After a glitch in the teleportation network left thousands of people stranded in the wrong bodies, Kevin found himself in the body of a minor Canadian celebrity, isolated in a mountain cabin until the network came back up. But that was just the beginning of his troubles.
But he was soon distracted from his surroundings by a glance down at himself. At the clothes he hadn’t been wearing a moment ago, the shopping bags he hadn’t been carrying, and the breasts that hadn’t been part of him, displayed to advantage in a low-cut blue blouse.
“Make sure you’ve got your passport out,” Kevin instructed his son Bryce, “and the letter from Dr. Shaw. We’re almost to the head of the line.”
Bryce nodded silently and fished his wallet and a folded-up sheet of paper out of his backpack. There weren’t as many restrictions on what you could take with you in an international teleport as there were on domestic plane flights, but it couldn’t hurt to bring a letter from Bryce’s doctor about the medical equipment and medicine in his suitcase. The TSA guards or customs officials didn’t often hassle them about it, but when they did, the letter was invaluable.
The last of the group of college-age girls ahead of them finished having her suitcase scanned, and went on to the row of teleport booths ahead. Kevin stepped up and lifted his, Bryce’s, and his wife Elise’s suitcases one by one onto the conveyor belt, emptied his pockets into a bowl, and followed his wife and son through the metal detector. Elise was already arguing patiently with the TSA guard, who was looking at the letter from Dr. Shaw suspiciously while another guard pawed through Bryce’s suitcase and pulled out his nebulizer and other equipment.
“...and thus very clearly qualifies as medical equipment. Plus adapters so it will work with European power outlets. And it’s got nothing more complicated inside it than an electric motor, so even if it were turned on — it can’t be, it doesn’t have batteries — it couldn’t possibly interfere with a teleport. I know, I work on those machines for a living.”
Kevin let her talk; she had more patience for dealing with bureaucracy than he did. Bryce didn’t say much, either, fortunately; his sarcasm would not have improved the situation. Finally, the TSA guards decided to let them go, and they joined another, somewhat shorter line for the teleport booths.
Up ahead, they saw one person after another being called from the line by the teleport attendants, who would take their ticket, scan it to program the booth, and let them in. The glass door would close and the person and their luggage would vanish.
Finally it was their turn. Elise was at the head of the line, and one of the teleport attendants finished sending someone to their destination and waved at her. “See you in a minute,” she said to Kevin and Bryce, and briskly walked toward the empty teleport booth. Then Bryce was hurrying toward the next free booth, and then Kevin.
He handed his ticket to the attendant and showed her his passport. “Is your destination showing correctly?” she asked, gesturing at the display on the teleport booth, which was reading “International Customs, Heathrow Airport, London, UK.” They’d put the international teleport stations in airports because that’s where the customs posts were already set up, and because the airlines didn’t need as much space as they used to.
“Right,” Kevin said.
“Then have a nice trip,” she said, and pressed a button to open the sliding glass door. Kevin walked in, pulling his rolling suitcase. He didn’t have time to turn around before he heard the glass door slide shut behind him and —
— okay, this was wrong. He’d teleported before, more often than most people with his income due to Elise’s InstaThere employee discount, and he knew if you weren’t facing the transparent door, you couldn’t tell you’d teleported until you turned around and saw a different place. But he was still facing the back wall of the booth and felt really weird all over.
He turned around to face the glass door, which was already sliding open, and became more aware of the changes. Longer hair was tickling the back of his neck as he moved, and something wobbled slightly on his chest as it caught up with the motion of the rest of his body. There was not a customs receiving area beyond the open door of the booth, no desks or officials or queue of travelers or signage in various languages. Instead, he saw... a tiny little room with a couple of doors, a thumbprint lock, and a bell for visitors to ring. This looked like the teleportation vestibule in a wealthy person’s home, not that he’d ever seen such a thing except on TV.
But he was soon distracted from his surroundings by a glance down at himself. At the clothes he hadn’t been wearing a moment ago, the shopping bags he hadn’t been carrying, and the breasts that hadn’t been part of him, displayed to advantage in a low-cut blue blouse.
He started hyperventilating, dropped the shopping bag (which went flomph rather than clunk, fortunately), and staggered back against the wall of the booth, leaning against it trembling for a few moments before his legs (no, clearly not his) gave out and he slumped to the floor. Finally, after gasping for breath and staring down at that cleavage and the tight pants with no room for anything extraneous in the crotch for some time, he gingerly reached up and touched the left breast, just above the neckline of the blouse.
It felt real. But it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him.
When he had calmed down enough to stand up, he walked out of the booth and tried his new thumb on the thumbprint lock. He breathed a sigh of relief when the door clicked open, revealing a living room. The owner of the house had to be rich, judging from the fact that they had a teleport booth in their house, but you wouldn’t have known that from the other furnishings. They looked like good quality, wood rather than particle board, but not obviously super expensive. No one else was in the room, and he hesitantly called out, “Is anyone home?” No one answered. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. He didn’t want anyone looking at him like this, but if someone were home, maybe they could explain what the hell was going on.
He became aware that he was wearing a purse slung over his shoulder. He pulled it off and rummaged through it, finding a Canadian passport and an Ontario driver’s license in the name of “Dakota Severin,” age 32, female. Not that he hadn’t already figured out the last bit.
There was also, in addition to some feminine paraphernalia and necessities he absolutely didn’t want to think about, a minitablet. He hoped it didn’t need a password. He tried the thumbprint sensor and the desktop came up right away.
He had Elise’s phone number memorized because of having to reel it off whenever someone asked for emergency contact numbers for himself or Bryce. He didn’t want to call her because she wouldn’t recognize this woman’s voice, so he typed her number into the addressee field for the text app and said:
“help! I’m in the wrong place AND THE WRONG BODY, how did this even happen? apparently this body belongs to dakota severin, age 32, female! I’m at somebody’s house, probably hers. will message again when I know more.”
He felt like he was on the verge of another panic attack. He needed something to distract him. After taking some slow, deep breaths, he got up and explored the house. He hadn’t gotten farther than looking around the room just beyond the teleportation vestibule before he realized that he hadn’t identified himself in the message. He pulled out the tablet again and sent:
“this is kevin by the way.”
Then he realized that, if this was like some of the fictional teleporter accidents he’d seen on Star Trek, somebody else was probably in his body. Most likely Dakota Severin. He sent a text to his own phone number, telling her who he was and asking her to look around the Customs area for Elise, whose photo she would find on the wallpaper of his phone; her contacts at InstaThere would get this sorted out soon.
He was about to continue exploring the house, but the sight of his slender arm as he sent the text started another panic attack, and he collapsed onto the nearest sofa, curling up and trembling.
A few minutes later, he forced himself to get up and look into the other rooms. He only glanced into the bathroom, not wanting to see Dakota’s face in the mirror yet, but he wasn’t able to avoid the mirrors in the bedroom. Dakota’s body was striking, though not exactly beautiful; her skin was a shade paler than Kevin’s own, and her hair a shade darker. From this outside-ish perspective, her breasts didn’t seem as freakishly big as they did when Kevin looked down, though he figured they were larger than average for a woman of her build — maybe implants, or maybe one of the new treatments for “naturally” growing larger breasts.
The house seemed smaller than he’d expect from someone rich enough to own their own teleport booth, but it had a great view from every window, forests and mountains as far as the eye could see with no other houses in sight. It had a deck that overlooked a small lake. And there was no garage, car, or even a road, only a helipad, which had no helicopter sitting on it — not that he could pilot one if there had been. The only way out was the teleport booth, which he didn’t trust or know how to use, or walking on foot through however many miles of wilderness to the nearest town.
He pulled out the tablet again and found the maps app, then centered on his current location. It showed nothing but a blue patch of lake and a surrounding blank, unlabeled green area. He had to zoom out a lot before he found the nearest town, which was a long, long way to the southeast. He was somewhere in the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of Alberta.
Of course it had gotten easier to build in remote areas since teleport booths were developed. You helicoptered in a generator, a satellite dish, and a cargo-sized booth, set them up, and teleported in building materials, laborers, and more fuel for the generator until you had an alternate power source set up. It was still pretty expensive, though. This obviously wasn’t Dakota Severin’s only house, given how small it was and how few clothes she had in her bedroom here — mostly sleepwear and hiking gear, it seemed.
After exiting the maps app, he saw a notifications icon. He hadn’t heard any message pings, but he realized the minitablet had been silenced for some reason. He checked the messages and saw several apparently intended for Dakota, from named people he didn’t know, and three from unknown numbers — two of which he recognized as Elise’s and his own, plus an unfamiliar one.
From his own number he saw this:
“no, I’m not this Dakota person. I’m Amy Jedynak and I was on my way to Hartford for my cousin’s wedding. now I’m stuck in Heathrow for who knows how long, not to mention being a GUY. check the news if you haven’t already.”
From Elise’s number, this:
“I apologise, I am not your friend, I do not know what body or place they are. if you have not seen the news, you may not know that this have happen to many people who teleport in same minute. I treat your friend’s body with utmost respect. let us pray the teleport company fix this soonest.”
And from the unknown number, this:
“to whoever is in my body: you’re not going anywhere until the teleport network is fixed, if you haven’t figured that out already. don’t worry, there should be more than enough food in the pantry to last until then. if it looks like the downtime is going to last more than a couple of weeks, I’ll arrange for a copter to come rescue you. don’t try to impersonate me on social media or you’ll regret it; just relax and enjoy a mountain vacation.”
Horror built up in him with each successive message. Everyone who’d teleported within the same minute...? Then Elise and Bryce were almost certainly lost somewhere in the wrong bodies, and someone else was in Bryce’s, too. Someone who wouldn’t know how to do Bryce’s treatments or when to take his meds. Bryce’s health would probably take a sharp downturn by the time he got his body back unless Kevin or Elise could get in touch with whoever was in Bryce’s body and tell them about Bryce’s medical regimen.
That was assuming they would ever get back to their own bodies. But he couldn’t think about that, or he’d start panicking again.
He called Bryce’s phone and didn’t get a response; it went to voicemail after a handful of rings. He then sent a text message, but to be on the safe side, he also sent additional messages to the people in his own and Elise’s bodies, telling them to look at Bryce’s contact photo and then look around the customs area to find the person in his body, and please tell them to get in touch with him via Dakota’s number.
After that, he was too anxious about waiting for the call to pay full attention as he looked for news about the disaster. Not much was known yet, but thousands of people all over the world were stranded in the wrong bodies, often in the wrong country, and InstaThere had shut down their teleport network in response. That meant that a lot more people, not just those in the wrong bodies, might be stranded with no way to get home if the shutdown lasted very long. People who’d teleported moderate distances for the sake of convenience could fly home when they’d finished their vacation or business trip, but there hadn’t been any intercontinental flights in years, not since teleportation became cheaper than long-distance plane tickets, and it would take time for the airlines to gear up and start running them again if the cause of the mixup couldn’t be identified and fixed quickly. As for getting people back in their right bodies... who knew how long that might take.
He watched a couple more videos from other news networks that didn’t tell him anything new, then read some articles, one of which quoted Elise’s boss as saying, basically, they didn’t know why this had happened but they were confident of figuring it out soon. Kevin would feel a little more confident about that if Elise were in the lab helping them.
Finally, a notification ping sounded, and Kevin checked messages. It was from the person in his old body, Amy something.
“finally found the person in your son’s body hiding in the ladies’ room. unfortunately he or she doesn’t speak English. trying to find an interpreter. also looking for the luggage you mention, it wasn’t with him. can you describe it in more detail?”
Kevin swore. If the person in Bryce’s body had panicked and run to the restroom to look over their new body, abandoning his backpack and suitcase... or if they had been stolen from him in the chaos that had probably followed the arrival of a wave of body-shuffled people... even if they established communication, that person would have a hard time following Bryce’s medical regimen without any of his equipment or medicine. Kevin wrote back, describing Bryce’s backpack and suitcase.
About then, the original Dakota started sending him a long series of messages instructing him about her own self-care regimen. He skimmed them over. Nothing as health-critical as Bryce’s treatments, but he’d try to follow it and return Dakota’s skin, hair and... female parts... in the same condition he’d found them. He was a little vague about how fast a woman would get an infection if her vagina wasn’t cleaned properly every day; surely not as fast as Bryce would get sick if he ignored all his treatments, but he wasn’t taking the risk. Still... he’d put most of that off until tomorrow. Hopefully this would all be fixed by then.
He’d been ignoring Dakota’s body as much as possible, but by this point it was insisting that its bladder needed to be emptied, and he couldn’t put it off any longer. He took care of that business as quickly as he could, not looking down at Dakota’s body more than he had to. Feeling restless, he paced around the house for a while, obsessively checking messages and news and not finding anything new. Finally, he decided to go for a slightly longer walk. He wouldn’t go far from the house and whatever infrastructure was allowing this little minitablet to function like a satellite phone in the wilderness, but he wanted to get outside. And he’d already seen Dakota’s crotch and thighs naked, so changing into other clothes without stripping out of underwear wouldn’t be any worse violation of her privacy. He’d have to do worse to follow her self-care regimen if he stayed here for a day or more.
He changed from the shopping outfit into hiking clothes and boots and walked out onto the deck, then down the stairs to the helipad and a small yard with wildflowers and other presumably native ground cover, getting his first look at the house from the outside. It was only a little bigger than his and Elise’s house back in Atlanta, with plain-looking wood siding that blended into the environment pretty well, and the sort of steeply peaked roof he’d seen on his travels up north, lined with solar panels on the south side, and with a high windmill built into the north side. He hadn’t seen the machinery or control room for the windmill in his explorations, though he hadn’t yet thoroughly examined every room. Probably something he’d assumed led to a closet actually connected to the windmill?
He walked around the house on all sides and along the lake for a little distance before heading back to the house, uncertain what the range of reception was. As he was heading back, he got a message from Amy in his body:
“okay, we found your son’s luggage and it seems to have all the medical stuff still in it. still waiting for the interpreter to get here.”
Kevin breathed a sigh of relief, then winced at what that did to Dakota’s chest. He walked for a few more minutes before getting hungry and returning to the house for something to eat.
There wasn’t actually a lot of variety of food in the kitchen. Most of it was non-perishable staple goods, large bags of dried rice, beans, and pasta, and cans of vegetables, soups, and pre-cooked meat. There were no bread, eggs, or fresh vegetables — which would make sense if Dakota (and the rest of her family, if she had any) only spent time here sporadically. If they were rich enough to have multiple houses and teleport booths, they might have a chef, and the chef could bring them most of their meals here while they were in residence, reserving the food in the pantry for emergencies that could prevent them from teleporting out.
There was an extensive spice rack, though, and he added some cayenne pepper and a dash of garlic powder to the can of beef and vegetable soup he heated up. While he ate, Dakota’s phone rang with a call from someone named “Harper,” which he ignored, and a couple of minutes later, an unknown number. Reflecting on the irony of the situation, which had him ignoring calls from identified people (Dakota’s friends) and taking calls from unknown numbers, who might be people he knew, he answered.
“Hi?” said a tentative voice, a woman he didn’t recognize. “Is this Kevin Eldridge?”
“It’s me,” Kevin said, feeling self-conscious at trying out Dakota’s voice for the first time. It was high compared to his natural bass, but lower-pitched than most women’s voices. Probably a low alto if he had to guess, though hearing it from inside the head was undoubtedly making it sound lower than it really was. “I know I sound different —”
“Oh God, you do! I’m Elise, I wound up in Guarulhos, Brazil. Where are you? I just talked to the person in your body, and they gave me this number — they said they’d been working on helping the person in Bryce’s body get started on his meds and treatments —”
“Yeah, once I found out it happened to everyone and not just me, I started trying to get in touch with them. It’s a mess; did they tell you the person in Bryce’s body can’t speak English?”
“Yeah. He said they were trying to get an interpreter. Shouldn’t take too long around an airport. Have you heard anything from Bryce?”
“No, and I’m pretty worried. I’m doing okay, kind of isolated, but safe. I wound up in this rich lady’s summer cabin in the Canadian Rockies —”
“No way!”
“Sure enough,” and he described his situation briefly.
She told him how she’d ended up in the body of someone whose phone battery was dead. The intercity bus station where she’d arrived didn’t have many places to plug in a phone charger, and when she did get it charged, she’d at first had trouble figuring out the Portuguese-language interface on the woman’s phone. When she’d tried calling Kevin or whoever had his phone and body, she got busy signals the first couple of times, and Bryce’s phone kept ringing with no answer.
“We’d better ask Amy or the guy in your body to check Bryce’s phone for messages,” Kevin said. “There could be something from our Bryce saying where he is.”
“Yeah. I’ve been trying to check Bryce’s social media, but I’m having trouble with the Portuguese apps on this phone. The basic phone call interface is about all I’ve figured out so far.”
“I should have thought of that. I’ll do that as soon as we hang up.”
“Do that. I’ll call you back after I get some things straightened out here. I hear in some places the authorities are sorting out temporary housing for people stranded in the wrong bodies, but Guarulhos doesn’t have that busy a teleport station and I was apparently one of only three people teleporting in during the critical time window. Once we figure out Bryce is okay, I’m going to call my boss again — I talked to her briefly earlier — and see what I can do remotely to help fix this.”
“Good. I’ll talk to you soon.”
He hung up, logged out of Dakota’s social media apps, and logged in to his own accounts. He soon found two near-identical messages from Bryce on both accounts; one said this:
“So I’m an old Asian guy now, and my joints hurt, but I can breathe better than before, so that’s a plus. This guy’s ID, if I can figure it out right (the numbers are the only part I can read, and I’m guessing on which is the birthdate) says he’s 49, older than you and Mom. I’m in some city in China I’ve never heard of. It took a few minutes to find somebody who speaks English well enough for me to understand them. Anyway, Mei, the lady who speaks English, says they’ll find me a place to stay until InstaThere fixes the teleport network. Where are you? And what are you? I hear half of the people got turned into the opposite sex, which is freaky but kind of neat, I guess? Did you get that?”
Kevin sighed in relief, fired off a text to the phone of the woman whose body Elise was now in, and then replied to Bryce, telling him about his and Elise’s situations and the person they didn’t know much about yet who was in Bryce’s own body.
I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.
Chapters of Wings will continue to be posted on Friday evenings while I post chapters of "Misteleported" on Tuesday evenings or Wednesday mornings.
The shower took about ten minutes longer than it would have, and thirty minutes longer than his normal showering routine, because he broke down halfway through and huddled in the floor of the shower, unable to look at Dakota’s body or touch it, turning the temperature and pressure up as high as he could stand it as though it would wash off this soft feminine shell and leave the real him.
Over the next few days, Kevin had to endure an endless barrage of teasing and questions from Bryce about what it was like turning into a woman. His hope that the situation would be quickly resolved rapidly evaporated, and he resigned himself to following Dakota’s self-care regimen. He started the next morning with her exercise routine (five different stretches followed by twenty minutes of cardio), which made him uncomfortably aware of Dakota’s body, but wasn’t too unbearable. Then a shower, following her detailed instructions to ensure that her hair stayed glossy and untangled, her skin smooth, and her vagina yeast-free. That took about ten minutes longer than it would have, and thirty minutes longer than his normal showering routine, because he broke down halfway through and huddled in the floor of the shower, unable to look at Dakota’s body or touch it, turning the temperature and pressure up as high as he could stand it as though it would wash off this soft feminine shell and leave the real him. But the real him was divided, and half of him was thousands of miles away, across a continent and an ocean.
After he was dried off and dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, he fixed breakfast and ate, taking a women’s health multivitamin and three herbal supplements. He couldn’t follow her diet exactly with no yogurt or fruit on hand, but he did his best.
He kept in touch with Amy, the woman in his body, who was working with an interpreter to help Ayesha, the person in Bryce’s body, take care of it. The British authorities had gotten them a hotel room together along with the other stranded people from Heathrow and other regional teleport stations and private teleport booths around the London area, and assigned Ayesha an NHS doctor for the duration of the crisis, though so far she hadn’t had any problems that would require a doctor visit. If the crisis lasted more than two weeks, though, she’d need some prescription refills.
Elise and Bryce kept him updated on their situations, as well. Elise’s boss had sent her a laptop via cargo-teleport, which was still working, and she had a priority flight back to the U.S. scheduled on one of the first intercontinental flights since the cost of teleportation had dropped to a level that could compete with airlines. She was working with other engineers to figure out what had gone wrong with the teleport network. The family of Benedita, the woman whose body she was occupying, had loaned her a few days’ worth of clothes and given her a place to stay for the first night until the Brazilian government arranged hotel rooms for her and the other stranded people in smaller cities.
After spending one night in a hotel in Xinyi, Bryce and a handful of other stranded travelers had been sent by train to a new hotel on the outskirts of Guangzhou, where the government was putting up all the foreigners in that region of China who’d ended up in the wrong bodies. Apparently the hotel was still under construction, though the wing they were staying in was pretty much finished, which was why the government could get so many hotel rooms in one place on zero notice. Bryce had found a lot of other travelers who spoke English, whether natively or at least pretty well, and several of them had formed a sort of tour group to explore the city while they were stuck there. He complained to Kevin about how his forty-nine-year-old knees ached when he walked up slopes and stairs, but he seemed to be having a pretty good vacation nonetheless.
Kevin was freaking out about Dakota’s body less often now, but he wasn’t anywhere near used to it and didn’t think he ever would be. The mountain scenery was beautiful, and he enjoyed short walks in the clearing around the house and along the lakeshore, but Dakota had warned him that there were bears, cougars and wolves in the area, so he’d decided to stick pretty close.
Eight days after the mass body shuffle, not long after Elise had flown back to Atlanta and joined the other engineers working on the problem, InstaThere announced that they had found the cause of the problem and fixed it, and opened up the teleport network again. They said they should have a solution to return people to their proper bodies again within a few more days. Mere minutes after the announcement, a chime sounded, and a few moments later, a tall blond man in a tailored suit stepped out of the teleport vestibule.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Dakota. You told me you didn’t know how to operate a teleport booth, so...”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Can you program it for me? I’d like to meet up with my wife and son — I sent them messages after I heard the announcement, but I haven’t heard back yet. My wife is at InstaThere’s main R&D lab in Atlanta, Georgia, and my son is in Guangzhou, China. I sent him a message suggesting we meet up at InstaThere in Atlanta.”
“Well, that makes it simpler,” Dakota said. “I’m sure InstaThere has public teleport booths in their lobby. We just need to look up the target code. Do they have more than one facility in Atlanta...?”
But she didn’t want to enter the target code and send him to Atlanta right away. “You’ll need a few days’ worth of my clothes,” she said, “and toiletries and so on.” Kevin would have been perfectly fine making do with some of the hiking clothes and sleepwear she stored at the cabin, but she was horrified at the thought of him going out in public wearing that. “No, you need decent things for different occasions,” she said. “At the very least, several work outfits and something more casual for after work or if you leave home on the weekend. And makeup.”
“I’m not comfortable in your body and don’t want to wear anything too feminine,” he said uneasily. “Definitely not makeup.”
“Tough,” she said. “I’m a public figure and I don’t want you going around in my body, wearing my face with no makeup, getting photographed wearing hiking clothes or whatever baggy androgynous stuff you decide to try hiding my figure in. Those photos will stick around on the Internet forever. You don’t want that woman who wound up in your body wearing dresses or makeup and risking pictures getting back to your friends, do you? Think about it.”
Kevin reluctantly agreed, so they ended up teleporting together to Dakota’s house in Toronto, where Dakota dragged him up to her bedroom and went through her drawers and closet, picking out outfits and instructing him in the fine points of their use. It was over an hour later when she teleported him to InstaThere Labs in Atlanta.
Kevin walked out as soon as the door slid open and went to the reception desk. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Kevin Eldridge. My wife, Elise Eldridge, is an engineer here, and she’s supposed to have told you to expect me...?”
The receptionist didn’t bat an eye at the mismatch of Kevin’s name and body — apparently she’d met some other sex-swapped victims of InstaThere’s screwup. “Just a moment,” she said, and made a phone call.
While the receptionist was trying to reach Elise, Kevin felt a hand on his arm and turned around, startled. “Bryce!” he exclaimed. There was the middle-aged Chinese man his son had sent him a selfie of, grinning ridiculously.
“Looking good, Dad,” Bryce said. “Have you been whiling away your time in the mountains watching makeup tutorials?”
Kevin blushed, feeling gross. Bryce was just good-naturedly teasing, like he usually did, and it felt wrong to resent it, but he didn’t like it. “No, Dakota insisted on showing me how before she’d teleport me here. She hadn’t bothered telling me about her makeup regimen while I was stuck in that cabin, but once I was going out in public, she didn’t want me to wind up getting photographed and messing up her ‘image.’”
“And I guess that explains the clothes, too.”
“Yeah, I’ve been wearing her hiking clothes and pajamas until now.” Kevin was wearing, at Dakota’s insistence, an outfit similar to the one she’d been out shopping in just before Kevin landed in her body: a low-cut blouse, black with dark blue patterns of lines and circles, and those new women’s pants, Kevin couldn’t remember what the style was called, that were tight in the waist and continued tight down one leg while getting extremely loose on the other.
Bryce grinned even wider. “Fortunately, Mr. Chu hasn’t been such a pain in the ass. Come on, let’s go see Mom.”
“Don’t we have to wait for...?”
“No, Mom sent me out here with an extra visitor’s badge for you,” he said, and fished it out of his pocket and handed it to Kevin. “Come on!”
Kevin turned to the receptionist, who’d hung up and was smiling at them. “I see your son’s already found you,” she said. “Go on.”
So Kevin clipped on the badge and followed Bryce down one of the halls branching from the lobby. A few minutes later, Bryce knocked on a door and Dr. Landon Karga answered the door. He was Elise’s boss, whom Kevin had met at a couple of office Christmas parties, a white man a little older than Kevin — that is, the age of his real body. “Hey,” Bryce said. “I’m Elise Eldridge’s son, I was here a few minutes ago, and my dad just arrived,” gesturing at Kevin, who smiled nervously.
“Come on in,” Karga said. “Elise said she was going to show you around a little and then take a late lunch break with you.” He led them into the lab and Kevin barely had time to take in all the equipment, including over a dozen partially dismantled teleport booths of different sizes, before Elise, now a dark-skinned woman not much older than Dakota, was hurrying toward them.
“Kevin!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad to see you,” and she hugged him. After a moment of hesitation, he hugged back, trying to ignore the awkwardness of feeling Dakota’s breasts pressed against Benedita’s. Would Dakota or Benedita object to this? Certainly they’d have a right to protest if he and Elise went much farther, but hugging was probably all right.
“It’s good to see you too,” he said, backing up a couple of steps after they let go of the hug. “I’ll be glad when you and your colleagues get us back in the right bodies, though.”
Elise frowned, and Kevin felt like Dakota’s heart had dropped into her stomach. “What? The news said you were close to cracking it!”
“The PR department kind of took what Dr. Karga said and ran with it,” she said. “It’s not the first time we’ve had trouble with them promising something that we have to deliver on. We have some ideas, but... well, figuring out how to keep it from happening again is not the same as reproducing it reliably on demand. We could be in these bodies for a while longer.”
Kevin felt dizzy, and looked around absently for something to sit down on. “How much longer?”
“I don’t want to try to estimate... could be weeks, could be months. Probably not years.”
“Huh.” After a long silence, he said, “I guess that’s under NDA, right? I’m not supposed to tell Dakota, or Amy, or anybody?”
“Definitely not. Anyway, let me show you what we’ve figured out so far...”
But Kevin was in a haze of shock and didn’t take in much of what Elise said or showed them. He didn’t start to recover much until they were already on the way to lunch. The building had a food court with several higher-end fast food places, and he had to furrow Dakota’s brow and review the instructions she’d given him about her diet before he could think clearly about what to order.
During lunch, the conversation turned to the people in their original bodies. “I think we should see about getting Ayesha to Bryce’s clinic,” Kevin said.
“I’m not sure we need to,” Elise said. “Yeah, the general standard of health care in Libya may not be great, but she’s from a rich family and can get whatever she needs to take care of Bryce’s body as long as she has it.”
“So she can teleport to Emory just as easily as anywhere else,” Bryce said. “But just because it’s the best clinic in Georgia doesn’t mean it’s the best in the world. She can probably afford one of the even better ones.”
“But the doctors at those clinics won’t know your medical history like Dr. Shaw,” Kevin pointed out. “They can request records from Emory, but reading the records isn’t the same as remembering every illness you’ve ever had.”
“Good point,” Elise said. “So let’s contact her and suggest that she keep Bryce’s appointment with Dr. Shaw on the eighteenth of August if she’s still in his body at that point, and go to him if the body’s health gets worse before then.”
After lunch, Elise went back to work, while Kevin and Bryce rode home in Kevin’s car, which Elise had summoned from their driveway at home when Kevin arrived.
Kevin didn’t have to be back at work, or Bryce back at school, until the next day, so after they unpacked, they relaxed and watched a movie, starting to fix supper when Elise messaged them with her ETA.
After Elise returned home, they ate supper, and talked more about their experiences and Kevin and Bryce’s impending return to work and school. It wasn’t until after supper, when Bryce went to his room, that Kevin and Elise found themselves alone together for the first time in these bodies. Kevin felt the awkwardness and the sexual tension more than ever.
“So,” Elise said, “I didn’t want to ask in front of Bryce, but how are you holding up? Being in a woman’s body can’t be easy for you.”
“It isn’t,” he said. “After eight days, I’ve gotten somewhat inured to bathing this body, and peeing sitting down. But only sort of. Seeing myself in a mirror — or rather, seeing someone else — is still a shock.”
“I can relate to the last part, at least,” Elise said. “If there’s anything you need help with, let me know. Has that body’s period started yet?”
“No,” Kevin said, turning bright red. “Dakota told me it should be due in another week or so. She sent me home with a supply of the brand of tampons she uses.”
“Did she show you how to insert a tampon?”
“...She told me.”
“Okay. Let me know when the time comes and I’ll help if necessary.”
They were quiet for a while before Elise said, “When I talked to Benedita through an interpreter, she asked me not to have sex while I’m borrowing her body —”
“Yeah, Dakota said the same thing,” Kevin said. She had also given him extremely specific instructions about what he was and was not allowed to do in the way of masturbation; he’d tuned it out, not having any intention of doing anything of the kind. Doing anything with her body that confronted him with its femininity was stressful enough; he didn’t want to add more to the minimum necessary bathing, dressing and peeing. He didn’t mention that to Elise.
“And no kissing, either,” Elise continued with a frown. “But she said we could hug. And she didn’t say we couldn’t keep hugging for a long time. Do you want to... just snuggle? I’ve missed you so much.”
“Yeah,” Kevin said with a nervous smile. “That would be nice.”
It was nice, eventually, though they had to shift around a little before they found a comfortable position that didn’t constantly draw Kevin’s attention to Dakota’s breasts or crotch.
I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.
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“Well, it’s only around five or six times a day now instead of almost constantly. That’s better. But it’s still plenty bad.”
Going back to work the next day, Kevin suffered through what he suspected was more than the average woman’s daily share of staring from his co-workers. Presumably, if he stayed in Dakota’s body long enough, the novelty would wear off and he’d only have to suffer the “normal” level of guys staring at him. A couple of assholes had pointed questions or rude comments for him, but most of his co-workers were sympathetic with his predicament.
At supper that night, Bryce had amusing stories to tell about going to school as an “old man,” as he kept referring to his borrowed body. Forty-nine didn’t seem that old to Kevin, but he had to admit that Bryce’s body looked older than that. The man whose body Bryce was borrowing worked in a microwave factory, and seemed to have had a harder life than Kevin or Elise. “I’m older now than most of my teachers,” Bryce said. “Coach Argall excused me from most of P.E. because of my old joints. He said I should learn Tai Chi or some other old people exercise.”
“If you wind up staying in that body much longer, yes,” Elise said. “Let’s look into classes. Or maybe water aerobics, that’s easier on your joints too.”
“You think it’s going to be a while?” Bryce asked.
Elise sighed. “I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s less than a month.”
Kevin winced, thinking of Dakota’s impending period.
After Bryce went to his room, Kevin and Elise snuggled on the couch and watched a mediocre movie with half their attention. “Did they give you a hard time at work?” Elise asked after the movie got so boring they turned it off.
“A couple of guys, yeah, but most people were decent.”
“I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”
“It’s... when I’m focused on work, I can ignore it. But five times a day, at least, when I take a bathroom break or I catch a guy staring at Dakota’s boobs or see her face in the mirror, it just hits me all over again how wrong this body is for me.”
“It hasn’t gotten any better?”
“Well, it’s only around five or six times a day now instead of almost constantly. That’s better. But it’s still plenty bad.”
Elise hugged him harder for a moment. “I’m sorry. I wish I could make it better. We’re doing what we can as fast as we can, but... we still don’t fully understand how it happened, and until we do...”
“I understand. Don’t overwork yourselves. If it’s going to take a while, you need to pace yourself for the long haul.”
“Yeah.”
They cuddled on the couch for a while longer before going to bed.
* * *
Days passed, and then weeks, and the five or six panic attacks per day diminished to two or three (after spiking to more like ten times a day when Dakota’s period started). Sometimes Kevin could get through a shower or visit the toilet without having a panic attack, or notice a guy staring at him and merely sigh with resignation instead of feeling disgust and indignation. He got through his period somehow with help from Elise and one of his female co-workers, hoping fervently that Elise and her colleagues would get everyone back in the right bodies before Dakota’s period came around again. His co-workers got used to his new appearance, and stopped treading so cautiously around him, though only a few went back to treating him like before; most started treating him more or less like a woman.
Bryce was keeping in touch with Ayesha; they were apparently feeding each other’s messages through an online translator and were mostly able to get the gist through the imperfect and sometimes misleading translations. She kept Bryce’s appointment with Dr. Shaw, who sent a report to Bryce’s parents as well as to Ayesha. She seemed to be taking decent care of Bryce’s body, not skipping his medicines or treatments.
The news was full of stories about governments around the world pressuring InstaThere to fully compensate the victims of the mixup, which had included diplomats and other government officials from several different countries. That was in addition to the various lawsuits, both individual suits by wealthy individuals and class action suits from lawyers trying to get as many victims to sign on as possible. Elise brought home rumors from work about how InstaThere was internally responding to the crisis.
“My job is secure until we fix this thing,” she said, “and probably for a while afterward, assuming the whole company doesn’t go under from the cost of compensating the victims and the loss of business. But the best case scenario is that I won’t get a bonus this year, or probably next year either. And we need to prepare for the possibility I’ll lose my job. In any case, what we’ll get from the settlement won’t make up for what we’ve lost on our investment.”
Elise had joined the company relatively early, after they had teleportation consistently working for small objects but long before they’d successfully demonstrated safe teleportation of living creatures (first white mice in lab tests, then a photogenic collie for the public demonstration). They’d put most of their savings into her stock options for several years as InstaThere boomed, and they’d seemed comfortably set to send Bryce to a top-tier university and retire in their early fifties. But with the way the stock price had crashed since the disaster, and had only recovered a fraction of its pre-crisis value since the teleport network reopened, those plans were so much ash now. They weren’t idiots, they had diversified their retirement plans somewhat, but those more conservative investments had only grown slowly compared to the previously skyrocketing price of their InstaThere stock.
“We’ll get through it somehow,” Kevin said. “We can live on my income alone, though things could get tight.”
“How bad is it gonna get?” Bryce asked. “Give it to me straight.”
“If your mom loses her job, we’d have to cancel the streaming services, eat out a lot less, and put off replacing our cars,” Kevin said. “Which means you wouldn’t get one of our cars when you turn sixteen. The worst of it is that your choice of college might be more limited, if your mother still hasn’t found another job that pays as well.” And Elise and I will have to keep working until we’re sixty-five or older, he thought but didn’t say. “But we’re not going to go hungry and we’re not in danger of losing the house. Or not being able to pay for your medicines.”
Support groups for victims of the body-shuffle sprang up both online and in various big cities, and InstaThere, trying to salvage their reputation, offered them resources such as meeting rooms, web hosting, promotion, and free teleportation for people who lived in smaller towns or rural areas and wanted to go to support group meetings in a bigger city. Kevin was reluctant to get involved, other than lurking on one of the online forums for shuffle victims, but Elise strongly encouraged him and Bryce to go with her, the second Saturday after they all returned home, to a meeting of the group that met at InstaThere’s main office tower, a few miles from the R&D lab she worked at.
The group met in a large conference room on the second floor. One of the organizers was sitting at a small table near the entrance, with nametags and markers spread out before her, a legal pad and pen, and three boxes of donuts and other pastries, one marked “Gluten-free.”
“Welcome!” she said. “If you want to get our newsletter, sign up, but it’s not required. And you don’t have to put your real name on your nametag, just something we can call you if you don’t mind.”
Kevin, Elise and Bryce put their real names on their nametags and Elise put her email down on the legal pad. Then they looked around. There were around twenty people in the room. Glancing at a few of the people standing around and talking, Kevin noticed that about half had names that didn’t go well with their current body.
“Welcome, everybody,” said the woman who’d been sitting at the nametag table, standing up and picking up a microphone. “I see we’ve got a lot more people here this time. It’s a bit too many for everybody to have a chance to talk, so let’s split up into two groups. What about if everybody who got swapped into a body of the opposite sex gather over on that end of the room, and everybody who didn’t gather over here. I’ll lead this group and Avery will lead the other.”
Avery, wearing a middle-aged Hispanic woman’s body, raised her hand and led the way over toward the far end of the room. Elise said, “See you afterward,” and hugged Kevin. Then she and Bryce headed over toward the nametag woman’s end of the room and Kevin walked toward Avery, who was organizing a couple of people to rearrange the chairs into a circle. Kevin pitched in and sat down once the chairs were in place and everyone who’d swapped sexes had gathered.
“So let’s go around briefly and everyone tell a little bit about ourselves and how we’ve been affected by ending up in someone else’s body,” Avery said. Kevin figured Avery must be at least as old as his current body looked; all the Averys he’d known in school were female, but he’d heard of a couple of older guys named Avery, and apparently it used to be a male name until a couple of generations ago. But then Avery destroyed his inferences. “You don’t have to say any more than you’re comfortable with. I’m Avery, and I’m a thirty-four year old trans woman. The reason Mia asked me to lead this group is because I’ve got a lot of experience dealing with the gender dysphoria that most or all of you have been feeling — that’s the feeling that your body is the wrong sex for your mind, to put it simply. And it’s been great the last couple of weeks to be able to pass perfectly, and feel what it’s like to have a period, but I feel guilty about hoping this doesn’t get fixed any time soon. Okay, to my left?” She turned to the person on her left, wearing a rotund black man’s body, who said:
“I’m Callie, and I work in marketing at Coca-Cola. I don’t think I’ve been feeling that ‘gender dys-’ — what was it?”
“Dysphoria.”
“Right. Anyway, I’ve been feeling weird about this body, but the, uh, male parts don’t bother me, I think? But I’ve been feeling horribly guilty about how I’ve reacted to being black... I mean, I didn’t think I was racist, but...” She trailed off and looked down at her lap. “And being — overweight, too.” Kevin thought she’d just stopped herself from saying “fat.” “That’s not cool, but I can’t seem to stop feeling this way.”
Kevin was the next person to Callie’s left. He took a deep breath and introduced himself. “I’m Kevin, a CPA. I... I don’t really feel comfortable dressing like this, but apparently the person whose body I’m wearing is a minor celebrity in Canada and she insists on me dressing the way she would dress whenever I go out in public, in case photos of me end up on the Internet. And I’m having a lot of that gender dysphoria, though it’s a bit less frequent than it was right after the disaster.”
They continued around the circle. It seemed that Kevin’s gender dysphoria was worse than average, though almost everyone was feeling it to some extent. The exceptions were Callie and a game designer named Graham, who had the body of a red-haired girl in her early twenties. “Being a girl has been really neat,” Graham confessed. “I’m pretty sure I’m transgender. I considered whether I might be, back in college, but I didn’t really fit the criteria, or so I thought, and... but this is just so cool! The only reason I’m here is because this body has Crohn’s Disease, and that’s been kind of hard to adjust to...”
After everyone had had a chance to speak, Avery talked a little more about her experiences of gender dysphoria and gave them some tips on managing it and the other psychological problems that were likely to result from it, like depression and depersonalization. “For some people, the only thing that really makes it go away is physically transitioning to their real gender,” she said. “For others, just transitioning socially — changing your name, the way you dress, your hair and perhaps makeup — is enough to get rid of it or make it easily manageable. But there’s obviously a limit to how much of that you can do when you’re just borrowing those bodies. You can’t ethically start hormones or even cut your hair. But you can, and probably should, if you feel safe doing so, dress and present as your real gender. The person your body belongs to,” she said, turning to face Kevin, “just needs to suck it up and sort out any image problems after she gets her body back. If her fans are the type to get upset because a man is inhabiting her body through no fault of yours or hers, she’s better off without them. Your mental health is a lot more important.”
Kevin didn’t reply, but just nodded. He glanced down at Dakota’s probably-not-entirely-natural assets and wondered if any kind of clothing could hide them or even de-emphasize them much. But he could probably wear some sort of more masculine pants, at least... only he wasn’t sure if he should spend money on a new wardrobe that neither he nor Dakota would have any use for once Elise and her colleagues fixed this. Now, when the financial situation was so uncertain? Maybe not. But one or two outfits would probably fit the budget. And men could get away with wearing the same things multiple times a week, far more easily than women...
He realized he’d zoned out and forced himself to pay attention as Avery talked with Grace, one of the women who had landed in a male body, about the things she’d tried so far to make that body look somewhat feminine and what else she could do. After a bit, she talked in more general terms about things men who’d landed in women’s bodies could do. “I can’t speak to that from experience, of course,” she concluded, “but I can point you to some online resources for trans men, including a forum where the guys are pretty friendly and helpful to newbies.”
She gave over the rest of the meeting to letting those who’d ended up with diseases and disabilities they weren’t used to talk about their experiences. That turned out to be almost half, though not everyone had mentioned it in their initial introduction, in some cases because they thought that their new health problems were pretty minor compared to their gender dysphoria, in others because their problems seemed insignificant compared to Jacob, whose new body was blind, or Nera, who’d ended up in a very young body too immature to maintain bladder control or talk understandably without great effort.
After the meeting was over, Avery talked privately with Callie and Graham, while the rest got up and milled around, talking with each other or people who’d been in the other group, or left the room. Kevin went over and joined Bryce and Elise.
“That was good,” Elise said. “Did you get a lot out of it?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “I think I’ll probably come again.”
My new short story, "Race to the Altar", is up now on DeviantArt. It's a contest submission, so it won't be posted to BigCloset or other sites until some time after the contest is over.
I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.
After doing some research and talking with trans men on the forum Avery had recommended, he’d reluctantly decided that binding her breasts wouldn’t be right, given possible health risks for Dakota if he wound up staying in her body for months.
A few days later, after careful consideration of the budget, Kevin bought a couple of new outfits for work which de-emphasized Dakota’s assets as much as was feasible without long-term consequences for her body. After doing some research and talking with trans men on the forum Avery had recommended, he’d reluctantly decided that binding her breasts wouldn’t be right, given possible health risks for Dakota if he wound up staying in her body for months. Most of the potential health problems — back, chest or shoulder pain, for instance — would go probably away shortly after she got her body back, but some, albeit less likely, could give her trouble for months or even years to come. If he got a respiratory infection and it developed complications... So he simply wore a sports bra. Along with a loose sports jacket and dress shirt, it did help — he was a lot less feminine-looking than he’d been when wearing what Dakota had insisted he wear to protect her image, though he couldn’t fool himself that he passed as a man.
He sent Dakota a message about what he was doing and why. Perhaps predictably, she was angry and threatened him with a lawsuit if he didn’t start wearing her clothes and makeup again and change his hairstyle back to what it had been.
That was scary. Kevin doubted she would win purely on the merits of the case, but she had much deeper pockets than he did and could pay for more and better lawyers. He’d heard of some body-shuffled people suing the people in their original bodies for smoking, engaging in risky hobbies like mountain-climbing or sky-diving, or other dangerous things, but none of those cases had been decided yet. With the family’s uncertain financial position, could he risk the costs of a lawsuit? He decided, after discussion with Elise, that he’d continue going to work like this for a few more days and see if the gender dysphoria went away or got less frequent, and if so, risk the legal consequences. It did help, although not as much as he’d hoped.
* * *
Not long after returning home from Dakota’s cabin, Kevin had tried to get back to work on the model train layout he’d been working on before. But he found it hard to focus. When he did manage to focus on it, it helped distract him from Dakota’s body, but too often it was the other way around. After a few days, he abandoned the train for a while.
He tried to get into it again after taking Avery’s advice and starting to wear masculine clothing. It went better this time, but he still had days when he felt too bad to do anything after work but watch TV.
Despite her threat, Dakota didn’t actually file a defamation suit until photos of Kevin at the grocery store appeared on the Internet, two weeks later. But after a visit with a lawyer, he was somewhat relieved.
“It’s going to be very hard to prove that you’ve harmed her or done anything illegal,” the lawyer told him after doing a little research. “There’s no existing laws governing what people can do in borrowed bodies because it’s a situation no legislator anticipated was possible. You’re not making false claims about her, because it’s common knowledge — at least among the people who know and care she exists, which isn’t as many as she likes to think — that she wasn’t wearing that body when those photos were taken, you were. And she can’t claim a breach of contract, even a verbal contract, because that agreement you two made didn’t have any obligations on her part balancing your obligations.
“Suppose your friend asks you to help him move, and you agree. But he’s not paying you or anything. You don’t show up on the day, and he tries to sue you — well, assuming he could get a lawyer to take the case. It would be thrown out because he wasn’t compensating you for the moving help, so it’s not a contract.
“Even the people who’ve been much more provably harmed by the people borrowing their bodies, like those who’ve posted nude selfies or neglected necessary medical care, are going to have a hard time proving their cases, and I don’t think this one will get very far before it’s thrown out of court. But because it’s an international case, it will take longer and cost more before it’s thrown out than if an American was filing the same frivolous lawsuit against you. We can stick her with the legal costs when that happens, but until then...”
Nothing much seemed to happen with the lawsuit for the next several weeks. Kevin continued to wear men’s clothing; Bryce joined a senior water aerobics group; Elise worked long hours and arrived home too tired to say or do much. Kevin and Bryce continued going to the support group meetings most Saturdays, but Elise didn’t join them again as, on the rare Saturdays she didn’t go to the lab, she was too tired from five long days at work to go anywhere else.
Finally, five weeks after the lawsuit began, Elise came home from work with good news. “We may have it! We’re going to do a test tomorrow, and see if we can swap a couple of people back.”
“Just a couple? How would that work?” Kevin asked.
“Most people are part of a chain of mind-shifting,” Elise explained. “Like Amy’s in your body, you’re in Dakota’s body, she’s in that guy Bennett’s body, and so on through a few dozen people who all teleported at about the same time, until you reach the person who ended up in Amy’s body. But there were two people who ended up in each other’s bodies, and a couple of other relatively short chains, less than ten people rather than dozens. We’re going to do our tests on them before we try to swap everyone else back.”
“I hope it goes well.”
And it did. The following afternoon at work, Kevin got a text from Elise saying “It worked!!!”, followed half an hour later by Levi, one of his co-workers, telling him, “Hey, did you hear the good news?”
“Some of it,” Kevin said cautiously. He didn’t want to violate his NDA if Levi wasn’t referring to a press release from InstaThere.
“Check it out; InstaThere says they’ve put some people back in the right bodies, and they’ll be ready to do it for everyone else pretty soon.”
“Awesome, thanks.”
He watched the press release video and didn’t learn much new. InstaThere Labs had swapped back two people who’d ended up in each other’s bodies, and they were planning to swap back everyone else once the logistics could be worked out.
Later in the week, Elise told him that they’d done the first test of the system they would use for the bulk of the shuffle victims. They’d swapped back a small chain of eight people who’d swapped into each other’s bodies, but instead of bringing them all to InstaThere Labs, they’d had them each go to a specific teleport station near their home at the same time, then teleported their bodies to them. “We’ll have to do it that way for everyone else, there’s no R&D facility or teleport station in the world that has enough teleport booths to sort out even a hundred people at once, much less everyone. And Dr. Karga says we’ll probably do everyone at once, rather than doing each chain on a separate day — it would minimize the number of times we disrupt the operation of the various teleport stations around the world.”
“I can’t wait,” Kevin said. “I thought the dysphoria was getting better when I first started wearing men’s clothes again, but it’s back with a vengeance this past week or so.” Dakota’s body’s period, the third that Kevin had experienced, had started a few days earlier, just in time for a crunch week at work.
Finally, everyone who’d been swapped was instructed to report to a specific teleport facility on the following Wednesday at noon, EDT, and stand in the booth they were assigned until everyone was in place and they could be restored. Kevin’s family reported to InstaThere Labs in Atlanta and stood in several teleport booths starting at noon. Kevin had with him in the booth a couple of suitcases of Dakota’s borrowed clothes and toiletries. The glass doors didn’t close yet; it was almost an hour before InstaThere employees all over the world reported that 99.8% of those affected were standing in the booth they’d been assigned. Kevin sat on the floor of the booth, bored and apprehensive.
Then Dr. Karga approached Kevin’s open booth and said, “We have a problem. Amy Jedynak in your body hasn’t reported to the booth at LAX she was assigned to, and she isn’t responding to calls or messages. So we’re going to have to punt on getting you into your body.”
“You mean I’ll stay in Dakota’s body?”
“No, Ms. Severin is waiting in her booth at her home in Toronto, and we need to put her back in that body. We’re going to put you in Ms. Jedynak’s body for now; the person with her body is waiting at Bradley International in Connecticut. Once Ms. Jedynak turns up, we can do a pair swap for the two of you any time during business hours. Give us a few minutes to recalibrate the shuffle for you and a handful of other people whose original bodies haven’t shown up, and we’ll be ready to go.”
The minutes seemed like hours, but there were only six of them. A chime rang, the glass door slid shut, and suddenly, Kevin felt different — but the scene outside the booth didn’t change.
Kevin looked down at Amy’s body. He’d never asked her what her original body was like; most of their conversations had focused on helping Ayesha take care of Bryce’s body, until she’d returned to California, and they hadn’t talked much since then. She was younger than Dakota, he knew, but it seemed she wasn’t in as good a shape; she was overweight, though not much more than Kevin or Elise’s original bodies, and she wore glasses. Hopefully Amy wouldn’t give him a self-care regimen as long as her arm to follow until they could swap back. He hoped she was okay, and he was frustrated with himself for feeling angry with her when he didn’t know why she hadn’t shown up at LAX. It was probably something beyond her control; he couldn’t imagine anyone slacking off on something this important.
The door slid open and Kevin stepped out. He saw Elise and Bryce emerge from their booths, looking at each other and then around at the strangers who’d been swapped back into their own bodies. Kevin approached Elise.
“It’s me,” he said, “Kevin. They told me...” Amy’s voice was a lot higher than Dakota’s had been; even from inside her head, it sounded almost squeaky.
“Yeah, she told me too,” Elise said, hugging him. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
The family was asked to move over to a waiting area for a while, in case Amy Jedynak would show up late at LAX and they could swap Kevin back after all. Elise and Bryce cautiously talked about how good getting their original bodies back felt, giving Kevin sympathetic glances that he was too distracted with worry to resent.
“In a way I miss being young again,” Elise said, “but I don’t miss seeing a stranger’s face in the mirror, or reaching for something and missing because my arms aren’t as long as I’m used to. I’m sure it’s nothing compared to your gender dysphoria,” she added hastily, “but it’s still good to be back.”
“I sort of miss Mr. Chu’s lungs,” Bryce said, “but I don’t think mine are any worse than they were a few months ago. Ayesha’s taken pretty good care of them. And hey, my knees don’t hurt anymore!”
Kevin forced himself to congratulate them, but said little otherwise, anxiously watching the door someone would come out of to tell them if they’d found out anything about Amy. But another hour brought the news that Amy in Kevin’s body was in critical condition at USC Medical Center, having had some sort of accident at home. The details didn’t become clear until later.
When Kevin came back to work the day after the mass swap-back in Amy’s body instead of his own, he had to endure a new round of curiosity and commiseration from his co-workers, but it seemed like it wasn’t as bad as when he’d returned from “vacation” in Dakota’s body. He didn’t have any men’s clothes that fit Amy’s body, so for now he was wearing clothes from the suitcase that Amy had meant to take to her cousin’s wedding back in July, and which had been teleported to Atlanta along with her body.
Amy’s family kept them informed about her condition; it was touch and go for the next few days, but eventually Amy was out of danger.
By then, Kevin, who had just gotten done with a third of Dakota’s periods before the mass swap-back, had started Amy’s period as well. “Do you want to swap with Amy as soon as she can leave the hospital?” Elise asked him one evening after they’d heard good news about Amy being moved from ICU to a regular hospital room. “Or wait until she’s recovered more?”
“I’m not sure,” Kevin said. “I don’t know which would be worse, the pain of those injuries or the wrongness of staying in this body longer. But... given that I’m having panic attacks less often now — or I was before we got the news about Amy, anyway — and,” (he blushed hard), “Amy’s flow isn’t as heavy as Dakota’s... I guess I might wait a while longer?”
Elise nodded. “It’s probably a good idea. We still don’t know whether and to what degree that accident was Amy’s fault, but it certainly wasn’t yours. You shouldn’t have to swap back any sooner than you want to. After she’s recovered fully, or at least enough that you can keep working.”
What if she doesn’t recover? Kevin wondered, but couldn’t bring himself to say.
I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.
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From the experience of the trans people he’d been talking to, at the support group and online, he didn’t think the dysphoria would get much better. Most of the improvement had come in the first few days after he got over the shock of the sudden new body, or in the first few days after he started wearing men’s clothes again.
A couple of days later, Kevin was eating lunch at his desk when he got a call from Amy.
“Hi,” she said. His voice sounded tired. “Just wanted to let you know I’m going home today.”
“That’s great,” Kevin said.
“I’m gonna be going to rehab three times a week,” she continued. Kevin heard indistinguishable words somewhere in the background, and then his own voice saying a little more quietly, “No, Mom, he deserves to know this.” Then, louder again, “Plus there are exercises I have to do every day. Or you’d have to do if you want your body back right now. I don’t blame you if you don’t — Not now, Mom — but I wanted to check, because now that I’m getting out of the hospital, tomorrow is probably the earliest we could swap back if you want.”
“I think I need to know more details,” Kevin said, hating himself for it. “Like how long do the doctors think my body will need rehab before — whoever’s in it — gets full mobility back? And whether there are going to be lasting effects after that?” He wanted to ask her how the accident had happened, too — her family had told him that she’d fallen down the stairs at her apartment building, but not how or why. But he wasn’t sure now was the time.
“We don’t know yet,” Amy said. “It’s going to be a while, though. Months, at least, and they said I might still need a cane or walker even after I’m as recovered as I’m going to get. Assuming I’m still in this body.”
Kevin was silent for a long moment, feeling terrified of the pain and the incredible amount of work whoever wore that body in the next few months would have ahead of them, and nearly as much dread of the dysphoria he knew he’d be experiencing during the same time if he stayed in Amy’s body. Finally, he said, “I need to think about it.”
“Okay,” Amy said. “Talk to you later.” Before she hung up, he heard her mother somewhere in the background raising her voice.
Kevin sat there staring numbly at his phone for a long while before he took another bite of lunch.
* * *
At supper that night, Kevin told Elise and Bryce what Amy had told him.
“You should keep her body until she gets yours fixed up again,” Bryce opined.
“I’m considering it,” Kevin said, “but I’m not sure. It’s not like I’m not suffering right now. Probably nowhere near as bad as she is, but... at some point in the recovery process, she’s probably going to be suffering less physically than I am mentally.”
“Assuming your... discomfort with that body doesn’t get any better than this over time,” Elise pointed out. “It’s better than it was at first, so who knows if it might get even better?”
“We’ll see,” Kevin said. From the experience of the trans people he’d been talking to, at the support group and online, he didn’t think it would. Most of the improvement had come in the first few days after he got over the shock of the sudden new body, or in the first few days after he started wearing men’s clothes again. “If that does get a lot better, and she can’t bring my body back to anywhere near the mobility I had when she landed in it... then maybe I would stay here long term? But if so, I think I’d make some changes. Hormone therapy and a mastectomy, at least.” He’d been looking into the options, but they didn’t look that great, especially in terms of female-to-male genital reconstruction. Better than they were twenty years ago, apparently, but still unsatisfying.
Elise hugged him. They’d been hugging a lot more often since kissing and sex were off the table, and it was all they had. “We’ll support you, whatever you decide,” she said.
* * *
Kevin talked with Amy again later that week, after she’d been to a couple of rehab sessions. It was grueling work, it sounded like, even though the amount of exertion would have been trivial for an uninjured person Kevin’s age. Lifting each leg a handful of times and holding it for as long as she could, which was only a few seconds so far; holding a ball weighing a few pounds in both hands until she couldn’t hold it steady any more. Each session left her exhausted, and she took a long nap as soon as her mom drove her home from the rehab center. When she’d recovered more, she said, they’d have her walk short distances on a track with hand-rails until she was strong enough to walk further with a walker.
He finally asked how it had happened, and she told him she couldn’t remember the accident. “I hit my head when I fell, and the concussion wiped out my memory of the last few minutes before the accident. I don’t remember walking out my apartment door, much less stumbling or tripping or something. The doctors did some tests to see if your brain or heart have something wrong with them that made me pass out for a moment, but they didn’t turn up anything. And I know I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs.”
It seemed likely they’d never find out what had caused the accident and whether Amy was at fault.
* * *
Another six weeks passed, and Kevin became somewhat more reconciled to Amy’s body. She had given him permission to cut and restyle her body’s hair, and wear a binder, which helped. But only somewhat. He didn’t have panic attacks when he saw her face in the mirror nearly as often, but he still felt uncomfortable with his reflection and avoided mirrors when he could. Amy reported more progress in her rehab; she was walking half a mile on good days, though she still needed a walker, and she could lift about 30% of what Kevin used to be able to lift when he was going to the gym regularly a couple of years ago.
Finally, Kevin decided he needed to see for himself. He arranged a day off work, teleported to Los Angeles on a Friday morning, and rented a car, giving it the rehab center address Amy had given him.
Walking into the rehab center and seeing his old body sitting in the waiting room was possibly the worst shock he’d had since finding himself suddenly in Dakota’s body, even though he thought he’d been completely prepared for it. The casts had come off and the bruises had faded, but his old body had lost a lot of weight while Amy was in the hospital, and hadn’t gained all of it back yet. The stress of the accident and recovery had aged it years in a few months. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the hairline might have receded further, and there were definitely more wrinkles and more grey at the temples. But seeing his body from outside, its face animated by someone else’s personality, was a worse shock than seeing how it had changed.
Judging from the expression on his old face, Amy was just as gobsmacked by seeing him walk in in her old body. It was only when someone else tried to come in the door behind him and said, “Excuse me,” to Kevin that he and Amy stopped staring at one another. Kevin walked further into the room and sat down across from Amy.
“So,” Kevin said, somehow more aware of the high pitch of Amy’s voice than he had been since the first couple of days after he got her body. “How are we going to do this?”
“I figured you could just hang out and watch while the physical therapist and I do our usual routine,” Amy said, shrugging slightly and tilting her head in a vaguely feminine way that seemed incongruous on Kevin’s body.
“I kind of wanted to ask the physical therapist some questions, too,” Kevin said. “Seeing as how...” He was about to say we’re probably going to swap back at some point, but trailed off. He wanted his body back, but did he want it in that condition?
“Yeah,” Amy said, “it’s yours, I’m just borrowing it. You deserve to know what shape it’s in and all.”
Just then a lean, fit woman in her forties or early fifties came into the waiting room and said, “Amy, I’m ready for you.”
“Okay,” Amy said, putting Kevin’s arms on the walker parked in front of her and heaving herself up onto his feet. Kevin winced at the expression on his alienated face; in pain, but trying not to show any more of it than necessary. “Alexis, I told you Kevin might be here today — that’s him, in my original body.” She tilted her head toward Kevin, pointing with her chin, as her hands were occupied.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the woman. “I’m Alexis Shen. Come this way, please.”
Kevin followed Amy and Alexis through the door into a middling-size gym; it had a lot of the equipment you would expect from any gym, treadmills and stationary bikes and weight machines, all surrounded by a walking track with three lanes, but also odd things like a short flight of stairs that went nowhere, a set of handrails about four feet apart and fifteen or twenty feet long, and other things whose purpose he could only guess at. Alexis led them over to a set of chairs along the wall and had Amy sit down and start a series of stretches, lifting one leg and then the other several times, then rotating Kevin’s feet at the end of an extended leg, tilting his neck this way and that as far as it would go. Kevin watched the exercises, figuring he’d need to learn how to do them if he decided to switch back before his body was completely recovered. But he also watched his face, seeing Amy’s expressions as she did them. These opening stretches didn’t seem too bad from the lack of evident pain displayed there.
They moved on to the weight machines, and when Amy did the leg extensions and leg presses, he saw that pain on his face again, worse than when she’d made the effort to stand up. Then walking around the track; she didn’t go very fast, not much over a mile an hour, but she went pretty steadily with only a couple of short pauses to rest. “This a lot better than a few weeks ago,” she said. “I couldn’t go even a full lap, and I had to rest three or four times in that short walk.”
After the walk, Alexis let Amy rest for a few minutes and went to do some paperwork. When she returned a few minutes later, she had Amy walk up and down the stairs to nowhere a couple of times. That put the most blatant grimace of pain Kevin had yet seen on his face, and he winced in sympathy again. But when she sat down again afterward, she had an air of satisfaction and accomplishment that reminded Kevin of when Elise told him about solving a problem at work.
Finally, after some work on the stationary bike and some more stretches, she was finished, and they returned to the waiting room.
“Do you want me to help you get your walker into your trunk?” Allison asked.
“I think Kevin can help with that,” Amy said.
“All right. See you Monday.”
“So what did you think?” Amy asked Kevin. She got out her phone and brought up her car’s control app to tell it to drive up to the front door, then gripped her walker, stood up and walked slowly toward the door.
“I’m impressed,” Kevin replied, getting up and walking beside her. “I don’t know how well I could do all that, considering... So you’re doing all that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and some other stuff at home on other days?”
“Yeah, every day I do some stretches and then walk back and forth in the hall at my parents’ house.” She’d moved in with her parents after she was released from the hospital, as she couldn’t handle the stairs at her apartment building.
And if they swapped back, that wouldn’t be much of an issue for him; there were no absolutely essential stairs in Kevin and Elise’s house, only a single small step up from the sidewalk into the front door. He wouldn’t be able to go up into the attic until he recovered more thoroughly — if ever — but Elise and Bryce could handle getting the Christmas decorations out...
“So,” Kevin said, “I have some more things I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind. Shall we go eat somewhere — the diner across the street, maybe? — or would you feel more comfortable going back to your parents’ house for that? Or just sitting in the waiting room here?”
“Sure,” Amy said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to eat at this Thai place over near my old apartment. My parents don’t really like spicy food and I haven’t had a chance to eat anything very interesting since I moved in with them. And it’s a quiet place where we can talk without the loud music too many restaurants play.”
“That sounds tasty to me,” Kevin said.
They reached her car, which was sitting in the circular driveway in front of the rehab center. Amy unlocked the doors and trunk, then got in the front seat and let Kevin fold up her walker and put it in the trunk. Kevin came back over to the car door and said, “Can you text me the address for the restaurant?”
“Just hop in,” she said. “We can come back here for your rental car, or you can just send it back to the rental place and I’ll have my car give you a ride to the airport after I go home.”
“Okay,” Kevin said, and got in the other front seat, the one that used to be the driver’s seat when Kevin was young.
Once they were underway, Kevin worked up the nerve to say, “I wanted to ask you... how much is it bothering you, being in a male body?”
Amy didn’t answer for a few seconds. “A lot,” she said. “Less now that I’ve got other things to worry about, but back before the accident, it was pretty bad. What about you?”
“It’s not good,” he said. “For me it got a little better after I bought some male clothes for Dakota’s body and started wearing them, but the... gender dysphoria didn’t go away. Early on, it was worst when I had to go to the bathroom, but now the worst moments are when I’m out in public and some stranger calls me ‘Miss’ or ‘Ma’am’. Or some guy holds a door open for me... things like that.”
“The worst part for me was how one of my friends reacted,” Amy said after a few moments. “She’s not... comfortable being around men, socially. I haven’t been to see her, haven’t even talked on the phone with her after that one time. Just texts, and they’re fewer and farther between every week.”
Kevin wondered briefly why, and firmly instructed himself not to ask. Amy went on:
“But yeah, just the sheer physical weirdness of it is pretty bad. I guess it’s gotten a little better over time, but only relative to how horrific it was at first, when the shock and surprise were compounded with the basic wrongness of it.”
They continued talking about their experiences as they reached the restaurant and got seated, then paused for a bit to study the menus and order. When the conversation resumed, it drifted from gender dysphoria to other aspects of their lives, and then back to his body’s injuries.
“I think when I’m a little stronger, I’ll be able to put the walker in my trunk myself, and then get from the trunk to the front seat by leaning against the side of the car as I go. And go back to work around that time. My company told me they’d have a job for me, if not necessarily the one I had before. So I could start looking for another apartment, someplace on the ground floor.”
“Or a building with an elevator?” Kevin suggested.
“What about if there’s a power outage or a fire?” she countered, and he nodded sheepishly.
Kevin thought about what he would do in that situation. If they swapped back pretty soon... well, he could get Elise or Bryce to put the walker in the trunk before he left for work in the morning. And maybe he could get one of his co-workers to meet him at his car and get the walker out of the trunk for him? And the other way around in the evening...? It could be a problem on days when Elise had to work late and Bryce had an after-school activity or wanted to go over to a friend’s house after school, though. So that might not be feasible just yet.
The exercises he’d seen Amy doing today looked painful and difficult, and he wasn’t excited about undertaking that regime, but seeing his body from the outside for the last couple of hours had made him miss it all the more. He wondered if Amy was feeling the same way, and considered asking her, but for some reason didn’t feel comfortable doing so, despite how intimate some of their other talk had been.
After lunch, they returned to the car and Kevin put Amy’s walker in the trunk. After Kevin got in, Amy told the car to head to her parents’ house.
“So,” she said when they were getting close, “how soon do you think you’d be willing to switch back?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, looking out the window and not meeting his eyes. “I miss my body a lot, but I think I’d better wait until you’re recovered enough that I won’t miss any work by taking my body back.”
“That could be a while,” she said. When he turned back toward her, she had his eyes fixed on hers. “This body’s going to need rehab three times a week for several more months.”
“I might be able to work around that,” Kevin said. “Work later in the evenings on the days when I go to rehab, or work extra on the weekends to make up for those hours. But I need to be able to get to work and back on my own.”
“I hate to say anything that might make you delay switching back, but I feel like I have to point out that I’m generally pretty tired after rehab. Today’s better than most, but as soon as we get back to my parents’ house, I’m going to crash and not get out of bed until supper. A late supper.”
“Oh,” Kevin said, disconcerted. “Well, then.” He had noticed she was moving slower on the way from the car into the restaurant than she had been at rehab, but he’d attributed that to the difference between exercise, walking at the fastest pace she could sustain for twenty minutes, and normal walking.
They reached her house, and Kevin got the walker out of the trunk for her. She used her phone to instruct her car to take Kevin to the airport as he got back in the car.
“Talk to you in a few days,” she said. “Let me know what you decide.”
“I will. Goodbye.”
My fantasy romance/courtroom drama, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better and more promptly than Amazon.)
You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“At some point, InstaThere is probably going to be offering body swap services. It’s going to be expensive at first, but I’ll probably be able to get you a big discount. You’d just need to find a — um, a trans woman to swap with you... But she probably won’t want to swap if you’ve been taking male hormones or had a mastectomy.”
That night, Kevin talked it over with Elise and Bryce again, telling them about his visit with Amy and what she’d said about the progress and prognosis of his body’s rehab.
“So if we switch back now, I’d have to take a lot of time off work,” he said. “Probably the better part of three days a week, between rehab and the long nap Amy said she needs on rehab days. Maybe I could partly make it up by working longer hours on the other two weekdays and the weekend, but I’m not sure my body will hold up to a longer schedule even on non-rehab days.
“And there’s another thing. Right now, Amy’s needing a little help getting in and out of the car, and she can’t put her walker in the trunk or get it out by herself. When I arrive at work or the rehab center, I could get a co-worker or therapist to help me get out, but when I’m leaving the house, I need to make sure one of y’all is here. I’m not sure it’s worth constraining your schedules that much.”
“Do what you need to do for your mental health,” Elise said. “I’ve seen how depressed you’ve been, and I know what her body is doing to you. I can’t tell you if it’s worse than the physical pain you’d have to deal with if you got your body back now, but I suspect it might be. That’s something you can do something about, by putting wholehearted effort into your rehab, but you’ve already run up against the limits of what you can do about the dysphoria without permanently altering Amy’s body.”
“Or you could keep that body and do the hormones and surgery thing,” Bryce pointed out. “From what I’ve been reading, that would help a lot with the mental problems even if they can’t give you totally convincing dude bits. It won’t be as good as your old body was, but it might be as good as your old body is going to get even with a year or two of rehab. Amy could start doing hormones in the other direction once she knows she’s going to live with that body long-term.”
“I’d be cautious before doing that,” Elise said. “At some point — don’t mention this to anyone, of course, the usual rules — InstaThere is probably going to be offering body swap services. It’s going to be expensive at first, but I’ll probably be able to get you a big discount. You’d just need to find a — um, a trans woman to swap with you... But she probably won’t want to swap if you’ve been taking male hormones or had a mastectomy.”
From his limited exposure to the trans community over the last few months, Kevin doubted he would find very many trans women who weren’t either (a) in denial, (b) closeted, (c) couldn’t afford what a body swap would cost, or (d) already on hormones. That would change over time if body swapping became the routine way to transition, but it might be years — and it wasn’t as though Kevin would be the only trans man wanting to get one of the first voluntary body swaps.
“How soon do you think the body swapping service might be available?”
Elise shrugged. “Technically, we could start doing it tomorrow — it would be exactly the same process as when we swapped back those two people in our first test. But in practice, probably a year or more for legal and business reasons. Right now only a few engineers know how to make the teleport booths do body-swaps, which they weren’t designed for. We’d need to train more technicians and probably design a whole new type of booth that supports body-swapping as an intended feature, and the FDA will probably insist on testing and approving it as a medical device. And the lawyers will have to figure out how to protect the company’s ass from all sorts of contingencies; who knows how long all that will take.”
Kevin shook his head. “It’s not just the gender thing, although that’s the biggest part of it. Y’all remember what it was like to be in the wrong body, even though you were the right sex — your teeth feel wrong in your mouth, everything’s too high or too low, your hands are the wrong size. Even if I swap bodies with a trans woman who hasn’t started transitioning yet, or transition Amy’s body and eventually make it pass as well as some of the trans guys on the forum, those things probably won’t ever stop feeling wrong. I thought they’d stop bothering me by now, and I haven’t talked about them much because the gender stuff is so much worse, but...”
He realized he had already decided. “I’m switching back. I’ll talk to my boss tomorrow about arranging time off for rehab, and switch with Amy as soon as I’ve got appointments for rehab and whatever else I need.”
“You can talk with Dr. Littlepage’s office about getting Amy’s medical records from her doctor and rehab center,” Elise said. “I guess you’ll need her permission, even though it’s your body? It’s still a legal grey area, last I checked.” None of the numerous lawsuits surrounding the involuntary body swaps had been decided yet, although a few had been thrown out of court.
After supper, Bryce went to his room to do homework while Kevin and Elise went for a walk around the neighborhood to the little park on the edge of their subdivision. It might be one of the last times he could go for a walk like this for months to come, if not ever. They sat on a bench in the park and held hands.
“I’m proud of you,” Elise said. “That can’t have been an easy decision. I don’t know what I would do in your position.”
“I’m already having second thoughts,” he said. “About how this will affect my job. I’m not sure my boss will go for it — if I got injured under normal circumstances and needed time off for rehab, he couldn’t say anything, but when he can argue I could keep working full time if I’d just put up with Amy’s body a few months longer...”
“He still wouldn’t have a leg to stand on,” Elise said. “In the worst case, if they fire you, we’ll get by on my salary until the wrongful termination suit makes us rich. Even if InstaThere goes under, and I don’t think it’s going to happen at this point, I won’t be out of work long with my skills, and I don’t think you would be, either, once you’re recovered enough to work full-time again.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I need to do this. Even if there are other consequences I haven’t thought of, beyond the pain and the hard work of rehab and pissing off my boss.”
They walked back to the house and watched a movie before bed.
* * *
Kevin continued to second-guess himself over the weekend, but on Monday, he started things moving. He sent messages to his doctor’s office and to Amy, giving them each other’s contact information so Amy could get her doctor and rehab center to send medical records to Dr. Littlepage’s office. Then he told his manager he needed to talk with him. He was disappointed when he learned that Kevin would be switching back and needing three half-days a week off for rehab, but he didn’t try to talk Kevin out of it or cast aspersions on his decision.
Things moved agonizingly slowly, giving Kevin ample time for second thoughts. Amy’s doctor sent records to the wrong Dr. Littlepage (there was a rheumatologist of the same name in the Atlanta area, actually a second cousin of Kevin’s GP), then sent them again but incompletely. The rehab center Dr. Littlepage usually recommended was full up, and he looked into a couple more before finding one he felt satisfied in recommending.
There was one piece of good news during this frustrating week: Dakota’s lawsuit was dismissed for lack of evidence.
But finally Kevin was set up for appointments with Dr. Littlepage and with the rehab center, and then Elise’s contacts set up an appointment for Kevin and Amy to switch back, earlier on the same Tuesday of his checkup with Dr. Littlepage. Elise took the day off to be with him. He went with her to the InstaThere office, a little later than either of them normally went to work, and Elise’s colleague ushered him into a booth. They had to wait a few minutes until word came from LA that Amy was in her booth, and then the glass door closed, and a moment later, Kevin felt pain in his legs, hips, and lower back. It wasn’t the worst pain he’d ever felt by any means, but it was bad, and he would have stumbled to his knees if he hadn’t found himself leaning on a walker with its brakes on. He grimaced and his eyes blurred with tears as the glass door slid open and Elise tentatively stepped into the booth and put a hand on his.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it’s mostly just the shock, the pain coming on suddenly like this. It’s not at a level I can’t manage, just... need to get used to it. And do rehab until it gets better.”
He unlocked the brakes of the walker and walked out of the booth, and they kissed. Then he checked the under-seat compartment of the walker, and found the bag Amy had mentioned, which contained Amy’s pain meds, a couple of long elastic bands, and a bundle of instruction sheets for the exercises Amy was supposed to do every day at home. Amy had told him in a phone call a little earlier when her last dose was; he couldn’t take the pain medicine again for two more hours.
Elise stayed close to Kevin as he walked out of the InstaThere offices, but he managed to walk most of the way to the parking lot before he had to park the walker and sit down for a couple of minutes. The pain got a lot better when he was sitting down, although it didn’t go away entirely. After that short rest, they walked the rest of the way to the car, and Elise helped Kevin get in, then packed his walker away in the trunk and got in. There was a traffic slowdown on the way to Dr. Littlepage’s office, but they had time to spare and still got there in time for his appointment.
Dr. Littlepage examined Kevin and said everything looked consistent with the California doctor’s notes. “Keep doing rehab, and your daily exercises, and you should get most of your mobility back in a few more months,” he said. “You could go into work for a few hours in the mornings before rehab, but I’d recommend working those hours from home if possible. Rehab is going to take a lot out of you, and you don’t want to be tired to begin with from going to and from work.”
“What about, um, intimate activities?” he asked, not meeting the doctor’s eyes.
“No reason you shouldn’t, at this point,” Dr. Littlepage said. “Just take it easy and don’t overdo. Maybe let Elise take the more physically active part, okay? There’s no nerve damage or anything that would keep you from performing.”
Kevin started rehab the next day after spending two hours at the office, and asking his boss for permission to work from home on rehab days. Doing the same exercises he’d seen Amy doing a week earlier caused the worst pain he’d felt so far, but despite gasping and pausing for breath a few times, he pushed through and managed to complete all the prescribed exercises in the time allotted. He fell asleep in the car on the way home, and woke up just long enough to call Bryce and get him to come out and help him with the walker, then slowly walk into the house and navigate to his and Elise’s bedroom.
He woke up to find Elise lying by his side, her head on her hand, looking at him. She kissed him as soon as he was awake enough to appreciate it.
“How was rehab?”
“Exhausting. I figure at some point I’ll start feeling a sense of accomplishment about it, probably when I go up another five pounds on one of the weight machines or walk an extra lap, but for now, just exhausting.”
“You’re not regretting it, are you?”
“I regretted it just after I started rehab,” he said. “For a few minutes. Then I was too busy to think about it. Now...” He put one arm around her. “Being here with you, the way we’re supposed to be... yeah, it’s worth it.” He kissed her back and one thing led to another.
My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. Callie is an AI, serving the Watsons of Knightdale, North Carolina and managing their household ever since her manufacture. Then one day she finds herself summoned by a wizard in another world, to serve his family and mange his household. She wants to get home, but maybe she should try to help out here while she can. One of the wizard's children seems kind of depressed, and Callie thinks she knows why...