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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m an Eel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethertravel, Inc.

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

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

The group came to agree on a few basic points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Receiving Reports

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

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

The Penisbirthers

Ethertravel report #71, received May 12, 2465.

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

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

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

Infancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Kids’ School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checking Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninth Term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One World Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computers and Biology

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

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

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

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

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

Eleventh Term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelfth Term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How?”

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

“OK, I suppose.”

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

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

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

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

Thirteenth Term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi, I’m Carla.”

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

“Becca.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Very true.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living with Carla

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

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

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

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

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

“Becca, you all right?”

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

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

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

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

“What is it, Carla?”

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

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

“I bet it’s your ovulation.”

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

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

“Same from my class. Surely they knew.”

“Maybe it’s not only at ovulation.”

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

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

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

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

Real Work

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

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

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

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

Ethertravel report #247, received January 12, 2481.

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

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

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

The People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infancy to Starting School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reproduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondary School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tertiary School

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

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

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

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

Moving on Past School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She flipped the page to show us some other pictures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she showed pictures of this too.

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

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

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

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

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

“They go back to school?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now, does that hurt?” I asked.

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

“How long does that take?” Sally asked.

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

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

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

This was the end of that series of questions.

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

And she flipped to the first two.

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

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

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

Next page.

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

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

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

“How long does that take?” Sally asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next page. Birth.

“Who remembers being born?”

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

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

Sally asked, “Does it hurt?”

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

Next page.

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

She closed the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

The Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living with Linda

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I never heard of any of that.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh God. Seventeen million.”

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

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

“They never pinpointed a cause?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was there land for that?”

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

“And tell me about the whole secrecy thing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pairing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tyler!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Completing Our Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethertravel report #1902, received June 1, 2534.

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

Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Home with Lisa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I replied.

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

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

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

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

Inventor School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering New Mars

After hundreds of years of space exploration, we finally located signs of civilization out there. Mankind had had about 8 generations of space telescopes of increasing power, culminating with placing stations all over the far side of the moon to act as a virtual telescope almost as large as the moon itself. This scope swept across the plane of the Moon’s orbit for two weeks each lunar month and then shut off to recharge when the Sun’s light blinded it the other two weeks.

It was this scope that found it, an Earth-sized planet 135 light-years from Earth that bore unmistakable signs of not just life but significant industry. Because of its reddish color, people had taken to calling it New Mars. Early analysis showed it had an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, and lots of liquid water. Once a month the moon-scope faced New Mars and we collected one type of data after another. Trips to the moon to augment the scopes allowed it to gather types of data it had not originally been equipped for, back when its goal was only to locate the planet. Spectroscopic analysis made clear it had an atmosphere with the familiar gases: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water, with no obvious poisons.

Because mankind had longed for centuries to travel to another planet where we could live (the moon and our neighbor Mars not qualifying on that last condition), we planned an expedition. It was far from practical; the idea was just to send some people there on a one-way trip. They could report back, and nearly three centuries from now we’d hear what it was like. Maybe by then we’d have come up with some more practical means of traveling there. There were many risks, such as collisions with objects in space we couldn’t see, but there were plenty of volunteers and the global space travel organization chose candidates.

There were limitations on our ability to build near-light-speed ships; they could only be so big. Partly for this reason and partly for greater chance of survival, we were sending six ships, each holding ten astronauts selected for both a variety of skills for the mission and varied genetics, with four men and six women on each ship. If the mission was successful, and both conditions on the planet and the residents permitted it, they’d be expected to breed and populate the planet.

We built other support ships as well which would precede the people. The first probes were going to explore the planet, learn about the geography, climate, the distribution and density of people, the language, plant and animal life, and whatever else they could pack AI into the probes to do. Another set of ships which followed were garden stations. These would go into orbit around the planet, send drones into the atmosphere to retrieve water, and grow a variety of food plants that generations of space missions had shown were easy to grow in space.

Four years after we discovered New Mars, the manned ships were launched, one a week for six weeks, for their 150-year flight. For those on board, because they traveled close to the speed of light, the time would be much shorter, but it would still be many years. Because it was impractical to load the ships with enough food for the travelers to live normally during all that time, the travelers were going to be in suspended animation the whole way. We wanted them to still be able to have children after they arrived.

Arrival

I was on the third ship to leave Earth, and the first to arrive out of our six crewed ships. As I came out of stasis, I found my uniform, which was stored in a chamber designed to preserve it during the flight, and put it on.

I was on the end of a row of stasis chambers. Across from me, Melissa Canelli came out of her chamber at about the same time I did. The other two chambers I could see both had the red lights on indicating their occupants had not survived the journey, which worried me, but when I went down the rest of the row there was only one other dead.

The ships were far apart, but close enough to maintain fairly slow communication, which the ships did automatically for most of the trip while we were suspended. Upon our arrival, we read the logs. We lost communication with the first ship early on in the journey, and the second ten years ago. One of the following ships was still functional, but two others had also dropped off the radar in the middle of the trip. This was why we sent six separate ships, after all. I counted myself lucky for being on one of the two ships that made it, and one of the seven people who survived the stasis. The other ship reported their commanding officer did not survive, so I was, as ranking officer, in charge of the entire mission.

As we approached the planet, we got transmissions from the advance craft already there, enough of which had made it to do their job. It was a beautiful, largely water-covered planet very similar to Earth, if you ignored the red color of the water. It had 0.98 standard gravity, a day 23.5 hours long, and a 382-day year (about 374 Earth days). It had 22% land area, 90% of it at reasonably habitable temperatures, and all of that heavily developed. It had two moons, one large one, smaller than Earth’s moon and a little closer, orbiting in 27 days, and a pretty small one 4 times as far out.

And while we’d detected many signs of a civilization at least equal to 21st century Earth’s when we first detected New Mars and in the years we spent preparing, and plenty of signs of civilization when we got here, there was one thing missing: The people who built it. The reddish color of the water was some form of marine plant life which was abundant near the surface over both shallow and deep water. Except in the coldest parts, and small areas perhaps set aside as parks, the land was covered with buildings ranging from small houses to shopping malls. There were lots of solar cells including part of just about every roof, and wind turbines and other renewable energy resources. The worldwide density of the construction indicated they had more of common metals like iron and aluminum than Earth did, or they’d already done some serious asteroid or moon mining to find them. There were, however, no obvious signs of major space exploration around the planet.

It was just the people who were missing. There were a large number of what appeared to be maintenance robots, keeping the power generation systems running, but there were no life signs coming from them. There were plenty of wild animals, mostly small ones, but they didn’t show signs of intelligence we’d expect for building something like this. There were fleeting signals of something else, what appeared to be beings of a suitable size to be the people who built this, but we hadn’t spotted them yet. We had plenty of videos of the landing modules from our probes flying through their cities, but none showed any of the people who built all this.

There were statues and murals that showed some fairly humanoid looking bipedal beings. They were a bit stouter than humans, with prehensile tails which reached to the ground when they let them hang down. Judging by the typical sizes of these statues, they were about human-sized. We had records of written and spoken language, on signs and murals, and in audio broadcasts our satellites had recorded years before arrival, though all the broadcasts repeated on some schedule and we had already collected clear copies of all of them. The automated linguistics satellites had deciphered three separate major languages and prepared automatic translation systems for us to use, should we encounter any of the people, as well as what we believed to be five minor languages we did not have enough samples of to fully translate.

There were houses, lots and lots of houses. Readings suggested that there had been housing for approximately 12 billion human-sized beings. “Had been” because, unlike the power generation facilities, many of the houses were in various states of decay. Some whole neighborhoods had collapsed. Most of them seemed still fully functional, though empty. Those houses usually had half their roofs devoted to solar cells, the other half to rooftop gardens, probably meant for growing food, though they were untended and growing wild. It appeared the maintenance robots were keeping them from covering the solar cells, but otherwise not tending to them.

The Hunt for People

Some catastrophe had befallen the people here, and as our ship completed the last leg of its journey toward the planet, we set about discovering what it was. Atmospheric scans showed no elements there which would be toxic to us. It had a bit more oxygen and carbon dioxide and a bit less nitrogen than Earth did, and twice the argon. There was very little atmospheric sulfur, which agreed with the post-fossil-fuel power generation systems we found.

There was a healthy biosphere of microorganisms. There were none we thought would be harmful to us. And there were small animals which had not been harmed by what was there. They freely rummaged through the remains of the rooftop gardens on the houses that had collapsed, and less often on the standing houses.

There were no signs of unusual radioactivity as might be associated with nuclear warfare or a nuclear energy disaster. The destroyed houses didn’t appear to have suffered damage from conventional warfare, either. It was more like neglect and lack of maintenance. And there were no obvious signs of large-scale death. We saw occasional skeletons which could have been people’s bodies that the small animals had already picked clean for food. But there were far too few of these for them to have all died suddenly.

And there were those fleeting life signs that could have corresponded to the missing residents, but they never seemed to last for more than a minute. Were they living deep underground, coming up briefly to retrieve food? The scans run so far were strong enough to penetrate the buildings we saw here and one or two levels of basements (though few buildings had more than one basement level) and we simply weren’t seeing them, but if they were deeper we would have missed them.

After my ship docked with one of the functioning garden satellites and we got our first meal of real food after arriving, we made that our base of operations and sent its location to the other surviving ship as a rendezvous point. That ship was two weeks behind us. Eight of their people had survived the suspended animation, as had seven of ours, and we agreed to wait for them while continuing to observe. We sent our first report back to Earth, just giving the status of the ships and bringing them on alert to watch for our subsequent reports.

From this space-dock, we analyzed the data on the fleeting life signs and saw that they were concentrated in certain areas. Specific buildings, one or two per square kilometer, were generating these signs periodically, some more than others.

In response to the early data showing no people, one of the other ship’s crew suggested that the people could be in a kind of suspended animation. We scanned for fainter life signs that might have corresponded with that, and found none. Cryogenic freezing would have given a strong temperature signal which was also absent. And the signals we got didn’t seem weak, just transient.

The next bright idea came from the only other man besides me to survive from our ship, Anton Fredericks. He noted that there was a large power generation infrastructure that seemed to be functioning, and wondered where the power was going. The sensors on the drones the probes sent out weren’t equipped to check for power movements. We commanded one of the probes to collect several of its drones and bring them to us, and we were able to modify them to scan for significant power movements and sent them back down into a particular city we’d chosen for no reason other than that we had the most data on it.

This took some time, and it took more time to collect data on the power movements. First off, the power was indeed going underground. Their entire power grid was underground, with individual buildings connected at basement level and deeper trunk lines. But in addition to this we found sharp power drains occurring occasionally in the buildings with the fleeting life signs.

By this point, the other ship was arriving, and we stopped to welcome them aboard, and feed them. After their first meal, we summarized our findings, and together we agreed we needed to watch these buildings. The power drains gave us more specific points to watch than simply the entire building, so we picked the building in this city which had seen the power drains and fleeting life signs most often, and sent a couple video drones to try to get as close to where the drains were happening as they could get.

It was then sleeping shift for half of us, but the rest, four of our crew including myself and four of theirs, gathered in a room where we could watch the live video feeds from our drones. One drone entered a large gallery with a sign written in two of the three major languages. Our translation system displayed that it meant MAKE A WISH in both languages. The room contained about thirty statues loosely matching statues we had seen of the people elsewhere. But while most of the statues elsewhere were clothed, these were all totally naked. It showed the people were even more humanoid than we had thought, down to the sexual organs, though some of the statues appeared to possess both male and female organs. The sexual organs were prominent, with the males sporting erections and the females posed so as to make the sexual organs prominent. This made us wonder if we’d found an alien brothel.

And then it happened. A live person, green-skinned and matching the general appearance of the statues, appeared in a flash of light on one of the statues. It was a female, and she appeared to be in a sexual encounter with the male organ of that statue. She stepped off, went over to a different statue, engaged in sex with that one, and vanished in another flash.

Two of the women gasped out together, “What the fuck?!”

“That does appear to be the relevant question,” I responded, drawing laughs from some of the others. “I believe I saw a woman materialize in a sexual position with one of the statues, switch over to another statue, and vanish as quickly as she appeared.”

There was a chorus of agreement in the room.

Deanna Dixon, a woman from the other ship who was managing our connection to the drones, said, “I’ve saved the relevant bit of video permanently, and I am going to instruct the computer to watch for any similar events, save them as well, and alert us.”

“For that matter, have it save anything that looks significantly different from the empty room we have been watching the rest of the time,” another suggested.

Immediately after Dixon called out “Done” the alert went off, and we saw a male of the species similarly switch from one female statue to another. It was about fifteen minutes later when we saw a second man appear, and a few minutes after that a woman.

Fredericks asked, “So what do we have here, some kind of sex parlor? Are these people getting transported somewhere where they are having sex in the positions they put themselves into?”

“Matter transportation would account for the high energy drains,” a woman from the other ship responded.

“Maybe it’s virtual sex,” another woman suggested. “Rather than an immediate transport, they are stored in a computer where they have virtual sex for a time. When the session is up, they come back, and start another session. That would account for us not being able to detect the life signs except during these moments.”

I responded, “Oh, God! An entire civilization that has gotten themselves so addicted to virtual sex that it’s all they do. They built robots to do all their maintenance, so they didn’t have any actual work they had to do on their own.”

The others nodded and said various words of agreement.

Fredericks said, “At least, the robots do all the maintenance needed to keep the system going. They don’t seem to be keeping the people’s houses from falling apart, but I guess they are no longer using them, anyway.”

“So what do we do?” I continued. I wanted to survey ideas from my crewmates before jumping into a course of action.

Fredericks replied, “I think it’s imperative that we try to make contact. It’s possible they are so sex-addicted that they will ignore us and continue what they are doing, but I do think there’s a chance if we make contact that we can get someone to explain to us how they got into this state. It’s unlikely they will attack us, given that they come out of these encounters naked and carrying nothing, though it is possible we may encounter automated security systems.”

“I agree with that assessment. We either try to get their story or make a good effort to do so, and send a report back to Earth. Then, since there are plenty of good living quarters available, we take up residence.”

The others agreed as well, and a woman from my ship, Clara Callahan, added, “And we absolutely do not participate in anything these sex parlors offer, since they are obviously too addictive.”

Not everybody expressed their agreement, but there were no denials of the statement. There were two Ayes (one of them mine) and an Amen.

One of the previously silent ones from the other ship, Ping Guo, added, “If we can’t get anything from them, maybe we can find something in the homes they are no longer using.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nelson Jenry, a man from the other ship, commented.

Deanna Dixon said, “It looks like they have extensive computer systems. They might have history recorded in them.”

“Fine, we have some alternatives if we can’t get it from the horse’s mouth,” I acknowledged.

We agreed to wait until the end of the current sleep cycle, give the sleepers a chance to make other suggestions, and send a mixed team down. But they had no other ideas and agreed with what we had come up with.

The landing team would consist of 2 pilots and 4 explorers, split from our two sleeping shifts, so we didn’t have to withdraw if it took too long. Ultimately, if nothing went wrong, our entire team would go down and settle on the planet, but we needed to investigate before we fully committed. By the time they reached the surface, the people from my shift would be sleeping. We drew lots for slots. First we picked one pilot from each shift to be part of the landing party, and the other three pilots would remain in space. Then two explorers from among the rest of each sleeping shift. I ended up selected as an explorer.

The Horse’s Mouth

So I got onto the landing craft (we chose to use the one from the ship I arrived on) and before we landed I settled down to start my sleep cycle along with another explorer, Melissa Canelli. The pilot from my shift, Lakshmi Ramanujan, was going to stay awake as a backup until we landed, since landing was, after all, the most difficult piloting job, and then sleep. Clara Callahan, the first pilot, would monitor our exploration team from the landing craft until relieved by Ramanujan after her sleep, and Anton Fredericks and Sarah Carmichael would be the exploration team who would first seek out the natives.

When Canelli and I woke up, Callahan, still watching our team’s video feed, gave us a recap.

“It’s going OK. Our two explorers entered the building we had been observing via drone earlier. It took about 20 minutes before any of the people appeared, and the first one ignored our people and went into another fantasy. The second, a woman, came out about 10 minutes later, and Carmichael called out, ‘Excuse me!’ which was translated by her wearable device into both of the languages seen on the sign here. But the woman ran and hid from our duo, and after a few minutes went into another simulation. So it went for several more people. Finally we got a woman to help us. This one reacted to our explorers’ attempt to get her attention with ‘Eek! Aliens! Computer, end simulation!’ and a computerized voice responded that she was not in a simulation. But she stopped to listen to us, and since then, our explorers have been explaining how we discovered their world and traveled over what would normally be lifetimes to get here, and the resident has explained a little of her culture, such as it is, or was.”

So Canelli and I joined them. We had landed in one of the spaces we identified as possibly parks, and had to walk just under a kilometer to reach the large building within which was the simulator room where our team was. We found them in another room adjacent to the sex simulator room, one that had tables and chairs and perhaps was once meant to be a restaurant. Their chairs were a little lower than what we were used to and had an obvious hole for their tails, which our guest was using, but they worked fine for us to sit on.

“Oh, now there are four of you, and you all have clothes. I am getting self-conscious sitting here naked,” were the first of her words I heard translated by the device I wore.

Almost as soon as I sat down, she walked back into the other room, asking, “Computer, remind me which locker was mine and open it for me.” The computer gave her a number, and she retrieved something from the locker. She appeared sad as she brought it back to our group and put it on the table.

“These were my clothes, but they are useless now.” The translator was pretty good, able to pick up and convey the emphasis she put on the word equivalent to “were” in her language. The clothes were fused together in a lump, and the parts she was able to separate from the rest had obvious holes.

“How long have you been here?” Fredericks asked.

“I’ve completely lost track of time. Computer, how long has it been since I stored my clothes in the locker?”

The computer responded, “34 years, 6 months, 12 days.”

I asked, “How old were you when you went in?”

“22.”

“Is your appearance normal for someone from your world 56 years old?”

“Oh, we don’t age in the simulators. I’m aging now, but the small time we spend outside the simulators doesn’t add up to much. I’m 56 now, but I’m effectively still 22.”

“Interesting. So your people have no need to work, you can play forever, and you stay eternally young.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. When I turned 17 and was allowed in the sex simulators, at first I only went a little bit, and then a bit more, and once I was 20 sometimes for days at a time. After a while I decided life outside the simulators was boring, and there was nothing keeping me from staying here all the time, so I did.”

“Yes, we noticed that,” said Canelli. “It appears that everybody on your world has made that decision.”

“Everybody? No. Children aren’t allowed in, nor are the government officials.”

Canelli continued, “We have run detailed scans of your world. Unless your children have a significantly different form, we know exactly what your life signs look like, since they are not too different from our own. But the only life signs anywhere are fleeting ones around for a minute or two and then gone again, in facilities like this one.”

“What? Everybody is in the simulators? Computer, how many children are there in the world younger than 17?”

“Zero. The last known birth occurred 31 years, 11 months, and 8 days ago.”

“Computer, who is in charge of the government of the city?”

“Nobody. All government roles are vacant.”

“Computer, who and where is the nearest government official?”

“There are no registered government officials anywhere on the world.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world, including those currently in simulators?”

“Twelve billion, four hundred seventy nine million, twenty four thousand, six hundred eleven.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world who are not in a simulation or in a simulator room?”

“One.”

“Computer, am I the one you counted?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to the doorway between the simulator room and the room we sat in. “It counted me, because the simulator room ends there. And I guess it doesn’t recognize you as people.”

She slumped with her head resting on one hand. “OK, it’s hard to believe, but it looks like you are right. All my people decided to go into the simulators rather than face real life. Are the maintenance robots still active?”

She didn’t address this question to the computer, so when it did not answer, I did.

“Yes. We have seen many of them in action, keeping the solar and wind energy systems operating. There are some in other buildings, too, but they do not appear to be maintaining the individual houses. Some of those have collapsed.”

“It’s likely they were damaged by storms. The maintenance robots normally take care of all the buildings, but if a home is destroyed or seriously damaged during a storm, its resident has to request a repair, so that the robots prioritize repairs where they are wanted. Normally, government officials would request repair of damaged vacant homes once the occupied ones were taken care of. If all the people were in the simulators, they weren’t at their homes to request a repair, and if there are no government officials, they couldn’t do it either. Speaking of which, I am still bothered by being naked, so let me go back to my house and find some clothes. There should be some that have survived the time.”

Emperor of the World

She led us all to her home, which was a couple hundred meters from the building we had been in, but it was one of the destroyed buildings.

“Hmm,” the woman said. “I don’t imagine the others will care if I take their clothes, but their homes will be locked. But wait, there’s no government! I wonder...”

She led us back into the building we were in before.

“Computer, is the role of emperor vacant?”

“Yes.”

“Computer, I volunteer to be emperor.”

“Since there were no declared candidates in the last election for emperor, as of this moment, year 3479 month 8 day 12, you, Chen Dresta Balanjia, have become the emperor of the world, effective until the next election with candidates or until you resign or die.”

I chose not to worry about the fact that emperor was an elected position here. I treated it as a limitation of the translation; perhaps, in terms of power, the role was equal to an emperor.

“Well, I’m glad the system works. It’s always been possible for people to volunteer themselves into roles that were vacant after an election. Usually they aren’t accepted immediately; the nearest supervisor over that role has to approve of unelected volunteers. But I guess there is no supervisor for emperor. We learned how this system works in school. Once, when an entire town was destroyed by a storm and everybody in the government was killed, they had to reestablish the whole government that way, with the mayor being approved by the governor and then approving others under him. They also do that when establishing new cities. This is like that but restarting the entire government of the world. As emperor I should be able to enter any home whose occupants are away, and that’s all of them. My size is common, and one of the houses on this block should have clothes that fit. Then I can see about how else I can help you.”

Chen now led us to the group of houses nearest the sex parlor, and she went from house to house, unlocking each one and going inside briefly. It took her until the fifth house to find a dress that she came out wearing. But she stopped at the doorway.

“Come on in. My house was destroyed, and all my stuff is surely ruined, so I might as well make this one mine. There are clothes here that fit me. In fact... Computer, register this as my home.”

“Home registered.”

“You see, as emperor, I can exercise every government power including the one to assign housing, even for myself.”

Then we followed her inside, and there were couches and chairs not too different from what we had on Earth, except the back was held up by metal bars, leaving a gap between the padded parts of the back and the seat. We all sat down, including Chen, who put her tail into the gap as she sat down.

“Now, how can I help you?”

Everybody started speaking at once, but the others deferred to me as the ranking officer.

“Well, we’d like to know a lot about your history. Please start with how the sex simulators got started, as it could explain your current situation. Also, without going into too much graphic detail, what you experience in the simulators. We were afraid that if we went in we’d get just as addicted to them as your people seem to have done.”

“Well, the simulators have been around since well before I was born, but they got better over time. As I understand it, they started as a transportation system. You could travel instantly over long distances. Or very fast, anyway, but not completely instant. It takes some time to transmit your pattern. If you’re going to the next town, it’s pretty quick, but if you are going to the other side of the world, it takes an hour. And since it took a day to get to the other side of the world otherwise, that was the way it was mainly used at first.”

“Transportation via matter-to-energy-to-matter conversion?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chen replied, and then continued her story. “You actually experience that hour, though at first it was as a bland nothingness. Somebody figured out how to project entertainment programs into the virtual space your essence was in during this transmission, and at first it was just like the programs that people watched at home in those days.”

Fredericks interrupted, “Those programs are still running. Our advance craft found them broadcasting on a loop on many different frequencies, and these make up the bulk of how our translation systems learned your languages.”

Chen continued, “I’ll keep that in mind. Over time, the in-transportation entertainment got interactive, and they added sensory feedback, and then eventually people figured out how to make simulated sex using this feedback, and that was available as a premium option. But it was so popular they made sex simulators like the one you found me in, where you could experience virtual sex while not going anywhere. As I understand it, your pattern just goes around in loops under the building. There’s a transit hub in another part of the building you could use to go elsewhere; the larger sex sim rooms were built over them to take advantage of the already large computer systems in them.”

Carmichael asked, “Does it feel the same as real sex?”

“I’m told it feels just like real sex, but I’ve never actually had real sex. Hardly anybody did that by the time I started going into the simulators.”

“Do you need to eat?” Canelli asked.

“Yes, sort of. If I am going through simulators constantly, I might only be out of simulation for about 10 minutes a day, and that’s all the time that passes for my body. So I can go a month or so between eating, and then there are eating programs that actually feed your body pattern, and I just do one of those when I feel hungry. Likewise, you can call up a bathroom sim, do your business using your choice of body form, and your real body’s wastes will be eliminated. Apart from the eating and bathroom sims and a few other special ones designed to improve your real body, the sims are just sims, and anything you do in them does not affect your real body.”

“So they thought of everything. Made it so you never have to leave the simulators.”

“Yes. And as I understand it they were quite expensive when they started, but by the time I was old enough to be taught what the simulators were, they were free. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe you can ask the computer.”

Alien People

“The computer is accessible here, too?” one of the others asked.

“Yes. It’s basically available in every building, and even right outside the building so it can unlock the building by recognizing you, though locking and unlocking is really all you are allowed to do outside.”

“Computer, tell me the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

There was no response.

“Computer, tell us the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free,” Chen echoed.

It started into the history, but Chen asked it to stop.

“Computer, how many people are in this building?”

“One.”

“Computer, how many life forms are in this building?”

“Five.”

“Computer, can I register the other life forms here as people?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to be registered people on this world?” Chen asked us.

“Yes,” we responded in unison.

“OK, you figure out who goes first, and I’ll start you off. The computer will ask you some questions, and you don’t have to say ‘computer’ when you answer them. You do have to say that any other time for the computer to recognize you are making a request.”

We agreed to go in rank order. The two women on the landing team were of equal rank after me, and they played rock-paper-scissors to choose who went first, which led me to explain that game to Chen. When they were done, Chen started.

“Computer, register this life form as a person. He does not speak our language; accept commands from his speaking device as if they were given by him.”

The computer now spoke, “Applicant, which language would you prefer?”

This was repeated, apparently in all the languages we had discovered and the translator got it mostly right for all of them.

I responded, “English.”

“Language not recognized. Please choose from the available languages.

A list of languages appeared on the wall in front of us, which our translator showed as the names we had assigned the languages we discovered. Just those eight.

Chen explained, “This lets you choose which language the computer will respond to you in. But it doesn’t know your language. Your translator seems to work well for my speech, so just take the first one. Say one.”

“One.”

“Language 1 accepted. Please speak your name,” the computer said in the first language it had spoken at the start.

“Joseph Michael Walters”

“What is your nickname?”

“Joe”

“Gender?”

“Male”

“Birthplace?”

“Earth”

“Location not recognized. Please restate birthplace.”

“Off-world”

“Location not recognized.”

“Chen, what is the name of this city?”

What she said was translated as Bridgeport, and she had the computer take that as my birthplace.

“Birthplace Bridgeport accepted. Date of birth?”

“Hmm, it’s not measured in your calendar. And I was in suspended animation for 150 years that isn’t reflected in my apparent age, but I guess that happens to your people in the simulators, too. So I guess I should be 182 years old. Maybe 178, due to the slightly longer years here. What year did you say it was here?”

Chen shrugged. “Computer, what year is it?”

“3479”

So I did some quick mental math and responded, “OK. Computer, set my date of birth to year 3301, month 3, day 12.”

“Do you have any living relatives?”

I thought for a moment, recalling that any that I knew would be dead. There certainly weren’t any on this planet, and that meant that the computer wouldn’t know them as people. So I said, “No.”

“Registration complete.”

Chen continued the process to register the rest of our current team.

Now I repeated my request from earlier.

“Computer, tell us how the simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

The story went on for about half an hour, but the gist was that it was expensive because of the amount of electricity needed to power the sims. Imagine buying a ticket for a long-haul airplane flight to participate in sex sims for the hour that the transit took here. They had long ago exhausted the fossil fuels here and relied on solar and wind power, apparently never having developed nuclear power, or at least not having fusion and deciding the radioactive waste of fission power couldn’t be tolerated. So there was a big effort to build solar cells, and expand the offshore wind farms. For a generation, most new jobs were based on making the solar cells, whether mining to obtain materials, refining, manufacturing, or installing.

They had a global, high-capacity, superconducting electric grid and they did have some batteries to cover peaks in demand and slowdowns in generation, but solar from the side facing the sun at any given moment, together with wind power worldwide, powered the whole world, so they did not need the huge daily cycling batteries associated with the use of solar power on Earth. As more solar power systems were installed, electricity became cheaper and normal people could start to afford trips into the simulators, while rich people could start to live there all the time. This led to the development of eating and bathroom programs within the simulators.

Some solar and wind installation jobs were dangerous and put people at heights, and they paid people well to take the risks. The jobs to maintain those installations were equally dangerous, so they developed autonomous robots to do the maintenance jobs. Jobs building and repairing robots replaced the other manufacturing jobs, but many fewer people were needed, so people started working fewer hours. Eventually they built robots that could repair the other robots, and robots that could recycle damaged equipment and build new ones from them, and the entire system ran autonomously. Once the solar and wind networks were finished, the cost of electricity fell to nothing, as there was excess power available, and they made the simulators free.

In fact, they did away with money. When I asked for more about this, I found that the rooftop garden thing had been going on for generations. The population had long exceeded the capacity of farmland to grow enough food for people, and people had rooftop gardens to grow most of the food they needed. Once the labor of people was no longer needed due to robots being built for all sorts of manual labor, many people couldn’t earn money, and since they didn’t have to pay for electricity, didn’t have to pay for food, and most everything else was handled by a system of self-maintaining robots, the government simply did away with money. Some people still worked jobs, including caring for and educating children, and there were a small number of government jobs, mainly law enforcement and some oversight over the automated systems that ran everything.

So people played games, enjoyed entertainment (which was mostly old material, but there were hundreds of years of movies, music, books, etc. all available on demand on their version of the Internet; more than anybody could ever watch), and they used the simulators. Over time, though, people got bored of the other stuff, and everybody used the simulators. The children grew up, no more children were born, child care and teachers were no longer needed, and the people doing these jobs also ended up using the simulators. And the government officials, bored with days, weeks, and months with literally nothing that needed doing, also resigned, bypassing a rule that prohibited government overseers from going into the simulators. They were allowed to travel, but not to purposefully spend time in the simulators. The rule was supposed to ensure there was always some human oversight, but nobody envisioned the entire government resigning. By the time they did, there was nobody left to object except other government officials facing the same situation, who followed suit rather than protest.

I started writing my report to send back to Earth with these details. It was going to need a lot more, but this was useful.

One of our reminders went off, and we agreed to call in the rest of our crew. The group in space had completed a plan we had agreed upon, to move one of the ships to the other garden station and steer it to a position opposite the first one around the planet, ensuring that they had maximum visibility of the planet and access to send signals back to Earth at all hours. The reminder was that their orbital position after this maneuver was nearing a point from which they could land most quickly near us. Of course, they had been watching us and knew it was going well for us here, and they were ready to come down as soon as we gave the word, which we did. We also called in our two pilots from the first lander to join us.

When I explained to Chen that two more people already on the planet and 9 more coming from orbit would be joining us, she appointed the four of us as other government officials who would have the power she did to register people and reassign homes. The pilots arrived pretty quickly and we registered them.

We tried some of the food from Chen’s garden and it was fine. Better than space rations, and comparable to what we had been eating on the space station. We also learned there was a rainwater collection system on every house which filtered the water to provide drinking water. Water that was leftover after cooking was put into a system that filtered it again, using it to water the gardens when rain didn’t supply enough. Water that ran off the plants was allowed to soak down into the ground naturally.

In her kitchen, there was a small refrigerator. The Martians didn’t eat meat, and they made a calcium-rich drink from certain plants rather than drinking animal milk, except for infants breast-feeding, so they really only needed to preserve half-eaten fruits and certain harvested plants. There were a few black lumps of who-knows-what left in there that she cleaned out, though we didn’t see what she did with them.

Next, the six of us looked for homes with suitable clothing. We agreed the clothes we came in would only last so long and we needed to find local clothes if we didn’t want to eventually be going around naked.

Their clothes included shirts, pants in various lengths, and dresses. But we discovered quickly that their pants, all tight-fitting styles, had a roughly palm-sized hole in the rear for the tail. For us, it would mean a big stretch of our butt crack showing, unless it was covered with a dress. The dresses had a vent in the back for the tail, basically two pieces of fabric that overlapped, with a hole between them that they threaded the tail through vertically. This meant the hole closed flat like the space between two shirt buttons when we wore them with no tail. There were dresses for both men and women, easily distinguished by whether they had space for the breasts. Two of the men had tried putting on two pairs of pants, one backward, but they found that uncomfortable, and pretty soon everyone was in a dress and we gathered again in Chen’s house.

Chen explained, “Each of your homes has a bathroom, and you can dispose of any trash in there.”

She demonstrated, opening the door to hers and depositing some inedible bit from food we ate into a covered chute she pointed out to us, just inside the door.

Canelli spoke up, “I could use a bathroom now.”

Chen stepped out, gestured to indicate it was open for her, and Canelli pulled the door shut behind her. But a moment later she came back out.

“How do you actually use the bathroom here?”

She opened the door wide so that we could see inside, and the others of us moved around the room to look. There was a mirror, a countertop with a few items on it, and not much else we could see.

“The mirror is for grooming. When you are ready to go into the bathroom sim, touch the panel on the far wall.”

“Oh, it’s a sim?”

“Yes. All our bathrooms are sims. You can only access the bathroom sims here, not any other sims.”

I and all my crewmates let out sighs of relief. We were not going to have the temptation of sex sims in every home.

“It’s based on bathrooms we had a long time ago, before I was born. The first thing you will see is a choice of body. There are three choices, and you can think or say 1, 2, or 3 or press buttons in front of you. 1 is your own body, 2 is a generic male body, and 3 is a generic female body. Then you will be in the bathroom, naked, and there will be an oval toilet that you sit on and pee and poop. There is a bidet built into the toilet, and once you are sitting you will see two buttons. The first is to spray water to clean yourself, and the second is to spray air to dry the water. But you don’t have to use the bidet. The bathroom sim ensures you are clean when you leave. It will clean your clothes, too.”

Canelli went in and did her business, and the rest of us took a turn as well even if we didn’t really need it. When we were done, we compared stories. We had chosen all the body types among us. Naturally, the generics were generic New Martians (who we quickly decided to simply call Martians). We now knew Martians peed and pooped like humans, except the males did not use their penis, with the urethra instead opening at the outermost point of the scrotum.

When we asked about them, Chen explained, “The generics were originally put in to help disabled people. If it was difficult for you to use the bathroom because of your condition, you could choose a generic body which would have no difficulty.”

“Originally?” I asked.

“While the bathroom and eating programs change the contents of your body, they also figured out how to make sims that would modify the body itself, materializing you afterward with changes in your body that you specified, rather than just changing the contents and removing dirt on it and such. Most of the sims, including all the sex sims, explicitly don’t change your real body in any way, regardless of what you choose or do inside, but there are other sims that can fix just about anything that’s wrong with your body.”

“So you stopped having disabled people because they all got fixed in sims.”

“Exactly.”

Chen didn’t say more, but seemed to be hesitating and thinking about saying something.

“I’m going to guess it didn’t stop there.”

“Good guess. People made custom versions of the fix-your-body sim which ‘fixed’ things that most people wouldn’t consider wrong in the first place. There were people with extra arms, giant and tiny sizes, and some outright monsters, but they put a stop to that. Now you can only overwrite parts of your body with corresponding parts from the generic male and female bodies, which will be adjusted to match your size and skin tone, and if your size is far from the average you can bring it closer to average, and you can change skin tone, hair, and a few other bits of your appearance within the normal ranges.”

“So they are back to just fix-your-body sims.”

“Well, mostly. It’s possible to pull from either generic body, so you can draw from the other to give yourself a sex change.”

“Did a lot of people do that?”

“At first, yes. It was quite popular before the monsters, and nobody saw anything wrong with it so it was explicitly left as an available option. Later, when everybody was using the sims all the time, there was less of that, because you can take a different body within any given sex sim, though people still change sex to use the statues, like I did.”

“You changed? You were originally male?”

“Yes. But I preferred being female in the sex sims. I think women have it better. So I changed to female so I could jump on the erections of the statues to get into sims where I’m female with a male partner.”

“Does that immediately throw you into sex with what the statue represents?”

“Yes. The alternative is to touch a panel on any of the statues, similar to the one for entering the bathroom sims. When you do that, you first get a menu like in the bathroom sims, but with many more options. But sometimes I didn’t much care, and just wanted some sex, fast. I had to get all new clothes, but by the time I did that it was easy to get robot-made clothes.”

I noted for both my report and for our later usage that robots made their clothes, as Chen continued.

“There is essentially an unlimited amount of customization possible if you go through the menus before you enter the sex part. You can choose just about any body for yourself, including forms banned from the real world. You can add more or fewer limbs, otherwise impossible shapes or dimensions, and you can have either or both sexes. There are alien bodies with different skin colors; everybody on this world has green skin, though it varies just as yours do: from very pale green to very deep green and also varieties that have reddish sections. That is why I recognized you as aliens, because we have legends of visitors from other worlds with other colors of skin besides green and red.”

I interrupted, “That’s remarkable, because nobody on my world has naturally green skin, and one of the earliest and most persistent stories of aliens was about ‘little green men’ with green skin who supposedly came from a red planet near ours called Mars. There were never any real little green men, though; they were fictions that people made up and repeated. Your planet looks red to us from our home world because the solar cells absorb light and most of the reflected light is from the water, which is full of red plant life, so we called it New Mars even though we didn’t know it was actually populated by green people. But go on.”

“You can likewise choose any kind of body for your sexual partner(s). You can give them any kind of personality you want as well, from pliable and submissive, willing to accept any suggestion of what you want them to do, to one who will totally take control and tell you what to do, and from ones who need a lot of coaxing to get them to have sex to total nymphomaniacs who want nothing but sex. Oh, and I should mention that panels on the walls and pillars of the sex sim rooms let you enter non-sex sims, again with a menu to let you choose what you want.”

She stopped to make a query when she mentioned this.

“Computer, how many people are in simulations right now other than the sex sims, standard eating and drinking sims, sleep sims, and bathroom sims?”

“One million, one hundred forty one thousand, six hundred eight.”

I remarked, “They are obviously not very popular. 1.1 million out of 12 billion people in sims are doing something other than sex or handling their body’s necessities, about one hundredth of one percent. But they are used.”

At further prompting from Chen, the computer provided a run-down of the million. About a third were in some kind of sports sim. Almost as many were in hobby sims, like painting. About 20% were acting out interactive versions of this world’s popular fiction. Just over 10% were in tourism sims, viewing the famous places of this world, but rather than going there physically, they could take in everything virtually and switch locations instantly. 5% of the people were in the body experiment sim. Chen explained this let you experiment virtually with different body types, and you could save them as custom avatars for use in other sims. Just 5 people were exploring the real, permanent body modification sim. 271 were in other miscellaneous sims that didn’t fall into any of these categories.

The Whole Team Arrives

I updated my report for Earth to add some of these details about the sims, and about the time I was done, the crew from the other ship arrived. So we spent a while getting those 9 registered in the computer system, and finding them homes. They already had a bit of orientation into the way things work here, since they were watching much of it from the ship, but we explained some details, and everybody took a turn in the bathroom sim.

We agreed there was no reason to maintain the split schedules, and should instead adjust to the local time. For my group, that just meant staying up an extra hour or so beyond when we would have gone to sleep. The other group was due to sleep soon, and would probably just sleep a few hours now and a few at the end of our sleep cycle to adapt. While the 15 of us (16, counting Chen) were all awake together, we went back to the non-functioning restaurant area next to the simulator room as a place we could all be together but with a little more room to spread out.

Not long after we got there, I called the other four other surviving men to a corner of the room. All five of us were wearing dresses we had taken from the closets of some of the native males from the area near the landing site. One man, Clark Gerrold, had objected to the dresses but was wearing one anyway over pants, so as not to expose his butt crack. The question was, do we want to dress like the natives, in dresses, or, once we have learned how to ask robots to make more clothes for us, do we want to make pants without tail holes that we can wear with shirts? We had different opinions and not much conviction either way, except for Clark, whose adamant opinion I already knew. For his sake, we agreed we’d at least try to get the robots to make proper pants, but if it proved difficult, we would just go with the dresses.

When we returned, Chen was giving an answer to a question the women had asked.

“We do have menstrual periods like you suggest, but the bathroom program should clean you out. In the same way that it removes any leftover bodily wastes from the outside of your body, once the menstrual lining starts to degrade it considers that waste and should remove the whole thing at once before any of it leaks out.”

“What if you chose the male avatar?”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s designed to clean out your real body. Provided you are using the bathroom at least twice a day, you won’t have a problem. Oh, and the sim bathrooms also give your skin and hair a cleaning.”

Deanna Dixon said, “OK, I was wondering why there were no showers or bathtubs, but that answers that. It cleans everything. But we’re going to want to reproduce here eventually, so it would help if we knew our menstrual periods to help us predict fertile times. We’ve been in stasis for ages, and who knows when that will happen for each of us again.”

“Oh, you will see a red light over the exit if the bathroom sim removed your menstrual lining. I remember seeing that.”

“Oh, that’s what that was for,” two women responded.

Laura Espinosa now asked about childbirth, and Chen didn’t understand the question at first. Laura explained how birth worked on Earth and then let Chen explain the Martian way.

“Well, I never did, and few people did in my time, but we were taught about it. But we just push the baby out. We cut the umbilical cord the way you describe, go into the bathroom to clean up, and the only thing we use a special facility for is registering the birth. That’s usually limited to specific government officials, but I gave several of you positions that should allow access to that.”

Espinosa explained, “Birth isn’t always easy for our people. Sometimes our children get too large to fit through the birth canal. Sometimes the umbilical cord gets wrapped around the baby, or it comes out backward.”

“Size has never been an issue for our people during birth. The cord wrapping, yes. If the baby feels stuck, it usually means the cord is wrapped around it. You would ask another person to reach in and untangle it. If he reaches in and feels feet, then he sticks both arms in and pulls the baby out by both legs. Again, that was what I was taught, not from personal experience.”

“Both arms? It sounds like your birth canal is a lot bigger than ours, and that is why you don’t have such problems.”

At this point I suggested, “Could one of our women give birth in a simulator? Configure the simulator to give the woman a larger birth canal and ... pelvic bone I guess. Stronger vaginal muscles, and whatever else helps the Martians do it more easily. Let her give birth in there where it’s easier, and then come out with the baby born.”

Chen replied, “That should be possible. We can create custom sims, starting with one of the standard ones. The bathroom sims are the most obvious, but we’d need to pull in part of the body modification sims, and something to recognize that what comes out of the body needs to be saved rather than eliminated!”

“I guess we are going to end up in the sims anyway,” Espinosa replied. “Just no sex sims, please. We all agreed before launch that if we ended up in a suitable environment, which it seems we have done, that we would breed and populate the world. There are only ten women and five men, which is less than ideal, but should be enough. The computers on our ships have programs to establish genetic diversity, and we were all checked to ensure we had no genetic defects, so we should be viable in all combinations. Each of you guys is going to get two of us women to have sex with repeatedly until you get us pregnant.”

Three of the other women gave encouraging comments, while the other six were less gung-ho about it, but none of them looked like they loathed the idea. All of the women who embarked on this mission knew they would be having children with some of the men if our mission was successful. Meanwhile, the men were glancing around among the various women and wondering which ones they’d prefer to have sex with. But I knew what Espinosa said was right; we’d put all our data into a computer program and it would decide who got to be with who.

“Are we all agreed that we are going to start a breeding program in the coming months like she suggested?” I asked the group.

There was silence, and then nods.

Seeing her interest in the subject, I continued, “Laura, you are in charge of the breeding program. Give us all time to learn more of how things work here, and when each woman’s period is. I’ll make sure you get the genetic data from our ship so you can set things up.”

“Sure thing.”

Then I suggested, “And we are all going to be a family soon, and shift into new roles needed for this family life, so just as I addressed Espinosa by her first name, we should all get friendly on a first-name basis. I’m Joe.”

And we went around the room.

First Supper

Just after we finished the introductions, I heard one man’s stomach rumble.

“We should prepare dinner, especially because our food supplies are up on the roofs of the houses, and I imagine it’ll be dark soon,” I said.

Chen spoke up next, “All of you have been to your houses, but most of you probably haven’t been in the gardens. All of you should find the stairs to the roof, make sure they aren’t damaged, and collect some of every plant you see up there. If there is damage, come back here and I’ll show you how to file a report and get the robots to fix it. I’m going to show you the plants most people have in their gardens. There is no guarantee they all survived many years of neglect, and there is no guarantee weeds haven’t crept in.”

“We could use the eating sims,” one woman suggested.

“We certainly could,” another replied. “But we want to try not to rely on the sims that got these people to the point they never do anything in the real world, at least not any more than we have to. If we could build a sewage system, we could avoid using the bathroom sims, but the people here had trouble maintaining theirs, and now they have so much wiring and such underground it would be difficult to try and put one back in. That might have had to do with having 12 billion people, though Earth managed it.”

There was general agreement among the group with this rebuttal.

Chen touched a dark square on the wall, and said, “Computer, display Cram’s Garden Guide on this screen.”

Chen tapped a couple buttons on the screen, and then a picture came up which looked exactly like a tomato plant. She described it that way, too.

“On this plant, you eat the red fruits. Green ones aren’t ripe; let them keep growing. Small yellow flowers will yield fruits in the future. Don’t eat the stems.”

The next one looked like some variety of lettuce.

“You eat the leaves on this one. New leaves grow in from the center, but take ones from the outside and leave the rest to grow.”

The others didn’t look quite so much like Earth plants I was familiar with, but they looked like plants that I could have believed grew there somewhere.

“The yellow berries on this plant are ripe. Green ones still need to grow longer. Black or brown ones are overripe; pull them off and bury them in the soil. They only last a few days when ripe, so take all the ripe ones.”

“This one’s trickier, because they are green when ripe, but the unripe ones are the same color as the leaves, while when ripe they turn this light green color.”

“Here’s another one you eat the leaves from. Take any leaves as big as your palm, and if any stems have gotten so tall that they bend over, break them off where they are still vertical, so it’ll grow new stems, and harvest all the leaves from the broken-off part.”

“The green fruits on this tree turn orange when ripe, but you have to peel off the skin and eat the inside.

This went on for about 10 more plants.

“You should find a dish with a cover that locks on like this in your kitchen. It holds about a whole day’s food, but you only need to pick what you expect to eat right now since you are going to sleep soon. However, you can seal it and keep most things until morning if you take too much. I want all of you to bring them back here so I can make sure you’re doing it right. You can find smaller versions of the container, too, for keeping things separate.”

I pointed out to her, “We have scanners that can tell us if food is safe for our people to eat. But not for everybody, so we still need everybody to come together.”

Two people held up the scanners I had described.

“If you see a plant I didn’t show, bring back a leaf or berry and I’ll try to help you identify it, but keep it apart from the rest of your food since it might be poisonous. OK, go get food,” Chen said, and everybody dispersed.

Shortly, everybody was back, and Chen went around examining people’s food choices, and also one of my crew circulated with a scanner. Everybody agreed afterward that they got the same advice from the scanner and from Chen, but Chen was also able to say if unknown plants were weeds that should be removed or good plants that could be eaten, but maybe not yet or not the part the person brought back.

For one plant, Chen explained, “This is a fiber plant. It’s not edible but people make clothes from it. There used to be a factory that you could take these to, put them in a machine, and make cloth, but I’m not sure if it is still there. But since we need new clothes it is good to see these exist, though we can also throw in ruined clothes and reuse the fibers that are still good. Then the robots in the same factory can make clothes from that cloth.”

Chen led us to a kitchen next to the restaurant dining room we'd been sitting in, with many food-preparation devices. Chen showed us all how to prepare many of the plants we brought back, making a variety of dishes, most of which we found quite tasty. Then those who were on sleeping shift went to sleep. I reviewed my report in progress with some of the others, and Chen continued telling stories to the rest. As my group was rejoining Chen’s, I heard Chen explaining how there were sleep sims.

“Your body needs sleep, but only after every 16-18 hours of time outside the sims, and a person in the sims all the time might only spend 10 minutes a day outside the sims, so it was something I did once every 100 days or so. When you do, you’ll sleep in real time until your body is refreshed, usually 6 or 7 hours. Well, those times are for my people; I am not sure about yours, but I know you did send people off to sleep.”

“We sleep, maybe a little longer than you do, and we are used to a slightly longer day than this world has, but I expect that we will adapt,” I told her.

After a while, the rest of us went to our new homes, including Chen, though I didn’t know whether she was ready for sleeping yet. But I guess she did sleep, because she was up with the rest of us in the morning.

After we all awoke, we gathered more food that we all took down to the restaurant area, and both Chen and the scanners again checked the new items people had missed the night before, or had simply not picked because they filled their bin up before getting to them. One man, Rocky Hillman, came back with what looked like a long yellow hot pepper, and Chen confirmed it was too spicy to eat as is.

“If you have these in your garden you probably also have the tools in your house to turn them into a spicy sauce. The sauce stays good for months and you can just fill a jar with it and leave it here for everybody to share... those who can tolerate it, anyway. Two of them this size make enough sauce to fill the size of jar people usually store the sauce in. I never actually made it myself, but you should be able to get the computer to show you how.”

Getting Stuff Done

After our meal I started assigning more roles. Clark, the guy who wanted pants, was put in charge of clothes-making. It was his job to learn from the computer what the clothes-making capabilities of the area were.

Brenda Davis and Lakshmi Ramanujan were the two people who’d been carrying around the food scanners. I put them in charge of inventorying all the plants. We weren’t limited to the gardens at the 16 homes we occupied. We could search all the homes in the area, and those two were given the government role to inspect homes for damage in order to do this. In the process, they could also actually identify any damage only visible after they got inside homes and request repairs, as well as request repairs for the obviously damaged ones. Chen put in a request to have her old home repaired to show those two how to do it.

Mara Rogers and Nelson Jenry were put in charge of learning the state of technology and science on this world beyond what Chen could tell us. For instance, it was obvious they had a bigger source of certain metals here than we had on Earth until we started mining asteroids. Was this planet different in that way or had they been into space also? Chen didn’t know about her people ever traveling into space. Had they ever actually encountered other aliens, or was it just the same myths Earth had had for centuries? Interestingly, those myths really took off on Earth around the time we started to venture into space, though some myths of people coming from the stars were much older than that.

Two computer whizzes, Deanna Dixon and Wendy Youngblood, got a different technological role. We could use the vocal interface on the computers here via our translator, but writing documents was something we really only knew how to do on the computers we brought. Those wouldn’t last forever, and it was unlikely the robots here could learn to make something so detailed using technology alien to them. Could we find a way to use their computers to write documents we could read later? They had computers everywhere, and except where buildings were destroyed, all of them we had found had survived 30 years or so of idle time without any apparent failure, unless the robots had fixed them without prompting. Not to mention the simulator computers that kept billions of people going in and out of simulations a few times a day, though it is quite likely the robots did maintenance there.

The next mealtime, Rocky came back with a jar of yellowish hot sauce that he passed around. Most of us thought it was too hot, including Rocky, but three people enjoyed it. One of them did not have an assigned role, so I put her, Christa Bellizzi, in charge of it. “Move that plant to your own house, and find other ones growing around here. The two with the scanners have been inventorying all the plants; they may know of more. Rocky knows how this sauce was made. If there are other pepper plants that may make more mild sauces other people could enjoy, make those sauces too. And any other sauces, seasonings, and spices we can use are also your domain.”

With me in command, that left 5 other people without assigned roles.

“Just help out the others in whatever way you can,” I told them. “If you think of something interesting we could be doing that nobody’s thought of yet, let me know. I might put you in charge of the effort.”

I provided Laura with my ship’s genetic records, marking out the people who hadn’t survived the trip, so she could start her task. She went around asking all the women to record when they saw the red light to help establish fertile periods.

On the third day after I gave him his assignment, Clark reported that he’d found one of the clothes factories. It had a still-working machine for processing fiber plants (which the plant people had collected a large bucketful of) and recycling old clothes (which we had a virtually unlimited supply of; they seemed to give about half the fabric needed to make them). The clothes-making robots in the factory had been sitting idle from lack of orders, but they seemed operable. Clark had them make one shirt to confirm they worked, and was working on figuring out how to modify the pants pattern to make some without tail-holes.

Two days later, the tech learning team came back with a report. As far as they could tell, the people here had never gotten into space. However, at some point in this planet’s not-too-distant prehistory, a fairly large metallic meteor impacted on the far side of the world from here. It left an absolutely massive metal mountain which covered nearly all of what may have at the time been a newly created island, with a lot of distance between it and any other land. The island itself was barren, with no plants or animals living there, and it was so far from any civilization that it was unknown until the people here started exploring the world. In their theory of evolution, this meteor was responsible for the extinction event in whose aftermath their people evolved.

The meteor was made of a mixture of many different metals, many of which had melted during entry and trailed behind the core of heavy metals which remained solid, which made a big crater upon impact. The lighter metals ended up on top, giving the mountain a reputation for catching on fire, as these included lots of lithium and sodium, elements which are usually found in oxidized forms because the pure metals react violently in contact with water. The outer bits were oxidized, but when someone cut into that, pure metals from the interior were exposed to the generally damp air nearby, and they tended to spark and ignite. Likewise, if a bit of these metals was chipped off the mountain and fell into the sea, it exploded on contact. This caused significant difficulties in mining it.

The Martians did eventually overcome those challenges with a better understanding of chemistry and the mountain’s composition. In the earlier days of mining it, they sought the iron and copper inside the mountain and mined deep into it, including below sea level, discarding many of the lighter metals as junk. When they developed electronics and discovered how useful many of the lighter metals were, with most of them pretty rare in the rest of the world, they had to go dig through the places the “junk” metals were previously discarded. In order to cover most of the land of the world with housing and then with solar cells on top of that, and build a worldwide network of superconductors, they had basically mined the mountain down to the sea bed, and below it in places, the biggest underwater operation ever performed on New Mars.

The computer group had figured out how to add English as a language in the computer system. They had the robots make us new keyboards labeled in English letters, and interfaced our translation dictionary to let the computer understand commands spoken in English and respond to us that way too. Once everybody was re-registered with English as their official language, we started sometimes turning off our translators. We turned them on for Chen, but she wanted to start learning English and tried to understand the spoken English before it was translated for her, so even when she was around we sometimes turned them off.

While they were at it, they also got the robots to make us electrical adapters, so that instead of having to charge the devices we brought with us on board our ships, we could plug them into the ubiquitous electrical outlets in the houses. It was trivial to make enough of these for every such device and leave them permanently attached to the cords.

Chen worked with us to create a plant inventory out of the book she’d showed us which used different files to attach both local and English names to the plants, going much deeper into the book beyond the common ones she had showed us the first time. Some of them were easy (tomato, lettuce, pear, orange, hot pepper). Some were easy to improvise (yellowberry, essentially a yellow blueberry, and white apple, which was sweeter and juicier than any apple I’d ever eaten, but essentially like an apple save for the white skin and pink flesh inside). And other times we just had to make something up. We used fiddlefruit for a reddish brown fruit that had a long, narrow neck with two lobes at the end that were flat on one side. And there were about 20 varieties of melons we had encountered so far, some of them only from a single plant. Chen had only shown us the commonest plants earlier; the full guide was actually pretty comprehensive and showed dozens more melons we hadn’t found. We named the ones we had somewhat fancifully, such as galaxy melon for one that had dark blue skin speckled with white spots.

And Christa had done her job with the hot sauce, too. If we called the first sauce Hot, she’d found peppers that made corresponding Mild and Medium sauces, as well as a Very Hot version which... we figured the one jar we had would last us indefinitely. In fact, nobody actually wanted to put it on their food. We had developed stews, though, so we weren’t always eating this world’s equivalent of salad or fruit salad, and a little dash of the very hot sauce in a pot of stew made use of the stuff, though it did mean half the people wouldn’t eat from that pot. But there were enough of us to make a second pot of stew without hot sauce. One of the five previously unassigned people had become our chef for such meals, and our plant experts kept his supplies filled with the kinds of foods he wanted, using plants from unoccupied houses.

Pretty soon Clark came back with a pair of pants and a shirt for each man in our sizes, and a whole wardrobe of them for himself. He invited everyone else to bring all their worn-out clothes to the clothes factory and he could have the robots make whatever sort of new clothes they wanted.

Just over a month after getting the breeding role, Laura presented the first round of breeding assignments, instructing each of us to have sex for a week starting on around the 12th or 13th day after having seen the red light. One of my partners had just had her second period after arriving on the planet, so wouldn’t be ready for a while, but the other, Lakshmi, was thought to be just starting her fertile period, so I spent some time every day for a while with her. She did a bunch of tantric stuff to make it interesting the first time, but by the third day was more like “Let’s fuck.”

I prepared an addendum to the original report telling how we were living comfortably here now, and sent it to Earth along with a copy of the original report in case it was missed.

Pregnancy

So all that was really left at this point was to get the women pregnant. In this first round I could only speak for my two assigned women, but neither of them shied away from this duty. However, Lakshmi quickly got into a mood of “let’s get this over with.” She didn’t want to worry about enjoying it, just to get me to come inside her. She ended up not getting pregnant that first month. Sarah, on the other hand, was a sex fiend. When it was our turn, our sessions ran for one to two hours, sometimes with me coming inside her two or three times, and I couldn’t keep count of her apparent orgasms. And she showed up at my house to start on the 10th day after the red light, just in case she ovulated that early, and kept going until the 19th day.

It probably wasn’t surprising Sarah got pregnant. Lakshmi needed two more cycles. She was one of only two women to not be pregnant two months after we started the program. After the third month, every woman was confirmed pregnant. By this time, we were eating delicious food at every meal, we had a good command of the computers here, everybody had all new clothes in styles they liked, and the living was easy.

Some of the people who’d been appointed jobs didn’t have much remaining to do, but they found other things to do. Some people went into the various houses near us and took all the old, ruined clothes and hauled them over to the clothing factory. Also, all the pants with tail holes went there, even if not ruined by time. While we now had adequate clothes, we could always use more, so we just amassed a pile of to-be-recycled fabric there for when we needed something. Elsewhere in the building with the sex parlor, we found a space with racks like a clothing store, and Chen thought that was effectively what it once was. It was obvious that it hadn’t been maintained in about as long as most of the homes hadn’t been lived in. The few garments left were ruined, so we put them in the recycling and moved all the still-good clothes from the nearby vacant houses into the store, sorted by type, gender, and size, free for anybody to take. This let us all move into a block of adjacent houses like a neighborhood instead of just wherever we found fitting clothes.

I also wanted to explore how the sims could be adapted as childbirth sims. While we might not strictly speaking need them, all the women would appreciate any help they could get. Clara volunteered for this job, and Chen assigned her the government role Director of Sim Development which gave her essentially unlimited power over the sims. That was one of the few high-level government officials who was allowed in the sex sims, as it was expected she would sometimes need to test how things were operating and test new or questionable sims, but she also had control over the non-sex sims. One of her first changes was to make generic male and female human models that she made available as options in the bathroom sims, something everyone could test, and we all approved of them.

Three months later, Clara reported, “Chen helped me learn how to register a new type of sim, and how to access the sim designer, but I was on my own after that. I started with an empty sex sim with no partner, and with the user in a human body pregnant and ready to give birth. Then I experimented with body modifications meant to make birth easier. I had no choice at this point but to test it repeatedly in different configurations so I could properly compare them. I considered bringing in other volunteers, but the results were going to be subjective and difficult to compare experiences across different people. The only way to compare them properly was for me to do them all myself. Fortunately, after the first few, the births were pretty easy. I made one which was way too easy; the baby shot out like a rocket with a single push which might have injured the baby due to the impact. Then it was only a matter of finding a happy medium between that and the human norm. Here’s what I ended up with.”

She showed a video of a birth in the finished model. The body looked like a caricature of a wide-hipped woman, with the thighs at least 25 cm apart. The actual birth took only a tad over two minutes.

“After that, I extracted the changes between the original, realistic human woman and the final model, and made that into a body modification sim. To test that it would work, I did more testing in modified sex sims, taking several different bodies from the sex sims, applying the human female generic over them, making them pregnant, and applying the birthing body mod. Once again, I gave simulated birth using these different bodies. Having decided it all worked, I packaged it up as a bathroom sim mod.”

She brought up another video on a screen for all of us to watch.

“When a pregnant woman enters any bathroom now, she’ll have six options. Own body, generic male Martian, generic female Martian, generic male human, generic female human, and childbirth. In the childbirth sim, instead of the toilet there will be an inclined birthing chair. The body mods I designed will be applied to your real body, and you will sit in the chair and really give birth to your baby in a process that should take only 2 to 5 minutes. When you are done, pick up your baby and leave. The sim will remove the cord, placenta, all the fluids that come out during birth, and apply the same cleaning to your body and clothes and the baby that you get during bathroom visits, and restore the shape of your body before the mod. While I can’t test it for real until one of our pregnant mothers is ready to give birth, I’m confident the testing I have applied to the parts should give a good result, even if it doesn’t 100% match expectations.”

As the pregnancies progressed, our mothers were able to get the robots to construct beds, cloth diapers (based on a pattern modified to eliminate the tail hole), and other supplies they would want for the babies.

Laura, our director of breeding, was ironically the first to go into labor. Somebody helped her to the nearest bathroom and she called up the birth sim and went in. Five minutes later she emerged holding her child in her arms.

“I never gave birth before, but I’m pretty sure this was the easiest birth any human woman ever experienced. Thanks, Clara and Chen for helping set this up. Everything you designed worked the way you described.”

This also started our next duty: Childcare. Laura started the research into that area with the first obvious question, “What did you do about dirty diapers?”

Chen was unsure. “I never had kids of my own, and I don’t remember from when I was little.”

But she looked it up and came up with the answer: “When the diaper is soiled, take the baby with its dirty diaper into the bathroom sim. That sim was designed to remove poop and pee, wherever they ended up, and that includes clothing, which the cloth diapers count as. In dirty, out clean, as simple as that. We should have figured that out, given that that was how we cleaned our own clothes. Those sims removed other bodily secretions, dirt, food stains, and just about any problem that could befall clothes. We had long ago developed the routine of going into our bathroom before bed and then taking off our clothes and hanging them up.”

I guess this meant we really only needed one diaper per child, so the stacks we had made would probably last us through this entire generation of children.

At first it was just Laura, but two weeks later we had three babies, and the mothers decided on a new plan. There were some larger houses clearly meant for larger families, and the mothers moved into one of these together, and they switched back into sleeping in shifts, since of course babies slept when they felt like it. This let each woman sleep part of the day, take care of the children (which to a significant extent meant breast-feeding) part of the day, and take care of other duties, if any, for part of the day, or simply rest. Two weeks later, three more mothers gave birth within a week and they moved into another such house. The last four mothers straggled out their births over the next couple months, and moved into a house with room for four. Then men then moved into the single houses closest to this group. By the time the last of the first round of children were born, the first mothers had already had their first post-birth period and were certified ready to get pregnant again. In later generations we would wait, but we had to compress this generation because some of the women were as old as 33, physically, when we arrived, including Laura, who ended up with me in the second round.

Chen felt left out. To our surprise, Chen decided to use the body modification sim to replace her reproductive system with a human one, and not just an imitation one! The ships’ databases included the complete human genome, and we had the data about the DNA structures needed. The body modification sim was able to process that to make real human cells with human DNA, and we chose a set of genes for her from the genome which was considered safe while being optimally distinct from what we had.

However, there was an issue with rejection, and we ultimately decided the only way around that was for Chen to take a fully human body. She felt weird without a tail, but otherwise was able to make one close to her original sizes and continue wearing the same clothes. The final test was whether she could get pregnant and bear a human child successfully. We assigned her one of the men at random and she succeeded in getting pregnant around the same time as the others were doing so for the third time. Then we just had to wait.

During that time, even though it was still years away, we started trying to figure out how we were going to teach the children. We were going to have 4 grades with 10 or 11 children each, and the plan was to introduce one teacher for each grade, to be assisted by what we could get out of the computer. Their other duties would get shifted to other people, to the extent those jobs were stlll needed. Chen had already learned English to a 5-year-old’s level and volunteered to be a test student for lessons they set up.

When birthing time came, Chen had her child along with the rest of them, and he seemed perfectly healthy. But this gave us a dilemma. If this child grew up healthy, we could use the same technique to artificially make children using the complete spectrum of human DNA, not limited to just the genes of the crew who survived the trip to New Mars. But should we?

One woman said that since the women had all contributed to the effort by giving birth, the men should do so too. Literally every other woman shot that idea down. Some pointed out that the women who signed up for this mission did so knowing they would be asked to bear children if they arrived successfully on New Mars. The men had no such expectation. Others noted that if one or more men did go female for this, they wouldn’t be there for their turns servicing some of the women.

Still others pointed out that our effort to raise 40, and now with Chen 42 kids was already going to be a strain on all of us, and suggested we should not have any more. If we modified DNA at all, we should modify some of these children, or their children, wherever certain genes are detected in excess to avoid inbreeding when they had to start having children with their effective cousins two generations from now.

With all these arguments, and none of the men volunteering to become female to have children, and Chen happy to stop at 2, the idea of having more than 42 children in this generation by any means was dropped.

The Second Martian

The women had all borne their last children and we were at one of the now quite-large meal sessions with all the adults and half the children eating standard food, the one-year-olds eating pureed food, and the infants either breast-feeding or sleeping, but all 58 of us were there, filling the restaurant, when a man stepped out of the sim room and said something we didn’t understand since we had stopped using the translators at this point, carrying out both our business with the computer and conversations with Chen in English.

Chen responded to him in his language, and then when none of us said anything, she realized we didn’t understand and translated for us.

“He asked, ‘Who are all you weirdos?’ and I said ‘They are our guests from space and you are welcome to join us.’”

The man hadn’t made a response yet either, but by the time he did, one of my tech people had found and turned on a translator so we could all speak with him.

“So, you all are having real sex and making babies? Does that have anything to do with your skin being so pale?”

Clearly, this guy hadn’t figured it out yet, so I responded, “We are from another planet where all the people look like this, and we traveled two lifetimes to get here after we discovered your world through big telescopes. Except for her; she changed her body to look like us because she was lonely as the only one of your people here.”

He responded, “The only one? Where are all the others?”

“In the sims,” Chen responded.

“What? All of them? That was supposed to be forbidden for government officials.”

Chen replied, “Only overseers. And you are looking at the entirety of the government officials of the world now, at all levels.”

“For the whole world? Computer, how many government officials are there in the world now, excluding people in this room?”

“Zero.”

“Computer, how many of the people here are government officials? How many overseers who are prohibited from using sims?”

“Sixteen, five with roles that prohibit them from using adult entertainment sims.”

“How did this happen?”

Noting that he did not address the computer this time, Chen responded, “They all resigned. Our society automated everything, and made it so we could live every part of our lives in the sims. And so people did. And so the government officials who had nothing to do resigned and joined them.”

“So you all just volunteered for empty offices?”

“Exactly. I volunteered to be emperor because the post was empty and certain things couldn’t be done without government officials.”

“You volunteered to be the emperor? Computer, how long has this person in front of me been emperor of the world?”

“For the last four years, three months, seventeen days.”

“Computer, how long was the post of emperor vacant before she assumed the role?”

“Nine years, eight months, twenty-one days.”

“So Miss Emperor, what are you doing about the problem that our entire race is living their entire lives inside sims?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They are happy and they are not needed.”

Even through his alien face, it was clear the man was flabbergasted at this response, and didn’t know what to say for a moment. Finally, he asked, “So what are you doing?”

“Acting as ambassador to the people of Earth, who have traveled an unimaginable distance to see our world in person.”

“But... our people!”

“Look, we’ve been eating almost all of our meals in this restaurant, in plain sight of people changing sims, every day for over four years now. Or at least the sixteen adults among us have, since the children aren’t that old yet. You are the first person in all that time out of over a thousand using this sim room to show any interest in us.”

“And how did you come to be with these people?”

Chen was speechless, apparently out of ways to explain things, so I spoke up. “When we first arrived, we found everything functioning but all the people missing. We discovered that people were switching sims periodically in this room, and we tried talking with them while they did so until we managed to get her to answer us. And she was as shocked as you are to discover the state of your world.”

Then Chen added, “And I am surprised you noticed us.”

“It’s hard not to notice a room full of aliens.”

“Maybe for you. Not for them. The people switching sims here have tried everything, including sex with aliens.”

“Oh, I wasn’t switching.”

“What? You were in one long-running sim?”

“Yes. Computer, how long was my last sim session?”

“Forty-seven years, eleven months, twenty-five days.”

“What the heck kind of sim was that?” Chen asked, clearly shocked one sim could go on that long.

“Custom paid sim. But my money should have run out long before that.”

“The government abolished money once the automatic electrical generation exceeded even the needs to keep the whole population in sims.”

“Oh, well that explains that.”

“So why did you leave your sim?”

“My buddy died and I was distraught.”

“Your buddy died? Level with me, what kind of custom sim was this that you were in?”

“It was the deluxe sex sim. You can change into any type of person or animal you want, have sex with literally anything, basically mold the world how you want.”

“The God sim.”

“Yes, that one. When normal sex got boring, I turned one of the prostitutes male and taught him how to double-penetrate women with me. But eventually that got boring, and I taught him how to do other things. Non-sexual things. And we were just living a good life in there and he just fell over and froze solid! Nothing I could do could bring him out of it.”

Chen explained to us briefly, in English, “That sim is even more expansive than the standard sex sim. You can change literally everything, not just you and your sex partner. You can have the computer create stuff in the scene around you, live, without pausing the simulation.”

And then, in her language directed at our new visitor, “So you were in the sex sim, but you weren’t even having sex.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What sort of other things were you doing?”

“Oh, everything. We played all kinds of games, we learned to play music together, we did everything you can imagine. But he just froze and the rest of the sim kept going around us.”

Clara, our Director of Sim Development, interjected, “You probably exceeded the capacity of the simulation’s memory buffer. It can access a pretty large amount of memory, but there is a limit. It’s well above what anybody is expected to ever need in even pretty complicated sims, but it is still a limit. Trying to live a whole virtual life in there and develop the AI into a virtual friend is probably enough to eventually reach the limit. And when that happened, since your buddy used the most memory, the computer shut him off to avoid having the whole simulation collapse.”

The newcomer said, “Well, I don’t think I have it in me right now to just try to start over. Well, if there was nobody here I’d get bored and go back into another sim, but right now I’m interested in you all.”

I responded, “I’ve explained how we discovered your world from far away, and traveled here to meet you, only to be disappointed to find that you are all hiding in sims, so we are glad to have been able to speak with two of you. You see that our bodies look a lot like yours except we don’t have tails. They work a lot like yours too.”

“Ah, that is what you said. You are from another world. This would be hard to believe if I didn’t see all your alien bodies here in front of me. Are you wearing our clothes?”

“Yes, since none of you were using your homes, their contents, and what the robots provide, we have taken a small part of that for ourselves.”

“I guess that makes sense, since the owners were not around for you to ask their permission. This world you came from, is it one of the other planets that circles our sun?”

“No. It is like that, but it circles another star out there in space, far away.”

“Another star? The stars are very far away. How did you travel so far? You did say that it took you lifetimes.”

“We were held in suspended animation in our ships. Like in your simulators, it means time didn’t pass for our bodies, but unlike your simulators, we were asleep and did not experience the time. We accelerated close to the speed of light, but even so, the journey took almost 150 of your years.”

“The speed of light. I haven’t heard anyone mention that since I was in school. Nobody ever figured out how to travel anywhere close to that fast, but doesn’t time get funny if you do?”

“Yes. It was more like 12 years on board the ship, half of that in the time it took to accelerate and decelerate, but because we didn’t have your simulators, nor enough room to store so much actual food on board, we spent the time suspended.”

It was interesting to learn that the Martians had at least discovered relativity and knew about it to the point that children might learn about it in school. We learned more from him about the way things were before the sex simulators became the way of life for Martians, but not too much, because he’d also gotten addicted to the sims at a young age. We eventually learned his name was Weld. As a member of one of the aristocratic families, he’d not only been able to get access to the sex simulators before they became free for everyone, but he had access to them before the usual minimum age of 17. By the time he was 21, he’d grown bored with them but even more bored with real life here, and started the custom sim he’d described for us.

“I’m surprised to see all the statues,” Weld explained.

Chen explained, “The statues were added around the time the sims became free for everybody. With lots of people wanting to get in, they wanted a way for people to get into sims faster. That’s also why we have the lockers. People needed to be naked to mount the statues, so they let those using sims store their clothes in one of these small square lockers. It was only expected to hold the clothes you wore into the place, so they didn’t have to be big.”

“Right; when I went in, the sim room was only a quarter of this size, and there were no lockers.”

“That makes sense. The sim preserved the clothes you were wearing, too, so they still look nice. My clothes disintegrated in a locker while I was in a sim, and I bet yours would have, too, if they hadn’t been preserved in sim-space.”

“Well, I’m interested in learning more about you all. I’d like to live near you if that’s possible.”

“Not in your family’s big fancy home?”

“No. I already know they aren’t going to be there. Maybe I’ll go get some of my clothes.”

“You should be aware a lot of our clothes also disintegrated within our homes. Maybe a third of the clothes were still wearable when I met this group, and some of those have fallen apart and been replaced in the last four years.”

“Hmm. Let’s go look.”

Chen and Weld left to go find his home. They came back a little while later with Weld carrying a few garments in his arms, and took them into one of the homes similar to the ones the men among my crew were living in, which Chen assigned to him.

Information Leak

Weld lived like one of us for a couple weeks, learning a lot about us and helping us learn a bit more about the time when most Martians lived in real life all the time. Then he grew bored, and started looking for his friends. Clara still had the sim director role, and helped him find them. One was in a different simulator room, but the others were in the room we had been using, and none of them were in long-term sims, so Weld got a stool and sat there waiting for them. One by one he found them, and the conversations he had with them all went about like this:

Weld: “Hey, Turra!”

Turra: “Hey, Weld! Long time no see!”

Weld: “Did you know aliens have taken over the world?”

Turra: “What, the aliens now available in the sims?”

Weld: “Yes, they look like that.”

Turra: “Well, it was nice of them to have given us more options. Bye!”

And Turra jumped into another sim. It didn’t matter if his friend was male or female. They all reacted the same way.

When we watched this particular recording, Laura asked the question, “Did we make humans available as an option in the sex sims? I know they are available in the bathroom sims.”

Clara replied, “It’s possible I did when making the birth sim, but I didn’t mean to.”

Weld, who had spent short periods in the modern sex sims to learn about the options now available, and naturally had also used the bathroom sims, confirmed for us that he had seen human options available in both types of sims.

Clara, Weld, and I went to a room together where we could investigate from one of the computer consoles. Clara, the most familiar with sim administration, led the effort. I was there to confirm her results, and Weld was mostly curious but volunteered to point out avatars he had seen.

“Computer, show me a list of all human and part-human avatars available in any type of sim.”

The result was a list about three screens long.

“Computer, show me the list in chronological order of creation, showing creator names, creation dates, and full permissions.”

It was longer now because of the extra data, but now we could make more sense from it. The first several entries were avatars Clara created during the development of the childbirth sim. They were labeled private, and the computer confirmed that only Clara would be able to use them or even know about their existence, apart from the kind of administrator access we were using. Since the government officials had resigned their posts, none of the Martians had this level of access, though Chen and I did.

The next three entries in the list were the generic human male, generic human female, and pregnant human models available in the bathroom sim, also created by Clara. The pregnant human was a different kind of avatar from the others; you never played it directly, but as a modification of your own body. It contained the modifications to allow pregnant women to give birth easier. The computer confirmed that these avatars were only usable in the bathroom and birth sims, as intended.

The other 70-some avatars were created by six other people, all Martians. Some of them were marked private, and only accessible to the creator, but each of the six had published some human avatars, including at least one male and one female each, so that everyone could see them. All of them were for the sex sims. A series of queries let us determine that they were all created by applying the generic humans to other existing Martian avatars. Essentially, what Chen had done to make herself human, others had done to make Martian sex sim avatars human. They hadn’t used the pregnant human, even though as an overlay type of avatar it was even easier to combine with other avatars, because Clara had only made it visible to pregnant humans, so the Martians didn’t know it existed.

Clara said, “I should have realized that by making the generic avatars world-readable in order to make them usable in the bathroom sims, they were also world-copiable. Chen copied them, but she’s the emperor and has global access. I hadn’t realized other normal Martians could copy them. But once they were in the bathroom sims, everybody knew about them.”

I asked, “Computer, how many sex sims have used one of these human avatars?”

“Fifty-seven billion, three hun...”

I tuned out the computer’s voice response as it read out the rest of the eleven-digit number. That was a lot, almost enough for every Martian to have used human sims five times. But most of these people were doing multiple sims a day, and they had been available for over 1000 days.

“Computer, out of all the sex sims run since the first of the sex sim avatars on your previous list was published, what percentage involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero four three seven percent.”

Clara, who was good with mental math, said, “That is in line with the average person starting about ten sims a day.”

I continued, “Computer, what percentage of the sex sims run in the last day have involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero five two two percent.”

“So they haven’t gotten significantly more popular over time. It took awhile for people to discover they existed, but once they did, likely the ones who liked them kept using them. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have ever used one of these avatars in a sex sim?”

“Twelve point two zero one percent.”

“Almost an eighth of all Martians have tried it. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have used one of these avatars in a sex sim in the last ten days?”

“Zero point one nine three percent.”

Clara exclaimed, “Wow, a lot less!”

I replied, “Yes. Most of them didn’t like it and went back to whatever they had been using, but about one in 500 Martians continued using humans in sex sims regularly. Since about one in 2000 recent sims have involved human avatars, it means this group uses human avatars in about one out of four sims for at least one partner. Computer, out of the 57 billion or so sex sims that involved at least one of these avatars, how many also involved avatars not on this list?”

“Forty two point nine one percent.”

“Almost half of the people using them are simming human-Martian sex. I guess I am not surprised. And I’m sorry,” Clara said.

We took this back to the whole group.

Clara addressed them, “I have to apologize to you about something. Not to any of you specifically, but to the human race, and you are their representatives here.”

There were a couple chuckles, but the group mostly looked serious and watched her intently to see what she was apologizing for.

“When I created the generic human bathroom sims, they became available to all the Martians who used the standard bathroom sims. This meant basically all of them, save for a few who spend such long periods in long-term sims that they never do, and a few who have custom bathroom sims and do not go through the selection menu of the standard one.”

“But we aren’t trying to hide from them,” someone said.

“Not just the Martians using this facility, though. For practical purposes, all twelve billion Martians learned humans exist.”

They looked, waiting for the real apology, knowing that this was nothing to apologize for.

“When I did this, I didn’t realize that Martians would be able to copy those generics, not to modify their own bodies as Chen did, but to modify the bodies of sex sim avatars.”

There were several gasps, and looks of realization across the whole group.

“Six Martians made modified sex sim avatars with human bodies and published them so that anyone using the sex sims could use them, either as their own avatar in the sex sims or as their partner. And the Martians have indeed been using them.”

A few people asked “How many?” and “How often?” and “Who?” and similar questions all at the same time.

“None of the perpetrators who made these copies are in this city. But Martians worldwide have used them. Approximately one in eight Martians has at some point used one of the human avatars. About one in five hundred Martians uses them regularly. So I have to apologize for the Martians getting to know us much more closely than we ever intended.”

The people were upset, but not too strongly, and they seemed to accept Clara’s apology.

“That said, they aren’t using any of us specifically. The generic avatars are based on a composite of all of us and data about the human race we brought with us. They are meant to be average humans in every way. So far, I haven’t done anything to stop this, because I wanted to ask the group first what, if anything, we should do.”

There were murmurs both of “Stop it” and of “Ignore it” and similar phrases. No clear agreement.

“As I see it we have two real options. One is to do nothing, let them keep using human avatars, which hasn’t seemed to have caused any real problems in the three years and change since the first of these avatars was published. The other option is to block all access to the human avatars created so far, and block copy access of the generic humans so that they can’t create more. And the reason I hesitate is that this may create about 24 million irate Martians, upset that they can no longer use human avatars in the sex sims.”

“They’ll imitate,” Chen said from the back of the room.

“What was that?” Clara asked.

“If you shut off access to the real humans, they’ll make imitation human avatars. Start with a Martian, remove the tail, change the skin color, make it a bit more slender, and you get something that looks believably human, but isn’t.”

Brenda chipped in, “That’s arguably worse. They could use that on their real bodies and they will look believably human, but they won’t be. Fortunately, they don’t seem interested in coming back into the real world, but if they did, they could come out in a body like that and we’d think they were human even though they aren’t. They could end up cross-breeding with us, which is almost certainly worse than anything they have actually done so far.”

Clara responded, “No. That wouldn’t happen. When Chen tried to give herself a human reproductive system in her Martian body, we studied Martians down to their DNA. They have DNA with the same four bases, but the genetic code, the mapping of base triads to amino acids, is entirely different. There is no chance Martian sperm could fertilize human eggs or vice versa. Even if you forced them together in a lab, the foreign DNA would transcribe as gibberish, and wouldn’t make anything useful. The cell would destroy itself before it could reproduce. This was why she had to turn her entire body human, because the two systems are entirely incompatible.”

A few people sounded relieved, but Mara asked, “They may not be interested in imitating us in the real world, but what’s to say they haven’t already created sim avatars which are really Martian but look like humans externally?”

Clara replied, “Good point. Computer, show me a list of sex sim avatars which are not based directly or indirectly on the generic human avatars, but which resemble humans in terms of skin color and not having a tail.”

The list had 21 pages. Everyone was shocked into silence for a few moments. Clara continued by having the computer sort the list by creation date; the first of these avatars showed up just two days after she released the human bathroom sims.

“Not only did they make imitation human avatars, but they made seven times as many of them as actual humans, and sooner, starting immediately after they encountered them as options in the bathroom sims. Computer, list all the people in the world who have any human DNA in their real bodies, apart from the people in this room.”

“There are no such people.”

“Computer, list all people born on this world whose current real bodies lack tails and have skin in human colors, but weren’t born with those properties.”

“Chen Dresta Balanjia. In total, one person.”

“Right, I didn’t exclude the people here this time. But that’s good. They haven’t done it. Should we prohibit that?”

There was a lot of discussion about it, and ultimately we decided not to ban it but to make it require permission from the sim director. It took Clara a while to figure out how to phrase it, to make it require permission for people born as Martians to change their real body to one containing human DNA or to one which resembles humans, with a lot of detail about what constitutes resembling humans, while letting them continue doing the things they have actually been doing. And Chen helped her confirm it worked, both in the usual case and after permission was granted.

Weld stuck around with us for about three more weeks after this incident before he decided that, like all his friends he was able to find, he didn’t care that aliens were in charge of his world, though unlike the others, he did so after seeing how we were not messing things up any worse than accidentally announcing to everybody that we were here and unintentionally letting them simulate sex in our bodies.

But the incident did have one lasting effect on us. At one meal soon after this, Lakshmi asked, “How long are we going to tolerate having to walk through the sex parlor with our kids to reach the restaurant where we eat all our meals?”

It was a good question. We had only done so because it was the first gathering place we had known here, the first place set up with enough tables and chairs for us to all eat together, and it happened to have a kitchen attached.

Some people were in favor of simply having construction robots close the doorway between the sex parlor and the restaurant and open another doorway into the restaurant on some other side. But there was another proposal to set up a school for teaching our children, which would include a cafeteria where we could all, children and adults alike, eat. It was an unconventional idea to have all the adults, teachers or otherwise, eating at the school, and even on days when classes weren’t being taught. But when it was pointed out we probably wanted to have at least four of us teaching classes, at least two preparing food for the kids, and the three of us who now gathered ingredients bringing those to the school, that was already a majority of our group.

Someone recalled having seen a building that might have worked as a school. Indeed, when we took Chen over there, she remembered it as her school, many years ago. And because it was still registered as a school in the system, the robots had been maintaining it, at least to ensure nothing was broken. A little cleaning was needed, but the school was easily large enough for several hundred children, and we were only going to have 42, so we only used a small fraction of the rooms, and we started using the school cafeteria for our meals and meetings, again using only a small portion of the space.

The Rule is Broken

Three years after the last children were born, after some of them had already started school, Sarah failed to show up when we expected her to for one of her shifts taking care of children. When we couldn’t find her, we asked the computer, which responded, “Sarah Carmichael is in a sex sim.”

We had another all-hands meeting to discuss this, and because it was about the sims, we met at the restaurant next to the sim parlor instead of the school cafeteria which had now become our primary meeting place. We had agreed, informally, that we weren’t going to enter the sex sims, yet here she was, in them for so long we had noticed her missing.

Clara requested, “Computer, show us all occasions when a human has entered a sex sim and how long they stayed in.”

The report was short. Several people had gone in a sex sim once early on, seemingly out of curiosity. Clara had gone into modified sex sims briefly several times when she was researching how to make the birthing sim. Chen went in a couple to test the availability of human avatars. Then nobody had until after the last of the children were born, and Sarah had gone in thirteen times for less than an hour each time, all within the last month, but this time she had been in a custom sex sim for about a whole day.

“A custom sim!” Laura exclaimed. “So it was something she planned. Computer, can you show us what she is doing in there?”

“Video of sex sims is protected information and may not be shown.”

Clara responded to that with, “Computer, is Sarah having sex in the sim?”

“No. Sarah is not engaged in sexual activity within her sim.”

“Hmm, what is she doing, then? Computer, show us on this screen what Sarah is doing in her sim. Sim director’s override.”

We were all shown a picture of a woman giving birth. The woman was based on our generic human female avatar.

Clara commented, “This avatar appears to have the birth mods. Computer, does the avatar of the mother in this sim contain elements copied from the avatar used in the human birthing sim? If so, how did Sarah obtain them?”

“Yes. Sarah made a private copy of the birth sim three years, four months, and 21 days ago, and extracted the avatar modification parameters and furniture from it 27 days ago when building this sim.”

“She copied it when she was pregnant. She apparently loved giving birth so much she made herself a sim to keep doing it. But why has she been in this sim for a full day?”

There were murmurs from a few others in response to this last question, but we all sat and watched, hoping it would answer the question. The woman gave birth, the baby stood up, and quickly the mother vanished, and the baby grew to adult size and became pregnant. The new mother sat on the birthing chair and prepared to start giving birth again.

The reactions in the room were varied, from “Why would she do that?” to sheer horror.

Deanna asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah given birth in her current simulation?”

“None.”

Understanding the situation, I asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah been born during her current simulation?”

“Fifty-seven times.”

Most of the people present gasped.

Clara said, “She’s probably stuck. In any case, I’m pulling her out. Computer, end Sarah’s simulation. Sim director’s override.”

Sarah materialized next to a column in the sim room next to us. She saw us all sitting there and hung her head low as she walked over to join us.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry! Giving birth in the birth sim was the most pleasurable thing imaginable, and I did it a few times in my custom sim because I missed the feeling. I also wanted to feel what it would be like to be born, but I screwed up. The sim was set to automatically restart, but I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to stop it when I was the baby! Thank you for getting me out.”

I said, “Sarah, when we discovered the plight of these people, we agreed not to use the sex sims, for fear of getting addicted to them. While you weren’t having sex in the sims, you still violated my trust in you, not once, but fourteen times, and you found a second reason for us to avoid the sims. Clara, can you block Sarah from the sims?”

Clara said, “Computer, disallow Sarah Carmichael from entering any sims other than the standard bathroom sims until further notice. Sim director’s override.”

“Done. Sarah Carmichael is blocked from all sim access except standard bathroom sims.”

Clara continued, “Computer, how many other people are stuck in sims which are looping through the same cycle repeatedly?”

“There are many sims where repetitive actions are occurring, but none of them are stuck. They are under the control of the sim participants and no sims have repeated the same actions for more than one hour.”

The Next Generation

When the children were all in the equivalent of middle school or high school in the education program we had adapted for life on New Mars, when kids on Earth might have had sex ed, we introduced them all at once to the breeding program. It was still mostly usual sex ed including directives for abstinence (for now), except that we explained that we were hoping this group would produce 80 children which all of us (their generation and ours combined) would raise. However, they could start earlier than we did, and they would not have to have them all back-to-back like we did. Also, they’ll get to choose partners, except nobody was allowed to mate with a half-sibling. Each member of this group shared a parent with at most 11 others, 8 by father and 3 by mother, and that only for the ones fathered by the men who fathered Chen’s kids. Most of these groups were well-mixed in gender, so they had a variety of choices, and they would be allowed to have unprotected sex with any of their potential partners so long as they haven’t already had a child with that partner and so long as neither partner has already had too many children.

At first they seemed happy to participate, three of the boys even voluntarily changing to girls so that we could spread the childbearing load across 25 mothers rather than 22, so most only had to bear three children. The first sign of trouble was once they reached the age of 17 Martian years, and the pre-existing age limit no longer kept them out of the sims, we found missing kids in there several times.

After a lot of discussion, during which some of our group wanted to ban them from the sims entirely and others thought it was good to let them practice a limited amount, we agreed to let the 17-year-olds in the sims for no more than half an hour a day, and only with avatars representing their real bodies, and only with the generic human avatars as partners. This was another challenge for Clara to program into the system. She defined all of our kids as a special class of users for whom the sims cost money, and defined a new currency to use for that cost, gave them accounts that topped up automatically to 30 minutes worth of that currency at midnight, and applied the restrictions on avatars and sim partners to that user class. This gave us the possibility to give specific kids more currency to give them extra sim time, or take it away as a punishment.

We had also found that the Martians had, long ago, invented their own version of condoms very similar to the ones we were used to, and that the robots could make them if we brought them a particular plant as material to use in production. We had been using them to a small degree, for those who wanted to remain sexually active, and had made sure we had the plants on hand. We hadn’t previously given them to the kids, because we wanted them to have sex with breeding partners starting at age 18. But we rethought that decision and gave them condoms until they were 18, expecting them to find breeding partners after that. They took to the condoms quite well, and most of them stopped using sims entirely once they had condoms.

But there was one other thing. We expected some of them to develop into the next generation’s leaders, and none of them showed the least interest in doing so. They had cooperated in terms of the breeding program, and when given duties like gathering food or clearing unusable clothes out of more homes so that they could start using them, but none of them ever volunteered for anything, or did more than the minimum we required of them.

By the time the oldest kids were starting to turn 22 and all of them were out of high school, and we expected them to be taking on new roles as the parents and leaders for the third generation, we weren’t able to motivate them at all. Promising them extra sim time hadn’t worked; they weren’t even using the sim time they had, in most cases, having taken the opposite stance to the Martians in saying they had real sexual partners and didn’t need sim time. They had more children, and cared for them, as we did, but they still didn’t do more than we strictly required of them, and there was simply no leader material among the group.

When their children started reaching school age, they proved useless as teachers as well. Our group of 16 had to continue filling those roles. And with more of them and us still acting as parents to their parents as well, it meant we had a lot less influence over each one of them.

We were facing a crisis. We were being successful at growing the human race, but not in developing a society here among us. This was, we realized, the same problem the Martians had faced. On a world where there is no scarcity, how do you motivate anybody to go out and lead? Even the ones among the Martians who had that drive from before things got so easy had given up and joined in themselves.

Brenda was the one who suggested, “Make them decide their children’s future.”

I asked, “How so? We already tried having them act as teachers, and they simply didn’t care when they failed at it.”

“In the same way we set rules for them, allow them to set rules for their children, BUT!”

Brenda made a dramatic pause and then finished her sentence, “They have to agree on the rules among themselves.”

“So someone has to lead the group so they can come to a decision,” Clara observed.

“But what if they decide they don’t want any rules?” I asked.

Brenda said, “If they don’t make a decision, our rules for them remain in effect for the kids.”

“I still think they are likely to choose that,” I replied.

Nelson added, “Or just use their kids to bypass the rules we set for them.”

At the end of the next day’s lunch, I brought up the idea. “We are starting a new system. Just as we made the rules for you when you were kids, and have continued making rules for you as you have not been able to govern yourselves, we want to give you a new opportunity to set the rules for your children. You can make them more lax or more strict than the rules you lived under growing up. But even in letting you set rules, there have to be some rules; we have just three.”

Clara said, “Rule number one, you have to agree on the rules. One of you has to propose a set of rules and a majority of you, at least twenty-two of the forty-two of you, must vote in favor of the proposal.”

Brenda said, “Rule number two, you can’t choose to have no rules. If you vote for no rules, or you cannot agree on rules, your children will be governed by the same rules you lived under when you were their ages.”

Nelson said, “Rule number three, you cannot use your kids and/or the rules you set for them just to circumvent restrictions we put upon you.”

I concluded the presentation with, “Talk amongst yourselves and consider what rules you might want. After lunch tomorrow, when we send your kids back to school, you are to remain here and discuss the rules.”

This actually got them talking, though there wasn’t much agreement. After the next day’s lunch, there still wasn’t much agreement. For every potentially good rule like “Starting at age 7 they have to take their own fibers and recycled clothes to the factory and order their own clothes,” there was a disastrous proposal such as, “They should have unlimited sim time as soon as they are old enough to understand what a sim is.”

But it worked in that we got three of them to make serious proposals, work to try to get others to support their proposals, and then agree to work together to try to pass all three rules. One of those rules was the make-their-own-clothes rule, one was that there would be breaks in the school schedule with fun things for the kids to do, and one was that kids should have access to the non-sex hobby and recreation sims. Someone wanted to clarify that all the restrictions that they had to follow at the kids’ ages should still apply, except where these other rules contradicted them, and with that they were able to get thirty votes making these the new rules.

Once they’d come up with these rules, I pointed out the issues with them.

“The rule about ordering their own clothes implies they will get to choose what they wear, and that’s fine, in general, but we’re going to enforce a dress code at school, since we run the school. You never had to worry about that because we provided you with clothes and all the clothes met rules we considered decent.”

There were lots of murmured responses, and a couple who didn’t realize that the rule implied that the kids would get to choose their own clothes, but enough of the group to have passed the vote without those agreed that it did imply that. Nobody argued with having a school dress code.

“On the second, someone will have to design the fun activities for the kids. Since this was your proposal, we are leaving you with this duty, though I’m sure if you ask for help there are some among us who will.”

Apart from the realization that they had voted themselves some work, there were no real complaints for this one.

“And for the third, I don’t think there’s ever been a prohibition on minors using the non-sex recreation sims. Can you confirm, Clara?”

She asked, “Computer, how many sims not related to sex, body or avatar modification, bathroom, sleep, or eating have been initiated by people under the age of seventeen in the last twenty-six years?”

“Four.”

She brought up a list on a screen in that room, and naturally, because of the way she had phrased the question and the fact that there still had not been any Martian births since we had been here, all four of those had been by our children.

“See, three of you have already done that, one of you twice.”

The one who put forth the proposal for that rule, who was the one listed twice, pointed out, “The problem is that you can only access them from within the sex rooms, so we had to sneak in to do it.”

“Hmm, that is a problem,” I admitted.

Carla suggested, “It should be possible for us to install a sim room somewhere else. I mean, we have sims in every bathroom. I’ll look into it.”

A few days later, Carla announced at one of our meals, “I considered the possibility of making these non-sex sims available in all the bathrooms, but the problem with that is that the bathrooms are meant for very short-term sim usage. In the houses you are using as singles, the bathrooms only have a capacity of one session at a time, and in the ones where three or four mothers raised a group of kids together, the capacity is two. It’s fine if each person only spends a few minutes in there, but not if you spend two hours painting a picture.”

There were quite a few laughs, including from the schoolchildren.

“But I’ve put in a request for the robots to install a sim room at the school, one that will be accessible from outside so you can go there outside of school hours, with a ten session capacity. If they prove popular enough that this isn’t enough I’ll add another one. And sex sims won’t be allowed there. It’s a bit more involved than most of the requests we put in for the robots but it is among their standard functions. It should be available in a few days.”

This drew cheers and applause.

When the room was ready, there was a line waiting for access on the first day, so we imposed a one-hour limit on sessions. After the first day, though, there was never a line, and we removed the limit.

The more important thing, though, was we got our children involved. Not all of them participated in parenting or leadership activities, but we didn’t need that. It just needed to be a significant fraction, and some of the ones who didn’t join initially started participating after they saw the fun things a few of them had designed for the kids to do during school breaks. Some of the parents had fun doing those things, too. We even managed to get a couple of them to start teaching.

Our first generation, Chen and the 15 born on Earth, still had our own meetings once in a while. In one of these we drew up the school dress code, which included some bits that would never have appeared on Earth. “Clothing with tail holes may only be worn if the hole is made so it doesn’t expose the buttocks while there is no tail in it, or if the wearer has a tail going through the tail hole.” We didn’t have any Martians in our school but we considered it a possibility in the distant future, and if we didn’t, the rule didn’t hurt. Otherwise, it was the usual about body parts having to be covered from the shoulders to just above the knees, for skirts and dresses, or to the feet, for pants, and we didn’t prohibit boys from wearing skirts or dresses. We had imposed that Earth custom on our kids, and several of the boys had chosen to wear skirts once we allowed them to choose their own clothes, though whether they did so because they actually liked them or merely as an act of rebellion we didn’t know. But we considered it to be part of the motivation for them choosing the rule, and we honored it.

After a year of the kids having fun-breaks at school, having access to hobby sims, and the oldest ones starting to be able to choose their own clothes, at one of these meetings, Carla announced, “This is going well. I guess we won’t need the sim command center after all.”

“The what?” Melissa asked.

“Fearing that we were going to need to be the leaders for our human population here forever, I started a plan allow us to keep running things from within a sim where we don’t age.”

“Oh, God. No. Some of us might want to live forever, but not that way!”

“That’s why I’m dropping the plan. It was far from finished, anyway.”

By the time the oldest of the third generation were entering high school, and the youngest of that generation were just entering school, fully two-thirds of the second generation was involved in some aspect of parenting, teaching, or leadership. They’d made five other rule changes that they had voted on as a group, the most controversial of which came that year: Naked Day.

Our elder group had a serious talk about whether we needed to block this, but we decided to let it go through, though it was something that never could have happened on Earth. But here, it was voted for by a majority of the parents of the current schoolchildren, parents who had been raised not in sex-obsessed Earth culture, but in the portion of Earth culture that 15 of us had carried here. The Martian culture was pretty sex-obsessed too, but it was hidden away in sim rooms; while we hadn’t hidden those away from them entirely, it was less prominent.

It was explicitly not Sex Day; nobody was to touch anyone else in ways they wouldn’t if they were clothed, and we stated the touching rules explicitly a few days in advance. It was a clothing-optional day, on a school day, for the children of all ages to learn about the human body, learn not to be ashamed of the naked body, learn what makes boys and girls different, and learn why we covered it in the first place. Instead of being split into the usual age groups, part of the day consisted of a single large class for all 80 of the children. In part of the combined session we lined up boys of different ages and girls of different ages and used them to demonstrate the changes that occurred in puberty. Divided into two groups, those who had reached or were about to reach puberty in one group and the younger ones in another, they got some sex ed; the older group was told about the breeding program, including that it was ages 18 and up and none of them should be having unprotected sex yet, and the younger group got a less detailed and less explicit version.

It was an unqualified success. Kids of all ages enjoyed it, and not because they got to ogle naked people, but because they got to learn about things they felt had been hidden from them. Most of the second generation said they wished they’d had this when they were in school, even some who voted against the proposal. We decided to have Naked Day every three years, because that would allow enough time for significant changes in mind and body development for it to mean something different for them the next time through.

As the second Naked day approached, we prepared to officially starting handing control over to our children, starting with the breeding program.

“You are all familiar with the breeding program, having been participants in it some years ago, and now your children will have their turn. We are letting you set the rules. We need to keep expanding; there are still fewer than 150 humans on this world. But you can slow the pace of growth; the only real rule we are imposing on you is that there must be more than 80 children in the fourth generation. You can set that number as much higher than that as you are comfortable with.”

Several numbers were called out, but there was no agreement among them at this time, and once they agreed to disagree, I went on.

“We have ported the genetic software to the Martian computers so that you do not have to use the few surviving antiquated Earth computers. We don’t anticipate that you will need to do anything more with it than tell your children certain other children each may not mate with due to being too genetically similar. Half-siblings still may not mate; certain others may be excluded due to having inherited too many similar genes from common ancestors of my generation.”

There was no argument there.

“Finally, I have something to pass along not related to the breeding program. We’ve made a new rule that those over 65 Martian years of actual body age may retire, meaning they may choose to no longer have any official duties, and they have unrestricted use of the sims. The body age excludes time we spent in suspended animation getting here and time spent unaging in sims, and the computer can now report these body ages for all of us. Many of those born on Earth have already reached this age, and the ones who have not will do so within the next few years. This means my role as mayor and effective commander of the human settlement, Clara’s role as sim director, and others will become available for members of your generation to take over. We expect that those who do so will neither neglect or abuse the power those roles give, but use it to best propagate the human race of New Mars. And never forget that there are twelve billion effectively sleeping Martians in sims. Don’t wake them up!”

There were a few chuckles, but it was good to see that they took this seriously.

“I will remain available for one Martian year from the time my successor is chosen to train that successor, assuming I live. I cannot promise not to disappear into sims after that point.”

Then Clara stated, “I make the same promise, if and when a suitable successor is appointed. There’s quite a lot to do as sim director that’s not obvious, and it may be that you want to have a sim director and one or two deputy sim directors to handle it all. I will share details with anyone interested.”

I did exactly as I said, training a successor for one year, and then retiring into sims, but not the sex sims, at least, not most of the time. Clara scared off the few candidates who showed interest with the details of everything she’s been doing in recent years and everything she learned she did wrong in her early years in the role, and she did end up reviving the sim command center as a sim director’s sim, with the ability to monitor all the sims from within a sim, to enter other people’s sims, and more.

Clara came to visit me periodically, as I was one of the few people she could often visit who were not engaged in sex, and kept me updated on the state of things. Thirty years after retirement, Sarah was the only one besides us still alive; she’d gone the way of the Martians and permanently lived in sex sims, while the others had all let themselves die naturally.

“And you’re still sim director?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you keep doing it?”

“By ever-increasing employment of technology. Basically, I’ve written programs to monitor all the things that needed doing, and used Martian AI to monitor those reports for anything out of the ordinary. I only have to be the enforcer to go deal with the situations that actually need dealing with.”

“Like people getting stuck in sim loops?”

“No, the AI can pick those out. There has only been one other one, a Martian, since we’ve gotten here, and the AI correctly threw him out of his sim into his sim room and let him try something different.”

“So what, then?”

“A sim room on another continent got damaged and the computer had to do an emergency expulsion of 700 Martians.”

“How did you deal with that?”

“I had a robot on the scene project a hologram of my avatar, speaking to them via the translator in their language, and apologizing for the mess and giving them some suggestions or reminders of what it is like to live in the real world. I called in 500 construction robots from up to 20 kilometers away to rebuild, and I had our emperor appoint one of them as mayor of that city so she could get them into houses temporarily. They’re all back in the sims now.”

“Sounds like you did a good job.”

“Many of them thanked me for it. They were understanding that real-world problems could cause the sims to fail, especially after decades of use.”

She shared stories like that periodically. But one day, Clara came to me and said, “We’re it.”

“What, our descendants got themselves all killed?”

“No, the other way around. We finally got a response from Earth. About a hundred years after we got here, Earth was hit by a massive meteor. The only survivors were in space, and there was only a single self-sufficient station with food crops. Those who could do so docked with it. They got our message and returned it, but they didn’t have the practical capability to continue the human race, and they were just living out their natural lives. Since that message was sent 135 years ago, they are certainly all gone now.”

“How about our people here?”

“There are over ten thousand of them now. They also have over three hundred Martians living with them, all committed to living lives outside the sims and continuing their race.”

“I guess that’s a success, then, for us.”

“For us, yes.”

“Rest in peace, Earth.”

The Beginning

January 3, 2007, early morning

“Time to get up, Teddy! Now, so you won’t be late for school,” I heard my mother yell from the doorway.

I groaned, “Uh, I don’t feel so well.”

She came up to the side of the bed. “Let’s have a look at you.” She pulled the covers off my face. “You look OK.” She put her hand on my forehead. “Not running a fever. You just have the back-to-school blues. I know, it’s tough going back to school after the Christmas break, but it’s something you have to do. Get up, now.”

The last word was said firmly without actually yelling it, so I started moving. By the time I was done with my morning routine upstairs, my breakfast was ready and waiting for me, and Dad was already gone to work. I scarfed down my food, and after another time reminder from Mom, found my schoolbag and got ready to head out to meet the bus.

As usual, Mom met me at the door and kissed me goodbye. What wasn’t usual was that I suddenly felt very disoriented, so much so that I fell down.

“Teddy, when people say I’m a real knockout they don’t mean it literally!” Mom said with a laugh. Then, with a more serious tone, “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I think so. But everything was very confusing for a moment there. It seemed like I was seeing two different things at once - seeing you and also seeing myself, somehow. But it’s back to normal now.”

“OK, then, hurry to catch the bus!”

And I left. Mom walked out to the street and watched me all the way to the end of the block, but nothing else happened on the way to the bus.

My day at school was ordinary enough. I got homework from almost every class. I think it was the teachers’ way of trying to make us remember what school is like after the long break. Half a year of eighth grade to go and then I’ll be in high school.

On the way out to the buses after school, I saw my girlfriend Kelly just ahead of me, headed to her own bus, so I took a small detour to go visit with her. I knew I had a good ten minutes before my bus left, and I intended on using most of it.

“Hey, Kelly!”

“Hey, Teddy.”

“I didn’t see you all day. Good to know you’re not sick or something.”

“It seemed like I was having to rush everywhere today just to get places on time.”

“Yeah, I know how that is, sometimes. But the school day’s over!” I punched my fist in the air, then pulled her toward me to kiss her. Just a quick, simple kiss was all I intended.

That is when it happened again. This time, I was holding Kelly for the kiss and used her to keep balance when I started seeing double. I also noticed there was more to it. For about ten seconds after I kissed her, I was simultaneously seeing what I should be seeing, and what Kelly was seeing. At the same time, I felt what Kelly should have been feeling, too - at least, feeling what had to be Teddy leaning against “me” and with his arm on “my” back. The fact that I was using her to support myself had to be obvious to her.

“Teddy, are you alright?”

“Yeah. Something weird happened, though.”

“Weird how?”

“For a moment I was seeing myself, as if from your perspective.”

“That’s weird, all right,” Kelly said with a chuckle. “Are you back to normal now?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how that happened,” I lied. Well, not totally a lie. I didn’t know how it worked, but I figured it had something to do with the kissing, since when the same thing happened this morning it was right after Mom’s kiss. “But I’ll try to be careful in case it happens again.”

“All right. You do that. I gotta go get on the bus,” Kelly said, and waved as she walked off.

I headed to my own bus, trying to think about how this could be possible. How could it be that I could steal a glimpse from another person’s vision as well as their sense of touch after kissing them? I continued thinking about this during the bus ride, and I was so absorbed in this thought that I almost missed my stop. I came to realize where I was just in time, as the other neighborhood kids were standing to get off the bus at my stop.

“Hi, Mom, I’m home!” I shouted as I entered the house.

“Hi, Teddy. How was your day at school today?”

“Boring. A lot of homework. A pretty normal day, until I met Kelly going out to the buses after school. Then it happened again.”

“What happened?”

“The thing that happened here in the doorway this morning. I kissed Kelly and then for a moment I was seeing what she was seeing, and I think feeling what she was feeling, too. I didn’t fall down this time, but only because I leaned against her.”

“Really? When you kissed her? Do you think it has something to do with kissing?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. But she had to go catch her bus, so I didn’t get a chance to test it.”

“Let’s go sit on the couch and test it,” Mom said. “If you aren’t struggling to keep your balance, maybe you can learn more about what is going on.”

We sat down on the couch, turned to face each other, and kissed like we often did when she wanted to kiss me goodbye.

“Is it happening?” Mom asked.

“Yes. I am definitely seeing you at the same time that I am seeing my face from your perspective.”

“Close your eyes.

I did so. “Oh, that’s better. Now I am just seeing me. With my eyes closed.”

“Like in the They Might Be Giants song? How does that one go?”

Before I could think of it, the effect ended, and I opened my eyes so I could see normally again. But shortly after that I remembered.

“It’s from ‘Dead,’ the song where they die and come back to life as a bag of expired groceries. ‘I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed,’ they sing. But I don’t need a mirror and I did see myself with my eyes closed.”

“Yes, that’s the song I was thinking of. Is the effect over now?”

“Yeah. Back to normal.”

“You said you felt what Kelly was feeling, too? Did you feel anything special this time?”

“No, but maybe there wasn’t anything special to feel.”

“All right, let’s try it again. We’ll kiss, both close our eyes, and I will do something you should be able to feel.”

I puckered up, closed my eyes, and Mom kissed me. She pulled away, and I could see her vision of the television as she turned that way before she closed her eyes.

A few seconds passed. “Mom!” I shouted when I realized what she was doing.

“What was I doing?”

“You were playing with your boobs!”

“Yes. I put one hand inside my bra, held my breast, and played with the nipple. What did that feel like for you?”

“It felt like I had boobs and was playing with them.”

“Even though you, quite clearly, do not have boobs.”

I put my hand to my chest - my real one - and there were definitely no boobs there. “Yes. No boobs.”

“Teddy, I can only think of one reasonable explanation for this. You have a special power.”

“Power? Powers like that are real? I thought that kind of thing was only fantasy.”

“We try to let the world believe that. But in Normal, things aren’t always so normal. A long time ago, a meteor landed in Normal, and ever since then, every so often somebody here develops some kind of special power.”

“Really? How many people in Normal have special powers?”

“I don’t know the exact number. Hundreds. NANA keeps a registry, and after you get to know more about how your power works, I’ll take you there.”

“Which Nana? Yours or Dad’s?”

“Neither. It’s the Normal Always Normal Association, NANA for short. They sponsor various kinds of events in the town, normal things. But they also help keep track of people with special powers who they can call on in an emergency, or when somebody decides to use their powers for evil.”

“Oh, right. That NANA. Pretty sneaky. How many people know they do this?”

“Most of the adults in the town do. I would have told you within a few years even if you didn’t get powers. But it’s hush-hush. We don’t talk about it, don’t say anything where outsiders could find out.”

“Do you know any of these people with special powers?”

“Well, I have one.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty minor. I can make fire, but it’s pretty small. I’m registered with NANA as Sparky, but I don’t expect them to ever call on me for anything, since anybody can carry a lighter in their pocket to do this.”

Mom demonstrated for me that she could make a flame about like a cigarette light come out of her fingertip.

“How did you find out you could do that?”

“I... had some trouble setting some stuff on fire when I was a teenager. Not too much trouble, because even uncontrolled, I only made little flames like the one I just showed you, but I set my clothes and my bed on fire a few times. Eventually I learned to control the fire and only make it when I wanted to.”

“And how did you learn to control it?”

“Practice. First, I had to figure out how to make it happen intentionally, since when it first started happening, it just happened when I was excited or angry about something. Once I did that, I could sort of feel where the power was coming from, and I could avoid activating it just as well as I could activate it when I wanted. It became just another thing I can do, like talking or riding a bike. With your ability, you already figured out how to activate it, though you may need to explore the limits of that activation. You need to learn what you can do with the power and its limits. Can you make it last longer? How much of a person’s sensations can you receive while the power is active? Can you control the body of a person you have used it on? Can you read their thoughts? Can you let another person see and feel what you do? Can you use it on more than one person at a time? Can you use it on animals or inanimate objects?”

“Yuck! Kissing animals?”

“You might kiss a pet, if you really loved it.”

“I guess so. Do you think my power might actually do all those things?”

“It’s always hard to tell with powers. You can only test them, experiment with them, and try different things to see what works. NANA can also help you test them further.”

“Does Dad have powers too?”

“No, but he knows about my power.”

Soon, Dad was home, and Mom told him about what happened to me today.

“Well, that’s an interesting power, son. I guess we’ll have to call you the Kissing Bandit.”

“Ugh, Dad, no. Even though that might be a good description of my power, I don’t think I want to be called that.”

“Well, you’re going to need a code name when you register. I know there was some actual Kissing Bandit historically. Maybe you can research that and take a nickname from whoever that was.”

“Maybe. I’ll look into it.”

When I did look into it, I discovered that there were several people referred to as the Kissing Bandit. The earliest (apart from general usage of the term to describe people who “stole kisses”) was an actual thief, a woman named Edna Murray who was also nicknamed Rabbit. There was also Morganna, a woman who ran onto the field during baseball games to kiss players. And Richard Dawson, the host of Family Feud for many years, was also called a Kissing Bandit. There were a few other kissing bandits as well, male and female, real and fictional, but none of them seemed to provide good code names.

Mom stopped by, and when I suggested the code name Rabbit, she said, “That name’s probably taken.”

“Are there people who get powers that let them hop around?”

“Yes. There are also people who develop an odd appearance, like having rabbit ears.”

“How come I’ve never seen any of these people?”

“That’s actually what I came to talk to you about. One of the founders of NANA cast a spell over the town, which is still maintained today by residents with magical powers. The spell hides any unusual appearance of residents with powers from anybody who hasn’t been told about the secret of NANA and the powers people have in Normal. So you might start seeing some of your schoolmates look odd.”

“Oh, well that’s probably important to know.”

“If you do, act normally around them. Remember that most of your classmates at this age will not know. But if you have the chance to speak to one of them privately, you can let them know you can see whatever it is and tell them about your power.”

And the next day I did see one with blue skin. I didn’t get to talk to him, though.

Testing

Over the next week, each evening Mom had me spend an hour testing my ability in different ways, with a bunch of testing over the weekend as well.

By making extra-long kisses, extra-sloppy kisses, and dry-mouth kisses, I learned that my power seemed to be connected to making contact with another person with saliva present at the point of contact. Completely dry kisses didn’t work. Spitting on someone from a distance didn’t work, but spitting and then touching the spit, even with another body part like my hand, would activate the power. Licking my hand and then touching with the wet hand also worked. And the more saliva, the longer and more intense the power. My first kisses were practically dry and that is why the power lasted for such a short time.

With a big, wet, slobbery kiss, the power could last for a good chunk of an hour, I got all of their normal senses, and I could control that person’s body to a limited degree. I could not read their thoughts, nor project thoughts to them. It was difficult, but with some practice I learned to manage multiple bodies while my power was in use. It was like learning how to walk all over again. I still couldn’t do much, but I could stand both bodies and walk with one without either falling over.

The power worked on men as well as women, but not on dogs or plants. It needed to be something humanoid, I guessed. This explained why my power didn’t activate on every bit of food I ate (which would have been super-creepy).

At the mall, I kissed a mannequin in a store, and the mannequin turned into a living person. I had full control of the body even with a minimal amount of saliva. I could move her, but I tried not to so as to avoid making it obvious to anybody who didn’t know. Would the spell hide it from them? I did move her a little to test it. I didn’t have the full movement of a normal body, only the movements the mannequin would otherwise make. The arms swiveled, but didn’t swing outward like a person’s arms. Which was fine, because I didn’t want the mannequin to end up in some different position where it would be obvious I’d moved it with powers. So I basically had her “play statue” until the effect wore off, at which point she turned back into a normal mannequin.

The concept of a statue gave me an idea. I knew where there was a statue in the park, so I tried the same thing there. And it worked. Interestingly, the clothes on the statue did NOT change. So I was standing there in what was basically bronze armor. With no other clothes under it. Cold and hard, and basically immobile. Fortunately, with my small kiss, the effect did not last long.

The next step was to make my own. How realistic did it need to be? I would find out. I laid out some of my clothes on my bed, and stuffed them with pillows, towels, sheets, socks, etc. A volleyball inside a shirt served as the head, with the rest of the shirt stuffed down inside the other shirt which covered the mannequin’s torso. The head-shirt was one which had Benjamin Franklin’s face on it from a $100 bill. It was the shirt I owned which had the closest to life-sized face printed on it. Life-sized for a person, not a C-note, of course.

When I finally had a whole body formed, I kissed it. And it came to life, briefly. So then I gave it a good, long, wet kiss, spitting as much saliva onto it as I could. Even after the body came to life, I kept adding more until my own mouth was dry.

The new body did not look like Ben Franklin. It actually looked like me. I stood up with the new body, came over to my old body, and carefully got both bodies lined up to look in the mirror. And yes, we were spitting images. Ha, ha, “spitting.” I bet whoever invented that phrase never thought it could be this literal. The clothes I had put on the body, which basically served as its skin to hold in all the stuffings, now actually were skin - the new body was naked. So after I clothed it, I took both bodies out to show my family.

My folks are pretty bright, so they figured out what I had done after only a moment, but it was still a surprise that the other body came out looking so much like me. That definitely wasn’t true of the mannequin and statue, which stayed looking like the people they represented. In particular, the mannequin had definitely been a girl, with boobs. Maybe this constructed body didn’t really represent anybody, and so by default it took my form.

After a while, the second me turned back into a pile of clothes, and I brought it back to life again just long enough to let it walk back to my room. Or to let me walk it back there. Whatever. It was a successful test and I would do more later, but I was done for the day.

On other days I experimented with fuller kisses, and I got a longer lasting effect and a stronger feel for the other body’s senses when I gave it a big, slobbery kiss instead of just a little peck. The more saliva in contact with me and the target, the longer and stronger the effect. There seemed to be a limit, though. An amount of saliva roughly equivalent to what I got by licking my hand from wrist to fingertip with a wet tongue and applying that to the person or mannequin was what I needed to get the maximum ability.

Telling

January 12, 2007

I didn’t intentionally kiss Kelly during that week, but when she wanted to kiss I did. And my practice allowed me to do it without losing my balance.

Friday evening my parents invited Kelly’s family over for dinner, so it was one of those occasions where we put the leaf in the dining room table and set up extra chairs so there was room for everybody.

After Mom served all the food, but before we started eating, she spoke.

“I want to explain why I invited everybody over today. Who can see what I am doing that’s unusual right now? Raise your hands.”

Mom was holding up her finger with the flame above it, and as people saw the flame, everybody but Kelly raised their hands.

“What am I missing?” Kelly asked.

“That’s what we are here to rectify tonight,” Mom explained.

She went on to talk about the deal with NANA and the meteor and powers like she had with me, ending with, “And the reason we are doing this now, Kelly, is that Teddy has used his power on you unintentionally and is likely to do it again, and we think in all fairness that you should know.”

“What’s your power, Teddy?”

“Remember when I got dizzy after I kissed you last week out by the buses?”

“Yeah.”

“That was only the second time I had ever activated my power. It activates on kissing.”

“And your power is to make yourself dizzy?”

“No. It lets me see what another person is seeing, and feel what they are feeling. I get their other senses, too. But I am still getting sensations from my own body, too, and the same time, so when I first did it, it was very confusing. I’ve been practicing with it on my family, though, and I can use it now without making myself dizzy.”

“Wow! How weird!” Then after a pause, Kelly added, “Just how much of their senses do you get?”

“Everything. Some of the senses can be pretty dim though.”

“And how long does it last?”

“For the kiss we had, it was only the 5 or 10 seconds until I was in control of myself again. But it varies. It seems to be dependent on saliva. The more saliva, the longer and stronger the effect. In the stronger versions I can also control the body, to a limited extent. So I’m not going to kiss you again unless you’re OK with it.”

After a long pause, she said, “It’s a little creepy, but I’m OK with it. Just don’t try to get all slobbery with me.”

“OK, that’s reasonable. Thanks, Kelly.”

And I did kiss her, a simple peck that got me a few seconds of her sight. With that done, we all went about eating dinner.

Other Bodies

After my success with constructing a body, Mom encouraged me to try to construct other bodies that wouldn’t come out as a duplicate of mine. If I tried to make the body taller, shorter, fatter, etc., it had the same effect, but to a much lesser degree, in the resulting person, which was still basically me. And this worked up to a point, after which it seemed that the body was too nonhuman and I couldn’t animate it at all. It seemed that below about 2 feet tall (which led to a 3-foot person) it didn’t work. Did that mean I couldn’t animate babies? Or was it because it was trying to come out as me and was too different? Some of my toys were humanoid figures, but none of them that tall, and kissing them didn’t seem to do anything.

So I stuck with the stuffed clothes body. As another way of making a person who was not me, Mom suggested making it female, and gave me one of her bras, and I stuffed some rolled-up shirts inside the torso-shirt to fill it. That worked a little. The animated body was still me, still fully male down below, but with breasts. So I tried some other things. I made a body with 3 arms. With no arms. Two heads. A tail. All of these cases worked and produced bodies with the appropriate features, except the armless one which still had two arms, and when I tried one without arms and legs, torso-boy was apparently not human enough to animate.

So Mom next suggested I make the body have a vagina. With the jeans fly open, a paper towel tube stuck inside, and a thing on the end, the vulva, that Mom helped me construct, I animated this new body. It still had my face, but was now fully female. This was actually the first time I was looking at live female genitals, as opposed to pictures, and they were on “my” body. Mom did a brief examination and said that the parts looked correct to the extent she could tell, and that it would take a doctor to tell whether they were right all the way inside. But this still wasn’t what I wanted to do, which was to make a body that wasn’t just an altered version of me.

Mom suggested, “Maybe it is coming out as you because you used your clothes as the body’s skin.”

“Could be. That could explain why it didn’t happen for the mannequin or the statue.”

So I took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it using Mom’s clothes she loaned me for this purpose, and this let me make a copy of Mom. I could make a copy of Dad this way too. If I mixed and matched clothing, then it seemed to pick one person - maybe whoever had the “most” clothes serving as skin, though it was difficult to measure that in some close cases. It was certainly true if I just swapped in one sock from a different person. And when it came out as Mom, I didn’t need to put in my makeshift vagina to make it come out with girl parts. What I saw led me to conclude that any body part not well defined in the mannequin came out in the standard form for whatever person it was.

So the next thought was what would happen if we used nobody’s clothes. Or nobody I knew, anyway. Mom went out and bought several outfits worth of clothes: a set of new, never-worn girl clothes; another set of girl clothes from Goodwill that were worn, probably by different girls, but we did not know who; a set of boy clothes from Goodwill in my size, and a set of boy clothes from Goodwill that were too small for me.

I used the new girl clothes first, and this time, a body formed of a girl none of us knew. I got the same body with the thrift store clothes, so this was not likely a girl who had touched something in the store, but another sort of default character. The boy clothes in my size gave my body, but the small ones gave some other boy. We concluded that the boy clothes that fit me were the only ones that could be considered my clothes for the purposes of my power.

Mom also bought several pillows for me to use for stuffing, instead of the various things I had been using, so that we could have our towels back for drying ourselves off after showers, etc. She cut open some of them lengthwise and sewed the edges shut to make two narrow pillows out of each one, for use in stuffing arms and legs. She got enough stuff for me to make two bodies, with the intent that I would eventually practice animating both of them at the same time, and if I ever reached the point where I could do that well, she might get more.

“Really, Mom? You think I’ll be able to control three bodies well at the same time? I’m having enough trouble controlling myself and one animated body.”

“Some people improve their skills with practice. So I want you to practice. The ability to control multiple bodies is a rare and powerful one, and I think it is the most valuable skill you have shown.”

“All right. I do find the idea interesting, though it feels weird when I’m animating a body that isn’t mine.”

“Definitely practice that. Being comfortable in bodies that are not just a copy of yours will help when you are controlling another live person’s body, as well as when you want to use an animated body as a disguise.”

I protested that I didn’t want to be a girl, but Mom said if I ever wanted to go possess a girl’s body for some reason, I’d want to know how to walk and act like a girl. So I went along with it. It was, after all, fun kissing her.

So I did. I started animating a body after school each day, and keeping it going for as long as a single large sloppy kiss could last. At first this was about 15 minutes. After about a week of this, the short sessions were frustrating, and I started recharging a second or third time each day. I quickly learned the signs of impending deanimation, and usually tried to kiss my other self before he or she deanimated. Kissing Trixie and even kissing Jack (the names I came up with for the unknown girl and boy) was nicer than kissing the deanimated cloth body, and it worked just as well. On weekends I would do extended practice, two to three hours a day when the weekday sessions were less than an hour.

An interesting thing we discovered was that the animated bodies got hungry and thirsty. It seemed that each character (the other me, the other Mom, the other Dad, Jack, and Trixie) had a body clock that only advanced while that character was animated. If I’d used the same one all the time, I probably would have noticed it in a week, but as it was, it was more like a month before, on one Saturday, I started noticing how thirsty Trixie was. She had probably been used the most because of Mom’s encouragement for me to try using female bodies, since I kinda felt like her body belonged to me. It was a little weird walking around in Mom’s body, so I did that less.

Mom suggested that Trixie should drink some water, like any normal person would. She figured that the worst that would happen would be that the water would get her stuffing wet when she de-animated, and the best was nothing would happen besides Trixie quenching her thirst. The latter was what happened. Eventually my characters got hungry and so they ate food, too.

Mom guessed that the fact that my characters were drinking and eating meant that they would also have to go to the restroom and have ... other bodily functions, though naturally it was a while before that happened. So, later the same day that Trixie drank for the first time, Mom sat down with Trixie for a “private” talk. Of course, Trixie was me, but Mom said it wouldn’t feel right to have this particular talk with anybody but a girl. Mom explained Trixie’s girl anatomy, and made me really examine it. For the first time, I was touching girl parts. She showed me the correct way to wipe Trixie’s body in the bathroom, and she also explained about periods and sex. Of course, Dad had already had the sex talk with me, but it was different being a girl and having the potential to get pregnant. (How would that work, I wondered? Would I have to keep Trixie animated for nine whole months? And would the baby be flesh and blood, or would I have to animate that too? I didn’t plan on figuring this out for a good long while, if ever, but it was something to consider.) Mom also talked about things like the proper way for a girl to sit in a skirt, how to apply makeup, and some other stuff about clothes. Basically it was like having to learn how to be a human being all over again.

It was during her session the next day that Trixie had to pee. The pressure associated with that need felt much the same as it did in my (Teddy’s) male body. And after Trixie sat down on the toilet, the way I had to release the pee was almost the same. The biggest difference, of course, was that Trixie had no penis, and some of the pee splashed against her body. Gross. Trixie had peed on herself. But Mom had explained this is normal. Girls pee on themselves all the time. Fortunately, most of the pee went down in the bowl, and with a couple wipes with toilet paper, Trixie’s girl parts were dry.

After this event, I started focusing mainly on animating Trixie and Jack, since it was clear that they had ongoing lives for which time only elapsed while they were animated, and it would probably be better if they got to live a little more often. I was not comfortable yet keeping multiple characters animated, so doing that meant eliminating the other characters who were copies of my family. With this change, I had each character animated about 5-6 hours a week, so about once a week each character would eat a meal with the family.

Kelly Visits

February 17, 2007

It had been normal for me, before I found my power, to invite Kelly over to the house on weekends sometimes. After discussing it with my parents, in mid-February was the first time I invited her over since I developed my power. Shortly after she arrived, I introduced her to Trixie. “You can think of me as Teddy’s sister if that’s easier for you, but I’m really Teddy,” I had Trixie say.

“You took control of your sister?”

“No, I created my ‘sister’,” I explained, with air quotes. “Before I kiss her, she’s more like my ‘brother’ is now,” which I explained by retrieving and showing her Jack’s un-animated body, then kissing it to make him briefly be alive.

“So when you kiss a person, you take control of their body for a little while, but when you kiss one of these life-sized dolls, it comes to life?”

“Yes. It comes to life, as a part of me. Trixie and Jack don’t have any minds or personalities apart from me. Everything they do is something I am doing with their bodies.”

Then, as Trixie, I continued, “And Mom wants me to learn to be more comfortable using other bodies. Part of that includes learning how to be a girl. So please comment on anything I do that looks too much like what a guy would do. If I don’t just completely ignore my powers, I will have bodies out in the world at some time, and if I do, I need to be able to act like a completely believable girl.”

“That’s OK, I guess,” Kelly responded. “I can help you learn to be a girl, as long as you are also the Teddy I love.”

And she hugged Trixie. This was my first girl-girl hug. “It feels interesting having boobs pressing on boobs,” Trixie said, “Even though we are both still quite small compared to most adult women. I can only imagine what that’s like for two women like my mom.”

Three times during that visit I took Trixie aside and privately had a big slobbery kiss with her to keep her active, before I let her drop. Kelly was a little jealous of this at first, but when I reminded her that this was keeping Trixie alive, and promised her that I didn’t look at Trixie as a girlfriend the way I did for Kelly, she seemed to get over it.

Trixie and Kelly managed to talk about a lot of girl stuff for the two hours that lasted, and I was exhausted (both of keeping Trixie alive as well as of the girl talk).

Continued Practice

As time went on, the length of an animation extended. By the start of March, the long sloppy kiss that got me only 15 minutes animation when I started was giving me about 40 minutes. Each weekday I was doing three sessions for about 2 hours of animation of one character, and several hours on weekends. By the start of April, I got an hour a charge, and by the start of May, an hour and a half.

Since my characters peed, it was natural to expect that they would poop also. With them each only around a few hours a week, it took more than a month of regular summonings before they did. But both Jack and Trixie did, and the urge to do so felt pretty much the same as it did for Teddy. The actual act was the same also. The down side of having two extra bodies was that I now had to poop and clean up butts for 3 bodies. At least the others did so rarely.

It was in March when I realized my characters needed to be washed. It was the same as any person, really; you accumulate sweat and dirt and whatever even doing normal things. They had been alive a few days each at this point without being washed, and that is what it took for us to notice the smell. I tried this in two ways: by having the animated character shower and by washing the clothes and such that held together the deanimated figure. Both ways seemed to work, but it was less work for me to have the character shower. You might think that it was easier to just throw some things in the washing machine, but it was actually more work disassembling and reassembling my creations. It felt weird at first, showering a body that wasn’t my own, especially a female body, but I got used to it. This also helped me to learn more about the sensitivity of a female body, since I had to touch all parts of it.

I also started animating one character in the morning before school. This character would stay behind and do things at the house, but mainly it was a test of how well I could control a body from a distance. The feelings and vision were no problem at all, but the actual control was harder at first. Once I had that working well, I mostly used this time to have Jack or Trixie do chores for me, cleaning my room, taking my laundry (and theirs; they each had multiple outfits now) down to the laundry room, and late in the school year, when they lasted longer, actually running a wash load and folding the dried clothes and putting them away. Before the charge lasted long enough for Jack or Trixie to finish these tasks, this had always been an evening or weekend chore for me.

By the start of May, this meant that my two characters were collectively animated for 6 hours each weekday and typically 9 hours each weekend day, or 48 hours a week. So Trixie and Jack each lived one full day each week. This time continued to increase.

In the first week of June was the first time that I still had a character animated (it was Jack) when my bedtime came. He had been up from 4 to 10.

“Bedtime, Teddy,” Mom reminded me as she passed where I was sitting.

“But Jack’s still up.”

“Wow, you are really improving your charge times. You just charged him three times tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess you and Jack can both go to bed.”

About that time, Jack fell over and became a lump of clothes and stuffing, which ended that discussion. I took him to my room and went to bed. But the next night it happened with Trixie again, and she didn’t deanimate, so I walked both bodies to bed.

I wasn’t really sure how to put Trixie to bed. I only had one twin-sized bed. Normally the deanimated bodies just lay on the floor beside my bed, one on top of the other. I tried having Trixie lie down on top of Jack’s deanimated body, but it wasn’t very comfortable. Finally, I just decided to share the bed. Trixie did not have any pajamas, and anyway it was warm in June, so I just had her strip to her bra and panties, and we crawled into bed next to each other. She was only there a few minutes, and deanimated before I fell asleep, but it was a plan.

This became a regular ritual the rest of the school year, and eventually I did fall asleep before the other body lost animation. Even in bed, though, I never really felt comfortable going to sleep as Trixie, though. When I commented to Mom about that, she said it was probably because girls shouldn’t wear their bras to bed. Another girl lesson learned.

She bought Trixie a nightgown the next day, and I changed her into it each time before she went to bed. Some people would have thought it was weird to have her change while I was in the room, and I wouldn’t have had Trixie strip in front of other boys, but she is me and it felt perfectly normal to me to have her changing clothes in front of me. I see what she sees. I would see her naked anyway while she was changing, even if she was in another room. Although I kissed her with big wet kisses all the time, I didn’t lust after her. She wasn’t the object of my sexual desire; she was just me. For the same reason, though it felt a little odd to be in bed with her, it didn’t feel weird in the way a brother and sister would feel weird sharing a bed.

I kept inviting Kelly every 2nd or 3rd Saturday after her first visit, and later on, every Saturday that Kelly was available, and soon I was able to keep Trixie around for the full time of her visit. After a point, though, Kelly pointed out to me how training Trixie was getting in the way of our own relationship, so we agreed on a compromise. Half of each visit Kelly spent with Trixie, and half just with me. So every visit, Trixie got more lessons in being a girl. By June, I felt confident Trixie could interact with society and be seen as a normal girl. At the same time, I was practicing only doing those girl things with Trixie’s body, so as not to give away my dual nature when using Jack or my own body.

Summer

Over the summer, while school was out, every day was like a weekend. I did extensive training with both Trixie and Jack, including starting to animate both at the same time and control all three bodies independently and simultaneously. It was not as hard as I thought it would be, so I quickly started keeping them both going full time, except I dropped one of them at the last recharge of the day to avoid having to go to bed with all three of them. There really wasn’t room for three in my bed.

Dad helped me solve the bed problem in July by buying a full size bed and a bunk bed frame to suspend the existing twin bed above the new bed. Then Trixie slept in the bunk while Jack and I slept below. I could have arranged my three bodies in any combination but this provided Trixie with the partial privacy that would have seemed right for a sister forced to share a room with her brothers. If I had to put my bodies to bed with anybody present who didn’t know they were all me, it would seem right. It also meant that she could have a permanently girly bed, a small bit of the room that was just hers. I was still a boy, but the part of me that was Trixie wanted to be a little girly, I think, because of the training I’d been doing to make her act like a girl.

This made my room pretty crowded. As I started using Trixie and Jack more, Mom had bought them more clothes, still not what a normal boy or girl had, but it was enough that they had bought a wardrobe, a three-drawer dresser with a closet for hanging clothes above the drawers, just for Trixie and Jack’s clothes. This sat alongside my existing dresser, between a small built-in closet for my clothes on one side, and my computer desk on the other. Just past the computer desk was a cabinet where toys and games were kept. Practically every inch of wall space was occupied.

Mom encouraged me to start trying to do more, different things with Trixie and Jack, and in particular, social things with other people who didn’t know their special nature. It was no problem for Jack; I knew how to be a boy. I worried about acting as a girl in public, though. I asked Kelly to help Trixie meet other girls and do the things girls did socially. Because Kelly knew my secret, she was able to help steer activities in a way that wouldn’t take Trixie away from me for too long a time between charges. Although I had called her my sister when introducing her to Kelly, we now decided to call Trixie my cousin. This would be easier than trying to explain why I suddenly had a sister who was my age when I had never had one before.

Meanwhile, I (Teddy) took Jack out to meet my friends, also calling him a cousin. I knew how to act as a boy, so he fit in quickly. Secretly, I used Jack as an ally in games to give me an unfair advantage. Not too much of an advantage, because I couldn’t give away the secret, but a little, wherever I could reasonably pass it off as skill or good luck. It depended on the particular game what kind of an advantage I could get from him. But we had a lot of fun figuring out ways to make use of my ability in secret.

Trixie’s First Period

July 13, 2007

Trixie lived for a total of about 8 days in January through April, 4 days in May, and 6 days in June, but with me having no school and keeping her animated all day, she was going to live for about 20 days in July. It was around mid-July that Trixie started her first period. Mom had explained this in her talks with Trixie months ago, so when I saw the small blood spot in Trixie’s panties one day, after momentarily being afraid that Trixie was hurt, I quickly realized what it was. Trixie carried a small purse with makeup and some other things, and this included one of what I’d learned was called a panty liner, a very thin absorbent pad with a peel-off backing that allowed it to stick to the inside of her panties. This was a short-term solution to the problem. Trixie was at another girl’s house when she discovered this, so she just used the pad for the time being, but when she went home for her next recharge, she talked to Mom about it.

Mom was proud that I’d been so calm about it; apparently most girls really freak out about this. Maybe my multiple nature had helped the other parts of me calm her down; I did recall a scared feeling when I first saw the blood. Mom showed me her supply of thicker pads and also tampons. Mom and Trixie had talked about tampons before, which was a really weird thing to me, sticking this thing inside Trixie’s body in a spot I didn’t even have. But now Mom helped Trixie insert her first tampon, gave her a couple to keep with her, and told her that these things were free to take as needed.

Experimenting with Bodies

When I wasn’t out doing those things, I was experimenting with bodies. I wondered what it would be like to build bodies out of other substances. What would it take, for instance, to build a wooden or metal body? Dad showed me how to use his tools, and I caught on pretty quickly. After some experimentation, I decided it would take too long to make a good wooden body. But I could get flat pieces of metal and coil them into body, arm, and leg shapes, and a few holes drilled through the overlap would let me use nuts and bolts to hold them together.

Those coils alone were not enough to make a whole body, though. There were pre-made corners for ducts which, in small sizes, made good shoulder joints, and in the next size larger, hip joints. The top of the shoulders was a carefully cut flat plate, with little projecting bits that folded over to bolt onto the torso. I got a spherical enclosure meant for a light fixture to use as the head, and devised a way to attach it to the torso. It took me about a month to get all this together, and it turned out to be too stiff for me to put any clothes on other than pants, and mine were too small, so I left it “naked”. But I confirmed I could animate it. It was a different character when I did so, though; neither me nor Trixie nor Jack. He had an all-metallic body, including metal face parts, metal fingers and toes, and metal male genitals (he was, in fact, naked). All my clumsy bolt-joints either vanished or turned into nice, solid-looking ones when he was animated. I called him Tony, after another metal man, but mine was a far cry from his fancy metal suit. My guy could barely walk; I had not provided him with much mobility in his joints. It was a start, though. The mannequin in the store could move a little, in the way mannequin limbs moved. I supposed that I needed to figure out how to attach the parts with movable joints, which was a whole other level of construction.

Formal Testing

At one point that summer, Mom and Dad took me and a deanimated Trixie to a secret testing center where someone from NANA evaluated my abilities. They ran me through all kinds of tests, but I did not have most of the abilities these tests looked for. After I animated Trixie, they ran her through some of the same tests, including running the two of us through the same test and different tests at the same time. Then they performed some tests on the two of us together. We had also brought my animated metal man, but he wasn’t even able to do what a regular person could, so we didn’t spend long on that. Finally, they had me take control of a volunteer from the center, and they tested my level of control, they tested what I could see and hear and feel through the volunteer, and they tested control across a long distance (by driving me about a mile away from the center).

But except for regenerating from cuts faster than a normal person, and what they considered a pseudo-telepathic link between my different bodies, they didn’t really find that I had much in the way of powers beyond the obvious ones. If they called on me for something, it was either going to be to animate someone, to take control of a person who had been knocked out, or to be in two or more places at once to relay information where ordinary methods wouldn’t work.

And I did get the code name Dawson.

Ninth Grade

Keeping two characters animated seemed to make the duration of animations increase even faster. At the start of July an animation was lasting three hours and 10 minutes, but by the start of August, it was lasting almost five hours, and by the time school started in late August, it was six and a half hours. Mom had talked about sending Trixie and Jack to school if they were going to be around so much, but she didn’t, because I would have had to recharge them during school. But pretty soon I knew that would not be a problem.

While I was at school, Trixie and Jack stuck around the house and helped Mom with all kinds of chores, and even some cleanup of old junk that she just never seemed to find the time to work at. The time was easier to find when you had two helpers most of the day. But before long she ran out for things for them to do, and so they ended up just doing my regular chores.

By the end of September, Trixie and Jack’s animations were lasting 9 hours each, and if I charged them right before I left for the bus, they were still going when I got home, so now Mom started talking seriously about sending them to school.

“Mom, they’re all just me. They’re not going to learn anything more than I will. We’re going to end up with basically the same grades, and worse, they’ll probably think we’re cheating off each other because our work will be too similar.”

“You have shown the ability to learn things independently with each body at the same time, so I think you will be able to learn more things, and learn the things all of them study better. You can take different elective classes, so you can learn more things.”

“If you do try to enter them into school, they are going to ask for their previous records, and they won’t have any.”

“Friends in NANA can set up histories for them. It will look like they went to school elsewhere, and I’ll give them grades comparable to yours.”

Eventually we compromised and she decided to send Trixie to school, while Jack would remain at home with her. It took a couple weeks to set up all the records and get her enrolled, and by that time Trixie was lasting 10 hours on a charge. I would wake her up with a kind of normal kiss, then before we walked together to the bus, we would both go to our room to pick up our school things and I would give her and Jack each a full charge. This lasted until we got home, with a safe margin, at which time a second charge lasted well into sleeping time.

I was already taking the intro shop class, and they managed to get Trixie into an art class. The two of these together, along with higher-level classes I could take later, would help me learn more about modeling the human body and about using various kinds of tools to construct those models.

There was also a required gym class. Teddy and Trixie had gym at the same time, though the boys and girls in the class split into two separate groups supervised by different coaches. Having Trixie in this class wasn’t a bad thing - she was in good shape and reasonably athletic. But it did mean getting used to the girls’ locker room. Teddy had been around Trixie’s naked body plenty of times, but not around other naked girls. Due to their mental connection, Teddy could now see a room full of naked, showering girls after gym class every day. The problem with that was that Teddy was naked with a bunch of boys at the same time, and viewing those girls even a little gave Teddy an erection. So I avoided this by avoiding having either body look at any naked people as much as possible. This was every teenage boy’s dream, but I had to ignore it.

School also meant Trixie got more clothes. Since she was going to be out where she would meet lots of other kids, she needed to have enough clothes that she wasn’t wearing the same five outfits every week. This meant that she needed her own separate wardrobe. I had to move my computer desk out into the middle of the room, with both wardrobes back-to-back behind it. I barely had room to get around in my room now. I had had the metal body project in my room, though I hadn’t really been working on it lately, but now this had to go out into the garage.

By Thanksgiving, I got 12 hours out of a full charge, so two charges a day kept them going round the clock. I didn’t ever have them drop out of animation unless I wanted them to. Fortunately, I had learned another trick: If I wanted to drop them out, all I had to do was give them a dry kiss. This reset their animation time to the minimum, and within a minute or two they would collapse into the stuffed clothes that they started as. This was handy if I just needed to get rid of one of them for a while, or wanted to animate a different body. Our Thanksgiving dinner was just the five of us, but even at that it was two more people than we would have had in past years, if nobody was traveling. All three of me helped a little preparing some of the food.

Jack did all my chores. He washed laundry for the three of us, helped Mom with the dishes and cooking, mowed, swept, vacuumed, whatever. I had gotten very good now with doing different things with each of my bodies independently, and this led to the result that I had a good amount of free time. Jack also had an identity, though he was supposedly being homeschooled. With two of me in actual school, he was easily able to pass the occasional tests required by the state for all homeschooled students.

Christmas Break

We had a big Christmas, and for the first time invited some of our out-of-town family to come and meet my new selves. I didn’t know until we were discussing plans for Christmas, but it turned out that several of my other relatives had minor powers, which they shared. We told them the truth about Trixie and Jack. The list of people who knew my secret now was Kelly, Mom’s NANA friends who set up our identities, the people at the testing center, and several aunts, uncles, cousins, and one grandmother.

I got a bunch of Christmas presents including some tools of my own, and all three of me got new clothes, but the biggest present was that Mom and Dad were going to add on to the house. They were going to put a new row of three rooms behind the house. Jack would get my old room, I would get a new room directly behind that which connected to a workshop that ran behind the garage, and Trixie would get the room across the hall from mine. This was going to be built over a period of three months, and there would be some disruption but it was for the best in the long run.

I suggested adding a bathroom, and they were able to get the plans modified to squeeze it in between my bedroom and Jack’s. Each of my boy bodies would get a little less space, but it was so much more than I had now that I didn’t care.

Testing Round 2

After the family left, but still during Christmas break, all three of me went back to the testing center. This time, they wanted to test how I was thinking, specifically whether my brain did all the thinking and Trixie’s and Jack’s just controlled basic motor functions, or if I actually thought with all three brains. So all three of us got skullcaps fitted with a variety of sensors roughly equivalent to an EEG, and they separated us and had us do different kinds of activities. They knew what normal brainwaves looked like for the particular kinds of activities they were having us do, and the activities were chosen specifically to make the patterns distinct. So at one point one of me was reading while another was playing a video game and the third was chopping wood. There were other activities as well (including “nothing” - just sitting in a plain white room with a chair and no other features) and we switched around, so two or all three of my bodies did some of the tasks at different times.

What they saw was that each brain primarily focused on the activity that body was doing, but there was also a constant background pattern associated with my telepathy, each of my bodies telling the others what it was experiencing, and there was also a sort of “playback” of the other bodies’ activities. They explained it as each brain was devoting a small amount of time to watching what the others were doing, and sometimes contributing brainpower to the others’ activities. I was using all three brains equally, with about 90% of each brain’s focus being on what that body was doing at the time. If one of them was doing nothing, that one contributed more to the other bodies’ activities. They also noted that all three brains were telepathic, and even when they sealed me in a telepath-proof room apart from the others, Jack and Trixie could communicate information telepathically while Teddy’s brain didn’t get it.

Finally, they did one more test, one I am surprised I hadn’t thought of: They had Jack and Trixie kiss other mannequins and people. It turned out that they had a very limited version of my power, equivalent in strength and duration to what I had during the first week I discovered it. The limitation here was blamed on not practicing it. I was never going to practice it on them to the extent that I used it myself - this would just lead to an ever-growing mob of too many mouths to feed - but I did resolve to have them practice it more. The people they animated were fully in the network; I could access them as much the one activating the person did. Because of this, there was not the disorientation that I experienced in my first week of power, because the whole network took charge of reading, and when appropriate, controlling the new person, and the network was very experienced in doing that. The practice consisted of letting Jack and Trixie animate each other once in a while. This was slow at first, but by the end of the first week, with them doing 2 or 3 sessions a day right before I was due to recharge them, they were giving half-hour animations. They indeed seemed to be gaining skill much like I did.

If my other selves had been more active socially, I might have already discovered this aspect of the power already, but Jack mostly stayed at home or around Mom, and I wasn’t ready for Trixie to be dating other boys. Or at least, I hadn’t been.

Dating Talk

That fall, a couple boys had asked Trixie out on dates, but I declined. I was conflicted on this. I knew that it was normal for a girl Trixie’s age to be dating, even if only in casual, innocent, dates that didn’t go beyond kissing. But I wasn’t sure I wanted any of me to be dating boys at all. I hadn’t originally wanted to be a girl at all. I only did so at first because Mom told me it would be good experience, and only later did I decide it was fun to have part of me be a girl. Over break, Trixie had a good long mother-daughter talk with Mom about this.

“Mom, some guys at school have asked me to go out on dates.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. You’re a nice looking young woman.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to be dating guys.”

“Do you want to be dating girls instead?”

“No! Well, maybe. It’s complicated. First off, although as Trixie I’m pretty comfortable being a girl, there is still a part of me that is Teddy, and that part of me has no interest whatsoever in dating guys. So maybe I should be dating girls.”

“Well on that count, you’re lucky. It’s more acceptable today for girls to date other girls, as well as for guys to date guys, than it has probably ever been. Gays and lesbians are still rejected by a certain part of society, but the part that accepts them is bigger than it has ever been, their right to not be discriminated against is being affirmed in more and more contexts, and we don’t tolerate abuse or hate speech against gays and lesbians in Normal. There are even some places that now allow people to marry other people of the same sex, though Normal is not one of those places.”

“Well, I’m a long way from that, but I’ll keep it in mind. Second, as Teddy I’m already dating Kelly. What will Kelly think when she finds out that another body I’ve created is dating somebody else? And will this be worse for her if that someone else is a guy or a girl?”

“Trixie, I know Kelly was acting as your being-a-girl coach, so you and Teddy should just talk it over with her. She might actually think that dating is the right next step for you, and she might even help you decide who you should date, or find someone who’s looking who she thinks is a good first date for you. But what I recommend is taking it slow, finding somebody you like who also likes you, and also someone you feel you can trust before you go out on a date with anybody. And feel free to give somebody a ‘maybe’ answer, and talk it over with your friends, but just don’t leave them hanging too long. If you can’t decide, just tell them that you’re not ready yet.”

“Hmm, maybe you’re right.”

“There’s a club at your school that you should be aware of. It’s called GLBTTQ which stands for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, and queer.”

“I understand gay and lesbian, though it’s complicated in my case, but what about all the rest of that stuff? What does it all mean?”

“Bisexual is easy. It means a person who dates and/or is sexually attracted to both men and women. A transsexual is a person who changed their body from male to female or female to male to some degree, or who wants to change the gender of their body like this. A transgendered person doesn’t necessarily want to change their body, but they dress or act as the opposite gender. Queer used to be a mean name people called gays, but as I understand it, in the name of an organization like this it’s used to describe any person with gender or sexuality issues not described by one of these other categories.”

“What kind of person would that be?”

“In most of the world it probably means people who some combination of the terms applies to, or who haven’t made up their mind, or who change regularly. There are also asexual people, who just don’t have any sexual attraction to anybody, and genderless people, who don’t really consider themselves male or female.”

“OK, that all makes sense.”

“But I told you that powers sometimes change a person’s appearance. We have within Normal people with both male and female sexual organs, ones who change genders back and forth on a daily basis, and people who are really neither male nor female, not having any of the organs. What do gay, lesbian, transsexual, and transgendered mean for such a person? If the gender switcher likes women when he’s a man and likes men when she’s a woman, does that make that person bisexual or straight? I don’t know if there are any people like that in your school, but if there are, they would fall within this category. Other than you, that is; since you have male and female bodies, you are at least potentially in this category. It would be up to you to decide.”

“Thanks. I was wondering when I asked the question if I fell into the category.”

“There are even more words I have seen used to describe some of these people. One, which also applies to you right now, is questioning, which is generally for people who have been living as heterosexuals but are wondering whether that’s not really what they want to be. The club is for all these people, partly to help them defend one another against anybody who might want to harm them (though I told you that’s not tolerated in Normal), and partly because the nature of some of these people puts their potential mates in the same group.”

“OK, I see. But it is a lot to think about. So assuming Kelly is OK with it, what is the guy who I date going to think when he find out Teddy has to give me a big sloppy kiss twice a day to keep me alive? How could Trixie ever marry someone other than one of me? Maybe I should be dating my other selves; it would avoid that complication, even if it feels weird to basically be dating myself. But so far, the whole thing about any of my selves besides Teddy dating at all still feels weird to me. I’ll definitely ask Kelly, and see what she thinks about it, before I do anything else.”

“I agree. It’s complicated,” Mom replied. “You just figure out what feels right to you. There’s one more thing. How far have you and Kelly gone?”

“You mean like, what we do in private? We kiss and hug and cuddle. We touch some, but not private parts. We haven’t seen each other naked yet. We haven’t been doing anything you don’t see couples do in public sometimes.”

“You might talk to Kelly about some of that; she may be more interested in going farther in that direction than you realize, but take it slow and don’t do anything you don’t feel like you’re ready for. But I bring it up because you’re possibly going to have Trixie dating a high school boy, and some high school boys are kind of aggressive with that sort of behavior. They might touch you in ways you aren’t comfortable being touched, or try to get you to do things you don’t want to do, including sex.”

“Oh. I think you’ve got a point. I’ve been focusing so much on my power, even in my time with Kelly, that she and I haven’t really been dating much in the last year, unless you call what we do when she is hanging around the house dating.”

Matchmaking

January 12, 2008

After break, when I did explain the situation to Kelly, she was almost as conflicted about it as I was.

“You’re right, Trixie, that this is a complicated issue. I’ll tell you right off that it doesn’t feel weird that my boyfriend wants to date somebody else. Every girl thinks their boyfriend wants to date someone else, and many of them think that they are dating someone else, and some of those are right! For most people that’s just being unfaithful, but for you it’s a special case. You have other bodies and I understand that you might want to be able to have these experiences of being close to a person with your other bodies. It is also something society expects of girls Trixie’s age. Everybody at our school besides us doesn’t know that Teddy and Trixie are really one person, and those boys don’t know they are asking Teddy out when they are asking Trixie out. So no, I will not stand in your way if you want Trixie or even Jack to go dating other people, whether they are guys or girls. And I will help you find a date for Trixie if that is what you really want.”

“Thanks, Kelly. I am still not sure I want that, but I do trust you to help Trixie find the right guy, if that is what I decide to do. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily work that way, because guys usually expect to ask girls out.”

“But it can work. Let’s say I know a guy who I really like and trust, but I don’t want to date him only because I want to stay faithful to you, Teddy. If that guy asks me out, or if we’re together in some other social situation where the subject of dating comes up, I can drop the guy a hint that Trixie really likes him and that he should ask her out, and then I tell you to watch for that guy to invite you out on a date and to say ‘yes’ if he does.”

Using Teddy, I responded, “Oh, yeah, thinking about my experience as a guy, I can say that that might work. Maybe not right away, but it would make me look at the girl, anyway.”

Then as Trixie, “I’m going to give you a solid maybe.” She laughed. “Don’t actually do the hinting yet, but at least try to find a guy that you would recommend, and tell me about him first.”

“All right, I’ll do that. One more thing, though. I want another date with Teddy, first. Not because I’m jealous, but because we haven’t been out on a date in more than a year, since you got your power. We’ve grown, and high school kids have different expectations of dates than we did when we were in seventh grade and a ‘date’ was burgers and fries, with one of our parents as chaperone watching us from the next table.”

“Yeah, Mom mentioned something like that to me.”

“What? She’s been spying on us?”

“No, she asked me about how far we’ve gone, as part of a warning that any guy Trixie dates might want to go further. And I realized that, except for revealing my power to you, we haven’t really moved our relationship along since seventh grade.”

“I have a confession to make, Teddy. When you first asked me out, I accepted mostly out of peer pressure. All the other girls seemed to be going out on dates and getting boyfriends and I was worried I was going to be left out, so I jumped at the chance. I came to like you afterward, but I would have accepted a first date from just about any guy at that point.”

“Kelly, that’s actually kind of how it was for me, too. I had actually asked three other girls before you but they were all dating other guys. But I’m glad now that we started dating, because I really like you.”

We kissed, though I kept it simple and dry to avoid taking control of Kelly’s body. And I made the kind of move I thought Mom was suggesting. With one arm around her back, I put the other hand between us, turned so the palm was on her breast. She didn’t stop me, and only seemed to push against me more. When she later pulled my hand off her breast, I thought it was going to be over for now, but she put my hand under her blouse and directly on her bra.

I don’t actually remember how we got there, but at some point her blouse came off, and she was sitting in my lap, back to me, while both my hands were cupping her breasts outside of her bra, and she had her head turned to kiss me. She reached around like she was going to unhook her bra, when she stopped.

“Wait,” she said. “Is this too far, too fast?”

“Maybe. We have some ground to make up, but it’s all right with me if you don’t want to make it all up at once.”

“All right. Let’s stop. But I will need to leave because I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop right now.”

She put her blouse back on, and went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came back, I invited her to an actual date the next Saturday, and she accepted. Then Kelly said goodbye to me and left.

I talked with Dad the next day about how our talk turned into a sort-of date with Kelly. He agreed that we were old enough to go out on a date by ourselves, suggested that I move up to a slightly better grade of restaurant, and go see a movie with her afterward, and come right home after the movie. He also mentioned that boys and girls start doing more touching at my age, but to take it slow. “If she says ‘stop,’ you stop.”

He also suggested I needed some nicer clothes than what I wore all the time, and we went on a short shopping trip to get those. The date was going to be close to Valentine’s Day, so I also got Kelly a card and a small box of fancy chocolates.

There were several restaurants near where we lived which were in the right price range, so I picked one and we went there. It was nice getting to eat a special meal with Kelly, but apart from holding hands from the time we ordered until the food came, we didn’t do any more touching in the restaurant than we did on any other date. In the theater it was different, though. She leaned over in her seat and put one arm around my back in a kind of hug, which suggested I should do something similar with my arm, so I did. When the couple was kissing on screen, we kissed, too, and briefly I got to watch the movie twice over because of my power.

When the movie credits were running, Kelly whispered to me to stay behind a moment while other people were leaving. Once everybody was past our row on their way out of the theater, she continued, “You didn’t do this during the movie, but Trixie’s dates might.” She grabbed my arm, and put my hand inside the top of her blouse, inside her bra, directly on one breast.

“Now kiss me good,” she requested. So I gave her a kiss just short of what I needed to briefly take control of her. Once we broke the kiss, she continued, “Play with my nipples so you learn what that feels like.”

Trixie had touched her own nipples, so I knew they were sensitive, but Kelly’s somehow seemed twice as sensitive as Trixie’s. I wasn’t sure why. Since I was feeling the results, I could experiment to get it just right. There were two just-right touches that seemed to give equally powerful results. One was a gentle squeeze, just enough to press the sides of the nipple in slightly, and the other was a gliding motion that barely touched the nipple at all.

“Good. That’s about the level of touching I’m ready for now. We can do some more at your house some time. We were almost there last weekend but I got scared, never having had a guy touch my boobs directly.”

This also gave me more ideas about what I could try with Trixie.

It was three weeks after I set Kelly on the matchmaking task when she told me about Ben Franks. “He’s a really nice guy, kinda shy though. He somehow managed to get up the nerve to ask me out recently, and I told him that I was already seeing Teddy, but if that it wasn’t for that then I would’ve dated him.”

“And did you mean it?”

“Yeah, and he was so broken up over it I thought he would die.”

“Wow. So you think this is going to help him as much as it’s helping me?”

“Probably. And because of his shyness and his emotional state right now, he might not come forward so easily and ask you out. You might need to encourage him a little. You know him, right?”

“Yeah, Teddy has met Ben before, though I’ve barely spoken a word to him.”

“Make sure he sees you, smile at him, maybe even wink at him when you see him looking at you.”

“All right, I will. You go do your part.”

Trixie Has Dates

March 6, 2008

It took another two weeks before he did, but Ben asked Trixie out and she accepted. It was to be dinner and a movie Saturday. That afternoon, when Mom picked us up from school, Trixie told Mom about it.

“That’s great, dear. I hope your date goes well. Do you know what you are going to wear?”

“I thought I might wear my blue dress.”

“I should get you something nicer. Right now you basically only have your casual around-the-house clothes and your school clothes. What did Kelly wear on your last date?”

“Um, I guess it was something nicer.”

“Come on, the stores are still open. We can get you something tonight.”

Mom took Trixie into stores I had never been into. In the third such store she finally found something she was satisfied with. It was a striking yet simple red dress, basically a tube with thin straps at the top, but made of some shiny fabric that reflected the light in interesting ways. This was, however, the kind of thing Kelly wore on our last date, and to the extent we’d had any as opposed to training for Trixie in the last year, those other dates as well. Before we were done, I had new shoes and also a coat, since it was too cold to wear this dress outside without something to cover it. At our next to last stop, Mom put in a pizza order, and we picked it up on the way home. This shopping trip had consumed the time she would have normally spent making dinner.

Mom brought the two large pizzas to the dining room table as Trixie ran upstairs to store her new clothes away in her ever-tighter wardrobe.

As Dad came over to the table, he commented, “I remember when one large pizza was enough to feed our family. I hoped that Teddy would expand the family someday, but I never expected it to happen so soon.” He finished with a chuckle.

“The reason we’re having pizza today,” Mom explained, “is that I had to help Trixie buy some stuff for her date.”

At that moment Trixie was returning to the table, Dad spoke to her in exaggeratedly extended syllables for humorous effect. “Oooooh. A daaaate! Who’s the lucky boy? Or girl, if that’s what you’re into.”

“It’s a boy. Ben Franks.”

“Franks? Too bad, he almost has a name that means money.” Everybody got the joke and laughed.

“I guess it would be even funnier if he really was named Ben Franklin,” Trixie added. “Can you imagine going through life with everybody singing ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ around you every day?” More laughter ensued.

After that everybody got down to the serious business of eating pizza.

The next day when Trixie met Kelly at school, she told her about the date, and also about the dress Mom had bought her.

“Oh, that’s great, Trixie. I was going to ask you about that since I know it’s your first date.”

“Well, I think Mom’s taking care of me.”

“I still want to be over there Saturday afternoon to help you get ready for the date. What time is he picking you up?”

“At 5:30.”

“OK, I’ll see you at 2 then.”

“OK,” Trixie replied, but what I was thinking was “At 2? What sort of getting ready required three and a half hours? Shower, put on the dress, shoes, makeup, perfume. How could that take more than an hour?”

She showed me. Saturday I discovered I had my first hair salon appointment. I didn’t really know what I wanted my hair to look like, so I let Kelly and Mom and the stylist pick something they thought looked good on me. That, and the travel to and from the place, took an hour and a half. And even though the dress and shoes were already chosen, Kelly had to pick out my underwear. This was the first time anybody but Mom and my selves had ever gone through any of my selves’ underwear drawers, and since I’d gotten old enough to do my own laundry, Mom didn’t even do that any more. I told her that this was a first date and the dress was definitely not coming off, but she insisted. And after doing makeup and redoing parts of it and touching it up several times, and some role-play with Kelly acting as Ben to ensure I knew exactly how to behave around Ben, I was ready to go just as he rang the doorbell at precisely 5:30.

Neither of us had a car, but it was only a half-mile walk to an Italian restaurant which was near the theater we would visit afterward. We shared antipasto and I chose a risotto entree while he had a beefy rigatoni. We shared a little of each others’ entrees, and then he had a tiramisu dessert while I had a gelato.

We had two choices for a movie that was neither a kids’ movie, nor one that one of us had already seen, and started within a reasonable time. The choices were a romantic comedy and an action film, and Ben somewhat sheepishly suggested the comedy while I could tell he really wanted to see the action movie. I, however, was not sure I was really ready to see a romantic movie, even a comedy, as a girl, with a boy. When I suggested the other movie I could see Ben was happy for that choice.

Ben was a perfect gentleman during the entire date. We kissed, not for too long (so I only got some of Ben’s feelings and not control of his body), and hugged, without him trying to get too grabby, and he walked me back to my house a little after 10. I actually would have preferred if he had been a little more grabby; he seemed cold, and not very interesting to be with. He seemed to have a hard time speaking to me. I had to keep the conversation going during our travel and dinner, which was really ironic for me, the girl who had only been alive for a year and was having a date for the first time, but it was probably his first date too. During the movie, it was fine that we weren’t talking, but he didn’t try to hold hands with me, he didn’t look at me, and it felt like I was watching the movie alone.

So when Dad asked me how it went, I had to tell him it was actually a little boring. It was, however, a success in that I was never afraid or uncomfortable to be out on a date with a boy, but it was possible that was only true because so much of the time it didn’t even feel like I was out on a date. After I described it to him, he agreed with me, and thought maybe Ben was just too afraid to be more forward. Maybe Ben needed a little more encouragement - though of course, I had to be careful not to encourage him too much. So for instance, in response to him ignoring me during the movie, I should have grabbed his arm from where it was crossed in front of him and pulled it down to the armrest between us.

In the end, I resolved to give Ben another chance, but I’d talk to him first and tell him why I thought it wasn’t a good date. I guess I’d try to be his date coach, a little, in the way that Kelly was for me.

Three weeks later, Ben and Trixie had a second date. Mom got me a second nice dress and matching shoes, and I went through much of the same hours of prep.

Though he got me a rose this time, the date itself was still very sterile. Ben and I did see a romantic movie this time, which I hoped would get him to interact with me more. It didn’t work. Ben actually fell asleep during the movie, and when I noticed that, I gave him a solid elbow to his shoulder.

“Huh, what?” he said upon waking.

“Pay attention,” I whispered sharply to him.

“To you, or the movie?” he whispered back.

“Either one!”

This worked for a little bit. He put his arm around my shoulders at that point and the next time the couple on screen kissed, he kissed me, but after he did so he pulled his arm back and went back to watching the movie alone.

So that was our last date.

I didn’t ask Kelly to set me up again immediately, and I didn’t have to. Two other guys asked me out, but based on what I had observed of their behavior at school, I thought both were jerks, and I declined. But when Matt Freeman asked me out, I agreed to go on a date with him.

Matt’s date started out pretty well. He at least was paying attention to me. He had flowers and he hugged and kissed me at the door, and was chatty during dinner and also played footsie with me. Hooray for slip-on shoes! But he got way too grabby during the movie. The first time he tried to put his hand inside the top of my dress, maybe 5 minutes after the movie started, I pulled it out gently. Kelly and I had done that, but we’d been dating for years. This was a first date!

It was only a few minutes later and his hand was back there. I tried to give him a hint by pulling his hand out and putting it on my breast on the outside of my dress. I also, through Teddy, asked Mom what I should do. She told me that I was being very reasonable in trying to draw the line on how intimate I wanted to be with him, and that I should tell him directly.

So the third time his hand was partially on my bra and partially in my cleavage, I pulled his face toward me and told him, “Matt, this is a first date. I know you want to touch me, but keep your hands outside my clothes for now.” He pulled his hand back, but returned it only minutes later. I removed it again and told him, “Last warning.” The fifth time, I walked out of the theater, into the lobby, and through Teddy I asked my parents to come pick me up. Matt followed and apologized, realizing what he had done wrong, but I had had it with him, and went home when Dad showed up.

“Sorry your date didn’t go so well,” Dad said during the ride home.

“Yeah. It’s just weird, going from the guy who won’t pay any attention to me to the guy who keeps trying to get inside my clothes.”

“Yeah, it’s tough sometimes. Teddy was really lucky to get along with Kelly so well. You see that it is not always as easy as it was for them.”

“Yes, I do see, now.”

“I also want to reassure you that the kind of thing Matt was doing is pretty common behavior after a couple gets to know each other better, but what you did was fine for a first date. The kind of guy who can’t respect your limit on a first date is likely to have the same problem later on.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I was afraid of. Exactly why I was hesitant to date guys at all at first. Just the way a lot of guys talk made me worry about going out on a date with one.”

The Dance

April 26, 2008

The next time Kelly came to visit, I had Trixie tell her all about the date, and all three of me were crying by the end. While Kelly was consoling Trixie, as Teddy I asked her, “Do you think it’s normal for my guy selves to cry just as much as Trixie when she’s telling this story?”

After a moment, Kelly replied, “Maybe? I don’t know. Like most girls, I have never been a guy, and I have never shared my mind with a guy the way your group does, Teddy. But you really feel like Trixie is a part of you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it’s fine. I know I might cry thinking about something like that, like a guy touching me in ways that I didn’t want. And imagine if the guy had touched one of your guy selves that way. I would totally understand if you had been crying while telling that story.”

“Ew! OK. Thanks for the confirmation. I’m still confused by some of this stuff.”

With a sly glance, Kelly added, “I wouldn’t cry if you touched me that way.”

“Yes, I think you made that clear the other day.”

As Teddy, I took the invitation, stepped behind Kelly, put my arms around her and slipped both of them inside the neckline of her loose blouse and put one hand over each breast.

Kelly asked, “Why did it take so long for us to get beyond kissing and hugging?”

“I don’t know. I think we were both unsure of the whole thing when we started. I know last time we talked about how we dated at first, both of us, just to keep from feeling left out.”

“Yeah. We were both as shy as Ben during that first date, with my dad there as chaperone.”

“But we stuck with it, initially because of the peer pressure and later because we grew into each other. But we got comfortable in this kissing-and-hugging stage, and just stuck with it. And then, of course, my powers came, and we both got involved with exploring those rather than exploring each other,” I said while I played with Kelly’s nipples.

“That feels nice, Teddy. Put your hands inside my bra and actually touch my nipples.”

As I did that, Kelly turned her head as far to the right as she could, so I could kiss her. I accepted the invitation, giving her a kiss just wet enough that I would get to feel what she felt for a bit, so I could feel what she was feeling and touch her just right. After a few minutes, I had her moaning softly and when she got to the point that she was gasping, she pulled my hands off her.

When she got her breath back, Kelly said, “Teddy, that was amazing. We have really been missing something by not doing this. But I don’t think I can take any more of that now.”

“We were talking about Trixie,” I reminded her.

“Oh, yeah. Her date.”

I had Teddy’s body step away and sat Trixie next to Kelly. “I’m wondering if I’d like it better with another girl. Teddy likes girls, after all.”

Kelly surprised me by asking, “Trixie, would you like to go to a dance with me?”

“Um, sure, I guess. Yes.”

“GLBTTQ is having a dance the Saturday after next. I’d like to go with you.”

As Teddy, I replied, “How come you know about GLBTTQ’s schedule?”

“I was always a little curious how it would be to be with another girl. And I was not getting from you what I had started to think I should be getting from a guy, so I was considering my options. I think you’ve resolved that nicely now, though. But to answer your implied question, no, I’m not seeing any girl. I started doing some checking on the club. Since Trixie is curious also, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try it. And you’ll still get to date me, just in a different body.”

“OK, sure. Let’s do that.”

Kelly approached Trixie and kissed her. Soon it was much more than that. I had to take Teddy out of there because he was stiff as a rod. Even outside the room, I could not block out the signals I was getting from Trixie, and from Kelly as well, due to how slobbery they were being in there; the feelings were too strong. I deanimated Jack and sat Teddy on the toilet, the cleanest way to dispose of the result that I knew was coming. I had learned how to block out, for instance, Trixie’s view of naked girls in the locker room to avoid Teddy getting inappropriately aroused, but this was more than I could ignore.

Kelly and Trixie both ended up topless, and Kelly actually sucked on Trixie’s nipples, before trading off and inviting Trixie to do the same. Finally they stopped, both breathless and soaked with sweat.

“We’re obviously not going to be able to do that during the date, Trixie, but that was amazing and I want to do it again sometime.”

“With Teddy?” Trixie suggested.

“Oh yeah, with him too. Definitely. Not right now, but some time.”

Kelly put her clothes back on, and went to the bathroom to clean up, while I came back into the room to help Trixie clean up.

When Kelly came back, she said, “Now this time, I’m not going to help Trixie get ready. It’s up to you, your mom, your other selves, or whoever to get you ready. But I’m sure you’ll do well.”

The day of the dance was here before I knew it. I had two nice dresses from my other dates, and considered reusing one of them for the date with Kelly, but Mom said I needed a different kind of dress for dancing, so the weekend before the dance she got me one. This time, like my second date dress but unlike my first one, we had time to have it altered to fit perfectly.

She had invited me, and the dance wasn’t within walking distance, so Kelly’s mom drove her to my place, where they picked me up, and drove us to the dance.

Kelly looked amazing. She hadn’t dressed up this nice for her dates with Teddy... but then I realized that those weren’t dances. Before I got my powers, I was afraid to go to a dance; I thought I didn’t dance well, and I’d embarrass myself. And since then, Kelly and I had barely done any dating.

“Is that a new dress, Kelly?”

“Yes. I see yours is new, too. It looks very nice.”

“Thank you. Let’s go in.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect inside. And I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing once I got in. There was no consistent theme to the decorations. There were hearts, and some decorations that looked left over from Valentine’s Day. Some of them were definitely left over from Easter. There were some pairs of crossed male symbols and crossed female symbols, as well as a single symbol which was a blend of the male and female signs, I guess for the transitioning ones.

Of course, there were boy-boy, girl-girl, and apparent boy-girl couples. At this kind of dance I couldn’t be too sure about some of those. There was one “girl” there I recognized as a boy I knew in school, and a “boy” I knew was a girl; both were dancing with people who seemed to be boys. The boy who was dressed as a girl had what I now understood to be D-sized breasts; I wondered what he had stuffed them with, because they looked much more natural than the breasts did on deanimated Trixie.

Mostly, though, I was surprised how many people were there. There were only about 1200 kids in my school but there must have been over 100 here. I didn’t recognize a lot of them, though; some of them might have just been older kids I didn’t know, and some people probably brought dates who went to other schools.

We danced several dances. Kelly led, at first, but later she had me lead.

There were also a few people who had obviously been changed by their powers. One of them was a bird-girl, covered head to toe in white feathers. I guessed a girl, anyway, since she was wearing a dress. Later, when I was in the ladies’ room, waiting for Kelly to finish doing her business, the bird-girl came in, in a rush. She had some sort of plastic thing in her mouth she was inflating, but there weren’t any stalls open, so she grew more agitated and continued inflating the thing.

“Are you in line?” the bird-girl asked me.

“No. I’m just waiting for a friend. You’re first in line,” I replied.

“Oh, good. My egg can wait a few minutes, but not too long.”

“Oh, I noticed you seemed to be a bird, but I didn’t realize you would be that much of one. I have powers too. My name’s Trixie.”

“I’m Bella. What’s your power?”

“I can animate other bodies. Except this is an animated body; my original body is at home.” I didn’t tell her that the original body was a boy.

“Cool. Well I’m a bird, I can fly (though not in this dress; I actually have to be able to spread my wings). I don’t have much else for powers. I don’t have periods, but once a month I lay a big egg.”

“What’s the inflatable thing for?” It was now clear that the device was about the size and shape of a large cooking pot, with a thin ring protruding sideways two inches all the way around the top, and had inflated to be about an inch thick all over.

“It’s an egg-catcher. I always carry this with me in case I have to lay an egg when I’m away from home. It cushions the egg and keeps it out of the toilet water.”

“Oh, I guess it makes sense, if you’re out, that the toilet is the sensible place to do it. Just how big is this egg?”

“It’s about the size of a football, but egg-shaped instead of being pointy-ended.”

“Wow! Does it hurt?”

“It did the first time I laid an egg, but now it comes out pretty easily.”

“Does this egg-catcher mean that mean you’re saving the egg to take home to hatch?”

“Oh, goodness no. These eggs aren’t fertilized, but just like chickens, I lay eggs all the time anyway. Thankfully not every day like chickens. I save the egg so I can eat it.”

“You eat your own egg?”

“It’s my doctor’s recommendation. The egg has enough nutrients to make a baby about the size of a 5th or 6th month preemie, we think, and every month after laying, my body hoards nutrients to start building the next egg. Since that happens every month, the effect on my nutrition is like being permanently pregnant with quintuplets. He gave me three choices if I didn’t want to end up malnourished: Take some expensive supplements my family can’t afford, eat triple meals for a week each month, or eat my eggs. I could afford the triple meals, but it would mean basically doing nothing but cooking, eating, and pooping for that week. So instead I cook my egg, making seven large omelets, and I eat one for breakfast each day for a week. They refrigerate OK that way.”

While she was saying that, Bella squatted down, reached up under her dress, and removed her panties.

“Um, Bella, how soon will you lay your egg?”

“As soon as I can get into one of these stalls. It’s ready. Once I start, it only takes a minute or two and it’ll be out. You want to take a look?”

“Actually, my request is a little more personal than that, but I’m really curious. In addition to animating bodies, I can temporarily feel what another person is feeling, and since I think this is a rare chance to experience something different, I’m interested. Will you let me do that?”

“Go right ahead.”

“In order to do this, I have to kiss you.”

She puckered up, which I took as an invitation and kissed her, enough of a kiss to get 5 to 10 minutes of her feelings. About this time, Kelly came out of her stall, and Bella went in.

“I heard you talking with the bird-girl,” Kelly said while washing her hands.

“Yeah. Crazy power, huh?”

“Definitely. As much as I hate periods, I would rather keep my period than do what she’s doing. I’m surprised you want to feel that even without the benefit of not having a period.”

“I just wanted to know what it would feel like. Oh! She’s pushing it out now. It feels like there’s a basketball in... my vagina. Or in my ass. Like those two are split open and the basketball is moving down the combination of them both. I’m going to have to wait here until she’s done, because this is intense. Oh, oh, ohhh! And she says it doesn’t hurt! There, it’s out.”

About 30 seconds later, I went back to the dance with Kelly, but I was still experiencing Bella’s senses. She stood up, wiped the egg off with toilet paper, then removed the entire egg-basket from the toilet and set it on top of a large bundle of toilet paper she had spread on the floor. She now sat down on the toilet and wiped herself as well. Then she stayed there to use the toilet normally, which turned out to also be in the manner of a bird. She didn’t pee, but a whitish a pasty mess came out of her butt. After some more wiping, she finally went to wash up. She put the egg in an otherwise empty compartment in her oversized purse, and she was deflating the egg-catcher when my feelings of her faded.

There were no other such distractions, and soon the dance was over. We filed out, found Kelly’s mom’s car eventually among all the other cars arriving to pick people up, and we both went to our respective homes. At my house, Kelly accompanied me to the door, and I gave Kelly a good wet smooch just before we parted, one that would let me keep experiencing her senses until she was home and then some.

The Workshop

The week after the dance, the first week in May, the house expansion was finally finished and it was time for me to move in. With the three of me and Mom and Dad helping, it didn’t take long. My stuff went into my room, Trixie’s into hers, and my tools, experiments, and building supplies (many of them previously in the garage) went into the workshop. We set up Trixie’s mattress on my old bed frame, and I was going to have to keep sharing with Jack for a little while longer, while my parents were getting another bed delivered for me. Jack was going to keep the large bed, as he had the least other stuff in his room.

Seeing the bird-girl and others at the dance had reminded me of the fact that I could animate modified bodies, and made me wonder how far I could take it. It also reminded me of my neglected metal body project.

Although the workshop was attached to my room, I intended to have Jack working in there during the school day when he didn’t have other chores to do. The first task was to do something useful with that robot body. When I started filling up my room with stuff for three people, I had to leave this out in the garage, where there wasn’t enough space to work with it easily. Now there was finally space.

Jack removed the arms and legs. Instead of the fixed duct corners as shoulders and hips, he replaced them with short sections of the springy, flexible kind of ductwork. And instead of attaching them directly to the body, they were attached to plates, each of which was fastened to the body with a short but thick bolt, with large washers on each side and two in the middle, to make a sort of pivoting joint. The head was attached to the neck in a similar manner. For now, I didn’t supply the robot with any genitalia; it had come out male when animated before.

Jack was capable of animating bodies for hours at a time now, so once all the modifications were complete, he did so. But he found that the robot’s other joints - the elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles - were still stiff. More trips to the hardware store and days of work installed similar fixtures in all these joints, and soon I had a robot body that was capable of moving in all the ways a normal human body could. It seemed a little unnatural, though. Although I’d been calling it a robot, I was going for “walking suit of armor.” What I got actually ended up looking more like a robot. I needed to think about how I could make it look better. Were the joints still not made right? Or maybe it was the proportions. In the summer when I had more time, I would look at it.

More Animations

I also did more experiments to see if I could modify my own body, that is, Teddy’s body; I consider Jack’s and Trixie’s bodies also to be mine. Sticking parts on and trying to animate them didn’t work, no matter whether it was Teddy or one of the others animating. So instead, I tried wearing some of Trixie’s clothes. I stripped off all my other clothes, and put on one of Trixie’s loose, summer dresses, one that Teddy’s body fit into. I filled in the top with some spare breast forms. Then I tried it. I licked my hand a little, then pressed that down on top of one of the breasts.

And for the first time ever, it worked. I animated my own body, turning it into a duplicate of Trixie’s, turning those breasts real. I was all female down below, too. In order to run more tests, I immediately ran the deanimation test. I gave my finger the lightest tiny dab of a lick and pressed it against the dress where it was covering one of my new breasts. That worked; in a minute or two, the animation faded and I was back to just being a cross-dressing Teddy.

This was great. I experimented some more, and found that it needed to be a full set of clothes, either a dress or a top and a bottom of whatever sort. A bikini worked, though, so it wasn’t based on a portion of the body covered. And wearing my clothes didn’t work. Of course, I had been wearing my clothes before when I tried this, so I figured it wouldn’t. There was always the possibility, though, that I had developed or unlocked for myself a new ability.

It worked with the others, too. If Jack put on a set of my clothes, he could reanimate himself into a copy of me. Trixie could wear Jack’s clothes and become a copy of him. At one point all three of us existed as reanimated versions of others of us. At this point, before I forgot who was who, I decided to deanimate all the reanimations and go down to just single animations except for one experiment at a time. With that single experiment, by reanimating a body just before it was due to expire, I discovered that the reanimation actually extended the animation time. When the reanimation ran out, and the original animated body returned, it would have left the time which was left before that body got reanimated. I also discovered I could go more levels deeper, and those deeper levels could involve bodies already used. I mean that Trixie could reanimate into Jack, then re-reanimate into Trixie, who would become the first Trixie again after two animations ran out. This provided a sort of emergency time extension for my animated bodies, assuming they had practiced enough to have any real time of their own. And it was different from when I reanimated a body in its own clothes, or naked: That didn’t work at all if the body tried to reanimate itself, and it replaced, rather than extended, the time if another body did the deed.

I experimented more with different clothes, as well. When I first started animating Trixie and Jack, I discovered that both new and used-but-resold clothes generated Jack’s body for boy clothes, and Trixie’s for girl clothes. That still worked that way; I could make an army of Jacks and Trixies if I wanted. Borrowed clothes, on the other hand, generated a copy of the owner. Kelly “borrowed” clothes from her other family members for me, and I was able to create copies of them, and it also worked for a dress Mom borrowed from one of her friends one time. What about rented clothes? When I was getting ready to go to the year-end dance with Kelly, Dad rented me a tuxedo to wear. I tried animating it, wondering who I’d get when the owner was a store rather than a person, but I just got Jack.

Teddy’s Dance

May 31, 2008

I stopped fooling around with my power and, as Teddy, I went to a regular dance with Kelly. This was not the prom, which was reserved for juniors and seniors only, but the last dance of the year for the other classes before prom, and it had become unofficially the lower class prom, and most of the juniors and seniors who would attend the prom only two weeks later skipped this one.

Now that I had had more practice dancing, I enjoyed myself much more here. Kelly and Trixie had taken turns leading, so I got practice in both roles, and the practice leading was now proving useful.

At this dance, as I expected, there were few GLBTTQ members, and even fewer who came as same-sex couples. In fact, there were just two, one gay couple and one lesbian couple, who were somewhat hiding that fact by switching off. One dance same sex, the next guys with girls, and the third guys with girls but paired differently. In any case the four of them always stayed close.

I didn’t run into obviously powered people during the dance, and didn’t borrow the senses of anybody else at the dance besides Kelly. We just went and enjoyed ourselves. Kelly’s mom took us to the dance, and my mom picked us up and brought us home. Kelly did give me a special treat, though, in secret. I gave her an especially slobbery kiss as we dropped her off at her house, and she went into her bathroom and masturbated about 10 minutes later, just enough time for me to get home, but when she knew I’d still be picking up her feelings. Trixie and Jack shut her out, since this was meant for me, but I had to go into the bathroom myself, stripping out of my tux quickly. I came on the toilet twice with the intensity of the feelings I was getting from Kelly before the connection faded.

Kelly and I had a long phone call the next day. Naturally the subject of her little after-gift came up.

“I mean, I did enjoy it, but it was unexpected.”

“Teddy, I figured you were inviting that by giving me a kiss I knew would have you feeling my feelings for an hour or more.”

“Well, I hadn’t intended to. I was just trying to say goodbye properly after our first dance... the first with Teddy involved, anyway. A step forward in our relationship.”

“OK, maybe we should set up some signals, then.”

“Like a safeword?”

“Yes. If I understand that correctly, that’s supposed to be a code word that means really stop.”

“Yes. Kelly, I think that’s a good idea. I know we’ve both felt like we were going too far sometimes, so let’s set a safeword that means stop all things leading toward sex, pull away from each other, and take a moment to look at what we were doing. And if I give the safeword after a kiss, it means it was only supposed to be a kiss.”

“I agree. Do you have a good safeword?”

I thought for a moment, but when I chose it I knew it was right. “Basketball egg.”

Kelly burst out laughing. “Oh, God, yes that would make me stop. I didn’t experience that the way you did, but the description alone was priceless. I don’t know how you survived.”

“It didn’t actually hurt much. Remember, it didn’t actually stretch any part of me that wide, it just let me feel what Bella was feeling. And what she felt was this wide opening, really an absurdly wide opening, but only a tiny twinge of pain as the widest part of the egg passed through the narrowest part of her. Her body is no doubt modified in a way adapted to doing that.”

“I guess I can understand that. So it’s agreed, basketball egg is our safeword. Either of us says that and we stop what we’re doing, pull apart if we are touching in any way, and if you’ve just grabbed my feelings with a kiss I don’t do anything in response specifically to send you the feelings.”

The character in this story was introduced as an encounter in The Kissing Bandit. I later decided the character deserved a background of her own. Normal started as a way of reconciling the inconsistencies.

Changing

I’m Ben Plover. I was a perfectly ordinary thirteen-year-old boy until it happened. Actually, until two things happened. Where most boys grew hair on their body, I started growing feathers. And I started turning into a girl!

Both of these changes started around the same time, over the Christmas holidays during my eighth-grade year in school. I’d always been blond, but on the morning of December 23rd, I woke up to find that I had hair covering my arms, legs, chest, pretty much my whole body except my face, palms, soles of my feet, and genitals. White hair. Not blond, but really white like I had bleached it. It was about a half inch long most places that it grew, but at this point it didn’t seem any different from normal hair.

Since I’d gone from barely anything to that overnight, I asked Dad at breakfast, “I know you said I’d start growing hair, but I didn’t expect it to grow so fast!”

It was only at that point he looked up at me. “Wow, that is a lot of hair to have so fast!”

Mom arrived shortly after that. “Hmm, that doesn’t seem normal.”

Dad nodded in agreement.

“Let me know if you see any other changes, honey,” Mom continued.

By evening, I had in fact noticed more changes. My balls had retracted into my body, and it seemed like my penis was smaller. When I somewhat sheepishly mentioned these to Mom, she had Dad go examine me in private.

He had me hold it out to its full limp length. That was only 3 inches. I’m sure it was longer before but I didn’t have any measurements.

He left the ruler in the bathroom and told me, “I don’t know how big your penis was before; it’s not impossible for this to be normal for your age, but it should, if it changes measurably, be getting bigger. You measure it once a day so we can track it. Also, if you can, measure it when it’s hard. Do you think you can do that if I leave you alone for a moment?”

“I’ll try.”

He left, and I sat on the toilet but I was unable to get an erection no matter what I did or thought of. I pulled my pants up and told Dad so. He went into his room somewhere and came back with a nudie magazine which was as old as me. But, however old it was, it had naked women in it. I returned to the bathroom with that, and still I was unable to get an erection, which I reported back to him, an hour after our examination began.

When I woke up the next morning, my changes had accelerated. The “hair” all over my body was now fuzzy. Not like normal hair any more. It seemed like it actually covered a portion of my body now. And I didn’t need a ruler to know my penis was shorter. There was barely anything to it now. And where my balls were, there was less than nothing. A small indentation.

Dad said, “You’re developing powers. And for some reason your powers are turning you into a girl.”

“A fuzzy girl,” Mom added.

“What’s this about powers?”

Mom replied. “Our city, Normal, isn’t actually all that normal. A long time ago, a meteor struck here, and since then, people have sometimes developed strange powers.”

“How come I’ve never heard about this?”

“Two reasons. First, we keep it very low-profile, and try to avoid talking about it where anybody who’s not in on what is a rather open secret around Normal. We don’t tell kids until we think they need to know, and we absolutely do not tell outsiders. And second, a long time ago they cast a spell to keep our secret. Some people’s powers change their appearance, but the spell would keep anybody who doesn’t already know about the powers from being able to see the changes, if they knew the person already, or anything abnormal, if they first met them after the change.”

Dad added, “And what Mom just told you let you in on the secret, so you may now notice some of your classmates or other people in Normal who look different. Don’t go commenting on it in public, but do tell the person when you see them in private. Although with your obvious changes, they will probably already know. But take the opportunity to make friends, or renew your friendship with that person. And if you keep changing, you might have to reintroduce yourself because your friends may not recognize you.”

“Oh, that’s going to be terrible!” and I started crying, literally crying.

“Honey, it’ll be OK,” Mom said, wrapping me in a hug.

Dad changed the subject, or at least got us back to where this conversation started. “Given your description of what you look like now, you might want to have Mom examine you from now on.”

And I cried some more.

Merry Christmas! I woke up to my new body.

My body now looked completely white. Even on my head, my blond hair had been replaced by the shorter white hair, which had gotten longer. Examining the “hair” showed it was actually small feathers, 1/4 inch wide and up to an inch long. And as for my genitals, there was nothing. No penis, just a slit between my legs. In fact, that was the only thing down there, besides feathers.

Mom took me into the bathroom, with the intention of giving me a lesson in female biology. But she got as much of a lesson as I did. What she found in that slit was not what she expected.

There were supposed to be two holes inside that slit, and there were. But they were deeper inside the slit than she expected.

So we stopped and did some research. Specifically, on the reproductive systems of birds. We learned a lot, and at the same time still had questions.

Some female birds have parts that correspond to mine. They have a vagina similar in function to the human one, but it’s the hole in front. The hole in back is the cloaca, which is sort of the butt, but that weird bird poop comes out, which is actually a mixture of both pee and poop.

Some male birds don’t have penises. They just have a hole they squirt from during mating season, directly into the female after lining up and opening their slits. This hole is in about the same spot as the vagina in females, so it’s almost impossible to tell male and female birds of these species apart from their genitals. In those species the sexes usually have different coloration or other body characteristics, not that that helps with my one-of-a-kind anatomy. A few kinds of birds do have penises, and I saw a really crazy thing about goose penises that Mom and I both decided was better to stop reading.

Because of how far inside my slit this hole was, Mom thought it was likely males of my kind of bird would have penises, but we couldn’t be sure I was female until a doctor examined me. Likewise, I didn’t have any breast development, and my nipples had disappeared under the feathers, but that also didn’t mean much. Birds don’t breast-feed. There is a part of the body called the breast, but it doesn’t make milk, and indeed birds have no nipples. So I still didn’t know whether I had turned female on top of being a bird.

Later the day, I confirmed I now poop like a bird. When I did, the slit opened up pretty wide. This meant I could actually poop in the toilet like a normal person, rather than mashing it all over inside the slit. It was easily wide enough for me to reach in there and wipe myself after I went. And I learned from that how to open up the slit for me and Mom to more easily examine my parts, but it didn’t actually help confirm anything.

Testing

December 27, 2006

Mom made some calls yesterday and ultimately found somebody to properly examine me today.

At 9 AM sharp we arrived at a NANA testing facility. They ran me through a full battery of tests to look for various kinds of powers without finding anything. They didn’t assume that because I grew feathers that I would just be able to fly; they checked all the kinds of powers they had seen and could easily test for. I could run just typically well for a teenager. I healed a little better than normal, but not enough for them to call it a power. They did decide my hearing and vision were enhanced. “Eyes like a hawk” applied literally to me and I learned how I could focus on tiny details.

They spent quite a while trying to see if I could fly. Since I was turning into a bird, they thought it might happen, but for now it seemed I was a flightless one. They also tried to help me try out any form of transformation ability that might let me be more birdlike as opposed to birdman-like. But nothing happened.

Lastly, I got a physical examination. The doctor performing the examination, Dr. Zbigniew (which was pronounced pretty much like it looked except the W was pronounced as a V), introduced another man, one I recognized. Dr. Woods was a local veterinarian. He was serving as a consultant to explain avian anatomy, to help the main doctor understand what he was looking at. He confirmed I was female and that the hole in front was my vagina. He stuck a tool into my vagina and shined a light to look inside. That felt really weird and a little uncomfortable, but ultimately he decided I was OK in there. He suggested it was possible I might be able to become pregnant, but more likely I would lay eggs rather than carry a baby for nine months. All in all, he said that a lot of my internal anatomy had undergone changes to the form of many birds. My bones were lighter and more hollow, with a network of smaller bones in the place of some of the larger bones found in a human body. I didn’t seem to be any particular kind of bird, though; I was an amalgam of different types of birds. As a result, they didn’t really know what to expect, so Dr. Woods gave me a tutorial in the reproductive systems of birds.

“First off, some birds have sex like humans and most mammals. Your parents have explained that, I hope?”

“Yes. A penis goes into a vagina. I am not sure how I feel about that.”

“Well, nobody’s pressuring you to have sex now, but you can. When you do, because your vagina and cloaca are recessed 3 inches inside your cloacal slit, you may need to help your partner find the right hole. I can’t guarantee sex will be pleasurable for you, or even that you would prefer vaginal sex over the other way, but if you do want to get pregnant, your partner will need to find your vagina.”

“OK. Good to know, I guess.”

“As I was saying, some birds have sex that way, but in other species of birds the males don’t really have a penis, and the mating pair just arranges themselves so that the male can squirt his semen into the female.”

“Mom and I found that when she was trying to help me figure out what I was.”

“Because of your anatomy and your potential partners, that’s unlikely to apply; your partner would have a penis.”

I nodded, still not sure how I felt about that, but accepting the fact.

“Now it is possible you’ll get pregnant and carry a child like people do. Your pelvis has changed rather into the shape of a woman’s, which would allow a child to be born live through it. In fact, the opening is larger than in a normal woman, and it probably means you would have no difficulty or pain whatsoever in giving birth to a full-term human baby. If this is how your body works, then you’ll probably have periods like any normal human girl and your mother will be able to explain that.”

“I got the basics of that. I am sure there is more I didn’t hear about because I wasn’t a girl before, but she can tell me.”

“However, the pelvic bone is also modified to be shaped more like the ones in the larger varieties of birds, so I think you’re more likely to lay eggs. If that’s the case, you probably won’t have periods. The wide pelvis might just mean you are going to lay large eggs comparable to those of an ostrich. Here’s a chart showing typical sizes of large birds and their eggs, all sizes based on females.”

“Out of these,” I commented, “The cassowary looks closest in size to a woman, and the eggs are... pretty big!

“Yes, a little smaller in diameter than the head of a full term baby, and much shorter than one. Fortunately, your large cloacal slit and pelvic hole, combined with the rounded shape of eggs, means you should have less difficulty laying eggs than a woman does giving birth.”

“But won’t the baby be tiny, then?”

“Yes. Do realize, though, that birds fill essentially the entire space inside the egg before they are born. If you lay an egg the size of the cassowary, you may hatch a child from it who has a head 3 inches in diameter and who is 12 to 14 inches tall. Assuming your child has human form, anyway. A child that small may need special care after hatching.”

I sighed. “So I could end up with a bird child?”

“Anything’s possible. Your body is large enough to potentially lay an egg even larger than the ostrich’s, one which could hold a nearly full-term human. There’s no way to know more until you have one, though.”

“That’s a little scary.”

“You could find out sooner than you think. Egg laying birds fall into three varieties, which you may be any of. The first type, which is most common, has certain fertile periods, often once or twice a year. If you get fertilized by a compatible male during those times, you’ll lay one or more eggs probably one to three weeks after the sexual encounter. You’ll feel a pressure inside you which won’t feel like anything else you have ever felt. Find a place where you can do so, and push the egg out of your body. You’ll figure out how when the time comes.”

“Oh god, more than one at a time?”

“The largest birds usually lay only one. The second kind of bird is always fertile. In this case, you could lay eggs after having sex any time of the year. Other than that, everything is similar to what I just described for the first type. The third kind of bird has regular cycles and fertile periods like humans do. These birds always lay an egg, usually just one, each cycle, but unless you’ve had sex recently the eggs won’t be fertilized.”

“How would I know?”

“Well, that kind of bird usually lays eggs more frequently. Rather than one or two fertile periods a year, those birds might lay eggs anywhere from once every two months to once a day, like chickens.”

“Ugh! Every day?”

“I don’t know that it would happen that often. It hasn’t happened yet, anyway, right?”

“Right. But it’s only four days ago that I started looking like a bird at all.”

“If it happens, take note of when it does the first time and the second time to help learn your cycle. If it doesn’t happen within, say, a year, you can figure you’re a type who only lays eggs when you get impregnated.”

Finally, I had to choose a code name. Clearly I needed a bird name, and at least right now it seemed like I needed a white bird, but several of the ones I tried were taken. Ultimately I ended up with Egret.

Returning to School

January 8, 2007

For a while it seemed like no further changes were happening except that the feathers got thicker and covered me more densely. However, over the past weekend, I noticed growth of new feather-covered skin under my arms. Was I growing wings? I was not sure how far this transformation was going to go, but maybe I would be able to fly someday. Elsewhere on my body, the feathers were getting broader and denser. Even on my face and up to the edge of my cloacal slit there were now feathers, and if I am not opening that you, can can’t even see its there. When I am standing naked, except for a few features like my lips and eyes and nails, I’m white all over. And speaking of nails, those still looked human. I didn’t develop the talons some birds have.

Today I was back at school for the first time since the change. Since I didn’t have breasts, nobody needed to know I was female down below. Even showering after gym class, nobody could really tell what I had; it just looked like everything was covered with feathers. By that time I had also learned I could use a towel to dry my body like normal people did, but I had to go in the direction of the feather, which meant downward on most parts of my body. In the bathroom, I couldn’t use a urinal anymore, but nobody could see what I did inside a stall.

Just as had been explained to me, some kids didn’t know about powers yet and just saw me as pre-transformation Ben. Others knew, and I could tell some of them were shying away from my changed form. Two of them called me bird-boy. Some of my closest friends already knew as well and I talked a little with them at lunch about turning into a bird inside and out, and about their own powers or those of other friends they knew about. One of them didn’t know, but we explained the basics of powers and then he could see the new me.

I managed to get through the school day with no particular problems.

It was fortunately on Saturday when it first happened. There was a strange feeling inside me. Muscles inside me were clenching, pushing against something. But pretty quickly I figured out that it was an egg inside me trying to get out.

Unfortunately, my parents were out and I was home alone. So I went to the bathroom, stripped below the waist, and instead of opening the toilet, sat on the lid, with one hand under me to try to catch the egg.

Pretty quickly, I realized I was laying a really big egg. Somehow it didn’t actually hurt, but it was uncomfortable. Imagine trying to shit a watermelon, and being big enough to do so. After about 5 minutes of trying, I got one end of it just to the opening.

I used a hand mirror to take a look at it. Just barely protruding from my slit was what looked like a grayish, dirty old baseball. I could tell from the feel of it that what was coming out of me was a lot bigger than a baseball, though.

I kept pushing and it opened me up wider. This hurt a little, but also felt really good, somehow. Eventually, I got it to the halfway point, and then it came all out at once as it became easier for the egg to get out of me than to go back in. I used both hands to grab hold of the egg. It was as big around as a football (the American one), but not quite so pointy on the ends. That’s bigger than any of the bird eggs on that chart I saw! It was almost as big as my head. I was stunned something that big came out of me.

Now what was I going to do with it? The egg seemed relatively clean; it was not covered in the pasty poop that I was always wiping out of myself. I did wipe off a little of what might have been poop with some toilet paper.

I decided to take the egg into the kitchen. Resting it carefully on the counter and holding it in place with one hand, I got a large soup bowl, lined it with several layers of paper towels, and put the egg in it.

A couple hours later, my parents came home.

“Mom! Dad! I laid an egg!”

“Wow! Can I see?” Mom shouted.

I led her into the kitchen where I had placed the egg.

“Wow! That’s a big egg! That came out of you?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t believe how big it was either.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Maybe a little. It didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as I thought it would to push something like that out of my body.”

She called the doctors who had tested me and ultimately got an appointment to take the egg directly to the vet tomorrow.

We went in to see the vet at 10 AM. Dad had found a cardboard box to put the egg in, because I really didn’t want to be showing off to everybody my huge egg.

Dr. Woods examined me only a little, and spent most of his time examining the egg. He subjected it to several kinds of tests. He listened to it with a stethoscope. He shined three different lights on it. He measured it, length and width: 6.3” in diameter, 9.1” long. He weighed it: 5 lb 9 oz. He put several other devices against the surface of the egg. Finally, he put the egg back in its box, handed it to me, and also handed me one of the devices.

“See how one end of the egg is slightly pointed, while the other end is very nearly round? The round end comes out first, but that’s not really important. What’s important is that the yolk is closer to the round end, and that’s where the embryo develops. This device can detect whether eggs of your type are fertilized. When you lay an egg, press this device against the round end of the egg. If it shows a red minus like this, the egg is not fertilized. If it shows a green plus sign, the egg is fertilized. If there’s no symbol,” which he demonstrated by putting it against the pointy end of the egg, “it hasn’t detected the yolk. You can try again in another part of the egg.”

“And then what?”

“Well, if it is fertilized, then you’re going to have a baby!”

“OK, but that’s not going to happen unless I have sex, right?”

“Well, I think so. You can see this one is not fertilized. But I’ve seen stranger things in my time in Normal than self-fertilized eggs. So you should always check.”

“OK. Now what do I do with the huge, non-fertilized egg?”

“Anything you want. However, making an egg this size takes a lot of nutrients from your body. I don’t know yet how often you’re going to lay these eggs, but since it’s been less than a month since you’ve been in this form and you already laid one, it’s possible the cycle is a month or less. For your personal health, either in the week before or the week after you lay an egg, you should eat a special diet.”

“What kind of special diet?”

“You need a lot of extra calories and protein, and quite a bit of calcium. You might eat a lot of eggs, meat, soybeans, and milk, or the nutritional supplements athletes use. This egg weighs about five and a half pounds, so you’d need to eat about 4 pounds of extra food, not counting the milk, or maybe 6 pounds of the nutritional supplements. However, the easiest way to get the nutrients is to simply eat your egg, along with drinking a lot of milk.”

“Eat my own egg? So I’m some kind of cannibal?”

“No, you wouldn’t really be a cannibal as long as you don’t eat the fertilized ones,” he assured me.

“Oh, OK, I suppose. It still seems weird. How much milk would I need to drink?”

He thought for a moment before answering, “About a quart of milk a day for seven days should do it, on top of the usual amount of milk or other dairy products you consume.”

“Is there any special way Ben should prepare the egg?” Mom asked.

“In theory, any of the ways you prepare hens’ eggs should work. However, it would probably take far too long to boil this one whole. Any other way of preparing an egg by cracking it first and cooking the white and yolk should work.”

“It seems like a lot to eat at once.”

“Oh, you don’t have to eat it all at once. You probably can’t and shouldn’t. Even after you remove the shell it would weigh over 5 pounds. Once it’s cooked, put any uneaten part in a sealed Ziploc bag, removing as much of the air as is possible, and store it in the refrigerator. You can heat up any part of it again in the microwave and it’ll still make a good meal. You should eat it within about 3 days of cooking it, though. If you need to keep it longer, you can freeze it, but if you do, cut it up into separate meal-sized bags so you can thaw each one separately. And you can store the unbroken egg in the refrigerator for up to a week. Since you haven’t been doing that for this one, though, you should take it home and cook it up right away.”

“OK. If I did have a fertilized egg, how would I care for it?”

“Eggs need to be kept warm, just not so warm that it cooks them. Birds typically sit over their eggs, keeping them around body temperature, and that’s a pretty good guideline. You want to keep the egg at around 95-100 degrees Fahrenheit. There are incubators you can buy that will do that. You would have to improvise a bit since most of them are designed to hold eggs of chickens or geese, but some of them are large enough so that if you simply remove the egg trays meant to hold several of those eggs, one of your eggs will fit. You would need to see how it comes apart for cleaning to determine whether it provides enough space. For an egg of this size, it might need to be kept for several months before it hatches. By the time it does, your baby would have incorporated almost all the mass inside the shell as part of his or her body, and so weigh about 5 pounds. That would be considered low for a human birth, but only a little below the low end of what is typical; a five-and-a-half pound birth which went full term would not be considered abnormal.”

I wasn’t hoping to lay a fertilized egg anytime soon, but I kept this in mind about incubators.

So we went home, and Mom cooked up the egg. First, she had to figure out how to break open the egg. Cracking it on the edge of the frying pan like you did with chicken eggs was not going to work. Eventually she smashed it by whacking it with one pan while it sat in another, and that just cracked the egg. A second whack in the same spot extended the cracks to the point Mom could break the shell apart into three large pieces.

Mom poured out the contents, filling the pan half an inch deep, so she poured half of it into the other pan. She made an omelet (well, two super-large omelets) by throwing in some chopped up peppers, mushrooms, and other goodies. And she showed me how to do it so I’d know how to tell when it was done. And then I had about half of one of the two omelets for lunch. She put the rest in a big Ziploc bag in the refrigerator and wrote my name on it. I guessed that would provide me with dinner and also breakfast and dinner tomorrow, with lunch being whatever I ate at school.

It was tasty. I tried not to think about where this had been - but then, every egg came from a bird’s butt. It was mainly weird because this one had come from mine.

And I had a glass of milk with it. Milk with every meal for a week was going to be the rule.

I’d had a good week, which was ruined when my string of successes in not having boys examine my body shape in the locker room came to an end. Some of the boys I was changing with were blinded by the spell and just saw the old me. Some who knew about powers saw that I changed and were sympathetic. But it was always possible there would be rude ones, and two such bullies outed me as a girl. They roughed me up a bit, though the gym coach came over to break it up before I really got hurt. But I knew my attempt to live as a boy was over. I could have tried to explain about how most birds don’t have penises, but there was the shape of my hips and other things. Besides, if it happened so soon, it was likely to keep happening.

The school called Mom, and she came and got the whole story. She called her relatives and found some who could help get my gender officially changed. I would be doing that tomorrow. I was sad about that, but it would mean that I would stop living that lie I’d been living for weeks now. I did manage to get over it and finish the school day, having missed two whole classes, but that’s it. It was over.

Those boys were getting punished, and there would be others. But I would have to deal with them.

Today I learned how hard it is to get your gender changed, even in Normal.

First off, I had to have a doctor certify me as having a female body. Not the one from NANA who had examined me at my testing, because it had to be one with certain certifications from the state. We had doctors some in Normal with that, but the one who examined me before wasn’t one of those. So I had another internal examination.

And Ben wasn’t going to work as a girl’s name. I decided on Bella; it was kind of like Ben.

Then I had to fill out separate forms to get a reissued birth certificate indicating the change in gender and name, a reissued state ID card, and an update for my school registration. They had a long list of other kinds of registrations that might include my gender, but none of those really applied to me.

None of those new cards would come to me today, except a temporary ID card, but that was enough. I could now start living officially as a girl. That said, I wasn’t going to be one of those girly girls, but at the same time, I wanted to make myself look a little more like a girl so I didn’t get rejected by the other gender too. I thought about fake breasts, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to get implants, not with all the horror stories about those, and any sort of external fakes were going to come off in the locker room among the other girls. When I got a little older, though, and the other girls all had boobs, I would probably need to wear something to fit in.

Oh, heck, I just realized I was going to be showering with the girls. I was excited, scared, and sullen about that all at once. Woo, naked girls! Um, are they going to notice me staring at them? And yeah, naked girls, but I was going to be staring at the flesh I could no longer expose even if I wanted to.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to be wearing dresses and frilly lacy clothes, but I did agree to let Mom help me find some blouses that were not too girly, but also clearly not boys’ clothes. And I’d actually already been wearing girls’ jeans, because I’d certainly gotten the hips! I’d stuck with fairly traditional looking jeans so it was only obvious if you noticed the shape, and not I wouldn’t have to wear bulky sweaters over them to hide the shape.

School was not as bad as I thought it would be. All my teachers were informed I was now named Bella, and the spell made those who didn’t know about the powers hear them call me Ben, though a lot more of them had been told about powers now. Some of the kids who knew about powers noticed, but knew not to talk too much in public; some gave me either congratulations or condolences privately depending on how they felt about it. A couple of the guys actually came on to me, but I shut them down. Even though I had a vagina, I wasn’t interested in guys, at least not right now. Maybe that would change? A few boys taunted me, but I told them, “I didn’t ask for this, it’s just a thing that happened, and it could still happen to you, too!”

Two girls who were apparently Lesbian and had never been interested in me before also started coming on to me, and I told them maybe. Most of the girls simply accepted me. A few shunned me, and when I was in the girls’ restroom one of them insisted I show her I didn’t have a penis anymore “or get out,” but once I showed her, she seemed satisfied.

At gym class, I was re-introduced to the class of girls at the entrance to their locker room by the girls’ coach, who’d been informed in advance, and all the families of the girls and the boys in my gym class had been contacted over the weekend to let these kids in on the secret of powers. So the entire class knew about powers now and that someone in their class had a power, but they weren’t told it was me until our class started.

“Girls, you all now know about the powers some people have here in Normal. Some of you already knew and some of you just learned. The reason for that is that we have a new girl today. You may already know her, but this is Bella. Say hi!”

“Hi, Bella!”

“Hi, girls.”

“Bella’s powers, in addition to turning her into a bird, have also been turning her into a girl under those feathers, and she’s 100% changed now. No trace of her boy parts remains. So she’s going to be changing with you all from now on.”

That was the public story; nobody needed to know I’d actually been fully female since the end of December. After I went inside, I showed everybody my lack of manhood, since they’d see it eventually while we were changing, and there was no argument from any of them. In fact, I made a couple new friends.

After a week, things had calmed down. One boy had gotten detention for shoving me in the hallways, in addition to the two who had assaulted me in the locker room, who were still suspended, and there were still a few who obviously didn’t like me, but I was able to get through my day without any obvious trouble. And I was making lots of friends among the girls.

I was still undecided about the two Lesbian girls who were interested in me. I found them together at lunch today and decided to sit with them, something which made them both obviously happy.

“Jen, Tracy, I know you two have been giving me signals.”

They both gave me an innocent, “Who, me?” look, which I ignored.

“I am still trying to sort out my feelings. I am not interested in guys, which means that maybe I need to still be interested in girls. But I am just not sure.”

“Well, you could give it a shot with me,” Tracy suggested.

“Or with me,” Jen retorted.

“Or,” Tracy started to reply, then dug out something from her purse. “Maybe GLBTTQ is for you.” And she handed me a card, a business-card sized note but printed on regular paper. This was a club I wasn’t aware of, and the acronym stood for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, and Queer. No wonder they abbreviated it.

In a low voice, Tracy continued, “You’re certainly transsexual, even if not by choice, and maybe Lesbian too. But we welcome everybody outside of the heterosexual norm.”

I was skeptical. “This isn’t some huge gay makeout session, right?”

“No,” Jen answered. “Anything more than a peck on the cheek is forbidden during our meetings, though some people use them as a way to find dates. It’s about finding friends who have common interests and being ready to stand up for one another when necessary.”

Tracy chimed in, “We meet afterschool on Wednesdays in room 241.”

“Hmm. I’ll need to arrange a ride home.”

“We have several supportive parents who come to pick us up and also give rides to those who need them.”

“OK, I’ll think about it.”

Mom was going to come pick me up, so I didn’t need to find a ride home, and I was ready to go visit this group after school.

I got my things prepared as if I was going home, and then went to the room.

I was stunned. There were 27 kids there! Some of them I knew but had no idea they were gay.

They introduced me, though most everybody had heard about me by now. It was too many for everybody to tell me their story individually, but they explained the terms, with a different person who identified that way explaining each term:

• Gay and Lesbian I understood. They liked people of the same sex.
• Bisexual people could go with boys or girls.
• Transgender meant people who identified as the opposite gender from their physical sex. They explained that transgender people exhibited this to varying degrees, and there weren’t any showing it during school, but one boy and one girl from the group identified this way.
• Transsexual referred to people who wanted to change their physical sex, or had actually done so. They explained that this was beyond transgender. Not all transgender people wanted to change their body, but transsexual referred to the ones who wanted to. Usually at our age it just meant that we wanted to; those pursuing surgery usually had to wait at least until they were 18. Here in Normal, the term also applied to those whose like me powers caused their bodies to change sex, whether they wanted to or not, and while there were others in Normal this had happened to, as far as they knew, I was the only one in this school right now who it had happened to.
• Queer referred to people who weren’t sure, those who might go back and forth over time, and those whose powers made it hard to say what was heterosexual and what was not.

And it turned out that about a third of the group were in that “not sure” category. A few of them identified as bi, most as gay or lesbian, and most of them admitted they might change their minds later. Most of them had not actually had sex yet, and realized that after they did, their feelings might change. But they at least had an idea now of what they were, and most of them had gone on dates like that. All of the trans people had been out in public dressed as the opposite sex. And they introduced one more trans category, transvestite, which meant you simply dressed as the opposite sex but didn’t consider yourself that sex. Usually this only applied to men dressing as women, since women dressing as men were so common it was practically mainstream.

It was a useful lesson. I hadn’t realized all the different types of gender issues people had, but they did, and increasingly all these groups were banding together like this, though they mentioned that elsewhere they didn’t always use all the same letters or put them in the same order.

After all this, they got on with club business. There was a gay and Lesbian dance coming up which was shared across all the schools in town. Each of the other three area high schools as well as two of the middle schools had GLBTTQ clubs, with a total of 142 members, easily enough to have a small dance if, say, half the kids attended.

But the important thing was learning all these kids were here, that they all would support me, and I could count them all as friends.

Dating

February 7, 2007

At the next meeting of GLBTTQ, I agreed to a date with Tracy for this Saturday.

After I got home, when I was talking about it with Mom (who was fully supportive of me dating either boys or girls), I was unsure whether I should be dressing as a boy or a girl for this date. Although I was technically female now, depending on my clothes I could easily pass as either male or female. Mom was happy to go out and buy me a nice dress to go out on my first date as a girl, but I’d rather wear the guy clothes I already had, and which still fit me. The slacks were loose in the hips normally, so they fit just fine.

I dealt with that dilemma by calling Tracy in the evening and asking if she was OK with me dressing as a guy on this date. And she actually preferred that! Her parents didn’t completely accept her Lesbianism and it would help her in their eyes if she was seen going out on a date with a guy.

It was four weeks to the day from the first one when I laid my second egg. Exactly the length of a typical girl’s period, Mom noted. This meant another weekend of eating omelets, but it saved on the food bill I’d have otherwise. On the other hand, the two extra gallons of milk cost most of that. I resolved that after drinking milk with every meal for a week, I’d drink one extra glass a day every day thereafter.

The feeling was much like last time, but getting the egg out was easier.

I had agreed to a date with Tracy for this evening, and it was a good thing I laid the egg before lunch. It would have been embarrassing for that to happen while we were out, or while I was trying to get myself prepared. This meant I’d be eating one meal that wasn’t my egg, but that was fine. I’d eat it for all three meals tomorrow and be done.

We had dinner at a restaurant and saw a movie afterward. Tracy was a bit of a tomboy; while she had worn a dress for the date, she told me it was only because her mother made her do it. She never wore dresses or skirts at school. She didn’t go for the romantic movies; we ended up watching an action film. But with me appropriately dressed, and known as Ben for the evening, we went to her house after the date where I met her parents. And her parents were so happy she was on a date with a boy that they encouraged me to go up to her room with her. They never actually said the words, but I could tell from the way they talked that they expected me to have sex with her!

Well, far be it for me to disappoint them, I let Tracy introduce me to the ways of Lesbian sex. During this activity, I experienced the same good feeling that I experienced just for a moment while laying each egg. I realized that was an orgasm! I have a clitoris, which is at the front of my cloacal slit, where a human girl’s would be relative to the vulva, and probably not a standard part of bird anatomy, but I already knew I was a hybrid in a bunch of ways. The egg must have pushed against my clitoris on the way out. But with intentional stimulation I had more of it.

While we were doing this, and thus making a lot of noise, I whispered in Tracy’s ear, “I’m fine to keep doing this with you. But what are you going to do when they realize I can’t get you pregnant?”

She replied at a normal volume, “Dad doesn’t care who I date, boys or girls, as long as I don’t get pregnant until after I finish high school. That’s why I have the condoms. Mom wants me to have children, but accepts Dad’s restriction as practical. However, she is pretty much hoping for me to get pregnant at 18.”

Then, in a whisper, she added, “So at 18, I’ll do what every Lesbian couple does, either find a willing donor or use a sperm bank.”

I replied, “That makes sense,” and then went back to focusing on the sex.

When we were done with the sex, before we put ourselves back together and I went down for the trip home, Tracy had some final words for me.

“I like you Bella, and I want to keep doing this, but I also don’t want to keep you from exploring your new sexuality. If you want to date Jen or other girls, or even guys, go ahead.”

“Oh, OK. Thanks. Did you want to set another date, maybe after a little while?”

“Sure.”

And we did, a month off. While we were having this conversation, she was collecting some of her vaginal secretions in condoms. She added some spit as well. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “This way, it will look like the condoms were used for their intended purpose.”

“Do you really think your parents are going to check on you that much?”

“Yes. Well, they’re not going to run scientific tests on this stuff, but Mom will look through my trash to find these. Seeing some liquid in each should satisfy her.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with her family issues, but if she didn’t stay close to her family after she grew up, it is possible that it might work out. But more importantly, I didn’t think I wanted to be a parent at 18, so if she was going to satisfy her parents, I didn’t want to stay involved with her.

My wings continued to develop.

Normally in their current state, they just look like feather-covered arms, and I can wear regular shirts. All the actual wing stuff is folded flat against my underarms and the sides of my body. But when topless, if I hold my arms out to the sides and think hard about it, I can make the wings fold out.

When I do that, there are other changes. My stomach gets very thin, while my upper chest expands. Not like breasts, though. This went all the way across from side to side, and from my collarbone down to the bottom of my ribs, as a single smooth bulge. I knew girls’ breasts (large ones anyway) were jiggly and they wore bras to help hold them in place. There was nothing jiggly about this; it was a solid mass of muscle, like all the muscles in my stomach moved up into my chest.

I showed Mom, and she suggested they were flight muscles. Mom scheduled me a flight test a couple weeks out, figuring I’ll be even more developed by then.

I also showed Mom the other problem I had. When the wings were out, their connection to the side of my body extended 9 inches down below what was normally my armpit. I didn’t have any kind of shirt that I could wear that wouldn’t get in the way. She told me she had some ideas about that.

Another Saturday, another date. This time with Jen. Again, I asked her in advance about dressing up, and she wanted the girly girl.

So this time I let Mom take me out shopping for an actual dress. I really had no idea what I wanted in a dress, so I basically just let Mom shop for me and suggest things to try on. She tried to teach me about women’s clothing sizes. They were much more complicated then men’s because women’s clothes tended to be more tightly fitted, and the breasts and hips could vary differently on different women. But she explained that the sizes called “juniors” were designed for younger girls who had little breast development, and since my bird body probably wasn’t ever going to have any, I should stick with those.

But even when I tried on the juniors dresses, for the kind of dresses she was looking at for my date, they didn’t fit right on my chest, or in the “bodice” as Mom called it. The dresses expected that I had at least small boobs. So we then went to shop for fake breasts. And that was actually a thing available in Normal because I wasn’t the only person here with gender issues, even if I was the only one in my school now that we knew of. If we ordered online there were more options available, but there were actually some I could walk into a store here and buy.

There were two main kinds of those - ones that you stuck to the body with a sort of temporary glue, and ones that went into a special bra with pockets to hold the breasts. Because my feathers covered my chest, we thought the stick on kind would be difficult and perhaps dangerous to use. But I tried on one of the pocket bras with breasts that were made to turn my completely flat chest into a B cup, and that actually looked good on me. So we got the breasts and two of the pocket bras in white. Then we went back and I tried on the dresses again and they fit well. In some styles the bra was going to show, but the white was so similar to the color of my feathers it didn’t really make a difference. Still, for now we picked dresses in two styles that covered the bra completely.

Mom also took me into a lingerie store. This was a sidetrack from our date shopping, and there was a lot of stuff I knew I wasn’t ready for yet (if ever), but what she brought me in for were garments variously called leotards, bodysuits, and other names. They looked like one-piece women’s swimsuits, but what was useful was there were a few styles that were completely open under the arms down to the waist.

Mom explained, “These are thinner than actual swimsuits, and they’re designed to be worn under or partially under other clothing. With the opaque ones, some women just put on shorts over the bottom and leave the top exposed. You could wear them that way when you are using your wings.”

I tried one on, and pushed out my wings, and it seemed to work. It didn’t get in the way of my wings at all. We got a white one (which Mom thought would be better when I was flying, though I thought it would make me look naked), and a black one, in two slightly different styles that both did the job.

After a break for lunch, I had to get matching shoes for each dress. Pumps, Mom called them. They had heels only two inches high, so were high heeled compared to anything I was used to wearing, but not crazy high, not like the tiny spike heels I knew some women’s shoes had. I think Mom expected this was a way for me to learn how to walk in heels without killing myself, and I was grateful for it. We actually spent more time shopping for the shoes than the dresses because my feet had not changed shape, and so we were basically trying to find women’s shoes to fit a boy’s feet. But we did eventually find some. Women’s “wide” shoes worked for a standard man’s foot, but they simply didn’t make them in a lot of styles.

Just when I thought we were done, Mom added, “Normally, Bella, a girl would want to get her hair done before a date. But all your hair has been replaced with feathers, and I am not sure there is anything to do with them, or at least not that any salon that I know of would know how to do. And a wig might look too weird on your head. So instead, I want to find you a nice lady’s hat.”

This led to another hour of shopping. Including the lunch break, we were out for six and a half hours. I barely had time to take a shower, dry off, and dress for my date.

Jen and I had a long conversation over dinner. She had also come in a nice dress, so it was obvious we were a couple of girls, and she ended up talking a lot about the style choices and preferences of Lesbians.

She explained, “Lesbians come in many different types. Some of them are tomboys and would never enter the women’s clothing section at all if they could find men’s clothes that actually fit.”

“I know men’s jeans don’t cut it.”

“Since you don’t have breasts, you can get away with men’s shirts, but bigger breasts make many shirts fit weird, too.”

I nodded.

“Especially when these tomboyish Lesbians have short hair, they call them butch. Others are girly girls and like wearing dresses and skirts and making themselves up pretty, the same way straight women typically dress for men. Those are called femme.”

Then I asked, “So if you’re femme, why didn’t you suggest I dress butch?”

Jen sighed. “While the stereotype is for a butch and a femme to be a couple, the reality is that Lesbians don’t strictly fall into one category or the other and don’t strictly date the other type even when they do.”

“Well, you see that I can do this look, even if it’s not my preference.”

“I’m sorry if you don’t like dressing this way. Maybe Tracy would be better for you. I hear she goes for more of the tomboy.”

“Oh, she liked that, but it’s because Tracy’s Mom only lets her date boys.”

“And with your tomboy tendencies and experience as Ben, you could pass. Your flat chest is an asset for that role, too. By the way, are you wearing some padding today?”

“Yes. They don’t make date dresses without at least a little space for boobs, and since I have literally nothing, I got something to fill in.”

“It looks nice.”

“But Tracy has family issues. Her mom wants her pregnant at 18.”

“What the fuck?”

“Exactly the fuck,” I replied. “They encouraged me to go to her room with her when I met them after our date, and even before I did I got the feeling they expected us to fuck. Tracy confirmed that along with the pregnancy thing.”

“Oh, God, I knew there was something weird there but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“Yeah, and Tracy’s pretty sure she doesn’t want a guy’s dick near her, but she’d be willing to get pregnant once from a sperm donor to satisfy her mother. I don’t know that I want to be mixed up in it. But I know I can get sex there if I am willing to be a part of that, at least until her mom figures out I’m female. But let’s stop talking about her; I’m on a date with you.”

And so Jen did tell me a bit more about herself. There was something weird about her parents she wanted to let them explain later, but nothing like Tracy’s. They let her date whoever she wanted and she’d decided she liked girls. In fact, we talked about her for so long that we almost missed our movie and got there so late that we missed all the ads and previews and they were just starting the actual film.

My mother picked us up. When we took Jen home, I got to meet her parents briefly. I was surprised to find she seemed to have two fathers. One of them, Sam, explained.

“I’m an alternate-day shapeshifter. One day I’m a woman, the next day a man. Buck here is bisexual, and I am his perfect match, someone who can be his perfect girl, and also his perfect guy. I didn’t know what I wanted, only someone who could accept me no matter what form I was in.”

“So how did that work when you were pregnant with Jen?”

“The pregnancy lasted 18 months! I actually have two different bodies which swap in and out, clothes and everything. The other body goes into some pocket dimension or something, but no time elapses for it. So I was a perfectly normal-looking, non-pregnant guy half the days while I was pregnant.”

Buck spoke up, “And after having the one kid, Sam swore to never go through that again. The mental adjustment between the pregnant female and non-pregnant male was too much for her.”

Sam added, “Given this, and the possibility any crazy sort of thing might happen if Jen got pregnant, we are giving her full freedom in choosing who to date. If she wants to date only girls and never ever get pregnant, that is fine by us.”

At least they didn’t expect me to have sex. I gave Jen a goodbye kiss and then went home with Mom.

I took some time off dating, to think about my experiences. I really preferred dressing as a boy; even at school, where I was now publicly known to be a girl, I opted for the tomboy side of girls’ clothing, just girlish enough to remind the people who know that I’m not a boy. Away from school, it was usually a full boy look for me. If Jen wanted me to look like a girl, I could do it, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into a relationship where I’d be expected to do that all the time.

But I was more worried about what I’d be getting into with Tracy. Sure, she could get a sperm donation and have a kid, who wouldn’t be mine genetically in any way. But I would be seemingly committed to doing so at 18, unless she simply cut all ties with her parents.

As a result, I didn’t think either of them was my right long-term partner. There were a couple other girls in the club I might try. I actually thought about dating boys, but the ones who’d made passes at me seemed like jerks, while many of the straight ones knew I used to be a boy and probably weren’t interested for that reason. The gays knew I was now a girl and wouldn’t consider me, and the one bi boy in the club had a steady boyfriend and a steady girlfriend.

It was time for my flight test. I had been stretching my wings out every night before I went to bed, and they looked more and more like the wings of a snowy owl with their short, wide, fluffy feathers. So I put on one of my leotards under my other clothes, and we went out to the testing facility. They measured my height and weight (I had lost another 5 pounds since my last visit, though I was the same weight in both winged and unwinged forms) and then they attached a bunch of sensors to me to check my breathing, heart rate, body temperature, altitude, velocity, and who knows what. There was an open field there, and they explained it was protected by spells so that nobody who didn’t already know Normal’s secret about powers would be able to see any flying people. I could go try to fly, along with another flyer and a teleporter on hand to save me if I got into trouble.

The flyer explained to me that there are several kinds of flying powers. Some of them use magic, some have abilities which basically let them ignore gravity, and then there are the ones like me who grow wings and fly partially by generating lift with wings.

He was a magical flyer, so wasn’t the best one to teach me, but he had at one point studied all those mechanisms for flight. And he explained that if I could fly, it would be only partially by wing power. Unless we were unnaturally light or had absolutely huge wings, a human could never generate enough lift to get airborne from wings alone. We always had magical assistance, though that magic might be generating extra lift, reducing our mass, or reducing gravity around us. But however it worked, it allowed winged flyers like me to fly with more or less the same principles as birds use.

The basic idea was to run and flap my wings, of course. But he had some cardboard wings he wore to show me the kind of motion I should be doing with my wings. It wasn’t simply moving them up and down; they turned a bit as well.

I tried this for an hour before I was getting too tired to keep it up. I was never off the ground for more than 10 seconds. While I thought that was disappointing, my flight tutor mentioned that Michael Jordan was known for what they called hang time, the length of time he was in the air when he jumped, and that was never actually more than one second! What I was doing already greatly surpassed the greatest basketball jump of all time!

We made another appointment for two weeks from now and I went home.

I ate lunch, and relaxed for a while before I had to get ready for another date with Tracy. That went in a predictable way. We ate dinner at a restaurant, saw a movie (I let Tracy pick, as I wasn’t particularly looking forward to any of the other movies that were playing now besides the two I’d seen on my other dates), and went to her house for an hour or so of sex.

When we first went up to her room, I asked Tracy if she could get me a glass of milk.

“We only have skim. I hope that’s OK.”

“Yes, thank you.” I didn’t tell her it wasn’t ideal - the milkfat was also part of my fuel for making eggs - but the calcium was more important and that was present at full strength in skim.

She went down and returned a couple minutes later with the milk. I drank it right down, intentionally leaving a tiny bit in the glass when I was done.

After we were done with the sex, I suggested Tracy use the leftover milk instead of spitting into and trying to collect vaginal secretions in the condoms. She thought that was a great idea and did so.

I didn’t plan any activities for today because I knew I was due for an egg. It was a really good thing I hadn’t planned a date because the egg came a little later today, at 5:30 when I’d be trying to finish getting ready for my date if I had one.

It was also just in time for me to cook that egg for dinner. Mom had already started on a dinner for the family and as soon as she was done with that, she helped me get started cooking my own omelet for the first time. Rather than waste the portion of dinner she had made for me, I threw it all into the omelet. Corn, steak which I diced into small pieces, and potatoes went into the eggs instead of mushrooms and peppers. And I was right about this making an extra meal. One meal’s food was just right to add to the egg, so it meant that if I ate pure egg it would have probably been only three meals. For a normal person, twice as many, but after I made my egg, I was extra-hungry until I replenished myself.

I had another flight test today. It went significantly better than the last time. I reached a maximum altitude of 25 feet and a longest flight time of 32 seconds. I started to feel like I was actually flying, though I couldn’t keep it up for long.

I went to the GLBTTQ St. Patrick’s Day dance with Jen. I had invited Tracy, but she declined. She isn’t a fan of dancing. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

It took me a little bit to learn the moves, but I got into it and had fun there with Jen. There was a mixture of fast songs and slow, romantic ones, and Jen was into the romantic ones, sometimes resting her head on my shoulder as we slowly swayed with the music, while at other times engaging me in a kiss while we danced. And as little as I cared for that type of dress, I admitted it did work well for dancing.

We didn’t do anything afterwards, though.

I had another date with Tracy. However, this time, we didn’t bother going out. I went to her house and ate dinner with her family, and afterwards we went to her room. She turned on a stream of Lesbian porn on her computer, and we alternated between watching it and having sex, sometimes trying to do some of the things we saw them do.

Tracy called.

“She found out!”

“What?”

“Mom was spying on us. She found out you weren’t really a guy, and so she’s forbidden me from dating you.”

“Well that sucks. I was always worried about that happening, though.”

“I know. It was great while it lasted, though.”

“Maybe you could sneak over to my house sometime?”

“Sometime, maybe. But I’m grounded for a month. I’m not even supposed to call you so we’ll talk at school.”

Today I had another flight test. I’m really improving. I made it up to 40 feet this time, and Mom got some pictures of me while I was flying above her.

Afterwards, I had to agree that the black leotard looked dumb on me when I was in the air. I’ll try the white one next time.

Predictably, I laid another egg today. This one came in mid-afternoon.

While I was cooking it for dinner, I had a thought and I asked Mom about it.

“Mom, what am I going to do if I am away from the house when I lay my egg? If I sit on the toilet in a public restroom, there’s no lid and I’m afraid the egg will fall in the water!”

“Well, that is where I’d recommend you lay it. That’s going to be where you can most easily find a little privacy. Let me see I can come up with any ideas to help you with the water problem.”

I had another flight test and continued to do better. This time I wore the white leotard and Mom got pictures of me in it. She was right. While it did look like I was naked, I was a naked bird, covered all over with feathers. My flying posture really did make me look like a bird. My legs held tightly together behind me looked like the tail of a mockingbird. The rest of my body looked like a huge white hawk, except for the lack of a beak.

In the afternoon Dad came to me with an idea. He had been looking at inflatable things online, thinking that he could find something I could insert into the toilet opening to catch the egg. And he found it. An inflatable floating mini beer-cooler. It was round, with a 7 inch inner diameter and 9 inch outer diameter when inflated, with a flat inflatable ring around the top with drink holders in it, which were just mesh pockets I could ignore. That was perfect. The hole in a toilet seat was about 8.5 to 9 inches wide, so I could stuff this in and sit on the ring. And it was 6 inches deep, which was not quite deep enough to hold the egg, but I had to stand after my egg came out the way I was doing it, so this would be no different, really.

Dad ordered it, and it would be here long before my next egg for me to test it out.

I had another date with Jen.

We had not gone beyond kissing yet, and knowing what was possible with Tracy, I was hoping to have us go further. But during our movie, when I tried touching Jen’s breasts, she pushed me away. I could imagine doing exactly the same thing to a guy who was more touchy-feely than I was ready for, so I just pulled back and didn’t pressure her on it. Everybody’s different.

Yes, it was time for me to lay another egg.

This time I tried out the inflatable thing at home, and it totally worked. It was solid enough to hold the egg up after it was laid and I was not sitting on it. And it wasn’t actually too much trouble to inflate, either. Maybe 5 minutes by mouth. If I could, I was going to carry a small battery operated air pump with it, though, because if I was in a hurry that 5 minutes might be a problem, trying to huff and puff while my egg wants to come out below. Dad ordered one of those for me and I was going to try it next time.

Also, I’d gotten tired of eating so much egg at once. I decided to spread it out longer, freezing some of it so I can just eat it along with bacon or sausage for breakfast until it ran out.

Flying School

May 12, 2007

I had another practice flying session today. I think I finally have the hang of it. It was tiring, but with practice I was getting stronger and I stayed up 3 minutes this time.

They recommended to me a flying school that was going to be having 5-day-a-week classes this summer, starting in June a week after regular school was out. It was 3 hours a day, 8-11 in the morning. That didn’t seem too bad; I’d still have the afternoons and evenings to do fun stuff. It cost $2000, which was a lot, on top of new clothes and other stuff my parents had spent on me, but it was a one-time thing.

It sounded like the kind of practice I needed to build up my endurance. Three hours a day, five days a week would have been more flying in the first week than I had done already, combined. I told my parents I wanted to do it if they would pay for it, and I was glad to hear them say yes.

Then, on the way home, Mom stopped to buy me more leotards. I had liked the style of the black one more, but she had proven to me the white color was better, so I got five of those in white, enough to wear all week during flight school with the first two as spares. I could probably actually fly naked and nobody would notice, but they would notice when I was on the ground with the others.

There was another GLBTTQ dance tonight, and I went with Jen. She still made it clear that we weren’t going to be getting any more friendly than kissing, and I still preferred not to be dressed up this way. Jen noticed my continued discomfort with this and decided not to ask me to a dance again.

This was the last egg I would lay before school was out, and it came right after lunch. I got to test the little pump. It worked well and pumped up the little inflatable egg-catcher in 30 seconds.

Today was the last day of school. Everybody was happy for getting to be out of school for the summer, but I was especially happy because I was going to start flying school in a week.

There were fifty or sixty students at my school I considered friends, including the entire membership of GLBTTQ, but only 8 I considered close friends, and it was exactly that group who I told about my flying school.

The first day of flight school. And it was amazing how many people here in Normal could fly, or at least thought they would be able to.

To my disappointment, we didn’t go out flying at all today. Instead, we had three hours of lessons in flying safety. It all boiled down to a handful of things to be careful of while flying:

• Power lines. Contact with power lines wasn’t as bad for flyers as you might think! If you weren’t touching the ground, or another line, it was actually safe to be touching one power line. That was how birds sat on them all the time. It was only when you established an electrical connection with the ground or another line that things got bad. That said, those birds were pretty light, not more than a couple pounds in the case birds like seagulls. My classmates were anywhere from 80 to 180 pounds, or more in some cases when their flying machines were included. So the key things were never to rest on a line, and never touch one while touching any other line or any grounded object.
• Other flyers. The low airspace we would normally use was lightly regulated and we were expected to watch for other things in the air. If we were flying at night we had to wear the same kind of beacon lights planes used, and likewise look out for such lights.
• Birds. Usually birds would fly away from anything the size of one of us, but sometimes they might not notice us fast enough to get out of the way, and if we happened to be flying near a nest, some species were territorial and aggressive and would attack us.
• Airports and no-fly zones. If you could take off and land without a runway, flying near airports was generally advised against; if you needed to, you had to contact the control tower and ask for and wait to be granted clearance. There was a set of rules about this we’d learn later. And there were certain fixed no-fly zones, like near the White House, which were always off limits, though there weren’t any of those near Normal.
• Airplanes. If we were flying high enough that we might encounter airplanes not near an airport, we also had to follow rules planes used. The local air traffic control cell was staffed by Normal people (several people snickered when our instructor phrased it that way) and later they’d tell us how we would manage elsewhere.
• Asteroids. Some people laughed when this was suggested, but a couple of Normal’s flyers were actually capable of escaping the atmosphere, and they had to look out for asteroids, satellites, and other space junk. This needed another kind of license beyond what this class offered, so we would not be tested on this.

This morning we actually went out flying. Each one of us flew just once, separately, to show what we were capable of, so that the instructors knew where we stood. I was actually ahead of about a third of the class with regard to flying ability. A fourth of the class couldn’t even get off the ground yet, and a few others could only do short flights like the first time I did any sort of flight at all. I was able to get to the top of the tower they had built on the flight grounds, with some effort, and a handful of others were like me. About half the class was already capable of flying quite well and had no difficulty getting that high, though some of them did not have the ability to fly slow or hover in place and could only zoom past above the tower.

I learned that some people in Normal had powers that didn’t actually let them fly directly, but which allowed them to levitate objects, reduce their own mass (but not to zero), or modify gravity around them (but not entirely eliminate it). The levitators needed to learn how to use their power when they were on the thing being levitated, and the others needed assistance from some kind of flying machine, like model airplanes, to handle the lift component that their power did not give them. The class was going to help them with that. They had some flying machines of different types they let this group try out, but whatever worked, they were ultimately going to buy or build their own.

The rest of the class we spent inside, learning more about flight rules.

For now, most of us were borrowing helmets that the school had, but that was also something we were expected to get our own. So I’d be shopping for that soon.

It was now the end of the first week of flying class. I was getting better every day, both in my control and in the ease with which I could get up into and remain in the air. I felt confident that by the end of the summer I would be able fly without difficulty for significant distances. Speaking of which, they explained to us today about various kinds of magical devices we might use to hide us from outsiders if we flew outside of Normal. It might actually be possible for me to fly across the country some day and just look like an airplane to others while I was flying.

After the first two days, the class split into two groups. One group went out to fly at the start of class and came in for lectures afterward, while the other group reversed those roles. We weren’t split by flying ability. Instead, each group with similar flying skill was split in two, so each instructor could work with his or her group separately.

Male and female locker rooms were provided for us, because flight was physically demanding for some of us, and some needed special clothing or to stow materials they were carrying. In my case, I stripped off my cover-up clothes and went out in just the leotard, which I worried at first was going to be awfully revealing, but due to the feathers I didn’t seem to draw any undue attention. When I came back in I showered and put on some regular underwear and the other clothes I came in.

It was due to a locker room mixup that I encountered Freddie. He was a random daily gender shifter. Each morning he/she would wake up possibly, but not necessarily, having changed gender overnight. I had not even realized the two I had seen were the same person until the male Freddie started to head into the ladies’ locker room with me and the handful of other women in the class. He looked about my age (like about half the class; there were also some who looked to be high school seniors or college age, and a few older ones on up to 40s or 50s), and something about Freddie caught my eye. After we were all changed in the correct locker rooms and heading out to the flight field, I caught up to Freddie and let him know I’d like to talk to him more, and after the class was over, we exchanged numbers.

We talked in the evening, and I had my first date with a boy (maybe) tomorrow. His male and female bodies were so different that he had completely different sets of clothing for them, and so he was going to come dressed as a boy if in his male body, or as a girl if in his female body, and he’d call me tomorrow morning to let me know which way he was so that I could do the opposite.

I had forgotten when making my date that I was due to lay my egg. Fortunately, it came right after lunch and I still had plenty of time to get ready. I had time to go out and find that helmet too. A white one, with the face shield which was optional but recommended. I might be flying along as fast as a car goes down a highway someday, and not having that strong wind in my face would be a nice thing.

It turned out that Freddie was a girl today, so I didn’t yet have my first date with a boy and instead I was dressed in the boyish clothes I preferred.

We ended up sharing our gender changing stories in much detail with each other during dinner.

Freddie started her story, “I was born a girl. What you see today is what I would have looked like if the whole body change thing had never happened to me.”

“So what happened?”

“I developed powers that had me and things around me floating in the air, or sometimes landing on the wall or ceiling as if gravity was pulling the wrong way. I learned how to control the power, so I only altered gravity for things I wanted to move, when I wanted to move them, and I learned to use my power on myself to let me fly.”

“That’s cool. I’m still learning but I kind of have the hang of it now. You’ve seen me out there flapping my wings; my power doesn’t make me weightless. But go on.”

“It was about six months after my powers showed up that the accident happened.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I was flying and another flyer, a boy, crashed into me. I didn’t even see him until the crash; he must have come up from the ground straight into me.”

“Oh no! Did you manage to keep from crashing?”

“It happened too fast. We went straight into some power lines nearby. I knew they were there but I was trying to be careful and avoid them, but the boy hit me and drove both of us directly into the lines. Somebody saw it and called an ambulance and I woke up in Normal Hospital.”

“How bad was it?”

“I had some mild burns and bruising from when I fell afterward, but it wasn’t actually all that bad. They were going to send me home after my second night in the hospital.”

“But they didn’t? What happened?”

“The boy who crashed into me was never found. I’d been talking with the police already from my hospital bed and actually filed a report against this unknown boy. His parents had also reported him missing and everybody thought he fled after the accident. But the second morning in the hospital I woke up in his body. That’s the body you saw me in Friday.”

“Wow! That’s crazy. How did you feel?”

“I was a mess. I was mad at him, but I also felt sorry for him when the NANA people tested me and found that when I had his body, I also had his powers, and they were pretty sure that meant he was gone.”

“And was that right?”

“He never showed up. His name was James, but apparently he was called Jimbo.”

I laughed, and Freddie laughed with me, confirming she thought the name was funny too.

“It was easy for me to skip taking that name. I was Frederika and I became legally Freddie all the time afterward. But I did take up learning how to use his magical abilities and specifically how to cast the flying spell he used. And at first I thought I was going to be good with his family, as they loaned and later gave me his clothes so I’d have something for that body to wear. Six months in, I’d mastered how to fly his way when I had his body, and that’s when his family sued me. They wanted seven-figure damages for wrongful death, claiming I killed him and stole his body.”

“Oh, sheesh! Obviously in Normal court,” I commented.

“Of course. And my family countersued for my emotional distress at having to live half the time in his body. It took a month, which was mostly legal shenanigans on their part trying to make a case, because besides me there was only one real witness, the one who called the ambulance, who testified that Jimbo was under me as we collided and then went upward into the lines. Ultimately a jury found I was mostly liable for my own suffering for flying near the lines to begin with, and Jimbo was mostly liable for his own death for flying near the lines and flying into another overhead flyer. And they decided the result of me ending up with his body was an unforeseeable consequence. Instead of damages for either of us, they forbid me to fly until I got formally trained. I’m not allowed to fly outside of our flying school until we finish. His family is still trying to appeal the result and get actual money I don’t have, but my family and my lawyer don’t think that’s going anywhere. The class seemed like a good idea anyway, so I enrolled.”

“Did you get his memories or anything?”

“Memories, no. But aspects of his personality rubbed off on me. Before this happened, I only liked boys, and I wouldn’t have even considered going on a date with another girl. You know, a date date. I might have gone on a shopping date.”

I laughed with Freddie.

“It turns out that Jimbo had a seriously macho attitude. He wasn’t a gay-hater, but he was 100% certain he could never date a boy. You see how I’m dressed? This was exactly his picture of an ideal date. Not that I would have ever dated that jerk.”

Freddie had on the kind of outfit Jen would have wanted to see on her date. I told her, “Yeah, I’ve had to shoot down my share of jerks too.”

“Even if he had turned into a girl, he’d just have become a Lesbian. The first part of his personality I noticed was that when I was in his body I got erections for girls. It was later that the other bits crept up on me. Before I realized it, I had acted downright rude several times, in ways I never would have before, including to my former boyfriend. When I realized what I had said to him was when I realized I had a problem.”

“Ouch.”

“Once I realized it, I was able to stamp out the negative aspects of the personality I inherited from him, but I never eliminated the way I now like girls. I even like girls now when I’m in this body. I apologized to my poor boyfriend, but we saw that our relationship could no longer be, so now we’re just friends.”

“Well it’s good that you didn’t lose him as a friend.”

“But dating is hard. I arranged one other date with a girl before you, while I was in my male body, and I ended up in this body the day of the date. I’d explained to her I was a girl sometimes, and she didn’t indicate a problem with that, but when I showed up to my date as a girl, she just walked out.”

“Aww... Could you have just dressed this body as a boy?”

“Maybe. But I don’t have male clothes for this body. You know we’re completely different sizes. And I’ve never dressed this body like you are today. I wear athletic gear when it’s practical, like for flying, and dresses otherwise. And I still like it that way. You never could have gotten Jimbo into a dress, but I think he thought this was the proper way for a girl to dress, and that’s what came over, reinforcing my own belief.”

I nodded.

“When I’m a girl, I can still consider dating boys, but if I turned out a boy on the day of the date, my mind simply wouldn’t allow me to go, even if the boy would have me. So as much as I’d like to, I don’t think I can date boys anymore. You’re the closest I can handle. And because of the potential reactions of my female dates, well, I pretty much have to have a bisexual girlfriend.”

I responded, “Or at least one with bisexual tendencies. As I told you, I was a boy before I turned into a girl bird. I was slow to accept my female nature. When I first started, I wore girl jeans and panties because the boy ones didn’t fit right, and pretty much everything else boy clothes. Now I can deal with ordinary girl clothes. And I wasn’t sure whether I liked boys, and I am still not sure, but I tried dating some girls. Things didn’t work out, I think more because of issues with those specific girls more than myself, but also in part because I am still not comfortable dressing like you are now. I could do it once in a while.”

“Well maybe we can have some dressed-down dates when I’m a boy. Not like ripped clothes and all, but I could just wear a nice shirt and pants and you could also wear pants if you wanted. I can beat down the part of Jimbo in me that would have insisted you wear a dress.”

We went on so long like this that we missed any chance of seeing the movies we were interested in, and instead went home to my house where we continued our conversation. Among other things, Freddie explained that she prefers that people use female pronouns to describe her in her female body and male ones in his male body, which is confusing sometimes, and I knew I wasn’t always going to get it right, but she accepted that.

When I had my next date with Freddie, he was a boy. I did wear a blouse and skirt, but not a fancy dress.

We kept track of time better this time, and made it to a movie. Afterward, we went to Freddie’s house, and I met his parents. They were normal, but Freddie had already told them about me, so they weren’t surprised by my feathers.

After a short meeting with them, we went to Freddie’s room, where he told me more about his parents.

“Before my accident, while not outright gay-haters, they had never really been comfortable with gays and Lesbians, and my father was known to use the word ‘gay’ as a slur. A few months after I changed, when I still hadn’t had any dates yet but I was starting to think about dating girls, one time that he used that word in front of me, I confronted him:”

“Dad, I wish you would stop using that word like that.”

“What? Oh... Does that bother you?”

“Yes it bothers me! I don’t even know any more whether I want to be with a boy or a girl and it’s going to be gay half the time no matter who I’m with!”

“Oh. I am so very sorry, dear, and I will avoid using that word in the future.”

Freddie finished by saying, “And he did. He slipped up a couple times but noticed it and apologized immediately afterward.”

“Well that’s good. I’m glad you stood up for yourself!”

“After that incident and some other talks in which I explained the difficulties I was going through, my parents became fully supportive of my attempts to date girls. The mere fact that I’m now on my second date with a girl (not counting the one that never even got started) I think is making them very happy.”

We had agreed no sex today, but I did partly undress and explain my anatomy to Freddie.

“If you’re going to continue dating me, we’re going to want to have sex eventually, and it should be possible, but it’s not the same as for other girls. You see, this slit between my legs is all I have. There’s no other opening.”

Freddie responded, “Huh? You don’t have an asshole?”

“I do, but it’s inside.”

At my suggestion, he got a flashlight and I held open my cloacal slit so he could see. “Inside a bird, the vagina is the hole in front. The asshole is the one in back. And there’s no pee hole; that gets mixed with the poop.”

“Weird!”

“I do have a clitoris, though, and it’s right where you’d expect. That’s not a bird feature though, it’s just me.”

“Well I learned something. Thanks for sharing.”

By now, I had a pretty good understanding of my flight abilities and limits.

I could fly at up to about 40 MPH when I got up above the trees, power lines, and buildings; 150 feet up was enough to be above most of those. I could get up to at least 1000 feet, where I would start needing to be on air traffic control, but I wasn’t able to fly faster up there or really have any other advantages, and it was work getting that high, so I probably wouldn’t often do that.

The air traffic control cell in Normal was here at the school. Those who flew that high could practice with them, and they also helped warn any other passing craft, which were rare, and mostly other locals taking off or landing at the tiny air strip here, and the locals would at least be aware there might be flying people around.

Once I got up above the buildings and trees and stuff like that on the ground, I could soar, holding my wings out so they caught the air just right to keep me aloft, only occasionally flapping to maintain altitude. This was work, and unprepared, I’d tire after about an hour, but my school practice didn’t really allow for significantly longer flight times anyway, nor was there anywhere I needed to fly for such a long stretch until I was going outside Normal.

Tonight for the first time male Freddie and I tried to have sex. It was, to say the least, awkward. We spent most of the time just finding a position where he could fit into me. Any position where we were lying alongside one another, the typical way you think of people having sex, was not going to work. What did work was if I lay on the bed with my butt at the edge and my legs raised and spread apart and held my cloacal slit open. Freddie could stand next to the bed, put his dick and balls entirely into the slit, and get about half his dick into my vagina.

It wasn’t very good for either of us, but we proved it was possible. But we thought it was better to just use our hands or mouths on each other, which we could also do when Freddie was female.

Freddie and I had been dating every Saturday evening for a while. Today, though, my egg was due, and it did not come until the evening, while I was having dinner with the then-female Freddie.

“Oh, it’s time for my egg!” I exclaimed as we sat down.

“You did mention laying eggs. How often does it happen?”

“So far it has been reliably every fourth Saturday, though the time of day varies. This is the latest in the day that it has happened.”

“You’re going to do it right now?”

“No, not quite yet, but I can feel it coming. Probably when we are ready to leave here.”

So we enjoyed our food, paid for it all, and by then, I knew I was ready.

“You wanna come see me lay my egg?”

“Where?”

“In the ladies’ room.” While I was dressed in boyish clothes today, there was nothing about me that said I wasn’t a lady, including my genitals and ID if anyone questioned me, and I almost always used the ladies’ room when I was out these days, even when dressed in boyish clothes.

“OK.”

We grabbed our purses and went to look for the restroom. When we found it, we saw they had a single-stall “family” restroom in addition to the regular multi-person ones for each sex, and it was available, so we went in there instead.

I pulled the catcher out of my purse and quickly inflated it with the small pump.

“What’s that?”

“I usually sit on the toilet while laying my egg. It’s a comfortable and generally available place. I use this to catch the egg when I do.”

“Oh.”

By that point the catcher was inflated, and I put it in place, removed my pants and panties, and sat on it.

“Now how long does this take?” Freddie asked.

“At the stage I am at now, I can push it out over the course of a few minutes.”

I spread my legs wide and leaned back a bit and beckoned Freddie to watch. She knelt in front of me to do so.

About a minute later, Freddie excitedly commented, “I see it!”

This was the first time I had done this outside my house, and the first time I was sharing the experience with anyone. But I was experienced with the pushing.

“Oh, God, how big is it?” Freddie exclaimed.

Finally, the widest part of the egg was out of me and I stood while expelling the egg completely.

“Wow! I couldn’t believe that huge thing came out of you if I didn’t just see it with my own eyes.”

I grabbed some paper, cleaned the egg, then picked up the catcher, egg and all, wiped the underside of the catcher with some more paper in case it got wet from the toilet, and maneuvered the whole thing back down inside my purse.

“What are you going to do with the egg?”

“Eat it,” I told her, deadpan, while cleaning myself up with still more paper.

“Really? You eat your own egg?”

“Yes. Not tonight, of course; I’ll start tomorrow. It was recommended to me by my doctor because of the amount of nutrients that go into creating an egg this large. If I don’t, I’ll have to eat a bunch of other extra food or supplements.”

“Isn’t that, like, being a cannibal?”

“Well, no. The egg’s not fertilized. When we had sex it was protected, so it won’t be, though I have a device I can check it with. So it’s more like drinking your own milk, which you probably also think is pretty icky, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it.”

I finished getting dressed and we exited the restroom, and the restaurant, our bill being already paid. But Freddie was too grossed out by seeing this and we ended our date early with neither a movie nor sex. Guess I won’t invite her to watch that any more.

I had another date with Freddie, who was a girl once again. I could not promise not to have to lay an egg during our future dates, but I wouldn’t mention it to Freddie, and that I did promise, much to Freddie’s relief.

Otherwise there was nothing notable about this date. We ate, saw some pretty forgettable movie during which we spent more time kissing and groping each other than actually watching, and went to my house for some Lesbian sex.

All week, we were doing our final tests to get our flight licenses. We all took the written test Monday and everybody passed that part. Since yesterday, we have been doing our flight tests, one at a time, with everybody else watching. Two people had failed, one for violating rules and one due to being unable to get up in the air. They would get another chance after everyone else was through.

It was now Wednesday and I was third up today. I no longer had trouble getting up into the air, and I felt pretty confident in my ability to manage the rules. The air traffic control tower here had a landing strip that could hardly be called an airport, but it allowed the locals who needed it to take off and land, though it was closed for such purposes during our test period unless someone had an emergency. The airfield around it was being treated a no-fly zone today, except for those who needed it to take off and land, and even for them it was no-fly in the middle of the test. We had to fly a loop around that zone without entering it as part of the test.

Those of us not flying were sitting on a set of bleachers inside the tower-controlled zone, so the first part of the test for those not using the runway was to walk to the edge of the zone before taking off, which I did (as most did) while the previous student was still in the air. I had no trouble getting myself up in the air, and took off to start the maneuvers for the test. Around the no fly zone, through another area used to show control, and made the appropriate communications with the tower before coming back in for my landing.

I passed. When the day was through, they issued my license. I went home a legal pilot, though I was only allowed to fly my own body. Outside of Normal, I’d fly wearing a charm that could either make me appear to be a single-person private plane to anyone who didn’t know our secret, or make me invisible to such people, depending on which mode made more sense for what I was doing. Within Normal, I didn’t need that; people not in on the secret simply wouldn’t see me in the air. Mom was already there to pick me up, so I rode with her, but the last two days of classes, for which I would merely be an observer, I would fly to and from the school (as some of the students already did today). I wasn’t completely confident in my ability to navigate everywhere yet, but I knew the roads in Normal well enough to find my way between here and home.

Due to his weird dual nature, Freddie had to do his flight test twice, once in each form. Freddie was female Tuesday, and was tested in that form then. Today was the first time Freddie was male during this testing period, so he did tested in that form. He aced it, naturally.

We flew home together to his house after class for a little celebration with his family and lunch before I went home alone to my house. Freddie’s family was going on a vacation next week including both weekends, so I was going to have two weekends without dates.

As a sort of graduation present, my parents got me a small GPS system and mounted it in my helmet for me. It wasn’t a cheap one, either. It was a miniaturized one designed to be mounted this way, with a piece that projected the map onto the upper right portion of my face shield.

This was great! I turned off all the route calculations, which were based on following roads, and set it in a mode where it just showed me the map and a marker at whatever destination I had set. I could set it into a mode where the destination stayed at the top of the map. This let me use it sort of like a compass, aligning the roads below me to match the orientation of the displayed map to get going in the right direction. Or I could put it in a mode where the direction I was going was on top, and orient myself to keep my destination in view. I wasn’t sure which was better. I’d experiment.

It was also voice activated, and the enclosed helmet made that work well in flight. I could change destinations mid-flight or even just pick a destination after I was already airborne.

I spent the intermission before school started again and while Freddie was away by doing a lot of flying. It was exhausting, but I’d learned I just needed more carbs, basically fuel to keep me flying. I needed my wings out, and couldn’t eat while flying, but I could make short stops anywhere, sometimes on rooftops. For every hour of flying, I needed to stop and eat 2-3 ounces of pure sugar. Basically, a couple candy bars. If I ate my “fuel” in advance, I could fly for up to 3 hours nonstop, though without a plane charm, there was nowhere I could go that would take that long.

I could fly in a straight line, not impeded by all the obstacles on the ground, and go directly to my destination. Even though I was limited to about 40 MPH with some stops, I figured I could go places faster than cars except on very long trips where the cars could spend almost the entire trip on highways.

Back to school! After one week off at the end of flight school, it was time for regular school to begin again. I was in high school now, a new school, with lots of new people I didn’t know before. I was still not at the same school with Freddie; he lived too far from me and went to a different high school. I didn’t have gym this year, so I would not have that daily ritual of showering in front of a bunch of naked girls, nor the ordeal of being picked on by the boys who knew me before, when they thought they could get away with it.

I was going to miss seeing Freddie every day. However, we would be able to go to GLBTTQ dances, and Freddie also promised to invite me to the regular dances at his school. I wasn’t sure if I’d go to the ones at my school, due to my past difficulty there. Freddie did not have the kind of confrontation with her classmates that I had with mine when her dual nature became known. Part of that was due to looking so different that most people did not immediately connect her two identities; because her male body was actually that of another person, and not a power, per se, the spell didn’t hide it, and she’d either go around all day as female to everybody or all day as male. Part of it was that she showered with the girls when she was female, and with the boys when he was male, and so always fit in wherever she was. And part of it was that she was initially a girl, and both the girls and the boys who knew her before the change were more forgiving of a girl changing, for some reason.

She’d told me the stories about that. There were still girls, like some who I had to deal with, who didn’t want to be in the same restroom or locker room with her due to her “sometimes being a boy” but they were officially told by school administrators to deal with it, in some cases also pointing out how any alternative would actually put her in a restroom with people who were currently her opposite sex. And there were boys who harassed Freddie’s male form for being a girl. But his male form was actually a pretty large guy, and when he told them forcefully that he didn’t even start out a guy and that they should be impressed he was even sometimes this much of a guy and to wait and see how much of a guy he became next year, they left him alone afterward. This hadn’t been an issue at the flight school. Everybody there had powers and maybe a third of them looked abnormal in some way. Nobody messed with anybody.

After my first day at school, I decided on another change I wanted to make. Since I had to live as a girl anyway, I decided to start, as of tomorrow, wearing the breast forms every day. They were only B cup, which meant they weren’t huge and didn’t really cause any trouble with my clothing or anything, but they would make me look more like the other girls, who all had breasts now. Well, like them in one way, since my feathers still made me stand out. I had already been doing things like wearing high-necked outfits and white clothes to make my feathers less obvious, and I would continue to do these things.

In the evening, when I was pulling out the breast forms and placing them where they’d be more readily accessible when I was getting dressed every morning, I realized that I was now thinking of myself as a girl. I am not sure when that really first happened, but this was the first time I noticed it. At the beginning of the summer, I was definitely still thinking of myself as a boy forced to live as a girl. It shouldn’t have really taken this long, since I have been laying eggs, an innately female action, for more than half a year now. I’ve let my boyfriend fuck me in my vagina. Of course I’m a girl!

I wore the breast forms to school today. I think some people noticed, but nobody commented, so I don’t know if they realized I had fakes on or if it was just boys realizing I had breasts, and thus looking at them and not at me. And that was fine! While many women hated that, if they were ignoring my feathers and the fact that I used to be a boy, rather than harassing me over those things, so much the better!

Mom commented on it after I got home, though.

“Yeah, Mom, I finally feel like a girl. I can’t say when it happened, but probably some time after I started dating Freddie. At the beginning of the summer, I know I definitely still felt like a boy whose power had forced him to be a girl. Now I feel like a girl whose power forced her to never grow breasts.”

“Well I will go out today and buy you more of the pocket bras so you have a full weekly set.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

For Friday, rather than dressing down as was some people’s tradition, I wore one of my date dresses to school. I wanted to try to cement the idea in people’s minds that I was a girl, since I didn’t have the hair other girls did nor could you see the softer lines in my face, and the pants didn’t help either.

This sort of worked. I made a couple new friends among the girls. But I also had several of the boys hitting on me, which I did not really want, as I already had Freddie. So I had to think about whether I wanted to keep doing that. It was probably OK. Just part of really living as a girl that I’d have to learn to live with.

I had a date with Freddie Saturday to cap off the first week of school. We didn’t feel like going out. He ate with my family at my house and we went upstairs to try sex again afterwards. We were well into it before I realized that I was going to lay my egg. But I knew I had a little time, so I let him go on until he came.

“OK, I need a break.”

I eased apart from him and went to the bathroom, where I relaxed a bit until I could lay my egg. I took it downstairs and put it in the fridge. I went back to Freddie, but he wasn’t ready for more sex. We instead shared some more stories of our experiences.

I told him about my experience with boys hitting on me. Freddie had had plenty of similar experiences during his time as a girl. He told me he had an idea and to wait for next weekend.

Today I went on a flying date with Freddie. We started out at lunchtime by separately flying to meet at a restaurant a bit farther than we would normally have gone to, about 5 miles from my house and 6 from his. I ate a hearty meal to ensure I could fly for a while without stopping to eat; Freddie had no such limitations. And Freddie gave me my surprise, a necklace with a large, flat, heart-shaped locket with a photo of the two of us in it.

“It’s perfect, Freddie. I can wear this with my nice dresses at school, look more like a girl, and drive off the boys from hitting on me all at once.”

When we were done, we took off again directly from the restaurant to wherever. And we flew and flew to see the sights, including flying above some places we’d normally pay to enter, just to watch.

We still did have to stop for me to eat, and for both of us to use the restroom. Our mid-afternoon stop was just for me to fuel up, so I just got something to munch on quickly and we took off again. Our next break was dinner and we went to another restaurant. We both had the required lights for night-time flying with us, so during one stop we turned those on and kept going.

After it was dark, with some low clouds moving in, Freddie wanted to attempt midair sex. We flew up above those clouds, maybe 900 feet up.

“Bella, you fly like normal, and I’ll fly along with you, pull the crotch of your flight suit aside, and slip in.”

Yeah, he tried that. He’d actually planned it and brought condoms. But it distracted me too much from flying and I almost fell out of the sky, and ended up hanging into him for dear life.

“Freddie, I can’t fly like you do. I have to soar. I can’t do that with you dragging on me. You have to either push me along so that your weight does not drag me down, or you have to support us both.”

He figured out how to do the latter, so he floated along on his back while I sat on top of him and got us arranged. That actually worked. When I was not myself trying to fly, I could handle the thrusting, and it actually worked pretty well.

Once he came, I separated us, adjusted the crotch of my flight suit, and launched myself into flight using his body as a jumping-off point. We flew back toward our homes for a bit, and when we reached the obvious separation point, he kissed my face guard so as not to interfere with my flight but still give me a goodbye kiss of a sort, and we flew to our separate homes.

This was another egg day. Freddie and I had decided to skip dates on my egg days, and on all other Saturdays we were having some kind of date, sometimes like normal people, sometimes flying, and once in a while with sex.

Two weeks ago, during a midair sex session, Freddie had busted through a condom, so I hoped he hadn’t gotten me pregnant. Or, fertilized the egg, I realized, was the correct term.

The egg did not come until evening, and after almost a year in which I had gotten used to laying these eggs, this one was difficult and more painful than usual. Just looking at it, I could see it was different from my usual eggs. It was wider and not as long. Sure enough, the tester told me it was fertilized.

I came crying down the stairs with the egg to Mom, and through sobs told her the story.

“It’s all right, dear. We can deal with this.”

“But Mom, I’m not ready to be a mother!”

“Well, you have two options, Bella. Many girls who get pregnant while in high school have abortions, and for you it’s far easier than most.”

“Noooo! Mom, I couldn’t! It’s my child in there!”

“Well, it’s got to be one way or the other, Bella. Either you become a mother, or we smash this egg.”

Ultimately I decided to hatch the egg. Mom could help me care for my baby when it hatched. She wrapped the egg in blankets with two hot water bottles on either side until we could get an incubator for it. I replaced the water every two hours, and when I went to bed I took apart that contraption and cuddled the egg.

In addition to this, I was going to have to eat a special diet the next week. I would carry my lunch each day rather than eat the school lunch to ensure I got the nutrition I needed.

Today the incubator arrived. Mom had been changing the water for me every day while I was at school, and I took over in the evenings and warmed it with body heat at night, but today when I got home from school, instead I learned how to use the incubator. It was pretty easy, really; set it and forget it. The egg would be at a constant 98 degrees.

Once a day I would use the tester on it, which had additional modes I had not needed until I had a fertilized egg. It would estimate the progress of the development based on detecting the baby’s heartbeat and blood flow, but it had not reached the point where those things were detectable yet. The doctor had said it would take months to hatch, so it was not too surprising it didn’t have a heartbeat after only one week. I had to be patient.

Both of our schools were having a Halloween dance/costume party tonight. I had almost told Freddie I wouldn’t go, due to the whole egg thing, but I relented. We had worked out a deal before my egg hatched that we’d go as Superman and Supergirl, who were actually brother and sister rather than a dating couple, but who really cared?

The trick was the Superman and Supergirl costumes were interchangeable. The core of each costume was a long-sleeved legless leotard, one with much more coverage than the ones I wore as flight suits that let my wings be exposed. It would actually serve as either Superman or Supergirl depending on the shape of the person wearing it, and whether they had the blue tights under it covering the legs like Superman did, or the little red skirt which attached to it for Supergirl. Supergirl had a blonde wig, and Superman a short midnight blue one.

The deal was this: If Freddie came out a girl the day of the dance, she’d wear the Supergirl accessories and I’d go breastless with the Superman tights and wig, and we’d go to her school’s dance. If Freddie was a boy, he’d wear Superman, and I had opaque flesh-colored tights to cover my legs to make myself a more convincing Supergirl, rather than the Superbird I’d otherwise look like. And in that case we’d go to my school’s dance.

Well, Freddie was a boy, so it was my school we showed up at. It was great! All my friends got to see the guy who had so far only been a picture in my locket to them. I made of point of introducing the guys who’d hit on me to Freddie. I know I heard a couple of the bullies who remembered me as a boy snickering, I’m sure because they saw me dating a boy and considered me gay for doing so, but I didn’t care about them. At least they were leaving me alone now. And while I could not actually fly in this costume, Freddie could, and lifted us off the ground for a few brief moments at just the right times while we were dancing.

I hadn’t originally planned to actually trick or treat, but Freddie asked me to go with her. She was female, so we met up and swapped costume bits so that I could be Superman and she could be Supergirl, and we walked in her neighborhood. So the other costumed kids I passed were even less recognizable to me than they might have been, since I didn’t actually know most of them.

A funny bit happened at one corner. Another kid dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk did a double take on seeing me and Freddie and, as I soon realized, another Supergirl approaching from around the corner, and tripped and fell. Freddie and the other Supergirl helped him up. He thanked us and we introduced ourselves. The Mr. Mxyzptlk was a kid named Robin who sounded like a girl even though she was wearing a male costume, but I knew anything was possible in Normal. The other Supergirl was a kid with an identity problem who called herself George, Shelly, and Samantha.

We got a pretty good haul, enough candy to last me a month if I didn’t want to overdo it. But I knew I could easily use it after my next egg, or when flying, so I saved it all for those uses.

This morning I checked the egg for the umpteenth time and found it had progressed to a stage the device was now able to call 28% developed. That was four weeks in, so if it was exactly right it would be ten more weeks and some days before it hatched.

Today I laid another egg. This was a weird thing about birds; because we laid eggs rather than bearing live young, our “pregnancy” did not interrupt our cycle one bit. Since I’d had no more disasters with the condoms, this one was of course unfertilized.

Tonight, GLBTTQ had their first dance of the school year and of course I went with Freddie. She hadn’t realized such a club existed until I mentioned it to her over the summer, but for someone like her, it was perfect. And there was no issue with two girls going as a couple, so we agreed I’d go as a girl and Freddie would dress appropriately for whatever gender she awoke as, which turned out to be female.

I’d been unwilling to keep doing this for Jen, but I did it for Freddie. Why? I thought about it while I was getting ready. A big part of it was, I realized, that Freddie was willing to take me as I was. I made sure to tell her that during one of the slow dances.

“Freddie, I love you. I love you because you take me as I am. And I take you as you are, too, or at least as you became after beating back Jimbo. Don’t ever change.”

Freddie laughed at the mention of Jimbo, and responded, “Thank you, Bella. I love you too. And you’re so right about that; I do take you as you are, and love you as you are.”

Freddie’s family was traveling to see relatives over the holidays, ones who had been briefed on her dual nature. We’d been dating every Saturday I wasn’t laying an egg all school year until today. But my family had some of our own relatives over, a branch of Mom’s family, some of them with powers, who were anxious to see how I had turned out.

The day was marred by tragedy, though, when I checked the egg to find it now reported as sterile. I wasn’t sure if that meant my baby had died, or was just a malfunction in the scanner. We called the vet, but he said there was nothing to be done about that. He said that by this point I should be able to hear a tiny heartbeat if I pressed the egg against my ear. I checked, and there was definitely none of that. Since it was not there, he said, the embryo was dead. Just like live births, which sometimes ended in miscarriage, not every fertilized egg succeeded in producing live young. He did, however, ask me to bring the egg in so he could study it. He might be able to tell how my baby died and if there was anything I should do differently when I had another.

With that done, I turned off and packed away the incubator, to be used again if I ever needed it. I wanted to forget about it and try to have fun with the visiting family, but they wanted to hear about me and my eggs, since none of them were egg-layers, and they naturally led back to that, so I ended up talking about it all evening and going to bed early to escape that.

The vet called today and told me my egg was a horror story. Something about our baby was very, very wrong, like major birth defects. The parts were not arranged to form the shape of a human being, nor a bird, nor any kind of being, really. It had managed to live for a while, but as development proceeded, the strain on the malformed body was eventually too much. It needed to have a heartbeat to circulate blood through a circulatory system by this point, and it didn’t.

He wasn’t sure why this happened, but he was going to run some genetic tests, and he wanted my and Freddie’s DNA. I told him Freddie was traveling, but I’d let his family know and after the holidays he might come in to give a sample on a day he was male. He hoped to be able to tell me if there was a mutation that caused this, or if Freddie and I were somehow incompatible.

Today the vet was able to give me the news. Not only were Freddie and I incompatible, I was probably incompatible with most people. My powers had altered my DNA in some fundamental ways that made it quite birdlike, and there were too many genes that didn’t have counterparts in humans and too many human ones missing from mine. I’d probably only ever have live children with a mate who also had avian characteristics and similar genetic differences. Which meant essentially nobody. People from NANA were able to tell me there were only 7 male avians in Normal.

If at some point in the future I really wanted to have a child, maybe I’d ask them, presumably pay them to get genetic tests done and be my sperm donor. Or Freddie could take a normal sperm donor and we’d find out if she’d have a pregnancy that progressed only on female days like Jen’s mom did.

At least I’d worry less about it; if Freddie and I had another accident, we’d just break the egg quickly instead of nurturing it and finding it dead after 2 months.

Today was both an egg-laying day and a GLBTTQ dance, and as a result it was the first time I was with Freddie on an egg-laying day in a long time. And as luck would have it, the egg decided not to come until evening, so I had to excuse myself and find the ladies room. Naturally when I went in there, there weren’t any stalls open and one girl was just standing there.

“Are you in line?” I asked.

“No, I’m just waiting for a friend. You’re first in line,” the girl replied.

“Oh, good. My egg can wait a few minutes, but not too long.”

“Oh, I noticed you seemed to be a bird, but I didn’t realize you would be that much of one. I have powers too. My name’s Trixie.”

“I’m Bella. What’s your power?”

“I can animate other bodies. Except this is an animated body; my original body is at home.”

“Cool. Well I’m a bird, I can fly (though not in this dress; I actually have to be able to spread my wings). I don’t have much else for powers. I don’t have periods, but once a month I lay a big egg.”

“What’s the inflatable thing for?”

“It’s an egg-catcher. I always carry this with me in case I have to lay an egg when I’m away from home. It cushions the egg and keeps it out of the toilet water.”

“Oh, I guess it makes sense, if you’re out, that the toilet is the sensible place to do it. Just how big is this egg?”

“It’s about the size of a football, but egg-shaped instead of being pointy-ended.”

“Wow! Does it hurt?”

“It did the first time I laid an egg, but now it comes out pretty easily.”

“Does this egg-catcher mean that mean you’re saving the egg to take home to hatch?”

“Oh, goodness no. These eggs aren’t fertilized, but just like chickens, I lay eggs all the time anyway. Thankfully not every day like chickens. I save the egg so I can eat it.”

“You eat your own egg?”

“It’s my doctor’s recommendation.” I had finished inflating the thing by this point and I told her the details while I reached under my dress and removed my panties.

“Um, Bella, how soon will you lay your egg?”

“As soon as I can get into one of these stalls. It’s ready. Once I start, it only takes a minute or two and it’ll be out. You want to take a look?”

“Actually, my request is a little more personal than that, but I’m really curious. In addition to animating bodies, I can temporarily feel what another person is feeling, and since I think this is a rare chance to experience something different, I’m interested. Will you let me do that?”

“Go right ahead.”

“In order to do this, I have to kiss you.”

I puckered up, and she kissed me. It was more of a kiss than I was expecting, and kind of slobbery. She didn’t force her tongue into my mouth, but she left some saliva on my face.

At that moment a girl came out of one of the stalls, so as soon as Trixie pulled away from the kiss I went into the stall, closed and latched the door, set the egg catcher on the toilet, and sat down on it and started pushing. The egg came out quickly, but once I got it out and cleaned up, I realized I also needed to use the toilet for what it was meant for. I got that done, got myself cleaned up, put away my egg and the egg-catcher, and returned to Freddie.

Of course, I did not speak about it the rest of the night.

Caution: This story contains references to prostitution, murder, and suicide, but there are no graphic depictions of any of them..

I’m George Walda. Shortly after I turned 17, some strange things started happening to me. First it was this recurring dream that I had turned into a pile of goo.

There wasn’t really much of anything to this dream, but I experienced this along with a sense of returning to my proper body shape just as I was waking up, for months on end. And I worried it was real because somehow, without fail, every night I had this dream, I managed to lose my underwear in bed. I mean, I was in bed and so were the underwear I wore to bed each night, just they weren’t on me when I awoke.

In March 2007, I started noticing stuff happening with the goo, like it was forming shapes, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, one night, the goo formed into a body and climbed out of bed still within my dream, not under my control. There was only dim light in my room from a street light, but the goo body looked in my mirror, and I could see it was a girl. Her naked boobs were visible. Her appearance blurred briefly and she changed to a couple other girls and then back to the first one. I assumed by where she appeared in the mirror that she was about my height. She had dark wavy hair that reached to her shoulders. One of the other bodies had blonde hair, and one had dark, shorter hair and a tiny nose. There was at least one other one I didn’t catch a good glimpse of. All were young, somewhere between my age to mid-20s, as best I could tell in the dim light.

She explored my house, keeping quiet to avoid waking anyone and not turning any lights on. Once she was done, she climbed back into my bed and turned back into goo and I turned back into myself when I woke up.

The next night, my goo turned into the girl again. This time, she looked through my clothes until she found some sweats and put them on. And my shoes; they didn’t fit, and she changed her feet so that they fit my shoes. Then she seemed to change her mind, took everything off, opened a window, and tossed the clothes out, jumping out after them, turning into goo on the way down and landing with a splat. She quickly formed into the girl again, put on my clothes, and spent a while exploring. That night that was all she did. She came back to my house and did a trick where she turned one arm into a long tendril of goo stretching up until she reached my second-floor window, using it to pull herself up and inside. She shut the window, put my clothes away, and got back into bed. This was followed by my now-usual experience of turning from goo back into me when I woke up.

The third night she seemed more intent. She tossed my clothes and herself out my window quickly, walked to a place she had explored the first night, and took off, jogging a few miles down Main Street and turning into some other neighborhood. She located the address she was looking for, but didn’t go into the house. In the garden next to the house, she turned into the goo again, seeped down into the ground, and located a glass jar sealed with a metal lid which the goo pulled out of the ground, leaving a small hole behind. She turned into the girl again and opened the jar. Inside was a small change purse stuffed with cash - 10s and 20s, a few hundred dollars worth - and an ancient-looking ID that expired before I was even born but with a picture that looked like this girl. Shelly Peterson, her name apparently was.

She carried the jar and purse with her after she dressed again and took off again on Main Street. Another mile or so down the road was our 24-hour Wal-Mart. She left the jar on the base of a lamppost in the parking lot but took the purse and money with her. She seemed to know her way around here, and went straight to the women’s clothing department. She picked out a few things and tried them on. She had gotten different sizes of the same things, so I guess she was figuring out her sizes. She got it figured out, kept one of the dresses she had tried on, and picked out a couple bras, a pack of panties, a couple more dresses, a pack of socks, and a pair of shoes. Sneakers, but girly ones. She checked out and paid for all the stuff with money from the jar.

There were restrooms at the front of the Wal-Mart, outside the checkouts, and she went inside, changed into some of the clothes she bought, and put mine in the bag before leaving. After picking up the jar again, she went straight back to my house from there, but she stopped outside and went into the shed where we kept lawn tools and such stuff. She stripped, stuffed all her new clothes and the purse and jar into it, and hid it in a corner, putting on my clothes and repeating her trick to get back into my room.

I told my parents at breakfast the next day about the weird dreams I’d been having. They just thought I was having some elaborate dreams and didn’t seem to think it was important. But the dreams continued. I took my family’s digital camera up to my room, set it up to record video, and aimed it at my bed. I wasn’t sure how long it would record, but I hoped that it would simply stop if it filled up. I started it recording as I went to bed, and I left a desk lamp on so there was enough light for my bed to be visible on the camera.

The fourth night, she didn’t bother with my sweats. She went straight outside naked, to the shed. She retrieved the bag, dressed, and took her purse, leaving the empty jar and other clothes behind in the bag.

She went back to Main Street, turned on 33rd before reaching the neighborhood she’d visited the previous night, and went down a couple blocks to an area I wasn’t allowed into. There were bars and nightclubs and other places I wasn’t legally allowed to enter until I was 18. But this girl looked old enough. Was she going to get in? She had ID... ID that expired 30 years ago that, if assumed valid, claimed she was almost 60 now. Was the dream happening in the past? How could it if she put on my sweats and visited our shed which was built only a few years ago after we moved here?

She found the place she was looking for, which I think was a nudie bar, though of course I’d never been inside. But she didn’t go up to the front entrance. She went to a back door and knocked in a peculiar pattern. It apparently worked, because some guy answered the door, and they accepted her old ID there and let her in.

“Woot! Shelly, nice one. You actually look like your ID photo now!”

Where was she now? Of course I’d never been inside, but it was obvious she was not in the public part of the club people would normally use. At first I thought maybe it was the strippers’ entrance. The guy who let her in locked the door and led her upstairs to an office with a star on the door but no name. She went in and the guy went elsewhere.

There was another guy inside the starred door, and he was wearing an absurd amount of gold and gems. Like a Mr. T amount of gold, but he wasn’t a bodybuilder, and with diamonds and rubies in addition to the gold. Even gold caps with little diamonds on his teeth.

“Welcome back, Shelly.”

“Great to be back, Freddy.”

“What’s the story behind this body?”

“A boy turns to goo at night, and I can take over the goo while he sleeps. So I’m not going to be able to get here until 10:30 or 11, but I can turn a couple late tricks before things shut down.”

“That’s cool. Some is better than none. You say this is a boy’s body?”

“The goo is very malleable. I could look like anybody, probably, with practice, but I’ve only been practicing for a week and the only thing I can do easily is look like people I’ve lived as. This is actually what Shelly looked like at around 20 or so.”

“We’ll get you an up-to-date fake ID in case anybody asks, which’ll work as long as nobody tries to run it. You can only be here nights?”

“Yeah. I only get to use this body while he sleeps.”

“I’ll get you entered in the system tonight and you’ll be able to start tomorrow night. But I want you to practice looking like other people. If you can look like whoever your john wants, you can probably make double and make up for not being available earlier.”

“Thanks, Freddy. Sure. Let me try something.”

Freddy stared at the girl for a couple minutes while I couldn’t see what was happening, and then said, “Oh, that’s real good, Shelly!”

Freddy got up and stood beside her, and pointed to one side, where Shelly looked and there was a full length mirror. Shelly now looked pretty much like Freddy, but smaller, and she was wearing the dress she’d come in tonight instead of the shirt and tie and jewelry Freddy wore. The dress looked kind of silly on Freddy’s obviously male body.

“I could pass as you only to somebody who didn’t know you well and only if I took your clothes and chains. And it took me what, three or four minutes?”

“It would work if we get a request. I mean, if somebody asks for Marilyn Monroe, they know the real Marilyn Monroe isn’t going to be here, but if you have a passing resemblance you’d be accepted.”

Freddy printed out some documents on his computer, signed some things and had Shelly sign, and took a few pictures of her in her Shelly body, some clothed and some naked. She put her clothes back on, and they hugged and said goodbye, and Shelly started on her way back to my house.

I wasn’t really thinking during the dream, but in the morning I realized Shelly had signed up to be a prostitute. With my body. I had never had sex with a girl yet, but it sounded like possibly as early as tonight I was going to experience what it was like to be a girl having sex with a guy.

So that was the discussion at breakfast. I showed my parents the part of the video where the goo turned into Shelly. It was grainy and dim, but it was enough to show what I was experiencing was real. And then I told them what happened with Shelly. My parents were concerned this was getting too elaborate and dangerous.

“Did you catch the name on the front of the place Shelly went into?” Dad asked me.

“The Can-Can Club,” I answered.

“I’ll talk to the police and see if they have ever heard of there being a prostitution ring running out of there.”

That evening, Dad told me, “The police have had numerous reports of prostitution happening there, but they’ve never managed to catch anyone. Today they searched the whole rear of the building, confirming with measurements and everything there were no secret rooms on the ground floor nor in the basement, and they were convinced there was no sub-basement.

“Did they search the second floor? She definitely went upstairs from the door she came in.” I responded.

“He didn’t mention it. I’m not sure why he would have omitted mention of it if there was a second floor.”

He made a phone call, and I didn’t hear anything coming from it, but that night when Shelly went to start her job, when she arrived at the place there were police cars everywhere and she turned and left. She went to Wal-Mart and bought one of those pay-as-you-go cell phones, sat in the food court area outside the checkouts for a while charging the phone (but not actually eating or drinking anything), and then called somebody. She was apparently trying to set up another job, but she didn’t have any luck.

At breakfast, when I saw Dad I cheered.

“Yay, you got ‘em!”

“I did?”

“Yeah, they busted the place. When Shelly got there, they had a fleet of police cars in the parking lot and were loading people into them.”

He made a call, and then told me, “The police said they had never suspected a second floor. It doesn’t look like it has one from the outside, but since you had suggested a ghost might be prostituting borrowed bodies there, they thought maybe it was hidden with magic or something. And he’s coming over tonight to talk with us.”

I followed up with, “If you want to tip the police some more, after Shelly fled from there, she bought a phone and called some people. She plugged it into the outlet out in the shed to finish charging when she gave up last night. You should be able to get the numbers she called off of it.”

“Good idea. I’m on it.”

A police officer indeed came to visit at 7, just after we finished dinner.

“You folks only moved here a few years ago, right?”

“Yes,” Dad replied.

“So you don’t know about what makes Normal special.”

“Nope.” We all shook our heads.

“A long time ago, a meteor struck Normal. Ever since then, people living here sometimes develop powers.”

“What kind of powers?” Dad asked.

“You might think of them as comic book types of powers. They fly, get super-strength, are able to control fire or water or do magic, and other things. Sometimes their bodies change colors or adopt animal characteristics or other changes. Each person who gets powers gets a unique combination. There have been shapeshifters, so what your son described is possible.”

“I’ve never heard or seen anything like that in town.”

“We keep it secret. Outside of Normal it doesn’t happen, and we let the rest of the world stay ignorant of what happens here. We don’t tell newcomers until they need to know so that word doesn’t leak out. There’s actually a spell cast over the town that keeps people who don’t already know from seeing it, but it can’t keep your son from knowing what is happening to himself. Magic is only so strong. But you all know now and you’ll see the things I have mentioned. Don’t go talking about powers in public, but you can speak with the people who have them privately if you get the chance.”

“This would be hard to believe except for what my son recorded on video happening to him. It’s almost easier to believe this than some sort of scientific explanation for it. But thanks for letting us know.”

“If your ghost does anything more, keep calling it in. We’ve tapped all the lines you gave us so we can catch her, and hopefully keep your son from experiencing being a prostitute. Here’s a direct line to vice.” He handed Dad a card.

“Can you do anything about the ghost?”

“I can’t, no. But I can put you in touch with someone who might be able to.”

It was reassuring they were at least trying to do something.

Shelly kept calling around, and Dad kept taking down the numbers she called and feeding them each morning to the vice cops. Three days later, after another one of the places she was trying to get into got busted, word got around that Shelly couldn’t be trusted, and after that everybody was hanging up on her immediately. Or not even answering. They’d changed their numbers to avoid being tracked.

Once this happened, Shelly figured out I was hearing/dreaming what she was doing. To nobody in particular, she said, “Hey, punk, you listenin’ in on me? Rattin’ me out? You cost me and a bunch of other nice folks good jobs. I’ll find some other thing to do, but it won’t pay as well. Still, I’ll give you a cut if you don’t rat me out. Let me know.”

I told Dad, and he responded, “What do you think?”

I replied, “I think she’s going to keep at it until she figures out something I can’t stop her from doing.”

“Why? Why does she want money such that she’s going to do criminal things? Why does a ghost need money at all?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can ask her. But I’m definitely going to give her some ground rules. She can’t do anything that’ll get me hurt, infected, captured, or killed. Or pregnant. I don’t know if she can get pregnant and have me still be pregnant when I wake up, but it’s off-limits in any case.”

“Fair enough. Once you learn why she wants the money, maybe you can come up with better ways for her to earn it. I bet crime and prostitution is all she ever knew in her past lives.”

So that evening, I wrote out a note for her. I wrote SHELLY in big letters across the top of a page in Sharpie so she couldn’t miss it, and then I wrote the note normally on the rest of the page.

I don’t know why you want the money, but I will fight you doing anything that has a chance of getting me hurt, killed, infected with disease, captured, or pregnant. Not sure if you can get pregnant or if that will pass on to me, but don’t want to take the chance. But if you do something safe it’s OK.

So why do you want the money? Why do you need so much money that you need to resort to prostitution? You don’t pay for rent, food, or taxes.

George

I left the note at the edge of the bed as I went to sleep, so she’d have to roll across it getting out of bed when she took over my body.

Like the previous nights, she came and took me over, and quickly found and read the note.

“Hmm. Maybe. I feel like the goo body should be more resistant to those things. Like if somebody shoots or stabs you I just turn to goo and remake my body with no wound. Get pregnant, remake the body with no baby, not pregnant.”

She read the rest of the note.

“But why do I want the money? Good one, Georgie. Why do I want the money, anyway? It was to try to pay off Mama’s gambling debts, originally. Whatever happened with that? Heck, I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I’ve done this with four bodies now before I couldn’t use them anymore. You know, I can use cell phones to make calls but I never got this whole Internet thing. Georgie, I bet you can find out what happened to her easier than I can. Let me write down her information.”

She took the paper over to my desk, found a pen, and wrote down:

Etta Carmichael 225 Carlton Street Arlington, Virginia (703) 555-4646 Owed $60,000 in 1962 to Frank Stallone

Then she walked around my room naked for a while, looking at all my stuff, and occasionally picking something up and looking at it. Eventually she climbed back into bed and just went to sleep.

I reformed normally from the goo on this Saturday morning, and Dad wasn’t up at breakfast. But after I ate mine, I came back up to try to find this woman. It took less than half an hour of searching before I found her. Etta Carmichael, nee Jackson, of Arlington, Virginia died February 12, 1999 at age 79. I don’t know if she ever paid off her debt. I found a page I could print out, and there was a death notice in the Washington Post which some web site wanted me to pay $10 for a copy of. But Normal’s library claimed to have this paper, so I figured I’d get it there later.

Next, I looked up Frank Stallone. He was more notable, or rather, infamous, and there were many reports of his death I could read and print out for free. I printed one.

Finally, Shelly. I looked up Shelly Carmichael, but none of the people of that name lived in the right area or at the right time. And I tried Michelle also, but no luck. Then I remembered her name was Shelly Peterson. Did Shelly marry? Or did Etta marry other times? Anyway, I looked up Shelly Peterson as well. There was one who lived here in Normal, rather than in Alexandria, who committed suicide in 1977. Was that her? It did match her ID which expired in 1977, so maybe it was. I printed out that story as well.

Later in the morning I walked down to the library and got a copy of Etta’s death notice from a newspaper saved on microfilm, which cost me only a dime. And when I got home from that I discussed it with Dad.

“So, your body is getting inhabited by this ghost, the dead daughter of this dead woman from Virginia, every night. The death notice should pacify her - it’s clear that your ghost died young, and may not have had practical means of communication with her mother after death, but wanted to help her out nevertheless.”

“That sounds right.”

“And you think she used other bodies for prostitution for over 40 years? She didn’t have much in the way of her own expenses, so I’m guessing she sent most of this money to her mother, maybe even sent money after her mother was dead and who knows what happened to it. But she should have paid off the 60 grand a long time ago, even with interest, even with a bad pimp giving her a low cut. She might have been having to pay for other expenses - we know nothing about what else this woman might have been dealing with. But it agrees with Shelly not having communication with her mother. I’m no expert on ghosts, but I’m guessing she died trying to do something to help her mother, and her ghost was focused on that one thing and just kept doing it forever. I’ll try to find somebody who knows more about ghosts to confirm that.”

“Thanks, Dad. And I’ll leave these death notices for her tonight. I want her to not worry about the money, so I’m also going to tell her that rather than provide me with money, which she offered to do, that she should help me controlling my goo body. She obviously knows how to do it better than me.”

“That sounds good.”

I left the printouts in my bed the next night. At the bottom of Shelly’s printout, I wrote: Is this you? If not, what was your original name? Frank’s was a page and a half, so I wrote on the bottom half of the second page:

Instead of trying to give me money, show me how to shape my goo. Right now I form automatically into a boy when I wake up and apparently turn to goo when I fall asleep. Show me how I can make other shapes while I’m awake.

P.S.: My family knows about you now. No need to hide. You can go downstairs and walk out the door like a normal person.

Shelly read the page about Shelly Peterson’s death first and cried for a bit. “This is right, Georgie. Shelly isn’t my original name. It’s the name of the first girl I inhabited as a ghost. She didn’t turn into goo like you; I just used her real body. She figured out that she was going whoring in her sleep, though I don’t know that she ever figured out I was doing it, as opposed to her just sleepwalking or something. She committed suicide in 1977 just like it says here. She was the first one I took to the Can-Can Club and so they knew me by that name, even in the other bodies. My original name... Umm, I forget. I do remember that I kept going until 1967 when I was murdered by one of my johns. Throat slashed.”

Shelly next read Etta’s death report and cried some more. But then she said, “If she didn’t get it paid off, I guess it ain’t going to happen now. So I guess I don’t need that money. Just a little for some clothes so I don’t go around here naked. And don’t I have some?”

Finally, she read Frank’s report and the notes I left at the bottom. “Duh. Yeah, you had me marked good. Glad I can stop hiding. I should go get my clothes. If I don’t need to hide, might as well bring them in here.”

She walked naked out the door to the shed, got dressed, and brought all the rest of her clothes and her phone and purse inside and back to my room. She put the bag on the bottom of my closet with only socks and panties left in it, and tossed all the clothes which had been worn already in the hamper with my clothes.

“OK, Georgie, you did good. Just about everybody is dead now: Mama, Frank, and at least three of the girls I used to turn tricks. And I’m sorry.”

She stopped for a bit and she was crying, but it wasn’t obvious until she continued talking through sobs.

“I’m sorry for what I did to those girls, what I tried to do to you, for everything. I can’t help them now, but I do want to help you. I don’t know if I can explain to you how I shape the goo, though. I just do. And I get kicked out of your body when you wake up. You’d have to find some way to not kick me out, like accept me as a part of you.”

As always, I saw and heard all this in what I now know was not really a dream. Whether she was sincere or not, I needed the help. I tried to respond to her within the dream, “Shelly, or whoever you are! Apology accepted! Come, be with me. Become a part of me all the time so you can help me control my body.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but nevertheless, Shelly responded, “I hear you, Georgie.”

She did several things, and at one point turned back into goo and then back into Shelly.

“I don’t know that any of that did any good. I don’t feel any more a part of you than I did before. See if you can still reach me this way when you wake up.”

I had the familiar experience of being goo briefly and then my own body when I woke up, and Shelly wasn’t there. I shared this with Dad in the morning.

“Well, the expert the police arranged with us is coming over tonight.”

Meanwhile, I searched the Internet for stories of the original Shelly’s death. I could never have found it without the extra detail she provided. A search on girl murdered 1967 mother Etta Carmichael turned up a newspaper report. There was a picture of what she looked like before she ran away and started prostitution, and an actual story about the murder, not just an obituary. Samantha Carmichael, that was Shelly’s original name. I printed that story out, too.

The woman who came over had that whole “fortune teller” look about her, but supposedly she was legit. She introduced herself simply as Stephanie. I handed her the stack of printouts and spent a while telling the whole story, from me just having the dreams about returning to my body from goo (which I had since learned were real and only experienced as dreams), to Shelly taking me over, digging up money and buying clothes, trying to get a job as a prostitute, and the story about her mother’s debt and death, as well as her ability to stretch me into different shapes, and her difficulty of staying with me. Stephanie read through the documents and also examined me, seeming to put herself into a trance for a short while.

“It sounds like Samantha was very focused on repaying her mother’s debts. She died trying to do that, and her soul became a ghost dedicated to completing the deed. Such ghosts often have a one-track mind, and just keep doing whatever it is they were doing when they died. Since you’ve helped her see the task is complete, or at least as complete as is ever going to be possible, she’s going to be very compliant for a while, as she’s lost her purpose. It’s likely she’s sincere and will become completely loyal and obedient to you if you take her in now.”

Dad and I both nodded, but Stephanie went on after pulling out some notes.

“The goo thing is typical for some shapeshifters, especially if they haven’t learned to completely control their powers. But only certain people can host ghosts, and it’s uncommon for them to also be shapeshifters. What is more common is that the person only gets powers at all from the ghost.”

“Do you think I have any other powers? I haven’t noticed any.”

“I can run some simple tests. You can get formally tested to look for more subtle powers.”

After a half an hour of various tests, she decided I probably didn’t have other powers.

“OK, then, how do I open myself up for Samantha? I’m not actively blocking her, but it seems she’s only able to inhabit my body while I’m asleep.”

“I should give you a little background about ghosts. The creation of ghosts and spirit possession of living people are among the few elements of what people think of as the supernatural that commonly happen in the world outside Normal. Ghosts can be created when people die in certain circumstances, such as when somebody dies trying to complete a goal, or when a person with an especially strong soul dies, or when a child dies. Ghosts can enter only certain people, ones whose souls aren’t big enough to fill their... I’m simplifying here, but call it their body. They can enter when there is space left over. Everybody has a little space like this, but for most people it’s too small for a ghost to enter. When the gap is large enough, a ghost can enter, and there are different possible results depending on how much space there is.”

Stephanie drew two circles on a sheet of paper, one inside the other and almost filling it.

“When there’s only a little space, only a small, weak ghost can get in, and it can’t do anything. The person usually never realizes it’s there, but they sometimes get bits and pieces of the ghost’s memory, People who feel like they are reincarnated likely have this sort of ghost.”

She drew beside it another pair of circles, but with about twice as much distance between the inner and outer circles.

“If the opening is a little bigger, a larger, more powerful ghost can get in, but still can’t do anything to the person. If this sort of person realizes the ghost is there, they can use it to access the spirit world and communicate with other ghosts. These are the psychics and mediums out there in the world, at least the real ones, because there are a lot of charlatans who are faking the whole thing, or they have a ghost that has made them aware of the spirit world but they can’t really do more than detect ghosts and they fake the rest. Because of all the fakes, most people think they’re all fake. I have a ghost of this sort, and here in Normal I was able to work with people who actually do understand this stuff and learn how to work with ghosts for real, and safely. You could say this case is the happy medium, pun very much intended!”

We all laughed. Stephanie drew a third pair of circles that looked about like a car tire, with plenty of space between the circles.

“When the ghost and soul are of similar strength, there may be a battle for possession. Sometimes, as you experienced, the ghost may only have control when the person is asleep. But I think this isn’t literally true in your case, because I can see the ghost is not in you now. Usually the ghost hangs on, and only leaves if forced out by a more powerful ghost or an exorcism. Have you ever heard of an exorcism?”

I said “Yes.” Mom nodded, and Dad said, “I remember the movie The Exorcist.”

“There are a lot of inaccuracies in that film, and the spirit is portrayed as a demon rather than a ghost, but the essential idea of removing the ghost from the person it’s possessing is correct. Usually we would only attempt that if the soul and the ghost are in conflict, leading to violent reactions perhaps similar to the ones in the film. Usually the exorcism destroys the ghost, and outside Normal, these more powerful ghosts are rare, so the person may not experience this again, or may encounter a more benign ghost. It’s different in Normal, though.”

“How so?” Dad asked.

“The same thing that gives people here powers acts like a beacon in the spirit world, and ghosts from far and wide are attracted here. So we have to go on the lookout for people whose spirits do not fill their bodies. When such a person is born here, we usually detect it shortly after birth and bond the person’s soul to the ghost of a child who didn’t live long enough to develop any real goals or negative traits, and is the right size to fill the gap. This basically means that the person growing up is an amalgam of their own soul and the ghost, but they live in peace and have a normal life. Sometimes they can access the spirit world later in life, like the second case I described, but usually the bond severs the ghost from the spirit world. But the body and soul don’t always grow evenly, and the gap can grow later in life, and we can’t be checking every person all the time, so we still get these cases here sometimes.”

She drew an even more extreme pair of circles.

“In cases like this, a ghost can move in which is significantly more powerful than the soul. The ghost is going to take over the person entirely. If it happens when the person is very young, nobody will ever know and the ghost simply replaces the original soul. If it happens later in life, depending on the strength of the soul and the temperament of the ghost, the ghost may merge with the soul, usually continuing to live that person’s life. If it was the kind of ghost with a goal, it may redirect that person’s long-term goals toward the person’s long-term goals while keeping other aspects of the person’s personality. In other cases, the soul can be completely destroyed, and the person now controlled by the ghost may experience amnesia, or his or her personality may be drastically altered as it is replaced with that of the ghost.”

“So what about me?”

“Well, your case is confusing. I can see you have a very small gap like this first case or like the case where no ghost can enter you at all. It’s clearly different somehow when you are asleep and turn to goo, in order for a ghost to get in which is powerful enough to control your body and even use your powers. So with your permission I’d like to put you into a hypnotic trance similar to sleep, which I hope lets you turn to goo so I can examine you in the goo mode.”

“I’m fine with it,” I said. Mom nodded and Dad said, “Go ahead.”

She had me lie down on top of the table, and did the thing with the swinging pocketwatch you see on TV or in movies when someone is being hypnotized, and put me to sleep, and turned me into a pile of goo on top of the table, and went on with her examination.

“Oh, it’s huge! Somehow, when George’s body goes into this goo state, a much larger space opens up around the soul. I’ve never seen this before, but it explains a lot. There’s definitely enough room there for a ghost almost as powerful as George to fit in, right in that range where the ghost would only have control when he’s asleep. OK, I’m going to bring him out so we can talk to him some more, but he’s going to be naked because his clothes have fallen through the goo, so get a sheet or something to put over him.”

So I awoke a moment later, aware of what Stephanie had said and covered with a sheet.

“And there, the gap is gone. What I think is happening is that Samantha simply gets pushed out when George returns to his own body shape.”

“So is there anything we can do?” Mom asked.

“I can bond Samantha to George the way I have described. Then she wouldn’t be able to be forced out, and she’d be with George all the time. George’s body should expand spiritually to contain her, though she may sort of “stick out” for a short while until it finishes expanding, or he may be slow in actually changing to George’s body. I think as long as he holds his shape, this expansion should finish within the evening. When George is awake, he would have control. When he’s asleep, Samantha would have control. Would you like that?”

“Sure, let’s do it now. The sooner the better in terms of her being loyal to me, right?”

“Correct, George. If your parents are OK with this, we can get started.”

“It sounds like a good opportunity, to do this while George is on Samantha’s good side. I’m in favor,” Dad said.

“I’m sure we’ll all appreciate your body not getting up and roaming the streets while you sleep,” Mom said. “Let’s go.”

“There’s one thing. I am not actually detecting her. She probably hasn’t gone far, and she may be sleeping until George’s next regular sleep cycle. So the first step is to summon her. And I’m going to need the table.”

So I got down and covered myself with the sheet as I sat in a chair, and Stephanie set up some candles and a lot of the schlock popularly associated with a seance, but apparently if you knew what you were doing and had the power of a helpful ghost within you, this stuff was real. She wrote out some words for me to say on a card I kept in front of me, and we all held hands.

“Samantha, who also goes by Shelly,” she intoned in a low, drawn-out voice. “Samantha Carmichael, also known as Shelly Peterson. There is one here who would like to speak with you.”

It was less than a minute, before Stephanie finished her invocation a second time, that Samantha started to materialize above the table. She was somewhat transparent, but I could tell it was her.

That was my cue. “Samantha Carmichael, I welcome you to come, live in my body, bond with me, and become a part of me. I solemnly swear this on my name, George Walda.”

It seemed like she tried to move into me, but failed.

Stephanie said, “OK, she’s here. Probably not surprisingly, she still can’t get into you, George. Now you get back in the table and I’ll turn you into goo again, and perform the bonding.”

So I did, and when I turned to goo, Samantha jumped right in and I could tell, as my body assumed Shelly’s form. My parents covered me over with the sheet again.

“Is he going to be stuck in that form?” Dad asked worriedly.

“Samantha had good control over the goo, so I expect she’ll be able to change it. We don’t want her to change now, though, because George’s body doesn’t have enough space. I need to perform the bonding first.”

Stephanie performed another ritual, and after a few minutes I felt it work as I gained a closer connection with Samantha than I had before. I could actually feel her in my head in a way. Stephanie announced that was complete and then brought me out of the hypnotic sleep I was in. Surprisingly to me, I didn’t immediately turn back to my own body. I opened Shelly’s eyes and was seeing the room through them. I saw the tent the sheet made over Shelly’s breasts.

“Welcome, Samantha,” I said out loud.

“Nice being in here while you’re awake,” she responded, inside my head.

“You all didn’t hear her respond, did you?” I asked. I got three “no”s in response.

“OK, let me see, I should be able to...”

Talk to you like this. I finished the sentence by thinking a thought directed at Samantha, rather than speaking it.

“Yes, you’ve got it,” came the voice inside my head.

Good, I told her.

“OK, I can speak to her without speaking out loud.”

Stephanie responded, “That’s good, George. You are slowly returning to your own body. It’s forming slowly, because forming quickly would make it too small to hold Samantha. So talk with her a bit.”

“Fine. I’m going to get her story and I’ll repeat it for you all.”

How much of the conversation we had here earlier did you hear?

“I was sleeping. I didn’t hear anything until you and this medium called my name, my original name Samantha, which I haven’t heard or used in a very long time.”

We came to the conclusion that your original body died trying to help your mother repay her debts, and you became a ghost dedicated to that goal.

“That’s right. This guy Frank was threatening her if she didn’t repay the money she’d borrowed and wasted on gambling, and I ran away from home partly to avoid being around Frank and partly to help Mom. In the 60s we got 15 bucks a trick, two or three of those a night, 7 days a week, making $200 to $300 a week, which was pretty good money back then. These days, stiffs working at the grocery store make more than that and barely make ends meet. In the mid ‘60s, $300 paid my rent, bills, and food for a month, so I sent everything over $75 a week to Mom and, at least at the time, she was using it to start paying off the debt. We exchanged letters, and I never told her what I was doing, but I’m sure she suspected it.”

So about $175 a week, that’s seven hundred a month. The debt would have been paid off in 8 years, maybe 10 to 12 years with interest.

“Yeah, if I kept it up. Some john slashed my throat in ‘67 and that was the end of that. Except I became a ghost. I wanted to keep doing it, but at first I didn’t know how. But something attracted me to Normal, and once I got here, I was able to talk with other ghosts. They taught me a lot and hooked me up with that place you saw me visit. They’re all ghosts or people using powers to make temporary bodies or something like that in there, but the johns are mostly unpowered people and they don’t know no difference. They had somebody working for them who could do magic, advertise the place in the minds of potential customers while not letting the police know. By ‘71 I was taking over the other poor girl’s body, Shelly Peterson, while she slept, doing one or two late tricks a night, $20 a trick then, but the girl’s normal job paid her expenses so this all went to Mom.”

So about $200 a week.

“Yeah, only I told her don’t try to write back here, ‘cause I only had control of this girl at night. It was like you, she saw what I did with her body as dreams, at least some of the time. Shelly figured out after a while that all those dreams she was having about sex with so many different men were real after she got some bruises, ones she remembered getting when I had control. But still, she didn’t do anything about it, until about 6 years in, she committed suicide.”

I paused at this point to recap this part of the story to everybody before continuing to speak inside my head to Samantha.

And between the first set of payments and those 6 years, your mom had probably paid off the debt, assuming she was smart enough to stay out of more gambling.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t really thinking like that.”

‘One-track mind’ was how the medium here described it.

“It was weird, though. I could plan things out, go buy clothes I thought would look good, and figure out how to please each john, but I couldn’t think for myself that the debt should be paid off, or go visit Mom in person, even when the next body was some brain-dead girl I had control of all the time. I mean literally. She was in a coma before I found her and without me she would have stayed that way forever, or until they took her off the machines, anyway. I had her for about 12 years when she got too old for what most of the johns wanted, and so I suicided her and found another girl I could take over at night.”

Oh, that’s terrible.

“Yeah, I know, but one-track mind, remember? If I couldn’t do that, the body was worthless to me. And she didn’t have no mind left of her own, so if I left her, what would’ve happened? Either she died, or some other ghost would take over and do something else terrible to her. I thought it was better not to have some other ghost doing shit in a body people thought of as mine. Anyway, the third girl I only had nights, and she didn’t dream what I did with her. She never suspected nothing until the money orders started coming back. I didn’t know if Mom had died, moved, or if I just got so addled I couldn’t remember her address straight. But I kept doing it, promising myself I’d get the money to her some day.”

So you still have the money from the last 8 years?

“Well, she called in an exorcist and got rid of me, and I didn’t find another body for two years. That one suicided also after four years of it. But I kept all that money, $70 a trick, two a night, promising myself some day I’d find a way to get it to Mom.”

What did you do with it?

“Buried it in little jars like the one you saw me dig up.”

That’s a lot of money. $1000 a week, probably $200,000. How many jars?

“That first jar I buried my old ID in, it only had $400 because it was my first one with that girl, and I had to some stuff to set myself up. After that, every two weeks when they put out recycling, I snatched a baby food jar from one of the neighbors. Everybody around there was having babies, it seemed. I put all my money in it and buried it somewhere in her yard. There’s ten of them under her garden but I was worried she was going to notice her garden getting dug up so much so I switched to a dead spot in the far back of the yard where nothing grew. And as far as I know nobody ever found any of them. I was spelling out her name with the jars, ELIZABETH, but I only got halfway through the second E when she suicided.”

Four years, two hundred weeks. So there’s about a hundred jars out there with roughly $2000 each in them.

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” Samantha replied.

By this time, I realized that I was back to my own body, or mostly so. No more boobs, at least.

“Can I get down from here now?” I asked out loud.

“Yes, it looks like your body has relaxed nicely to accommodate Samantha,” Stephanie said.

So I got down, keeping the sheet over me as I took my clothes into the bathroom with me and got dressed before rejoining the group at the table. And I recapped the story for everybody else that Samantha had taken control of four girls here in Normal to use as prostitutes, three of them dead by suicide, and one exorcised her out.

Then, I thought at Samantha again, Some time I’ll let you use that goo trick to go dig some of those up, but right now I want you make me taller.

My view of the room changed considerably as she made me a LOT taller.

“Nothing to worry about,” I reassured my parents and Stephanie. “Just having Samantha test out changing my body.”

Dad responded, “The silvery effect when you stretched was cool.”

“Silvery effect?” I asked.

“Yeah. When your stomach stretched it turned silvery, kind of like in Terminator 2, before settling into skin color in the tall, narrow stomach you have now.”

“Oh, I bet that’s the goo. I only ever saw it before in my dreams, in my dark room or outside at night, and I couldn’t really see the color.”

I had her change me into the Shelly body, and make a copy of Stephanie and of Dad before returning to my own body. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a girl, but knowing I could was useful. Mom held up a mirror during some of the changes and I saw some of it myself, and confirmed it was my goo that was silver-colored.

“Well thanks, Stephanie. This is really going to work out, I think.”

“Good to hear, George, and Samantha for that matter. I should be going, but there’s just one more thing. Since you know you have powers now, you should register with NANA. They can help you verify whether you have any more subtle powers I couldn’t find in my quick tests here, and will help you with any difficulties. For instance, if you decide you want to live as that Shelly girl they can give you a female identity. You know, one who is not a dead girl.”

She pulled out a card with contact info.

“How soon do we have to do this?” Dad asked.

“We don’t have any hard and fast rule. But the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be eligible for help.”

“Well, thanks, Stephanie,” Dad replied.

She gathered up her stuff, and Dad wrote her a check and showed her out.

“I should have figured out that you had to pay her,” I told him. “How much?”

“Five hundred. A small price to pay for you to get control of your life, and some pretty cool powers to boot.”

“OK. Not that much. I’m worried Samantha’s own worry about her mother’s debt might rub off on me, but five hundred is nothing. Still, she’s got some money buried where she got the money she spent on clothes and stuff, and she’s probably going to want to retrieve some of it to pay you back.”

“She didn’t send it all to her mother?”

“After her mother died, the mail started getting returned. She figured out that the address wasn’t good anymore, but she had convinced herself her mom had just moved and some day she was going to find her and give her more money. So she just kept burying it at the house of this other girl she was in before she found me.”

“How much?”

“About 200 grand.”

“And now somebody else lives in the house?”

“Maybe not. I remember there was a for sale sign there when Samantha visited, which was only a couple weeks ago. She dug up the jar that had Shelly’s old ID in it from there. And by dug up, I mean she used my goo form to ooze down into the ground and pull it out. That jar also had some money she used to buy the clothes and phone. The rest of the money is in other jars on the same property.”

“Well I’m not going to stop you. Heck, I’ll drive you there, and play lookout for you.”

For once, I didn’t have dreams about turning to goo and then other bodies. But when I awoke, I was in Shelly’s body.

Samantha, why are we Shelly? I asked her.

“Sorry. I lost concentration.”

I have school today, and I need to be George all day. Can you do that?

“Yes. Sorry.”

My body quickly turned into George, and I went about my morning routine.

After school, Dad tested out how he’d notify me if there was trouble when I went digging. I still had the phone Samantha bought, and Dad had his. Samantha confirmed there shouldn’t be any of her contacts calling; they’d all written her off as compromised.

I set the phone to vibrate and put it on the ground near where Samantha turned me into goo and oozed down into the ground in our own backyard for the test. And Dad called the phone and I heard it. So when we went out that was going to be his signal. One ring and a hang up meant hide, stay in the ground. If it kept ringing, I should answer it and he’d tell me what to watch out for as I came out.

That night, in the middle of the night, Dad got me up and drove me over there. He waited in the car for me, and Samantha gooed me down into the soil like she did with her ID jar, but we pulled up a whole letter worth of jars at once:

@@@@  @     @  @@@@   @@   @@@   @@@@
@     @     @     @  @  @  @  @  @
@     @     @     @  @  @  @  @  @
@@@@  @     @    @   @@@@  @@@   @@@@
@     @     @   @    @  @  @  @  @
@     @     @  @     @  @  @  @
@@@@  @@@@  @  @@@@  @  @  @@@

We’d brought with us a bunch of old plastic grocery bags and we put each letter in a separate one, except the L and I went in together because they were small. And there were ten individual jars in the garden up by the house that we had to go down in separately to get, the ones she had hidden first, and those went in one bag. In two trips I brought the 7 bags out to the car, and we never needed the phone signal; nobody came near. I was naked for the entire excursion from the car to get the jars because I was going to lose my clothes every time I went to goo anyway, but my clothes were in the car, along with some very welcome heat for the trip home.

We weren’t really sure what to do with the money. It was hard to explain having it. It was technically the proceeds from criminal activity, though that criminal activity was committed in the body of a now-dead woman by another dead woman. And it was technically stolen from property we didn’t own, so we didn’t want to be showing it off. But we could certainly spend small amounts of it once in a while. But when we got home I just shoved all the bags under my bed and got some more sleep.

In the morning, I paid Dad back the $500 he spent on Stephanie, and Mom called me in sick to school so I wouldn’t go on as little sleep as I’d gotten tonight. I spent about $200 more on a wall safe, one that fit inside a wall and we’d cover over with a picture. Dad and I spent a couple hours installing it that evening. It wasn’t very deep, but I could fit two stacks of bills side-by-side on each shelf, which gave me two stacks each 15 inches tall. I hoped it was enough.

Then instead of just having the money shoved under my bed, we sorted it neatly into stacks and counted it. There was $194,371 in all, mostly in 20s, 50s, and 100s, and it barely fit into the safe.

Mom and Dad agreed this was my money, with restrictions. If I wanted to spend a significant amount of it, I needed their approval. If I wanted to spend a couple hundred bucks on something nice for myself or the family, gifts for friends if not too extravagant, etc., then I could just do it. They gave me a cap of $500 for things that stay within the family and $200 for anything I was giving to anybody else before I had to ask for approval. Of course, anything I buy should be legal for me to buy.

Samantha had wanted to donate a good chunk of the money to the families of the girls she used to earn it. And while that sounds like a nice bit of altruism, I worried it would do more harm than good.

“Wouldn’t that creep you out? A family member committed suicide, and years later you get somebody coming by saying it was actually a ghost who caused her to commit suicide, and here’s some of the money the ghost earned using her body?”

Mom and Dad agreed that was probably not the right way to do it. And we’d contacted NANA about the girl who exorcised Samantha out. She had changed her name and moved out of Normal and we were expressly forbidden from knowing who or where she was now.

So what I suggested instead was to donate some of the money to charities.

It wasn’t unheard of for kids to run fundraisers for charities and then buy a money order to send the money off to the charity, and 10 grand wasn’t a crazy amount to earn this way, so I decided money orders were the way to go. I decided to give 5% of the money to each of five charities, 25% in total. I picked out the charities with Mom’s and Dad’s help, ones that helped the poor and homeless, people with mental health issues, runaways, and suicide prevention. I wanted to find one that helped protect people from malicious ghosts, and we ended up choosing NANA itself for this, even though they’d only managed to help one of the four girls Samantha had possessed here. Maybe with more money they could do a better job.

I made five piles of $9718 each plus a small amount of extra money for the money order fees, went to five different stores that sold money orders, filled them out and mailed them to the various charities. I was $49,000 poorer, but I was still $145,000 richer than I had any right to be.

Afterward, most of the time Samantha was just a passenger unless I asked her to do something, but once in a while she asked me something and I replied to her in my head. Nobody else knew this was happening unless it distracted me from what I was doing, and Samantha quickly learned to wait for idle moments. She was actually being very good. She wasn’t a child, but she had never lived as a teen boy, and she only lived bits and pieces of lives in the world after the electronic and computer revolution, so there were just some things she didn’t understand. She understood cell phones, and cable television, but not computers or the Internet. I tried to answer her questions, and when they prompted more involved demonstrations or lessons, I found times to go through those. Any time was fine for Samantha - she wasn’t doing anything else.

I set aside some time, usually in early mornings and in evenings, to explore what shape-changing Samantha could do. She wasn’t changing me at night now, and in fact slept when I did, just having a small part of herself awake enough to hold my form, whichever form I was in when I went to sleep, which was usually my normal form, unless one of the evening shape sessions went so long I fell asleep during it in some random form. But during these lessons, we explored many forms. Samantha could make me into a dog, a cat, a horse, and other animals, though they were all my size instead of the size they were supposed to be. Samantha explained to me that she couldn’t change the amount of my goo and so was limited to my size. She demonstrated in detail by showing how when she made, for instance, an arm longer, it got narrower. We experimented by changing while standing on a scale. My weight was the same in any form.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in forms other than mine, Shelly’s, and goo, but we did experiment. And I kept the clothes Samantha had bought for Shelly’s body, and I was occasionally seen around the house in her form, enough that my parents weren’t surprised by it.

In May, I was finally able to do what I had seen Samantha do with my body many times, and control the goo myself. At first, the only thing I could do was become goo, and when I let up on it, the goo immediately re-formed into George. Even if I started as Shelly, going to goo and releasing it made me George again. So that was good. At least I’d never forget how to make my own body. But she suggested I learn how to turn myself into Shelly, one body part at a time, as an introduction to making other bodies. At the time, I hoped to make that a summer vacation project, with the idea that by the time I started school again in the fall, I’d be able to assume any shape on my own, without having to ask Samantha to do it for me. But it wasn’t that easy.

A first step was practicing extending one arm, making it longer and necessarily skinnier. Once I was able to do that, and reverse it gradually, rather than just turning it to goo and letting it snap back into my proper shape, Samantha worked with me on other changes. I changed my face and hair in front of a mirror, one piece at a time, changing each part of me to look like Shelly, and by early June I was able to change my whole face at once into Shelly’s face.

Then she started working with me on other body parts. It took a while, and some of the parts were complicated. I practiced making skinnier legs while making more muscular arms at the same time, or vice versa, so I wasn’t changing the length of my limbs, just their thickness, and so I could learn to move goo around to different parts of the body.

In June I was asked to testify in court about the prostitution ring. Or rather, Samantha was. No, make that Shelly was. Stephanie testified first, that she had bound the ghost Samantha Carmichael a.k.a. Shelly Peterson into “this person,” referring to me. I had let Samantha change me fully into Shelly for this, since I was clearly not practiced enough to change myself yet and it was Shelly and not George who they wanted to testify. I wore the clothes she had picked out for what would have been her first day prostituting my body, to be more fully in character. When it was Samantha’s turn to testify, the judge announced to the room what had been arranged already: Samantha and I were to be given immunity for whatever we had done related to prostitution in exchange for the testimony. I was a little worried about revealing the money; was digging that up covered by the immunity? But the questioning did not go that way. They really just wanted Samantha to identify people and describe what went on there, that she had had sex with various men for money. I had to stay there the rest of the day, but they didn’t call me up to testify again, and didn’t ask me to come back for the rest of the trial. I was glad for that. There was a whole row of defendants, including Freddy, other people who helped run the prostitution den, the people who ran the public-facing part of The Can-Can Club, people associated with the other locations Samantha had tried to go to after that one was busted, and three people with magical powers who’d been responsible for all the very effective concealment. Or, at least, they were accused of all those things; Samantha did not have first-hand knowledge of it all, and it probably took many days to get all the witnesses in to testify about all the crimes they were charging them with. For me, it was one day and I went home, and I rewarded Samantha for it by staying as Shelly and in those clothes for the evening.

It was well into July by the time I tried to make breasts on my own, and even though I’d been Shelly many times with fully formed breasts, I still had trouble concentrating when I tried to make them. Too often I was breaking down laughing before I even got started. But the arms and legs practice helped, because I was pulling in mass from my stomach and arms to go into the breasts. Still, what I got was clearly wrong.

After my clumsy attempt to make breasts the way I changed the sizes of my arms and legs, Samantha explained, “Female breasts are actually a lot different from anything you have as George and from what you were doing. The basic structure of the nipples is there, but there are a lot more nerves, milk ducts, and everything. Trust me; just reach into your memory and pull out your memory of Shelly’s breasts. Turn that part of your body into goo, combine it with the goo you pulled from elsewhere, and turn that goo into Shelly’s breasts.”

This was a totally different way of changing my body! It worked, but Mom suggested I buy an anatomy book to help me learn all the body parts, what they looked like, what they were called, and what they did. And that helped also. Shortly before school started in August I had finally mastered it enough to make the breasts and hold them long enough to put on Shelly’s bra over them. So the further elements of my transformation went more slowly since I was also having to deal with school.

In September, Samantha explained hips to me. I knew that as girls developed breasts they also got wider hips, but I didn’t fully understand the details until Samantha made me look at myself in detail in George’s form and in Shelly’s.

“It’s not just that your hips get wider, it’s actually that the legs get further apart. Everything down to the bone moves around to make it possible for you to give birth through there.”

Ah, yes, I remember. When I first started spending time as Shelly, Mom pulled me aside one day while we were Shelly, and she gave me the birds and bees talk a second time, from a girl’s viewpoint. Remember that?

“I certainly do. I could have given you that talk too, but I understood why your mother wanted to do so, so I just patiently waited through it. But right now, I don’t want you to worry about genitals. Just leave them like they are but practice on the shape of the hips. You’ll need to pull in some mass from your legs. Remember to focus on this aspect of Shelly’s body and recreate it. It’s too different from yours to just shift.”

I was getting better. With the shorter practice times available, by the end of September I had this part mastered to the point that I could not only do this but also do the breasts, arms, and face at the same time. I could put on Shelly’s panties (somewhat poorly because my dick and balls were there), her bra, and her dress over them and I actually looked like Shelly.

Naturally genitals were next, and Samantha told me not to worry.

“Unless you are planning on having sex, you don’t need to worry about making proper female genitals yet. They are pretty complicated. It would definitely be a copy job when you do, but it’s a whole lot to copy. Just do this for me. In that internal space inside Shelly’s pelvis, pull your balls inside, and pull in your dick just to where the opening is exposed to the outside. Make all the skin smooth and tight over it. You’ll just have the openings to pee and poop, and you’ll be able to do so the way girls do. And then Shelly’s clothes will fit you, and unless somebody else is seeing you naked, you’ll look right.”

When I thought about it, I realized Samantha was right. The space that would have held Shelly’s vagina and other internal parts was also big enough to hold my dick and balls.

But if I still have my dick, it’ll be possible for me to get an erection. What will happen then? I was worried about it because I had gotten erections three times in the last week while trying to be Shelly.

“That’s why you make the skin smooth and tight. The erection will just back further up inside you.”

I did that, and it was actually pretty easy. And it was also pretty easy for me to combine that with all the other stuff and dress as Shelly, including having her panties fit properly. For the first time, that weekend, I went out with Mom as Shelly to spend some of Samantha’s illicit money to buy some other clothes that fit Shelly, and then spent evenings for a whole week turning into Shelly entirely under my control. And I only lost control and snapped back into George’s shape once, ripping one dress. I was doing everything in Shelly’s form except going to school: My homework, eating, going to the bathroom, everything. I had erections frequently, but nobody could see them, even if I was only wearing tight clothes over my crotch that exposed my female shape there.

When we went shopping, Mom pointed out that I still sounded mostly like George. This pointed out another area I hadn’t fixed yet. So the next week I worked on that. I had made my neck and the parts within it slightly smaller for Shelly. I needed specifically to make the larynx, also called the voice box, narrower within my neck to both reduce the prominence of my Adam’s apple and to change my voice. I didn’t think it actually changed much, but Mom confirmed for me that I sounded a lot more like I had a few years ago before my voice started changing.

Saturday at the end of a second week of being Shelly every evening, I turned into Shelly first thing in the morning. There was one thing I hadn’t done as Shelly, and that was taking a shower. And it was pretty normal. But one thing surprised me. I hadn’t really played around with my breasts much. I knew they were sensitive, but it was only when I was trying to wash them that I realized just how sensitive they really were. Before I knew it, the erection hidden inside me came, and what squirted out of the opening meant for Shelly’s pee wasn’t pee. At least I was in the shower, and could just wash it off.

“Don’t worry about that,” came Samantha’s voice inside my head. “I’ll get you making female genitals later, and you won’t have that problem. They are even more sensitive than the breasts, but when you don’t have male parts at the same time, it’ll probably be easier to manage. You had them before when I made you be Shelly, remember.”

Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to shower.

“True.”

I went back to showering, and the “even more sensitive” comment caused me to come a second time, but I got through it after that, and could even feel my internal erection had gone down by the time I was drying off. Probably a good thing, or else I might have come a third time trying to dry my breasts. I put on the clean outfit I had brought into the bathroom with me, and went out to eat breakfast as Shelly.

Dad was there, and he commented, “Are you going to be Shelly all the time now?”

“No, not all the time. But I am practicing holding the form, and I want to do so across a variety of activities.”

Mom suggested, “If you want to try different activities, how about going trick-or-treating as Shelly?”

“Dear, you know what adult female Halloween costumes look like. Do you think our son-and-occasional-daughter is really ready to go out looking like that?”

“We can find one that’s not overly sexy,” Mom replied.

“I’ll allow it, only if George is OK with it. George, you get to pick the costume and if you can’t find anything you don’t think you can bear to walk around in for a few blocks one night, feel free to call it off at any time.”

“Thanks, Dad. I will try looking for a costume.”

“OK, George. Or should I call you Shelly when you look like that?”

“Um, maybe. How about you do, so that if I reach the point that I’m doing this while someone else is here, they don’t think it’s odd that George is a girl.”

“OK, Shelly.”

So that’s how I ended up going out with Mom and looking at girls’ Halloween costumes a mere 4 days before the big event. And Dad was right, most of them were more sexy looking than I was ready to go out in public, even though I’d arranged for Mom to take me several miles from here where nobody would know me.

Eventually, I decided on a Supergirl costume. There were knockoff sexy versions of this costume, but I stuck with the traditional one. It was skin-tight but completely covered everything above the waist out to the wrists and neck. The bottom was a cheerleader-length skirt over what turned out to be the bottom of the leotard, which I saw fastened in the crotch so I could pull it on like a shirt.

Mom suggested, “You should get skin-colored opaque tights. It could be cold Halloween night, and they will help insulate your legs a little. That’s kind of a girl secret. Samantha could probably tell you if you asked her about this sort of thing. Also, you should get a pair of panties the same color as the costume to help make sure nothing shows through.”

“Nothing, out of the nothing I have down there,” I joked. “Just kidding. I know you meant my panties of another color.”

Mom helped me learn to put those tights on when I got home, and I learned why they were called tights.

“They are really supposed to be this tight. Ideally nobody notices them and they just look like your legs,” she explained. “But you won’t be shivering.”

“Thanks, Mom. I remember shivering in what I thought was a dream one of those nights Samantha went out in Shelly’s body at the start of this whole thing. But it was starting to get warmer then, and not all the nights were cold.”

It turned out Halloween was a warm night and I could have gone without the tights, but I was determined to wear them after putting in the effort to learn how to get them on.

Nobody really had any chance of guessing who I really was, since on top of doing this outside of my neighborhood, also very few people had seen me as Shelly.

At one corner, a kid dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk slipped and fell. A moment later I realized what surprised him as a second Supergirl accompanied by Superman coming up from the other direction. I and the other Supergirl helped him up, and Mxyzptlk thanked us and introduced himself, or as I then realized, herself as Robin. The other two were an apparently cross-dressed couple; Supergirt was named Freddy and Superman was Bella. I got so flustered I introduced myself as George, Shelly, and Samantha. I hope they didn’t think I was too weird.

I got a lot of candy, so I shared with Mom and Dad, each of us taking a piece or two after dinner and planning to do so every night for a while.

The very next morning, Samantha wanted to get me going on copying female genitals, the ones from her version of Shelly, but I put a stop to it.

No, Samantha. Not yet. I’m satisfied now I can make myself into a convincing fake girl anytime I want. Well, as long as that girl looks like Shelly. You’re going to have me using tampons and dildos soon the way you’re going, but that’s your life, not mine. Let’s work on other bodies so I’m not restricted to only George and Shelly.

“I wasn’t going to do that to you, Georgie.”

You would have before I took control! You were one day away from having Shelly have sex with guys before I had Dad put a stop to it.

“I’m sorry, Georgie. You’re right. It’s your body. But I have to tell you something. I can only make Shelly in such detail because I lived in her body. When I copied Freddy, and your dad, and the other people you saw me copy, I was only faking.”

Faking? I thought you looked like a good Freddy, and Dad thought you did him well, too.

I mostly just copied their faces, and flattened the breasts. I was actually a girl in my crotch those times. It was only after you brought me in for good during the seance that I even learned how to make male genitals. Before that I only possessed you as goo.

Wow. Good fakes, then.

I can show you how to do these things, and it will be good to help you learn to copy anybody.

I went out to breakfast as George and explained to my parents.

“I’m done being Shelly for a while. Samantha wanted to get me started copying female genitals, but I think it’s more important to learn how to copy other people besides Shelly.”

“That sounds good, son,” Mom told me.

“I’m glad you are exercising some control over your relationship with Samantha. It is your body, after all,” Dad said.

“That’s what I told her. She explained these lessons are going to be harder, but I think they will be more valuable in the end.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Dad replied. “The main thing you will get out of having female genitals is that you will be able to have sex as a woman, and that can wait, though I’m sure your mom and Samantha will tell you it is important.”

Mom just nodded.

“There is actually one other advantage. By not having concealed male genitals while I’m in a woman’s body, I won’t come in the male way if I accidentally arouse myself too much.”

“Couldn’t you just have no genitals?” Mom asked.

“Maybe.”

Samantha, how hard would it be to make me have no genitals?

“You’d have to improvise. I never tried taking away things, but see if you can make yourself have no pinky on your left hand.”

I tried to do this, but I couldn’t.

“Samantha suggested trying to see if I could have no pinky, and I couldn’t do it. That probably means I can’t have no genitals, either. But I can make it smaller,” I said, demonstrating the latter option. Then I had a brainstorm.

“I should be able to make the hidden male genitals those of a 10-year-old. Then I wouldn’t come.”

“Now that’s a good idea!” Mom, Dad, and even Samantha all said at the same time.

I had to look deep into my memory to recall 10-year-old George, but I did. I tested the 10-year-old genitals idea by putting them on George first, and confirming I couldn’t get an erection that way. Then every day for a week, I showered as my version of Shelly with the genitals this way, and never came during those showers. The idea worked!

The rest of the time, Samantha was mostly helping me work on faces. There were pictures of faces everywhere and lots of options to duplicate them. Mom had a great idea of buying a woman’s makeup mirror, which would give me a closeup of my face and allow me to compare with the face I was trying to copy on the computer next to it. Faces were such an important part of how people identified other people that Samantha was convinced if I could do the face well, I only had to do the rest of the body vaguely right to pass.

“By the way, you’ll never need makeup. Color comes easy with the goo. Did you notice, when I first started taking over your goo, that time I went to Wal-Mart, that I looked in a mirror by the makeup counter and adjusted my colors?”

No. Must’ve been too subtle for me to notice.

“It was mainly my lip color and the bit above my eyes representing eye shadow. I’d put in some color when I made the face, but I was checking how it looked. The basic colors representing Shelly are so ingrained in me that they came automatically when I was copying her from my memory, but I did different makeup colors at times.”

So can you explain how I do colors?

“Well you already made Shelly’s hair the right color. Just think about how you did that.”

Hmm. Yeah, got it!

Pretty soon, like a kid who has just discovered a new toy, I was giving myself blue hair, green skin, yellow lips, and other fun shades, before I got serious and tried making myself look like various ethnicities. I discovered one limit to my power, though. I couldn’t make part of my goo into clothes, weapons, or other objects. I could, to some degree, make an approximation of a sword or spear by shaping my arm and hand, but it was still my arm, and wasn’t any harder.

Samantha told me in my head, “I couldn’t make clothes from the goo either. That’s why I went out and bought some.”

Samantha continued giving me lessons in changing my body various ways, but I had a funny thought when I woke up this Saturday morning, the start of two weeks off school for Christmas break, and I tried to take all the color out of my body. What I intended to do was go invisible, but the actual result was that I kept my body shape but I was the silvery color of the goo. I stood in front of the mirror so Samantha could see clearly what I’d done.

Ta da!

“Hey, that’s really cool, Georgie! We look like some kind of robot or something.”

It’s just my body with no color at all. I guess the color of the goo shows through, even when the goo is formed into skin and organs.

“That’s interesting. That’s probably what happens when we stretch a lot, too. The color takes a moment to catch up and the silver shows for a moment.”

I changed it to Shelly’s body with my current modifications, and took out all the color.

“Ooh. That looks awesome!” Samantha practically shouted inside my head. “But try this. Make your nipples and areolae really small and the breasts slightly pointed.”

Specific changes like this were what we’d been practicing a lot lately. I did it, and I liked the look. I could see why Samantha suggested it.

“Now get rid of the pubic hair.”

I made that change as well.

“Awesome!” Samantha said to me in my head. “You could actually run around naked this way. People would either think you were a sophisticated robot or a girl in an all-over metallic bodysuit.”

Ha ha! You’re right! A solution to that problem of not being able to make clothes! I said to her as I looked at myself from various angles in the mirror. So I should go down for breakfast like this.

“Do it! do it!”

So I did. Mom and Dad were used to seeing me come down with a different look every day except on school days, when I stuck to normal George. Both of them laughed when they saw me. After I got my cereal and sat down at the table to eat it, Dad started singing.

She’s a... quicksilver girl

A lover of the world

She spreads her wings

And she’s free

“I have wings?”

“No, it’s just part of the song. It’s an old song, but it’s by Steve Miller, who I think is still performing after all these years. You can probably find it online. I haven’t heard it in a long time but you reminded me of it.”

Mom came close to me and whispered in my ear, “Are you naked?” and I whispered back, “Yes.”

I finished and put away breakfast and left the room without Dad ever commenting on my nudity. Not sure whether he noticed. But when I caught Mom alone I soon afterward I talked to her about it.

“I haven’t been able to make the goo into actual clothing, but Samantha suggested making my nipples really small and the breasts slightly pointed, which makes it look like something covering the breast rather than an actual breast. And then I hid the pubic hair, and my fake girl crotch is almost completely smooth already. And I had to test it out. I don’t know whether Dad noticed.”

“He certainly noticed you, but I also don’t know whether he figured out you’re naked. You’ve been making a lot of different looks and he doesn’t know all your clothes like I do. I noticed your nails, though.”

I looked at my hand. Yeah, you could totally tell my hand wasn’t covered by something.

“So what if I did something like this?”

I made my hands, feet, head, and neck normally colored and left the rest of me silvery.

“That actually looks a lot more convincing as clothing,” Mom replied. “You could also try coloring the other parts of you like more normal clothes. Make seam lines and everything.”

“Oh, God, seams? Let me go look at some actual clothes and I’ll find you later.”

I found it too difficult to make fake seam lines, but I made the top pink and the bottom royal blue split at the point where my pants would come up to, and Mom liked that. So then I stuffed an actual pink top I had similar to that and a pair of Shelly’s jeans with pillows and towels to make a makeshift mannequin, adjusted the color of the “pants” on my body, and used that as a model to work from in trying to add those seam lines. It was too much to try today, but I did manage to add the outline of a pocket on one butt cheek.

I was also able to memorize what I had done so far so that after spending time as George I could jump back to this body. That was one of the things I had been practicing with Samantha, memorizing whole bodies so I could recreate them quickly. Every time I add one thing I add it to the memorized version.

Mom and Dad had gotten me some Christmas presents, including Mom getting me some more clothes for Shelly’s body that I wouldn’t have considered but I admitted were actually nice. But they also gave me a card they said was a ticket to spend up to $500 of the money Samantha helped me recover on fun stuff. So I took some of that money and went out today.

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I bought several different kinds of construction toys and clay which I thought might help me better visualize other bodies I wanted to make. And then I saw a comic book store.

I hadn’t really been buying comic books, but I was inspired by my experience as uncolored goo. Specifically, I thought I remembered there being some characters, fictional heroes, who were just made of something like ice or metal, and didn’t wear any clothes over it. I mean, everybody knew Donald Duck didn’t wear pants, but he’s a duck. These were human-looking people just made out of something other than flesh and bone.

I searched the whole shop, and sure enough, I found 8 comic books featuring 5 different characters who fit that description, and bought all of them to study later. Well, to read, but also study how those characters were depicted.

The comic books were disappointing. It turned out two of them actually wore skin-tight bodysuits and weren’t actually naked, including the only woman among them. But three of them, as far as I could tell, actually went around naked. The drawings simply never depicted them in poses where you could see anything between their legs. But you could see their chests all the time. None of them have nipples. For that matter, they usually depicted them in ways you couldn’t see their nails, either, and when you could see where their nails should be, they simply didn’t have any.

I’d been developing a clothed version of Shelly’s body and I’d already figured out how to shrink the nipples and the two openings in my crotch each down to the size of a hair follicle. I’d gone with rounded breasts rather than the pointed look Samantha had first suggested, which I thought looked more convincing, as if I had some bra on under what I wanted people to see as clothing.

But looking at this, I removed the color and I shrank the nails down, too, letting the skin close up around them. And it did now look like I had some incredibly flashy bodysuit on more than it did that I was naked.

But it was too flashy for practical use. The fake-clothed body I’d been making was better, and even then I didn’t feel like I’d use that in public except in emergency, if I was left without clothes perhaps after having gone to goo and lost them. But if I did, I’d be better off trying to fake-clothe Shelly. Boys didn’t usually wear such tight clothing and the look was much less convincing

Mom decided it was a good time before classes started again to go get me tested and registered with NANA, and last week she got me a Thursday appointment. I didn’t realize until she explained it that it was going to be an all day thing. They were going to do the tests like the medium Stephanie had done, but in a lot greater detail to test me for every known power.

A tall black woman came out and led me inside to run the testing. The first part was physical testing and they first had me put on an all-over bodysuit.

“I shapeshift, so is this suit going to be able to fit other bodies?”

“As long as you don’t change too much. It’s designed to stretch a lot to support most bodies. We’re not going to be testing your ability to warp outside of normal human shapes in this first part, so it should be fine.”

She had me try some other shapes for some of the tests, more thin and tall, more short and muscular, male and female, but except for the muscular forms being able to lift a little more, and the bodies farther from George’s and Shelly’s shapes being more awkward for me, I didn’t notice any difference in how I performed.

After a bunch of those tests, there was a chance for me to shower, change back into my normal clothes, and go eat lunch. Afterward, there were a bunch of tests where they quickly figured out I didn’t have certain other kinds of powers like magic. In one part of this they had a psychic who could communicate with Samantha directly. Samantha relayed to me inside my head what she was getting.

Then they focused on my shapeshifting. They had me put on something like a sports bra and skin-tight shorts for this part, made out of that same stretchable material, so most of my body was free to change shapes, and I could be male or female, and they could see the things I could do with colors on my skin. As before, I was unable to make clothes, tools, weapons, and such. Also, the goo isn’t actually liquid. It stays together in one semi-solid clump. I can’t turn into raindrops and rain down on somebody.

They did find some tricks that I could do with the goo. First, there was Samantha’s trick from very early on, stretching to reach a high window and pulling myself up by retracting the goo. I could use basically the same trick to go through a small hole, making a hand on the other side to hold on with and bringing the rest of myself through as goo. This worked even down a long straight pipe, to about 12 feet long, and around curves for shorter distances. Of course, I lost my clothes going through the pipe, but it was a chance to use the ability I developed to paint my skin with fake clothes. Another of Samantha’s tricks was to leap from a tall height landing as goo. The goo doesn’t have any bones to break, and it cushions itself, so I could fall any distance they had the facility to check easily, up to a 10-story building, land as goo, and then simply remake a body out of the goo. Between that and the ability to look like other people, they definitely thought they’d have some reason to call on me. And I’d get paid when called upon.

Finally, I had to choose a code name.

“Quicksilver,” I suggested.

“Sorry, that name’s taken,” the woman at the counter said.

“Quicksilver Girl,” I tried next, changing myself to have Shelly’s goo body to go with the name.

“Nope, sorry, that name’s taken too.”

Samantha, would you mind if I used your actual name in my codename? It seems like I need something more unique.

“Go ahead,” she told me in my head. “Nobody’s going to associate this with my original body. We aren’t even using the original Samantha’s shape.”

“Samantha Quicksilver.”

“That name’s available. Congratulations, you’re Samantha Quicksilver.”

The links in this article go to YouTube. At the end there is a playlist of all the songs.

January 22, 2007

Saturday I learned the lie everybody around here has been living.

Some people here randomly at some point in their lives, commonly during teen years but sometimes at other times, develop powers. I thought that was a thing that only happened in the comic books, but it’s real. At least, here in Normal it is. It doesn’t happen elsewhere, or else those other places are hiding it as well as the people of Normal try to.

They hid it from me successfully until they decided I needed to know. And that need was because one of the boys in my gym class developed a power that changed him into a girl, so she’s going to be dressing and showering with the girls now and not with me; that was the thing they couldn’t hide with magic.

I had been in the locker room with her when two other boys who apparently already knew the secret were shoving her around and announced she was a girl to everybody. It didn’t make any sense to me; I didn’t see a girl. But now I know. A magic spell over the whole city of Normal hides abnormal things from people who don’t know; now that I know, they told me I’m going to see changed people in my school, my neighborhood, and elsewhere in Normal.

And I did. Come gym class today, I discovered not only is she now a girl, but a bird-girl, covered with feathers from head to toe. And she had the feathers since the start of the month, but the spell hid them from me. I’ve seen a few other obviously changed people today, and there’s no telling how many of my classmates have powers that you just can’t see.

And this explains why that one radio station KNRM plays so much comic book music. I thought we just had a lot of fans here, but it’s actually personal for a bunch of people. But, for now at least, I’m just David Daniels, 13-year-old middle-school student with no powers.

The whole powers thing has mostly seemed overblown. After the first week I didn’t encounter any more people with obvious powers. There were only a few and none of them seemed to have great powers. Maybe some people here get cool powers, but I talked with the bird girl today at lunch. She didn’t want to be a bird, didn’t want to be a girl, and doesn’t even fly. And she has to deal with laying a big egg every month instead of periods; I don’t know whether that is a plus or minus, but if she hadn’t gotten stuck being a girl she wouldn’t have periods or eggs. If that’s what powers are like, no thanks.

Today I got the creepiest feeling listening to KNRM. I don’t know why. They were playing one of those comic book songs that are so popular here, “My Secret Origin” by Ookla the Mok.

I’m waiting for my Lady of the Lake to come and crown me king.

I’m waiting for my rocket to land so I can get my power ring.

I’m waiting for my radioactive meteorite to fall.

I’m waiting but I ain’t got no goddamn meteorite at all.

I’m waiting for my story to begin.

In Normal, it was really only the meteor which gave everybody their powers, and it fell a long time ago and just keeps on giving. That other stuff is just fiction. But it’s clear why this song resonates with people here. I’ve seen that powers can mess some people up more than it helps them, but there are plenty of people who’d rather roll the dice and hope for an interesting life with powers rather than live a boring one, not that there is really anything they can do to influence it except stay in Normal. I’m still not convinced.

But I’ve heard the song before, lots of times, several times since I learned powers here are real, and it didn’t affect me like it did tonight. I had to change the station to one of the ones with normal music. Any other station, really.

I was kind of bored, studying for finals, and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on the radio it happened. Well into the song, but still before it should have been over, the music stopped. Not because somebody turned the music off, but because I was in a different place. There was a weird building with a big pyramid in front of it. You could see the framework inside holding up the pyramid. A lot of people were scattered around a large plaza.

I was there for a few seconds, and then the music resumed and I was back with my study materials. I wondered if I was studying too hard and starting to lose it, and I decided to take a break in any case.

I mentioned it to Mom, and she suggested maybe it was a power. So now I was watching for it to happen again.

School was over and I was home for the summer. Normal was throwing a sort of city-wide party to celebrate summer, and I got together with my girlfriend Kendra for a walk through the festivities.

There was one guy who was doing his best Sinatra impression, crooning “My Kind of Town” ... and suddenly I was somewhere else. There was a train running on tracks above the road. “Wait!” I thought. “Chicago! The El! That song was about Chicago...”

By the time I finished that thought I was back beside Kendra.

“David! What happened? You disappeared for a few seconds.”

‘Kendra, I think it’s a power.”

Just then I was back in Chicago again for as short a visit as the first one.

When I returned, I started running, yelling back to Kendra, “I gotta get home and tell Mom.” She ran after me, and caught up to me because I blinked out once more before it stopped.

“Mom! It happened again!”

“What happened, David?”

“My power took me to another place. And Kendra saw it.”

Kendra was there beside me now. “Yeah, like David said, he disappeared from beside me for a few seconds. It happened three times.”

“OK. You said that happened before, so tell me specifically what happened this time.”

“A guy in the square was doing a Frank Sinatra impression, singing ‘My Kind of Town,’ a song about Chicago. And then there was a train on tracks above the road. I’ve never actually been there to see it myself, but I thought that could be the El that Chicago is famous for.”

“Could be. Chicago isn’t the only city with elevated trains, but it makes sense. You were listening to music the other time, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m going to get you a testing appointment with NANA. Until then, just to be safe, try to avoid music, OK?”

“OK, I’ll try.”

So Kendra stayed with me the rest of the day, and she called home.

“Hi, Mom. I’m still with David. Yes, we’re both safe, but we’re going to be staying at his house for a while because of a possible issue with him developing a power. Yes, I’ll keep you updated.”

We talked about various things, including when Kendra’s brother developed electrical powers two years ago and burned out every electronic device in their house. It cost some money to replace those things, but they’ve started recovering the money. Now they now live off the grid, as her brother charges up a big battery periodically to run everything in their house.

Testing

June 18, 2007

They couldn’t get me a testing appointment until Monday, not because it was Sunday yesterday, but because they wanted to have a teleporter, a GPS tracking device, something to hide my teleports from outsiders, and a bunch of songs on hand. There were actually three people there for my testing.

“Hi, David, I’m Chris. I’m going to be in charge of your testing.”

“I’m Cynthia. I’m a skilled teleporter, and I’m here to rescue you if you end up somewhere that you need it.”

“And I’m Fred. I make magic charms that all our teleporters carry which help hide their comings and goings from outsiders. The charms don’t make them invisible; they just make it so that people don’t notice teleporters suddenly appearing and suddenly disappearing. If you don’t pop out immediately, you would be able to interact with people normally while you are there.”

Fred came over and handed me two charms on necklaces. He continued, “The second one is a magical GPS tracker. It won’t be blocked in any way by the don’t-notice-me charm, and it sends its location back magically to the receiver Cynthia is holding, anywhere in the world, not dependent on the Internet or cell access, and it never has to be recharged.”

Chris said, “Now I want you to tell me what powers you experienced.”

“The first time was about a week ago. I was studying and I had the radio on and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on when suddenly I was some other place. There was a strange looking building with a pyramid in front of it that you could see partially through. You could see a lattice structure supporting the pyramid.”

“Well, the most famous pyramid like that is at the Louvre in Paris.”

Chris typed out some commands on a computer and a picture of it showed up on a large screen on one wall of the room we were all in.

“No, that’s not it,” I told him. “The pyramid, I couldn’t say for sure, but that was not the building next to it. The building was not fancy like that, just weird.”

He did some searches and then up popped the right building. “That’s it!” I exclaimed.

“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. That’s certainly one way of interpreting the heart of rock and roll. Now I want to test this point, now that you have those charms on. I’m going to play the song here - I have the entire catalogs from several of the local radio stations on this computer - and we’re going to see when you teleport.”

It was weird. The song mentions a whole bunch of cities, but I didn’t go to any of those, until, in what turned out to be the last segment of the song which mentions cities, right after he sings “The heart of rock and roll is still beating” he says “in Cleveland.” That’s when I teleported. After I came back, I didn’t teleport again as the song finished, but when he replayed the song I teleported at that point, and to the same location. Cynthia came and watched me the first time, close enough that I could see her, but the second time she didn’t, and I saw her taking notes when I returned.

“You went to the same spot both times,” Cynthia commented.

“Well, we’ve established that that part of that song makes you teleport to that location. If we can figure out other teleports maybe we can understand more precisely how your power works.”

So they tested me with a recording of the real Sinatra singing “My Kind of Town” and confirmed I was going to a spot next to the El, the same spot, and after I came back, each time that he sang “Chicago” I went there again, which was several times. And of course Sinatra has an even more famous city song, “New York, New York.” Indeed, that took me to a place I could see several of the famous buildings in New York City which I recognized, even though I didn’t know what some of them were called.

Next they tried “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston, which is a somewhat fictionalized story about the band itself, and starts “Well, we were just another band out of Boston.” That line sent me to some place in Boston. I didn’t know the specific location I ended up, but I did know about the Citgo sign by Fenway Park, and I saw that. Cynthia confirmed I was in that area.

“One of the stations has a DJ originally from Boston who moved here to retire, and when his powers rejuvenated him, he restarted his career at a station here. So we have a whole bunch of Boston songs. Let’s see if they all take you to the same place.”

They didn’t. “MTA” by the Kingston Trio, popularly known as “Charlie on the MTA,” was a song about Boston’s subway system, and it specifically mentions Scollay Square station. I ended up inside a station called Government Center, but they explained to me that it’s the same station, just renamed. There’s a more recent and slightly modified punk version of the song by the Dropkick Murphys which took me to the same spot. They played “Dirty Water” by The Standells which I thought was strange, but it took me to a park which ran along part of the Charles River, which they explained is where the dirty water in the song is found (and each “dirty water” took me there). But “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison took me to a spot along the Mystic River, a smaller one that flows into the Charles, and thankfully not actually into the river.

“Wait, how many rivers in Boston have songs about them?”

“Well, I threw that one in as a kind of a test,” Chris explained. “That song isn’t actually about the Mystic River, but especially because he ‘sails into the Mystic’ at one point, a lot of people think it is. Some of these other locations have been mentioned just once in a song with other locations also mentioned, but the most well known bits are where you ended up. Several of Boston’s subway stations are mentioned in “MTA,” but Scollay Square where his wife gives him the sandwich is what people remember most. So it might be that popular opinion has something to do with it. It’s clearly not your belief, though, because you had no idea about the Dirty Water song until after you teleported to the Charles. I want to try other tests, but it’ll take some time to set them up. What happens if you hear a song that is clearly about a particular place but it’s brand new and doesn’t have any popularity at all? I don’t have one, but I know somebody who might.”

He came up with several more New York songs, and some Los Angeles ones including “I Love LA” by Randy Newman, and these songs took me all over those cities. “Land Down Under” by Men at Work took me to a spot where I could see Sydney Opera House every time the title was sung. The song is only generically about the entire country, and in parts of it, a man from Australia who isn’t actually in Australia when the singer encounters him, but that was one of the most iconic sights there.

We took a break, and then they provided me with an iPod and showed me how to use it. The songs I’d just been teleporting from listening to were on it, and I was going to either listen to a prepared list of songs or put one on repeat and see if I could stay there and walk around the area, whether it would keep teleporting me back to the starting spot, or whatever else might happen. And it turned out that as long as the song was playing uninterrupted, even looping back to the start of the song after it was finished, I stayed there and could move about. It didn’t keep teleporting me back to the landing point. If another song started after the one ended, I still stayed where I was, until I reached a teleport trigger in another song. This was good. I could actually go somewhere and do something, though I had to be listening to music continuously to stay there.

When I came back from this set of tests, they had brought a space suit into the room.

“You’re going to send me to space? Why do you even have a space suit?”

“Well, some of the people with zero-gravity-based flying powers can escape the atmosphere, and they need something like this if they do. But what we’re actually going to do is send you to the moon. Your GPS won’t work there, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out if that’s where you are.”

They played “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra. Obviously one of the stations had somebody who loved his songs. But nothing happened.

“Why didn’t it work?” I asked.

“Most likely, your power isn’t strong enough. Australia is on the other side of the world, but the moon is 30 times as far away.”

After I got out of the space suit, we had a break for lunch, and after lunch, they tested whether I had any other powers. At first the tests were unassisted by music, to get a feel for my abilities, but then they had me repeating tests with various songs playing, a lot of them from KNRM’s catalog of comic book music. REM’s “I Am Superman” didn’t make me literally Superman, and I wasn’t able to fly, but I could run faster and lift more weight when the song was playing. The theme from Spider-Man, whether the new cover by Michael Bublé or the classic version, didn’t let me shoot webs from my fingers, but it did let me climb the wall. “A Little Prayer (Wolverine’s Theme)” by Jewel did nothing at all for me; I didn’t get adamantium claws, didn’t heal unusually fast, and didn’t get augmented sight and smell. “Das Uber Tuber” didn’t turn me into whatever that Mr. Potato Head character in the song was meant to be. But that reminded me of something.

“Hey, while you have Ookla the Mok playing, can you try ‘My Secret Origin’? The day before I teleported for the first time, that song was playing and I got a really weird feeling. If it was a power, I didn’t notice what. But whatever it was creeped me out so much I had to turn it off. That’s how I ended up on a regular station the next day.”

Chris played the song, and nothing happened. They let it play all the way to the end.

“Nope, nothing this time. Maybe it wasn’t the song.”

Chris suggested, “It still could have been. I have a couple ideas, but heck if we can ever test them. The song is about getting powers, so one possibility is that it gave you the power, and the feeling was the result of your body changing to have your power. Unless we have a song that takes away your power so that we can use the song to give it back, we could never test it, and I don’t know what would do that, anyway. My second idea is that it lets you detect when somebody is in the process of gaining powers. And you happened to hear it when you were gaining yours. Massive coincidence if it happened, and pretty massive coincidence if you ever hear the song again at the same moment you are near someone else gaining powers, depending on how close you actually have to be. The farther the distance, the more likely and less useful it is. If you simply detected that someone in Normal was getting powers, what are we going to do, do test everybody?”

I laughed.

“Let’s just forget about that power until we get more evidence. If you ever get that feeling again, or anything weird during that song, make a note and let me know. But I do have one more important test for you. Hang on a sec.”

Chris left and came back with an assistant, each of them pulling a clothes rack with various shirts and jackets hanging from it.

“I know you take your clothes and other carried items with you when you teleport. I want to find the limit. I’m going to put ‘Dirty Water’ on, and each time you come back here, grab one more shirt or jacket and add it to what you have on already. Cynthia’s going to go watch if anything falls off there and I’ll watch here.”

After a bit it got difficult to layer on more coats, and Chris clearly realized that and slowed the pace of the repeating segment of the song. Eventially I was struggling under the weight of almost the entire two racks when Chris stopped the music.

“OK, I don’t know if that one fell off because it was too far from your body or too much weight, but we’re going to test it.”

Chris helped me take off and hang up all the extra clothes, and he then put one cost on me and put a bunch of small weights in the pockets. After confirming I could teleport with all that weight, again I added more jackets to it. It took a lot less this time before I stopped bringing all the coats with me. They weighed me with all the coats and confirmed I could take approximately 65 pounds of stuff with me. And then Chris showed up with even more weights, and had me just wear one big parka with lots of big pockets and every time I came back, he handed me more weights to stuff in the pockets. This time, when it got too heavy, the entire parka stayed behind when I teleported. The power treated it as a single unit. The weight was the same.

“That’s useful to know,” I said.

“Well, that’s it for today, Normally it would be the end, period, but there are a lot more songs I’d like to test out but which require more setup. But I’ll let you choose a code name and then go home.”

“Because of the way my power is triggered, I think The Listener is a good name.”

He typed it in. “Looks like that’s available. Not surprising, since I’ve never heard of anybody else with powers like yours.”

I was back in testing in the morning, and I got to see the other songs they wanted to test.

First off, they brought in a live musician. Not the crooner from the square the other day. This guy wrote his own songs, and he had written a new one in the last couple days about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, because the entire NANA testing group had only been able to find one song about the city and none about the arch. The new song didn’t do anything for me, though, despite being more clearly about the arch than a lot of the songs that did make me teleport were about their subjects. So they decided there was some way my power triggered off popular opinion of the songs, and I couldn’t simply write my own songs to get powers, unless I could get them recorded and recognized by people. They then played the one St. Louis song they knew before, “Meet Me in St. Louis” from one oldies station’s music catalog, and I did get to go to St. Louis, but not to the arch. I was in some park, which Chris explained afterward was in 1904 part of the fairgrounds for the World Fair held there that year. The song was written that year for the fair and that was where the characters were supposed to meet. The arch wasn’t built yet.

Next they took me outside into a field. Chris explained that there was a class for those whose powers let them fly starting next week, and recommended it for me if I could get off the ground, but with a whole playlist of flying songs, including R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” I wasn’t able to get off the ground even for a second, not even wearing cardboard wings. I felt pretty silly, and I didn’t believe I could fly.

“How’s your swimming?” Chris asked me next.

“Um, I think I won’t drown?”

“Well, just in case, we’re going to have a lifeguard on hand.”

He took me to a swimming pool at the college, which he said was the only one in Normal equipped with an underwater sound system, and they’d rented it for an hour. He handed me swim trunks, pointed me at the locker room, and I changed, and went in for a swim. Indeed, I didn’t drown, but I almost did trying to dive and swim underwater. I surfaced and then completed a lap across the pool with some difficulty.

Then they played Ookla the Mok’s “Arthur Curry” which was probably the only song about Aquaman anywhere. I didn’t grow gills or anything, but I did swim better. I wasn’t convinced I couldn’t learn to swim that well just by practicing, without the song, though, and the setup of being able to listen to a song underwater was pretty unlikely. This wasn’t going to be a power I could practically use, and Chris said he only tested it to see if I got any benefit from it. I didn’t get any benefit when he played one of the songs about Superman underwater; in fact, I was actually less coordinated at swimming when my strength was increased above what I was used to.

After I got dried off and changed, they bought me lunch, and we went back into the building for a session of songs that might give me other kinds of powers. Some songs about reading minds, including “Read My Mind” by The Killers which was new and playing on some stations right now, let me read a person’s mind, but only if I was physically touching the person, and the song playing made it hard to concentrate, but I could, for example, identify a card the person had just looked at.

There were also songs that gave me magical abilities, including “Magic” by The Cars, but probably really weak ones, and I also needed to concentrate on the actual magic, and it was hard with the song going. I managed to cast the simplest spell, showing that it could potentially work, but realistically my magic ability was 0. I could see why Chris left these options to day 2.

Chris decided I was pretty safe at this point. Songs that let me do things other than teleport were probably going to give me low-level versions of those powers that I was going to have to work at to do anything at all with, so the main thing was going to be the sometimes uncontrolled teleporting to places that had songs written about them. And with my charm, I wasn’t going to stand out when I did that.

After dinner, I had a long call with Kendra, telling her as much of my experience the last two days as I could.

Rather than an iPod, I ended up choosing another kind of MP3 player that had a set of programmable buttons. I could set up a series of destinations, each song playing on repeat while it was selected, make playlists with specific sequences of songs (which could also be assigned to those buttons), or search the entire list of songs by first letter of the song title and then scrolling by song to pick a specific song to play.

And then I tested out lots more songs to see if they would teleport me. At this point, I was testing songs with cities and landmarks in their titles or in their lyrics (to the extent I could search for that), and trying to find them on YouTube or anywhere. Just two weeks after my testing I’d built up a list of 200 usable songs, of which I’d acquired copies of 40 from a mixture of online purchases and used CD stores.

NANA had given me the magically connected GPS unit, which recorded places I had recently been detected so I could record them in a spreadsheet along with the songs that took me there. I also had a private Google map with numbered pins at the locations that matched to rows in the spreadsheet. I was hoping to eventually find routes to get anywhere in the world, though I expected there would be locations that weren’t practical to reach.

I was done with the city-name songs after a couple weeks, and since then I had just been trying to listen to a variety of music in case something else interesting comes up, often switching radio stations when a song that was clearly having no effect came on. And I did find more of those songs.

But then when Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman” was playing, suddenly I discovered that I was one. Well, a girl.

“Mom!”

I shut off the music and went to find her. And she was running to me at my scream.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Helen Reddy was singing ‘I Am Woman’ and she made me into one.”

“Are you still female?”

I looked at myself. The small boobs under my T-shirt that I had first noticed were still there. I stuck a hand down into my shorts.

“100% girl,” I replied.

“Your voice changed, too. You sound a lot like you did a couple years ago before your voice started to change. I mean, before you started developing a man’s voice.”

“Hmm, I didn’t notice. But now that you mention it, I can tell my voice is different. But why didn’t I change back when I turned off the music?”

“I don’t know. But maybe we can play a different song to change you back.”

“Hmm. That’s a good idea. But what song celebrates being a man?”

“Try ‘Macho Man.’ It’s a song by the Village People.”

I found the song on YouTube, played it, and soon found myself back in the body I was used to. And stayed there after I stopped the song.

“Well that’s a relief. Thanks, Mom.”

Mom didn’t let it end there, though. She had me turn female again and gave me a long talk, similar to one I’d before, but from a girl’s viewpoint. Instead of being careful not to get a girl pregnant, it was being careful to avoid letting myself get pregnant. I assured her I had no interest in changing into a girl, but since I could never be sure I had 100% control of this power, Mom insisted on giving me the whole talk.

Of course this meant I needed another round of testing. This was thankfully short and I never left the building, but I had my tracker just in case. Chris was there to lead it again.

There weren’t many songs that turned me into a girl, but “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” did it. They’d brought a doctor in this time to examine me, inside and out. I learned that a “physical” exam for a woman means looking inside the vagina. That was weird and unpleasant. At least he said I looked normal. He also gave me a close study outside my body, and pointed out to me in a mirror the subtle differences when I changed. The hair on top of my head stayed the same, but the tiny trace of a mustache I’d started to grow, really just a few hairs and not anything people would actually notice as a mustache, was gone when I was a girl. The similarly sparse hair that had started to grow on my arms wasn’t completely absent, but there was even less of it when I was a girl. And my Adam’s apple had vanished, and my waist was a little narrower and my hips a little wider. The doctor explained how women’s hips looked wider because their legs were actually farther apart to allow space for the birth canal. He explained that the breasts and hips would probably both get larger as I got older, assuming that the woman I was changing into aged at the same rate I did.

What was more surprising was that any gender-bending songs, such as “Lola” and even the last verse of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” where the roles are reversed, made me a mixture of male and female. I still had my developing breasts, and the extra hair had vanished, but I had my male voice, Adam’s apple, and everything below the waist was male.

The doctor explained, “This state is common for transsexuals. They take hormones that allow their breasts to grow, remove their body hair with electrolysis, and dress and live as a woman in this form. It’s as far as many of them ever go.”

“How much farther could they go?”

“Well, outside Normal, they get surgery to remove their male genitals and give them the semblance of female genitals. It’s never fully functional but ideally they get a vagina that they can use for sex.”

“And here, obviously it happens automatically sometimes.”

“Yes. Some people get powers which change their genitals to the opposite sex, and sometimes this makes them fully functional as the other sex. In other cases they may have partial or abnormal sexual function. A lucky few like you have the ability to go back and forth and can choose which they prefer. Some shapeshifters also can choose bodies of either gender. Among those who don’t get powers, there are still some who seek to change, but usually they seek out magic users for a chance at full sexual function. There’s still no guarantee, but it’s been successful for some.”

I thought about asking about the failed cases, but decided not to. Instead, I asked, “I’m not really considering it, but suppose I did want to become female. How would I update records that say I’m male?”

The doctor handed this question over to Chris, who explained, “I’m glad you asked. Because of the kind of gender change that is available everywhere, there are systems for updating your gender in any kind of record that tracks gender. For those people who experience a one-time gender change, NANA helps with those updates. For your case, where you might go back and forth, what we would do is update that charm that hides your teleports to also deal with the gender on your ID.”

They ended up taking new pictures of me as female and intersex, and updating the charm so that when I change in the presence of people who don’t know about powers, they won’t notice, and making it so that my ID would match my appearance and gender as each person saw it, treating the intersex form as female. And since David was a weird name for a girl, my name was now legally going to be Robin, though I planned on still going by David unless I had a real reason to do otherwise. Robin was still going to be male in all the records that mattered, but when I was in an obviously female body, the ID I carried with me would show me as female.

High School

August 20, 2007

It was time to go back to school, and because of that, I was ending my research into songs that could give me powers. Sure, if something happened, I’d take note of it, but I wasn’t going to spend an hour or more every day trying to listen to different music in order to find songs that worked for me. It’s going to be high school now, and I’m sure I’ll have enough to spend my time on without finding the 200th song that will teleport me to a unique location.

Two weeks in, and I can only say it’s not as different as I thought it would be. The kids are bigger. The girls have boobs. The classes are more advanced. But it’s not fundamentally different from middle school. It’s like Middle School: The Next Generation.

I had been tempted to put on a mix of songs and go trick-or-treating in different cities, a few minutes per city, but Mom convinced me it was a bad idea. But I still wanted to go out. I decided instead to pick the most outrageous looking character to dress as. There were many possibilities, but ultimately I chose to dress as Mr. Mxyzptlk.

Mixy, as he is sometimes called since his actual name pronounces most of those consonants as separate syllables and so is quite long to say, is one of Superman’s occasional enemies. He’s one of the more obscure characters, and I couldn’t find the costume locally and had to order it. Fortunately, it came in time. I’m sure some people would not know who I was dressed as, but with how comic-obsessed the powers had made many kids here, I’m sure some people would. I hoped I was at least unique.

He’s a bald man with white hair on the sides, who wears a purple derby hat covering part of his bald head. The costume came with a skullcap/wig with the hat attached, and also matching white stick-on eyebrows. The rest of the costume was an orange long-sleeved shirt with a V neck and purple bits that stuck out over the shoulders, orange pants, and purple gloves and boots.

It started out OK. There were some houses playing music, but it was the typical Halloween monster stuff and didn’t have any effect on me. It was fine until one of the houses started playing the theme from Ghostbusters. And I guess I’d never tried this song. It teleported me, I guess to wherever the movie was supposed to be. When I got there, rather than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, there was a huge, more than eight foot tall, perhaps 12 foot long statue of a lioness, and the song “I Am Woman” was blasting out. Hear me roar, indeed. So naturally I turned female as I popped back to Normal, and then I hurried to get away from the Ghostbusters house. I ran and ran, teleporting back in front of the lioness three times before I got out of range of the song in Normal, and I kept running for quite a while more.

After crossing one final street to put distance between myself and the Ghostbusters house, I stopped to get my bearings. I was going to go trick-or-treating around the next block, but was trying to decide between turning left and going straight. To my surprise, Supergirl was coming at me from both directions, one of them accompanied by Superman, and between that and the worry about being female in public, I tripped over my own feet and fell. Both Supergirls helped me up.

“Thank you,” I said.

I was going to introduce myself to them as David, but I realized I had just spoken with my female voice, and after a moment I remembered my new name. I said, “My name’s Robin.”

The Supergirl who was with Superman was named Freddy, and her (his?) Superman was named Bella. The second Supergirl introduced herself as George, Shelly, and also as Samantha. I was glad I’d only given one name, though they probably still thought it was weird a girl was dressed in a male costume. Too late, I thought to exchange numbers with them in case they had any advice about changing gender. Surely at least one of that group had changed! But by the time I did, they were lost in the crowd. I looked around and I could not see them.

I started to pull out my music player and turn myself male again, but I realized I didn’t know where I was; in fleeing the Ghostbusters house I’d gotten myself lost. I decided I should quit instead. I used my cell phone to call Mom to come pick me up. I was able to read street names off a sign and she located it on a map. She told me she needed 10 minutes to get here, maybe 15 with kids crossing the road, so I walked that one block and met Mom just as she was arriving at the corner I had indicated, not having spotted the Superfriends.

“How did you end up way over here?” she asked when I got into the car.

“I got scared and ran. I got lost.”

I told her the whole story to explain how I got scared.

I had gone months without identifying any more songs that teleported me, but mostly because I had probably found all the easy ones and because I hadn’t been trying. I’d worked more on getting copies of them I could carry with me on my player, and I had most of them by now. For Christmas my parents got me 25 CDs with a total of 31 of the difficult-to-find songs on them.

Ghost Patrol

March 1, 2008

I got a call from NANA today about a job. Not a permanent job, just a thing for today, but they were going to pay me $1000 for about 4 hours’ work if I qualified. The description was something that could only have ever existed in Normal: I was to be a ghost disperser. Mom and Dad were OK with it, and Mom drove me over.

The test to see if I qualified was at the NANA facility where my testing took place, but rather than Chris, there was a woman dressed like a traditional fortune-teller.

“Hi, I’m Stephanie, but for official NANA work today we’ll be using code names. So today you can call me Miss Tix.”

“Mystics? Is there more than one of you?”

“Sorry, it’s M-I-S-S T-I-X, like the name of an unmarried woman. I thought it was funny many years ago.”

“OK, Miss Tix. Then you probably know already, but I’m The Listener.”

“Yes, and welcome. So you’re probably wondering about this job, and why we need a ghost disperser.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a whole lot I can tell you about ghosts, but most of it isn’t relevant to the job today, so I’m going to try to keep it brief. The meteor is like a beacon for ghosts. Wayward ghosts looking for a new home or who are just lost tend to come to Normal because of it. The really lost and listless ones just go straight into the crater.”

“OK. Does that cause a problem?”

“Well, the ghosts all over Normal cause enough problems to keep me and some other people employed full time. The ones in the crater generally don’t, but the problem is the crater is full. Ghosts pass through normal matter as you might think, but they take up space relative to one another, and the crater is full enough of ghosts now that they are starting to back up into the building. We don’t want people being tested to encounter them on top of what else they are doing.”

“So the crater’s here?”

“Yeah. Now I understand you have quite a few different locations you can teleport to.”

Holding up my music player, I replied, “I believe the current count of teleport songs that I actually have copies of on here is 197. There are many cases where more than one song goes to the same city, but I don’t have any duplicates going to the same spot on here.”

“That’s fine. Are any of them within 50 miles of Normal?”

I thought for a moment and then said, “No. None of them are that close.”

“Then we’ll use them all. Can you set your player to cycle through all of those, pause and restart a song, and skip to the next song quickly?”

“Yes, I do have a playlist with all the location songs in it for when I want to go exploring, and I can do those things.”

“Perfect. If you qualify, we’ll have you teleport out once to each spot with 5 or 6 ghosts to get the 1000 done. But I need to run two tests to see if you qualify. If you don’t, you get 50 bucks for coming in to try, and it’s over. If you can do the job, you get $1000 for helping me clear roughly 1000 ghosts. For the first test, just sit down. I need to examine your soul and make sure you can’t be possessed by ghosts.”

“That’s a real thing? People get possessed by ghosts?”

“Yeah. Only some people. I can tell you more about it afterwards if you like. Just be quiet and sit still for a bit so I can check.”

She did whatever it was and declared I was safe from ghost possession.

“Aren’t the ghosts going to possess other people where I drop them off?”

“The ghosts I am having you move are too weak to possess a person. But you’re going to be right at the nexus that attracts ghosts for quite a while and it’s a precaution. And after I learned last year that ghost possession has been even more of a problem in Normal than we thought, I’m really trying to take precautions. And we’ve always taken the precaution to not inundate any one location with ghosts. We spread them around.”

“OK.”

“Now the second test is whether you can carry ghosts with you when you teleport. We had a guy who was doing this for us about once a year, but he passed away last year. I’ve already had nine other teleporters in here who couldn’t do this part. The ghosts just don’t go with them. So I asked you because your teleportation mechanism is unusual. Our old regular also had an unusual mechanism, though not like yours.”

“OK. How am I supposed to carry a ghost?”

She pointed to what I had first thought was just the table in front of us with a weird, quarter-inch-high raised ring about 2 feet in diameter.

“This is a portable summoning circle. And I’ve trapped a ghost in it. Now put on these goggles.”

I put on what she handed me, and WHOA!

“You should now be able to see the ghost in the circle.”

“Yeah. Creepy!”

“OK, pick up the board. Just grab the corner and pull, and pick up the whole thing as it slides off the table. The ghost should go with it.”

I did that, so now I was carrying a ghost.

“OK, now see this part here?”

She pointed out one bit of the raised circle which was different from the rest. There was a handle on it outside the circle.

“Grab onto this handle and yank it out, and the ghost will fly out.”

“It’s OK to release it here?”

“Yes, this is a pretty benign ghost and one I can re-summon easily.”

So I did it, and indeed the ghost flew out of the circle and across the room.

“OK, now put it down.”

I did, and she reattached the piece I pulled loose and did a little ritual and put the ghost back into the circle.

“Now get one of your songs ready to play to teleport you to another city. I’ll hand you the circle immediately as you do, and after you teleport you release it there. Then shut off the music and come back here with the empty circle.”

“You don’t care where?”

“Anywhere outside Normal will be fine.”

She picked up the circle and made ready to hand it to me. I strapped my player to my arm like was meant for joggers, put the earpieces in my ears, pressed a preset I knew was going to take me to New York City, and took the circle from Miss Tix before the song sent me out. It did, I released the ghost, I shut off the music, and I came back.

“You did it!” Miss Tix cheered.

“Yes, I guess I did. I saw the ghost leave the circle. It’s somewhere in New York City’s Central Park now.”

I set the board down on the table.

“Get your player set up to run through the whole playlist and follow me.”

We went down two levels of basement into the ground, and then we went down a long hallway with a couple turns and finally Miss Tix stopped in front of a door.

“Take off the goggles for now.”

Once I had done so, she opened the door. Inside was a rather large square room, about 40 feet on a side. The floor was actually made of granite paving stones and right in the middle was a round pit with an octagonal railing running all the way around it. There was a weird glow coming up out of the pit.

“I’d like you to meet Freya, Sneak, Dark Vision, and Veda.”

They were standing at four tables which, along with the empty one directly in front of me, were roughly evenly spaced around the pit with about 5 feet of space between each table and the pit. None of them had on the mystical garb Miss Tix wore, but they couldn’t have been a more diverse group. Freya was a tall, somewhat muscular woman with blonde hair and very pale skin. Sneak was an ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy you could have seen anywhere. Dark Vision, despite the name, was a cheerful-looking black woman in her 20s. And Veda was an elderly dark-skinned Indian man with an orange turban covering what I assume was white hair or a bald head, since his mustache and beard were all white.

“Don’t look at the pit with the goggles on. Normally the ghosts are all over this room, but we’ve concentrated them all in the space above the pit for now in a way we can draw out a few at a time quickly. We are all used to the sight, but it would probably be overwhelming for you to see that many ghosts packed together. But go ahead and look in for a moment without the goggles. That’s safe.”

It was clear she meant everybody in the room but myself was used to looking at ghosts. So I walked around the table in front of me and over to the pit, and looked in. The meteor was about 10 feet down, filling almost as big a space as the hole at the top, and it was glowing with a pulsing light. It was hard to say what color it was. It was every color and no color at the same time, but it wasn’t white like I learned in school is the mixture of all the light colors.

I said, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I’m not surprised the source of all our powers looks so freaky. Aren’t the sides of craters usually more sloped?”

Miss Tix, as I expected, had come up to the table I’d just walked around. She responded, “As I understand it, it was originally shaped more like the craters you are thinking of, but past generations filled it in and paved it for more convenient access to study it. At first, only the central part of the crater was paved and this room was built around it. Later, the rest of the crater was filled in and the rest of the building was built above it. When you are done admiring the meteor, come up to the side of this table opposite me, and look at me, keeping your back to the pit.”

I moved as she indicated.

“Now put your goggles on. You should see five ghosts captive in the circle. And if you look carefully to your left and right, without turning all the way around to look at the crater, you should be able to see ghosts in the other two nearest circles as well.”

I did all that. It took a moment to distinguish them all, but I did count five ghosts. “Yes, I see them.”

“OK, is your music player ready?”

I glanced at it. “Yes.”

“Great. I’m going to hand you this one to drop off at wherever your first song goes, and when you come back, set the circle back on the table and sidle your way over to the next table to your left, keeping your back to the pit. And Freya will hand you hers and you take it to the next location, and so on around the circle. It should give each of us time to refill our circles from the pit by the time you get back to us.”

She picked up the circle to be ready to hand it to me, so I took that as the signal to begin and turned on the first song and got the action going. Once I got the hang of it, it took about a minute to start a song, take the circle, get teleported, release the ghosts, come back, and move to the next table, with a few of the songs taking longer to set up when they didn’t teleport me until later in the song. After a couple hours, at one point when I reached Miss Tix she called for a break, and once they had all refilled their circles we all went into another room nearby where somebody had set up lunch for us. Then we went back and did another two hours of moving ghosts out. I realized I was done upon seeing an empty circle at the next table.

“Thanks. We have the ghosts down below the rim of the pit now, You can look at it now, just don’t look down inside.” Miss Tix told me.

After I glanced at it, seeing only a few ghosts high enough to show through the railing, I took off the goggles and handed them back to Miss Tix, and she led me out of the room.

“My coworkers are going to undo the spell that was confining the ghosts to the column over the pit so that the remaining ghosts can spread out the way they normally would gather, and I’m going to go get you paid.”

As we walked, Miss Tix described what happens when people get possessed by ghosts, and in particular, some of the things that had happened in the past. When we got where we were going, I had to sign a form and then the man there made out a $1000 check to me. And shortly Mom picked me up and I was home.

“So did you have an interesting day?” Mom asked.

“Well I learned a bit about ghosts. It was actually a lot of repetitive work, but they pay well. And they apparently are lacking in anybody else who can carry confined ghosts with them when they teleport, so I might get to do this once a year.”

The songs linked in this story are also available as a YouTube playlist.

June 5, 2008

I was Peter Mills, a 15-year-old boy. I was an honor student, but above all I excelled at math. That is, until one morning when I didn’t get up. My mother arrived in my room when I didn’t come downstairs and found something weird in my bed. She screamed.

I heard her scream, which made me realize I was still in the world I grew up in. I had thought I was in some kind of dream, or worse. It seemed like I’d gone into the Matrix. I couldn’t see my room, my bed, or anything I knew. I couldn’t feel my body. What I could see was a row of computer screens, full of gibberish or static.

I wondered if I could control what was on the screens. I didn’t have a keyboard, nor hands to use one. I thought to clear one of the screens, and it cleared. I proceeded to clear the other screens one by one.

After they cleared, they reset to different things. The screen at the left had a message: Missing geometry. Below this was a > and a blinking cursor. The second screen had a similar cursor but no message. On the third screen was a picture, some sort of blob shape. The fourth screen was the most exciting, because I could see my room. Mom was there, crying.

I needed to do something. But what could I do? I was able, by thinking to aim the focus for the image on the right screen, see other parts of my room. Maybe this whole system worked on thought?

The left screen wanted me to enter some geometry. I thought to add to the screen: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 < 1, an inequality representing a solid sphere.

This text appeared, and on the third screen, I saw the blob turn into a sphere.

Was my body was this blob, and now a sphere? Mom had her head in her arms and was not looking at me. I needed to get her attention.

I assumed, based on the perspective of my view of the room and because of where I last remembered myself being, that I was in my bed. Could I bounce my ball body up and down on the bed?

I changed the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-4)^2 < 1, which should put me two diameters above the bed. Well, I moved all right, but I was just floating there. I didn’t fall to the bed, and Mom still didn’t notice.

Could I access a time variable? I hadn’t yet taken trigonometry, but I understood the basic trig functions. A sine or cosine would vary between 1 and -1. I wrote x^2 + y^2 + (z-1-cos(t))^2 < 1, which did move me up and down, but didn’t really hit the bed. I was just grazing against it.

x^2 + y^2 + (z-0.5-cos(t))^2 < 1 would attempt to push against the bed by 1/4 of my diameter, whatever that was. And that worked! I could hear the noise as I hit the bed every several seconds, and Mom noticed it too, and looked up.

“Oh, you’re alive!”

Then, as I continued bouncing the same way, she asked, “Are you alive?”

Now that I no longer needed to make noise to get her attention, I switched to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3-2cos(t))^2 < 1, which continued the bouncing movement higher in the air, no longer touching the bed at all.

After a bit, I stopped, as if to say I was done answering the question, by changing the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1.

“Are you Peter?”

I did the previous bounce equation for about 5 bounces and then stopped.

“Do you know what happened?”

An up and down motion was a nod, which meant yes. Now I wanted to say no. I wasn’t sure which direction was x and which was y, but I figured I’d try one.

(x-cos(t))^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Oops. I could tell by the way Mom got closer and farther away in the last screen that this was the wrong way.

I quickly changed the equation to x^2 + (y-cos(t))^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Better. After about 5 swings I shut the motion off.

“Can you speak?”

I signaled no again.

Mom stopped to think for a moment, while I also thought about the functions. What other functions did I have available?

Wait, what if the blank screen was a help screen?

I typed help there, and it responded Enter help subject for help on subject.

So I typed help functions, and got a full screen of function names in five columns. In fact, it had scrolled off the screen, but when I thought about scrolling the screen back to see what I’d missed, I was able to do that.

help max

max(a, b, ...) returns the maximum of the arguments.

Sometime when I was alone I was going to have to read through all of the functions available. For now, though, I tried setting my equation to max(x,y,z-2,-x,-y,-(z-2))<1.

Yep, I was a cube.

I shortened this to max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1 and confirmed that the absolute value function could be called like this.

Looking back at the list of functions, another one caught my eye.

help union

union(rel1, rel2, ...) returns the set of all points which satisfy any of the relations specified.

Ooh.

I set the equation to union(max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1,max(|x|,|y|,|z-4|)<1). And now I was two cubes sitting atop one another. I could have made this as a single box by multiplying z by a factor. But this would let me do more complicated shapes.

I added three more cubes on top of those, and more to the side to make a crude letter P. Then, another stack of cubes not attached to the first, so for a moment I made the word PI. But I added more boxes to the right of the second stack, and turned it into an E. Continuing in this way, after about a minute I had assembled boxes spelling PETER.

I thought it would fill the whole bed, but it seemed that the cubes got smaller when I specified more pieces. Maybe I only had so much matter and the coordinates scaled to whatever I entered.

I redid the blocks so they spelled MEASURE ME. This time I was quite long, and extended beyond the length of the bed. Mom left and came back with a measuring tape of the sort used for woodworking, and held it across the length of all the letters. I had written each letter five cubes tall and three cubes wide, except the Ms were five cubes wide, and with a one-cube space between letters, and three cubes between the words. This meant that the whole thing was 41 cubes long, 5 high, and 1 thick. The way I had written them, each M contained 14 cubes, each E 10, A 10, S 11, U 9, and R 10, for a total of 98 cubes. She read the measurements to me as 106 1/2 inches long, 13 inches high, and a bit over 2 1/2 inches thick. Hmm, I needed a calculator. Could I use that help screen like one? It kind of made sense.

I typed 106.5/41 and it replied 2.597 and a bunch more digits I was ignoring. Then I typed 13/5 and it replied 2.6. Well yes, that one was exact. I could see that. If I assumed the thickness was actually 2.6 this was very close to matching the equal proportions of the cubes I know I was made out of.

Then I made one cube again, and Mom figured out I wanted that measured too. It came out to almost exactly 12 inches.

98*2.6^3 gave me 1722.448 and 12^3 gave me 1728. So volume was conserved. And I was only about one cubic foot in size, which seemed small. I guess this meant no matter how good I got working with the equations, I was never going to have a “normal” body.

I did one more check, making three cubes in a line with a space between each equal to the size of a cube, so I was 1x1x5. Mom measured this as 8 1/4 by 8 1/4 by 41 1/2. If I take the 8 1/4 as 8.3 so that the proportions are right, this is 1715.361, which agrees with the other measurements saying my body volume is being preserved.

“I’ll be back, son.

Cylinders were better for making bodies, but when I set the geometry to x^2 + y^2 < 1 I turned into the blob. Because it was infinite in the z direction, I supposed. But intersection(x^2+y^2<1,|z|<2) worked.

Suppose I made a child body. 24 inch waist, which was the circumference, so a quick calculation on the help screen told me that was about 7.6 inches in diameter. I rounded it down to 7 for computing the volume because people are not quite round. Let’s say 4.5 feet of body including the head and legs, roughly at that size. Some parts will be a bit wider, some narrower, and this doesn’t count the arms, but the legs are narrower so that should roughly match. The head and neck, however, is significantly smaller, so I’ll add another 4 inches to the final height, making a person 4’10” tall. This all worked out to 2077 cubic inches, a bit too much, but pretty close. Let’s try 4 feet of body and a 23-inch waist. Perfect. So if I could figure out the shapes, I could make a 4’4” body corresponding to an 8 or 9 year old child.

For now, until I learned better how to make the shape of a body, I was simulating this with basic shapes. I had a sphere for a head, a flattened cylinder about 2/3 as deep as it was wide and slightly wider than the head as a torso, two legs and two arms each as narrower cylinders. For now, I had set the radius of the head at 0.8, the torso to be 4/3 unit deep and 2 units wide and 2 units tall, the arms and legs to be 0.4 units in radius and 2.4 units long for the arms, 3 for the legs. This was pretty chunky, but it was a start. This came out to a volume of about 2.1 units for the head, 4.2 for the torso, 1.2 for each arm, and 1.5 for each leg, or 11.7 cubic units in total, so each unit came out to be about 0.44 feet or about 5 and 1/4 inches, and the entire body of 6.6 units tall came out to only 2.9 feet. But it seemed reasonable that when I trimmed off all those blocky corners and made the torso a proper shape, and added a neck, that I might have saved enough volume to get almost 50% taller. Where I’d figured a 23 inch waist, right now, it was about 27. But I thought it wasn’t bad for something I put together in only a few minutes. I imagined that in a day I could get something the right proportions, and over months or a couple years working at it, I could get the detailed shape to actually look like a small human being.

Mom came back in with Dad at this point.

“Hello, son,” Dad said. “Mom explained to me that you developed some strange powers and she was right that I just had to see for myself.”

I erased that body and started drawing cubes. I was going to try something different. Instead of having them change size as I added more cubes, I made a several rows of dozens of cubes and then started replacing some of them with ones in the area for the letter shapes I wanted to draw, leaving the excess as lines above and below the letters. It was still pretty tedious writing this way, but it was easier just going in and changing the numbers, and I spelled out:

HELLO DAD
YES POWERS

Whew! That took over 170 little cubes. I was pretty fast but I think it took about 5 minutes to write those words. I gotta find a better way. After a bit I rewrote it into:

COMPUTERS
IN MY MIND

And then in 3 more rounds:

I DEFINE MY
SHAPE WITH

MATH
FUNCTIONS

WANT TO MAKE
NORMAL BODY

“I’ve never heard of anybody getting powers like this, but I can understand how it is going to take some practice, and maybe you can make more body-like shapes eventually.”

I went back to the set of cylinders making a body, and then Dad asked, “Can you leave the bed?”

That was a good question. I didn’t want to be here forever.

I adjusted the y coordinate to move forward off the bed, the way I momentarily had done with Mom, and then lowered my z coordinate to the floor. Approximately. He turned to leave the room and Mom followed him, and I followed the best I could, teleporting in little hops as I updated my coordinates. This was tedious writing each one six times, so I reduced my body to just a single sphere to continue the movement.

Once I got into the living room, I reformed the body and I tested using parameters. I wrote my location as a set of parameters x0,y0,z0 at the top, and then everywhere I’d been using x plus whatever I put in x + x0 plus just the offset within my body. This worked! Now I only had to update one set of values to change my position, and I could do that very quickly. And if I wrote formulas in time into these parameters, I could generate smooth motion. This was actually pretty good. I could move about the world and see the world on a screen.

I wanted to also try rotations. The one other thing I’d learned about sine and cosine was you could use them to draw a circle. If you made x equal to cosine, and y equal to sine of the same angle, you could draw a circle using the mathematical convention that the angle started at the positive X axis and turned counterclockwise. So I added a rotation angle, and intermediate parameters to calculate the X and Y coordinates for the centers of my arms and legs, and after a little experimentation, the formula for the flattened cylinder that made my torso. Then I could rotate as well as move my body around, and my view of the world rotated with my body.

But as I noticed this, I wondered why that was. It was fine that it moved with my body, if we assumed the view was generated from within my body, but why the rotation? What about my body made one spot the front? When I focused on rotating the view in that last screen without moving my body, I found I could do it. But the moment I stopped mentally aiming that view, the view went in the direction I thought of as the “front” of my body, even though nobody could tell it apart from the back right now - the direction that represented the positive X axis, when the rotation was 0. When I ran some experiments, including setting my body spinning by making the rotation angle vary with time, I realized it was because I was subconsciously aiming the view in the direction I’d set the rotation to when I stopped actively aiming it. When I focused only on the room view while my body spun, my view did not spin.

Getting Tested

It was clear I was not going to go to school today. Mom called me in sick while Dad continued getting ready for work. Normally I’d be getting dressed and getting some breakfast in the morning, but I wasn’t sure there were any clothes in the house that would fit me, I wasn’t sure I needed any, and I wasn’t sure how or if I could eat now, either. In any case I did not feel hungry.

After Dad left for work, Mom made another call, to NANA. I’d learned about the powers people get in Normal after some of my classmates got them. Now it was my turn.

“Hello. My son developed powers overnight, and should probably get tested.”

A pause, about 30 seconds.

“Yes. He seems to be some kind of shapeshifter, but right now he seems to only be able to make simple geometric shapes and collections of them. That and a kind of a blob shape.”

A shorter pause.

“Yes, he flies. Or floats, I suppose.”

Brief pause.

“Yes, some of the time. I believe he does obey the law of gravity as the blob shape. And he was a bouncing ball at one point, but the ball also floated at other times, so I’m not sure that was gravity. The other shapes mostly float all the time.”

Another brief pause.

“No, I have not observed any other powers.”

A much longer pause, longer than the first one.

“I’ll check. He doesn’t seem to be able to speak now, but he has spelled out words in the air.” Then to me, she asked, “Are you ready to go get tested?”

I wanted to make a shrug, but I hadn’t made a body yet with enough features to make that possible. Instead I formed YES out of blocks until it was clear Mom saw it, then returned to the body-like shape. At this point I realized I had an innate memory for the formulas I was writing. I was able to restore the entire body I had constructed just by thinking to do so, even though the rotations had made the geometry pretty complicated.

“Yes, I can bring him in now. See you soon.”

And after another brief pause she hung up.

“You understood what that call was about, I hope.”

I formed the word TESTING. Then after a pause. READY.

Mom grabbed her purse, and after resuming my body shape, I followed her as she walked out to the car. I thought for a moment I should put on some clothes, but why? I didn’t have any of the bits society expects to be covered up. I didn’t even really look like a person. I looked mostly like the man who stands on the restroom sign. Nobody ever told him to wear clothes! So I followed as I was.

After Mom used the key fob to unlock all the doors, she opened the passenger door and let me in, and I moved into the car. I hadn’t tried to sit with this body yet, but I bent the leg-cylinders forward instead of down, and floated into the car, getting as close to the seat as I could.

Mom closed the door, went around to the driver’s side, and got in and started the car. She started to back out of the driveway, and I was thrust against and then through the windshield!

I rotated to look behind me, and to my surprise it did not appear the windshield was broken. My legs were inside the engine compartment and my torso was sticking through the hood. Mom was staring, and then she got out of the car and spoke to me.

“Um, you can phase through things. OK. Can you sit and stay motionless relative to the car?”

I formed DUNNO in the air and then, with less force this time, phased back through the windshield, and let my body assume the blob shape inside the car, since that form seemed to be affected by gravity and I hope also didn’t phase through things. I fell to the seat without going through it.

Mom started driving again, and this time I stayed put. This was going to be bad if I could only interact normally with things in the blob form. But we arrived at NANA without further incident.

Once the car stopped moving, I reformed my crude body in the sitting position, and then rather than sliding it smoothly, jumped it several units to the right, which had the effect of teleporting me outside the car. I then moved my legs into the standing position and lowered myself to just barely above the ground so it didn’t look quite so much like I was flying.

Mom clearly saw what I did and glared at me a moment, but then quickly smiled, I guess realizing that I was just trying to figure out how to live in my new situation. She walked up to the door and I floated behind her. She entered and held the door open for me to enter behind her, so I didn’t have to phase through it.

Mom went up to the registration desk or whatever it was, and I followed.

“Yes, I called this morning about my son’s new powers.”

The woman there called somebody, and told us, “Your tester will arrive in a moment. Have a seat.”

After about 5 minutes, a man came into the room and the woman at the desk directed him to us. Mom stood up and followed him through the doorway he entered through, and I floated behind her, figuring out what angle from the previous spot took me down the hall. We all went down a long hallway, and finally into a room with a table and chairs. I couldn’t use the chairs, but floated a bit lower than I had been to match their sitting height.

“My name’s Greg. I’ll be your tester today.”

Mom replied, “This is Peter, and I’m his mother Hannah.”

“So, Peter, tell me what happened in your own words.”

Mom responded, “He doesn’t talk now except by spelling words in the air, so I will tell the story and he can interject with words if needed.”

I spelled TALKING/IS HARD on two lines above the surface of the table, which helped corroborate Mom’s story and also showed what my words might look like. As Mom continued, I shifted back to the body I had been using.

“Sometime last night, my son here transformed. He had been a normal-looking 15-year-old honor student, but when he did not come down for breakfast, I went up to find out why, and he looked like... well, not like this. Show Greg what you looked like then.”

I moved myself over the table and changed the equation by making an intersection of the whole thing with a shape it did not intersect with, and the null shape caused me to revert to the blob, which plopped down gently on the table.

“He soon figured out how to control his shape, but only by making simple shapes or combinations of them, like the body you saw him use earlier made of a sphere and a few cylinders. He said in his terse manner something about seeing a computer in his mind where he can write equations for these shapes, or something like that.”

“So perhaps with practice he might learn more complex shapes and something more like a human body?”

I spelled out YES in response to this.

“What else have you noticed about his powers?”

“In the blob form he doesn’t do it, but when he is shapes, he floats all the time, he can phase through other matter, and and he can teleport himself.”

I made the blob again, and then the body shape, to demonstrate.

“Interesting. Peter, is the teleportation caused by you changing the position of your body in your equations?”

YES

“What about the phasing?”

INTERSECT
MATTER

“You phase through an object simply by writing your equations so that you intersect the object?”

YES

“Anything more?”

“No,” Mom said.

I WANT TO
TELL STORY
TOO LONG

“Your story is too long to tell by spelling out word shapes in this way?”

YES

“During our testing today, we will try to find another way for you to communicate that makes it easier for you to send longer messages.”

GREAT!

“OK, I am going to take this information back to the staff, and while we figure out what tests to run on you, a nurse will come here to administer the physical tests, to the extent we can, anyway.”

I changed back to the body form, and Greg left. A couple minutes later a short, stout nurse came in. She was only about 4 feet tall, but was almost as wide as the doorway. But she wasn’t fat. It was just like her whole body was wider and shorter than it should be.

“Are you Peter?”

YES

“Oh, OK. Follow me. Your mom can come along too.”

We went to one of those scales you see in the doctor’s office, with the weights on a beam to balance against the weight of the person on the scale.

“I see you’re a shapeshifter, and a levitator in some forms. Can you step onto the scale in the form that is not a levitator?”

I hovered over the scale, and forced my body to assume the blob shape, which then landed on the scale.

The nurse fiddled with the weights until she determined my weight as 90 pounds.

Then she knelt down and placed a ruler horizontally on top of my blob form to read its height on the pole of the scale which, surprisingly, did go all the way down to 0 at the top of the scale itself.

“9 inches. Not sure how useful this particular height is. Can you go back to the other form?”

I did so.

“Now lower yourself until you just touch the platform.”

I did that as well as I could, and she measured my height at 2’11”, which is what I thought it should be.

“Any other forms I should check?”

I turned into the cube shape, which she measured with the ruler in her hand.

“Hmm, a cube almost exactly 12 inches on a side.”

Then I was a sphere. After some difficulty she proclaimed my height as 14 and 7/8 inches.

“Any more forms?”

I turned into the letters SHAPES/ALL SAME on two lines, and for a moment as I started to spell the words she started to measure them, then decided against it as I continued writing the words.

“The geometric shapes you make are all the same ... volume? Probably mass too?”

I wrote YES.

Next she led me to one of those standard doctor’s office rooms with the weird raised bed. I had been in such a room enough to know what to expect in it, but at the same time I also thought few of those tests made sense with me the way I was. Still, after swapping some coordinates I made the body shape so it was lying down over the bed.

Fortunately, this nurse was prepared. She recorded the color of my body, as well as the amount of resistance it gave before I phased through something. She also used some kind of device to measure the smoothness of the curves of my body. Or tried to. She wasn’t able to detect any irregularities from perfect smoothness.

Finally, she said, “I want to take a sample of ... whatever it is you are made of ... to send to the lab.”

She retrieved a scalpel from a drawer, and tried to scrape my body with it, but it phased through.

I switched into the blob form, and waited until she tried again. This time it worked, and I could see she managed to remove a tiny bit of the pink-colored stuff my body was made of, and placed it in a small glass jar which she sealed with a cap.

She led me to two more rooms after this. In one, they took an x-ray of my entire body, which was fast, and in the other they did a CAT scan. This involved me lying on a bed that went into a narrow tube that scanned me. It was loud and took half an hour. They usually provide earplugs, but they didn’t have any way to use them on me. Fortunately, I was able to tune out the noise after a bit and I spent the time studying my functions.

Done with all the tests she could figure out to perform on me, she led me back to the waiting room where Greg had had the conversation with me and Mom and asked us to wait for Greg to return. He did, a few minutes later, and led us to a large room.

I finished these thoughts as Greg figured out where we were supposed to go and led us there. And finally he explained what was about to happen: “You are kind of an enigma to us, so we are going to run the full battery of tests of you, to the extent possible. Some of the physical tests don’t make any sense for a being who phases through other matter and only obeys gravity in a form which is a shapeless blob that can’t move, so we’ll skip those. There are some physical tests we can still do and others that only make sense for someone like you, and we will do those first. Then we will move on to the tests of other possible abilities you might have, which really covers the entire gamut of non-physical powers.”

He looked at a clipboard he had been carrying. “I’m going to stay here and observe the entire experience, and Hannah you can watch too, but each expert in the respective fields will lead their sections of the testing. First is Dr. Springfield, who is going to test how you interact with normal matter when you are in one of your equation-designed forms.”

He indicated a man nearby, who at the mention of his name turned up from what he had been doing and came over to greet us.

“Yes, I am Dr. Springfield. It was indicated that your body deforms somewhat under pressure before it phases through matter. I want to first test how much force you have to exert against matter, or how much it exerts against you, before you phase through it. Can you make a hand?”

Rather than telling them I could only make a crude hand, I started building shapes, not bothering for now to connect them to my body. I made a wide, flat cylinder as the palm, then added a thumb and two more fingers each made of three short cylinders. Then I quickly rewrote their equations to use a parameter which represented how much they were open or closed. It needed some adjustments to make the parts move together correctly, as well as to make the three fingers come together properly in a pincer grip. I used more parameters to make this work. Basically, instead of just having one starting point x0,y0,z0 which everything was relative to, I calculated the positions of points on other shapes to use as the starting points for other shapes, and more parameters defined the rotation of each part relative to the previous one. This was a useful idea, and one that would help me develop more involved bodies later on. But for now it helped me get the hand made quickly.

Finally, I moved it so it connected to my arm. I needed to be able to rotate the hand relative to the arm, and rotate the arm relative to my shoulder. This took two more parameters and some redefinitions of the previous ones. In about ten minutes from the request, I had my crude arm programmed.

“Good,” Dr. Springfield commented. “Now try to pick up this weight.”

He pointed to a weight that looked like one of the ones Wile E. Coyote always tried to drop on Road Runner only to have it backfire and land on him instead, but a lot smaller. It had 4 LB inscribed on the side I was looking at.

I aligned my new hand with the loop on the top of the weight, closed it around the loop, and raised the arm. But the weight phased through.

He produced a smaller weight, but that one phased through as well.

“Come over here to this machine and lift this bar.”

Apparently this was some kind of machine that simulated more weight the more I pulled the bar. So when I phased through, he read off “4.1 pounds.”

“Can you make a second hand and try with both?”

I duplicated the mechanism I had for one arm and hand for the other, mirroring the instructions in one dimension, and using a different set of parameters. Then I placed both hands on the bar and pulled.

“8.1 pounds.”

THIRD HAND? I wrote in the air.

“How about you just make them wider? I have a theory.”

I made the hands again, both hands and fingers horizontally stretched by a factor of 3, and lifted again. I clearly got a lot further.

“23.8 pounds.”

“Try making a hand that runs the length of the bar with a groove in it the same shape as the bar.”

That took a bit of experimentation to get it right, but I did. It didn’t look much like a hand in the normal sense, except that it was at the end of my arm. And I was able to lift more this way.

“64 pounds. Good. Now make both hands like that.” He showed me there was a second bar I could lift.

I’d only made one hand the shape of the bar before. Now I did both. Duplicating it didn’t quite work, because it added more volume. Rather than fiddle with it, I made my legs slightly narrower to restore the right size.

“128 pounds. OK, I think the weight you can lift is proportional to the part of your body in contact with it. With the small weights, you were trying to lift them using a thin ring so the area of contact was small. Your secret to power is spreading out the contact over a large area.”

USEFUL, I wrote. Then IDEA.

The doctor chuckled. “Go ahead and show your idea.”

I made myself into a big rug laid out on the floor. It wasn’t very colorful, but I made something that looked like the tassels I had seen on other rugs and put a few dozen copies of that all along two ends, leaving the rest completely flat. He clearly understood my idea and sat down on the rug and invited Greg and Mom to get on too.

“Flying carpet, up,” Dr. Springfield directed, and I lifted a few feet off the floor, not letting any of my passengers fall through.

“Fly over there near the guy with the goggles.”

I found the guy he was referring to and flew near him.

“Hey, Stan, look!”

“Frank! Um, what is that?”

“The person I’m testing.”

“Huh! Never know what I am going to see here.”

“Hop on if you have time, but climb on board gently. This shapeshifter can go anywhere, but phases through the load if too much weight is put on him in one place. He holds about 400 pounds per square foot.”

“Well that’s a good amount!” Stan said. “I’m just finishing up with another powers test here, but I’d love a ride over to Alma for the both of us.”

I lowered to the ground and let them both get situated, and then took off again and flew where they pointed out Alma to me, and my latest two passengers climbed off.

Then Dr. Springfield said, “OK. I have another idea. We’ll have to get off the carpet for a bit, though, because you won’t fit down some of the hallways and you shouldn’t phase through some of our walls here.”

I let them all off, and turned back into the body form.

“Everybody, follow me.”

We went quite a ways and finally into a large attached garage-like area.

“The vehicle pool? You want him to carry a car?” Greg asked.

“No, that wasn’t actually what I was thinking. The tires probably have too little area of contact anyway.”

Then, to me, he continued, “Come over here and form your rug again.”

I went and did that where he directed. Then he went over and climbed into what I soon realized was the cab of a small crane. Along the wall was a stack of large steel plates.

“Greg, if you could, please help guide the claw into place for me.”

There was a hole in the center of each plate with a metal bar running across it, and the end of the crane had a claw that fit into the hole and around this bar. With Greg’s help, he lifted one of the plates and set it down on top of me.

“Try to lift up now.”

I lifted up carrying the plate, and set back down when he indicated.

They repeated this with a second plate, and a third, and a fourth, and more and more. It didn’t hurt me any, though, nor was it in any way strenuous; I could lift the stack of ten plates as easily as I could lift the first one alone. Finally, I lifted up a huge stack of plates, and I thought it was all collapsing, but instead, what happened was that just one plate fell through me.

Dr. Springfield came down from the crane and counted the plates personally, determining I was carrying a stack of 19 of the plates.

“This confirms my theory. These plates are 4 feet by 8 feet, and half an inch thick. They weigh about 670 pounds each, and 19 of them weigh 12,730 pounds, which is slightly below the limit of 400 pounds per square foot spread evenly over 32 square feet. Twenty plates are above that limit, which caused the plate to phase through. I am a bit surprised that the phasing through shut itself off so immediately that only one plate fell through.”

I could have made a wider sheet and held a second stack of these plates, or more, but Dr. Springfield had proven his point. I could lift amazing amounts if I was spread out like a thin sheet. I lowered the stack of plates to the ground, and transformed myself out of the stack, and the two doctors put the plates back where they came from one by one.

Next, he led me to another large open space to test my flight. He tested how fast I could fly (as fast as I wanted), how well I could stop (as long as I had a good estimate of where I was supposed to stop, essentially instantaneously), my ability to navigate obstacles (excellent), etc. I passed all the flying tests with flying colors (Dr. Springfield’s pun).

Greg left us some time during this test, and when we were done, Dr. Springfield said, “That’s it for the physical tests. Greg is reviewing your lab results and will join us for lunch in the cafeteria shortly.”

Then, remembering my body was made of a uniform goo with no internal organs, he asked me, “Do you eat?”

PROBABLY NOT

“Well, your mother will want something.”

We went back up to the ground level, and he led us to the cafeteria. I went through the line with them, looking at all the food and drink and seeing if I felt a craving for anything. Maybe if I saw something I really wanted, I’d figure out how this body could consume it. But that did not happen and I went to the table without food.

Within a few minutes, Greg found us and sat with us at our table.

“The lab tests gave some interesting results. It appears you are made of a non-cellular material, or actually three of them, woven together. One of them appears photosynthetic, the other appears to spend the energy from photosynthesis somehow, and the third defies the laws of physics so much we can’t explain it.”

While he finished his statement, I spelled out, I EAT LIGHT?

“Yes, essentially. We think your body is powered by light you absorb. You will need to be exposed to a certain amount of light to survive, but we will need to run more tests to figure out how much.”

HANDY, I wrote, before returning to the body-like form.

“Doesn’t photosynthesis require that green pigment, what’s it called?” Mom asked.

“Chlorophyll, and no. While most plants use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, there are other plants and fungi that use other light-absorbing compounds which aren’t green. Peter uses one of those other ones; his is actually colorless, absorbing all colors of light well, and it’s the other compounds in his body that give it the pink color.”

Greg continued, “And you don’t really appear to have any internal organs whatsoever. It looks like you are made of the same uniform material throughout your body.”

When everybody was done eating and turned in their trays, Dr. Springfield said goodbye and Greg took us back downstairs to a different area, where a woman named Stephanie tested me for psychic powers, then a guy who introduced himself as Ed checked me for magic abilities. None in both cases.

Next Greg brought me to a table where a variety of parts and tools were spread around, and he told me I could do whatever I wanted with them. With that kind of introduction it was obvious I was expected to do something. I made my body with hands again and examined the parts, sorting some of them into different types. What we’d discovered earlier was it took 2.8 pounds per square inch of surface for something to phase through me. When I held something in my hand, I had a couple inches of area of contact or the cross-section of the object itself if it was smaller. This allowed me to pick up all of the items present, even the fairly heavy magnet. Really the only reason I had trouble was because I was trying to lift a heavy object by a small handle. Handles are going to make trouble for me. It did, however, take some time for me to do the manipulations. I was still quite a ways from being able to operate a standard body, and sometimes I made nonstandard fingers to pick up some of the things more easily.

Somehow, I figured out that some of the objects present made a radio, including a large speaker, and I set about putting them together. It didn’t look pretty, but I flipped the switch and it made noise. I turned a dial and it was able to pick up a weak signal.

Greg said, “That’s good. You can stop now. We’re underground, so none of the signals are great, so the fact that you hear anything but static indicates you’ve assembled it well. How did you figure out to make a radio?”

MEMORY, I wrote. HAD KIT.

Mom explained, “We got him one of those kits that lets you learn how to build simple circuits when he showed interest in those things. He must have remembered the circuitry for a radio and a speaker from that.”

Greg took note of it and led me to the next station.

There were parts here again, but this time I was given a specific goal.

“Inside this shaft,” Greg said, pointing to a vertical square tube about a foot wide that ran to the ceiling, “there is a bag of gold suspended from a hook on a rope. At the end of this shaft,” this time he indicated a 2 inch round hole in the wall, “there is a glass capsule in a circuit. If the capsule shatters, the hook will release the bag. We aren’t actually going to give you the bag of gold if you retrieve it, but we will give you something, and you should behave as if you are retrieving the gold for yourself and your allies. One more special rule for you: No part of your body may enter either shaft. This is to be a test of your ability to make something with these parts, and not to simply personally navigate the space. Treat it as being filled with poison gas, or something else that will kill you.”

I looked at the parts, and thought of multiple strategies. Clearly some of these parts were designed to let me make a gun, and shoot the capsule. Another set of parts looked like they might allow me to make a drone that could fly up into the shaft with the bag and cut the rope. Still another set looked like they might let me make a laser that could melt the glass capsule.

I spent a while working on each of these strategies, but there was something wrong with each of them that made them just not quite work. The drone didn’t quite fly, the gun only fired a couple feet and not all the way down the shaft, and the laser only made a diffuse light which wasn’t focused enough to melt the capsule way down the shaft. After an hour here, Greg had me stop and move on. As we moved to the next station, he explained, “That test was designed to determine whether the physics-defying ability of your body extends to things you make. It contains parts which almost make functional examples of each of the things you were trying to make, but each invention is missing something which makes it only work marginally, while the tests require one that works well. If you could extend the ability beyond your body, you might make one of them work anyway.”

The next set of tests were sensory related. First, they tested what I could see. If I was in a space that was entirely dark, I could see nothing, but with even the tiniest light, I could see the space around my body. If I was phased through a wall, I could see on either side, but only one side at a time. There was no particular part of my body that was the eyes. Likewise, I could hear what went on around my body even though there was no obvious hearing organ. It seems I did not have a sense of taste or smell, even when they placed food inside my body - nor did I digest the food they put there. My sense of feel was well developed, and even though I might have different body shapes at any given time, somehow I knew which parts were making contact with another surface (or phasing through it), and I could tell hot and cold, light and heavy pressure, and multiple touches at once.

Another set of tests they had for me related to my phasing. They tested my ability to phase through objects on demand, which was easy for me; the farther I tried to push myself through, the greater the pressure resisting it, until it reached my threshold and I phased through. But pushing farther just meant changing a number; it was easy.

When I was done with that, they had brought in a desk with a computer on it.

“We think you should be able to use a standard computer keyboard, as long as it’s not the mechanical spring type. The keys have about a quarter inch of surface area, but it doesn’t require much force to press them.”

I made a vertical square column as a finger, which I rounded the tip of by taking its intersection with a sphere, and moved it about over the keyboard, using a quadratic function of time in the Z coordinate to quickly press and release a key I was over. I had just made one, so I wasn’t able to use the shift key, but still, I wrote out, typing whole words in the time it took me to construct one letter in the air from cubes.

yay i can type. this is much faster. thanks.

“To finish up your registration, you should pick a code name. If you are ever involved with official NANA activities, you’ll use the code name when doing so. It has to be unique.”

I thought, if I was going to be doing geometry, who were the most famous mathematicians for geometry?

I typed out pythagoras.

“Taken.”

euclid

“Taken.”

Hmm. Let me see.

descartes

“Taken. It’s kind of sad; I understand why you want those names, but those people all developed powers that made them especially good at math, and they became skilled engineers or architects. They didn’t have to describe their body in precise mathematical detail just to have a body!”

At this point I was out of names. I am sure there are more, but those were all the ones I knew.

the geometer

“Available. OK, you’re The Geometer.”

yay

Greg added, “If you have the time, we’d appreciate you coming back for some extended testing. There is still a lot we don’t understand about you that will help our understanding of the kinds of powers that are possible, and will help you learn to use your body better, too.”

“How about it, son? Would you like to come back for more testing?”

yes

“That settles it. We’ll be back. When will you be ready for us?”

“We want to do some more in-depth lab study of your sample and other results from today, but maybe Tuesday will be good.”

“OK. Tuesday it is. What time is good?”

“Any time after about 8:30 AM we can get you started immediately on one test or another.”

“No eating?” my Dad asked.

“Yes. They say he now gets energy through photosynthesis like plants do.”

“Did he get any time outside in the sun today?”

“Not much.”

“Well, son, the sun is still shining. How about you go out, find a sunny spot nearby, and soak up some sun?”

WILL DO, I wrote in my manner of communication, then turned into the body form and headed outside, not bothering to open the door into the back yard but just phasing through it.

I saw a sunny spot along the fence on one side of the yard, so I went over there, and figuring more area was better, formed myself into a flat sheet covering the entire sunny area, the 6-foot height of the fence and about 12 feet long.

The way my body positioned itself, I knew I wasn’t going to blow away or anything. So, just checking every 15 minutes or so and adjusting my position to stay in the sun, I spent time reading through the function list, describing the built-in functions available which I could use in describing my body’s shape.

It was about an hour before the sun was so low in the sky there wasn’t much sunlight remaining and what was left wasn’t very bright, so when I went back inside, my parents were done with dinner and even done cleaning up afterward.

“Thanks, Dad. That was a great idea and I feel like I have a bunch more energy now.”

“So what are you going to do now, Son?”

LEARN FUNCTIONS
BUILD BETTER BODY

“That sounds like a good idea. Any chance you can learn to make something like a voicebox or speaker so you can talk normally?”

GOOD IDEA
NEED TO RESEARCH

“Oh, speaking of research, you might be wanting to research details about the shape of the human body. We put that parental block on your computer which keeps you from visiting web sites with porn, but it might also block sites describing the shape of the body in detail, since that might involve images of nude bodies. So I’m going to go remove that block right now. I am not even sure porn will even do anything for you now, but promise me, Son, that you will use the Internet responsibly.”

I PROMISE

It was an easy promise for me to make. I wasn’t sure there was any way for me to have a sexual response now. I certainly didn’t have the parts, and even if I wanted to make them now, I would only be able to make crude models.

He went up, with me following, and entered the parental block password while selecting the option to completely and permanently remove the parental block.

“Enjoy your search, Son,” he said as he left me there.

I definitely needed to research the shape of the human body. My estimate of the body that could fill 1 cubic foot came out to 4’4” tall, while the body I actually made was horribly blocky and only 2’11”. And I weigh 90 pounds now, about what I weighed two years ago when I was 4’11”. Some of my proportions were definitely off.

I did some research and quickly found a few sources defining the proper proportions of the human body. These included Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the drawing of a man in a circle and square, which was indeed part of a text about the proportions of the body. I found a translated version of the text to go along with it, in addition to other sources.

The arms were definitely too thick. They should only be 0.3 units in radius up by the shoulder, and get narrower, probably to around 0.18 units down by the hand. While converting these units, I realized how silly this was. I could just write all the dimensions in inches. My body would proportion itself to fit.

Aiming for a 5-foot-tall body, I decided the head should be about 7 inches in diameter, but a little taller than it was wide. Let’s say 8 inches tall. There should be a neck under it, 3 inches in diameter and 3 inches tall, extending up a bit further at the top so it met the head all the way around.

The rest of the body, then, was 49 inches tall. The legs (up to the crotch) should be a little over half the remaining length, approximately 25 inches, while the torso is the remainder, or 24 inches. The arms, down to the end of the outstretched hand, should be as long as the legs, and two arms raised to the sides plus the torso between them should be as tall as the whole body, to the top of the head. That means the torso, around the armpits, should be about 10 inches wide. It should be only 60% as thick as it is wide, or 6 inches. That meant about 25 inches around at that point. It could narrow down to a 22.5 inch waist, represented by narrowing both dimensions 10 percent. The arms should be 3 inches in diameter at the top and 1.8 inches at the wrist. The legs were complicated, but for now, assume they were 4 inches in diameter at the top and 2.5 at the ankle.

What volume did all this add up to?

The head was about 205 cubic inches. Everything else was now part of a cone, and the calculations included subtracting the part that was not there, but I quickly got 894 cubic inches for the torso, each arm was 115, and each leg was 211, and the neck was 21 plus the tiny bit connecting it to the head, which I ignored for now as it was probably less than one cubic inch. The whole thing was 1772 cubic inches, which was only about 3% over my target, which roughly translated to me being 1 inch too short. That was much better!

This was more like it! With this body people could at least see me as the teenager I actually am, and not the little kid the other body looked like. And once I had more time to add facial features, hands and feet, and round off the rough bits, people might actually see me as a person and not a mannequin.

With this much done, and leaving the lights in my room on all night, I got into (well, over) my bed, stretched out as a sheet covering the whole bed, and continued studying those functions.

Friday

June 6, 2008

My powers showed up Thursday morning, and I ended up studying and sometimes practicing some of the function forms all through the night. I don’t know if I just couldn’t get to sleep, or if this body simply didn’t sleep at all. But I learned a lot and experimented several times throughout the night.

There were two important new keywords I learned. The first, file, let me import the contents of a file into my body geometry. I could use this alone if I wrote an entire body definition into a file and just put the file command on the geometry screen. The second screen which provided access to the help and an immediate-mode calculator could also serve as an editor. There weren’t any menus, but if I thought about doing the things you’d expect to find in menus it just did it, like saving and opening files, undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, etc. So I wrote a bunch of files: One with the the first restroom-icon body, one with hands, one with my current body, and ones with words spelling out YES, NO, MAYBE, and some other phrases. Now I could use the files to swap them in and out, and not have to simply remember things. Though I could still remember what I did recently, I had to reconstruct my first body; clearly there are limits on my memory.

But the other thing I could do is define functions: define, followed by a function name and an argument list in parentheses, let me define a function that could define any element of my geometry. So instead of writing out the formula for a sphere every time I wanted to use one, I could define a sphere based on the center and a radius, and reference that in my geometry instead of the formula for the sphere. That isn’t a great example - it’s better with more complex shapes - but those shapes also start to require more parameters. For a cylinder, the center of an end and a radius and height isn’t enough. You won’t know what direction it is oriented in. Both end centers and a radius works, and there are other ways to do it. I figured these things out as I went along.

In addition to the basic box I used for drawing letters, I made a whole alphabet and common punctuation. I was still referencing them as letter_a(row,column) and the like, but once I find the string-manipulating functions I should be able to write one that takes in some text and writes it out as letter shapes. Those letters were all defined in a file, but putting file(letters) in my geometry made all those functions available.

Before I knew it, it was morning, and Mom came up to see how I was doing. Although I had made many shapes during the night, I always went back to the sheet when I was done, and that is how she found me. But when I saw her, I immediately switched to the new body I was using, still without hands since I had been studying other things during the night.

“Wow, you got taller!”

With my new pre-configured letters, which I had set up to all be the same width and height to make it easy to slot them into place, I started “typing” out a response:

YES, MOM. I STILL HAVE MORE TO LEARN,
BUT I HAVE THE RIGHT PROPORTIONS NOW
FOR A PERSON MY SIZE. I LEARNED HOW
TO SAVE FORMS AND SWITCH BETWEEN THEM
MUCH MORE EASILY. I HAVE SAVED EACH
LETTER FORM SO I CAN TYPE MESSAGES
FASTER TOO.

“Well, it will be better when you can speak, but this is much improved since yesterday. You can type fast enough now to have a conversation.”

YES. SO WHAT DO
WE DO TODAY?

“Your dad’s already gone to work. I want to let you keep studying and practicing, but come downstairs so I can watch as you go and maybe give advice.”

OK, BUT I MIGHT
NEED TO LOOK
STUFF UP.

“That’s fine. Nobody will be using the computer in the family room. You can look it up there. And I should disable the porn lock on that one too.”

Mom was always a little more direct in the way she described things. To her, it was explicitly a porn lock. Nothing else mattered. In any case, within 10 minutes that was done, and I was able to look up information about the human body there, while I worked on building a more realistic one.

For typing, I now made three of the fingers I made yesterday, with a set of parameters defined for every key that gave their relative locations based on other parameters that I set to the boundaries of the keyboard, including rest positions with them off the keyboard. Again, when I figured out strings, I could probably write out a function to simply type out something I could write in my mind all at once. I made three fingers so I could use combinations with keys like shift and control when needed.

This allowed my new body to type even faster than I could have typed in my old body, though I think not faster than really skilled typists. I also used the mouse, with another finger over any mouse button on in a rest position, and a frame around it to move it with; the mouse button positions were then relative to the frame.

I started working on smoothing out the figure. Atop the torso, I added a small cone only 1 inch tall, with a base 16 inches wide (covering all of the top of my arms and torso) and 6 inches front to back. I added another inverted cone below this, with the same dimensions except 6 inches tall, to smooth out the connection between my arms and the shoulders.

I needed a similar thing for the pelvis, but it should be a distorted sphere. I shortened the actual torso unit 5 inches at the bottom, in the area representing the pelvis, while the legs got 5 inches longer. Centered at the bottom of the new torso was a sphere, with axes distorted to match the base of the pelvis and extending 5 inches vertically below the new torso. Also, I realized I made a mistake with the legs, which was more obvious now that I had a pelvis. They were only 8 inches across at the top, but the torso was 9. The solution here was simple - there should be a little space between the legs, so make that space 1 inch. But that turned out to make a seam at the top of the legs. Because they curved out more than the pelvis, this caused little ridges to stick out where they met the torso. Reducing the space between the legs to 0.8 inches fixed this.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the shoulders yet, but I had eliminated the worst of the blockiness. The volume removed in the pelvis area made up for the volume added at the shoulders, approximately - the overlaps in the new figure made it very hard to calculate an exact volume.

Something was still wrong with this. I figured out this shape for the shoulders was not really right. It was right that the sides of the body are fairly straight all the way up to the armpits, but the shoulder joint was entirely wrong. It’s a ball-and-socket joint, and there should be a ball there.

I played with various ways of putting spheres and spheroids there, including ones that were cut off beyond a certain point, and the whole thing just did not work. I finally realized my entire approach to modeling the entire shoulder blade was wrong.

The top of the shoulders was basically a sideways half-cylinder, and the rounded part of the shoulders above the arms was a quarter-sphere aligned with the end of that half-cylinder. This extended below where I was putting the shoulder piece, about as tall as the top of the arms are wide, and the top of the arms should be at this level, too. The chest (even on a guy) pokes out below this, and I can make the transition by putting in a half-spheroid on top of the lowered torso piece. This was still not quite 100% right, but it looked a lot better, with approximately the right amount of roundedness, and it partially captured the way the chest got flatter close to the shoulders.

Also, I figured I should put the hands back on and add some feet. Feet were complicated; I made a ball heel, a box with rounded sides for the blade of the foot, and cylinder toes. Fingers were delicate things, and this time I made full five-fingered hands. Lots of little cylinders, rotating around spheres at the joints, small spheres on the ends, and I haven’t yet figured out how to do the nails properly. They wouldn’t work anyway, since nails are supposed to be harder than the skin but my flesh is all uniform. Maybe I could get some of those fake nails women wear, cut them to not be too long, and stick them on. Assuming they would stick on me, and assuming that I could put them back on after the first time I changed into any other form.

I still need to figure out how to make a face, but I am making progress on the rest of the body. Another thing I just noticed is that the back is all wrong. I centered everything but the feet within the y=0 plane, but this made my back side look just like my front. The top of the back should be different, flatter. The head and neck should be centered slightly behind this plane. When I figure out how to make knees and elbows, they will be different on the backs. And most importantly, I should have a butt! I made comments in my program for drawing in these features later.

I was getting tired, though, and that meant I needed to eat, which meant getting some sun. So I put away the file for the body I had been working on, found Mom and told her what I was doing, then went out into the back yard, found a sunny side of the house, and turned myself into a sheet covering a good portion of the house between windows.

While I soaked in the sunlight, I looked out at the neighborhood and spotted some details I had never noticed before. For instance, the little birdhouse next to the bird feeder next door has a little name plate above the door, reading “Tweety.” There had never been an actual bird living in that house that I could remember, despite the fact that birds come to the feeder; maybe we just didn’t have the right kind of birds around here. I noticed a couple dozen things like this by the time I felt full. Not in the same sense that you feel after eating a big meal, but in my own way, I felt like I was not able to absorb any more energy. I went back inside using the latest form of my body, and found Mom eating lunch. It was 12:30, so I’d been out there a little over 2 hours.

In the afternoon I got to researching those string functions. I also read about arrays, program loops, and other such constructs, but in the end, I had a function I could send a position, direction, and string of text to and it would write those words there.

Tuesday

June 10, 2008

Mom had confirmed my appointment for further testing yesterday afternoon, and we got there bright and early after she’d had breakfast and I’d had an early morning dose of sun. When we checked in, the woman at the desk paged Greg, who came to meet us and take us down to testing only a few minutes later. We went directly down to the testing floor, but Greg led me and Mom into a little office first.

“First off, Peter,” Greg began, “I want to commend you on how much more human-looking your body is. It’s still not nearly good enough to fool anybody into thinking you are a normal human, except maybe in a very dark place where they can only see a vague outline of your shape, but you’re making great progress, and someday you might make a body with enough detail to make people believe you’re a normal human.”

THANK YOU.

“There are a few areas we want to experiment in today. We want to try to understand your photosynthesis and its limits. And because you are making more humanoid bodies, we want you to try to wear a bodysuit that we usually equip with a bunch of sensors to check people’s vital signs while they perform athletic tests. In your case, we’re going to remove almost all the sensors because we don’t think they’ll help, but we want to see how this affects your phasing ability.”

I’M WILLING TO TRY THAT
AS LONG AS YOU THINK
IT’S SAFE FOR ME.

“Oh, yes, we will stop any test at the first sign of any danger to you.”

He led me to a part of the testing area where several people were assembled. The group seemed excited by this and looked eager to run or perhaps to participate in experiments with me in this form.

“Peter, let me introduce you to Diane, Nick, Tracy, Mel, and Vladimir. You met Stephanie and Ed last time. They’ve all agreed to help in your testing today in their own ways.”

As their names were called, each one of them waved, bowed, curtsied, flew up into the air, or, in Vladimir’s case, a giant neon arrow appeared in the air pointing to him. I guess his power let him make stuff, though whether it was real or an illusion I wasn’t sure of. Would my sight show me magical illusions?

“For our first test, we want you to phase through Diane.”

She stepped forward and said, “I’m ready.” The girl couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20, and was dressed in clingy athletic clothes which showed her shape. I wasn’t sure what was special about her.

READY, I wrote in the air briefly before returning to a body shape and heading toward Diane. I went straight through without any real issue.

Greg had me make various shapes, phase through matter, lift the entire group of them while in the form of a large sheet, etc. A lot of the same stuff I did last time, but clearly to show this group what I do.

Next, they brought out the bodysuit they mentioned, which had about a dozen sensor patches on it, but marks suggesting they sometimes had four times that many on it. Within the bodysuit, I had none of the problems I’d had lifting weights by small handles and the like. The group agreed this was probably because in order to phase through it, my whole body would have to phase through the bodysuit. As a result, instead of an effective area of one or two square inches, the effective area was about half the surface area of my body, about 4 or 5 square feet, and as a result, I could lift, push, or pull almost a ton before I pushed myself completely out of the suit. Likewise, if I intentionally pushed myself through a wall, the suit stayed behind.

Finally, he had me explain how I thought my powers worked. I was glad to have the faster text writing routine here.

I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF SIGHT.
I CAN SEE THE REAL WORLD, BUT I
ALSO SEE MY OWN INNER SPACE.
THIS SPACE CONTAINS FOUR COMPUTER
SCREENS, EACH FOR A DIFFERENT
PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO OTHER THINGS
THAT I CAN SEE IN HERE. THE FIRST
SCREEN CONTAINS THE GEOMETRIC
DEFINITION OF MY CURRENT BODY. IF
IT IS EMPTY, INFINITE, OR HAS
ERRORS, I TURN INTO THE BLOB BODY.

I gave them a moment to read all that, and then I replaced that with my next wall of text.

THE SECOND SCREEN LETS ME DO
CALCULATIONS, READ HELP ABOUT THE
FUNCTIONS I CAN USE, AND EDIT FILES.
THE THIRD SCREEN SHOWS AN IMAGE OF
MY BODY, AS YOU MIGHT SEE IT. THE
FOURTH SCREEN SHOWS A VIEW OF THE
WORLD FROM THE POSITION OF MY BODY.
I CAN AIM THAT VIEW IN ANY DIRECTION.
I CAN FOCUS ON ANY SCREEN OR ALL OF
THEM. I ALSO HEAR WHAT IS HAPPENING
IN THE WORLD NEAR MY BODY. DONE.

“Thank you, Peter. Now that he has shown us all what he can do, I’d like each of you to explain your powers to him.”

“I’m Nick. I have the ability to see streams of light or electrons that vary in artificial ways. Effectively, I can see when anybody is using such methods for communication.”

“I’m Tracy. I see through things.”

“I’m Mel. I can become intangible, a bit like one aspect of your power.” I assumed this was short for Melanie or something, since Mel was clearly female.

“I’m Vladimir. I manifest living matter. Everything I make, no matter how weird it looks, is alive, and typically has tiny analogues of your major internal organs keeping it alive.

“I am Stephanie. I have the ability to peer into the psychic world.”

“Ed. I do magic, and I can see magic when other people do it.”

“I’m Diane. I have the ability to feel precisely what is happening to every millimeter of my body at any moment, and down to the level of individual cells when I focus. I don’t have any powers that let me do anything special, though. This makes me sort of the ultimate test subject for certain things.”

Greg spoke next. “Now, Peter, you should be aware that I asked all this crew to observe you during all of what you do here today, including the parts you just did. So, crew, tell me what you saw.”

Ed went first. “I saw absolutely no magic during any of that.”

Stephanie stated, “When Peter was changing form and merging, I saw the faintest glimmer of psychic activity. There is something psychic about the ability, but either it’s not the main driver for the changes or the power has built-in shielding. I didn’t see psychic communication between his body and the place where he sees the screens, wherever that is.”

Nick said, “I did not see any communication coming from nor going into Geometer’s body during any of that. If Peter really is in a place with four computer screens, it doesn’t communicate with his body in a natural way within our world.”

Diane added, “I felt you push against me when we first came into contact, and up until a certain point when you were starting to push through me. That all stopped at once, shortly before you went all the way through. I didn’t feel any strange effects; there was no apparent interaction between your body and the insides of my body.”

Tracy now spoke up. “Peter’s shaped bodies have a bit of a skin to them. The skin seems to be made of the same substance as the rest of his body but is a little denser. When he goes through a solid object, the part that overlaps with the object is very, very thin, while the other parts get denser, and once he’s through to the other side, the density sort of flows across to the other side.”

Mel said, “My power is a bit different from yours, Peter, in that I can control whether or not I am tangible at any moment. But I don’t have much in the way of observational powers, and I think I’m mainly here as an advisor. I’m going to keep watching and suggesting stuff, but I don’t have anything to really add right now.”

Vladimir shrugged, “None of my powers apply to anything you did there. I think my part is still coming.”

Now Greg said, “It’s Mel’s turn now. She is going to lead you through a set of exercises designed to test the limits of your phasing.

And this she did. First off, she had me phase through a series of ever-thicker walls until I came to one I could not phase through. I went part way in and then bounced back out.

Tracy spoke up, “This is where my observation can probably help you. When you are trying to go through a wall, most of your material does not enter the wall at all; it passes directly across once part of you reaches the other side. So if you reach out for the far wall, you may be able to get through thicker walls.”

This advice got me through walls much thicker than the previous one I got stuck at.

“If you stretch out horizontally like one of the traditional flying heroes, you can go through more. And you can probably get through anything as long as you have the room outside the wall to make a needle long enough to go all the way through.”

This ultimately got me up to flying through 20 feet of solid lead with success. They didn’t have more. I’m not sure why they even had a solid lead wall 20 feet thick, but it was the thickest thing they had.

To everybody, Greg said, “I’m going to call a lunch break, but Peter doesn’t eat like we do. His lunch is going to be another experiment. Peter’s body is solar powered, and we’ve got what is effectively a high-intensity sun lamp. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a quantitative way of measuring Peter’s energy level, but I want to do a couple things. First off, we’re going to have Tracy study Peter and see if she can see anything different about him when he’s full of energy versus whatever state he’s in now. Also, Peter, I want you to try to judge the rate you are getting power as compared with a sunny day. I’m not sure there’s really anything for the rest of you; we know this function is a known method of photosynthesis some natural beings use, so you can all run off to the cafeteria.”

So they left, and Greg and Tracy and I went to a room where I found their sun lamp was just a tanning bed. Somebody had set up an off switch I could press with a small bit of my body outside the bed, and it would also stop a timer that kept track of how long I was in there. After I confirmed that I could press the button rather than phase through it, I made myself into a big rectangular slab to fill the bed and Greg turned it on.

So that I was never left completely alone, Tracy went and got lunch and ate it in the room with me, and only when she came back did Greg leave. I felt like I was in an energy state where I would have needed one and a half or two hours to fill up under the sun, which had become my regular single daily meal by now, but the bed filled me up in 40 minutes.

Tracy was done eating by then, so after I turned it off, she opened the bed up and studied me again, and when she was done she led me to the cafeteria where everybody else was finishing up.

“I couldn’t see any difference before and after,” Tracy told Greg.

THE TANNING BED FED ME FASTER
THAN THE SUN. WHAT I GOT IN
FORTY MINUTES WOULD HAVE TAKEN
ALMOST TWO HOURS WITH THE SUN.

Greg replied, “Good to know, and probably good for you to know as well.”

Stephanie spoke up, “One other thing I neglected to mention earlier is that I can see your soul, or whatever it is. Your essence. With a few rare exceptions I can see this for everybody, and yours occupies your body fully, whether it’s a blob or a collection of geometric shapes. Even when it’s passing through another person. Because it’s so normal, I didn’t think to report the observation, but conversation over lunch made me think it is relevant. So I think you are in there, and the computer screen interface is probably your mind’s way of coping with what your powers have done. I’m not saying it’s not real, but just that it’s your mind’s interpretation of what’s there, which is actually too complex for you to understand.”

SO MAYBE I HAVE
FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS
OF INTERFACING
WITH MY POWERS?

“Maybe something like that. You have one interface that lets you change your body, one that lets you explore the other abilities granted by your powers, one that lets you see what body you have made with your powers, and one that lets you see the world, which is in some powers-related way, not with eyes.”

In the afternoon, they tried (in various rooms - no one place was set up to test all these things) having me pass through magnetic fields, live wires with electricity running through them, fiber-optic cables, spaces with intense light rays, electron beams, and other things I didn’t even understand the names for. None of this stuff really affected me. Vladimir finally got into the game and created various configurations of living matter, none of which affected me in the least. They had me pass through a sheet of multi-layered kevlar - much like a bulletproof vest except it was a doorway-sized sheet of the stuff - and that took some effort. I had to push through each layer like it was a new wall.

But I could also teleport my body when I knew how far it was to the other side. And indeed I could teleport across all the obstacles they had presented. The phasing was more useful to understand in terms of how I interacted with things. And I knew the solution for that now; I had to put my whole body in a bodysuit and then I’d have to experience enough force to phase me out of the whole suit before I’d phase through anything unintentionally.

I discussed it with Mom afterward, and she agreed. The problem was the sizing. I was still undersized; in fact, the volume added for the details I’d added to my body while smoothing it out had cost me another 3 inches in height, so now I was only 4-foot-8. And it was awfully skinny. It was fine as a child’s body but even if I could scale it up to an adult size at the same proportions I’d look skinny for a woman and impossibly thin for a man. But it got me thinking: Should I try to design myself as a woman?

Subsequent Days

Mom took some measurements and we went out and she got me a bodysuit that fit. But it was a child’s size intended for about a 10-year-old. She helped me put it on; I didn’t think I was dexterous enough yet to do it myself.

But it worked, for the things that I could do now, like open and close doors. Though if I wasn’t wearing the bodysuit, I might not really need to, as I could phase through it or teleport past it, both of which would cause me to lose the bodysuit if I did it while I was wearing it.

And it let me wear clothes. Sort of, anyway. Some of my clothes from a few years ago were still in storage and Mom was able to help me put some of those on over the bodysuit. Even then, they didn’t fit me well; I’d made myself considerably skinnier in an attempt to add height. If I developed a more realistic looking body and wanted to interact with people in the world normally, I’d want clothes.

I spent the rest of the week practicing on making the shape of my body more realistic and in particular working on body motions. Even if I wasn’t really walking, it would seem less disconcerting to people if I moved my legs like I was walking when I moved.

And I finished my school year from home, with my exams carried out over the computer.

But I felt like I needed some other ideas on how to improve the body, and Mom contacted NANA and put me in touch with some other young people with, well, not really similar powers, but at least shapeshifters who had needed to design their own bodies. And I made separate appointments to have them visit me at the house in July.

The first one who came in was actually two bodies. Teddy explained that his power lets him animate extra bodies, and he’d brought a female animated body named Trixie with him. At first I thought it was weird he had a separate name for his other body, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Most people, even ones who knew Trixie was his other body, wouldn’t be thinking about it all the time, and it would make interactions with other people smoother if they could call the girl body by a girl’s name.

But when he told me about how his power worked, I realized he was of no real help for my problems. He made some sort of sculpture, stuffy doll, or anything of that sort and brought it to life, and as long as it was reasonably realistic, it came to life as a complete normal body. He’d never had to design feet beyond stuffing a sock with something. One good thing came out of it: He gave me the idea of making multiple bodies. It was no different from making multiple letters. I just made another copy of the body shape at another location. And of course, they got even smaller than the undersized body I already had. I’m sure this was of some use. I could focus my vision and hearing on either body.

The second one was George, and he had other names, too. He’d had two problems: A shapeshifting power he couldn’t control and a ghost who was possessing his body in his sleep and forming it into a girl body. I didn’t realize ghost possession was real, but he explained to me it was, and the other names he used belonged to the ghost and other people she had possessed in the past.

He’d eventually gotten this under control, keeping the ghost but working with her cooperatively. She showed him how to use his power, and the differences between male and female bodies. There were far more than I’d thought of! And it was his description of the differences that helped me solve one of my own problems.

I HAVEN’T MADE
A VOICE BOX YET.

I told him in my way, after he described his voice box, and the differences there, including the Adam’s apple that protrudes at men’s necks.

“Did you make any internal organs?”

NO, MY BODIES ARE COMPLETELY
SOLID UNDER THE SKIN.

“That’s your problem. Human bodies are mostly water, and having about the same density allows people to swim, but it’s not that simple. Humans have air spaces inside them, especially the lungs, which balance out the tissues and blood, which are heavier than water.”

Together we looked up some information about the capacity of the lungs online. This was complicated, but we found the following statistics: The total lung capacity of an adult human being is about 5.5 to 6 liters. This is the amount of air in the lungs when you take a full deep breath. The minimum volume is about 1.2 liters. When you exhale as much air as possible, there’s still that much air left over in the lungs. The normal amount of air while breathing at rest is 2.5 to 3 liters; you only actually breathe in and out half a liter per breath when you are just casually breathing and not exercising or trying to take big breaths on purpose.

But the topic of density got me thinking. I should put enough empty space in my body to give it the density of water. The density of water varies with temperature, but of course it should be at human body temperature, where it is very close to 62 pounds per cubic foot. I weigh 90 pounds. At that density, my 90 pounds would fill 2508 cubic inches, 46% more than my measured 1712 cubic inches. If I spread that out evenly over 3 dimensions, I’d be 13.6% larger in each dimension. That would bring me up to 5’3.5”, which is about what I was before my powers came in.

THANKS, GEORGE. THAT IS
GOING TO HELP A LOT.

The 6 liters of lungs at maximum inflation, not to mention the 3 liters at rest, was a lot less than the extra 800 cubic inches of hole I had to put inside myself to match the density, in part because the lungs weren’t the only hole, and in part because the density of my material didn’t match the density of flesh. I didn’t have the water; I only had the denser components. Well, at least something that was denser than water.

And then I figured out how to put a big hollow inside my torso and smaller ones in my head and legs. It was pretty simple. For the torso, I just had to specify a smaller cone with a smaller radius and the same slope and axis, and cut shorter on both ends, and invert the inequalities so it matched everything outside the shape, and take the intersection of that with the rest of my body. Naturally, it didn’t match the hollows inside a person, but maybe that was OK, as long as I made the outside look right.

George and I went to show my mom, who was surprised by the bigger me until I explained in another wall of text. Then George had to go, but I asked him to come back to explain to me the shape of the voice box and vocal cords, and, I realized, the entire throat and mouth which I would need to speak like a person.

I needed a larger size of the bodysuit, and I could wear the clothes I wore a couple weeks ago before this started, though I needed to use the smallest notch on my belt to fit my 27 inch waist to hold my pants up. I still looked like a string bean.

George came back a few days later and helped me work on the voice box. This went in stages. First I made just the vocal cords, with no body around it, and then put in half the larynx, which is the actual “box”, and the neck around it so he could still see what I was doing. And when he was satisfied, I enclosed it all and added a torso with some semblance of lungs. At this point, I thought that I should be able to tense the vocal cords and blow air through them from the lungs and make a steady sound, but it didn’t work.

At first we thought I’d done something wrong, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. What we noticed was that the vocal cords didn’t flap. We looked this up online and confirmed voice worked by air being pushed through the vocal cords causing them to open and close repeatedly, which caused pressure waves that echoed at certain resonant frequencies within the voice box to make the audible sound. What my body was made out of didn’t react the way a flap of human flesh did to air passed over it.

I did eventually make it work, by inducing the vibrations myself with math. Forcing air over already vibrating flaps of my body-stuff made the expected sound, which I could change in pitch by altering the size of the opening for the air above the vocal cords. To make many of the sounds for speech, I needed to put a mouth and nose over it, and a tongue, and lips, which took a bunch more direction from George. It took a whole day for me to build. At least these parts worked; they just provided different kinds of restrictions on the air passages.

But I had to learn how to speak all over again. At least I knew what I was supposed to be doing; it was a matter of translating it all into math. I worked on one sound at a time, tried different formulas, and when I had something that worked well I saved it as a function. I had figured out how to make time-varying functions before, and these were no different, except that they were very short and I would call many of them in succession.

Each sound required exhaling a certain amount of air, some less and some more. I basically had an air counter that tracked how much air was in my lungs. One function expelled it when I needed it to speak, and another function would take a breath during the pauses between words when I needed to refill that air, while opening up the channel fully so as not to make sound. On top of that, each sound required one or more movements of the mouth or tongue, opening or closing the nasal passages, and activating or deactivating my artificial voice box waves. Finally, I needed to put in transitions. There was a transition from each sound to the neutral position, and special transitions directly from one sound to another when going through the neutral position created an unnatural pause. The transitions were important; though I could instantaneously change my mouth from one position into another, doing that interrupted the sound in a noticeably unnatural way.

It took me a week to make the initial function for each sound, and after that I could speak, sometimes badly. I wrote a function that let me string together a bunch of sounds and say them just like I could write the words in the air. It took several more weeks to get all the transitions to work. By the time school started in the fall I could speak intelligibly. It still wasn’t perfect, and I started writing another level of functions for syllables and whole words, so that I didn’t have to think so hard about all the little nuances.

But this meant I wasn’t working on my body. I had put eyes and ears on the head just so it didn’t look so weird with only a nose and mouth, but I hadn’t done any more work to make it look like a more convincing human being. And my parents knew I wasn’t really ready to try to do all the school stuff yet, so they’d arranged for me to get my assignments emailed. I could use the computer both to read them and write responses. I hadn’t actually worked on the detailed hand movements necessary to write on paper, so it was better this way anyway.

I also had a tutor come out once a week who I could work directly with on anything where I had trouble. This gave me practice speaking with someone other than my parents, and on a variety of subjects.

Having to do schoolwork slowed down my work on my speech, so it wasn’t until November that I finally got around to testing every sequence of two sounds that could occur in an English word and making sure I had a proper transition and could call that work completed, and adding the pronunciations for words in my vocabulary was an ongoing thing. And it slowed down my work on my body even more, but once in a while I got the chance to tweak something.

So it was Christmas break when I got around to working on my body again. And the first thing I noticed was that I hadn’t grown. My cube shape was still 12 inches to the best that it could be measured by a ruler and my blob shape still weighed 90 pounds.

Christmas morning for the first time I showed my parents my new shape. A little narrower at the waist, small boobs protruding, and otherwise the same body I’d been using the past few months. “Merry Christmas. You have a daughter.”

George, Thursday, January 22, 2009

All the local TV and radio stations were broadcasting an urgent message in the morning.

Small, hard, irregularly shaped pink bits are scattered all over town, but most concentrated in the area around the north end of Collins Street. They aren’t harmful, but you could slip on them. If you find any of these bits, please do not eat them or let your kids or pets eat them. It is safe to pick them up with your hands, but if you’d rather not, feel free to use plastic bags. NANA wants to recover these bits. There are red bins labeled for NANA to collect these bits at all schools, post offices, many major stores, and on street corners in the Collins Street area where the most bits appear. Please simply deposit them in the bins.

Accompanying the TV broadcast were images of street sweepers trying to collect the bits off the roads before dawn, and some close-up pictures of some of the bits in somebody’s hand. They were small, about fingertip-sized.

They intentionally didn’t say it in the message, but it was pretty clear to those who knew about powers that this was related to a new manifestation of a power. So everybody left their houses for school carrying sandwich bags, dog poop bags, and the like. Those who were riding the bus picked up their streets down to the stop; those who walked to school picked up along the whole way, and anybody who was a few minutes late for the first class was excused.

We saw volunteers out at other times in the day trying to locate bits in the grass and in other areas where they might be missed.

I don’t think any of us were surprised to get summoned to NANA this morning. We were asked to show up at the testing entrance at 9, and I recognized some of the people, including the girl I helped last year who had to make her body out of geometric shapes. She actually did make a body that looked like a girl now, though the parts not covered by the simple dress she wore made me think she’d just added boobs to the body she was using before. I was pleased to hear, when she entered and checked in at the desk, that she was now speaking with the vocal parts I helped her design.

It was about 10 minutes past nine when a man who identified himself as Greg came into the room and called roll for our group, by code name even though he didn’t use one, and we then all followed him to a room with a big table in the middle covered in thousands of the little pink bits.

“Welcome, everybody. As I said, I’m Greg, and my usual role here is to be a powers tester. However, the person I am supposed to test is this pile of pieces you see on the table.”

There was only one shocked face. I think the rest of the group assembled here either knew already or had guessed we were picking up parts of a person.

“I don’t normally engage in non-powers-related work, but until we can get this person back together, this is non-testing NANA business, and I’ll be using my code name Kingsman. But I’m not a doctor, nor do I have relevant powers, so I’ll mostly be letting the rest of you run this effort and possibly bringing in additional help or supplies as needed.”

A woman I recognized then spoke up. “I’m Stephanie, but while we’re here today on official, non-testing business I’ll be using my code name Miss Tix. That’s M-I-S-S T-I-X. I have the power to see people’s souls, so I know that there is, beyond any expectation you might have, a living soul embedded in these little pieces. A boy named Jesse developed powers late Wednesday night, and spontaneously burst into these pieces when he did so. There aren’t any conventional life signs coming from them, but I identified the living soul still attached to the pieces, so we sent out the alert you may have seen Thursday morning. We believe we have recovered nearly all the pieces. There are at least enough pieces here that the soul can fit into the psychic cavity that the pieces represent.”

Then a man who came in with us said, “I’m Dr. Springfield, and like the others, while we are assembling this patient today I’ll be using my code name Illinois. My training as a medical doctor and understanding of anatomy make me suited to help out here, and I also have powers as a healer, so if we get this body together but he starts bleeding from the missing pieces, I can probably deal with that.”

A younger woman, the shocked face, introduced herself as, “Janice, code name Tech Wiz. If we have some idea how to use computers to solve this puzzle, I can probably do it.”

She invited me to introduce myself next, and I said, “I’m George, code name Samantha Quicksilver, and these days I am equally comfortable in male or female shapes. I’m a teenager who developed shapeshifting powers a couple years ago. I originally didn’t have any control of my shapeshifting powers, but then I was possessed by a ghost who did understand how to use my powers while she was in my body. Eventually, Miss Tix helped me and the ghost get along, and she showed me not only how to use my power, but also a great deal about the human body and the differences between male and female bodies, which are far more than those of you who have not studied anatomy might realize. And maybe that’s why I’m here. I also helped the last member of our crew with some of her problems.”

I gestured to her. In the slightly robotic but fully intelligible voice she now used, she said, “I am Petra, code name The Geometer. I am also a shapeshifter, but a very different one; I have to define my shape using geometry, so it’s actually quite involved for me to have this somewhat human-looking form. Samantha helped me figure out some of what I was doing wrong, and also showed me how the vocal cords work so that I could learn to speak. But I’m more comfortable as combinations of cubes and spheres and other such shapes, and if I don’t have a working vocal system, I sometimes write words in the air. I have a fixed amount of matter, so don’t be surprised if you see me floating on no legs today while I’m turning the legs part of my matter into tools to assist with reassembling our patient. So, Illinois, since you suggested we are attempting a reassembly, how exactly do we go about that?”

“Well, that is the problem. If you look at these pieces closely,” Illinois said, pulling down a camera I hadn’t noticed was mounted on the ceiling high above us almost all the way down to the table, and turning on a screen which provided a magnified view of the parts, the pieces have little tabs and holes which are irregularly shaped. So I think the body fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but a three-dimensional one, with thousands of tiny pieces which are all essentially the same color. But we have some pairs of pieces we managed to find matches for by hand, which are over here, and I invite you to take these apart and look at both pieces of a pair closely and confirm how closely the shapes match.”

The paired pieces were passed among those of us who were seeing the collection for the first time, and we all agreed they looked like exact matches.

Geometer suggested, “The pieces seem basically cubical, except the faces of the cubes are very irregular. If we have a way to get 3-D photos of the faces, Tech Wiz, could you match them up?”

“I think I could, if someone could help me understand the image format.”

Kingsman spoke up, “We do have a 3-D camera. Let me go get it.”

While he was gone, Geometer continued her idea. “I can turn most of my body into a bunch of little boxes, just covering this whole tabletop with boxes maybe 1.5 cm square, which I think should hold even the biggest of these pieces in any orientation, and help to keep track of them, and rotate them for the camera. Tech Wiz can process the images and figure out which pieces go together. That should let us build a network of all the pieces, and you can basically call out pieces by number and orientation, and I can lift each one from its box in turn for you to add to the growing body framework.”

“I think that could work,” Tech Wiz said, and the others agreed.

Kingsman came back with a whole cart full of parts: the camera, a set of rails and a mechanism to move it in three dimensions, and the hardware to hang the rails from the ceiling, and the computer that had the software on it to interface with the camera, which wasn’t standard webcam software. We actually moved to another room because this one already had the other camera mounted on the ceiling and what we wanted was a completely different type of ceiling mount.

There was a document for Tech Wiz to study which explained the file format of the 3-D images, while the rest of us participated in varying degrees in the assembly of the camera and its rails, and in moving our patient’s pieces to this room. And then Geometer made his big grid of cells to hold the pieces. But at first we just put one piece in while Geometer and Tech Wiz planned the sequence to capture all these images quickly.

“OK, Geometer, please print a number on the bottom of each cell, small, at the top, where the camera will see it when you are holding up the piece.”

“I don’t really do colors, but what I can do is make the numbers be holes. The table is a different color from my body and it will show through.”

She did that to Tech Wiz’s satisfaction and then proceeded to number all the cells that way. And then they worked out exactly how Geometer was to hold and rotate each piece to photograph all its sides. Once they got going, they could do all six sides of a piece in 3 seconds, 4 seconds including the time to move to the next cell. That meant we did 15 pieces every minute, 900 an hour... but there were 5000 pieces, so it took five and a half hours, during which they sent some of us home. And then it was a couple hours for Tech Wiz to program a solution to match all the images and run it. So it was in the evening when we came back to assemble the body.

Tech Wiz was actually able to piece together the 3-D photos to give us an image of what Jesse looked like.

“Wait, didn’t you say this was a boy?” Illinois asked.

“That is what we were told,” Kingsman replied. “But it doesn’t take a medical degree to see that’s not true now.”

It looked like the girl we were building was in a standing position, so we decided to go from the feet up, assembling her layer by layer. Tech Wiz brought up a display of all the piece numbers in the layer and codes that explained how each one should be rotated, Geometer raised up those pieces from their boxes and put them in the right orientations, and all the rest of us grabbed the pieces and put them together. As the legs got taller, Geometer also helped by providing some supports to keep our work from toppling over. Still, we had 160 of those layers and it was taking us a couple minutes to assemble each layer.

After one of the layers, Miss Tix called out, “Stop, please. This is going to take all night. I need sleep.” There was a general consensus of agreement.

Kingsman asked, “Geometer, can you hold the shape of the bins overnight?”

“Yes, I actually don’t sleep. But it will help if I can get some more time on the tanning bed.. I can take care of that myself, though. I had a session this afternoon, and usually one session a day would be enough for me, but I’m working my power pretty hard today.”

With that, Geometer’s arms disappeared, leaving just a head and torso under her dress. Somehow none of us were surprised, given what we had seen from her already, that she could just teleport part of her body to another part of the building.

And we left Jessie’s legs standing there, assembled up to the thighs.

Sunday morning we gathered again and continued building. We skipped the arms when we first encountered them, and waited until we had the torso fully built to the shoulders before branching out on them. Unlike the straight legs, the arms were in a random position which wasn’t self-supporting.

Before lunch we finished assembling the statue we hoped would turn back into a person, but... it didn’t. We just had a statue of a girl. We were missing only 10 pieces, each of which was a smaller piece on the outside.

Miss Tix said, “Let me take a mental look at her.”

We all cleared out of the way to let her do her thing. After a couple minutes, she informed us, “Her soul’s there, but the psychic cavity is still fragmented and the soul can’t occupy it. She’s basically shut out of being able to connect with her body, though she’s still attached to it in a loose way. I think we need to physically fuse the pieces.”

“How would we do that?” Tech Wiz asked.

Kingsman responded, “Well, we tried applying pressure to the pairs of pieces we had joined at the start. They remained separate bits that we could pull apart by hand.”

“What are they made of, anyway?” I asked. “Could they fuse by heating them?”

Illinois answered me, “As odd as it seems, they are made of living matter, the flesh of a body, just transmuted somehow into this solid form. The striations we saw as we assembled the inner parts of her body correspond to the various organs and tissues. Transmuted by her powers, I guess, and because of that, anything might work. I would test it with two pieces first.”

We agreed that was a good strategy, and Illinois pried two adjacent pieces from her shoulder, then covered the rest of the naked body with one of those plastic gowns from a doctor’s office. We took them elsewhere, where Kingsman scrounged up something ceramic, I think, to hold the two bits together, and we put it in an oven, gradually increasing the temperature, while Miss Tix stared intently, looking for the two soul bits to merge. They finally did when the oven got to a temperature of 300 F, and after some cooling, the pieces seemed permanently fused but otherwise unchanged. Illinois snapped them back into the space they came from and closed up the other bits around them.

While we were discussing the plan to fuse her whole body the same way, Geometer asked, “If we heat her whole body to 300 degrees, won’t she be cooked alive when she comes back to life?”

Illinois answered, “Well, that’s possible. We will want a setup where we can pull her out quickly, and I can apply my power as a healer. But it’s likely that her body has permanently transformed into this material and won’t be harmed. Other people in Normal have powers that allow them to resist heat that would cook ordinary people’s bodies.”

So now we looked for an oven large enough to cook her entire body for long enough to get the temperature up to 300 degrees, and pull her out quickly. Once they determined NANA didn’t have one, they sent some of us home while they looked for a solution. We got the call later in the day that we were going to use a pizza oven in a restaurant after they closed at 9 PM, so the group of us, who were all emotionally invested in seeing this girl live now even though some of our powers were no longer relevant, all showed up at this restaurant, along with its owner.

At our direction to heat the oven to 300 degrees, the owner set it that way. “Normally it would be hotter than that for pizza, but I understand we are most certainly not making pizza tonight.”

Our group rigged up a device to hold her body in the oven but pull it out quickly, so in she went. She was in there for about 10 minutes when we saw her stir to life, and we pulled her out. She thanked us for saving her, and seemed normal for a bit, and didn’t bleed from the few missing pieces, but after a few minutes she froze solid and went still. We all looked disappointed. Then some of her pieces started popping out, one of them stinging Tech Wiz where it hit her.

“Put her back in!” Illinois exclaimed.

Most of her body was still in one piece on the movable rack, so we put her back in the oven, and soon she was alive again. It seemed that not only was she not harmed by being at high temperature, she could only live that way. The reason she was frozen and had shattered was that she was too cold being at normal room temperature.

The pizza shop owner produced an oven mitt, which one of the group used to hand the piece that had struck Tech Wiz back to our now very hot girl, and she put it into the right spot on her body, where it fused with the other pieces again.

“You know where it goes?” Tech Wiz asked.

“Yes, I know where all my parts go. And I know where they all are, sort of. Thank you for reassembling me. I was aware of what was going on that entire time, but a lot of it was hazy due to me being in too many places at once.”

So some of us went home again while they called in other people to build a large mobile oven that they could put her into, and get her safely out of the pizza shop before business the next morning.

We confirmed later that when her pieces popped out, if they had enough energy, they were able to phase through normal matter for a time. Some of the pieces that had popped out that night ended up in the street in front of the pizza shop and in the alley behind it, and one was three blocks away. She gave Kingsman a list of the approximate locations and other NANA helpers went looking for them.

We all got to see her the next weekend via a video feed.

“Hi, everyone! You can call me Jessie. That’s spelled with an I-E now. I have a code name too, Some Like it Hot. I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a need for what I can do, but maybe they’ll have me pulling people out of a fire or something.”

Everybody laughed.

“I requested this call with you all to thank you for putting me together; I literally wouldn’t be able to live without your efforts!”

“You’re welcome,” a few said, and Miss Tix added “That’s what NANA is here for.”

“Not sure how many of you were involved, but I also appreciate you returning my lost pieces to me. I was able to snap those into place, so I have fewer blemishes now. Just this one and one on my thigh. These are both out in large parks somewhere.”

She pointed to one notable gap on her left cheek where a small piece had never been found from the first time she exploded all over town. She had decided on calling those holes “blemishes.” Apparently they didn’t cause her any trouble beyond her appearance.

“So this is my new home, which other people from NANA helped build. Sorry, I can’t turn the camera, but I can step out of the way and let you see what’s here.”

All her furniture seemed to be made of enameled metal. She held up her bed to show it was a perforated metal sheet attached to a frame with springs all around, the kind of thing that substituted for a boxspring on some bunk beds where vertical space was tight, but for her it was the entire bed. It didn’t look comfortable for a normal person, but maybe it was fine for a person who is basically made of stone. There was a folding metal chair and we could just see the edge of what I assumed was a metal desk in front of the camera. She had a window, a mirror, and a closet of some sort.

“Everything here is made of materials that won’t burn or melt at temperatures in a standard household oven, which is basically what I need to live. You saw how I needed to get up to about 300 degrees to activate, but I actually like it hotter, around 450. I usually keep it around 350, though, because that’s all my special computer keyboard and mouse can take. I have an insulated box you can’t see below the camera that keeps them safe when I turn up the heat.”

“How does the computer operate at those temperatures?” Tech Wiz asked.

“It doesn’t. It’s in the next room at normal temperatures. There are hookups for the special keyboard and mouse, and my monitor and camera are behind an insulated window. Think of the oven window and you’ll have a good idea what this is like.”

“Do you eat?” I asked her, wondering if they just slid raw meat into her room and let it cook in there.

“No, it seems that I draw energy from the heat. I told you that I like it hotter, and part of that is that I get more energy from the heat at those higher temperatures. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, either, so I could put away the computer, turn up the heat, and lie down and take a nap, and get up a couple hours later full of energy.”

“What happened to the mobile oven?” Kingsman asked.

“Oh, I still have it. I had to live in it for three days while they were building this room. Then NANA didn’t have any other use for it, so it’s on a trailer in my family’s back yard and they can back it up to the outside door of this room if I need to go somewhere. We practiced that once to make sure we can do it in case of emergency, but we just went around the block once and then back here. You remember how I didn’t freeze immediately when I came out of the oven? I can take a step or two outside, and as long as the mobile oven is already heated up I’ll be fine.”

Miss Tix asked, “How are you feeling about being a girl now?”

“It doesn’t really bother me. The isolation is more of a bigger thing. Being able to connect over the computer is essential, because it’s impractical for me to meet with people face to face. If somebody’s rude, I can turn them off. If I don’t want people to know I’m a girl, I don’t have to have the camera on. I do have a window and an intercom in my house but it’s just used by my family members. Inviting someone over just to have them chat with you through a window is pretty pointless when we can chat online. I might be having a tutor over here though, since I can’t very well go to school and explode all over the other kids, and for that I will have the tutor here in person some of the time. And as for the other aspects of being a girl, I don’t go to the bathroom so I can’t complain about that sitting down thing, and it’s not likely I’m going to have anything resembling normal periods either. The doctors want to scan me eventually, if I don’t show any obvious sign, to see if I have an active reproductive system, but even if I do, I might not ever... use it.”

There were a lot of implications in that statement, but Geometer responded with, “I didn’t have a chance to mention it when we were busy putting you back together, but I’m a shapeshifter of a sort, and I was originally a boy. I didn’t originally want to be a girl either, but eventually I chose to make my standard body look like a girl.”

“Why did you do that, when you can make any shape?”

“Any shape, but not any size. I have a fixed amount of material. I have to make a huge portion of my insides hollow just to make a girl body that doesn’t look like a little kid. To make a man-sized body, it would be an absurdly thin shell. And I don’t grow; it seems like I have the same amount of matter forever. But like you, I don’t use the bathroom or have periods; I just look like a girl.”

“We can start a club! I’m sure there are others like us in Normal,” Jessie laughed, letting us know she wasn’t serious.

“Even if it’s not a club, I’ll keep in touch.”

I shared my story before we ended the call, or at least an abbreviated version of it, leaving out the awful fates of Samantha’s former host bodies.

Jessie responded, “So she innately had the ability you lacked, to control your shape? And in exchange for that, you showed her how to live a normal life again?”

“That’s a good summary of it.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal for both of you.”

Samantha was mentally agreeing in my head, and I replied to Jessie, “It has been.”

When nobody else had more stories to tell, Jessie ended the call, promising to keep in touch with all of us.

Late night, Friday, February 6, 2009

Kenny

“No, no! Stop! Stop shrinking!”

Somehow, I wasn’t myself anymore. I was the house. It seemed like the kind of thing that had to be a weird dream, but it felt very real. And I was shrinking, trapping my family members inside the house. One of my sisters had gotten caught up in one of the walls, and I could feel her presence in my mind.

I tried to tell her, “Wake up, Deirdre! Break loose! Run while you still can!” I got a “What’s happening?” response from her, and then nothing. She had passed out.

With all the rest of my strength, I focused on stopping the shrinkage of the house. My other family members weren’t caught in the walls yet. I might still be able to save them. But they were asleep, and impacts with walls had not woken them up.

I could sense them, all of them, asleep in the house. But I could feel my sister most of all. Her bed had gotten flipped upright by shrinking walls and she was embedded in one of the outside walls of the house, but I could feel everything. The bed against one side of her body. The wall against the other. Her nightgown. Her breathing. She was still breathing. I could sense her mind somehow, but it was asleep, as asleep as everybody else. I couldn’t wake her up. And then she was gone.

Eventually it seemed like I had gotten the house to stop shrinking, but it had taken all my effort. And that was the last I remembered.

Greg

It was a pretty boring morning at NANA when the official phone rang.

“This is Kingsman at NANA.”

“Kingsman, this is Officer Riley with the Normal Police. We need you guys to come over and check out a shrinking house at 227 Fowler Street.”

“A shrinking house?”

“Yes, it was a two-story house and now it’s the size of a garden shed. There seems to be a person embedded in one of the walls.”

“All right. I’ll gather up some people and get over there.”

“I expect I’m taking the lead here,” Miss Tix suggested.

I agreed, and so did the others. She picked up a lawn chair from the yard and brought it close to the house, and sat to do her thing.

“There are four people alive here. They don’t appear to be possessed by ghosts or have the potential for that to happen. The reading of the one embedded in the wall is very strange. The house is part of the body. It’s all one person, with a normal sized space for a soul, and there is a soul which fits the space well. If that’s a ghost, then the original occupant of that body is dead. There’s no activity; they are all asleep, unconscious, entranced, or otherwise immobilized.”

When she stepped away, Illinois went up and pressed his stethoscope to the exposed skin near the shoulders.

“Despite being embedded in the wall of the house, this body has normal life signs: A pulse and normal, restful breathing. I’m not entirely certain, but I think this is the body of a girl or young woman.”

“The one who developed powers?” I suggested, having seen too many strange things happen in Normal because of such events.

“Quite possibly. It would make sense, to the extent that anything makes sense about this scenario.”

I asked, “Can we reach the others somehow? They might be in danger.”

“If the house really is part of her body, it might harm her to break in.”

“Other powers?”

Jump, a teleporter, said, “There’s no way I could teleport into such a confined space. I’m actually wondering how there’s enough space for their bodies. Are they perhaps stuck in walls too?”

“It could be,” Miss Tix replied, “But only the one visibly embedded in the wall appears to have the house be part of her body.”

When nobody had any other ideas, we got some tools from the police and tried to gently pry the doors and windows open, and also used a suction cup device to try to slide the windows up. But it was no use, even with windows we could see were unlocked. It didn’t even behave the way we would expect building materials to. It was unusually elastic. I could push the middle of the door inward by at least an inch with my bare hands, but it didn’t move apart from the frame on any side. It was almost as if the house wasn’t made of house anymore.

Illinois examined it at my suggestion. “Whatever it’s made of, it doesn’t appear to be living flesh. I can only sense a distant pulse, the pulse of the girl on the far side conducting through the walls. There isn’t blood flowing inside the wall itself, however much it may be a part of her.”

Miss Tix then suggested, “If the house really is her body, then maybe that boy Dawson can help. The one who takes control of people’s bodies by kissing them. I believe his powers do work on unconscious people, and he doesn’t need to kiss their lips. If he takes control of her body, maybe he could open the doors and windows.”

“Teddy, you’re wanted on the phone by NANA.”

“They want me, really?”

“They asked for you by your code name Dawson, so it’s official business, not testing.”

I took the phone from Mom.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is Kingsman from NANA. We’re looking for Dawson.”

“That’s me.”

“We’ve got a tricky situation with new powers and we are hoping you can help us. There’s a girl here whose powers have made her become one with her house, but she’s unconscious and there are other people inside. We don’t think we can get them out without hurting her, but we are hoping if you could gain control of her that maybe her powers will let you open the doors and windows to help us get the other people out.”

“My powers only work on people and things shaped like people, like statues, not houses.”

“Well she’s got a human body and the house.”

“Hmm. I’ve never encountered somebody like that so I have no idea if this will work.”

“We don’t know how much time the people inside have. If you are available we want you immediately.”

I put the phone down and told Mom, “They want me right now. They think I can help save some people.”

“Well go ahead! Go save some lives!”

I told Kingsman on the phone, “I can do it.”

“Great. We’ll send a teleporter right over, one by the name of Jump.”

“Oh, like immediately immediately. OK. Let me go deanimate my other bodies so I’m at full strength for whatever happens here.”

“You have other bodies? Oh, I guess that makes sense. Is that going to be quick?”

“Yes.”

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“OK, Jump will be at your door in seconds. Just tell her when you’re ready.”

“OK, see you real soon, I guess.”

I hung up the phone, and ran to go deanimate Jack and Trixie. Jump was ringing the doorbell before I got back, and Mom let her in.

“Are you Jump?” I asked when I returned.

“Yes. My name is Cynthia, but my code name is Jump, and on this kind of official business, it’s all code names. You’re Dawson?”

“Yes.”

“OK, I’m ready when you’re ready.”

“Ready, I guess.”

She held out her hand, and I took it, and instantly we were in another place.

A man there asked, “Dawson?”

“That’s me.”

“Kingsman here. This is part of NANA headquarters but we’re going to take you right out to the house now.”

“OK.”

Jump took both our hands and we were then outside, on the street. There was a strange miniature house there, the size of a shed, but with all the doors and windows and trim you’d find on a full size house, just smaller. It was bigger than a dollhouse (unless you had some pretty large dolls). The police had it cordoned off, but Kingsman took us through, just saying I was with him, and up to the other people waiting nearby.

Kingsman now said, “Over on this side, you can see where part of the girl’s body protrudes from the house.”

I went there and looked. “Ew! It looks painful to be inside the wall like that.”

“And it’s possible it is. It seems like everybody in the house, including her, is asleep or unconscious. We don’t know how it happened or why the house shrank. But we are hoping, if you can control her body, that you can open the doors and windows of the house and at least let us get the other people out.”

“OK. Let me try a quick kiss that’ll just give me a feel of her body for a minute so I know what I am getting into.”

I walked up to where her shoulders protruded from the house, with Kingsman following me. And I gave her a pretty ordinary kiss. I touched her with my tongue between my lips just for a moment, not that anybody else could see it. And whoa!

I was a bit overwhelmed by how much sensation I got from the girl and house, and my body fell over backward. Kingsman caught me and guided my body to a lawn chair that was nearby. But the sensation was brief and almost immediately after I got in the chair, I was just Teddy again.

“Are you alright?” another man who was there asked. “I’m Illinois, and I am a medical doctor for ordinary people in addition to helping out with some of the strange cases we get here in Normal.”

“Yes, I’m fine. It was just that the feeling I got from her was so intense. Usually it’s just a body, but she really is that entire house, and I could feel every nail and board that makes up the house in addition to her body. I’m not used to feelings like that. Usually once I am in, even if I’m animating a statue, it’s all flesh and bone.”

“OK. Is she in pain?”

“No, no pain. But she might be overwhelmed by the same feelings I got.”

“What about the other people?”

“I wasn’t in long enough to notice them. How long was it from when I kissed her to when I was in the chair?”

Kingsman replied, “Not very long at all. Less than 10 seconds.”

“I was out of her a second or two after that. So I got maybe twelve seconds for what would have been a one-to-two minute sense-borrowing for a normal person.”

“Maybe the time is reduced because of the size of the body?”

“Maybe. OK, I think I’m ready to try again, but I’m going to need to be in longer, and I am going to need control and not just senses, so this isn’t going to look like the kiss I did before.”

“Do what you need to do,” Illinois requested of me.

For my second attempt, I went up to her, raised her hair with one arm, and turned my head sideways. After working up a good deal of saliva in my mouth, I gave her a lick with my full tongue from one shoulder to the other.

My own body didn’t fall over this time, but Kingsman helped me back to the chair and with my mouth, I explained what I was now feeling to the group assembled there.

You’re right that this girl is one with the house. There are three other people inside, two on the second floor and one on the first floor. And I think I can control the doors and windows. Let me try.

I managed to open the front door, and it came swinging open. However, it was only about a foot wide and two feet tall, and the door and house were too small for people to move around inside. I slid open some windows, too, but they weren’t right next to the people inside. The effort wasn’t completely useless, because they reached in and pulled one person out. About that time, my animation of the girl-house stopped and I was just Teddy again.

“OK, that’s it. I’m not the house anymore,” I told the group. Illinois was overseeing a medical crew who were moving the one person they got out into one of two ambulances that had arrived while we were doing this, but I now had the attention of the rest of the group.

“Can you do it again? Or make the house bigger so we can get in and get the others?”

“I was starting to have the feeling that I could move or enlarge the windows and doors when I lost the connection. But I’m going to need more time to help get the other two out. Do you have a bowl, like one you’d eat soup or cereal from?”

Kingsman started to say something, but Jump reappeared beside me at that moment and handed me a white ceramic cereal bowl with a blue line around the outside.

“Thanks, this will do.”

I started working up a lot of saliva and spat globs of it several times into the bowl. Jump provided me with a glass of water as well to allow me to continue doing this, and when I had about two eggs’ worth of saliva in the bowl, I decided I was ready. I moved her hair aside again and poured the saliva out where I’d licked her before, letting it run down onto parts of the house as well. Where it was running fast, I smeared it to the sides so that it all stayed on the house rather than running to the ground.

And I sat my own body down while I resumed figuring out how to manipulate the house. Pretty soon I had figured out how to rearrange the windows and moved one adjacent to where each other person was inside the house, and opened them. They pulled out one, and then the other, and then, very quickly, the house shrank further, remaining at the same height but shrinking in length and width until it was only the size of a normal door on each side.

“So I guess I don’t have complete control over the house,” I commented.

Once Illinois finished seeing the other two patients off in the second ambulance, and canceled a return trip for the first, we gathered to decide what to do next. “You’re a telephone booth,” he commented.

I vaguely recalled a telephone booth as the place where Clark Kent changed into Superman in old shows, and in even older ones as a place people actually made calls. I hadn’t seen an actual usable telephone booth in my life. They just had pay phones mounted on poles these days, where they had them at all. But Illinois was right about the size of the house now. It was just big enough for one person, or two chummy ones who didn’t mind their bodies touching, if there was nothing else inside.

“Let me see if I can make it more like a telephone booth.”

I raised the second floor to near the ceiling, above the girl’s head, and cleared all the windows off one side. The house was unusually flexible, and I could somehow bend the windows around the edges without breaking them. Then I expanded the door to cover that side. I was just about to open the door at this larger size when I lost control again.

“Sorry, my time’s up. Do you want me to do it again?”

“I think it’s less urgent now,” Illinois responded. “Even if you take control again, I doubt we’re going to get the girl out of there if she’s one with the house.”

Kingsman asked him, “You mind helping me check if the house is actually attached to the ground at all now?”

“That’s a good idea.”

They tilted the house slightly, enough to show it was not in fact attached to the ground. Jump showed up with a flashlight and with it, we could see under the house to confirm that there was no connection whatsoever between the house and the concrete slab we were standing on. They tried to have Jump teleport the house, but it was beyond her capacity. So they called in a truck with a lift on the back and loaded it inside to take back to NANA. Jump teleported the rest of us there to meet it when it arrived.

They moved the house into a doctor’s office in which the usual bed had been removed, and I went with them since I thought they were going to have me animate the body again. But when we got there, the door opened without prompting. The girl inside was still wearing her nightgown, part of which was embedded in the wall, just as it was when I was controlling her. She spoke, “Are we done moving now?”

“Yes. I’m glad to see that you’re awake,” Illinois responded.

“I’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“The beginning, before you arrived, up to a point where I was a larger house than I am now, but a lot smaller than the house started, with my family members still inside. Thank you for getting them out! I hope they’re OK.”

“They are all receiving medical treatment now. I can’t be certain of the size, but I think the house was the size you remember when we arrived. It had shrunk to that size and wasn’t changing size until we pulled the last of the people out.”

“Well, at some point it was shrinking, and I was trying to keep it from crushing everybody! It already got my sister. Um, I need to explain something.”

“Go ahead.”

“The body you see is my sister’s. I’m her brother, Kenny. Somehow, overnight, I turned into my house. I don’t understand it. But my original body’s gone. The house started shrinking, and somehow my sister got caught up in one of the walls. When she did, I could feel her. I could feel every part of her body, as if it was mine. I could also communicate mentally with her, but her thoughts were only ‘What’s happening?’ and I tried to tell her I was going to save her, but I couldn’t. I felt it when she died. Her mind died, anyway. I thought her body was going to die, too, but it didn’t. Her body was part of the house now, part of me. If I took it from her, I didn’t mean to, nor do I know how it happened.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that, and even more so for your sister.”

Kingsman interrupted, “Jump, can you go fetch Veritas?”

Jump replied, “Sure thing,” and teleported away.

“Kenny, because someone died, we’re going to have you repeat your story in front of someone whose powers allow them to tell when somebody is lying. It’s not that we doubt you, but that this has to go into official records that anybody might doubt. But go on with your story for now. What happened after your sister died and her body became part of yours?”

“The house continued to shrink, and I was determined not to let it take the rest of my family members. They had all hit one wall or another already and were knocked out, though none of them had been pushed so much into the wall that they got caught up in it. I knew that I was the house, but I wasn’t in control of the activity that was causing it to shrink. So I studied what was going on, and figured out how to stop it. Well, not stop. Pause it. The effort of doing so knocked me out, but I guess it stayed paused while I was out.”

Kingsman commented, “It did until just after we got the last of your family members out. Then the house quickly shrank to the size it is now.”

“I woke up for a moment, as you were taking out my remaining sister. My parents were already out. And I could feel how much of a toll keeping the building at that size was taking on me. With nobody left inside but the body of my dead sister, I let go of what I was doing, figuring that if my sister’s body was crushed, it would be a loss, but a much less important one since she was already dead. I passed out again, and awoke in the truck you moved me in.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re OK,” Illinois commented.

About that moment, Jump returned with the woman who was apparently Veritas, and they had Kenny repeat the whole story about his sister’s death and how he gained control of her body.

“She’s telling the truth. Or he is. What pronouns would you like?”

“Well, I was always a he, but given that I have this body now, I’d probably better get used to being a she.”

“OK, then. Her whole story is true, how her sister’s mind died and how she gained control of the body,”

Kingsman replied, “Thank you, Veritas. Jump can take you to where you can sign a statement attesting to this truth and then back to whatever you were doing.”

And Jump took her away.

Illinois said, “I’d like to examine you further, if you don’t mind. If you have good control over your sister’s body then I may not need any of the rest of this crew.”

“I think I do. I can’t separate from the wall entirely but I can move around.”

Inside her little room, she turned around - revealing her completely bare back - and when she turned back around, she was naked in the front, too.

“Oops!” the girl cried, and the door slammed shut.

Illinois ordered, “OK, guys out! Miss Tix, you stay so you can help our patient with her wardrobe problem.”

Even though I was part girl most of the time, I knew the boy-turned-girl who’d just sealed herself up wouldn’t know that, and I accepted the dismissal. A few minutes later, Jump came out and told us we wouldn’t be needed anymore, so Kingsman went back to wherever he worked in the building. Jump led me to where I could get my pay for the day, and then teleported me home.

Dawson

Kenny, now going by Kendra, and her family invited all of us who helped them over for a housewarming party for their newly rebuilt house. It was at the same location as the original one that shrank. After I arrived, Kendra explained how she’s getting along.

“It looks like you have good control over the house,” I commented. Kendra now had her entire head and arms sticking out the roof, most of her legs out the floor, and she wore the house like a weird sort of dress.

“Yes, it’s still inconvenient at times, but I’ve learned to live with it. I can make it bigger or smaller, but only so much. It can get about as big as it was when you rescued the rest of my family, and small enough it only serves as a bikini top, but I usually leave it this size. But I also do this.”

She sat, but not using furniture. She maneuvered her legs to be coming out the side rather than the bottom of the house and extended the bottom to serve as a chair.

“I use the bikini size when going to the bathroom, and a large size when sleeping.”

“You have a bed?” Jump asked.

“Inside the house. Most of the furniture that was in our old house is still in here, miniaturized, but I can make it larger. When I make the large house, I can bring the bed up to a size I can sleep on. Mostly on, anyway. I can’t be entirely on the bed. Some part of me has to be embedded in a part of the house. So I sleep with my feet in a wall and the rest of me on my bed. While I can make the house the size you saw it when you rescued my family, it’s hard to keep it that size. But I can keep it without effort at a size large enough for the bed.”

She showed us around. Most of the new house looked pretty normal.

“NANA helped us rebuild,” she explained. “I wanted to make my house large enough for my family to live in, but I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t. So they had to build us a new one, and we stayed in an apartment for a few months while they built it. We’ve only been back here a week, but I figured things out pretty well in the apartment so it was easy to set up here.”

Unlike the rest of the house, Kendra’s room was pretty bare. There was a desk, but no chair, since she didn’t need one, and a big space where she put the enlarged house when sleeping instead of a bed. Near the entrance there was a plaque hanging on the wall serving as a memorial for the dead sister whose body Kenny now used. There was a closet in one corner of the room, but no dresser. The closet was open, and pretty empty. There weren’t any clothes visible.

“Do you have any clothes at all?” Miss Tix asked.

“Yeah. I have everything of Deirdre’s. I keep it all miniaturized inside the house unless I want to use something. If I make the house small and wear it up top, I can wear pants or a skirt. Alternatively I can wear the house on the bottom, and wear a blouse of some sort, or even some kinds of dresses, with the skirt hanging down to cover the house.”

“And a bra, I assume,” Miss Tix interjected.

“Yes, I need a bra in that case. The adjustment from being a boy to being a well-endowed young woman was eased by having my breasts covered by the house most of the time. Dressing like a girl took some getting used to, but I have had months to do that and it’s natural to me now. When I am home, though, I usually still wear the house like this and go without clothes, because there’s no need. Nobody can get inside or look into my house unless I want them to, and that’s pretty much only the doctor. Another reason I don’t wear clothes inside my house is that they don’t survive going through the walls with my body. They’re fine when they go into the wall, but they get destroyed coming out, like the wardrobe malfunction some of you saw when I was in the examining room.”

She laughed and the rest of us laughed with her.

I asked, “The house is your body also. Does it need food? Maintenance? Cleaning?”

“It doesn’t seem to need any maintenance. When we identified some damage, the next time I moved part of my body through that area, it came out fixed. Anywhere I put my body through the house, it opens automatically and closes up fully repaired when I move out. And it doesn’t eat. My human body eats normally. The house does need cleaning, though. When I have my head inside the house, I have to breathe the air inside, so I have to open it up periodically. That opening lets dust get inside, and it’s trapped there unless I make the effort to remove it. But it’s not too bad, really, because I can put all the stuff inside the house anywhere.”

She demonstrated how she cleans things by opening a window which had some wooden surface, I assume a table, behind it, and wiped it off with a paper towel. And it was hard to tell exactly what, but different things were moving up to the same window in turn. Obviously it was easy to clean the dust off when the things were small and she could wipe them with a single swipe of her hand.

“I am not sure what would have happened without Deirdre’s body being part of it. I’m not sure you would have even realized I was stuck in here.”

Kingsman asked, “Do you have electricity inside the house?”

“I don’t. We were talking about hooking the electricity back up when I thought I would restore the house to its original size, but due to the size change, which affects everything including the wires, it wouldn’t be safe. And yeah, I could selectively make the wires larger, but it would be too difficult to ensure I always did it right everywhere. Instead, we got some glow-in-the-dark panels that I put on the outside of the house during the day, and on my ceiling at night. They only provide a low glow, like a night light, but it works well to keep things from being completely dark in there. I instinctively know where everything is inside my body, but it’s still less disconcerting waking up with a little light.”

“Did you choose a code name?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was required to. I chose Little House.”

“Haha! I don’t think your case was what was meant by the title of that book.”

“It’s appropriate though, don’t you think? I’m not sure my powers are going to be useful for anything, but I’m glad to at least be able to live with them.”

“Oh, I can see some use. You can change the sizes of things, like you change your clothes. What are the limits with that?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I know that I can’t make anything bigger than its natural size. When I want to restore some of Deirdre’s clothes so I can wear them, I just make them ‘full size’ and they come out right to fit my body. And it has to fit inside my house before the size change. I’m not sure of the minimum. I’ve made some stuff pretty small.”

“I’m sure there are uses for that. Imagine transporting things in miniature size.”

“Hmm. Maybe. But I’d have to be there at the other end to restore them, and we are keeping our abilities secret from outsiders, so it would be difficult.”

“What about people?” Miss Tix asked.

“It doesn’t work with people. Maybe not with anything alive. I can’t change Deirdre’s body’s size. And my sister wanted to experience being really small so I let her inside the house once but I couldn’t change the size of her body.”

“Well, we all have our limits,” I said. “My power only works on people and people-shaped objects, but when I was helping rescue your family I learned it worked on your whole, combined body, even though only part of it is people-shaped. Also, my power is limited in time and during the rescue I learned it lasts less time on larger bodies.”

“What are you doing about school?” Miss Tix asked.

“It’s complicated. So far I’ve been getting lessons sent to me and a tutor to help sometimes. They want to get me back in school, but Deirdre was a senior in high school. I was only a freshman. I don’t know what she knew, who she knew. I can’t go back to school as Deirdre. I have to go back as me.”

“As Kendra.”

“Right.”

“NANA will adjust your school records, make it so Kenny was Kendra and you can continue where you left off as Kenny.”

“But the kids are going to know, right?”

“The kids who knew you as Kenny will know you changed, yes. The ones who don’t know about powers will still see Kenny, but nearly all the kids learn about powers by the time they enter high school, and they will see you as you are.”

“Will it be a problem for those few who don’t know? Will they see Kenny in a dress?”

“Maybe. We’ll find someone who doesn’t know about powers yet to test it on. And whatever happens, we’ll do what is needed to ensure that you don’t have problems.”

Saturday, April 4, 2009

George

This was NANA’s anniversary, or the weekend closest to it, anyway, and there was a big party. The magical members cast a special spell for the event. Anybody in town who didn’t know about powers would simply not be interested in what was going on in the park, on top of the usual spell that would cause them to not see anybody flying or with green skin or whatever. So it was an event where people could let out their powers in public more than they normally could.

KNRM was playing their usual playlist directly from the event. When there wasn’t something else going on, their on-air program was blasting out across the park. The Listener was staying away because of that, but most of the other people I’d met through NANA were there.

Right after a song they said was a new release, “Tony Stark” by a band called Kirby Krackle (the DJ explained that “crackle” was spelled with an initial K), they interrupted the music in the park to announce the actual event, and several people came up and spoke.

One of those was Greg. He said, “I have some news about one of the longest-running stories in Normal. Steve has been born!”

Clearly a lot of people did not know who Steve was, but still a few dozen people erupted in cheers. Miss Tix came up on stage and started speaking after letting the cheering go on for bit.

“I know many of you probably don’t know Steve’s story, but later this year will be the 25th anniversary since Steve’s most unusual power showed up. The story started when we were contacted by Steve’s girlfriend at the time, Emily. She called to tell us Steve had disappeared. They had been having sex, and he just vanished right in the middle of the act. So that’s why she called us rather than the police.”

There was a round of laughter.

“NANA sent over all the people with different kinds of powers they thought might help figure out what happened to Steve, and I was actually the one who figured it out. We spent some time examining the bedroom where it happened, and found nothing. But because we thought it could have happened because of a power Emily had developed, we checked her out too. What I discovered was she had Steve’s spirit within her, but not in the manner of ghost possession that was my usual area of expertise.”

She paused for effect, and it seemed like it had the desired effect. Everybody got quiet to listen to what she was going to say.

“We set up some other tests to figure out just how he was within her, and we discovered he had somehow transformed into a sperm and had gone up into her along with the normal ones. Unlike the normal ones, he had gone right through a condom!”

Once the various reactions from the audience died down, she continued.

“We had no idea what to do about it, though. We set her up with a device that let her hear Steve’s thoughts, and he confirmed he could hear what she spoke normally. We figured that it was their final days, as sperm typically live for no more than about 5 days, but Steve surprised us all by communicating with her for 20 days, telling her, among other things, that he had missed her egg but he hoped to catch the next one. Emily was a little shocked at that suggestion, but when Steve pointed out that was all he could really do now, she said she was OK with giving birth to Steve if he could manage to impregnate her. But she didn’t turn out to be pregnant after that. She kept the device on for a whole month hoping to hear from him again, but there was nothing.”

There were cries of sympathy from the audience.

“But if that was the end of the story we wouldn’t be up here talking about it! It was several months later when another woman with some psychic detection powers reported that she thought she was possessed because she was detecting something around her all the time. Pretty soon we discovered Steve was now inside her. And he had a story to tell. He’d gotten washed out of Emily with her period, made it through the sewage treatment system even with all the things there that are supposed to kill any bacteria and parasites and such, and through the filters that are supposed to keep anything but pure water from making it back into the water supply. Eventually another woman drank him. He made it into her bloodstream, figured out how to get into her womb... and discovered she was on birth control and could never get pregnant.”

This mostly got laughs.

“He left her through her urine and went through the cycle again. This time he got into a guy, worked his way in with the normal sperm, and into his wife, who was the woman who’d reported his presence. But they were using the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy and she wasn’t willing to get pregnant to help Steve, so, reluctantly, he left her body as well. And he went through this cycle dozens of times, hoping to eventually find his way into a woman who wanted to get pregnant or the partner of one. About once a year somebody would detect him and we’d add another mysterious presence or ‘haunting’ to the Steve file, along with whatever new part of his story he could tell.”

She mimed at first a file folder, then a growing stack of paper.

“I can now report to you all that Steve made it into a woman who wanted to get pregnant, succeeded in impregnating her, and his spirit now controls that woman’s daughter. It was only when the daughter was able to speak well enough to get the story across that her mother contacted us. She found the whole thing a bit weird, but she was aware that a child in Normal could be anything but normal, and she’s happily raising her most unusual child. And we’re keeping their names secret. It will probably eventually come out, but for now Steve’s trying to enjoy a second childhood. Apart from being Steve, the girl has shown no powers, but there’s still lots of time for that.”

Miss Tix turned the mic back over to Greg, who, after other announcements, introduced two other people. “Thanks to the work of our historian, we now have a more complete version of the story of how all of us got started with the fall of the meteor more than a century ago, the remains of which a few of you have actually seen in person. Fred and Frieda are here to tell this story.”

Fred and Frieda took turns speaking:

It was April 3, 1899, a Monday, in this small town which for some time had already been called Normal. It was a lot smaller then, just a few hundred people. In mid-morning the meteor struck. It landed in two farmers’ fields, but it was big enough that it shook the whole town. It caused surprisingly little damage, but the homes, barns, and other structures on those two farms were destroyed.

The residents of those farms were the first four people who gained powers from the meteor: Nicholas, Anne, Norman, and Abigail. Nicholas was the first to free himself from the rubble of his house, discovering he had super-strength in the process. He quickly rescued the others.

His wife Anne was the next to notice her powers. She sensed a lot of people from the town had heard and felt the impact (of what, the four of them still didn’t know) and were coming to investigate. Norman was worried other people were hurt, and without realizing he was doing it, zoomed off at super-speed to check on the nearest other neighbors. Abigail felt some strange sensations, a kind of energy that at this point she couldn’t explain.

Pretty soon Norman came back to where the group was gathered near the remains of his and Abigail’s home. He reported nobody else was hurt, but there was a crater on the line between their properties. So the group went out so they could all see the crater.

Before they even got there, they could see it looked pretty weird. There was light emanating from the crater, pulsing in intensity and changing colors. The light seemed less intense as they arrived at a wall of earth that had been created by the impact, which was blocking their view of most of the light. The wall was about 7 feet tall and extended all the way around the crater, which was about 60 feet in diameter. And, close to the crater, it was hot, but not too hot to walk on in their shoes.

They found a place where there was a more gentle slope going up to the top of the wall, and looked in. They immediately turned their gaze away, as it was almost too bright to look at. But eventually they did look at it. The crater sloped down steeply at first, and later more gently, to the remains of the meteor that had struck the earth that day, and was the source of the weird lights. They couldn’t decide if it was beautiful or creepy, but they were sure it was the cause of the powers they had just gained.

Other people from the town arrived while they were at the crater, and the four informed them of what they had seen, and also of their new-found powers. None of the others reported getting any powers, but some of them felt weird when looking at the meteor. Eventually there were about 50 people there, and nobody had any idea what to do, but they agreed to close off the meteor in case it was dangerous. The innkeeper put them up for free while they and other town residents helped build them new houses elsewhere in town, and a high fence was built all the way around their two former farms.

The four devoted themselves to understanding what had happened. They were aided by other people in the town who discovered they had powers, only a few at first, but more people seemed to develop powers over time. Apart from the original four, proximity to the crater didn’t seem to influence who got powers; they showed up all over town. Abigail turned out to be of the most help, as she discovered she had magical powers. It took her time to figure out how to use them, but ultimately she became a sorceress with powers in real life as strong as the strongest magic-users of legend.

They named their group NANA, after their four initials. It was a few years later, after word had leaked out to people in other towns about what happened in Normal that day, that they began getting a steady stream of visitors wanting to look at the meteor, or wanting to move to Normal in hopes of getting powers of their own. The population of Normal tripled in a year, and NANA realized they needed to do something about it. They spearheaded several efforts.

First off, they had the builders of the town construct a building around the crater, pushing much of the earth that had been piled up around the rim back into the crater, significantly reducing the size of the hole, and as a result reducing the size of the building they had to build around it. The hole was now more straight-down, and they reinforced the walls of the new, narrower hole as well as paving the new surface outside the hole with stones. It would be easier for those actually studying the meteor to do so, and they could also control access to it.

Abigail figured out how to temporarily enhance Anne’s psychic powers in a single subject area, and she used that to locate all the people within hundreds of miles who had heard about what happened. There were tens of thousands of them. Too many to go out and try to locate them all individually and magic them into forgetting about Normal. While those among them who were interested in coming to see the meteor were mostly already in Normal, those people could tell others, and the problem would keep getting worse. With the approval of town leadership, Abigail cast a mass forgetting spell from the center of town, with an exclusion zone large enough to cover all town residents. After that, only the people then in Normal would know anything about the meteor or the powers people got from it.

There were still long-term issues. Normal couldn’t completely isolate itself from outsiders, and visitors would find out from people blabbing or by seeing people using powers, especially as more and more people seemed to get powers of more varied types every year. In 1910, after a lot of research into how to cast stronger and more durable spells, Abigail cast the spell that protects us now, which hides accidental knowledge of our powers from those who don’t already know such powers exist. Also, at this time the name NANA was retroactively declared to mean Normal Always Normal Association, with the dual meanings of providing support to keep the town of Normal alive and maintaining the facade that Normal was in fact a perfectly normal town with nothing weird happening in it.

Of course, there is a lot more than that, but this is the end of the beginning, the time when things started being roughly the way they are today.

They ended their speech, and that was the end of the presentation at that time. They went back to just playing music.

At lunch I saw Fred and Frieda eating and sat down at the table next to them. They had two kids also, and once the kids were done eating they were eager to do play more of the carnival games and such. Frieda took the kids and left Fred with me.

“You said you had an interesting story. I know some of it already, as my story will explain, but go ahead and tell me the whole thing. Frieda will get it from me later; my story will explain that too. I’ll tell you our story afterward.”

So I told Fred my story, and then he told me his. (COMING SOON)

Afternoon of April 4, 2009

Fred (Alpha), as told to George

From my earliest memories, I grew up in two different houses, with two different mothers, two different fathers, two different sets of toys, two different kinds of clothes, in two different bodies... with two different sexes. I slept on a regular nightly cycle even at a young age, but every day I woke up in the other body. And during those sleeping times, I never had the kind of dreams most people have. Instead, I dreamed, at high speed, all the experiences of the initially unknown other person who ran each body while I wasn’t in it, before then waking up in that other body.

As a result of this body-swapping, I got to do everything twice, once in each body, but only driving each body half the time. Learning to walk, to speak, to write, to go to the bathroom, to dress myself. Although the constant swapping sometimes confused things, I think having the opportunities to learn everything twice in different environments helped me learn fast. There was another aspect of my power that helped me learn that I didn’t realize for years later, though.

I had just turned four (both of my bodies did) when I first made contact. I left a note for my other self. In my boy body, I wrote:

Dear Other Self,

I know that you must be doing the same as me, changing each day. Dreaming each night what I did in your other body. Let’s send notes this way.

And I left the note, with pencil on top of it, where the other could not miss it near the bed. Of course, the other would remember writing the note in the “dream” before waking up, so it almost didn’t matter where I left it, but still, I wanted to make it obvious to my other self. I made a similar note the next day in my girl body, and when I was the boy again, I found the response below my first note:

Yes, I figured out you had to exist, too. It’s weird, because I think other people don’t do this. They live in the same body every day.

And I wrote back:

So you think we’re the weird ones? Let’s watch for any signs of this, that anybody else lives like us.

The other me agreed, and of course as four-year-olds we didn’t discover much, so we made no progress on that goal for a while. But while we didn’t always have anything to say, it became a habit and we got used to writing a little each day. When we turned five, celebrating a year of communicating like this, and neither of us having observed any sign that other people did the same thing, we decided other people probably didn’t do this. We agreed to still keep watching for evidence, though.

Later that year, both of us had a chance to see our birth certificates when our parents enrolled us in kindergarten. Both of us were born precisely at 2:27 PM on January 30, 1970. We thought that was interesting but didn’t know what to make of it. It spurred us to learn about the calendar, though, and within the year, we had learned what we needed, including about leap years, and also some basic math. We determined how many days we’d been living, and that, if we had in fact changed every night since birth (a fact we could not verify, though it had happened consistently since we had understood it), I was born as Frieda and he as Fred. We started marking day numbers in our notes back then, and while we no longer need to exchange notes that way, we still keep the day count in our heads. Today we turn 14,309 days old.

We assumed that we had swapped since birth, though whether we had actually done so didn’t matter, as we were then and as far as we know forever locked into being both Fred and Frieda. Though we were both in Normal, we weren’t in the same school, so at that time we continued communicating only through these notes.

Before long, I proposed naming our two minds, or whatever it was that was swapping bodies. In my girl body, I wrote:

I know this body is named Frieda and the other one is named Fred, and we both use those names as we live in each body. But we should have names for our SELVES. I made contact first, so I propose that I’m Alpha and you’re Beta.

And the response to that was:

How about I’m Omega? Just because you thought of the idea to exchange notes this way shouldn’t make me secondary. Instead think of me as your opposite.

So I wrote:

A: Fine. I’m Alpha and you’re Omega.

This was shortly after we turned 6. A couple months earlier, I’d encountered the Greek alphabet when one of our parents had left a dictionary open to the alphabet table, and like everything else, we’d committed it to memory. We learned the Hebrew alphabet too, but the Greek one was what we’d seen used a few times. But having decided on the names and working from my precedent, Omega started prefacing all her, um, his or her writings with Ω: and we eventually went back and labeled all our other writings to the very beginning that way, in addition to adding the day numbers.

Sorry, pronouns are weird! Most of the time I’m OK. But for me to tell another person our story, since each of us is male half the days and female the other half, I end up stumped trying to apply a pronoun to Omega generically over time. When we wrote to each other it was only “me” and “you” and there was no problem, and when I’m referring to a specific event I use whichever pronoun applies at the time of that event, so most of the time I don’t notice the problem.

We were 8 when Fred’s dad figured out what was happening. Omega was in Fred when it happened, but I got the conversation in full that night, of course.

“Fred, can you sit with me for a moment? I want to ask you about something.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Do you experience anything strange? A presence in your head on certain days? Or maybe something stranger than that?”

“Yes, Dad. Maybe ‘stranger than that.’”

“Can you describe it for me?”

“Every night, I swap bodies with another person, a girl who lives somewhere else in Normal. Before I wake up in her body, I see what she did the day before, and before I wake up in this body, I see what he did in this body the day before.”

“Oooo-kay. That was not what I was expecting, but it does explain what I have noticed.”

“What did you notice? We thought we were the only ones doing this, and we were looking for signs it was happening to anyone else.”

“Wait. You communicate with this girl, the other who is sometimes in your body? This body, I mean.”

“We’ve been leaving each other notes since we were four, though the body-swapping has been happening as long as we can remember.”

“OK. I guess that makes sense. Well, I can help, maybe. Although our town’s called Normal, it’s rather abnormal. Sometimes people here develop powers.”

“What kind of powers?”

“A bunch of different kinds, no two exactly alike. Some of them are like comic book heroes. Some of them are weird ones, nowhere near as useful as those powers. Some of them are downright harmful to the people who get them and leave them essentially disabled, but with disabilities that are unique to Normal.”

“You think what Alpha and I have is a power?”

“Alpha? The girl’s named Alpha?”

“No. The girl’s named Frieda. But Alpha and Omega are names we chose for our minds, while Fred and Frieda are the names given to the bodies. She’s Alpha because she was the first one to first think to leave notes they way we’ve done regularly ever since then.”

“Well I have a power too, a psychic power. But it’s a pretty weak one, and I’m not really able to use it effectively. I just sense things once in a while that don’t come through any of the normal senses. So I live like the majority of people in Normal, the ones without powers, in mostly the same kind of life people live everywhere else in the world. You can tell just how weak my power is since it took me 8 years to figure out this has been going on with my own son.”

Fred’s dad contacted NANA, who said not to talk to Frieda’s parents yet, because they were outsiders who moved to Normal as adults and didn’t know about powers. NANA set up what they considered a proper way to inform them about the powers in general as well as our specific power, or what they knew of it.

After that, they arranged a combined testing session, two days long so they could test both of us in each body. We didn’t have any other powers they noticed, except for photographic memory with near-perfect recall. They said that might not even qualify as a power at all, because some people outside Normal have that ability, but the way it occurred with us together with our body-swapping, they considered it part of our power.

In one test, we were given 30 seconds to examine the sequence of cards in a deck, and then we then had to guess the cards in that same sequence. Over several full decks, each of us got about 95% of them right. If we were given only a few seconds to riffle the deck, we’d only get about 20% of them right, clearly better than random but probably not enough to effectively cheat at card games. If we repeated the same deck we’d already guessed one card at a time and been shown our errors, we’d get it 100% the second time, every time, and we’d still be able to remember it perfectly the next day in the other body.

A more powerful psychic than Fred’s dad was able to confirm the body swap, and physical testing showed differences in the way each of us controlled each body. Essentially, we had learned to walk, throw, etc. in slightly different ways and so we continued to do so. Neither of us was better or worse in those physical actions; each was better at some things in each body. Neither of us was significant better at any of those physical activities than a normal person. Even our handwriting was different, but it took a handwriting expert and large samples to tell the difference; nobody could see a difference between the way I signed Fred’s name and the way Omega did.

We got Alpha and Omega as our code names, so they became official, in a sense.

They gave us experiments to try later. What happened if one of us tried to stay up the whole night while the other slept? The answer was that the awake one could only last a couple hours beyond the other getting to sleep. And we figured out that the change happened right then; if we woke up immediately after the second one was pulled into sleep this way, we’d be in the other body and we’d have the whole day’s memories from the other body rush through us all at once. If we went back to sleep quickly after waking up, that didn’t swap us again; there was a minimum awake time as well. By varying when we went to bed, we could vary when the change occurred, and we figured if we tried we could eventually shift around a whole 24 hours, but we never did.

Doing these experiments also helped us understand better how our processing of memories happened. As soon as we changed bodies, we had access to the memory of what happened in that body, but it wasn’t integrated into our minds, Alpha’s and Omega’s minds, yet. We could still, if something suggested to us to look for it, find any event that happened during the body’s previous day and basically read that memory. What took time was making the mind aware of all those events, and the time asleep after we changed usually provided that time. If we didn’t become aware of an event during the day in the body where it happened, we wouldn’t have access to it when we were in the other body. And even with a full night’s sleep, we didn’t get every detail without consciously reviewing the memories, but we usually got enough to allow us to focus on the important moments.

After this point, our families started spending a lot of time together so that we could be together. Some of that time was free play-time, but there were more serious moments. After one shared dinner, we got the birds and bees talk, together, both sets of parents explaining the boys’ side and the girls’ side to both of us, since we clearly needed both. Our four parents occasionally argued about points, but when they did, they quickly came to an agreement. After one of these momentary disagreements, they told us they had agreed they were going to tell us the truth as much as possible, and not get preachy about it (as some parents do), but tell us seriously about the risks of pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and the kind of emotional effects that having had sex with someone can lead to. They acknowledged it was going to be weird for us, even weirder than it is for most teens, because of our daily swapping, and we were going to have to chart our own course, but they wanted us to do so in possession of all the facts they could tell us.

At first, Omega and I agreed only that it was going to be weird and difficult for us, and, for the time being, to simply wait. We weren’t going to be like certain other kids we knew who had declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend in fourth grade. There was no need; we had time. We had a pretty short discussion in our diaries at that time. (By this point, we’d both graduated from random scraps of paper through spiral notebooks and then to diaries with dated pages for the discussions we had by written notes.)

But it didn’t take long before we were going into middle school and realized we needed to start thinking about it more seriously. Who did we like? Did I like boys or girls? Did I like girls when I was Fred and boys when I was Frieda, or was it the same all the time? And all those same questions for Omega. And wouldn’t it be incredibly awkward if we didn’t like the same kind of person as the other did when we were in the same body? So far, we’d managed to maintain the same friends, but romantic partners are much more than friends. And to tell the truth, neither of us were sure about the answers to any of these questions, so we decided, again, to wait, even though some of the kids were going out on some sort of dates at this age.

We were also now starting gym classes where we were going to be changing and showering with other naked boys or girls, depending on which body we were in. We still hadn’t told any of our classmates about our changes, but most of the teachers and the gym coaches knew. The boys’ and girls’ coaches pulled us aside once each during the first week of classes, and basically told us that what we were doing already was going to continue as long as we personally could handle it. Fred would shower with the other boys, and Frieda with the other girls, and nobody would think anything special of it. Neither of us would stare too much at the other naked people around us, which was actually the way most of the kids behaved. That was a pretty simple rule, and we both agreed.

Soon we noticed the changes in our own bodies, the beginning of erections and the voice change for Fred, breasts and training bras for Frieda, and all the other changes that came with them. Frieda’s periods wouldn’t be far off. And here’s where our stories are a lot alike. Just like you had to do with Samantha, Omega and I came to an agreement about sex and masturbation and such. At this point, we decided masturbation was OK, and would help us each learn what we liked, and sex with other people was off limits. We were still not going to date other people, but we could look, and identify people we might want to be with, assuming they would accept us, and assuming both me and Omega would accept the same person, and we’d discuss it later.

Once we were in high school, we still hadn’t gone on dates, but we accepted that we had to think seriously about it once Frieda had gotten asked for dates a couple times. Clearly it was possible for Fred to ask girls for dates as well, but should we? We decided we would do a few dates to have the experience, but the whole thing was so awkward... was it OK for one of us to plan a date, or accept one, on a day the other would have to go out on it? We decided to discuss all of these things, preferably face-to-face, before we did them. And we’d also go out on some dates with each other. We were, after all, more than friends, though not in the way some people use that phrase!

Just trying to figure out what to do was awkward, but I let Frieda go out on a date first, with one of the guys who asked her. I used the experience, what the guy did that seemed right, what he did that seemed too touchy-feely, what he did that seemed like he was ignoring me, etc. to help guide me on a date as Fred. I can’t say that entirely worked, but it wasn’t a complete failure, either. But neither Fred nor Frieda ever dated the same other person twice.

Part of the problem was I just wasn’t interested enough. I suppose for most girls and boys, a ritual that was a prelude to getting to see someone of the opposite sex naked was interesting, at least for the novelty of it. There was nothing novel for me! Within any span of two days I saw a naked boy and a naked girl. Much more than saw! I had the sexual urges other teens had, but the unknown and the curiosity for finding it out wasn’t there.

The dates when I went out with Omega were the best. We weren’t very romantically interested in each other, but we felt comfortable being with another person who understood our nature, our problem, our difficulties in being with a normal person who lived in the same body all the time. We could just be normal and not worry that we were going to forget something we should know about our date that happened when the other of us was in control of the body, that we were going to reveal we knew something that we shouldn’t, that out nature was going to be exposed, or some other weird thing was going to happen. Together, we knew that if something weird did happen, we’d understand, keep it secret between us if possible, or else one of us would help the other make whatever it was right.

I didn’t know anybody else like us who experienced being both male and female; there were others, as it turned out, but they were less common than today. Of course, we planned those dates so that each of us got to wear both bodies on dates, as equally as we could. For that and for the practical reasons of us necessarily living part of each others’ lives, by the time we were finishing high school, we had decided we were sticking together.

Then we were thinking about college, and certainly about going to college together. Throughout middle school and high school, Fred and Frieda were in the same classes, except for a few electives where we had intentionally taken different classes just to learn a few more things. We aced most tests due to learning the same material twice. But it would be a lot less practical to have Fred and Frieda take the same classes in college. There’s no college in Normal; it would mean going outside, and not having the cooperation of administrators who understand our unique situation. It was explained to us, and I am sure, George, that you’ll soon get the same explanation in school, that Normal never built a college because it would draw in more outsiders than we wanted, and more problem cases. Imagine how many college kids would develop powers and either be unable to explain them to their outside families, or have to bring their whole families in on our secret. We had enough people who randomly ended up here as it was.

It would also cost two students’ worth of tuition when it seemed like one was enough. We learned those electives fully well enough with only one body taking the classes. Sure, we’d get scholarships to cover a lot of it, but even then, we’d be having to apply for all those scholarships twice, and possibly competing with each other for some of them. And it would be real money. Here in Normal, people with powers sometimes do things for others which are easy to do with powers but hard otherwise, at a great discount off what it would cost normally. No such discount would apply to college.

A lot of our college decisions were locked in after people from NANA contacted us during our senior year with a future job offer. They needed a historian, someone to manage all the records, organize them, and get them into computers. With my ability to recall anything I’d ever read, I’d easily be able to determine what documents were missing from searches, though that ability would help later on, as first I needed to get them all in.

At that time, they basically had one computer file, a database of the powered people in Normal, their code names, powers, addresses and phone numbers, and a reference to where their paper files could be found. They knew that a lot better than this was possible, and by the time I finished college our computers were expected to be much more powerful, and even more would be possible. So I was signing up for a degree in library science. That was the most common degree for jobs like this, to the extent that any job was like this one, and would cover both the organizational techniques and the computational ones. They’d made clear they’d be hiring me to make their records available through a computer system, and not to simply memorize all the records and provide the answers myself, though the latter was a side-benefit of picking me for the job.

The solution we found for attending college, one which allowed us to be together and yet not pay redundant tuition, nor confuse ourselves by taking different classes, was to get married. Since we’d already decided we were committed to each other, it was only a question of getting married then or later. At colleges where we were applying there was married student housing, effectively apartments sized for two people, reserved for married students. They were most often used by graduate students and what they called non-traditional students, meaning those who attended college later in life rather than directly out of high school, or returned after dropping out. But any married student was eligible. The housing cost a little more, but it cost a whole lot less than taking two sets of classes. So Fred would go to college, and Frieda would stay around the apartment and do housewife-type things, meaning that Omega and I alternated those roles, and we both learned our skills. This way, later on we’d be able to handle the job the same way. We planned we’d have kids someday and whoever was Frieda each day would take care of them.

The standard for this sort of job was a master’s degree, so I enrolled in a program that would get me the bachelor’s degree after year 4 and the master’s degree after year 5. Though I’d worried about the costs, between the other scholarships I earned on merit and one which NANA gave me, my tuition and fees and rent for the first four years were completely covered, and our two sets of parents were able to provide money for food and other expenses. I had a little debt the 5th year since a lot of those programs only covered four years, but I knew I’d easily pay it off in two years of my job. And I did!

Computers did improve a lot in those five years, and light-years since then. I realized I was going to have to keep up on advances in technology to do my job well. That occasionally meant taking online courses to acquire new skills, but NANA paid for me to take those during working hours as a part of my job. And the system was redesigned several times before I got all the records in. At first, we were just scanning all the documents, storing them on a network server, and providing links to the documents in the records of the people they belonged to. Later the server became a web server, and NANA members outside our headquarters could still access the data (with appropriate security in place). And we added OCR to read the text of the documents. And better OCR later to fix all the errors in the first application of OCR. I’m working on a system now that applies natural language technology to help locate the remaining errors, and hopefully next year we’ll have essentially perfect digital records going back to the start of powers.

But I long ago succeeded in my first goal, so that all the researchers at NANA have a computer system with which they can easily search for any records they need. I’m still going to be employed, improving the technology and keeping everything running, though I might be more involved in the research that many people do at NANA after that time.

Now you might think that with the viewpoint provided to me by my powers, I would also be valuable for my ability to compare how things are for men and women, whether that’s based on society’s treatment or on the sexual functions. I did do that, early on. But since then, we’ve had plenty of other people to fill that role, yourself included, George. And of course I know who all of them are, but that’s only to be revealed for official business.

Omega and I had agreed that once we started the job, we’d also start having kids, but we stopped after the two, Fritz and Felicia, who you met at lunch. Whichever one of us is Frieda takes care of the kids, and whichever is Fred works, much like we split the studying and chores during college, including sometimes informing the other in the evening of big work news rather than letting it pass overnight our usual way.

That’s the end of the story, or at least the end so far. Fritz and Felicia haven’t started showing any powers yet, and definitely not like ours, but they are just at the age where it’s common for powers to show up. And I see my family coming back now to remind me it’s time to tell the history again for a new group of visitors.

Friday, August 4, 2006

It happened one morning. Like most mornings, I woke up and went to the bathroom to pee.

It started normally. I got a good stream going into the bowl as I stood in front of it.

But I was feeling drained. While a little residual tiredness in the morning was OK, this was more than that, and it was getting worse. And something weird was happening in the bowl. I leaned forward, one hand against the top of the toilet tank to support myself.

Even that was getting difficult. I tried to stop, so I could switch to sitting on the toilet, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop peeing!

I stepped out of my briefs and instead sat on the toilet backward. The seat was up, but I needed to do something. Feeling the cold porcelain against my thighs was better than collapsing uncontrollably into the toilet. I leaned against the raised seat and the tank as my body continued to pee an impossibly large amount.

Some time later, I came to. I guess I had passed out there, and despite my efforts, I was now in the toilet bowl. My legs must have been entirely inside the bowl. There was just my torso protruding from the toilet.

My torso? No! When I looked down at myself I realized the torso wasn’t mine at all. It was slender, feminine-looking, with breasts. It was mine now, though. This was the body I was living in, however impossible that seemed.

I used my arms to lift my body out of the bowl, and it got more impossible. It seemed like my lower body was liquid, and as I pulled myself out, it solidified into the proper pelvis and legs of a girl. Soon I was standing on my two new legs, which weren’t there a minute before. I looked in the mirror, and the face that looked back was definitely feminine, but also something like my own. Maybe if I had had a sister, she would have looked like this.

I looked down at the rest of my body. Definite girl. Curves in the right places. Only girl between the legs. There was a vagina there as I confirmed by inserting a finger to the first knuckle. That was enough of that investigation for now, I decided.

At this point, I was thinking about the fact that my entire body had just been down in the toilet. Gross! I guess it’s time to find out what it feels like to shower as a girl.

I was naked already, so I just stepped into the tub and started the water. I stood out of the spray until it warmed up a little, and after that, it wasn’t bad. My new body seemed a bit more sensitive. Especially the breasts were sensitive! But after washing those carefully, it was not that different from any other shower I had taken.

I noticed the sensitivity more while drying off afterward. Were my towels rough? I had never noticed that before. But I dried myself off carefully.

Now what? I should put clothes on, but I could already tell most of my clothes were going to be too big. And this body should probably wear a bra, but of course I didn’t have one. I had some stretchy, bikini-style briefs I sometimes wore, and they weren’t as much too big as I thought they would be. The hips helped hold them up, though they were loose in the front where there was extra fabric to go around the balls and dick I no longer had.

I picked out one of the T-shirts that was a bit tight on me, normally, and it also was not as loose as I thought it would be, because of the breasts. In fact, my breasts pressed into it so much that when I looked closely in the mirror, I could see the outlines of my nipples. So I put it back and got a looser, more heavyweight shirt, which did not seem to have that problem.

I pretty quickly realized normal pants wouldn’t work. The only pants I could wear were sweat pants, which I could cinch tight with the drawstring around my much narrower waist, with the hips helping to hold them up.

And forget shoes. There weren’t any shoes in my house that weren’t going to simply slip off my feet the moment I tried walking anywhere. At least I was decent.

The next order of business was food. I was starving! Fortunately, I had food in the house. I had expected to eat breakfast after that pee. I prepared my usual and sat down to watch the news while eating it.

Our lead story is a new syndrome affecting many people around the world. It’s fairly uncommon, but there are hundreds of reported cases and we don’t know how many have been affected and not yet reported it. Affected people have reported that when they attempted to pee, they were unable to stop. Even after losing consciousness, they continue to pee out their entire body. In each case, after a short time the pee forms into a new body of the opposite sex. The syndrome has affected both men and women, and a few teenagers, but nobody before the onset of puberty. Medical correspondent Brent Lively has more.

Thank you, John. The cases are being reported in a widely dispersed manner around the world. There are 41 cases reported in China, 62 in India, 12 in Russia, 14 in the United States, and similar proportions of the population around the world, a total of 258 cases. Here’s what we know. Affected people get an urge to pee, and they do so, but what results is not a normal urination. Instead, they urinate their entire body, which shouldn’t even be possible, but it is for the affected people. The resulting pee quickly congeals, forming a semi-solid mass which cannot be flushed, so it is unlikely that people are flushing themselves away. The entire process takes about 15 minutes, and after a few more minutes the person awakes in their new body, with no memory loss except for their short period of unconsciousness.

The new body is always of the opposite sex to the original, and men and women have been affected equally. Those who have been checked out medically seem healthy, even to the extent of issues their original bodies suffered from being repaired. But the new bodies are not quite the same. So far, nobody has peed from the new bodies. We don’t know if they will pee normally, or change bodies again, or if the new bodies have a different mechanism for disposing of wastes.

But this brings up another issue. The new bodies do not have anuses. The entire digestive system is there but the colon ends without connecting to the outside of the body. This is sometimes seen as a birth defect in newborns and is usually corrected by surgery. With these changed people, we don’t know. They all started with an empty digestive tract, and a stronger than normal feeling of hunger, but a normal amount of food satisfies them. Since the digestive tract holds 2 to 3 days worth of food, we are not rushing them into surgery until we see what happens. Are they going to fill up their bladders and then pee themselves a new body before the remains of digested food in their colon becomes an issue? There is still a lot we don’t know about these new bodies.

For now, this condition is being referred to as Pee Body Syndrome. Back to you, John.

I hadn’t even realized my new body did not have an anus. The parts in front are there, for sure. But the news anchor went on after the medical guy was done.

We want to stress that people suffering from Pee Body Syndrome should not hide it. The US government has established a hotline, 212-555-3729, for people affected by this problem to seek assistance of any kind. Employers are urged to accommodate employees suffering from the problem whether that means working from home, using sick days, or sending out someone of the employee’s new gender to their home to help them understand any aspect of living as the other sex they need assistance with, or to find suitable clothing. If you are affected, don’t just call in sick. Contact your employer and explain what sort of help you need in order to work. Only then, if you need one or more days to prepare, should you use sick time.

I was expecting to call in sick, but they’re saying I should talk to my boss about it. We’ll see how this goes. I wrote down the number but did not call it. Instead, I called my boss’s cell phone.

“Hey, Mike, this is Clint.”

“Clint, is something wrong?”

“Yeah, if I don’t sound normal, it’s because I’m affected by this Pee Body Syndrome that’s in the news this morning.”

“You mean you’re a girl?”

“Excuse me, a woman.”

“Sorry. Of course.”

“I have clothes I can wear, but no shoes, and not quite up to the work dress code.”

“Well maybe you should work from home today. I can put you in touch with one of the women from HR. Hopefully someone can help you shop for some female clothes over the weekend.”

“That works.”

So I managed to work from home, and Terry from HR was going to come pick me up at 1 on Sunday to go shopping. We picked Sunday because of the suggestion that I might be changing every day, and be male all day Saturday.

I watched the evening news, and also the late news to watch for more info about the syndrome. Except for increasing numbers, there was nothing at dinner, but there was a network news report just before the late local news.

Breaking news: Pee Body Syndrome is now confirmed to lead to alternating sexes every day.

The earliest people affected by the condition report that roughly 24 hours after their first change, they felt the urge to pee again, and when they did so, they changed back into their original sex. The changed bodies in these cases are very similar to the originals, but with serious medical conditions eliminated. We expect the people affected by the syndrome are going to alternate being male and female via once-a-day pee sessions.

Medical studies are underway to determine a basis for what is occurring.

I stripped down to just the briefs for bed, but I had a thought. They said the people who swapped twice got their original bodies back, but the other-sex body was definitely different. I took a picture of my face, and I looked up online about women’s measurements. I didn’t have a proper tape measure, but I made a makeshift one using a ruler to measure along an extension cord, marking it with a Sharpie. I was 5’5” tall, 39 inch bust, 36 inches below the bust, which apparently gave me a 36C bra size, 32 inch waist, 42 inches around the hips. Was hard to say about clothes sizes, since there were a bunch of different variations for height and how high the breasts were on the body, but my breast height seemed average as far as I could tell, which would mean I wore a 12 or large size. Also, I wore a women’s 8 shoe, which was equivalent to a men’s 7, which was why my men’s 9 1/2s were way too big. Some other garments had special sizes, but I didn’t have time for it. I went to bed.

Saturday, August 5, 2006

In the morning, I felt the urge to pee. I started to do it on the toilet, remembering as a girl I’d have to sit down, but I had a thought. Why not do it in the bathtub? Put the plug in, and it would be just like filling the tub. I wouldn’t have to extract my body from the toilet afterward. If I somehow peed normally and stayed a girl, then I’d just pull the plug and wash it down the drain.

I removed the briefs, put in the plug, put the curtain outside, and squatted down and started peeing. And sure enough, once I got started I couldn’t stop. What I didn’t realize was how much of a stream I would get. When I held myself open down there, and pushed, the stream rivaled what I got from my penis. I ended up sitting down and leaning back in the tub, with my knees bent high and my legs spread as I continued peeing. When I let up on it, at first the flow slowed a bit, but pretty soon it was stronger than it started without any effort on my part to keep it going. I watched the stream from that little hole just above my vagina to where it hit the tub a foot away and trickled down to join the growing puddle over the plugged drain hole. Eventually, the puddle reached my feet and even my butt, but by that time I was too weak to do anything but watch it keep going.

Some time later, I awoke in my male body in the tub. There was a tiny bit of liquid remaining next to the plug - not enough to sensibly try to collect - but what I noticed more was some crystalline solid matter near but not in that liquid. Was that the part of me that the transformation could not use? Rather than simply showering it away, I found an empty pill bottle and used a knife to scrape it loose and save as much of it as I could in the bottle. Then I took a shower and got dressed normally in clothes that fit.

After breakfast, I called the government hotline. They asked how they could help me, and I instead suggested I could help them. I told them about the crystals, and they transferred me to a female scientist.

“You aren’t the first person to report such crystals left behind after one of these gender changes, but you are the first person to save them. Thank you. Can you get to a FedEx office today?”

“Yes, I should be able to,” I responded after thinking for a moment about where there was one nearby.

“Great. I can email you a prepaid order that will include the shipping cost as well as packaging costs, so all you will have to do is print the document I send and bring the bottle.”

I gave her my email address, and she read it back and confirmed the spelling, and she sent the document so I could confirm receipt while I was still on the line with her. She thanked me again, and that was the end of the call.

A little while later, I went out and dropped off the bottle at FedEx, and combined that with a regular weekly grocery shopping trip while I was out. And I couldn’t help noticing the “female products” at the store. If I was going to be female half the time, was I going to need these... once a month? once every two months? Never? Nobody mentioned this in the reports so far, but I bought small packages of tampons and pads so I would have them in case I did need them.

After I got home, I thought about my shopping trip tomorrow. I was probably going to end up with a lot of clothes. I needed to make space for them. At first I tried to make space by clearing out some of my existing clothes, but I realized there was no hope to make enough space. What I needed instead was more furniture to store the clothes. Maybe I’d get something more permanent later, but for now, I bought one of those kits you put together yourself, pressed wood stuff. Cheap and temporary but available for pickup at Wal-Mart today. Actually, two of them. A dresser to hold things that did not need to hang and a closet to hang things in, along with 30 hangers.

Sunday, August 7, 2006

In the morning, I predictably changed into a girl again, again using the tub for convenience. Sunday was normally my laundry day, and I did that in the morning, while wearing, I realized, the only other pants that would fit my girl body until my shopping trip today. I just managed to finish cleaning up after lunch when Terry showed up.

Knowing I had no shoes, she had brought along a pair of flip-flops I could wear until I got proper shoes.

“I brought these for you, since you’d said you had no wearable shoes.”

“Thank you.”

“What you are wearing is suitable for a woman... only for going out to buy better-fitting clothes.”

“Yep. That’s about what I thought, too.”

“Do you have socks? They’ll want you to have them when trying on shoes.”

I tried on some of mine and found they fit acceptably. They did not go with the flip-flops, though, so I was going to carry them, and Terry offered to hold them in her purse. Another thing I realized I should have if I am going to be a woman, at least some of the time.

“How about underwear?”

“Men’s bikini-style. The only thing I had that looked remotely feminine, and they actually fit surprisingly well, just differently. They’re tight getting over the hips, and then contract and fit without being tight below the narrowest part of my waist.”

“That’s actually how a lot of women’s panties fit a body like yours, except that they’ll be smooth across the front. There are different styles, some high on the side like that, others with more coverage over the hips. And there are the infamous thong ones which are nothing but thin straps everywhere but in the front. You can choose any style you like; unless you are wearing something skimpy or very thin - something which would be inappropriate for the office - none of them are really going to show.”

“OK. I’ve got my wallet with credit cards. Also this.” I handed her the page I’d written measurements on. “My best effort at taking my measurements.”

“Great. That should come in handy.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I brought scissors.”

“What for?”

“To cut the tags off some of what you buy so you can wear them home from the store. The first stop’s going to be at Wal-Mart to get you a few basics and something so you’ll look like a proper woman, and then you can change into those clothes before we look for other things.”

“Makes sense. Thank you.”

So we headed out like she said. At Wal-Mart, we started with panties. I had never imagined myself shopping for women’s panties before. I wasn’t into that sort of thing. But I had never imagined myself turning into a woman before, either! Now it wasn’t a fetish, it was a necessity!

There were some individual, higher-priced underwear, which she held up around me to judge for size, starting with sizes based on my measurements.

“Hmm, I am not sure whether an 8 or 9 panty will be best for you. It might actually depend on the style or brand. But these are cheap. If you decide they’re too tight, go up a size. Too loose, go down one. You’ll figure it out.”

So I got two styles of panties, one a lot like what I had on now, and one that covered the hips. Rather than the loose ones, we bought packaged ones which were cheaper. They came in three-packs that cost what one of the loose ones did. The two packs only made six... but I figured I would be a woman only three or four days a week, so it was enough for now. Unable to decide between the two sizes, based on my own measurements and a guide on the packages, I bought the 8s.

“Bras are more complicated, but you can try them on, and you will,” Terry emphasized.

I nodded. I guess she noticed my timidity when we started looking at the panties. But she reminded me again that this was necessary now that I was a woman, at least half the time. I have to own clothes for that situation all the time.

“These measurements will give us a good guess to start from,” Terry said as we entered the section with the bras.

We started with a 36C bra, and Terry went into the changing room for me to help me with it. She showed me the trick of putting on your bra backward so you can fasten it in the front, and then spinning it around your body before putting your arms through the straps.

“With practice you can learn to fasten your bra behind your back, but this is good for you now since you’re really just starting to wear bras for the very first time.”

And she pointed out some details of the fit. We decided to accept this one.

“I’m not an expert bra sizer. But once we have you in some decent clothes and wearing one of these bras, I’ll take you to the mall where in one of the stores we can have a woman who is an expert bra sizer go over these details and others to find your perfect bra. Because of that, I’m just going to have you get one bra here so you have something to wear.”

We also got one outfit I could change into, and sneakers in my size. At the mall, she led me to a women’s restroom first, where a handicapped stall served as a makeshift dressing room for me to change into my new clothes. But the bra sizer Terry mentioned is how I ended up showing my naked breasts to two women on this trip. The sizer at Victoria’s Secret was very helpful.

“Some women don’t realize that there is more to choosing a bra than band size and cup size. Breasts come in different shapes as well. They can be wider or narrower, and they can protrude more or less from the body. Both of these measurements get combined into a single fullness measurement in the cup size, but depending on whether your cup size is based more on width or depth, different bra styles may fit you better.”

She actually ended up having Terry get topless in the booth too as a model.

“Terry has deep breasts, so this style that has very full coverage over the breast helps to smooth out the breast and keeps it from hanging out. So even though you are both wearing a 36C, some 36Cs will work better on Terry, and other styles will work better on your wider, flatter breasts, Clint.”

And she demonstrated by having us both try on some of the styles. Ultimately, she decided that my breasts were close enough to the ideal shape breast that most styles will work for me, but the ones that worked better on wider breasts would work better for me in some cases. She also told me how I could switch to what they called sister sizes, a 38B or 34D, in styles that didn’t quite fit right in different ways. It was more than I ever thought I would need to know about bras, but I could tell it was going to be helpful to know it.

Ultimately I just bought one bra there as well, but now I knew what to look for. Once I was through with that, the rest of the shopping was easier, even when we were looking at skirts and dresses.

We spent about 4 hours visiting other stores in the mall and elsewhere, despite only coming home with a maximum of 7 of each sort of garment. Terry made sure my purchases included one dress, one skirt, and one each of several other kinds of garments I might not have thought about, just to make sure I’m aware of those things. Traveling to different stores and teaching me used up a lot of that time.

At the end of it all, when Terry helped me carry the several bags of clothing into my house, she stayed to tell me secrets of womanhood I should know. She explained about tampons and pads; the flow is usually light for the first day or so, heavy for about one or two days, and then light again for a day, and bigger tampons or pads are meant for the heavy flow in the middle. Makes sense. Also about wiping my butt - which I am supposed to do by wiping away from the vagina. That would be incredibly useful information if my body still pooped at all, but I couldn’t blame her for not knowing that aspect of my change.

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

But I was well prepared to return to the office as a woman - on Tuesday, since Monday I was a man and went in normally. By lunchtime, I had put on a big CLINT nametag like a newbie to help people I encountered recognize me. And I gave a bunch of the same answers repeatedly. “Yes, I’m still going by Clint even when I’m a woman. I’ll be a man again tomorrow, and I don’t want to have two different names or pick one of those gender-ambiguous names. No, I’m not interested in men. I’m not sure yet if I’m interested in women when I’m a woman. I haven’t had sex as a woman yet, and I’m not going to talk about it when I do because that sort of talk is not appropriate for the office.” That last comment got several guys to drop that line of questioning, making them realize they had gone too far and asked something they wouldn’t even have asked most of the other women in the office.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

It was better on Thursday, though there were still people seeing me as a woman for the first time. But I made it through a week of work and it made me feel like I could keep living my life.

I was still getting used to the fact that I didn’t go to the bathroom anymore, except to change bodies. It had become part of my routine in the office - I’d stop to pee first thing after getting in, midmorning after washing out my coffee cup, either before lunch or after lunch, again in the afternoon, and again before going home and now I didn’t do any of those. I needed to invent reasons to get up out of my seat more often! Also, since I was a girl half the time now, never having to go into the restroom meant there was no chance I’d accidentally walk into the wrong one. I guess I could still use them for washing hands, or changing tampons/pads or something about my clothes, but I’ve been washing hands in the kitchen and haven’t had issues with the rest.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

By the weekend, a lot more information was coming out about the condition.

They had a plausible mechanism. Somehow, the entire body’s worth of cells were converting to stem cells. And for some reason, as they did so, they were entering the bloodstream, getting separated out in the kidneys, and passing into the bladder until it was full. After this, they would build up in the bloodstream a bit, keeping enough blood cells there to not endanger the body, and after that they would build up in the body tissues. By this point the person feels a very strong need to urinate. Those stem cells don’t want to be in all those other places, so this urination triggers the removal of the rest of the stem cells from the body. It also, for some reason, causes the reaction that converts the body’s cells to stem cells to go into overdrive. They could not explain that.

And the stem cells are not exactly normal, either. They have some novel genetic factors which seem to cause the cells to generate an adult body, or a teen if appropriate, rather than, say, an infant. Details of these genetic factors make the bodies age properly up to about age 25, to match the person’s natural age. But in people any older than that, the newly produced bodies come out significantly younger than they originally were. So, while it may be too early to confirm it, it’s possible the condition comes with eternal youth.

Another odd thing about these cells allows the sex change to happen. Normally sex is associated with the XX or XY chromosomes. But those chromosomes merely control the expression of sex. All the genes necessary to create male and female bodies are present in every body, whether it has XX or XY chromosomes. The stem cells produced by a body expressing its normal gender carry genes that suppress the normal gender in the new body, and those produced by a body suppressing the gender have these genes deactivated, and allow the normal gender to be expressed.

They have studied the reproductive systems of affected people. Males seem to produce viable sperm, though in those originally female, they always contain an X chromosome and would lead to all female children ... possibly female children affected by the syndrome. It’s still too early to tell whether the condition would be inherited. The female reproductive systems seem active but not in the ovulating phase, and since they only last for a day, for all practical purposes the females are sterile. However, they do appear to have egg cells which could be harvested, fertilized, and grown in a surrogate mother. One such test has already started, but again, it’s still far too early to know whether it will be successful. It was likewise reported the female reproductive systems are never in the menstruating phase.

The genes controlling the expression of sex in these people are clear genetic markers for the condition, but genetic samples taken before the changes started do not show these genes. Where the genes came from and why they suddenly appeared in what they have now found to be about 1500 people widely dispersed around the world is unknown. Those affected are generally not related genetically, and don’t have any common environmental factors linking them. They have no explanation whatsoever for which people were affected.

Most affected people quickly adapted to changing either in the morning after waking up or in the evening before going to bed. It seemed that, even without an urge to pee, as soon as 8 hours after forming a new body you could pee on purpose to trigger a change, while by 24 hours after, the urge to pee was there, and you could hold it perhaps 3-4 hours at most. This allowed people to quickly adjust their schedules and thereafter stick to a 24 hour schedule.

So that was all very interesting. I had never had sex as a woman yet, but I had already thought that finding another person with my condition, but out of phase with my body, might be best. Now I know phase can be adjusted, and the tiny field of candidates is twice as big. But if I did find one of the rare other people with this condition as a potential spouse, we wouldn’t be able to have kids together. We’d have to find a surrogate to carry our child. But I could potentially get together with any bisexual person, anybody who could accept I was male some of the time and female some of the time. Not sure where I’d look for one, but if my partner was female, we could have children normally. If my partner was male, we’d still need a surrogate. I had been a heterosexual male, but now I don’t know what I am.

This morning, while I was female, these thoughts got me aroused, and I investigated what masturbation felt like as a girl. Of course I knew I’d have to experiment a bit, but that was something I thought I should know about my new body: How did it respond sexually? The answer was awesomely! Either women had it a LOT better than men, or my sexual response got magnified greatly as part of getting the new body. And that was just with external stimulation. Women used dildos or vibrators inside them to simulate the feel of a penis. I had never desired to have a penis inside me before, but if it felt that good without anything inside, doing that with a vibrator going inside me must be incredible!

I had sat on the toilet for this, the first time I’d been there in a week, and it was probably a good thing, as I leaked a good deal of what I realized was meant to be my internal lubrication. I washed up and went about other chores.

Also, I had a skirt and a dress I’d never worn, and I really should try wearing them at some point. So that I could do it when I could simply go home if I got uncomfortable with it, I did it today, taking a trip to the mall to go buy myself more female clothes. And it went OK. Once I got going, I barely noticed there weren’t two thin layers of fabric between my legs. I bought a couple more outfits, now that I had had some time to wear the ones I had.

I stopped at the sex shop too. There were probably other places I could find them, some maybe only by asking for something stored behind the counter, but it was the one place I was sure I could find dildos and vibrators. This store had always been a little controversial here, though I am sure there are lots of them down in The City. They managed it by making it adults only. Or at least, nobody under 18 without being accompanied by a parent or guardian. And it was enforced. I worried that I was going to get rejected at the door, since while I somewhat resembled the photo on my ID, it said I was male and 30, and while I might still look old enough to be 30, I looked young enough they’d check ID, and there was no way I could pass as male. So when I stopped at the place, I told the guy I always thought of as a bouncer right up front.

“Yes, we wondered if this was going to be an issue, but you are the first to inquire. And I know you don’t have any ID that really looks like you. You’re probably going to have to get some, but I am not sure what they are doing about that yet. But let me tell you what. We do actually have a policy that lets some minors in here unaccompanied provided they have prior parental authorization. So you come back tomorrow when you look like your ID. We’re open 12-6 on Sunday. Bring this form I will get for you in a moment, and your ID, and ... we usually ask you to bring the person with you when you want to register, but since you obviously can’t, let me take your picture now and I’ll put you in the system pending the parent form. Then we’ll get your female self entered on the system as a permitted minor with a note that you’ll have this ID.”

“Sure, that sounds good.”

He got me the form, and I put it in one of my shopping bags and came home.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

When I was male again Sunday, at some point I remembered this experience and I took the time to get myself suitably aroused. That turned out to be pretty easy. And the experience was... still not as good as it was as a woman, but better than I remembered it as a man. Maybe as good as I fondly remembered it as a teenager. Was that really better than I’d had it at 30? So I think the change increased my sexual pleasure and it’s also true women get more from it than men.

I did my laundry and went about my day. And I went out to get my female self registered at the sex shop. While I was there, I went in, and asked the guy inside. “Pretend I am shopping for my daughter. She’s masturbated but never had sex, and she wants something to put inside herself. What do you recommend?”

He showed me several choices, and I decided to go with a dildo and a somewhat smallish vibrator as a start.

Monday, August 14, 2006

After having proved to myself that I can wear a skirt in public, I went to the office in one. I really think everybody who knew me noticed. Only about a third of them commented on it, with half the comments neutral or positive, a couple catcalls and the like (from people I’d already told I wasn’t interested in dating and they were each warned it was the last time or I would report it to HR), and a few like Frank’s:

“Wow, really going all out with this female thing, huh? A skirt?”

“It wasn’t my choice to become female, Frank, but I’ve decided I am not going to hide it. This is a normal, accepted, and in some cases expected way for a woman to dress and I wanted to prove to myself that I can look the part.”

“Well, it does look good on you.”

“Thank you.”

I felt my responses to these had turned potentially problematic interactions into good ones, and made note of it for the future. The situation was, as far as I knew, permanent, so it was forever going to be possible that people who first met me as a man would later encounter me as a woman.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I wore pants the rest of the week, but I felt good about the experience. This was something I knew I could do now.

It was Wednesday evening when I first tried out my new toys. The first thing I had to do was break my hymen. This was expected; in fact, it was likely to be a regular occurrence for me, because one of the things I caught in one of the news reports was that anybody who started male or who started female but had an intact hymen when the change happened has had their hymen regenerate every time they turned female.

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Weeks passed, then months. I grew completely used to and comfortable with being female every other day, and my coworkers got used to it, too. I kept watch for any news reports about the condition. One report, apparently due to some people with the condition getting medical exams each day they turned female, confirmed the regenerating hymen thing, and also said the reproductive system resets basically to the no-uterine-lining state right after the period ends every time the female body was formed, so unless they found some way of prolonging the time you could spend in one body, there was no way I could get pregnant. However, the machinery was there to produce a pregnancy, even in those who started male, if such a prolonged state could be maintained.

Two months after my change, I saw a report about more people getting the syndrome, who fell into two categories. Some women who were pregnant when it started changed to male the next time they peed after giving birth. The pregnancy apparently suppressed the change, so one of us getting pregnant only requires a roughly two week span with no changes to initiate the pregnancy, and then the body will stay female until birth. Maybe. These women were peeing and pooping normally during their pregnancy, leading people to wonder if one of us did get pregnant, would the body switch to the normal human excretion activity? But so far nobody had even managed to go two days without changing, much less two weeks.

The other category was young teens (or realistically, tweens, 11 and 12 year olds). It appears that some trigger, early on in puberty, flips the switch and puts the body into a state where the change will occur. It’s too early to tell the rate, but the limited data available suggests that they could have been affected at the same rate as older people, and simply inhibited from changing until puberty enabled it. There was a program collecting DNA from 10 and 11 year olds, hoping they’d get something from somebody with the syndrome who had not started showing symptoms yet, so they could compare that DNA with the DNA after the change, as well as with the bulk of DNA from unaffected people, and figure out if it was possible to detect the condition in people not showing symptoms yet. There were very few of these, but given how few, relative to the world’s population, changed at all, it wasn’t too surprising.

So the number of affected people, who were now being called changers by some, switchers by others, was slowly increasing, but we were still so rare that most people would not know one.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Eventually, they confirmed the rates of new people starting to change. The change originally affected about 1 in 3.5 million people past puberty. There are about a billion younger people in the world, and about 250,000 of them reach puberty each day. So they expected one new changer every two weeks. The rate of births was similar, so they expected one mother to start changing after giving birth every two weeks, for nine months, I guess. It was five months in when they announced 11 teens and 8 mothers had started changing, very much in line with the estimate.

By this time, the USA had followed many other countries’ lead by introducing a “switching” gender to apply to people affected by the syndrome. Well, they did this two months ago, but the individual states issued IDs, and so each state had to figure out how they were going to do it. And most states only had one or two affected people, so for the most part they didn’t consider it a priority. California had 11 such people, though, so they established a system to deal with it, and most other states copied theirs. Under this system, the affected person and a witness (usually a family member, doctor, or coworker) had to attest under oath that the person was affected, and the affected person had to show up for an appointment on the day they were in the opposite gender from their original to get a picture that way. They’d get a new ID or license showing pictures as both genders in a slightly reduced size and a rearranged form of the other data. New York’s version of this system went into effect this week, as the news joked a “Christmas present” for the 6 people in the state affected, and Terry and I went on an officially excused trip during work time to let me apply today.

The rules the US established in theory went into effect immediately, even before the new IDs were available. The Supreme Court found one of the “bathroom bills” of recent years unconstitutional on a challenge from two syndrome sufferers (ironically, one who was born male and objected to being forced to use the men’s restroom at times she was obviously female, and one who was born female, and objected to being forced to use the “substandard” women’s restrooms with no urinals while he had a functional penis, and doubly ironically, because switchers didn't pee regular pee anymore, though this never seemed to come up in the press and wasn't mentioned during any of the trials). This paved the way for the federal government to establish uniform rules. Under the new rules, anyone who was on a medically certified gender change program could enter the restroom of their new gender whenever they were attired appropriately. Anyone who had completed such a program, meaning they had had their surgery and were now fully (as much as that was possible) changed to their new gender should only use the new gender’s restroom. And switchers should use the restroom they currently looked like, which didn’t necessarily mean the organs they had now, as some were going as one gender all the time, with the exception that if they had to change gender in a public restroom, they could use either. Of course, switchers did not pee or poop, so they were most likely to use a public restroom if they did have to change genders, though I suppose they could use one for hand-washing or checking appearance. Or changing clothes, which I’d already done once without being questioned. Or masturbating, I thought with an evil grin.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Nine months in, and very likely the last of the already-pregnant changers gave birth and started changing. There were now 20 teens and 17 new mothers who had become changers in addition to the original group. There was no progress on any sort of drug or procedure to keep somebody from changing. The longest any switcher had managed to go without involuntarily starting to pee their body out to begin a change was 34 hours. So based on our current knowledge all switchers were effectively infertile as females. Some of them had already fathered children. Well, gotten women pregnant, anyway. The first of those children would be born soon.

They had made no real progress on identifying a genetic marker for changers. They had managed to get samples of before and after DNA for changers, and there was no identifiable difference. The genes which were active in changers causing the chromosomal gender to alternately be suppressed or active and those causing the change to occur were both present in over half the population, as part of the so-called junk genes which were never known, until now, to be active. Based on the presence of these genes, there was a test that could eliminate about 45% of people as potential changers. They had not identified any cause for these genes to become active. They had found that these genes were not present in other mammals, including all known primates, so this was a human-only condition.

I had never used the tampons and pads. My female body never reached a condition where I would need them, resetting after every change. But I kept them. There was no telling what might happen in the future. We didn’t know why it had started, so we had no idea about how it might change again in the future.

Friday, June 8, 2007

The first children born to changer fathers, conceived after the change started, were born recently. Only 3 so far; there were, after all, less than 2000 of us in the world. These were born to changers who started out male and were already married, and simply had children with their existing wives normally. And while they all had the genetic factor that would allow them to possibly become changers when they reached puberty, none of them were changing from birth, born with both sets of organs, or any other such silliness.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

As we approached the first anniversary of the change, I started to think about dating. I had dated before, but my last sort-of regular date had moved to California 3 months before the change and we weren’t close enough yet for me to quit my job and follow her there, so we split up. And I’d just never found anybody right in the 3 months after that before everything got crazy.

Now I had different priorities. First and foremost, I needed a partner who was bi, or bi-curious, or at the very least OK dating somebody who was going to be the opposite sex from the one they wanted to date half the time. Another switcher would be nice, but at the time I got my ID there were 6 in the entire state of New York. It just wasn’t likely. There were several reasons for me to prefer a woman: First, that was what I was familiar with. Second, if it was ever going to be successful to the point we wanted to have kids, if I didn’t marry a woman then we’d have to have a surrogate to carry our kids. Again, assuming no further changes. It had been stable for a year; it was reasonable to assume it was permanent. Third, while I was not opposed to the idea of my female body being penetrated by a man, when I was male, the lack of an anus meant I had nothing to penetrate, even if I was OK with that if it had been possible. If I dated a bi man, he’d have to be the one penetrated when I was male. I’m sure such people existed, but it meant looking for someone very specific.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

I found a dating site that promised to be LGBTQ-friendly, and signed up. I had used sites before that mostly catered to straight people, and they usually had a policy that the site was basically free for women. Men got to send a few messages for free but had to pay to send more. Here the policy was fairer - applied equally to everybody, anyway. You got more free messages at the start, and 3 every month that were use-’em-or-lose-’em, but everybody had to pay to keep sending after the free ones.

They had a surprisingly long list of gender options. Beyond male and female, there were options for people transitioning both ways, those who had completed surgery for changing both ways, those who merely dressed as the other gender, those who only identified as the other gender, both genders, or none but had normal organs, those who had organs of both genders since birth, and (with a “new” tag) one just for me, those who had both organs alternately because of Pee Body Syndrome. If you chose a “both” option, you got additional options under it for identify as male, identify as female, identify as neither, or identify as both. The last seemed to be what I was doing.

For the part for what I was looking for, there were boxes I could check for male, female, and “trans or other.” If I marked “trans or other” and exactly one of male and female, I could also choose: Show me dates who present or identify as my preferred gender, show me dates who have organs of my preferred gender, include dates with organs of both genders, and finally, show me all trans dates. If I marked all of male, female, and “trans or other” then the “preferred gender” and “both organs” options disappeared and “show me all trans dates” was automatically selected. If I marked only “trans or other” at the top then the “preferred gender” boxes each split into male and female options. Clearly they had thought this through.

I marked female, trans, show me dates who have organs of my preferred gender, and include dates with organs of both genders. I hesitated on that last one. This was going to show me other switchers and people with birth defects that gave them both organs. In both cases it was likely such a person could not bear children for us if we married. But it might be good to meet people in those categories, anyway.

The mathematician in me made me want to consider the number of choices. There were 20 choices for gender including all the “identify” options. For what you wanted, it could be male only, female only, both, both with trans (which automatically included all trans types), or just one of them with trans, which then let you choose any combination of the identify, organs, and both organs options except none of them, or all trans. That was 20 options, but not the same 20. If you picked only the trans option at the top, many more combinations were possible. Some of those combinations weren’t very likely, but they were possible, and each would get you a different subset of the people registered on the site, assuming all 20 gender options were used by at least one person. Having figured this out, I went back to the choices I selected previously and went on entering my information.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Over two days, I took selfies as male and female, and edited those into one image to submit as my photo. Unconventional, but I was sure they would understand why I did that. And then my profile was complete and I could look for people I might be interested in and wait for others to find me.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

It was about a month before I went on a date with someone from this site, and three months before I went on a second date. That was with Brenda, who I worried was a little too happy to please me, but more agreeable than my previous 3 dates.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Brenda and I dated for a few months before I allowed her to spend the night with me one Friday night when I started male. In the morning after, I sat in the tub to change to female, but no sooner did I start peeing than Brenda burst in, and knocked me out with a paperweight.

When I came to, I was only a head, protruding from the ass of what I was sure was Brenda’s corpse, seeing how my feet were protruding from her mouth. I wasn’t sure how much of my female body had formed inside her, but I apparently at least had partial lungs. I could breathe, and speak, a little. So as loud as I could (which was only half as loud as my normal speaking voice) I called out, “Alera, call 911!”

“Do you want to make an emergency call, Clint?” the computerized voice asked.

“Yes!”

“Calling 911.”

I explained my situation to the 911 operator, who was stunned a bit by my situation but glad I was able to speak and seemingly not in immediate danger. She sent both an ambulance and police for me - an ambulance to help me, and Brenda on the off chance she was somehow still alive, and police because I had reported a crime.

“Make sure you tell them when they arrive to announce themselves loudly so I can hear. I can open the door by voice and let them in, but I don’t want to leave the door unlocked while I’m essentially paralyzed here.”

“Understood. Personnel will announce themselves loudly.”

It was about 10 minutes later when I heard a loud, “Police! Please open the door!”

“Alera, unlock the door.”

“Unlocking front door.”

“It’s open!” I called as loud as I could. I am not sure if the police heard me or just heard the door unlocking, but in moments two officers were standing in my bathroom looking at the grisly scene.

The male officer stated, “OK, this is what I was told to expect but I can still hardly believe it.”

The female officer was shaking her head. “Never a dull day on the job.”

The male officer said, “OK, I’m going to start a report. The ambulance will be here soon, and I will go to the hospital with you and continue the report after they get you extricated from her.”

I interrupted, “Ma’am, can you go get me a change of clothes from my bedroom to send with me so I have something to wear after they get me out? Female clothes, a full outfit, please.”

“Sure, no problem.”

The male officer continued, “OK, tell me in your own words what happened.”

“I and Brenda, the woman I’m inside, were dating; she knew about my condition. She was here in my home overnight on a date, our fifth date, while I was male, and stayed the night in bed with me. We had sex with condoms. As is usual for me because of my condition, I got into the tub here to pee myself into my female body in the morning, and the plan was to continue our date. But just as I started peeing, Brenda came in and knocked me out with a paperweight.”

“Uh huh. I see it here outside the tub.”

“And I was knocked out for the rest of it, but I assume Brenda either drank my pee or forced it up her ass, because my new body formed - partially, anyway - inside her. I can see her pussy here in front of my face, so I assume my head is protruding from her ass.”

“That is what it looks like.”

The female officer returned with a paper grocery bag presumably with my clothes in it. And just then there was knocking at the door. “Ambulance! Please open the door!”

“It’s open!” the officer yelled.

After a moment the ambulance crew found us there and police let them take over. The male officer rode to the hospital with me, carrying the bag with my clothes, and the female officer stayed to finish processing the crime scene, documenting basically everything in my house that seemed relevant.

The ambulance crew had already found no signs of life in Brenda, but at the hospital they did other tests to distinguish my life signs from her lack of them. After half an hour, one of the doctors there told me, “We don’t have much experience with people with your syndrome, and we’ve never heard of this, but based on the other places people with your syndrome have formed and gotten stuck, we believe there’s no way to unform the parts of you that are formed until the whole body forms, and there’s no way to make that happen that doesn’t mutilate Brenda’s body rather badly. Since you don’t seem in immediate danger, we are going to let the officer document what he wants to about Brenda’s body and then cut her open to get you out.

The officer came in and took about a dozen photos from different angles. He also took her fingerprints and foot prints and asked the doctors to take a blood sample and samples that should provide clean DNA for Brenda.

He said, “I am going to let the doctors take over now to get you out. This procedure will be recorded for evidence, but I will wait outside. And your clothes are here.”

The officer left the bag on a table where I could see it and left the room, closing the door behind him.

The same doctor who spoke to me before said, “We aren’t sure we can safely knock you out with drugs right now, so you’re going to have to stay awake for this. That also means you can scream out if we hurt you during the process, so please do.”

Another doctor entered, and the one who had been speaking to me introduced him as Dr. Jacobs.

Jacobs said, “I actually serve as the medical examiner at this hospital. I usually don’t work on live people, but I am a medical doctor. I’m here because I have experience cutting open dead bodies for autopsies. I am going to perform an autopsy on Brenda later, but cutting her body open to get you out is the priority now.”

Jacobs did a few brief checks and declared Brenda dead, and then with help from two other doctors, started working on freeing me. They used two pairs of sturdy scissors I assumed were meant for opening a body for surgery, and when they had to cut through her bones, a small saw. Only once did they do anything that caused me any pain and I yelped. Mostly they came into contact with my unformed mass inside her, which tickled in a strange way. As they opened her up, my cells oozed out and once freed, piece by piece they formed quickly into a normal body.

Eventually, I was all free, and they did a couple quick tests and helped me to a shower in an adjoining bathroom to remove the bits of Brenda’s blood, flesh, and bone that were all over me. They provided me with towels and my clothes, and waited in the main room for me to get dressed. They did more tests on me before declaring me healthy, and turned me over to the officer, who came in as they were leaving.

“OK, It seemed like you finished your story just before the ambulance crew arrived. Brenda knocked you out and you awoke as I found you.”

“Correct, sir.”

“Are there any more details you can remember that you think are important?”

“I don’t really know. Brenda had seemed eager to please me, maybe a little too eager, but she had never shown any desire to harm me until this happened. I was completely taken by surprise. I’m sure your partner found Brenda’s clothes and purse, probably still in my bedroom since she didn’t bring them into the bathroom with her.”

“I have not spoken with her, but I did observe male and female clothes and a purse on the floor of your bedroom during our initial check of the place. OK, I’m going to call and get us a ride back over there.”

The officer and I rode in the back of another police car to get back to my home. He talked with the female officer for a bit, and then came back to me.

“So far your story checks out. Detectives will have to examine all the evidence to confirm your story, but for now you’re free to go. Just don’t go on any sudden trips, OK?”

“Sure. Just planning to stay here and get back to work Monday.”

“Good. We’re going to pick up all the evidence - that includes both sets of clothes we found on the floor, in case you are looking for those - and then leave.”

And in 5 minutes they were gone.

What a crazy ordeal. I called me boss and let him know, and he also thought it was the craziest thing he ever heard of, but was glad I was OK. He told me to take a couple days off, so I didn’t actually go back to work until Wednesday.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The next Friday afternoon, the police called me. They had decided my story was correct and that she had caused all this, and arranged to meet me Saturday at home to discuss the details.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

It was a different officer, a detective, who came out. He explained it like this.

“In Brenda’s purse we had her keys, passwords, and everything else we needed to search her place, her computer, and everything. We found she had been planning this. She had an intestinal ulcer that she believed could only be treated with a novel form of stem cell therapy, but her insurance refused to pay for the experimental procedure. But having heard that Pee Body Syndrome sufferers basically turn into a mass of stem cells, she was determined to find one and have you pee stem cells through her intestines to try to cure her. There’s no way it would have worked; those are your stem cells, not hers, and you’re not a relative of hers. The only way it could have possibly worked is if it turned her into a clone of you, and these stem cells have not been behaving like that.”

“Oh, God. How demented she must have been.”

“In any case, this fully corroborated your story, so we’re closing this case as entirely her fault. She committed a crime, assault and battery for certain, and due to the bodily invasion, probably rape, though it would be a landmark case to apply the term rape to what she did. Maybe attempted murder, too. But since she died doing it, there won’t be a prosecution. If she had survived this somehow, a prosecutor would probably try all those charges to see what would stick. I’ve brought back the evidence we took from your home, except the things that belonged to Brenda.”

“Good. I don’t want to see any of her things. Go burn them.”

“We actually offer them to her next of kin - or will, when we find them. It seems she was pretty detached from any family.”

He handed me a bag of evidence they took from here, including my clothes that night and the paperweight.

“We can offer you counseling if you need it.”

“How long is that offer good for?”

“Two years. You have two years to decide to accept it, and you can stay in the counseling for two years once you start.”

“Good. I don’t need it now, but I will want to date again in the future, and I will probably need the counseling before I can start.”

“I’ll send you the information so you can get started when you are ready.”

“Thank you.”

The detective left, and I was left to contemplate the situation.

The detective said I was raped. And I realized he was right. She must have put my penis into her ass or her mouth after she knocked me out, and that is a sexual act. One that I did not consent to. I was raped. I am not sure how much she knew about my condition, but she knew I had it and she knew at least the detail that I turned into stem cells during my change.

She should have known that I was going to turn into a my-entire-body-sized bundle of stem cells. Surely she should have thought she only needed maybe 5% of my cells to penetrate through her entire intestine. Why didn’t she separate from me? Maybe by the time she got enough she had trouble doing that or passed out herself.

I have to assume she had never witnessed the change - it was possible for her to have seen it, since there were videos out there, but maybe she never had. She must have thought I peed out a batch of stem cells that surrounded my body and changed my organs, rather than turning my entire body into stem cells and remaking an entire new body. In that case, she would have wanted to take all I put out. Then, by the time she realized her mistake, she was already so bloated with me inside her that she couldn’t get up, and I just kept on flowing into her. She was probably awake for several minutes and aware of her predicament before she passed out.

I am not going to feel sorry for her, though. This was karma. She did a terrible thing, trying to take advantage of me in that way, and I feel good knowing she must have suffered, even if only for a few minutes, aware she was going to die before she finally did so.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

I opened the dating site, where my profile has been set to not looking and not subscribing to send messages for months, since I started dating Brenda more regularly. I had it find me some matches, and some of them looked potentially OK, but I realized I couldn’t even get myself to send a message to one of them, and I shut it off again.

I probably do need the counseling, and sooner than I thought.

I distracted myself by reviewing the state of knowledge about the syndrome. There had been a lot of fascinating studies, but they were no longer headline news and I had to go look for them.

The videos of the change were remarkable. The urethra and the cells around it - including the penis in male bodies - survives to the end. Literally the entire body flows through the urethra. At first, it’s only at the pace of regular peeing when peeing is urgent - about a minute to deliver 16 ounces of fluid. After the first minute, when the bladder is emptied, it speeds up. The urethra widens to allow more fluid from the rest of the body to pass. After four minutes, it increases again. In both males and females, the urethra widens to almost the diameter of an erect penis, and the flow is like water from a hose. This change probably caught Brenda by surprise, and she probably struggled to get off at that point, but maybe slipped on the fluid that leaked out, and her struggle only resulted in getting me stuck deeper into her.

It is also at this point that the old body starts to noticeably lose mass, the limbs shrinking first, and then the torso. Inevitably the person loses consciousness around five to six minutes after the start of the process. By eight minutes in, the body is child-sized; by eleven minutes, infant-sized, and the flow begins to slow, but still continues at the rate after the second minute until near the very end, when there’s literally nothing but a shrinking kidney and urethra converting itself to stem cells. Brenda would have been dead already, but in the final minute, what was left of me would have been entirely inside her, continuing to convert my remaining cells to stem cells until I was all gone.

The video isn’t over at this point, as we also see the new body form. Some part of the mass which is most open to the air forms a head first, and almost immediately afterward the lungs and the rib cage form, even if they are constricted and have to form at a reduced size. The stem cells can grow the undersized organs later. There were known cases where the body took over 6 hours to form and still came out right; deaths during change occurred only in people stuck in constricted positions for 8 hours. About 2 or 3 minutes after the head and lungs form, the body becomes conscious, even if incomplete.

One of the questions a lot of people asked was “where does the extra mass go/come from,” as people think women inherently weigh less than men. But this is a misconception, based on the late 20th century ideals of skinny women and muscular men. In fact, if not for different body goals, women only weigh a little less than men on average, and that because they average a little shorter. Pee Body Syndrome sufferers actually weigh the same as male and female. The female body appears smaller, but while the body is slenderer in general, the hips are wider, the bust is larger, and the legs are longer. A very detailed study was done on this, showing that in the long term, a sufferer’s female body has the same volume and mass as his male body. There are changes when it first starts. Those who started out obese lost weight with each change, and tended to reach an average body size after 20 to 40 changes. Those who started very small tended to gain mass, faster or slower depending on how much they ate. And those who started at puberty tend toward an average body size for their age and grow into full size as they age. Or at least they seemed to over the almost two years since this started.

There is usually a small amount of cell mass which doesn’t manage to join up with the body and it dies after a while. In studies, the body turned out OK even if over 20% of the cell mass was lost, and this was again built back by eating more. In such cases the person finds themselves hungrier until the mass is made up. These studies mostly used real-world occurrences, rather than experiments, because there were a small number of us and few if any willing to engage in experiments which might result in their death.

This agreed with my experience. I lost about 5 pounds of my cell mass during the incident with Brenda, but I have already made that up.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

I applied today for the counseling sessions. They only do business hours, so I’m going to have a work-from-home day each week with a break for my session. Work was understanding, especially with my explanation that they would have tried Brenda for rape if she had lived.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Four months now of counseling every Tuesday morning. I guess I knew it wasn’t going to be quick or easy. I’m really tormented by the thought that another woman would try to do the same thing - even though the story, without my name attached, has been circulated widely in news about the syndrome. This was not the first serious crime perpetrated on a changer, nor was I the first one targeted, but I was the only one ever targeted to try to get at the stem cells. The only one ever targeted by somebody who thought they needed stem cells for something without learning enough about stem cells to know they had to be from your own or a closely related person’s cells or they would just be rejected, or themselves reject the body they were in.

The first part of the counseling focused on understanding what my worries were. The situation was complex and there were many aspects that could come into play, but this worry that it could happen again seemed the strongest. So my therapy involved seeing how the knowledge about this incident had become widespread and it was now understood by the general population that trying to take a changer inside yourself while they were becoming stem cells was suicide.

The second anniversary of the change starting also passed recently. Kids are still turning into changers as they reach puberty at a rate of about one every two weeks. No other unexpected changes have happened. Well, there was one recent report. Apparently it had happened two times before but they kept it secret, but they were unable to keep this one secret. A changer was cut in half while in stem cell form, and each half formed a child-sized (but sexually mature) body. Two independent bodies, both with the memories of the person they started as. Potentially, they could have eaten double and maintained their separate selves and grown up to full size, but instead they turned to goo together in a tub and became one again, a single being with memories from both the separate bodies she had one day.

This prompted a dozen others to arrange setups where they could split on purpose, and a variety of other experimentation. Some of them stayed split on purpose, growing both bodies to full size, which introduced interesting legal issues. Two pairs stayed split and limited their consumption to stay child-sized, but varied their change times so that after a week they were out of phase with one another, both pairs rejoining while one was female and one was male, just to see how they turned out. Interestingly, one of the rejoined bodies came out male, one female, so more experiments of this sort are being planned to try to understand what principle governs the sex which dominates in such a case.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Now nine months into counseling. I am not up to dating again yet, but at least my stomach no longer turns at the thought of being alone with a romantic partner.

The splitting has gotten crazy. At least 10% of the original switchers have turned themselves into two full-size copies, typically sending one to work and having the other do chores around the house. Some of them are merging into a mega-sized body once every week or two and then splitting again, to share their memories. The others are typically getting the two bodies out of phase with each other, so that there’s always one male and one female. They don’t share memories in this case, so they still send the same person (half the time male and half female) to work each day. Nobody talks about it, but I think everybody assumes these bodies are having sex. Effectively marrying themselves. I thought about this. There are definitely some advantages, but it would not provide a solution to having kids.

Speaking of which, the legal system decided that because these bodies can always merge and become one again, switchers who split themselves are still legally considered one person, even if they choose to stay apart from one another. This settled some legal issues while opening up new ones. One splitter had sued the government over not having been allowed to have both his bodies vote in the elections last November. This was decided in favor of the government; splitters cannot get extra votes by making extra bodies, and likewise not extra government benefits. If they live apart, they have to pick one legal residence, in the same way that celebrities and some politicians have multiple homes, but one of them is their official residence where they vote, pay taxes, etc. But if one of multiple bodies of a splitter commits a crime, do they all go to jail?

About a dozen switchers are working directly with scientists by splitting. That is, they split, one body goes on living and eats to get back to full size, and the other engages in risky experiments that may kill the body. We don’t know all the experiments they have tried, but they include mixing two half-size bodies’ stem cells together. They refused to mix. In the same way that dirt on the floor doesn’t become part of our bodies and contents from the old body we can’t use crystallizes out into small masses, if your cells get mixed with somebody else’s, they self-separate.

From these experiments, they found that it takes about 45 pounds of stem cells to make a mass that will form a body. This makes one the size of a 6-year-old, but sexually mature, so we were advised to avoid doing this. The half-mass bodies are about the size of an 10- to 12-year-old, and much less disturbing to others. With smaller amounts, the cells start to differentiate but don’t actually go so far as to form organs. They mixed together two bodies from the same person that were in this state and the cells quickly joined with the other like-differentiated cells and completed forming the somewhat below-standard-sized body in only three minutes.

Another of the experiments they told us about was to see how large a person they could make. They had someone reproduce themselves several times and grew all the bodies to full size, then dumped all but one of them together at one change. The largest body they managed to make was about 8 and a half feet tall and 550 pounds. Beyond that, the cells will form one body of this giant stature and if the remaining cells are enough to make another body, they will do so immediately afterward. They thought this said something about how the stem cell mass figures out how much of it there is. In some way, it knows there is “enough” or “too much” to form a body, and it knows how much there is and makes the body of a size to match.

Obviously it’s possible for a human being to be smaller than that; we start out much smaller when we are born. But the stem cells are set into a mode of making an adult body, and preserving all the memories and such, and it makes sense that the minimum size is larger than an infant. Likewise, I can also imagine the problems such a huge body would have. Does it have enough strength to support its own weight? Can the heart pump blood around the whole body? Somehow it figures that is the limit and doesn’t go any larger.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

A little more than a year of counseling now, and I can at least log onto the dating site and look at my matches. But I had second thoughts about the splitting thing.

If I split myself and shift so one is male and one female at any time, we could take turns changing. I’d have one body unchanged to make sure my date isn’t doing anything inappropriate while the other is changing. As much as I’ve tried to convince myself through the counseling that it’s extremely unlikely to occur again, this would give me confidence that I have the ability to prevent it.

I would need to figure out if just one of me is dating her or if we both are. Both cases are weird in different ways, but it’s probably less weird if both of us are, not to mention that I wouldn’t have to do anything special for one of me to be “watching” my date while the other of me is changing. Ideally, then, I’d be looking for female bi poly dates. And, yes, I’m limiting myself again, but hopefully they’ll be very good matches when I find one. But if that doesn’t work out, I’d always have one body of whatever my date wants and we could date her alternately.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I brought this up with my counselor the next two weeks and she agreed that if splitting will make me feel better, even if it restricts my choices, it was better for me to do it. So I started making plans.

To do the actual split, I needed some way to split the liquid evenly. And it turns out that is a hard thing to do, especially considering I am going to be unconscious during more than half the flow. I did find a place where people were discussing splitting online, and they described two basic ways of doing it: The overflow method and the distributor method.

The overflow method was the easier to set up, but you needed to figure out your volume as stem cells. The stem cell mixture was known to weigh about 5% more than water, so while a gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, a gallon of stem cells weighs about 8.4 pounds. A typical person weighing 150 pounds then has a volume of 17.86 gallons as stem cells and wants to split into two parts each taking up 8.93 gallons. To do it, you’d buy a ten gallon bucket from a hardware store (the five gallon bucket is more common, but the ten gallon one is available if you look around, or online), measure out precisely the volume you need of water into the bucket, and then add stones or other heavy items until the water reaches the brim. Then you’d put this in your tub, sit on top of it inside the tub, and pee into it. Eventually, once your body starts to collapse, you’ll fall into the bucket and splash some of the cells out. but the part of your body inside the bucket would pee itself out inside the bucket and it would work. And if the parts weren’t exactly the same size, it doesn’t matter; they only need to be close, as most people let their bodies gradually grow back to normal size.

The distributor method is more complicated but works without knowing your volume. You need something like a large funnel with two outlets. The suggestion was taking something like the five gallon bucket and epoxying two identical plastic funnels to the bottom, making sure they are sealed all the way around the top, and cutting holes in the bottom of the bucket into each funnel. Then you’d mount this so the two funnels lead to different places, such as inside the bathtub and on the floor. And then you’d pee in the bucket. At first, it would flow out as quickly as you filled it, and at that point you’d make sure you were peeing equally into both holes. Later, the bucket would start to fill up as you are filling it faster than the liquid can flow out, and pressure would keep the liquid distributing evenly. Again, you would test it with water to ensure it distributes equally.

I decided the less complicated setup was worth the effort of having to measure my volume. I weigh - I just checked - 158 pounds today, which is about 18.8 gallons, or 9.4 gallons for half of me, so I need a little over half a gallon of stones. I knew how much that is, roughly, from the milk cartons, so I brought in a couple large stones from the yard and several small ones, and washed them off.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Next I needed to plan when I was going to do this, how I was going to manage work while I was regrowing myself, acquiring food - because small me would have a hard time driving! And clothes. I could wear oversized shirts like dresses, which might work for casual stuff but would be weird in the office. I’d need smaller pants under it or just go commando until I could wear my usual ones.

Work turned out to be easy. They told me to take two weeks of work-from-home while I get back to my usual size. So no major issues with clothes.

For food, I decided I was going to stock up. Maybe Friday night I could do a big food purchase, and Saturday morning do my initial split. Further research suggests It doesn’t matter what I eat, as long as human bodies can digest it. Carbs and fats help bulk up best; some proteins are needed but did not have to be the emphasis. So I put on my shopping list large bags of pasta and rice, several loaves of bread, bags of potatoes, way more cereal than I’d normally eat, gallons of whole milk, creamy dressings, etc. I was going to be buying for two of me, and those were each going to need to eat double to restore mass, so the quantities are what I would normally eat in a month. A week later when my supplies were running low, the two of me would be big enough to drive and I could go do it again.

I also should get a stepladder. I sometimes stood on chairs to reach high things in my house and I knew I should have one of those short folding ladders that let you get two feet off the floor to reach those things. With this I was going to be perhaps a foot shorter with no adult-sized person around and likely have even more trouble reaching things. So I made a stop coming home from work to get one of those tonight, along with the bucket.

It turned out, when I measured the one I picked up on the way home from work tonight, that these “ten gallon” buckets are actually a bit over that. They would hold ten gallons - but the measurement to the brim was a bit more. So I needed one more large stone from the yard to make it work. But at the end of the night I had a bucket with the right amount of stones in it, and I put the remaining stones back outside.

Friday, May 29, 2009

On the way home from work, I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a package of men’s briefs in small size and panties two sizes smaller than what my female self usually wore. I didn’t feel right going commando for two weeks, especially with two of my bodies, and I figured these would be close enough until I grew large enough to wear my usual underwear. I added a couple small sports bras for the same reason. I didn’t buy any other clothes. During the time we were mostly staying at home, I’d improvise from among my male and female inventories. Once we were back to full size, my two selves would share my male and female clothes. I might need more of them, but I could easily go buy them when I figured that out.

After that I went grocery shopping with my special shopping list and filled up my trunk with food. I had to improvise on some of the storage, but I found room. Clearly, I was not used to keeping food here for a family of four adults, because that was really all this was.

I put the bucket with its rocks in the tub before bed and put the plug in the tub. Might as well make it as easy as possible in the morning.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

I got up, ready to change as usual - except I remembered today was going to be nothing like usual. I sat on the bucket with my penis aimed inside, and let loose. It went as normal, except that my pee was filling up the bucket rather than the tub. I felt my limbs start to shrink and I think I felt the splash as my torso fell into the bucket just before I lost consciousness.

Soon, I awoke, a head, arms, and torso in the bucket, and I lifted myself out so my legs could form. Another me was lying curled up at the drain end of the tub, already fully formed. She started waking up about the time I was able to get standing outside the tub. We dumped out the rocks, and took a shower together - just showering! Well, we washed the bucket and the rocks too, since they had my cell residue all over them.

We got out, dried off, and put on the small sports bras (definitely needed), small panties, and we each wore one of my short dresses, which on us was cocktail-length. We were pleased to find that the sports bras and panties fit decently well. The sizing had to be a guess, but almost three years of living half time as a woman had taught me something about sizes. We let the rocks and the bucket dry while we went about our day. We intended to keep them. If we ever had to split again, we’d have them available.

The next order of business was breakfast. We were eating our normal breakfast - raisin bran with milk - today, except I put the milk jug and cereal box on the table in addition to our initial serving. The cereal box was new yesterday - the small size box I typically ate - but we were going to eat it 4 times as fast. That meant we’d finish the box today. The other boxes I bought were family size boxes, each as big as one and a half of the small ones. I’d finish one of those in two days.

“Okay, who’s who?” my twin asked.

“Flip for it?”

“Sure. You find a coin and flip.”

When I had the coin ready, my twin called, “Heads, you work and I stay home, tails, I work and you stay home.”

The coin came up heads.

“Looks like I get to go to work.”

We worked out a plan. I would work, but my twin would do the chores around the house, and cook meals. I’d still do the grocery shopping or any other needed quick outings on the way home from work, but she’d do any other shopping needed on weekends. The shopping trip we would do next weekend we’d do together. Also, I’d maintain the usual change schedule, which meant I’d start work Monday female (though it was work from home). She’d change before bed tonight, mid-day tomorrow, and in the morning just after me each additional day to establish the different sexes.

Also, while we would both be Clint to the outside world, we decided to take new names just for referring to each other. I was Kelly, and she’d be Stacy. Both names that could apply to men or women, of course. It would still be many years before we knew if the kids of switchers were all switchers, or even more frequently were, but they were naming all their kids with such names, including Michael, Dana, Pat, and Robin.

At lunch we each had a sandwich one of me would normally eat for lunch, and also a big bowl of pasta with alfredo sauce. Dinner was Chinese-style, each of us with a big plate of rice and assorted chopped up meat and veggies in it, covered in some sort of sauce Stacy improvised. We needed a while before we could eat a double bowl of ice cream each for dessert.

Stacy changed male before bed, and I waited for him there. I only had the one full-size bed, so I knew we’d both sleep there; at least at our small size, there was plenty of room. I’d slept with dates here before; there was room for two people who were intimate. And who could be more intimate than my other self?

At no point before I split had I decided my selves were going to have sex, nor after the split did we discuss it. But when Stacy got to the bed, he was naked, and simply asked, “Sex?”

And I replied, “Yes.”

So I got to be the first of us to find out what it feels like for a woman to have sex with a man's real penis. Even though we were small, our sexual parts were full-size - or only scaled down by the same degree as everything else, at worst. The penis was way bigger than I had at 11, and I didn’t have female parts to know, but I was pretty sure an 11-year-old girl was not developed like this between the legs. And it was wonderful.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

I changed male in the morning, and Stacy had the cereal and milk ready for us once I was dressed.

As we ate, I commented, “Remember, Stacy, we’re not going to fuck every day. After we get back to full size we’re going to go looking for a nice bi girl who’ll take us both.”

“Of course. But we can fuck sometimes.”

“Definitely.”

As Sunday was laundry day, and laundry was now one of Stacy’s chores, she gathered up all the worn clothes and washed them starting immediately after breakfast.

Stacy changed female after lunch, and again came out naked and invited sex. Naturally, she deserved her turn to feel my penis inside her. Unsurprisingly, she seemed to enjoy it as much as I did the sex the night before.

Only for a little while, though. I had to go adjust my work-from-home area to fit my smaller body - something I was going to have to update every couple days until I got back to my normal size - and Stacy had more housework that needed doing.

We had sex in bed again at the end of the day.

Monday, June 1, 2009

We changed in sequence today, as agreed, me first. Stacy had the cereal, milk, bowls, and spoons set out when I came out and she went in to change, and I started eating while she was becoming male.

Then female me sat at my newly adjusted workstation at home, while male Stacy did other chores, made meals, and kept up on the latest developments with switchers in the news.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

The rest of the week went similarly, with Stacy collecting and washing our underwear and some other clothes to make a load every second day because we had bought so few of the small ones. By today, Saturday, those small ones were getting tight and we both switched to our adult clothes, which were slightly too big, but we could make them work.

Also, we had eaten most of the food I bought 8 days ago and a shopping trip was needed. I drove. With the seat pulled all the way forward I could reach the pedals and see over the dashboard. With Stacy helping to watch for traffic, I made it to the store.

We were about the size of a 14-year-old today, not quite fully grown but a lot closer than when we started. It would take us until next Saturday to finish growing, and Sunday we’d be back to normal meals. So we were buying 8 days of quadruple meals again, and the stuff I bought last time worked, so we bought the same stuff again, or as close as we could based on what was available. Being smaller made it more difficult to lift some heavy items, but I pushed the cart and managed the list and Stacy grabbed items from the shelves, except when we were buying heavy items or large amounts in one place, when I helped load the cart as well. And we both helped unload at home, of course.

It wasn’t long after we got everything put away that it was time for lunch. We both relaxed a bit afterward. I shared with Stacy what was happening at work, and Stacy shared with me what was happening with switchers. And there was an interesting development. The new thing some long-term splitters were doing was called mix-and-split. Both members of a split pair deposited their stem cells in the same pool, but using a splitter to divide the results into two new bodies. This resulted in no or very little size change that was easily managed after a day, but they’d share their memories. This was interesting - if we did this, we wouldn’t need these info dumps, nor would we feel permanently tied to these roles. We’d both remember working my job as Kelly and housework and research as Stacy.

I noted, “We would need a bigger splitting tub. We’d be trying to make two portions of 18.8 gallons each.”

Stacy commented, “Yes, they used trash cans. They come in 23 gallon size, so we’ll need to put a lot in the bottom.”Wait, how big is the whole bathtub?”

I looked it up online. “A standard bathtub holds about 40 gallons. Since the top of the trash can would be taller than the top of the tub, it would not take up the whole 23 gallons of tub space, so it should work.”

“I think it would be a good idea to do at some point.”

“Yeah. I think down the road, it will keep us from building up enmity. You can’t be mad at something I did long ago when you did the thing too. You might feel like doing all the housework is the short end of the stick, or I might feel like making the money for us is the short end. But we’ll come together at these times and have both sets of memories.”

Stacy added, “Not to mention that should one of us die somehow, the other will be able to go on and make both of us again. If we don’t do this, we’ll lose one of our entire memories.”

“So maybe once a month or so we could do this, you think?”

“Yeah. The reason I brought that up is there’s another story that got some media attention with the headline, ‘Are Pee Body Switchers Immortal?’”

“I know Betteridge’s law of headlines says no, but tell me about it.”

“We can die if our stem cells get stuck somewhere where they can’t reach the open air enough to form a head. It can happen in as little as 18 inches of water, or if we fall into a tight space. Also, if we get split into pieces all too small to form a body. This happened to about 40 of us the first day, mostly by getting flushed by automatic-flush systems.”

“Good thing we stopped using the toilet after the first day.”

“I think almost everybody did as soon as it was clear that wasn’t really pee. There was a side-story about toilets, but I’ll get to it later. Another 2 died this way later, and 10 others have died in various kinds of accidents or been murdered. Several others have survived potentially fatal accidents by starting a change on the spot. It heals all wounds. But the big thing is, none of us have died of other causes. There are about 1800 of us spread over all ages, and you would expect in 3 years for 3-4% of them to die of the diseases associated with old age. They think our stem cells prevent aging, and in older people reverse it a bit.”

“I think I remember hearing something about stem cells reversing aging even before we started changing, but tell me the news.”

“Scientists think the telomeres of our chromosomes - portions at the end that don’t code any active genes - are buffers for aging. When our cells reproduce, they sometimes don’t quite copy the DNA strands all the way to the end, and as a result the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres are completely gone, we start losing active genes. This doesn’t happen to all the cells at the same time, but errors accumulate. When we are in our stem cell mass, before we form new bodies, the stem cells repair the telomeres. Now that we are almost 3 years in, 80-year-olds who started changing when we did have the telomeres of a 50-year-old and 50-year-olds have the telomeres of a 25-year-old due to the cells with shortened telomeres being fixed.”

“So if we repair our telomeres every day, we won’t age.”

“Or we will age very slowly. And they think it’s possible that the stem cell mass repairs even lost real genes, as long as some of the cells still have them to copy from, but that one’s going to take a lot more effort to confirm. Some people reacted to that with sensationalist responses. ‘if we keep producing new switchers, are we going to take over the world eventually due to never dying?’ There was also worry about splitters, who could potentially double their numbers every two weeks, quickly overtaking the world.”

“If they could find enough food,” I laughed!

“Yeah, most people dismissed it as unwarranted hysteria. We still get a new switcher appear at puberty about once every two weeks as well, but 26 more a year is going not going to take over the world in thousands of years. And apart from a few scientific experiments, the most bodies one splitter has made at one time is three. We could, given sufficient food, make a million of ourselves in a year, and overwhelm the human race in two years, but the sufficient food thing is an insurmountable obstacle. If all the children of switchers are also switchers, it could happen faster, but we’re still talking centuries. It won’t happen within the lifetimes of anybody alive today, except the eternal switchers.”

“That seems like a good summary and rebuttal to those people. So tell me the toilet story.”

“You know how flushing toilets work, right?”

“The drain goes up again beyond the bowl before it goes down, and pressure maintains equal height in the bowl and on the other side. When you put a bunch of water in at once, that pressure has to equalize. The water rises past the peak of the drain, and then falls with gravity, but the pipe is full and there’s no air between this falling water and what’s in the tank, so it pulls the rest of the water with it. That’s why it makes that sucking sound. I think.”

“That’s pretty much right. It’s called the siphon effect. The essence of the story is that our stem cell mass is heavier than water and goes to the bottom. This means that when we start peeing ourselves into a toilet, our cells fill the U-bend before there is enough added to make the toilet flush by pressure alone. And our stem cell mass likes to stick together, though within the mass those cells flow around. What happens, then, is that part of us oozes slowly down the drain, sticking together even against the effect of gravity. Effectively, we clog the toilet. Some toilets have an automatic flush on a sensor. If this activates before we have clogged the toilet, the water flow overwhelms our cells’ ability to stick together and we get flushed away and broken into little bits by the flush action. Even if enough of us is in one place down in the sewer, we won’t have air and we die.”

“A little gory, but worth knowing how it works.”

“It gets gorier. They studied what happens to trapped stem cell masses. If there is room to make a head and lungs with access to air, they can survive most of a day without fully forming. But if not, they have enough energy to survive a couple hours. After that, they continue to survive by cannibalizing other cells. The smaller mass survives, gradually dwindling. After about 8 hours, there isn’t enough of the cell mass left to form a body even if it gets free, and after about 11 hours it dwindles away to nothing. This was all done with split bodies donated to science, and not counted in any of those statistics - these people lived on through other bodies.”

“OK, that’s enough. I agree, we should look into doing this mix-and-split once a month or so. Does it guarantee we keep our genders?”

“Nope. You remember that when they experimented with mixing opposite sex copies together the results were random. In the mix-and-split case starting with opposite genders, about 80% of the time opposite genders came out, but sometimes they came out the same.”

“So sometimes, one of us will have to do a couple quick changes to get back to opposite genders.”

Stacy responded, “Oh, yeah, we should definitely do that.”

“Is that going to mess with our sex schedule?”

Yeah, it had already become a schedule. We’d had sex every day since the first split.

“I don’t think so. Remember how we had sex our first weekend? We came out the same Saturday morning, but I changed before bed and we were different genders then. You changed in the morning and I changed after lunch and we were different genders all evening. And then we both changed in the morning together.”

“Right. When you feel like you want to mix and split with me, just tell me, or if I feel like it’s time, I’ll say so, and we can get the stuff before that and be ready for some Saturday morning.”

Saturday, June 13, 2009

The second week of regrowth was uneventful. We were almost back to full size and wearing all normal clothes now. In fact, we were closer than expected. The scales this morning showed 157 for me and 156 for Stacy, so I only ate double breakfast and Stacy only double breakfast and lunch today. In the afternoon, Stacy and I went out shopping, buying food more like we normally ate, and in double the usual quantity instead of four times. We also managed to pick up the tall, square trash can which was one of several 23-gallon styles available at Home Depot. (The next smaller size was 18 gallons. That might have worked, but it also might have ended up making us several pounds lopsided, and with no easy way of checking whether it was really 18 gallons or 18.8 or 19+ when filled to the brim without buying it, we opted for the larger one.)

We put the stones in the trash can (remembering we will need to add more later) and put our small sized underwear in the 10-gallon bucket and stored it away in the attic.

Monday, June 15, 2009

It was back to the office for female me, full sized and looking no different to my co-workers. Only a couple of them knew male me was staying at home. Nobody needed to know I was fucking my other self and only my boss and those I worked most closely with needed to know I had a second self at all, in order to justify the time working from home. A couple people today asked me about my absence and I just told them I had some issues related to the syndrome.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

We agreed this week it was time to try a mix-and-split, so last night we weighed ourselves - matching weights of 158 for both - and we set up the trash can with a few bricks and other stones. So this morning, 5 weeks from when we first split, we climbed atop the trash can at the high end of the bathtub, sitting on opposite corners, me peeing from my girl parts and Stacy from his penis, both of us mixing our stem cells in the large can.

The idea of sitting there, two people peeing into the same bucket, was pretty weird. It wasn’t a thing I would have expected to do even with my girlfriend. Even the people into watersports were more for peeing on each other rather than in a bucket together. It only made sense for the thing we were doing today, along with the fact it wasn’t really pee, even though it looked like it, until the flow got absurdly strong.

Once we had shrunk down a bit, we changed our positions to dangle our shrunken legs inside the bucket, holding ourselves up with our arms until they got too small and weak to do that, and we both plunged in just as we lost consciousness.

The next I knew, I awoke in an uncomfortable position with my legs tucked up tight beside me inside the can. Other me was waking up outside the can. I was female, and the me in the tub was male.

“I’m female, so that makes me Stacy, and you’re Kelly,” I told my other self.

“Right, we agreed that if we came out different sexes, we’d stick with it and whoever came out male today would be Kelly and go to the office. I actually feel more like Stacy, for some reason. Those memories are stronger in my mind, but I can also remember your work in the office and what you have been working on recently. Also the new password you had to pick last week.”

“Yeah, the office memories are stronger in my mind, but I don’t think we should change our plan because of it. I can do the housework the next month.”

After we got showered and the residue washed off the bucket and stones, we dressed, and I, as Stacy, immediately assumed the meal prep duties. Which, it being breakfast, just meant pouring milk and cereal for each of us, providing spoons, and bringing them to the table.

We spent a while discussing things that were easier now that we both had the memories of them. Also once in a while we confirmed things the other was expected to do. Not once was there any actual confusion, though,

In the evening, Kelly fucked me with his penis. I remembered our sex the previous night, during which, as I remembered it most strongly, Stacy fucked me with his penis. But I could also remember that sex from the male side. Thinking about those memories together, being able to remember both sides of the same experience, was pretty damned hot!

Kelly might have thought he got the short end of this deal, missing a turn to have sex as female, because we both experienced better sex from the female side. As far as working my job instead of doing housework, I am not sure how Kelly would think of it, but this worked well. The point of this experiment was to make sure we both experience both roles, and if the person who remembered it less was doing each role now, that was a positive thing for both of us in this experiment.

Being Stacy meant I got to go do shopping. While some stores were closed for Independence Day, most were open, and it didn’t interfere with my shopping. While I remembered Stacy’s shopping trips, it felt like it wasn’t me. So it felt like the first time I had gone shopping in a few weeks. But I had no problem putting together a shopping list and then going to fill it.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

I was male Stacy today, and since it was Sunday, that meant laundry. Of course I knew how to do that. I did it for many years before I started changing, and then almost three years as a single-bodied changer who had to do everything around the house. It was only a month that the other me did it exclusively. The only difference was there was twice as much to wash now.

At least, with me and Kelly sharing clothes, I didn’t have to worry about getting stuff mixed up the way, for instance, two sisters might. I wasn’t too likely to mix up the male and female clothes, and even if I did, they were all “mine” anyway. If either of us found something in the wrong dresser or closet, we were both familiar with where all the clothes belonged and could move it.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

We planned our next mix-and-split today. I was starting as male Stacy. It was still just as weird being face to face with my other self, just peeing ourselves away into that trash can. It was even weirder when Kelly started kissing me.

This time we came out both male, so we flipped for it, and I (at least, the one of me who more identified with the memories the most recent Stacy had had) stayed Stacy per the flip. That meant I was supposed to be female, and had to do the two quick swaps tonight and tomorrow afternoon to restore our gender situation.

Interestingly, though the most recent memories, those of being Stacy since the first mix-and-split, were stronger in my head than Kelly’s memories from this time, the memories from the earliest split time now seemed of equal strength. I could no longer say I was definitively the first Kelly as opposed to the first Stacy, except that second Stacy had felt like first Kelly in that earlier period.

Today, just three days short of the third anniversary of change day, we heard a report on another scientific breakthrough related to changers. They found a method of preventing the forced change long enough to allow pregnancy to occur. It’s not pleasant - they basically put the patient into a drug-induced coma. Selective application of the drugs let them disable the change but keep the reproductive system running, and they brought them out of it when ovulation was detected. Two volunteers provided female selves to be treated this way. These female selves then had sex with their chosen males (not their other selves) frequently during the following 24 hours, and one managed to get pregnant, halting the change further, as expected. Pregnancy also opened up the anus and allowed the patient to urinate and defecate normally. The pregnancy has been going for two months now, and appears to be proceeding normally. The second patient repeated the procedure and recently succeeded in becoming pregnant during the third iteration of the procedure.

They commented in this article that they strongly recommend switchers do not have children with themselves using such a procedure. It would be the worst form of inbreeding. The problem with inbreeding is that it makes it far more likely to have two copies of the same gene, which is harmless for most genes, but there are a large number of genetic diseases caused by two copies of certain genes. For each such gene that you are a carrier of, meaning you have one copy, your child would have a 1/4 chance of having two copies and thus getting the disease.

I wasn’t really thinking about this when I set myself up as a splitter. The idea was more to have a body around that could please my partner, of whatever preference, all the time, and for me to get used to the idea of living that way. The only part this discovery changes is that if I end up with a male partner and I have to be the one to have kids, one of me can use this method to do so.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

My recent thoughts got me to get back onto the dating site again. I updated my profile to explain I was now a splitter who kept male and female bodies around all the time, and I was looking for a woman who could love both of me and would bear my children. That was the original intent of my splitting and staying in opposite sexes, and I felt it was important to find somebody quickly so I didn’t get addicted to sex with my other self.

I was still going to the counseling, though only the one of me who was Stacy at the time went, which has been me for the last month. I wasn’t going to stop that until I had established a relationship with another woman and felt confident I could continue going through dates with her. Today, together with Kelly I looked at a few matches it suggested, but didn’t feel they were great matches. The fourth one that came up was named Brenda, and it wasn’t the same woman but the name gave us both a panic attack.

This confirmed I still needed the counseling. I need to be able to ignore what happened to me, make it history. That Brenda was dead due to her own stupidity, and I had to keep telling myself there was no reason to believe any other woman, just because she resembled Brenda or had the same first name, would act that way. There was even less reason to expect it than before, since the story was publicized. People knew now, much more than they did before, that in order for stem cells to help you at all, they needed to be your own or those of a full sibling, parent, or child. And people should already have known, but had another opportunity to learn, that all the stem cells from one switcher were too many for one person to take inside them by any means. If somebody stole from me, while I was switching, an amount of cells someone might actually use for something, assuming they even could, it would just make me come out a little smaller.

I spent some time watching the news stories that had been presented about the incident. One show even shared the grim result that would have occurred if she had tried to take my cells via her vagina. This was pretty gross and preceded by a content warning. [The content in this story runs to the next date header.] Her uterus would have swelled up like she was pregnant, but the uterus and skin cannot grow fast enough, so when she was stretched tight, the stem cells would have forced their way through her fallopian tubes, widening them into twin hoses, letting the stem cells run free in the internal spaces between the organs. She would have suffocated a few minutes after this, once the stem cells inside her didn’t leave enough room for her to take breaths.

But that was not the end of it. There were still stem cells flooding in, and they would have collapsed the lungs, ultimately inverting them and pushing them out of her body through the mouth, inflating them like balloons, and ultimately bursting them. There would have been stem cells flowing out through her mouth and the busted lungs, and other stem cells leaking from her vagina. Realistically, the result would probably have been very much the same as what actually happened to her, but the inversion of the lungs - a step that only happened after she was dead - made it seem more gruesome. And they said a woman had once committed suicide by sticking a garden hose up her vagina and turning it on full force, and much the same thing happened including the inversion and ultimate bursting of the lungs.

I had to stop at that point and the two of us played some games to take our mind off that.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

It was mix-and-split day again. I started as female Stacy, and Kelly and I perched ourselves on opposite corners of our big bucket again. I had a funny thought I shared with Kelly: In old men’s rooms from the 1950s or earlier, they sometimes had a long trough that men peed into instead of the now-customary single urinals. No privacy shields; three or four men would stand in the space of two urinals and all pee into the same fixture. And there was constant a slow drip of water to clean it out. When I was a boy, I saw a couple of these before they all got modernized. Of course, Kelly had the same memory, but I brought it up because this process reminded me of it.

Actually, if we could have gotten one of those, it might have worked for us. It might be about the right size. We could straddle it at opposite ends, maybe even mount two toilet seats on it, which the person who formed inside could lift up to get out. But I’d have to find another place to put it; it’d be too much to lift that in and out of the tub. I’d have to make a permanent space just for our mix-and-splits. One of those large spa-like tubs might provide enough space. And I’d seal the drain permanently, or at least install one of those plugs in the drain where you flip the lever to close it.

As we were peeing ourselves out into this plastic trash can, we realized the idea had problems. We’d had to clean it out, because dust accumulated everywhere, in addition to the grime from our own bodies and the rejected crystalline junk. If the inner tub was permanently mounted into the outer one, it’d be hard to clean the outer one. Maybe if the toilet seats were mounted on the outside tub, but we put a long plastic one inside it we could remove for cleaning? Did they make a suitable tub? I thought about baby tubs, but I thought they’d be too small. Something to look up after the change was completed.

I came out female this time, and my other half came out male, so I was now Kelly again. My strongest memories were of being Stacy the last 5 weeks, and the ones before that were all mixed together. I’d been in counseling for two months straight, so it was good my other half was going to get the chance.

That night we started looking at matches again, but it was only a short while before Stacy begged me to stop, so I decided to wait until she had some counseling sessions.

Friday, December 11, 2009

I was Kelly two splits in a row (9 weeks), and then became Stacy the last five weeks, and during this session Kelly and I were both able to look at potential dates together. After looking through them for a week without officially turning our status to available, we did that, and after looking through them for another week, we decided on two to contact, and one of them wrote us back and we had our first date tonight.

Kira was enthused by our double nature.

“I love being double-penetrated, but it’s hard finding partners who are willing to share me.”

“We always keep one body male and one female.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. When I do find willing partners, it’s often straight couples looking for something different, and I provide a strap-on.”

This first date didn’t have sex; we agreed to a getting-to-know-each-other first date, and the one with sex would happen in two weeks. There was plenty of sexy talk, though. I was glad she had a house and not an apartment, because it meant it was a lot less likely someone would hear our very frank sexual discussion through the walls. We had non-sexy talk, though, too.

“Before all this happened a few years ago, I was a male programmer named Clint. I actually am still known as Clint to most of the world, regardless of whether they are seeing the male or female me, and at work I’m always Clint. Only the people there who needed to know it know that I’ve split. We use the Kelly and Stacy identities privately to sort out our two selves. Kelly is always the one taking the work role, and Stacy is the homemaker. We mix-and-split on a weekend once a month or so, so we aren’t stuck in those roles and eventually we’ll both remember everything that happens to either of us.”

I knew from her profile that Kira was a lawyer, and my one fear was that she was going to be too much of a domineering type, but then she described herself to me in a way that removed that fear entirely.

“I know what I want, but I do my dominating in the courtroom. Especially after a day in court, I want nothing more than a strong partner to take control. Preferably two partners, as I mentioned.”

We had this date at her place because she knew she had an office day today when we planned it and she could get out at a known time. Court days were different; she never knew if a court session was going to run until 2 or 7. As a result, we planned the date two weeks from now at my house, and if she had to she would drive there straight from the court.

Friday, December 18, 2009

I became Kelly again the day after our first date, so I was female today. I would be the first one of us to wear the strap-on.

Kira had called on her way out of the courthouse, telling us she would be here in 20 minutes, and it was almost exactly that when she arrived at 5:54. I was watching from a window while Kira took a small bag from the trunk and then came to the door.

We had agreed to keep it simple, and just order pizza since we would only know when she was going to be available 20 minutes before she could get here, and so no sooner had she gotten inside and kicked off her high heels than the doorbell rang again and it was the pizza. A single large pizza with breadsticks, Kira said any toppings but anchovies and so Stacy had ordered sausage and black olives.

So we sat down for a pizza and Coke dinner first, and when the last slice was eaten we started the sexy talk. I had to try some things out to see just how she actually wanted it, but it sounded like she wanted to be dominated, at least a little. So I started us off by asking, “Kira, are you ready to get fucked?”

“Am I ever!” Kira responded.

“No, you’re not! You need to get out of that fancy suit first!”

Kira didn’t argue, and immediately started stripping. I showed her where she could hang up the suit in the hall closet, while Stacy cleared off the dinner table. In a couple minutes, she was wearing nothing over her body briefer, one of the kinds of garments I’d had to learn about later in life when I first turned female. This was a one-piece women’s undergarment that combined a bra with a tight-fitting section around the waist and hips, meant to make the body look slimmer and to present a certain type of figure. In this case, I’m sure it was meant to give her the type of figure her suit was designed for. There were variations that went down over the thighs as well, but Kira was wearing one that looked more like panties at the bottom, just reaching the widest part of the hips at the sides, and with a lot of lace all over.

“Do you always wear such sexy lingerie under your business suit?” I asked her while Stacy and I stripped.

“Usually I wear a more conservative garment of this sort, but I knew I was coming here for sex afterward, so I wore this one today.”

I had never needed such a thing; the change always gave me a body I was comfortable with. But I had taken the time to learn about every kind of women’s garment just to make sure I didn’t ever end up looking stupid by not knowing something I should. So I wasn’t surprised at all when Kira unhooked her garment at the bottom and pulled down the panties she had under it.

We engaged in a bit of foreplay, and ultimately Kira’s body briefer came all the way off, leaving her completely nude. Kira called for a brief stop. She opened the Ziploc bag she brought in, which contained the strap-on, a small bottle of lube, and some condoms, and helped me put on the mock penis. After this, Stacy and I took control.

“Come on, Stacy, let’s get her up on the bed.”

I bent down and grabbed Kira’s legs, and Stacy understood and held Kira by her armpits so we could pick her up off the ground and carry her to our bed. And yes, the full size bed was a bit small for the three of us, but it worked. Stacy put on a condom and the provided lube and carefully worked his dick into Kira’s ass, while I didn’t need any lube on the dildo to get it into Kira’s now dripping-wet pussy. Once we established a rhythm, we really pounded Kira, but it seemed she loved it.

After about 15 minutes, Stacy came, and we took a break. I switched around and started fucking Kira’s ass. After he cleaned up, Stacy had Kira blow him to get him set up for her pussy, and then he put on a new condom and we were both in her again. Stacy held off a bit longer before coming this time, but when he finally did, we ended the session.

“Thanks, you two. That was really, really good,” Kira said.

“This was not the way I am used to treating a woman, but I found I was able to do it and enjoy it,” Stacy commented.

“The vibrator in that strap-on is pretty awesome, too,” I added.

“Ha ha! How many orgasms did you have?” Stacy asked me.

“Oh, I lost count even before I switched to Kira’s ass.”

“I think we have a winning team here,” Kira commented.

“Just one thing,” I interjected. “The sex is great, but you should know from our profile we are looking for someone to bear our children. At least one child. The switching every day keeps us from doing it. And I’m worried it would interfere with your career.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Being a lawyer is intense, but we have built-in breaks. After every 3 years of the kind of duty I am doing, we require all of our lawyers to take a year of light duty. Office work only, research for cases but not dealing with clients directly and no court time. Possibly mentoring new hires. Three other female lawyers at my firm have used these years to have kids. And while bearing a child comes with its own intensities, it worked for them to provide a break from the court duty.”

“Then I guess we keep doing this!” Stacy cheered.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Holiday events and work issues kept Kira from having another date with us for a month, and today was the first time she could do it. We’d asked about weekend dates, but Kira told us, “Bridge.”

At the start of this date, I asked for an explanation of the bridge.

“I’m a competitive bridge player. Been playing since college.”

“And you keep that up, with lawyering and all?”

“I have had to cancel tournament attendances more than once for a case, but usually I manage to be there for Steph.”

“Steph?”

“College roommate, she taught me bridge, and out of all the other players we played with there, when she started trying tournaments senior year, I was the one she wanted for a partner. She’s an accountant down in The City, and there are so many bridge clubs there, there’s usually a tournament every weekend. Sometimes we go to Philly, Boston, or somewhere else. There’s one in New Haven every year. It usually takes up my whole Saturday and then Sunday I have to get other stuff done.”

“So how long have you been playing bridge with her?”

“Counting the years we played in college, 11 years. She got her CPA while I was in law school, and there was a short time we weren’t playing, but we kept in touch, and when she got a job in The City, she asked if I was available to partner with her at a tournament her first Saturday there, and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

“Did you ever try her as a sex partner?”

“We did once in a while, like most of the girls did, but she wasn’t actually all that much into girls and she couldn’t really satisfy me.”

“Like most of the girls?”

“Oh, you were a guy in college. You didn’t know because of the gay taboo. But almost all the girls in college try some kind of sex with their roommates at least once, and half of them do it any weekend neither roommate has a date. At least at our college it was like that; I can’t guarantee it happens at every college, but I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. It was less than that for us, and never since we graduated. She married a veterinarian. He doesn’t play bridge, but satisfies her sexually.”

“All right, dinner’s here. You tell me more about how all the girls in college are closet Lesbians while we eat.”

And she did... including the other 10 girls she had sex with while she was in college, sometimes two at once.

“You know,” Stacy commented, “You had sex with more girls in college than I did.”

Kira and I both laughed.

But pretty soon, we were done, Stacy cleaned off the table, Kira set me up with that awesome strap-on with a vibrator for me, and we were in bed in various positions for the greater part of an hour.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The day after our last date with Kira had been a mix-and-split day, but I stayed Kelly this time. Stacy went to counseling today, and explained how we are starting what seems like a successful relationship with Kira. They encouraged us to keep coming for a little while longer until we are sure of it, but I don’t imagine it will be much longer.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

At my next mix-and-split I became Stacy, though it didn’t affect the dating at all. I’ve had a few more dates with Kira since that last one. This time, since she didn’t have bridge today to mess her up, I invited her to stay overnight.

She was curious, so we let her see us both change this morning, each time with the other of us standing beside Kira watching. After that, Kira started teaching us bridge, and called Steph that morning and invited her up to join us. After a couple hours of instruction and with Kelly and I having bidding cheat sheets to work from, we played a bit. We didn’t do well, but Kira told us we did OK for our first time, which probably just means we didn’t totally screw up.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

I stayed Stacy after another split, and today at counseling, I told them I was ready to stop. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the day Brenda tried to steal me, kill me, or whatever she really thought she was doing, and that I could actually say that and not freak out about it was more evidence I didn’t need the counseling anymore. The fact that the time the service was covered by the state program was almost over was inconsequential. If I still needed it, I would pay for it.

In fact, Kelly and I have been talking about it, and we decided that on our next date with Kira, we’re going to propose to her. That date’s scheduled a week from Friday, ten days from now, and I’ll be female Stacy then, but to make it a little traditional (not that much about our relationship is traditional), male Kelly is going to propose to her. We’re going to get the ring this weekend.

Friday, April 2, 2010

This was the night of the next date. We did everything including sex first, and only then did Kelly pull out the ring. She pulled me alongside her, and asked Kira, “Will you marry us?”

“Oh, will I ever!” Kira exclaimed. “If you didn’t do this soon I was going to work on something myself!”

She hugged both of us, and we had a messy three-way kiss.

The rest of the evening we talked about all kinds of things, including where we were going to live and what our wedding would look like. My house and Kira’s were both a bit small for the three of us plus kids. But Kira’s had a big yard. Many of the houses in her neighborhood had been added on to over the years, as there was plenty of room, and she knew when she bought it that rather than consider it a “starter home” to move out of and into something bigger later, it was instead possible that she’d expand it into the house she wanted. We didn’t even need to go up to a second story. We could just build another row of rooms behind the existing house and expand the roof to cover it all.

As far as the wedding, we all agreed that both of me should be there. We were legally one person, and Kira was going to be having both of us, so it made sense for us to marry her together. Marriage for switchers and splitters had been among the weird legal issues that had gotten settled in the last year. Switchers could legally marry anyone of any gender, even where same-sex marriage hadn’t yet been made legal. Splitters were legally one person, no matter how many bodies they had, and they could marry one other person, and all the bodies were considered married to that person, even if the spouse only treated one body or the bodies of one gender as a husband or wife.

We sent Kira home before it got too late so we wouldn’t mess up her bridge game.

Friday, June 4, 2010

We didn’t waste time. We set our date and began making plans for our wedding. Each of our dates, in addition to dinner and sex, now involved figuring out a little of the plans. Today was the day we’d finally finished figuring it all out.

Some splitters had married by just having the opposite-sex member of the splitter pair participate in the ceremony, or in the case of two splitters marrying, one member from each pair, of opposite sexes. But other splitter weddings worked like we planned ours, where both members of the splitter pair participated, and you’d have two brides wearing bridal gowns, or two grooms in tuxes. The same thing happened at same-sex weddings, which had been a thing in some places since slightly before Pee Body Syndrome appeared, so it wasn’t unprecedented, except there wasn’t also usually one spouse of the other gender at those weddings.

We were trying to figure where in the sequence my female half would walk down the aisle. What we decided on, since I was going to have both a man and a woman on the right side which traditionally belonged to the groom, was that I would have both maids and groomsmen in my party. The sequence was flower girls, bridesmaids and groomsmen in pairs, groom and best man, and last the bride and her father. While we’d still do that, I’d have maids alternate with the groomsmen - so some bridesmaids would walk down the aisle with another woman. And my best man would walk at the end of that group, with the maid of honor; I would then follow with both of my bodies as a pair.

With that established, we needed to set the location. Neither of us were churchgoers, so we’d rent a wedding hall that wasn’t attached to a church. Neither of us had huge families, so it did not have to be big, but we’d invite many of our friends. We decided about 20 guests on each side was about right, so we rented a hall that could hold 50 and was available on our preferred date.

When we actually started figuring out members of the wedding party, we realized that both of us had small groups of close friends and family members who would be appropriate. Kira had already chosen Steph to be her maid of honor, or more properly matron of honor, as Steph was already married. Kira didn’t have any sisters - one brother - but she’d ask her unmarried female cousin to be a bridesmaid, and one of the other lawyers at her firm that she was close friends with. She was pretty sure she could also get one of the judges she had seen in court to marry us. She’d been in his chambers and seen his license as a marriage officiant and even photos of wedding ceremonies he’d performed, with him standing between the bride and groom as he was reading out the rites, not in his courtroom but in a wedding hall somewhere.

As for me, I had no siblings or cousins. So who? Maybe my boss could be my best man. Terry, the woman from my HR who helped me get my first set of female clothes, could be a bridesmaid. She would, probably more than anybody else at my company, appreciate the uniqueness of the ceremony. And my counselor. That did not work all that well - a best man and two maids! But I asked them, and my boss and Terry accepted, but the counselor could not make the date we had set. So I asked my father to stand in to balance out the party, and he agreed.

We’d also started plans on remodeling Kira’s house. I found it hard to believe a lawyer lived in such a tiny house, but she explained it this way:

“Several other lawyers in my office also bought houses here. They saw it as an opportunity. It’s close to the office and not a long drive to the local courts. The houses have big lots and zoning that permits expansion, and pretty much everybody buying here these days sees them as opportunities to build the house they want. And that was my idea, too. I just hadn’t made up my mind yet what I wanted to do!”

The small house had a living room at the front left, bathroom beside it and a bedroom at front right, a kitchen rear left with a dining room beside it and a second bedroom rear right. What we would do was add on a third row of rooms. Accessed through the dining room but running behind it and the bedrooms would be a master bedroom. The far right wall would have three walk-in closets with drawers at the back and rods to hang clothes on both sides. Left of the bedroom would be a bathroom for Kira and a “changing room” for me that had a large tub. I remembered the idea where my two selves could sit on toilet seats, peeing ourselves into the same mini-tub. We were really going to build that, but it was a custom thing we’d do later; we had found a suitable main tub. It would also act as a regular tub/shower. There would be a sink in there, but no toilet, as I didn’t need it. Finally, behind the kitchen there would be a passage about 6 feet wide to the back; this would lead to a new back door and the space along the wall would allow the washer and dryer, now located in the garage, to be brought into the main house, along with a couple closets for laundry stuff and random junk.

We figured the smallest size that would work for my changing room was 5 x 8 feet, so we made Kira’s bathroom the same size, but using a normal tub made enough room for a toilet to fit. That meant the bedroom was 16 feet deep, which was huge (but putting the bathrooms the other way, and making it only 10 feet deep, would not have left enough room). The three closets were each a bit over 5 feet wide, allowing 18 inches for hanging clothes on each side and over two feet of walking space, and we made them 6 feet deep, with the last 18 inches not having any hanging space so we had room to put drawers all the way across (and have room to open them). This left over 14 feet of width for the bedroom itself, which was plenty of space for a king-size bed, and bookcases, desks, and whatnot along the opposite wall. There was also a basement, but we weren’t going to extend it. The originally 24 by 32 foot house would be expanded to 40 by 32 feet. Still a modest house by lawyer standards! But limiting the changes this way also meant getting them done in a reasonable length of time.

Kira could continue to live in the front part of the house most of the time the construction crew was there, but for short periods during some of the messiest bits she’d stay with me. It was supposed to be finished a month before the wedding, but all kinds of things could delay it. I hoped that was enough time so it didn’t get delayed beyond the wedding date, but if it did, we’d deal with it.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Monday morning, and only notable because Kira’s construction crew was starting today. Phase 1 of our relationship was dating, phase 2 was the engagement and planning for the wedding, and today started phase 3, the construction of our future home. Phase 4 would of course be actually getting married and moving in together.

The house construction would also have phases: The first phase involved digging out the space for the foundation, ensuring there was space for plumbing, and by the end of the week pouring the foundation. It would set over the weekend, and in phase 2 next week they would start putting up the frame for the new outside of the house. By the end of that week they would have studs and plywood for the exterior in place. The next week the ceiling beams and the interior wall studs would go in. Phase 3, in the fourth week, was going to be the tricky part. That week, they had to tear off half the old roof and rebuild it. The house would not be insulated properly at that time, but it was in the summer, so it hopefully wouldn’t be bad. The plan was to have the new roof on by the end of the fifth week.

Phase 4 would work on the rest of the exterior, getting the entire exterior of the house done by the end of week 6. At some point during this, an electrician would install a new electrical box to replace the one which was on part of the exterior of the house that was being removed. The new one would have higher capacity to support the outlets for the new rooms and possible future expansion. The electricity would be off for a day during the switchover.

Phase 5 started the interior work. The old exterior wall where the new house joined the old needed to be ripped out. The interior side of that wall would mostly stay, but with the exterior part replaced with sheetrock like a normal interior wall. Wiring and plumbing had to be put in through these new walls, and sheetrock for the interior walls and ceiling. That should be done by the end of the 9th week.

Phase 6 was the more detailed interior work, constructing the closets and installing the bathroom fixtures, and finishing work on the connection to the rest of the house. They had to paint after that, and put in carpets, lighting and electrical outlets, and the like. If there weren’t any delays, it would be ready for us to start moving furniture into - the major pieces being the existing washer and dryer and a new king-sized bed - in week 16. That gave us five weeks before the wedding to get everything set up and potentially for me to move over there. Of course, there were lots of things that could cause delays.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

With a storm coming tonight, and a tarp fastened down over where Kira’s roof was supposed to be, she chose not to stay there, and came to join me. She packed 2 days’ outfits in her car so she could sleep here tonight and tomorrow night if needed and go to work directly from here. No sex, though. She promised me good sex Friday night, but these first two nights she really just needed a place to sleep. And she bought dinner.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Kira stopped at her house after work and confirmed there was no storm damage, but then came here for a date. As far as the good sex she promised, she told us to try something new, but anything we wanted. I didn’t think there was anything that was going to help me enjoy sex more, and I couldn’t take anal like Kira did since I didn’t have an anus, so we fisted Kira. First in the pussy and then in the ass. She cursed a lot but thanked us for it in the end.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Of course it took longer than planned. It was now Friday of the 19th week, and the work was nearly finished. They were coming back Monday to deal with a few minor issues - there was a spot that didn’t get painted, and one outlet did not work. Kira took the weekend off from bridge to order furniture with me, and help me start packing (though the fact that I had two of me was nice - I’d make a third, but she wouldn’t be grown up in time to do any good). Kira had a guy coming over to move the washer and dryer inside this weekend as well. But tonight was just date night.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Last night, I went to Kira’s house for a combination date night and hardware installation party, and I stayed here this morning for a mix-and-split in the new place.

We obtained some brackets meant to allow a certain kind of toilet used in public restrooms to be mounted to the wall, rather than the floor. The way these were meant to be used, the plumbing for the toilet ran through the wall and this heavy-duty bracket provided the support to hold the toilet up and for the weight of the seat and the person sitting on it. The floor would be clear to allow mopping completely under the toilet in case people are messy, because ugh, public restrooms. It mounts across two studs in the wall.

Our changing tub was a 5-foot octagonal tub, 63 inches to the outer edge, and the bathroom was, in inside dimensions, 63 inches wide and 92 inches long, allowing for the space of the door. Studs were placed every 24 inches from the corner, which was an inch past the inside wall corner, so the first stud was centered 22 inches into the room, the second 46 inches, and the third 70 inches, so we used the second and third, meaning the center of the seats was at 58 inches. Since the inside of the tub extended from 30.5 to 90.5 inches from that wall, centered at 60.5, this made the seats be about 2.5 inches off from being centered within the tub, which was fine. It meant that during mix-and-splits, outside-the-small-tub-me would form on the wider side of the small tub.

The actual installation wasn’t too hard. We had to pre-drill the holes for the bracket, since we were installing screws 1/4 inch in diameter into the studs. These screws were beyond the projecting part of the bracket where the seat mounted, so there was enough room to use a ratchet to tighten the large hex heads. The installation of the toilet seats again used the ratchet on these bolts, which screwed into the toilet seats themselves. There was barely enough room between the bracket and tub to fit the ratchet onto the bolts. If I was doing a normal change, I’d just use one seat, and the rest of the time keep both seats folded up, which allowed almost all the area of the tub to be used. The taps were on the far wall, which wasn’t the usual position but we’d requested this so we could use the sides this way. Kira’s tub, on the other side of this wall, was a conventional type running the length of the wall and had the taps at the end of the tub, on the wall toward the laundry room.

It wasn’t until four weeks ago we found the ideal inner tub, 12 inches high, 30 inches long, 16 inches wide, which would have been 25 gallons if perfectly square, but it was rounded a lot, so the inside was actually only 19.7 gallons, and we got some flat, smooth stones to put in the bottom to take up about a gallon of space for our splits. It wouldn’t actually work in a standard bathtub because it took up too much of the surface area of the tub. But it would work very well in the large tub. I had it already over at my place and had done the measuring, and brought it with me to Kira’s tonight along with the other parts.

And it did. We had the most enjoyable mix-and-split ever, the two of us sitting on seats that were meant to pee from, instead of the edge of a bin that was not even supposed to be a seat.

The three of us ate breakfast together, and then Kira went off to meet Steph for bridge while I (both of me) went home.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Today wasn’t a date night, even though it was Friday. After having Thanksgiving dinner together yesterday, we both had the day off today and I was fully moving my stuff into Kira’s house. The bed was there, the changing tub was there, the closets were there, and everything worked now.

We were making this easy on ourselves by not trying to move a lot of my furniture. We would include it with the sale of my house, which was going to more than pay for the work on Kira’s. While we did rent a U-Haul, we mostly loaded it with boxes of clothes, basically two whole wardrobes worth of clothes, and some personal items. We did load in a desk for my computer, one bookcase, and a nightstand. I’d gone through all my stuff with Kira’s help the last couple weeks and thrown out a lot of things I didn’t need anymore, including artifacts of my past life from before I started switching.

We listed the house a week and a half ago, when it was clear Kira’s house was almost ready, and so far only one person looked at it and didn’t make an offer. But we were hopeful it would sell quickly now that we could say it was ready for immediate move-in.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

By the end of today, I felt like I was good and truly moved in here. I’d used my changing tub for two normal, separate changes for my bodies. All my clothes, both male and female, were hung or stashed in drawers, and because we’d made so much space for clothes each of the three of us had some space left over. Male me had half his space unused; that was clearly going to be where we stashed things that just needed to be put out of the way.

Kira was enjoying having Stacy (who was me, currently) around all the time to clean the place and make meals and such, but agreed she would do some of that work, since moving in here had increased both of those jobs by about 50%. But all three of us chipped in today with checking on arrangements for the wedding. The flowers were ready and would be delivered early tomorrow morning. The hall was ready. The food was ready for the reception afterward. I bet a lot of our guests appreciated us getting married in one of those all-in-one wedding halls where the reception is in the next room over from the chapel. And speaking of guests, all those arriving from out of town arrived (some of them yesterday and making a weekend of it). The ones who were in town were set as well. Everybody had their clothes ready to wear for the big day.

And we had sex this evening, after being too tired to do it yesterday. Our last sex before getting married!

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Our wedding day was finally here. We had agreed to keep some of the many traditions associated with weddings and ignore others. Like the silly thing about the groom and bride not seeing each other before the wedding on wedding day. It was pretty much impossible anyway when she was sleeping between the two of me. We did, however, arrive separately at the wedding hall and did our preparations separately there.

As chance had it, I came out female at our mix-and-split the Saturday before yesterday, which meant I was female Stacy at our wedding too, the awkward third body in the marriage. But we all had our places and assigned roles.

The organist the wedding hall provided was running late, and they sent runners to both wedding parties and to the guests in the hall itself to let everybody know the ceremony was going to start about ten minutes late, and to time our entries into the chapel based on the start of the music. And once we got started it went off without a hitch.

Our officiant, one of Kira’s judges, ran the ceremony and naturally had to modify a few bits, but he did it well.

We are gathered here today to witness the marriage of these bodies, both belonging to Clint Jackson, and this woman, Kira Kellogg. ...

The ceremonial union of two people in marriage is as ancient as our very humanity, and yet every marriage is new and unique, with unique characteristics, such as one of the people having two bodies.

That got a laugh from the guests. The vows likewise needed to be modified:

We, Clint Jackson, take you, Kira Kellogg, to be our wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, ...

I, Kira Kellogg, take you, Clint Jackson, to be my spouse, ...

In same-sex marriages, they called each other both wives or both husbands, but since I was both, we’d ended up with that wording. Kelly and I spoke our vows in unison, using plural pronouns. I was legally one person, but grammatically two people.

And there were three rings. The jeweler we chose had served polygamous marriages before, as well as same-sex ones, and accepted that a wedding ring order might involve any number of men’s and women’s rings, so while we were still unusual, we weren’t unprecedented.

The pronouncement of husband and wife became simply a pronouncement that we were married, and the kiss was obvious too - each of me kissed Kira on one side.

We all marched over to the procession and had a great feast. And then we drove home, making sure we picked up all our wedding gifts, the clothes we arrived in but had switched out for our wedding clothes, and everything else we were supposed to take with us. Even a lost-and-found cell phone. It turned out to belong to one of Kira’s co-workers, whose wife called us looking for it around 8, and he came by and picked it up before we went to bed. In fact, just before we went to bed. Now properly married, we had a mad, passionate orgy starting around 9 and going until we passed out.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Kira and I weren’t much for travel - she mainly traveled to bridge tournaments, and only over 300 miles a few times a year, a distance which allowed her to treat trips to DC, Philly, and all of New England as local - so we had opted not to have a traditional honeymoon, but instead, we were gong to take every Monday off for the next month. Kira, who skipped bridge last Saturday, would do that with Steph every Saturday, while Sunday and Monday we would do other things with each other. There was one upcoming tournament that had a suitable beginners’ division where I, entering as Kelly and Stacy Jackson, planned to join them on Saturday as well.

With the larger size and the inner tub, it was possible for both of me to change at the same time. I didn’t think I would do that normally, except for mix-and-splits, but I tried it this morning just to show I could do it. We agreed male me (Stacy, this morning), with better aim, should have the tub mostly under him and aim into it, while female me could pee into the main tub. This went off without a hitch. We agreed it was good if we were in a hurry.

Today was my day for activities, and we were not going anywhere. It was going to be a video game marathon, with a great game from my childhood, Gauntlet. This was a quarter-sucker in the arcades - it was an epic long adventure, but a quarter bought only so much health, and your characters used it slowly all the time, as well as more quickly when fighting enemies. You could also pick up potions and food to heal you within the game, but only so much of it. On a home game system you could just hit continue any time you ran out of health or start to simulate adding a quarter when you were low. To keep people from running up crazy amounts of health, the game only let you buy up to three quarters worth of health at once, so it was still a thing, even though it didn’t cost actual money. As the male today, I played the warrior, and female Kelly played the Valkyrie. Kira chose the wizard.

“Wait, why an elf? Isn’t elf a race, rather than a class?” Kira asked when I offered her the choices.

“Well, yeah. I don’t know why they did that. One of the later games has a proper archer that the elf was cast as in the first game.”

And we played and played, through all the levels of the first game, which took all morning. After lunch we played other games.

“There are several more Gauntlet games which added in lots more stuff - more enemies, character classes, objects, and far more detailed maps. But I’m not going to make you play all of those - not that we could finish them today. I’ve got other games.”

At one point, I intentionally picked a two-player-only game for Kelly and Kira to play while I went shopping for food, taking requests from Kira.

I showed Kira Leisure Suit Larry after dinner. I mostly had her play it, with Kelly coaching her through it, while as male Stacy I mostly just repeated Larry’s sleazy jokes and touched Kira in ways that were only appropriate because we were lovers (and now married). This naturally led to us having sex afterwards.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

It was back to work today, for Kelly and Kira. For me, it was my first time cleaning this new, larger house. There were still little bits of construction debris here and there, so I made vacuuming the whole house thoroughly a priority.

Kelly came home praising the new commute.

“Even though it’s more distance, there’s no traffic from here to the highway, and it isn’t bad on the highway here either, until you get over to that interchange near work. It’s just as bad going through the ramps there as trying to go straight through. Definitely going to be days I get off before the interchange and just take the surface roads the rest of the way.”

Kira said, “It’s because these small houses don’t interest the professionals who work over that way. They’re all interested in the larger, fancier houses in the West End. Your old place wasn’t part of that, but you were close enough to the West End that you got stuck in their traffic.”

“But it’s worth it, isn’t it? Buy a small house here, add on to it like we did, and you can set it up any way you want, and still cost less than one of those fancy houses.”

“The neighborhood doesn’t look as nice. But it will,” Kira prophesized. “Other people will figure it out, do what we did. We’ll lose the quick commute, but our property value will go way up. And if you look around the neighborhood, there are already a few expanded houses.”

She opened up Google Maps in satellite mode for this neighborhood. The map was only a few months old, so they had a picture of our house under construction. And while most of the houses in the neighborhood were the same small size - it looked like there were two designs alternating within this neighborhood, the other a little larger than this one, and mirrored on the other side of the street - about one in ten houses had some sort of expansion. One of them had done something crazy, expanding the house to within 5 feet of the fence on both sides and in back, and judging by the roof pattern, a partial second floor. They must have had 6000 square feet of living space in there.

“Most of these are probably people like me - young professionals who couldn’t afford one of those fancy houses on starting salary fresh out of college, who started saving up from their raises and eventually added more space. This one big one I am sure you noticed is one of the few exceptions. Like a whole clan lives there - four generations including the current kids in school, maybe 20 people in all. They’ve owned it since they first built this neighborhood and it was a normal sized house for just the original couple. The second generation bought the house next door and another one down the street, but after that, they just expanded the first house so they could keep living here with their families. They still own the house next door also, where the entire back yard is paved as a parking lot.”

“Thanks. I was wondering what was going on there.”

Friday, December 3, 2010

By my first Friday of marriage, I finally felt like I had everything clean of construction residue.

I’d also gotten the morning routine down. Kelly and I just had cereal for breakfast, and I set out the box, bowl, and milk for us and poured orange juice for Kira, started coffee, and worked on cooking her bacon and eggs while Kelly changed. When Kelly came out, I went in and changed, and Kelly started eating. I ate last.

I had also been helping to better arrange my stuff, which meant mine and Kelly’s as we shared everything. I had some ideas for furniture that would help, which I brought up with the group at dinner.

“That’s nice, hon,” Kira replied. “As long as you have measured things and know it’s going to fit where you want it, go ahead and order it. Have it delivered. But what I really want right now is some sex.”

In response, Kelly stripped right at the dining room table, striptease-style, at the last tossing her bra in Kira’s face and her panties in mine, and stood there shaking her boobs for a moment.

I grinned and said, “Well, if it’s going to be that kind of party...” I dropped my pants and stood for a moment to wave my erection at them.

When we finished our meal, I took off my shirt as well and cleaned up the dishes totally nude. When I was done with that, I gathered all the clothes from the floor and joined my wife and other self in our bedroom.

They were already in bed. And for a change, Kira had put on the strap-on, fucking Kelly with it in her pussy. So I joined in, fucking Kira in her easily accessible asshole.

But after Kelly came once, we took a break, and when we reassembled we did our usual double penetration of Kira.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Saturday Kira had been with Steph at bridge, and today Steph came here for my bridge practice. The tournament they had invited me to was coming next Saturday, and while we had covered a variety of conventions, today we were all going to be playing the same conventions that would be used in the tournament.

At a beginner tournament, many advanced conventions were outlawed. Everybody was going to be playing some variation of Standard American Yellow Card, a common set of modern conventions. There were still a good number of options available, and everybody was going to have a convention card with them, with those options they were playing marked. Kira went over them both so I would know what my opponents might be playing as well as to explain why she suggested specific options for me.

There were only a few artificial bids, which were the commonest ones: the strong 2 clubs opening and its 2 diamond waiting response, responses to a 1 no trump opening, Blackwood (which could be standard or key card; I was playing standard), doubles of below-game bids for takeout and certain bids in competition, and Michaels cue-bids and the unusual 2 no trump overcall. None of these required alerting - there would be no alerting in our game, though Kira had explained some tournaments used it.

Kira had pre-assembled 10 decks of cards with various hands that were meant to illustrate some of these conventions, a few we hadn’t covered yet and some that we had. In each case, she knew how the bidding was supposed to go, and if Kelly or I deviated from that she corrected it. We did not actually play the hands; instead, we opened them all up after the bidding and Kira explained how the hand would play for our given contract, and how it might play in other contracts that we might have arrived at under different conventions or against different opposing bidding. After that, we just shuffled and dealt hands normally, and played them.

We stopped for lunch, a lunch that included discussion of certain conventions, and played all afternoon. Dinner had more convention talk, and Steph went home afterward.

We didn’t do anything more sexual than quick kisses while Steph was here, but the evening featured more sex.

Monday, December 6, 2010

On our second Monday off after the wedding, I showed Kira some programming. Of course, she had some programming in college - it’s impossible to get a bachelor’s degree today without some exposure to it.

I showed her Python. She appreciated many of the same features I did: It used English words in ways that made programs readable. The forced indentation, which some proponents of other programming languages decried as silly, actually did make it more readable, and easier to read if you were not making loops so long you couldn’t easily get the whole thing on the screen at once, which in itself encouraged good programming practice by breaking longer tasks out as separate functions.

I gave her some practical programming tasks. One of them was the game Mastermind. I stated it as a programming problem as follows: In one file I provided was a partial Mastermind game, each line having a four-letter string with different letters representing the colors, and the result as counts of black and white pegs. Print all the color strings which could be the answer given the set of clues. This had her practice how to read a file, break it up into words, figure out how to loop through the combinations of colors, and then check each one against the clues, eliminating it if that string would not give any result indicated, and printing it if it matched all the clues. The clue matching provided good use of a function - she could write a function which took an answer string, a clue string, and a clue result and return True or False whether it matched. When she was getting lost in the program getting too long, I suggested this, and it really helped her understand why programmers use functions.

We also did some paperwork today. Kira had brought home Friday some more of the paperwork to combine accounts, making certain that my name and her name were both on various records where they should be.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Finally it was bridge tournament day. Kira and both of me loaded up in her car right after breakfast, and we drove down to Stamford for the tournament, which started at 9. We met Steph there, got registered, put on nametags, and got assigned pair numbers. Once the registration was closed, they came up with pairings, and they projected on a screen a table of pair numbers and seats for each round. So I knew, for instance, my pair would be sitting north-south at table 9 for the first round and east-west at table 6 for the second round. I quickly wrote down these numbers. Five rounds of 4 hands each before a lunch break, and 8 more rounds after lunch, each at a different table. The tables were being supplied with cards and labels which provided the table number, a big NORTH arrow and labels for each set, and a list of which pairs were supposed to be seated each way each round. They also told us there was no pair 28, and if we were matched up against that pair, it would be a bye round.

Whew! We did not get a bye, so we played 52 hands in 8 hours (plus an hour break for lunch), and we met up with Steph for dinner afterward, and discussed some of the hands. I clearly did not have the memory for this that Kira and Steph did. Apparently, they played mostly the same hands as we did, in another room, but there were about 60 tables with several copies of each hand, and they played 10 rounds of 5 hands each. Kelly and I remembered a few of them, including the one where I bid Blackwood and put us in a 6 spades contract that made exactly for a top board. More than half of the players who played that hand missed the slam and only bid game, and two of the ones that bid it went down, so we were tied with only three other pairs who bid and made the slam. But there were many where either we could not recall the hand or we played it so differently that what Kira described didn’t ring a bell. We finished above average, 7th best of the 27 pairs who entered our division. Kira and Steph got 2nd of their much larger division.

But there was a big spreadsheet they’d emailed us before we left with a row for each of the 27 pairs in our division on our sheet and one for each of the the hundred-plus in Kira’s and Steph’s, and a column for each board. In a shorthand notation the sheet crammed in when each of us played it, from what direction, against who, what contract was reached, with what result, the corresponding score, and the matchpoints that resulted from that. In the column headed Board 33, in our row was listed “1N17 S3NT+1 +630 3.2”, which says in round 1 we sat north-south against pair 17, the contract was 3 no trump declared by south, it made with one overtrick, scoring 630 points and 3.2 match points. At the top of each column was a link that let us see the full hand. Reviewing these results over dinner helped me and Kelly remember a few more of them.

But once we finished our food, we had to forgo any further analysis to get home at a reasonable hour. My head was spinning too much to understand more, anyway, and Kelly’s was too. When we did get home, we were too tired to do anything but climb into bed and sleep.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

“How do you do it?” I asked Kira the next morning, after my usual change had left me as female Stacy.

“What? Keep all the conventions straight?”

“No, play a tournament like that every weekend.”

“You get used to it, I guess. Experience playing all the conventions probably helps, too.”

“I don’t think I could do that again for a month.”

“Then I’ll wait two months before asking you to another.”

So we did make love, but kept it simple.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

While Kira was off with Steph at another bridge game, I was planning her next surprise. She loved the bondage stuff, so I wanted to set up a harness in our bedroom. My plan was to put a mirror on the ceiling over our bed, which is kinky enough on its own, but it would hide the harness.

While Kelly and Kira worked, I’d been researching it, and I’d figured out the basic plan. The mirror is installed on rails on the room side of the ceiling, secured through the ceiling to the ceiling joists, and on a set of motorized, remote-controlled sliding rails so it can slide completely away from the area of the bed. Our big bedroom supplied us with enough room.

Above the mirror would be the harness, also secured to ceiling joists, but fixed to always be above the bed, and revealed when the mirror slides aside. This needed some careful planning to ensure that it didn’t get tangled with the mirror or rails, that the straps themselves and the way they were attached would support two people’s weight (because the idea is that Kira would be held by the straps with one of us on top of her and one beneath, on the bed), that the straps were the right length to let Kira hang down within reach of the one of me on the bed, but not resting on top, and that the straps wouldn’t hurt Kira or me.

We were still trying to figure out the material for the harness, but I’d drawn up plans for where the attachment points needed to be, on the ceiling, in order to make something the right size to support Kira and one of me, and to not get in the way of the mirror or its rails. So today we got the mirror and rails and did the installation. And then we covered it up with a whole bunch of wrapping paper. So Kira knew we’d installed something there, but not what “something” was.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Because we’d taken our vacation on Mondays, we didn’t have a long period off before Christmas. Kira took off the Friday before and the Tuesday after. I had more vacation time and the both of me were home the Thursday before and the whole week after as well. So we still hadn’t managed to test a harness, though I’d managed to order some straps that were supposed to hold 500 pounds - enough for the weight of two of us and some extra pounding force. They hadn’t arrived yet, but I was hoping to test those the week after Christmas.

And there was no bridge tournament today, so we were going to enjoy Christmas Day together. Our usual mix-and-split schedule would have had me and Kelly doing one today, but we didn’t want to interrupt Christmas morning with that. But Kira insisted.

“It would be a great Christmas present to let me experience your mix-and-split close up. Like really close up.”

There was only the slightest twinge in my mind about Brenda, because I really had gotten over that. Kira wasn’t stupid like her; in fact, she was really bright. She was just kinky.

“You want me to spray myselves over you in the tub?”

“Yes, I would love that.”

“OK, but some ground rules.”

Kira assumed her submissive stance and said, “Yes, master. Explain your ground rules, please.”

“While it might seem like a golden shower to you, this is actually me, not my urine. So you can’t get any of it in your mouth. You keep your mouth closed during the process, don’t put your face near the streams, and I will avoid spraying it on your face. Second rule, you can’t get in the small tub. I need to do an equal split, so half of me has to end up in there and it’s just big enough. You can lie in the large tub, and I can spray some of me onto you, but after a while I will have to put it all into the small tub, so that it fills up and whatever excess there is overflows onto you. Third rule, when I’m done, you roll over to the edge of the big tub and stay out of the way of my body outside the tub reforming. You watch but don’t touch, except to the extent that I initiate the touch. Got it?”

“Yes, master.”

This went off without a hitch. I came out of the process as male Stacy, outside the tub.

Once I was done forming, I told Kira, “Ground rules are over now, but there’s still a price to pay.”

Female Kelly didn’t have to be told what the price was, and grabbed her strap-on. As was our norm when doing a quickie, she got the vagina and as the male I got Kira’s ass. When we were done with that, we washed out the small tub and set it outside, and then the three of us showered together in there. That was only possible because of the size of the tub. Kira had a normally sized one which would have fit two people at most.

Besides that, and Christmas dinner together, the main other thing today was the opening of the paper covering the mirror. Kira loved it, and I hope didn’t yet suspect what we were planning.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The straps arrived today. There were two long leather straps, some mounting hardware to fasten them into the joists, and a fabric-covered pad with sleeves on both sides that the straps would go through. Kira called to say she was going to have a long day today, so Kelly and I got it attached to the ceiling and then tested it. At first, we just lay down on top of each other on the fabric pad, and then we bounced a bit. It seemed secure, so then to give it a more complete test, we had sex on it, with me on top of Kelly. Then we tested the length of the straps by letting me lie on the bed and see if I could reach Kelly on the pad for sex from underneath. And it was perfect. She brushed against me a little but wasn’t resting her weight on me when she was lying on the pad.

So we declared this a success, and put the stuff away on top of the mirror. It fit up there pretty well without sticking out.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

I wanted to unveil this for New Year’s Eve, but Kira ended up working until 8 and had to get to bed for a bridge tournament the next day, so it ended up being today.

“I’ve got a surprise for you today, but you have to be good.”

That was a code word we’d adopted meaning Kira had to be submissive. “Yes, master.”

When I slid aside the mirror and the harness dropped, Kira was confused for a moment, then overjoyed when Kelly and I lifted her up and put her onto the pad. We gave her a good pounding, with breaks to switch positions and holes.

When we finally stopped more than an hour later, once Kira caught her breath, she said, “You really outdid yourself this time.”

“Thanks. This was a challenge.”

“I have been sure for a while that I made the right choice with you. After all, I married you.”

That got a good laugh from both Kelly and me.

“But this is further confirmation that you are the right person for me.”

“Kira, the dominant role you asked me to play”

Kelly interrupted, “Asked us to play!”

“Yes, the role you asked us to play in our relationship wasn’t what I was used to, but I’m glad I’m doing it right.”

We helped Kira get down from the harness, and Kelly stood on the bed to put it away over the mirror as I used the remote control to slide it back into place, showing Kira the remote while I did so. Then Kira kissed us both and we went to our respective showers to clean up.

Epilogue

Kira and I had a good, long life together. On her next two "break" years Kira had two kids, a girl and a boy. That limited our own playtime some, but having three parents instead of two to care for them definitely helped!

The way we'd named ourselves Kelly and Stacy to distinguish ourselves within our minds didn't work for the kids. They just knew us as Daddy and Aunt Patty when they were little, Patty being a name we'd adopted for the female one of us while the male remained Clint when we had guests over. When the kids got old enough to understand, we did explain it to them, but they still called either of us Daddy if male and Aunt Patty if female.

Long before they reached puberty, it was confirmed by others that the children of switchers do not become switchers, so they got to grow up like most people still do and stay the gender they started as. And I think they liked it that way, though they occasionally resented never getting the opportunity to try being the other gender. When Dana was 12 and Sam was 8, I proposed swap day, a single day in the summer when we could all be together, and when Dana would dress as and be treated as a boy all day and Sam as a girl. The kids loved it, but were also glad to be able to go back to normal the next day. When they started talking about missing it, I set up another one, and we had them two or three times a year, even as they got older and it became more complicated to have them pass for the opposite gender. Dana stopped when she got a boyfriend who didn't go for the idea. Sam still dressed as a girl from time to time, and his eventual girlfriend had no problem with it, and they went out on one cross-dressed date a year after she found out about this family tradition.