep pod to antagonism toward the rejuvenation bed, to mistrust of the diagnostic pod. What happens if your negative feeling extends to the ship itself? At that point, there’s nowhere to go. Listen to me, Fergus: just because your sleep pod had a harmless defect, you can’t be suspicious of every machine on board.”

“I’m not suspicious of every machine on board!” I shouted. “Just that thing over there, and the goddamn rejuvenation beds! That’s what messed me up! We need to look at them! There’s probably some crap from Herman’s Human in there, too!”

Dr Harcourt caught Vara’s eye and Vara nodded. The doctor turned and left the room.

“Where’s she going?” I asked.

“I’m sure that she’s coming right back,” Vara assured me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you know what we ought to do? We ought to get you some clothes, and then we can talk about the -- what was it? The Herman’s Humans thing? What’s that about?”

I was glad to explain. “Herman’s Human is a small sensor manufacturer that NOBODY has ever heard of. They made a defective sleep-pod part that started this whole mess. I'm sure that they are the key to all this. I’m convinced there’s a similar issue with the diagnostic machine and the rejuvenation bed.”

She stepped behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. With her thumbs, she gently massaged the base of my neck. “Why don’t you tell me what needs to be done?” she suggested, in a soft, neutral voice.

“Oh, that feels good,” I sighed, as she squeezed and massaged my shoulders and upper arms. “Well, we should use the same approach we employed on the sleep pod: first compare the sensors -- also, in this case, the radiators, pulsers, and the analog parts. We’d see if there’s a difference with the other units.”

“Mmm,” she said. “That makes sense. And then?”

“And then…” I tried to organize my thoughts. Now that the doctor was gone, I’d begun to relax. I went on to describe the steps we used on the sleep pod. I told Vara how we’d need to adapt the plan to the two other machines. She very adeptly kept me talking, by prompting me with questions, and saying, "That makes sense. And then?" at intervals. Stupid me! -- I thought she was actually listening. In retrospect I realize that she was simply humoring me until the doctor returned.

When Dr Harcourt appeared in the doorway, she had her hand in her jacket pocket. Vara called to her, “Doctor! We need to get this man some clothes. He’s been telling me his plan to check out the machines.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just like we did on the sleep pod.”

“Ah,” the doctor said, nodding, as she sauntered closer to me. She was looking down. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. That was odd, certainly, but I thought that maybe she was embarrassed about not having listened to me before. When she reached me, and was standing right next to me, she said, “I guess we ought to schedule a meeting with the techs and the doctors again, then.”

“Yes!” I cried out, finally feeling as though I was being taken seriously.

“Right,” the doctor said, but she wasn’t speaking to me. She spoke in a tone of command. And it certainly was a command: Vara slipped her hands down to the middle of my upper arms, then locked me in a bear hug. The moment her hands closed in front of me, the doctor pressed a hypospray against the meaty part of my left shoulder. I cried out in surprise and dismay. Immediately I felt myself falling into darkness. The room was fading, growing smaller, and moving far away from me.

“Just let it happen, Fergus,” I heard the doctor say. “It’s for your own good.” And then, nothing. I was gone.

What happened next? The two of them wheeled me back to one of those damn rejuvenation beds, lifted me onto it, and hit the RESET button.

I know they meant well, but your own personal road to hell, you know, is lined with people who think they know what’s best for you.

The Endless Dance Card : 3 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I frowned. “Was he a real person?”

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

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

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

“As a girl.”

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

“How did my profile get corrupted?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shrugged. "Let's hope so!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Everyone but me!” I protested.

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

I huffed in response.

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

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

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

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

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

The Endless Dance Card : 4 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

During the second month of my convalescence, there was a handoff from my crew to the next. There is always an overlap as one crew prepares to go back to sleep and the next crew prepares to take over. During this overlap, both crews are awake. Remember: for the crew that just awoke, five calendar years have passed, and they need to be briefed on both the current status as well as any important events that happened while they slept. Usually three days are allotted for this overlap, but the time can be extended or shortened as needed. During the interval when both crews are awake, there is always at least one party. The parties help to break the monotony of life onboard, and they serve a big social need -- the need to have fun. There is also a great deal of fairly indiscriminate sexual activity.

Speaking of which, I did get to say goodbye to Dr Harcourt before she went to her sleep pod. She was quite embarrassed and uncharacteristically shy. I was glad to see her, in spite of all that happened, and she apologized several times for not having had the sense to stop when she didn’t understand what was happening to me. I knew that she’d been called before a review board, and was required to do some retraining. I didn't mention it, but it was clearly on her mind.

“I didn’t tell them about our sexual involvement,” she said, blushing. “They really would have creamed me if they knew.”

Even though we (the crew) were overtly encouraged to be casual in our sexual relations -- since, in the end, our mission was the preservation of the human species -- what she’d done was still against protocol. In spite of our permissiveness, there are some relationships that are explicitly taboo. What makes them taboo is the power dynamic: doctor/patient, supervisor/worker, etc. I assured her in a soft voice, “I won’t tell.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that, especially considering what it cost you.” She squirmed for a moment, then confessed, “I have to tell you… I want you to know that I’m not just sorry that I hurt you. I’m horrified to see that I’m capable of doing such a thing.” She swallowed hard, then looked me in the eye. “When I gave in to my, uh -- to my desire to dominate you, it negatively affected my decision-making about your care.” Then, with tears forming in her eyes, she said in an almost inaudible whisper, ”I’m so sorry for what I did to you!” She sniffed hard, and wiped her nose and eyes with a napkin. She drew a deep, hard breath, and in a normal voice said, “It frightens me to know I was capable of such insensitivity and neglect.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t disagree. I mean, look at me! I’m a girl now. At the same time, I have come to terms with my new gender -- to some extent. How and why could I do that? Because I was sure that being female was only a temporary condition. I was supremely confident that I wouldn’t stay this way for very long. My hope verged on a feeling of certainty, and that near-certainty allowed me to see my history with the doctor as just so much spilt milk. “Spilt milk under the bridge a long long time ago,” my father used to say. Also, I was surprised to find that I still found the doctor incredibly attractive. I can’t say I was actually aroused by seeing her. I didn’t have the anatomical equipment for arousal. I guess that in my new world, she migrated from being my lover to being my first crush, and I had no desire to make her feel any worse than she already did.

For the next five years, one element of every handoff from one crew to the next was that, as people learned what happened to me, they’d want to meet me or at least have a look at me. It wasn’t terrible, but it was weird. Sometimes I’d tell myself, This is what celebrities experience, and other times, This is what animals in the zoo experience. People took for granted that they could stare me up and down, ask me to turn this way and that… and comment on my appearance as if I couldn’t hear them. They’d ask the most tactless and insensitive questions, but I always made an effort to answer as honestly as I could. I tried to not take it personally, but ironically what made it uncomfortable and weird was the fact that it wasn’t personal at all: most people treated me more as a freak than as a person. So that was my life at that point.

On the positive side, I don’t think anyone else onboard -- not even the Admiral -- met as many of the crew as I did. I didn’t end up meeting everyone, but almost.

Another element of each handoff was a mixed blessing. From each crew of 150, the psychs appointed one woman to be my “mother.” Their method of finding these women was very simple, almost crude: they looked at the psychological tests we’d taken before leaving Earth, and chose from each crew the woman with the highest “maternal” values. I tried to ask exactly what those values were, but they wouldn’t tell me. In any case, every three months, I’d get a new mother. In the end, I went through 16 mothers, total.

These mothers were supposed to help me navigate the process of turning into a girl. The first one spent a lot of time talking to me about feminine hygiene and physical and psychological changes. At first I appreciated it: she answered a lot of questions I didn’t even know I had, but at the same time it rankled me, because it got into the nuts and bolts (so to speak) of being a girl -- and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about that. Also, I GOT IT ALL THE FIRST TIME she explained it -- she didn’t need to quiz me or explain it a second or third or fourth time. Aside from making me uncomfortable, from my point of view the information had a limited shelf life -- especially all the business about menses. I had no intention of remaining female, and I was definitely going to bail out of girlhood before all the monthly stuff started.

My second mother was far too busy to give me any attention, and that was absolutely GREAT as far as I was concerned. I have to admit, that after the intrusive lectures and quizzes from Mom No. 1, I got way too used to the freedom I felt under Mom No. 2. I loved being on my own and doing things my way, even more than I ever had as a man… I’m sure that being physically awake had something to do with it, but also I felt as though I’d escaped from something. On the other hand, all that free time and lack of supervision meant, of course, that I didn’t learn anything at all about being a girl. Not that I cared at the time.

My third mother wasn’t bad, really, and I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d only done one thing: I should have called her more often. It had been a couple of months since my convalescence ended, so I was an active member of the crew again. My duties took me all over the ship, and the ship isn’t just huge, it’s gargantuan. It wasn’t possible for me to physically get back to her every night to check in. So I didn’t bother, even when I was nearby. I almost never called, and after a while I stopped answering when she called. In retrospect, I think she was the least comfortable in the role. She wasn’t sure where to start or how to get a handle on me.

This cued my next mother, Mom No. 4, to be a hyper-disciplinarian. Maybe she would have been anyway, but I felt it was partly my fault for being so dismissive of Mom No. 3.

Mother No. 4 was clever. She gave me a few days on my own, so I continued to feel free and uncontrolled. By the fourth day of her Motherhood, my guard was down, pretty much all the way down. She used those days to get hold of my work itinerary and to look over my movements from the past month. She studied me. She read my records and got into my psych files. She spoke to my supervisor and to the head of security, and came to an agreement with each of them regarding my “upbringing.” She took the whole motherhood thing very very seriously.

Once her plan was neatly in place, she invited me to her room for dinner. We had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, with chocolate cake for dessert. I don’t usually bother with dessert, but the cake was particularly good, and intensely chocolatey. I didn’t used to care for chocolate, but that cake converted me. Then, while I was feeling full and happy, she lowered the boom. She showed me that she’d brought an extra bed into her sleeping area and told me that that’s where I’d be sleeping each night while she was my mother. Laid out on the bed was a pair of pale pink shorts, along with a light gray top. The top had the image of a winking kitten with its left fist in the air. “These are your pajamas,” she told me. “While I’m your mother, you’re going to wear what I tell you to wear.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t see any point in fighting with her or taking a stand: I knew I could get whatever clothes I pleased from any of the clothes-fabs onboard. Better to let her believe she had control, and then blow her off for the next three months. She wasn’t going to be my mother forever.

She informed me, “Another thing: you are going to come home -- here to this room -- every evening for supper with me.”

“That won’t work,” I told her. This was one idea I needed to nip in the bud. “My duties take me all over the ship.”

“I’ve worked that out with your supervisor,” she replied, and she smiled in a way that I regarded as treacherous and a little frightening. “When you have to go to the other end of the ship, you can use a one-scooter, and your new work itinerary takes your travel time into account.” That’s when I began to feel her trap closing around me. I literally felt my throat tightening. However, she was far too clever to keep pushing. She set my work schedule face-down on a table behind her, and completely changed the subject by picking up a deck of playing cards. She taught me a simple but wildly funny game she called Idiot. Once I caught on to it, I liked it immensely. We played for a little over two hours, and soon the two of us were laughing together and really having a grand time. We were to play this game quite a lot during her three months of motherhood. Part of the fun -- which I initially resisted, but then came to like -- was that whoever lost a game would have to wear a silly, cone-shaped hat until they won again. I loved making her wear the hat.

In fact, the last hand ended with her wearing the silly hat. She took it off, gathered up the cards, and put it all away. “Now it’s time for your bath,” she announced, and led me into the bathroom, where a steaming bubble bath was ready.

“How did you do that?” I asked, amazed.

“Magic,” she said with a laugh. “No, seriously, I just set a timer. Better check that it’s not too hot.”

I stuck my hand in, and the water temperature was just right. She waited until I stripped and got into the water. Then she picked up my underwear from the floor. It was a pair of men’s boxers. “This is what you’ve been wearing?” she asked. “This is going to change. This is going to change. No more mens clothes. Especially no more mens underwear.” With that, she turned and carried my gear out of the room. I never saw those clothes again.

Okay, It’s true, I’d been wearing men’s underwear. Why shouldn’t I?

She came back after twenty minutes to wash my hair. It was wonderful to feel her fingers running across my scalp. Then she pulled out a bottle of conditioner. “I never use that stuff,” I told her. “You do now,” she replied, and worked the lotion through my hair.

When I got out of the tub, she wrapped me in a towel, and she brushed and dried my hair. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, we’re going to get you a haircut,” she told me. “It’s good that you let your hair grow out, but now you look like a little lost boy.”

“I can’t get a haircut tomorrow,” I replied. “I need to go to the other end of the ship. In fact, you might not see me for a few days.”

She laughed. “No, you don’t have to do anything at the other end of the ship tomorrow,” she countered. “You have tomorrow off, so that you and I can get acquainted. When was the last time you got your hair cut?”

“Wow. I guess it’s been a over a year,” I told her. “I, uh, you know, I’ve never been awake this long since I came onboard, and what with everything that happened, I just kind of forgot.”

“Mmm,” was her only comment. Then she walked me over and had me stand next to a chair in her sitting room. It was an old-fashioned chair, made from actual wood. “There’s one more thing we need to do before you put on your pajamas,” she said. With a single swift movement, she undid my towel so it fell to the floor. She sat down on her chair and pulled me to her suddenly. I found myself lying across her lap, my bare ass in the air, my face looking down at the floor. Oh, no, I thought. This can’t be happening. She can’t. She can’t.

“Your last mother reported that you were quite disrespectful and wildly undisciplined,” she told me. Her hand rested on my lower back, and kept me from standing up. “That’s not going to happen this time. I’m your mother now, and you’re going to do what I say. Whenever I call you and tell you to come to me, you will come to me. When I choose clothes for you to wear, you will wear those clothes, and you will keep those clothes clean and tidy. I will teach you and I will show you how a proper young lady comports herself, and you will conform to what I teach you. You are going to be a proper young lady in every way.”

“The hell I will!” I shouted. “You can’t make me do anything! I’ll go to the other end of the ship, and you’ll never find me!”

She replied in a quiet, firm voice. “Find you? Why would I need to find you? That’s Security’s job, not mine. If I tell them my daughter is missing, they will find you and they will bring you to me, and then this will happen.” With that, she began to spank me. Her hand came down on my ass in a slow, steady rhythm: slap, slap, slap! The sound was hard and loud. I wriggled and fought, but she was stronger than me, and I was in a weak position. “You’re going to be a good girl,” she said.

“No, I’m not!” I shouted, gritting my teeth. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry or whimper or any of that stuff. “Fuck that! Fuck it! I’m not a fucking girl! And fuck you, too! And fuck the fucking security! They don’t know everything, and neither do you!”

I fought for as long as I could, but she was inexorable. I could only bite my tongue for so long. Soon I was crying, then I was sobbing. I could hardly believe it, but she utterly subdued me. I couldn’t protest or fight any more. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but all that came out of me was a whimper. She paused to let me cry for a bit. Then she asked me whether I was going to be a good girl. I hesitated for JUST ONE SECOND, so she renewed her spanking. My butt was burning. I’d never experienced a spanking before, and it hurt like blazes. She stopped and asked me again whether I was going to be a good girl. This time I didn’t hesitate at all.

“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Yes, what?” she asked. “Say it.”

“Yes, I’m going to be a good girl!”

“Yes, you’re going to be a good girl, who?”

I hesitated, trying to puzzle that out, so she gave my ass a sharp slap. “Try Yes, Mom,” she suggested.

“Yes, Mom, I am going to be a good girl.”

“You’re going to do everything I say?”

“Yes, Mom. I will do everything you say.”

“And will you wear whatever clothes I tell you to wear?”

“Yes, Mom. I will wear the clothes you tell me to wear.”

“Good girl,” she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “I hope you mean that, because if you don’t, this is what will happen. You don’t want to be spanked again, do you?”

“No, Mom.”

“Good girl. Tell me one more time that you’re going to be a good girl.”

I did. Of course I did.

When she let me up, I put on the silly pajamas as quickly as I could. Then she set a soft pillow on her couch, and sat me on the pillow. She snuggled down next to me and put her arm around me. Together we watched an old Audrey Hepburn movie. Somewhere in the middle of it, my head began to nod and I began to fade, so she helped me to my bed.

 

---

 

The next morning she showed me a bra and panty set. It was pink lace. “I don’t need a bra,” I told her.

“You’re right,” she agreed, “You don’t need one yet, but I want you to get used to wearing one. It will remind you that you are, in fact, a girl.”

The underwear fit me perfectly -- no surprise there: the clothes-fab had constructed them exactly for me. What I should have expected (but didn't!) was that the panties would suit my new anatomy far better than men's boxers. Next, Mom produced a pink dress with short sleeves. Aside from its pinkness, it was fairly plain and workable. I couldn’t help but ask, though, “Will I only be wearing pink from now on?”

She stopped short and smiled. “Fair point! I may have gotten stuck on the pink theme here. Good catch! I’ll mix it up, don’t worry.”

I shrugged and put the dress on.

“This is a skater dress, because of the skirt,” she told me. “A skater skirt is basically a circle with a hole in the middle.”

“Why ‘skater’?” I asked.

“Because skaters want the skirt to move with them.” She had me swish my hips back and forth, and then twirl. “See how it follows you? It’s a nice effect.”

We had a light breakfast, then went off to the hair stylist. She didn’t do anything wild or absurdly girly. She gave me a modern asymmetrical cut that was pretty simple and easy to take care of. “Basically I’ve just cleaned up your hair,” she said. “Got rid of the split ends, the overgrown parts… evened things up.”

“Evened things up… asymmetrically,” I joked. She froze. “Don’t you like it?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, yes, I love it!” I assured her. “I’m just being silly. Thanks, it’s really nice and cool.”

She smiled, and dusted her chair with a towel. Then she said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“When are you going to change your name?” she asked.

“Uh… do I have to?”

“Well, I would think so. Fergus is a very masculine name. Would you like a suggestion?”

I shrugged in a noncommittal way.

“Fergusdotter. Isn’t that a nice name? Dotter is Swedish for daughter, so it means ‘daughter of Fergus’ -- and that’s kind of what you are!” She smiled triumphantly, obviously proud of her invention.

I didn’t know what to say, but Mom spoke up. “That’s a lovely suggestion. We’ll write that down, won’t we, Fergus? In the end, though, Fergus will have to find her own new name -- that is, if she wants a new name.”

The stylist stopped smiling. She couldn’t tell whether she was being complimented or being blown off.

When we were out of earshot, I said in a low voice, “Thanks for telling her to fuck off back there.”

“Hmm,” my mother replied. “My pleasure. She’s kind of nosy, so I got some satisfaction for my own sake, too.” She stopped walking, put her hand on my arm, and looked at me. “You understand, I hope, that the point of all of this isn’t just to train and guide you: the real point is that none of us wants you to go through this alone.”

All in all, she ended up being my best mother, even counting the woman who actually gave me birth. Mom No. 4 never spanked me again, or even raised her voice. She wasn’t autocratic; she considered my opinions and my tastes. She never made me wear anything that I really disliked.

Her legacy -- what she truly changed in me -- is that after spending three months with her, I never wore mens clothes again. I got to like women’s underwear, dresses, skirts, and all that. It was nice to be able to wear colors and to put together outfits. She taught me how to take care of my hair and skin and nails. She gave me good habits that I never lost afterward.

Unfortunately, after those three months, I never saw her again. I think of her often, and of all the mothers I was assigned, she is the only one I really miss.

And yet, in spite of coming to like girls clothes, I was still determined to change myself back. I didn’t want to remain a girl.

I wasn’t obsessive, but I spent a LOT of time studying profiles. They were immensely complex. Their logic wasn’t linear. Even though it was mapped out in a file, which is essentially two-dimensional, the information spanned several independent dimensions. Each profile was broken up into 27 sections, and each section contained 30 subsections. As I studied the code that ran the reset function, I found that the meaning of one value in any subsection could vary incredibly, depending on apparently random values in other sections. It was mind-bending.

At the same time, the profiles were becoming very familiar to me. I could pick out the various subsections from across a room, and I could tell that my study was stretching my cognitive abilities. My mind was struggling to build a model that could comprehend the profiles’ complexity. I was pretty sure that I could do it; after all, a human being designed the profile’s format. Whoever they were, they weren’t superhuman. If they could write it, eventually I’d be able to read it.

Something else became clear to me: I could see why my profile wasn’t validated or checked before I was reset -- a profile is so immensely complex, you’d need a huge synthetic intelligence, built purely for that purpose. It would not only have to verify that a profile was coherent and consistent -- which is a massive task in itself -- it would also need to check that the profile corresponded to the person it was being applied to. To perform the second part, it would have to be able to calculate that the profile was a younger version of the person lying on the bed. Another massive task.

I was learning so much!

One day I took a glance at one of the other corrupted profiles, and something jumped out at me. If I hadn’t spent so much time reading profiles, I probably never would have seen it. There, in someone else’s bad profile, was the same block of corrupted data that occurred in mine. It cut across the same three sections in the same way, in the same location. Of course, it was compressed, so I couldn’t be 100% positive that it was identical, so I extracted it and compared it to the junk in my own profile. They matched. Exactly. Huh.

So I pulled out the junk from the other contaminated profiles and compared them as well. They were identical. The block of garbage was the same in every single case, and it always occurred in the same spot.

I spent two weeks digging into that block of junk data, trying to make some kind of sense out of it, but I couldn’t find a decompression algorithm or a cryptological method that rendered any meaning from it.

So, I called up the current engineering lead, a man named Nelson. He is a very sleek Afro-Asian man -- incredibly handsome, and extremely professional. I explained what I’d found. He listened without comment. Then I said, “I don’t know whether this makes sense. Should we expect random junk to be more random? Is it bad for bad data to be identical in every case?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “On the one hand, you have one defect that always gives the same result. That makes sense. On the other hand, is it intentionally the same? What is this junk, and where did it come from? Where did it pull this data from in the first place?”

“Exactly!”

Nelson asked me to put the bad data on a safe stick and physically walk it over to his virtual sandbox. “I’ll set up a port you can use. We don’t want to go copying this and sending it around the ship without knowing what it is.”

“Right,” I agreed. “Also, I looked into the parts lists for every device onboard, to see if we got anything else from Herman’s Human, but it was only that one egg-shaped sensor in the sleep pods.”

“Yeah,” Nelson agreed. “Qurakas also did that very same search, but -- good thinking, Fergus. Good looking out. I’m going to note that in the official report. It helps to have independent verifications.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He paused and looked at me. I could tell he was considering whether to tell me something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You do realize the implications of this, don’t you? The sensors, the junk data...”

“Yes,” I replied. “It could be sabotage.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Don’t repeat this, but our official conclusion is that the presence of the defective sensors was an act of deliberate sabotage. It’s rather obvious sabotage as well. You must have seen that. They wanted us to see that it was done on purpose.”

“Yes -- there was exactly one bad sensor in each box. It’s a slap in our faces.”

“Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do about it, other than send the information in a bongo ball, but who knows when it will reach Earth?” Bongo balls are small space probes used to send messages back to Earth. While they travel, they beam their payload ahead via laser. It’s our only way of talking to the people back home. Obviously it’s a one-way conversation.

“But…” I hesitated “what would be the point of the sabotage?”

“My theory -- and it’s only a theory -- is that ultimately they meant to kill us all. Luckily, you caught the corruption in its early stages, when it was small enough for us to cope with. I’m confident that if we hadn’t replaced the profiles, the corruption would have slowly spread beyond the profiles, seeping into other systems, shutting down the ship. At the very least, it would have screwed up some of our profiles to the point that a reset would kill. It wouldn't have to kill all of us. One kill, late in the voyage, would be terrifying. It would put everybody off the rejuvenation beds. These are just theories, though, and I realize that there are lot of pieces that I can’t prove, so don’t go repeating it. We don’t want to frighten people unnecessarily. Okay?”

A chill went through me. “Who would do such a thing?” I asked.

“Come on, you know who. The Christmas People are not above that kind of shit,” he observed. The Christmas People are a group of activists, or terrorists, depending on your point of view. They have a religious belief that it’s wrong to leave Earth, and are violently opposed to the Kingdom Ship project.

After Nelson made a few more comments about the Christmas People’s extremism, he was about to end the call. I stopped him. There was one more thing I wanted to talk about.

“Nelson, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time on the profiles, and it’s occurred to me that they could be used for some other really interesting applications. I don’t mean immediately… all these ideas would require serious development and testing, and so forth. At this point, they’re just ideas… things I can’t get out of my head.

“So, anyway, there are four areas I’ve identified.” As I spoke, I became quite nervous. I hadn’t spoken of this to anyone, and I was afraid I might sound crazy. At the very least, I was sure I’d sound impractical. “The first area is cloning: we could take a profile, and make an exact copy of a person!”

“Cloning! Why? Are you looking for a twin sister, Fergus?” Nelson asked, eyes twinkling.

“No, no,” I responded, waving my hands.

“I’m just teasing,” he assured me. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“That leads to the second area: resurrection, for lack of a better word. Suppose we lost a crew member in an accident? We use their profile to create them all over again.”

“Sounds a little dangerous... a little creepy... but still interesting. Go on.”

“The third area is storage: do you realize that if you combine two of our biggest storage devices, we’d have enough memory to fit the entire population of Earth? That’s everybody! With space left over!”

“Interesting,” Nelson commented, doing a little mental math. “We could certainly store everyone’s profile, that’s true.”

“And then, uh, we’d wake them up when we need them. We could put all of Earth’s population on every Kingdom ship that leaves Earth!”

“Hmmph,” Nelson said thoughtfully. “These are certainly big ideas. What’s the last one?”

“Teleportation,” I said. “That’s probably the most way-out, but if you consider that we already transmit profiles electronically, whenever they’re copied or accessed. It’s just a small step to send them via radio or laser or even through a wire, and in that way we could move a person from one place to another.”

“Wow.” Nelson fell silent for a few moments, considering what I’d said. “That’s really far out, creative thinking. Far, far out. It’s a whole world of possibilities and implications. However, there’s one great big roadblock to putting any of it into practice. Do you see it?”

“No, I don't.”

“Where do you get the new bodies from? What are the profiles acting on? When you make a clone, or teleport, or whatever, you can’t create a person out of nothing. So what do you apply the profile to? If you were to ‘resurrect’ someone, you wouldn’t want to apply the profile to their corpse, right? What if it only half worked, and you got some kind of zombie? Or you ‘resurrected’ someone and ended up creating a person whose body was in perpetual pain?”

I deflated. “Oh… I hadn’t thought of that.”

"And if you teleport someone, what happens to their original body? What makes it disappear? I mean, how do they actually travel? Aren't you really just making a clone, far away? I mean, you don't want to kill the person on the sending side, just for the sake of having only one copy."

"Yeah... no..." I said, feeling very stupid. "What you said is all so obvious, but none of it occurred to me."

“Hey, hey, don’t get discouraged! You’ve taken a big, bold step, but it’s only the first step. These are good ideas. Really good ideas. They need to be developed -- heh, they need to be literally fleshed out -- and maybe in the future -- maybe even in the near future -- we’ll figure out what a person could be cloned into, or teleported into. A new body? A synthetic body? Who knows?

“There's one thing you really need to keep in mind: you don’t have to solve every problem all by yourself. For all we know, someone else already has the necessary ideas, the ones that complement your own, and together those ideas could give us possibilities we can’t even imagine now.”

A little embarrassed by his praise, I shrugged and smiled shyly.

“Listen, Fergus, I want you to write all of that down, as soon as you can. It doesn’t have to be a long discourse; just get the essential ideas written, even if it's just a couple of lines, and send it to me. I’m putting together a bongo ball to report on the sabotage. I’ll put your memorandum in there as well, and send it back to Earth. Get some other people thinking about it. Maybe even Dr Idlewild himself. Okay? Good job, Fergus!”

It certainly felt great to have my ideas validated in that way. It was exciting to see that Nelson thought my ideas were important enough to include in a message back to Earth. His response gave me a lot of energy and determination to continue my work with the profiles. That’s when I began to call it my work. It wasn’t just “study” any more. It was my mission.

Nelson thought that Dr Idlewild himself might even be interested! The genius who first conceived of the Kingdom Ships, the man who invented both the sleep pods and the rejuvenation beds! Well… he at least ought to be interested to see what his inventions had done to me!

Nelson’s validation of my ideas and my new dedication to my work didn’t just help my self-esteem: they gave me a profound sense of purpose. They gave my life meaning, as corny as that may sound.

In all honesty and sincerity, its what kept me sane in the years ahead, and I really needed it, because in a couple of years my life took a wild left turn.

The Endless Dance Card : 5 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

My first clue about how my life was going to change was when I heard about the pools. There were two pools, two betting pools. Whoever picked the date closest to my entering puberty would win the first pool. Whoever picked the date closest to my official sexual maturity would win the second.

The rules excluded me from betting, and I guess everyone assumed that I knew about the pools, so for a few days, I was the only person onboard who didn’t know about them. It’s not that the pools were secret; it’s just that I was the last person anyone would mention them to.

The pools introduced two new elements to life onboard: one was obvious; the other was somewhat subtle. The first new aspect was that people started sizing me up. Ever since I turned into a girl, people regularly came to look at me, but now they looked at me in a different way. Instead of just glancing at me, they were studying me: looking me up and down, scanning my chest and hips. These weren’t gazes of desire or glances of appreciation -- these were more like clinical assessments.

The second, more subtle element was that suddenly everyone became an expert in the stages of the Tanner scale. That was an aspect that took longer to emerge in conversation, but it definitely influenced the character of the casual analytic appraisals I was subjected to each day.

After maybe two days of noticing the strange new looks I was getting, I finally learned about the pools, quite by accident. One of the engineers rather stupidly spilled the beans. I found out later that he’d broken the rules of the contest by his direct questions, but it didn’t matter: he wouldn’t have won anyway.

The guy asked me flat out, “How are your breasts coming along?” I was of course taken aback and offended, but I answered, “My breasts are as flat as yours, asshole.” The asshole I added mentally, but I felt it was pretty obviously present in my tone. He didn’t pick up on it. He was clearly disappointed with my answer, so he tried a more specific question: “You don’t feel any growth? Like a bump under your nipples, maybe?”

“No,” I said, amping up my level of hostility. He still didn’t get it.

“On either side?”

“No, asshole.” This time I said the word aloud, and miraculously, he got the message.

“Hey, sorry! You don’t need to get all in a huff! I'm just asking on account of the pool!” -- which naturally led me to ask, “What pool?”

He explained the whole thing to me -- as though this contest was the most natural thing in the world. I was stunned, and for a few moments I was left utterly without words. Then I shook my head and asked, “So, the -- uh -- winner… what prize do they get?”

I expected him to give a stupid, joking response, “They win you!” or to give the more likely response, “Nothing!” Instead, he astonished me by saying that the prize for winning the first pool was a bottle of champagne.

“Champagne!” I exclaimed. “And who is putting up *that* prize?”

He shrugged. Then he told me that the winner of the second pool would get two bottles of champagne, two bottles of Barolo, and an “elegant steak dinner for up to four people.”

“What the hell!” I exclaimed. Then after a moment, I asked, “What’s Barolo?”

He shrugged again. “I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of fancy wine.”

“Again, who is providing all that? Where on Earth did they get it? You can’t food-fab that stuff!”

“I dunno,” he responded. “They probably brought it from Earth, like you said. Or maybe the higher-ups can food-fab it. Who can say?”

The conversation really stuck in my craw. I was angry and offended, and that was only the shallow end of my emotional response. My informant, dumb as he was, had enough sensitivity to realize that I was fuming. So he tried to douse the flame while it was only smoldering.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s not about you -- it’s for the ship’s morale, you know? Do you realize, we could go for a thousand years on this ship without a single thing happening? I mean literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Each time I wake up for a new shift, I wonder What wild or interesting or fun thing happened in the last five years while I was asleep? You know? We’re in the middle of fucking outer space, where no one has ever been before, so you’d think that SOMETHING weird or out-of-this-world would happen every couple of days. But I wake up once every five years, and NOTHING! Nothing ever happens here. You are the single biggest event since we left Earth, and I doubt that anything’s going to top you for a long, long time.”

He shrugged a few more times, and moved his hands inarticulately. Then he said, “Try to not get all bent out of shape. Maybe it’s uncomfortable for you to be the center of attention, but can you let the rest of us enjoy the first blip in this monotonous eternity?”

 

---

 

I was so absorbed by the breakthroughs I was making with the profiles that I forgot about the pools and my impending physical changes. What I mean is I never thought about either the pools or my sexual development unless someone else broached the subject. And as I said, it was over a year after my accident before I entered puberty. For that first year, my general feeling (and my fervent wish!) was that puberty would never happen. When it finally began, there wasn’t any fanfare: it was a pretty humdrum event. One morning I woke up with a little lump under my left breast. That was the whole thing. I assumed it was a blocked lymph node or a weirdly placed pimple or some such thing. I expected it to go away after a day or two. Yes, I realize now that it was exactly the event that the not-so-bright engineer had asked me about, and yes, I realize that it was not very bright of me to not know what the little lump was or what it meant, but I didn’t connect it with puberty or being female because it only appeared on one side.

When I went for my medical check-in two days later, the doctor could barely conceal her excitement. “When did this first appear?” she asked me.

I was kind of grumpy. I hadn’t slept well, and the stupid lump had zero importance to me. “I don’t know. Two days ago? Three days ago?”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re not sure? Think, Fergusdotter, think!”

Oh, yes -- by the way, as weird as it sounded when the hair stylist first said it, I couldn’t get Fergusdotter out of my head. The name kept banging around in my cranium. At the same time, people kept pestering me to change my name, and making suggestions that I found silly and/or excessively girly. Obviously, the only way to make it stop was to choose a name, any name. Three times I came close: I actually came up with a name, liked it, settled on it, and was just about to make the official change, when some asshole suggested exactly that name to me. By telling me the name -- or any name, really -- they unwittingly took the name out of the running, because I didn’t want someone else to feel that THEY had chosen my name. It got to the point that I couldn’t remember whether I came up with a name or had it suggested to me. So I said to myself, Fuck ‘em. They want me to change my name? Let’s see how they handle this one! and I officially changed my name to Fergusdotter. To my chagrin -- but I have to admit, to my pleasure as well -- it turned out that everybody LOVED the name. No one even tried to give me a nickname. Everyone got it on the first try. Everybody trotted out all four syllables, every chance they got. Some people even went to the trouble of finding me just for the sake of saying my name and telling me how much they loved it.

Well, I liked it, too. In the end, I was glad that my new name didn’t piss anyone off.

Now… back to the lump. “It was two days ago,” I told the doctor. “I’m sure. I noticed it when I first woke up. Is it bad? Is it just a pimple? I tried to squeeze it, but I couldn’t get it to break.”

“Oh, no!” the doctor cried. “Don’t do that! This is it, Fergusdotter! This is thelarche! It’s a breast bud. It’s the first sign of puberty. It’s stage one on the Tanner scale.”

“Mmm,” I mused. “Someone will be very happy.”

The doctor looked up at me, puzzled. “Someone?” she repeated.

“The pool,” I explained. “Somebody just won the first pool.”

Then she got it. “Oh, yes, of course! The pool! Yeah... someone. But what about you? Aren’t you happy?”

I shrugged. “It’s just a bump.”

She laughed. “I have the feeling you’re going to have a nice pair of bumps before long!”

“We’ll see!” I replied. I still didn’t believe that I’d get to the point of having breasts. I had made a lot of headway on the profiles: In fact, I developed a mapping system that builds a holographic image of a person, based on their profile. I’d also been studying the plastic-surgery pod, to see how it executes its changes. Hopefully, I’d be able to incorporate parts of the reset system along with parts of the plastic-surgery pod, and create a new device that could regenerate a person according to the changes I’d make in my mapping system.

My mapping system was nearly bug-free. It rendered people perfectly. I was almost able to use my tool to edit the hologram and to save those changes to a new profile -- depending on what those changes were. I impressed the engineers by (potentially) correcting physical defects. One member of the crew was born with one leg shorter than the other. I managed to make him a new profile where his legs were the same length. There was a lot of discussion about whether we could ethically try the new profile on the man, but for me, the act of creating a new, valid profile was a huge step forward.

There were other, similar successes, but none of them were really visceral. I mean, none of the changes I made went deep into the body. So I found a challenge that really made me struggle and sweat: we have a crew member who donated one of her kidneys back on Earth. I wanted to see if I could replace the missing kidney. The process was much harder than I expected. We all knew that the rejuvenation bed could do some pretty miraculous things, including replacing SMALL missing body parts -- like a finger or toe, or a tooth, or -- most commonly -- lost hair. And it was capable of repairing damaged internal organs if the damage wasn't too extensive, but if something big was missing, like an arm or leg or inner organ, it couldn’t bring them back.

There were two problems: one was the creation of new tissue. I still didn’t understand where the rejuvenation bed got the material to replace a missing finger, for instance. The plastic-surgery pod presented the same mystery: when it built up parts of a missing face, where did it get the bones and other tissue from?

The second problem was aligning the markers. It turned out that the rejuvenation bed and the profiles shared a system of reference called skeletal markers. They weren’t, strictly speaking, based on our skeletons, although I suspect that they began that way. My mapping system could visualize a person’s markers -- I mean, it could create a holographic image of white points and connecting lines. These points and lines sketched out a human body. It was very difficult to work on, and extremely frustrating to edit. In some parts of the body, the concentration of dots and lines is particularly dense, and as a general rule you can’t move one point without affecting a mess of other points.

Really significant changes to a person’s profile required changes to the markers as well, and that could be very tedious. I was trying to automate the process, but before I could do that, I had to understand it better.

One thing I encountered while working on the missing kidney: I had no idea how to set up the markers where the left kidney was supposed to be. The human body isn’t completely symmetric, so I couldn’t just mirror the setup on the right side.

Often the effort of editing the markers would utterly exhaust me, but it was always exciting. Knowing how to work the markers was clearly essential to changing me back.

Each new crew would organize a day so that I could brief its scientists, med personnel, and engineers about my work. Some of the engineers and software folks were so interested, they wanted to come work alongside me, but they couldn’t get clearance from their supervisors. I was hoping that that might change in a few more months, as my breakthroughs continued. I felt a kind of deadline approaching. Maybe it wasn't a deadline. Maybe it was only a dreadline: I was dreading the day when my own crew would wake up and start its turn of duty. In spite of all I achieved, I was afraid that Qurakas would stop my work and shut me down. His words kept echoing in my head -- that what I was doing "was not essential to life or to our mission." That phrase hung like an invisible sword over my head. And of course, it was Qurakas who said that changing me back to my original gender was "not an issue." I definitely had to get this done before he woke up again!

 

---

 

A little over two years after the appearance of the lump under my nipple, I had my first period. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. Luckily, it didn’t catch me completely off guard. The day it happened, I woke up grumpy. Just the act of getting dressed and ready for the day seemed full of complications. Everything was rumpled or tangled or inside-out; I swore that nothing was where I left it; everything smelled funny or tasted funny. I didn’t like any of my clothes. The first thing on my schedule was a full-morning meeting with some of the engineering team. It was all about that block of bad data from my profile. During a recent check, it was found in the navigation system. It was caught soon after it appeared, and only because we were routinely checking for it. That damn data block turned out to be a clever virus that had a way of hiding itself as it propagated from one system to the next. The main reason we’d gotten ahead of it was because it was a very slow-moving cyber-infection.

When we were two hours into the meeting, an engineer named Erasmus raised the question of how exactly the data block arrived in the navigation system. He got stuck on the idea that my sandbox, which still contained copies of all the profiles, was a hotbed for the cyber-infection. Several people contradicted him on that point. Sandboxes were physically separate from every other ship network. There was no way for a virus to leap out of a sandbox. Of course, it didn’t hurt to examine that belief, but the way he talked about it irritated the hell out of me. Luckily, I was able to bite my lip.

Next, Erasmus suggested that the data block might be moving through the power system or radiating via electromagnetic waves. The second idea was silly, but the first one -- propagation through the power system -- was definitely worth exploring.

It took four days to determine that his intuition was correct, and this idea led to the ultimate defeat of the virus.

At the time, though, his comments seriously pissed me off. I managed to keep my cool during the meeting, but once it was over, I had lunch with my mother -- the woman who was my mother at that time. Just to make conversation, she asked how the meeting had gone. That question was enough to light my fuse, and I took off. By a lucky chance, the two of us were dining alone, so no one overheard me. I called Erasmus all sorts of insulting names, belittled his intelligence, and wondered why he was so hostile to me (actually he wasn’t, but that’s how I felt in that moment). After verbally ripping Erasmus to pieces, and complaining about how fucked up everything in general was, I fell quiet. It was embarrassing. I rarely, if ever, let go like that. Also, I didn’t believe a word of what I’d said. “I don’t know why I’m so touchy,” I told my mother. “I’m sorry for unloading on you like that. I really don’t mean any of it.”

“It’s alright,” she said. “I think you’re on your period.”

And so I was. That night, just as I was getting into bed, I felt something wet between my legs, so I ran to the bathroom. Just in time. There was blood. It wasn’t a flood or an explosion; it was messy, but not too messy. I got some small spots on my sheets and pajamas, so I rinsed them quickly in cold water. Although no one had seen any of this, I felt thoroughly embarrassed. I remade my bed and put on fresh pajamas. Then I sat on my bed in silence as the reality of what had just happened sank in. For the first time, I felt the impossibility of my ever changing back to Fergus the man. Sure, my body had changed a lot over the past two years, but to actually experience my first period, and to know that there would be many, many more... I had crossed the Rubicon, whether I wanted to or not.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of my sexual development. I still had plenty of changes to go through; all the rest of the Tanner scale: my hips widening, my breasts getting more round and smooth, my labia fleshing out. Each new development embarrassed me, and reminded me how far I'd gone from where I used to be.

At some point along the way, I had a discussion with one of the engineering leads about my plans. He listened attentively, then told me, “I’m really impressed with the work you’ve done, Fergusdotter. Everyone is. But you do realize that in the end we can’t let you try to reverse-engineer the accident. It's too dangerous. I mean, essentially you’d be taking someone else’s profile and trying to apply it to yourself.”

“That’s what happened the first time,” I pointed out.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “Even though it misread your profile, your body -- as it was -- wasn’t so far off what it turned you into.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m trying to account for that. If I can line up all the markers--”

He shook his head. “Look at yourself, Fergusdotter. By now, you’re distinctly female. You’re already vastly different from the profile they took of you right after the accident. I don’t think you could even apply that profile to yourself any more!”

“I’m working on recovering my original profile,” I explained. “You know that.”

“You’ll probably succeed in that,” he told me, “but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it. It won’t change you back to the original Fergus. Like I said, you’re too far off -- too different -- from any profile that’s ever been taken of you. Even when you get your original profile back, it’s either not going to work at all, or it’s going to fuck you up in some horrible way.”

“You don’t know that,” I pointed out.

“No, I don’t. But I’m pretty confident that those are the most likely possibilities. Think about this: what would happen if you took MY profile and tried to reset it yourself to that?”

I blushed deep red. “It wouldn’t work.”

“Right,” he said. “You ought to think about WHY it wouldn’t work. Maybe -- if you knew then all the things you know now -- you might have had a chance at the outset, before you started developing, but now you’ve deviated too far from the person your profile says you are.”

“Hmmph,” I said. “I wish someone had told me that before I put in all those years of work!”

“Come on, now! You can’t say that! I’m quite sure that you were told from the outset, and reminded many times along the way. I have seen the reports from the other engineering leads, you know. Are you honestly going to tell me that anyone led you to believe that you had any chance of success in reversing what happened to you?”

“No,” I replied, shamefaced.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But remember: your misfortune has saved the lives of the rest of us several times over, and all the work and study you’ve done since then hasn’t gone to waste. Every time we send a bongo ball to Earth, it’s got something from you in it. You know that, right?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re a frikking genius, Fergusdotter. I hope that’s some kind of consolation.”

I nodded. I couldn’t find anything more to say, so the two of us shook hands and walked away. In spite of his compliments and his attempt to build me up, that conversation was the death knell to my efforts to return to who I was. I finished up my work on the mapping program. I completed the documentation I’d been writing about profiles and their use, and that was that. I wasn’t happy, but I knew I’d done all I could.

Then, as a team, and with my knowledge and approval, the engineering team permanently deleted my sandbox. It turned out that Erasmus was not only correct about the virus moving through the power system, he was also right about my sandbox being the virus' breeding ground. It had to go. With it went all the corrupted profiles, including my own. I asked to be the one to 86 it. I typed the commands that obliterated my sandbox. I hit enter. Once they finished, I verified that the sandbox was completely and utterly gone. Then I asked Erasmus to verify my work. He nodded. "It's gone," he said simply. I felt as though I'd witnessed a boat sink into the ocean and disappear.

 

---

 

The med team and the psychs met with me, and together we agreed on a couple of things: (1) they would quit assigning “mothers” to me. I didn’t need the close support any more. (2) I’d continue with weekly psych sessions; (3) My med check-ins would drop to once a month. (4) I’d stay awake until my crew woke up, and then join them in the sleep pods when their three-month shift was done. That would be a little over a year from now.

“The extra time will give your body more time to settle into its current configuration. Then, just before you and your crew go back to sleep, we’ll take a new profile of you, and that will be that.” It was an approach that made sense to me.

Why did I want to continue the psych sessions? I needed to talk about the end of my efforts to change back. I wasn’t sad or angry or frustrated. I did have some feelings I couldn’t name, but overall what I felt was a deep sense of loss.

The business of maturing into a young woman had come along so slowly, I unconsciously got used to it. It blended into the background of my life, for the most part. I began having regular sex with men. (I almost said “other men.”) I found that I liked it, but I wasn’t finding any emotional aspect in it. Given my “celebrity” status, it was easy to find sexual partners. I came to realize that what I most wanted to do was to spend time exploring individual sexual sensations… to stop at some points to just feel that part of the sex act, and not rush on to the orgasm, but I haven’t yet found a man willing to take the time.

I talked with the psychs about all of that, too. It was good to be able to unpack my experiences with them.

Everything went along the way life does, one day after another. Things happened, things didn’t happen. Newly-woken crews came out of their way to meet me. I had to remember that, as old as my situation was to me, it was startling and new to each of them.

At last, we came to the month before my crew would come back online. I found myself getting anxious. These were the people onboard who I knew best, and I’d changed quite a bit since they’d last seen me -- I’d changed inside and out.

I have to say, as a preface to the things that happened when they awoke, was that I wasn’t a particularly attractive girl. I was okay; I was plain, but I was good-looking enough. I didn’t have an amazing figure or a striking face. I was definitely female, but I was no femme fatale.

So, when my crew woke up and I ran into Lt Donaldson, I was pretty surprised by the way he ate me up with his eyes. His eyes roamed over my body with a disconcerting hunger. In fact, he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It was pretty uncomfortable, and downright weird. Whenever I’d talk to him, his eyes would land on my breasts and slide slowly down to my crotch. Whenever I’d walk away from him, I could feel his eyes on my ass. There was something disturbing about it: it wasn’t ordinary lust. There was something else in there, something that I couldn’t identify, like some kind of fetish.

I almost found out what it was in a meeting two weeks after my crew woke up.

Lt Donaldson called me to a small conference room. I sat on one side of a table, and Donaldson sat opposite me. To his left and right were a medical doctor, a psych, a woman I didn’t know, and Qurakas, my team lead. The doctor and the psych were both women, and they were clearly uncomfortable. I figured they were creeped out by Donaldson, who had a feverish look. His eyes seemed ready to pop out of his head. He began by asking me, “Are you familiar with the Idlewild Protocol?”

“Protocol?” I repeated. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I know the name Idlewild, of course, but I don't know of any Idlewild Protocol.”

“Of course you don't,” Donaldson replied. “It’s classified. Highly classified. I’m about to declassify it -- to some extent.” He smiled. “Do you remember, back on Earth, during your training, there was a week of tests to identify Idlewild Candidates?”

“Oh, yes -- how could I forget! They were the most painful tests I ever endured.”

“But you were not found to be an Idlewild Candidate.”

“No, I wasn’t. And they wouldn’t tell us what it meant.”

“I’m about to tell you,” Donaldson replied. “But in order to understand what an Idlewild Candidate is, we need to take a step back and think about what we're all doing here on this ship, out in space. We all know our mission: to find new homes for the human race, and to propagate. It's the ancient directive of go forth and multiply. If you think about it, it’s clear that a ship like this, with this mission like this, doesn’t actually need men at all. You need women and you need sperm. But at the same time, our mission isn’t simply to find new planets and settle them -- it’s also to escape an Earth that’s nearly depleted of resources. That’s the Kingdom Ship project in a nutshell.”

I nodded. Everyone knew that.

“Everyone is meant to go. No one is left behind to languish and die on Earth. All of that is clear.

“Now, Dr Idlewild, the father of the Kingdom Ship project, made many inventions, uncovered many unknown truths... and one of his remarkable discoveries is that there are some men who, under certain circumstances, can turn into women. Those tests you took -- those painful tests -- identified men with this… um, possibility.”

I frowned. “This would have been useful for me to know five years ago. Why are you only telling me this now?”

Qurakas' eyebrows went up at that, and he looked at Donaldson. Did Qurakas have the same question?

Donaldson seemed surprised by my interruption. “Well… obviously... you weren't told because it didn’t apply to you! It still doesn’t apply to you. We just agreed that you weren’t an Idlewild Candidate. It’s in your record, in your file.”

“Right… but this is about changing gender, right? That's what happened to me, and that's what I've been trying to undo. So my question remains: why did you wait until now to tell me this?”

Donaldson held up his hand, palm facing me, to signal me to stop. I wasn’t talking anyway: I was waiting for him to answer, so I just shrugged. After a pause, Donaldson picked up the thread again. “On this ship, we have just over 1500 women, plus thousands of fertilized embryos and a gestation system… so we’re pretty well set as far as propagation is concerned, but once Idlewild found out about the possibility presented by the Idlewild Candidates, he decided it was prudent to develop it as an additional redundancy.”

“And how exactly do these men turn into women?” I asked.

Again, he seemed surprised by my question. “There’s a machine on board that does it,” he replied, as if that was obvious.

”WHAT!?" I shouted. “Are you kidding me? Do you know how hard I’ve been working to change back to who I was? And NOW you tell me that there’s a machine onboard that does what I’ve been trying to do?”

“No, no,” Donaldson said. He seemed more irritated than alarmed by my outburst. “It doesn’t do what you want! It goes the other way: it turns men into women.”

“Maybe I can make it go the other way!”

“No,” Donaldson said. “You’re not listening to me. Your behavior is getting a little out of hand. This isn’t the reason I called this meeting. This is not where I meant to go at all! I have an agenda!”

“I want to see this machine!” I shouted. “How could you keep this a secret from me?”

The psych and the doctor jumped up from their chairs and came around to my side of the table. One of them put her hand on my shoulder. “Look,” the pysch told Donaldson, “You’ve got to give her time to examine this machine. She’s earned the right.”

“That’s not what this meeting is about,” Donaldson insisted.

I was trembling, I was so angry. “Don’t worry,” the doctor whispered to me, “We’ll make sure that you see that machine.”

Donaldson and the psych argued back and forth while the rest of us listened. Donaldson continued to insist that we “stick to the meeting agenda” while the psych insisted that I be given time to examine and study Idlewild’s machine.

After a few minutes of listening to their fruitless argument, Qurakas broke the stalemate by slapping the table with his open hand. The abrupt sound made everyone jump. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and he gazed at Donaldson with open disdain. “If there is a machine onboard that can change a person’s gender, Fergus should have been told about it five years ago, when this first began. If I had been aware of it then, I would have told her -- classified or not. Now that I’m aware of this machine, and have access to it, my team and I will ensure that Fergusdotter has full and free access to it, and any related materials, for as much time as she needs. Anyone who tries to prevent this from happening, will answer to me.”

I almost wanted to cry. Almost.

The Endless Dance Card : 6 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

Donaldson’s eyes flashed fire. “We’ll see about that!” he said in a tense tone. “We’ll see about that!” He grabbed his tablet and abruptly left the room, followed by the woman I didn’t know.

The doctor, the psych and I looked at Qurakas. He looked into my eyes and said, “We need to move. Thank God I’m awake.” He put his hand on my shoulder and said with more urgency, “Now. We need to move NOW. Let’s go.” The two women looked at each other, and in unplanned unison said, “Anything we can do, let us know.”

“Thanks,” he replied. He pulled me out of my chair and into the hall. Once we were out of anyone’s earshot, he said in a low voice, “We need to seize that chamber, now.”

“Chamber?” I asked. “What chamber?”

“The one with the fucking Idlewild machine,” he growled, and started walking briskly down the hall. I trotted behind, trying to keep up. As he walked, Qurakas gave orders into his wrist device. He directed Jimson, who was in virtual mode, to project into the Idlewild Chamber, and once there, to disable projected access.

“Should I disable projected access to the Security team as well?” Jimson asked.

“Absolutely,” Qurakas. “Disable it for everyone. Then seal the room physically to everyone but me and Fergusdottor. Once the two of us arrive, no one gets in except for my engineering team, and they must be unaccompanied to enter.”

Goosebumps ran over my entire body. Qurakas wasn’t fooling around. “Projected access” is when your avatar moves instantly from one ship location to another. Its use was pretty much limited to meetings and emergencies, and it's a tool that allows Security cover a lot of ground quickly.

“Once we get to the chamber,” Qurakas told me, “I’m going to wake up half the team so we can physically hold the location while you work.”

“Are you expecting a fight?” I asked.

Qurakas smiled. “Back on Earth, I was a Boy Scout. Do you know the Boy Scout motto?”

I thought for a moment. Motto was already an ancient word, but Boy Scout? It sounded vaguely medieval, like the word “chamber.” In spite of that strangeness, his musty call to the past echoed somewhere in my deep memories, and in response a phrase came floating up from the depths of memory. ”Be Prepared?” I ventured.

Qurakas nodded. “Be Fucking-Well Prepared. If Donaldson tries to use force on you, he better bring a goddamn army, because we will be--” He looked at me to finish the sentence.

“Prepared?”

He laughed. “Good girl!” he said, and he socked me playfully on the arm.

“You’re getting off on this, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah, I am!” he replied.

It took another 15 minutes for us to arrive at the “chamber.” Jimson opened the door by the barest crack to let us enter, and swiftly closed and locked it behind us. Jimson was clearly anxious. I could almost hear his nerves jangling. “So…,” he asked. “What’s going on?” His hands couldn’t stop moving -- they way one hand worked the other, it looked like he was trying to crack every knuckle from wrist to finger tip.

“The game is afoot!” Qurakas cackled. “The GAME is AFOOT!”

Jimson's face showed even more confusion, as he glanced first at Qurakas’ feet, then at mine.

 

---

 

Given the size of the ship, the number of engineers in avatar mode, and the various duties they were currently performing, it was an hour before all the engineers were assembled in the chamber. Half our number was awake and physically present. The other half arrived as avatars. Everyone knew that something was “afoot,” and the nervous, excited tension was palpable.

Qurakas scanned the room. All eyes were on him. Every faced showed full attention. He paused for a dramatic moment, then spoke:

“Welcome to the Idlewild Chamber. The existence and location of this room were classified until ninety minutes ago. It was a secret only the higher-ups were privy to. I only learned of it today -- I was automatically given access when the Idlewild Protocol was declassified.”

Jimson raised his hand to ask a question. Qurakas shook his head. “Questions later. First, I’m going to explain. Second, we’re going to prepare for war. After that, you can ask your questions.

“You all know Fergusdottor. You all knew her when she was Fergus, and you all know about the accident that changed her gender. You also know that for the past five years, while we were all asleep, she was making major efforts, every day, to find a way back to being Fergus. Her efforts, while they didn’t succeed in changing her back to who she once was, have resulted in several scientific and technological breakthroughs and innovations. She’s expanded our understanding of the profile system, the rejuvenation beds, the plastic-surgery module, and several other devices.

“She also uncovered an insidious sabotage plot -- a plot whose goal was to kill every one of us through a cyber-virus. We all owe her our lives.

“In spite of all that, in spite of everything that Fergus endured, in spite of all the efforts Fergusdottor has made, I am offended, disgusted, furious, and sick at heart, because I have to tell you that -- during all that time, unbeknownst to Fergusdottor, unbeknownst to everyone on board -- except for a precious few -- there was a machine sitting right here -- a machine whose sole function and purpose is to change a person’s gender. That’s the one: that ugly-looking metal box back there.” He gestured to the device.

“There are a few people on board, all men, who have been designated Idlewild Candidates, and this machine is supposedly able to convert those men into women -- women capable of bearing children.”

“Why?” Jimson asked.

“Questions later,” Qurakas repeated. “As I told you, today, roughly ninety minutes ago, the Idlewild Protocol was declassified. Obviously, no one’s going to try to turn Fergusdottor into a woman -- she’s already there. And there’s clearly no reason to round up the handful of Idlewild Candidates and turn them into women.

“We can only speculate about what’s coming and what it has to do with Fergusdottor, but I have a very bad feeling about it and I want to make sure that Fergusdottor has the space, the time, and the support to look into this machine and see if it could help her solve her problem. I’m afraid that someone might be trying to close a door before she steps through it.”

Jimson asked, “Is someone actually trying to stop her?”

Qurakas nodded. “It sure looks that way. Lt Donaldson, specifically, tried to prevent her from even seeing the machine, let alone studying or using it. Now, I propose that we commandeer this room and make it our command center, and we will do whatever it takes to allow Fergusdottor -- who is one of us -- to use this place in peace and security, for as long as she needs.” He looked around the room, reading the faces. “Anyone who doesn’t want a part of this, just let me know. I’ll let you get out of this room and I’ll keep you out of it.” He looked around the room and was met with expectant silence. “Otherwise…” Then, just like in a movie, he abruptly shouted, “WHO’S WITH ME?” and the room erupted in cheers.

Jeez, I said to myself, Could we really go a thousand years with nothing happening?

 

---

 

While I walked around the Idlewild device, Qurakas prepared for siege. He brought in autonomous food-fabs, water and air purifiers, and power supplies. He wheeled in a portable lavatory, and set it up in the corner. In the little space that was left, he installed engineering workstations, so our team could keep up with our duties. Lastly, he brought in stun weapons and shields. “Just in case,” he said, with a smile.

“I forgot that you were Army before you joined the ships,” I said.

“That is correct,” he replied. “And now that WE are ready, is there anything else that YOU need?”

“I just need a console, so I can plug into the device.”

Qurakas had to send one of his guys out to grab me one. I could see he was a little miffed that he hadn’t thought of that one tiny detail. He sat at my side as I turned on the Idlewild device and attached my console. “I hope you don’t mind if I watch,” he said. “It’ll give me a chance to learn something.”

One extremely helpful thing I found while studying the rejuvenation bed and the plastic-surgery module, was that, among the folders containing the operating system, program files, and utilities, there was a folder marked DOCUMENTS. As you’d expect, there was quite of bit of useful information there, although the quality varied. Some of the documents were well-written and complete. Others were obviously dashed off quickly, like the sketchiest of field notes. In any case -- and exactly as I hoped and expected -- the Idlewild device had just such a collection.

Before I began to dig into that treasure trove of information, I took a quick look around the system, and (among other things) I found the names of the Idlewild Candidates onboard. There were three of them. Three men who -- unbeknownst to them -- could apparently be converted to women if the occasion demanded.

“Shit,” Qurakas exclaimed.

“Do you know any of them?” I asked. “I don’t.”

“I know they’re on the ship, but for sure they aren’t in our crew. They’re all asleep right now.”

“Should we tell them? We could leave each one a message.”

“No,” Qurakas said. “It’s doubtful this protocol will ever be invoked. Why give them something to worry about? Something that will never happen?”

“It’s already been invoked,” I replied.

“No,” he said in a pedantic tone, “It’s been declassified, and only to a limited extent.”

“That doesn’t change anything for these three men.”

“If you tell them, you’re going to give them a problem that they won’t be able to do anything about. The only thing you’ll do is raise their anxiety level, permanently. There is no point in telling them.”

“I feel I have an obligation to tell them,” I said. “If something this momentous was hanging over my head, I’d rather know.”

“Hmm,” he mused. “Don’t project your preferences on them. You don’t know what they want. And like I said, chances are, this will never happen. AND, one more thing, one big thing: it’s not your place to tell. This information, which we found by accident, is still classified. If you go telling anyone -- even these three men -- you’ll be subject to disciplinary measures.” We looked at each other for several seconds, trying to read each other’s thoughts in our faces. In the end, I figured that, even if I decided to warn the three men, I wasn’t obliged to inform Qurakas. It was also pointless to argue with him about it right now. If I convinced him that I was going to warn the three men, he could take steps to block me from doing it.

So I just said, “You’re right,” and turned back to my console.

The smallest document was labelled 00-OVERVIEW -- it was clearly the place to start.

According to the overview, Dr Idlewild and his team accidentally discovered a physical condition that they called Dormant Protandrous Dichogamy. In plain English, a man with Dormant Protandrous Dichogamy has a female reproductive system inside him. This dormant system is so small, and so minimally active, that it can only be found if you’re specifically looking for it. There are no external signs of the condition, which explains why those tests were so excruciating -- I mean, the tests we all underwent to determine whether we were Idlewild Candidates. They were painful and invasive. You could even describe them as harrowing.

It took me fifty minutes to get through the overview. The document wasn’t long, but I had to keep stopping to get over my horror and shock. Then I sat in silence for another thirty minutes, until Qurakas came over to see how I was doing.

“Donaldson was right,” I told him. “This has nothing at all to do with me. It’s a one-way process, and it’s only for men with a certain physical condition.”

“There’s nothing you can take, or use, or adapt for what you need?” he asked.

“No,” I said. Then, after a long pause, I added in a slow, quiet voice, “This is creepy as hell.”

“What is creepy as hell?”

“The whole thing: the idea, the testing, setting those men up for this… you know, Idlewild must have tested this on real people, back on Earth. He must have cut people open to see... “ I shuddered. “It’s all so… unethical... and wrong… and... just disgusting.”

Qurakas wasn’t sure what to say, so he rubbed his beard, making a light scritching noise.

“And this machine--” the words began to stick in my throat “--this machine is so fucking barbaric! I’d like to blow if off the face of the Earth.” Qurakas glanced at my face, bemused by my choice of phrase. So I added, “You know what I mean. This fucking horror ought to be destroyed.”

“What exactly does it do?” he asked.

“Well, the man is restrained in that chair,” I told him, pointing. “He is closed inside and knocked out. Then, through a combination of various injections and radiation pulses, his dormant female organs are forced to grow. In the beginning, all the changes are internal. They pump him full of hormones and other shit, including euphoriants. Once his vagina is developed enough inside of him, they chop off his male genitals and form a female set. If they left his bat and balls intact, they’d atrophy anyway, and his newly developed organs would have no outlet. At that point, the genital reconstruction is a medical necessity.”

Qurakas gaped at me, then shook and shuddered. “This is like something out of the middle ages,” he said.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s brutal. It’s ingenious, I have to say, but in a totally sick and twisted way. It makes what happened to me seem like a walk in the park. Anyway, the final step--”

“The FINAL step?” Qurakas interrupted. “You mean there’s more?”

“Oh yes,” I said, with a heavy sigh. “The final step is a massive conglomeration of cosmetic surgeries, meant to make the newly minted woman as visually desirable as possible.”

“Let me guess,” Qurakas said. “She gets turned into a bimbo.”

“Maximum bimbo, yeah,” I nodded. “Then, after recovery -- which can be accelerated, if they feel it’s necessary -- she is put into service, making babies.”

Qurakas shook his head. “It’s nuts. It’s not as though we don’t have enough women. Half the ship is female, and statistically most of the embryos are going to be girls. As some kind of insurance, or redundancy, this doesn’t seem very effective, or even necessary.”

“No,” I agreed. “It’s not as though you can expect one woman to be the mother to a whole new human race.”

Qurakas mused, “It’s hard to imagine a circumstance where a machine like this would ever be needed.”

“Actually… there was something about that in the doc,” I told him. “Apparently there were software glitches in the sleep pods on some of the first-generation ships. Those, uh, glitches ended up killing all the women onboard.”

“What the--” Qurakas swore. “All the women?”

I shrugged. “That’s what it says.”

“How?”

“It doesn’t say how. There isn’t any description of the glitch; it just says there was one. Even so, I can’t believe that this was supposed to be the remedy for that.”

Qurakas thought for a moment, then asked me, “So when did these things first go into service? Can you tell?”

“Yes,” I replied. “According to the docs, this was one of the features that defined the second-generation ships.”

“It was pretty clever, the way they hid this chamber from us, the engineering crew,” he mused.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I looked around. The room had high ceilings, typical of Kingdom ships, and it was a lot bigger than it probably needed to be. The machine was big, but it only took up a fifth of the room. What was all the extra space for? Spectators? I shuddered.

“We can go now,” I told Qurakas. “That’s for letting me do this.”

“Wait -- what?” he asked, startled. “You want to leave? If you leave, Security might not let you come back.”

“I don’t want to come back. I never want to see this room ever again. We can leave now, and seal the damn place up again.”

Qurakas seemed baffled. “But -- Fergusdottor, we’ve only been here a couple of hours. You can’t possibly be finished. You can’t tell me that you’ve really studied this machine.”

“No, I haven’t, but I’ve seen enough. I’m done. This machine isn’t going to help me, and frankly I’d like to get the hell away from it.”

“You can’t take a few more days to study this machine… to get to know it, all the way down to its casing?”

“No, there’s no point.”

“You can’t methodically work your way through every document and file in its memory? In the hopes of some hidden revelation that could unlock who knows how many secrets?”

“I don’t want to. It isn’t worth the time or the energy.”

He looked stumped. Was it because he wanted more time to play soldier? Why didn’t this place freak him out? Did he know more than he’d let on? How much had Donaldson told him? How much had he known already?

In soft, quiet voice, I ventured a question: “Qurakas, what’s going on?”

Qurakas didn’t respond. Instead, he leaned back in his chair so it was resting on its back legs. He leaned back so far, I expected him to fall over. He stared up at the far corner of the ceiling, then set his heels, with great deliberation, one at a time, on the edge of the table. With agonizing slowness, he linked his fingers together behind his head and spread his elbows wide. After all that, without looking at me, he said, “When I miss Earth, do you know what I miss the most, Fergusdottor?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, more than a little irritated by his manner. “The stinky air? The foul water? Sunburn?”

“No,” he said, in a slow drawl. “Smoking.”

“What?” I snapped. “Smoking? Smoking what? Smoking piles of--”

“No,” he replied, cutting me off. “Smoking cigarettes.”

“What are you even talking about?” I asked him. “On Earth, you can’t even find a cigarette in a museum, let alone smoke one. And aside from that, what the hell? What the hell, Qurakas? I just told you that I want to get out of here! We can all get out of here! Thank you -- seriously, thank you. I appreciate your giving me the time and opportunity for this, but now it’s enough. It’s over. I’m done. I want to get out of this creepy chamber!”

He held two fingers to his lips, and inhaled, as if he were drawing on an invisible cigarette. He held his breath for two beats, then blew it out gently, as if it were tobacco smoke. “I bet I would be a mad genius for blowing smoke rings,” he said.

“Fuck the smoke rings!” I said. “What is with you? I’m sincerely grateful that you did all this for me, Qurakas, but I want out of this chamber of horrors! Now!”

“What if I told you that there was a bigger chamber of horrors outside?” he asked in a very quiet voice.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Fergusdottor, Fergusdottor,” he said. “Do you remember how you said that if something momentous was hanging over your head, you’d want to know?”

My breath stopped. My heart stood still. “Yes?”

He took his feet off the table and lowered all four chair legs to the floor. He leaned closer, so his face looked directly into mine. In a voice that only I could hear, Qurakas whispered, “Something momentous is hanging over your head.”

The Endless Dance Card : 7 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

We ended up staying in the Idlewild Chamber for twelve days. No one bothered us or tried to get us out, which disappointed Qurakas, but he never lost hope. He did confide in me, one night, that the Security team had weapons that “we are helpless against” but it was quite clear that he would rather have fought and lost than never to have fought at all.

He wouldn’t expand on his “bigger chamber of horrors outside” or say exactly what the “something momentous” over my head was. All he’d say was, “Once you’re done studying that hellish machine, we’ll talk about our options.”

So, I did as he suggested: I studied the machine “down to its casing.” Why? Because (1) I didn’t have any better idea of how to pass the time, (2) he might well be right about the Idlewild Device holding some secret that would prove useful to me, (3) Qurakas wasn’t going to let me out of the damn room before he was good and ready, and (4) I kept bouncing back and forth between thinking he was bluffing and being frightened to the core by what he’d said.

As it turned out, the casing of the device had a thick lead lining, which was a strange surprise. After some thought, and given the size of the room, I figured that the shielding was for the protection of the onlookers -- although why there should be any onlookers was a riddle in itself. Med personnel would have their own individual shielding, but I guess that wasn’t part of the calculation.

It took me five days to dig my way through the nuts and bolts of the Idlewild Device, to read through all of its documentation, and to dip into some of its programs. In the end, my estimation didn’t change: the device and the idea behind it were cruel, brutal, and completely unnecessary. Also, I couldn’t discover any connection to me, except for the fact that I’d changed gender, although I’d done it in a completely different way.

Qurakas asked me to do presentations about my work on the profiles -- he called these presentations “brown bags” for some reason. Incidentally, I began to suspect that Qurakas was quite a bit older than he looked. He might have been one of the early testers of the rejuvenation bed, back on Earth. Dr Idlewild was supposed to be over 300 years old, so Qurakas could have been any age between 18 and 300, I suppose. Every time I tried to explore the question, he would deflect my questions with jokes.

Speaking of questions, several times a day, in various emotional states, I’d ask him what Donaldson’s “agenda” was regarding me. One of his replies went like this: “I don’t know exactly what Donaldson’s up to. He is clearly obsessed with you. A psych would call his obsession pathological. He’s got a dark design on you, and the fact that he invoked the Idlewild Protocol -- which is a pretty heavy card to play -- means that he’s looking to gain some ultimate authority over you. An authority that can’t be challenged. As to what he’d do with that...” He’d lift his hands in an open-palmed shrug.

I protested, “But nothing in the protocol applies to me -- except for the part about expecting me to make babies.”

Qurakas shrugged again, but said, “You could see in our meeting that the judge-advocate completely side-stepped the whole business about the protocol. To me that means that she didn’t see any connection to you, either.”

I asked him what the deal was with his references to smoking when I first told him that I wanted to leave the chamber. He said, “I was just stalling. It was stupid. Subconsciously I guess I was trying to tell you that it was okay to blow off some of our responsibilities.”

“To Donaldson and his agenda, you mean.”

“Exactly, to Donaldson and his agenda.”

Qurakas let me read a copy of the Idlewild Protocol. Most of it was explanatory; a briefer version of the 00-OVERVIEW document. It gave the location of the Idlewild Chamber (it was called exactly that in the document) and the access codes. An appendix gave the names of the three candidates--

I challenged Qurakas. “You already knew the three names! The three Idlewild candidates.”

“Not really,” he replied. “I got that document maybe thirty minutes before you walked into Donaldson’s meeting. I skimmed it. Most of it didn’t register. The main thing that concerned me was the chamber. That was the only piece I was actually responsible for. Everything else was decoration, as far as I was concerned.”

“So you haven’t read the whole Protocol.”

He wiggled his hand like a teeter-totter. “Sort of. Kind of. I’m not a big reader, Fergusdottor.”

I groaned and rubbed my eyes. “So you didn’t get the feeling that the Candidates are basically chattel?”

“Chattel?”

“Slaves. Property. Cattle. People without rights or self-determination.”

“It says that?”

“Not in so many words,” I sighed in exasperation. “But I mean, they’re yanked out of their lives, away from any purpose they’ve found for themselves, and changed into something completely different. They’re used. They’re compelled. They don’t have any choice in anything that happens to them. Isn’t that why you told me there was a bigger chamber of horrors outside?”

He reflected for a moment. “Not as such,” he said at last. “No. I actually didn’t read that part, or those parts, or whatever. Look -- what I said -- it was just a feeling… a really strong gut feeling about Donaldson. Up to now, I always thought he was a pretty solid guy -- I mean, in the past you never had any problems with him, right?”

“As Fergus, no.”

“Right. As Fergus. Now that you’re a girl, he’s gotten really weird about you. He obviously wants to jump your bones, but there’s some freaky twist in there as well.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s my feeling, too.”

“You know, a lot of guys…,” Qurakas said, warming to his subject, “... a lot of guys, you know, they want a woman, they kind of lock onto a woman. Say, some guy gets stuck on you -- he might even think he’s in love -- and he follows you around and says dumb things and all that, but the moment you have sex, the magic disappears; the spell is broken. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so.” It hadn’t happened to me as a girl, but I’d been on the other side of it, as Fergus.

“Yeah, so... but Donaldson, I don’t think it would end that way with him. If you had sex with him, it would be a confirmation to him: it would cement you in his mind. He would want to turn you into the vehicle of his weirdness. Do you know what I mean?”

Unfortunately, I did. Not in exact details, but Donaldson had acquired a level of creepy that absolutely radiated out of him. It was impossible to ignore.

“Oh, there’s one more thing,” Qurakas said. “I know that you’re planning on telling those three Idlewild Candidates about all this. You don’t need to bother.”

“Why not?”

“By now, everyone on the engineering crew knows the general outline of the Idlewild Protocol. They’re going to talk. It’s going to spread all over the ship. It’s inevitable. Those three guys -- they already know they’re Candidates, right? They knew back on Earth, after the tests were done. Until now they didn’t know what it meant, but as soon as their crew wakes up, they’ll find out.”

“Oh, shit!”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. It’s all on Donaldson.”

 

---

 

There were times in that room that I felt like Wendy with the Lost Boys. Qurakas was Peter Pan, of course. Tinker Bell? Any of the engineering avatars who popped up and disappeared. Captain Hook? Well, that would have to be Lt Donaldson, of course.

It was so boring in there, that I actually spent several hours trying to puzzle out a real-life equivalent to the crocodile with the alarm clock inside him.

There were a few times, in the deepest part of the night, when I was moved to quiet, secret tears by the efforts my teammates were making to protect and shield me.

However, all things -- whether good or bad -- come to an end at some point. For our campout in the Idlewild Chamber, the end came after twelve days. After nearly two weeks of being locked inside that room, all of us wanted out. Even Qurakas had gotten tired of playing soldier. In spite of the active environmental controls, the chamber began to stink. It also began to feel like prison. Just speaking for myself, I hate suspense. I don’t like the anxiety of anticipation. Whatever weird, creepy plan Donaldson had in store for me, I wanted to face it and get it over with. If it wasn’t inevitable, I’d put up a fight. If it *was* inevitable, avoiding it wouldn’t help.

Two days after we left the Idlewild Chamber, Donaldson convened his meeting once again. The attendees were the same: me, Qurakas, the doctor, the psych, Donaldson himself, and the woman I didn’t know. She turned out to be the judge/advocate, and this time *she* led the meeting. She never said her name; she asked us to call her “judge/advocate.”

“My role here is to see that everyone’s interests are represented: those of Fergusdotter, the various views represented by the other participants, and potentially those of everyone onboard. Whatever decisions we make here may come to be regarded as precedents for future behavior so they must be taken seriously, and they will be binding. If anyone has reason to question my ability to act super partes, now is the time to register your objections.”

No one spoke, so she continued. “This meeting was requested by Lt Donaldson, and he has chosen the Idlewild Protocol as the basis, or pretext, for his requests.

“After analyzing his requests, I believe they can be boiled down to one simple thing: that Fergusdottor enter the reproductive pool. Do you have any objection to that, Fergusdottor?”

“No, of course not,” I replied. “Aren’t I already in the, uh, reproductive pool?”

“In a general, casual sense, yes, but not officially. The pool I’m speaking of is a count of pregnancies.”

My eyes popped. “Pregnancies?”

“Yes. Every woman on board is asked to produce ten pregnancies, if possible. Ten embryos. Virtually every women in our crew has done so, including myself.”

“But that will take ten years, at least!” I pictured myself waddling around the ship, great with child, for an entire decade.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “At least one of your mothers should have explained this to you. Are you telling me that this is your first time hearing about the ten embryos?”

My mind drifted back to Mother No. 1 and her endless explanations. Somewhere in my memories of her prattling, there was an echo. I’m sure she did say something about ten embryos, but at the time I brushed it off. Back then, I never expected to remain a woman, so I didn’t pay very much attention, especially to something I deemed far off and improbable. “It does sound kind of familiar,” I admitted. “But I don’t recall the details.”

The judge-advocate looked to the doctor, who nodded at the silent prompt. She looked me in the eye (to be sure I was paying attention) and said, “Basically, it works like this: when you get pregnant, your fertilized egg attaches to your womb, and it begins to grow. You’ll wear a wrist device that can sense this, and after 5-7 days we’ll do a vaginal flush and transfer the embryo to storage. It will only be a dozen cells or less at that point. After we’ve landed on a planet, and it’s time for the children to be born, the embryos will move into the gestation device, and after nine months emerge as babies. You’ll never be pregnant for more than a few days.”

“So, you see,” the judge-advocate added, “You could produce ten embryos in less than a year.”

“It’s unlikely,” the doctor rebutted.

“But possible,” the judge-advocate replied.

I scratched my chin. “And every woman on board has done this?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, with a touch of impatience. “Virtually all. Some were physically unable, but everyone who could, did. Where do you think all the embryos came from?”

Honestly, I never thought about where the embryos came from. They were just there, like part of the ship. But, my God! There were SO MANY embryos. And yet, ten didn’t seem so many. So I agreed. “Okay,” I said. “If every other woman has done this, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t as well,” Then, joking, I added, “How bad could it be?”

The women, as one, stopped, held their breath, and looked at me, but none of them said a word. Donaldson gave a particularly creepy smirk. I was taken aback.

“No, but, uh, seriously--” I asked, looking from face to face, feeling a little concerned, “How bad can it be?”

I waited for an answer, but none came. After a few silent seconds, the doctor said, “After this meeting, you can come with me. I’ll set you up with the wrist device and go through all the grisly details.”

Half-kidding, and more than half-concerned, I quipped, “I hope the details aren’t too grisly.”

“Oh!” the doctor replied, as if just hearing what she’d said. “Let’s just call them details. Girl stuff.”

Donaldson’s smirk somehow gained a few degrees of creepy. The judge-advocate asked if there was any other matter to discuss, and ended the meeting.

 

---

 

The wrist device was a white thing that looked like a cool wristwatch. In fact, it did display the date and time as well as some of my physiological functions. It had a number of other useful functions, like a countdown timer and an interface to some general ship systems.

“Will this show when I’m ovulating?” I asked. “That’s the only time I can get pregnant, right?”

“Yes,” she replied, “that true, but keep in mind that sperm can live inside you for up to seven days. And most women’s menstrual cycles can vary, even from one month to the next, so it’s possible to get pregnant from sex you had *before* you were ovulating, on a day you might have thought was safe.”

“Even so,” I said, “I’ll still be able to mark days off my calendar when getting pregnant won’t possible at all, can’t I?”

The doctor seemed uncomfortable with my line of questioning. “Yes, sure, you can cross off some days. But the thing is… the kind of questions you’re asking were more relevant when people were trying to not have babies, or when they had difficulty getting pregnant. The current thinking -- Kingdom-Ship thinking -- is that we try any time -- or all the time, and your body gets the idea that you’re ready.”

I scratched my head. “Your body gets the idea?” I repeated.

“Look, Fergusdottor,” she said, “Do you want to get this pregnancy count over with? Just have sex as much as you can -- except, obviously, when you’re bleeding. If you want to win the lottery, you have to keep buying tickets, right?”

“The lottery,” I mused. “That’s not a great metaphor.”

“Oh my God, Fergusdottor!” she cried. “Don’t overthink it! Just line up some partners and do it!”

 

---

 

I didn’t think I’d have any trouble finding sexual partners, given my status as a “celebrity,” but now it seemed that men would glance at my wrist device, and practically run away. I couldn’t understand it. I mean, I wasn’t looking to get married. It wasn’t as though they’d end up paying child support or something. I didn’t want any kind of commitment or relationship -- not even a short one. I wasn’t looking for love; I was only looking for a jump. That’s all.

I tried wearing cuter clothes. It didn’t help. I dd different things with my hair. I tried wearing sexy, provocative clothes, and experimented with cosmetics. That seemed to positively scare the men, and made the women roll their eyes at me.

I ran into Qurakas in the hall during the peak of my attempts to be a femme fatale, and he smiled. “Who are you trying to be? Mata Hari?”

I shook my head. “Nobody knows who that is, Qurakas. I mean, if Madda Whoosie was even a person.”

He laughed. “Okay,” he conceded. “You look like a streetwalker.”

As soon as I was alone I looked up the word, and found this: “A prostitute, especially one who solicits in the streets.” Oh, great, I told myself. Not at all what I was going for! But still, if that’s what I look like, why aren’t any of the fish biting?

After two weeks in which I scored exactly zero for sexual encounters, I returned to my ordinary clothes. They seemed better suited for moping around. At that point, I ran into Donaldson, apparently by accident. And yet, as creepy as he’d been, I was so desperate that I would have even done it with him. But even *he* wasn’t interested! All he wanted to do was talk.

He told me that he heard that I was having trouble finding sexual partners. I asked how he could have possibly heard that. He replied that “things get around.”. He went on to say that he knew exactly what the problem was, and that he knew exactly how to help me solve it.

He was actually talking and acting like a normal person during this exchange. The weird, crazy, creepy aspect was gone -- or, as it turned out, was well hidden.

“I’ve got a way to make it happen,” he said. “See -- the problem is that your wrist device tells men that you’re looking to fill your pregnancy quota. Instinctively, the man feels that you want some kind of commitment, or at least a promise, from him. He looks at that wrist device and sees a ball and chain on his ankle.”

“But I don’t want any commitment!” I cried. “I’m not interested in any promise! All I want is a jump. I can’t tell if any particular encounter is going to make me pregnant. I just want to up my chances. Way up! I’m not asking for a guarantee; I just want a shot.”

“I know,” he said, “but men are wired to see pregnancy as a trap.”

“Are we?” I challenged.

He regarded me for a moment, then said, “Okay. Leaving aside the fact that you lost your man card, so you can’t say *we* -- think back to when we were all back on Earth, back when you were Fergus. Young, frisky Fergus. During training, all of a sudden, casual sex was not only okay, it was encouraged. Strongly encouraged! It was fun. It was totally casual and free. It had no consequences -- at least, as far as we men were aware. There weren’t any consequences whatsoever. I mean, none of the women ever got pregnant -- apparently! Not even one! But none of us -- not even one of us ever asked why. We had no idea that we were helping them fill their quotas. You didn’t know, did you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“No, of course not. If we had known, it would have spoiled everything. You thought you were getting laid so often because you were so smooth and handsome. So did we all; so did we all. In reality, we were just a number that increased their chances of filling their quota.”

My memories of that time drifted across my mind’s eye, and I saw, one after another, the faces of the women I’d had sex with. They knew. I could see it now: the anxiety, the hope, the stress that was written there. Now *I* had that look. Men could see it, and -- unlike back on Earth -- now they knew why I had it.

Donaldson added, “That’s why in ordinary life, men on Earth preferred to pay prostitutes.”

“Some men,” I contradicted.

“Some men,” he conceded. “The act of paying made it clear that the interaction had a definite beginning and a definite end. There were no consequences -- emotional or reproductive.”

I blushed. “I’m not going to become a prostitute,” I told him. “Besides, we have no money here. It wouldn’t make sense.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I have a way to make the whole issue more… transactional. Anonymous, even.”

“How can sex be anonymous?”

“What you need is a dance card,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”

“It sounds like something from the Middle Ages,” I replied.

“It was an actual, physical card, at one time,” he told me. “If a man wanted to, uh, dance with a young lady, he would write his name on her dance card, and when his turn came, they would dance.”

I blushed crimson. “So what are you proposing? A sign-up list? Do you really think that men would go and write their names… and all that?”

“Nothing quite as crude as that,” he replied. “It would be managed far more discreetly.”

I could feel the skin of my face and chest glow hot with embarrassment. “How discreetly? How exactly would it be managed?”

“I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Follow me, and I’ll explain everything.”

He led me to a small room, about the size of a meeting room. It was quite bare, except for a table, a few chairs, and a food-fab. In the far corner was a door that led to a full bathroom, with shower, sink, toilet, and bidet. A bookcase was piled high with towels, small and large. There was also (incongruously) a sofa against one wall.

In the middle of the wall opposite the sofa was a round hole. It was a meter across, and rimmed with a soft beige material that resembled a very pliable leather.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

Donaldson glanced around the room as if looking for something. “I’ll show you…” he said. “I’ll show you… as soon as I find the remote control. Do you see a little blue rectangular box, about this big, lying around someplace?” He bent to look under the table. I took a look in the bathroom. He shifted the towels, searching among them. I glanced into the hole, and called out, “Hey! Is that it?” and I pointed inside.

“Oh, yes!” he said with a smile. “That’s the one! Could you grab it for me?”

I put my head and shoulders into the hole and, resting on my elbows, I looked around. It was an odd space, maybe two meters wide. Immediately inside the hole, and filling the space, was a cushioned table exactly the height of my waist, precisely level with the lower edge of the hole. As I wormed my way inside, it seemed tailor-made for me: when I got far enough inside that my stomach was resting on the cushion, my feet were still flat on the ground out in the room.

The remote was farther inside than I first thought. I had to wiggle my way forward on the cushioned slab and stretch my arm and fingers forward. I was sure I could get it. It was almost out of reach, but I was up for the challenge: I knew I could get it. My thighs pressed against the wall below the opening, and I became acutely aware that my wiggling must have given Donaldson a fine show of my derriere. I blushed. Still, no one had cast even a casual eye on my buttocks in the past weeks, so let him look! As my hand moved closer toward the little blue box, I realized what a vulnerable position I had placed myself in. My hips, legs, and feet were hanging down in the room itself, where Donaldson stood. He’d be able to look up my skirt if he bent just a little, and if he wanted to grab me, I’d have a hard time resisting. My entire upper body, from my waist to the top of my head, was inside the hole. My stomach and breasts rested on the cushioned surface. A warning sounded inside my brain, but I couldn’t react in time. Stop! Stop! GET OUT OF THERE! a voice within me cried. But the warning came too late: my hand was already committed; my fingers closed around the little blue box. At once, I heard a soft click and a hiss, and the beige rim around the hole expanded until it trapped me, half in, half out. It was a soft restraint that held my waist irresistibly.

“What the hell, you asshole!” I shouted. “Let me out of here! LET ME OUT!”

I pushed on the remote control, but nothing happened. I pushed it a few more times, then took a good look at it. It wasn’t a control at all: it was nothing but a little box with a blue LED inside.

A small speaker crackled to life. “Hello, Fergusdottor. Can you hear me? Is my voice too loud? Too soft?”

“Yes, you bastard! I can hear you and I will kill you!”

“Wait,” he said. “Calm down and listen. There is a soundproof wall between us now. If I shout, if you scream, neither of us will hear each other unless the microphones and speakers are on. You asked me how sex could possibly be anonymous, and here is your answer! While you’re inside that hole, you could have sex with any number of men, and you’d have no idea who any of them were. For their part, they couldn’t be absolutely sure that it was you in there. They’d only see your cute derriere and legs. It could be any woman in there. Even the judge/advocate, if she felt like having some fun.”

I was angry, but what he was saying made some kind of sense. I stopped fighting and listened. “Let’s say you decide to have sex four or five times a day. That number of men would come in, one after another, or spaced at intervals, if you prefer. The sex act happens, then it’s over. They leave, you leave, no one sees anyone’s face. No one’s sure of anything. Everyone gets what they want: a simple transaction with zero commitment. At some point, you’ll become pregnant, but no one will know who the father is. No one would even know you were pregnant. It’s a win-win-win. You win, the man wins, the ship wins.”

I lay there, quiet, considering. I wasn’t sure how I felt about four to five sexual partners a day, but I did want to get through the pregnancy quota, and it certainly seemed like this could speed things up -- as long as there were men willing to participate.

“So what do you say, Fergusdottor?” Donaldson asked. “Do you want me to let you out? Or would you like to begin right now?” Before I could answer, he added, “By the way, if you start right now, none of the men will be me. In case that’s an issue.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you really have men lined up right now?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “As many as you like.”

Four or five, he had said. Was that a lot? Could I handle it?

“Yes,” I agreed. “Let’s do it. Let’s start with four.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m just going to get you ready.”

Ready? I wondered, but what he meant immediately became obvious. He undid my skirt and removed it. Then he lowered my panties and took them off. Finally, he removed my shoes. I was about to ask why he did the shoes last, when the speaker clicked off.

After a few moments of silence, I felt a pair of huge hands on my ass. The thick fingers felt my cheeks experimentally, then ran up and down my thighs. Without any further preamble, the two big thumbs spread my buttocks. Naturally, I half-expected a penis as thick and rough as the fingers, but -- quite to the contrary -- a smooth, narrow cock worked its way up between my thighs, and after a few short pokes, pushed inside me. I gasped and grunted as he went to work. He moved hard and pushed in deep, but his rhythm was so irregular -- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes stopping to push in deep and hold there -- that it was impossible for me to build up to an orgasm.

After five minutes, I finally started to warm up. There wasn’t really any way for me to move with him, except to tighten my pussy now and then. I tried to clamp down on him hard, but he slapped my ass sharply, and then, in a flurry of activity, he came, dumping his load inside me.

He pulled out, and a few moments later I felt a spray cleaning me back there, followed by a flow of air that dried me. I had no idea whether it was automatic or manual.

A second man came up and plugged into me. He pumped away manfully for four minutes, and came in a short burst. He tried to get going a second time, but wasn’t able.

I could describe the third and fourth man, but honestly, my mind wandered. I didn’t need to pay attention, so for the most part, I didn’t. I mean, yes, there was someone pounding away at my ass, their cock inside me. I couldn’t exactly ignore that. Yes, my eyes did widen when they’d start pulsing and dumping their load of sperm. I could feel it vividly. I didn’t cum, though. It didn’t take me anywhere. It was very clinical, very transactional, as Donaldson had said.

After the fourth man, after the spray and the drying air were done, I waited for Donaldson to let me out. I waited a minute (by the clock) and called his name, but there was no answer. I wasn’t scared or angry; I was just a little irritated. I punched the button on the “remote control” even though I knew it didn’t do anything. “Donaldson!” I shouted. “DONALDSON!”

After two minutes of frustration and waiting, I felt a new pair of hands on my butt: hands with long, slender fingers. I shouted, “Hey! No! I said four! FOUR! Not five! Four!” but whoever they were, they probably couldn’t hear me.

I gasped as a long, thick cock rose between my thighs. It was frighteningly big. With one hand on my butt, the man used his other hand to aim his tool directly at my vaginal opening. He paused there, with his tip touching my threshold. I felt a terrible sense of helplessness. How long will this go on? How many men did Donaldson really line up? I wondered. I said four, but this is five! How many will there be? When will he let me out?

As the fear and uncertainty welled up inside me, the huge cock slid inside me as well. I cried out. It was fearfully big. It was the biggest of them all. My body tensed; my legs kicked. I pounded the cushion beneath me with my fists. I screamed and cried. All the while, he kept pushing slowly forward, deeper and deeper within me. My entire body broke into a sweat, and without warning, completely unexpectedly, just moments after he entered me, I came. Hard. My back arched, my muscles tensed, I shook like the wheels of a rollercoaster. Tears rolled down my cheeks. The orgasm, once begun, seemed to have no end. My whole body shook like a leaf in a strong wind. I screamed with utter abandon. Then, my mind went blank and the world seemed to stand still. The only thing that existed was his massive member, sliding in and out of me. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see it.

I kept my eyes closed for a long time. I don’t know how long. With the first four men, I knew exactly what time they began and ended. But this man… I didn’t know anything… time, space… I hardly knew my own name.

My eyes popped wide open when he began to cum. My my jaw dropped open in a wordless cry. His cock pulsed like an earthquake, pressing me open from inside, and I swear I felt the hot white sperm filling me and spilling out of me. It dripped slowly down my inner thigh.

When he finished, he stayed inside me for a long time, not moving, not softening. I lay there, all my senses on maximum alert. Was he going to start again? Was that piledriver going to pound me a second time? Perhaps he was asking himself the same question.

But no -- he stayed like that, plugged into me, huge and hard but not moving, for five minutes by the clock. Then he slowly, oh-so-slowly slid out. I lay there in silence, wondering what would come next. First came the spray, then the drying air, and then…?

I heard a click and a hiss, and the beige restraint deflated and withdrew. Donaldson gave me a hand in sliding out of the hole. I was so shaken, I needed his help.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“I said four, not five,” I told him, and my legs buckled. I grabbed the hole to steady myself..

“Oh, sorry! My mistake! I thought you said ‘four or five’.”

I shrugged. My brain was so literally fucked, that I not only had a trouble standing, I could barely string two words together. I wasn’t about to argue the details of our previous conversation.

“Who was that last guy?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” he replied. “I mean, I won’t tell you that. It goes against what we’re doing here. The only thing I’ll tell you is that none of them were me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sold. Same time tomorrow?”