Blaine Forester examined himself in the mirror. His hair had grown disturbingly quickly; it had just been a couple of days, and it was already at the middle of his back. It was clear where his old hair, cut in compliance with Naval uniform code, ended, and the new, blonde hair begun. It was his favorite hair color - on women, anyway. His fingernails needed to be clipped again; letting him do it himself was a small mercy that they had allowed him.
As the nurse had said in an extraordinarily blunt way, his body was resetting itself, conforming to new DNA. The hairlessness was a small mercy; according to them, if he had continued to grow body or facial hair, it would’ve become completely unmanageable.
He didn’t miss it. He’d tried many times to focus on how uncomfortable it made him. But trying to dig up these feelings of discomfort yielded nothing. What was the point of it growing, anyway? It was one of the little mistakes of evolution - perhaps they were called vestigial structures? That was probably it. Again, he cursed the women who had their life on easy mode - no disgusting body hair to deal with. Well, they did have it, but they were allowed to shave it without being called a faggot.
He rubbed his arms, admiring the new, soft skin he had. The dust the shedding generated was a nightmare, but it felt strangely right to have skin like this, like his normal skin had somehow been wrong, and he’d just never known.
The only cause for alarm was his rapidly-declining musculature. How could he impress the ladies without his biceps? What the fuck were they doing to him? Making him weak and useless?!! He wouldn’t stand for this. Well, he would; he didn’t exactly have a choice.
A woman came into his cell. She looked like she was in her fifties, her raven-black hair already starting to gray. Despite the beginnings of wrinkles on her face, she looked quite lively - as if her mind was somehow younger than her body.
And, more importantly, she wore a gray shirt with a single pink stripe around it. He could recognize that uniform style anywhere - she was a member of the Antares Authority, although the lack of decoration signified that she was probably rather low-level.
But this was the Department of Autonomy, the only opaque portion of the Department; all bets were off here.
The fucking commies had captured him, and the ugliest woman on that blasted commie star system was here to interrogate him.
She sat down on a bench right next to him, apparently not threatened in the slightest by a military man without any of his limbs bound. She knew something that made it obvious he wasn’t truly a threat - something he didn’t know. Maybe there was some sort of containment field, or the injection made him too weak to put up a fight. She wasn’t to be trifled with.
“So, how were the first two days of containment?” she opened, “I know that those are the worst ones…”
“I won’t tell anything about that mission, you stupid commie! You can torture me, kill me, turn me into a fucking soyboy, but I’ll never talk!”
“Why would I need you to tell me about that mission?”
Blaine paused for a moment, his eyes wide. He didn’t know what to think, what to say. Why did they even go to the trouble of capturing him, then? The fact that he was missing would be far more suspicious; they could have just stolen the camera feed and gotten away with it.
“Well, why am I even here, then? What do you want from me? Other secrets? Battle plans?” he asked, genuinely confused. What was he even doing there? What information did they even need?
“Frankly, I know far more than you know, Lisa. You have nothing you can tell me,” was her curt reply.
“Who’s Lisa?”
“You.”
What even was this? Some sort of power play? Calling him by a different name for no reason?
Wait, that’s what they were doing. The lack of body hair, the muscles, the soft skin, the new name. They were turning him, Blaine Forester, random-ass fighter pilot, into a fucking woman, for whatever convoluted reason they had. And they hadn’t even given him the courtesy of naming himself. Probably some sort of fetish that Ms. Commie had, or maybe he was going to become a lab rat, like one of their fucking test tube babies.
“So, you’re turning me into a fucking woman?”
“No.”
“Well, then what do you call this?”
“You’ve always been a woman, Lisa. A woman who happens to be a victim of Gender Variant Disorder.”
Gender Variant Disorder. That was what the Antares Authority called being a tranny; they believed that it was a disease that unlucky people were born with, and the only cure was replacing the “defective” body. They really thought that gender wasn’t influenced by society and culture, that nobody could be turned into a tranny by societal factors, and that you couldn’t stop being a tranny, despite various public reports of trannies who abandoned their disgusting perversions.
They had diagnosed him with Gender Variant Disorder, declared that his body was defective, and now they were taking it and replacing it against his will. How dare they?
“You strapped me down and injected me with drugs against my will! How dare you do this to me? You don’t know me, you commie scum! I’m not a fucking tranny, I’m not a fucking woman, and I’ll never be one, no matter what your sick perverts try! My name is Blaine Forester, and you will never take it away from me!”
Ms. Commie let out a sigh, clearly defeated by Blaine’s mental prowess. She took a few seconds to think, wandering around the prison cell, figuring out her next response before sitting down.
“Okay, so, do you want me to bring your body hair back then, Blaine? Your tough skin? Your muscles?”
That was his name… Ms. Commie had used his real name.
Why did it hurt so much? He wasn’t supposed to be like this, he wasn’t supposed to be so effeminate. He wanted to go back. But why did the idea of going back hurt? He’d been used to it; he’d spent seven years being used to his body hair and his skin and everything. It was all familiar; he was supposed to miss it. Why didn’t he?
He managed a nod.
She grabbed a communicator from her pocket, hitting the transmit button, and began to talk into it.
“Hello? Nurse? We have a real man on our hands. I need an antidote, stat. He wants his chest hair back.”
Why did that feel so painful? He imagined going back, imagining the body hair, the rough skin, the muscles. It was wrong. It was hard to admit - he was supposed to miss it, but he didn’t want any of it.
A minute went by, and he remained silent. The nurse came in, holding an aluminum tray, containing a syringe with a blue liquid in it, as well as an alcohol prep pad.
It wasn’t supposed to be there. This was wrong, but he didn’t want the antidote.
“Wait!”
“What is it, Blaine?”
That name stung. He hadn’t quite realized how bad it had stung until now, now that he realized there was an alternative.
“I don’t want the antidote!”
The nurse continued to approach him.
“Well, then, I’ll need you to answer one question,” Ms. Commie replied.
What question would she even need answered? As he felt the alcohol pad being rubbed on his arm, he began to ponder. They didn’t need anything; Ms. Commie already knew everything about their navy, if she was to be believed. He was apparently useless in terms of information.
And then the question came.
“What is your name?”
He knew what he had to say.
“Lisa. My name is Lisa.”
The nurse retreated. There was no pain. There was no antidote injected. He wouldn’t get any of his male features back.
And that was good.
----------------------------------------
Perhaps watching the video feed was a waste of time; it would be better to spend it doing something else and wait for Phoebe to tag the interesting parts. But, after a week of making budgets and plans, Natasha finally had some time on her hands, some room for inefficiency. She could watch full videos now. She could burn a bit of free time. She still had to eat, drink, and breathe work, but she could do her breathing a little easier.
The tone of the alien’s voice had been filtered. There was a note of explanation attached: The Verds, as they were called, spoke in tones that were rather… hypnotic. It got into the mind and seemed to be incredibly persuasive, the voice having been intentionally modulated to attack the human psyche. One of the technicians reviewing the sample had become compromised, their mind influenced too much to be salvageable. They’d regrettably had to snip him, and a few others had to be reassigned to less critical roles. It was a shame; retraining was expensive, and snipping was even more so.
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Additionally, they’d logged the Verds’ capability of a more direct, active form of influencing the human mind - hypnosis. Every labbie who’d watched the raw video had been hypnotized. Luckily, the words didn’t affect them in any meaningful way; the hypnosis was highly situational, and wouldn’t affect their ability to do their jobs. Still, just to be safe, she was going to have them all snipped tomorrow.
Thank the stars they could just snip labbies instead of having to replace them; body disposal, according to Caroline, had been a nightmare.
But, on the bright side, they’d learned a valuable lesson about alien interaction. If one of those aliens were ever identified as present, they could filter all of their techniques out of the recordings. The hypnotic eyes were easy; a simple machine learning algorithm would identify them and black them out. There was a worry that the algorithm could be hypnotized by the footage, which was rather farfetched, but it was addressed by resetting it after each frame it saw. Before then, applying a simple Gaussian blur to all the videos would work well enough.
The Department of Autonomy wasn’t fond of machine learning, and preferred more traditional, if old, programming instead. Traditional algorithms were rigid compared to machine learning, and required more work, but they were less vulnerable, less likely to have backdoors, and, most importantly, more transparent and easier to modify - and, thus, more trustworthy. Natasha had seen the dangers of rampant machine learning firsthand - Phoebe’s underlings had been able to use prompt injections to grab important corporate secrets this way. She didn’t want her systems to have those vulnerabilities.
The biggest problem they’d had trouble with was the vocal cadence. Despite all the filtration, the Verds were still able to exert too much influence simply with the pattern of their words. In order to filter those out, they had to get slightly creative - they ran it through a primitive speech-to-text system, and then they ran the output through a primitive text-to-speech system that outputted voice without using any tone at all.
Finally, the entire video was sanitized, and there it sat, ready for consumption by her and her cabinet.
Sometimes, she wondered if growing a slave race in a gigantic lab was unethical. But this work had to be done by somebody; it was better if they were born into it, instead of experiencing a normal childhood and then being taken into this place. Of all the potential solutions, this was the most ethical way to keep Antares alive.
But was it really worth it? Yes; the math didn’t lie. She’d seen the horrors that took place outside Antares, and she wouldn’t let them happen here. She couldn’t.
The video started with a green, writhing mass of vines breaching the idiot’s hull. The alien was a formless mass of extraordinarily durable vines capable of surviving in the void. It was able to exert incredibly high amounts of force, as the sensors had recorded. It restrained Harold Food, and then…
It simply informed him that he was being rescued, and asked him not to resist.
What exactly was Harold even being rescued from? He was blatantly an enemy; this made no sense. But the alien simply kept restraining him. There was no attempt to sedate, no attempt to neutralize… it simply knew that Harold wasn’t a threat to it.
It slowly panned over Harold, doing an in-depth search. The bugs that Phoebe had put into him were completely ignored, as if the aliens didn’t know their purpose, or had been unable to see them.
Perhaps somebody lesser would count their blessings and blame alien incompetence for the bugs not being found out. However, Natasha knew that these aliens had decent scanning equipment. There was no way that equipment like this would be overlooked or not found if they’d figured out how to scan for lifeforms properly.
No, the aliens knew that they were watching. And this was something that they wanted Natasha to see. It was something they wanted everyone to see. She immediately went to attach this conclusion to the video, typing it in and attaching it, making note of the timestamp.
The Department of Autonomy’s system was ingenious - any media had notes that could be attached to them. These were usually summaries and just general descriptions that made it easier to process. Putting the annotations in the same file as the videos had made her job a lot easier; she wondered why civilians hadn’t done this yet.
What was this? Was it imperialism? Did they think that people like Harold Food would want this sort of thing? Regardless, Natasha knew their natural ability to manipulate people.
But, they did approach this as if they were genuinely trying to help Harold. Perhaps this was manipulation, but perhaps this was genuinely how they saw things. These aliens might not actually be evil; they might be capable of reason, of holding a conversation. Regardless, even if it was a lie, any information they were to divulge would still tell her something about them.
She wasn’t naive, however; she knew the precautions to take. She wouldn’t risk her diplomats. No, any conversation she were to hold would have to be digital to allow for filtering. She wouldn’t let aliens hypnotize any more of her labbies. She wouldn’t let the aliens sway them with their biorhythms, or woo them with their cadence. No, any diplomacy with them would either feature a sacrificial lamb, or the conversation would be extensively filtered.
She would have to talk to Leo about that.
----------------------------------------
Nicole, lead of the Subterfuge Branch, was looking at her diplomatic contact, William Thorten. He was heavily decorated, his gray shirt sporting five horizontal blue stripes that went from his waist to his chest, where three medallions were positioned. He thought that these were about specialization, the stripes meaning that he somehow outranked Nicole. In reality, each stripe was a symbol of inferiority, each medallion even more so. It was fun to watch him play diplomat. He genuinely believed that everything he said was true.
And their lie detectors did too. She laughed to herself - they genuinely thought this was an official diplomat, somebody who knew everything. Well, perhaps she shouldn’t overestimate them; being inside the government allowed any document you printed to be real.
The room he was in could only be described as excessively opulent. The table they were at was made of gold, encrusted with diamonds wherever was possible. A feast was arranged on it, the main course being roast Wagyu beef, smothered in an inordinate amount of gold leaf. Everything about the scene made Nicole sick; there was so much wasted potential.
Across from him sat Roland Food’s most trusted diplomat, Tyler Sustenance - a man who practically exuded corruption. Well, that wasn’t surprising; what else could a corporate man willing to make a deal with “communists” be described as?
“As you know, Roland Food wants his son dead,” Tyler opened, “Reluctantly, he has gone to you for help. He is willing to make a deal - if you can fabricate an order from Standard Oil for a suicide mission…”
“That can be arranged. It would be trivial. But, I have a counterproposal.” His face lit up, his honesty incredibly clear. This was a direct order from the legislators of the Antares Authority, notarized by all of them. He pushed the proposal over.
“Yes?”
“We know that Standard Food wants to go to war. It’s an obvious conclusion; you hold the upper hand. But we could cripple them and ensure your victory.”
“And how exactly could the Antares Authority do that? All your weapons are defensive.”
“Ah, but war isn’t just waged on the battlefield. If we pool our influence in the senate with yours, we could get rid of the monopoly Standard Oil has on plastics. The Antares Authority is prepared to undercut them and cripple their profit margins, which would destroy their ability to do business, allowing you to seize their infrastructure with ease.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Profit. We’d take over the plastics business with our cheap, durable alternatives, and you’d be down one rival. Win, win.”
“Throwing our weight around for this is incredibly costly, and it’ll make it more difficult to defend ourselves from impending legislation. How do we know that you won’t double-cross us?”
“We’ve been your staunch ally against Standard Oil for over a century. What kind of moron would throw all that goodwill away? And, besides, everything is legally binding. I’m Antares’s prime diplomat; I’m irreplaceable, and whatever I say goes. Finally, I’d like to show you records of our food production.”
He slid over a notarized graph of Antares’s domestic food production - barely half of what’s required to feed Antares itself. They still relied on imports from Standard Food in order to function. “We simply aren’t a threat to your food business. Undermining your monopoly would be useless.”
Tyler Sustenance snapped his fingers, and armed guards shambled into the room, each of them taking their place right next to William. “Then, you won’t mind if I keep you here as insurance, then?”
“Of course not! Plus, there’s no way they’d leave me to die. I’m irreplaceable! Nobody’s capable of matching my prowess!”
“We agree to your proposition,” Tyler said. The guards immediately grabbed the diplomat, and, without a fight, he was led into a comparatively non-opulent jail cell.
—
The next meeting, having taken place one day later, was slightly more grim. Brendan Oil had a little bit more of a personal touch. Instead of the opulence of a king that Roland Food preferred, Brendan’s place of residence was more of a supervillain’s lair - lots of open space, a black throne, and enough cybernetics that Brendan himself looked more like a machine than a human. It was incredibly intimidating; Nicole would give him that. Perhaps, if she were there, she’d crack. But it was impossible to crack someone who genuinely believed they were telling the truth.
Boris Milton, Nicole’s other diplomatic contact, stood on the opposite side of the room, ready to begin the negotiations.
“I’ve received advanced warning that Standard Food is going to blame Harold’s death on you,” Boris opened.
“Good. Then they’ve walked right into our trap.”
“I have a proposal to make, your highness.”
A creepy smile appeared on Brendan’s face. Upon closer inspection, it seemed to be one of genuine elation.
“Yes, yes. You may speak.”
“The Antares Authority wishes to help make the war even easier. They desire to remove Roland Food’s monopoly on food, which would cripple them! If you throw your support behind the measure, it would make your victory all the more glorious!”
“An interesting proposal, and a tempting one. But how am I sure you aren’t planning to double-cross me?”
It seemed like he could destroy Boris at any moment, if he so desired.
“Y-you can… scan my memories, your highness.”
Without a word, Brendan rose, almost gliding to Boris. A cybernetic tentacle, made for this exact purpose, wrapped itself around Boris’s head and began to bore into his skull.
Boris screamed in pain, his mind being violated by the CEO of Standard Oil as he searched every nook and cranny of his cranium, internalizing every fact that Boris knew. Boris was telling the truth. He was a premiere diplomat of the Antares Authority; the decisions he made were binding. And he was one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable, a once-in-a-generation genius.
Boris was unceremoniously tossed upwards, his arms latched onto some black metal fixture as he was hung from the ceiling of Brendan’s throne room.
“I accept your proposal. You will remain here until the vote concludes… for insurance purposes.”
—
The wars had begun days ago - light lag was a bitch - but the vote still had a week or two before it happened. She’d confirmed; the corporations were going to lay waste to each other.
“So, you’ve set up a scheme with both of them? Isn’t that a waste of resources? Isn’t one of your diplomats going to die?”
“Maxwell, you know how much they hate each other. We can use that to our advantage. That animosity was pitifully easy for our ancestors to cause, and now we’re reaping the fruits of our labor.”
“I mean, that’s just how this kind of operation works. You have to side with one of them. The entire point of this is to create competition and chaos and power vacuums. Doing both is useless.”
“Well, I’m doing something a little bit different this time.”
“Seriously, Nicole… Who wins this one?”
Nicole’s tone could only be described as smug.
“Us.”
----------------------------------------
One week after receiving the serum, he had finally kind of gotten used to all the changes. Clipping his nails three times a day was frustrating, but he managed. He’d gotten his hair lopped off to a more manageable length the previous day, only for it to already be back down to his shoulders. The hairlessness was weird, and it felt completely wrong, but he’d gotten used to it, somewhat. The skin took getting used to, but was surprisingly nice.
Working with Caroline was nice. He could just get lost in the paperwork, the budget requests, the maintenance that had to be done. He’d learned quickly, and he was already able to do some of it - although he was quite a bit slower than Caroline. The hardest part was shadowing her when she interacted with the rest of the cabinet. He’d gotten to meet them, and he was aware of the existence of others like him, but they never let them interact with each other in any meaningful way. Caroline wanted everyone to be finished changing before they did so.
Still, despite that, he could still see them. They seemed to be in similar situations to him, feeling absolutely horrible about their changing bodies, trying to chug along despite that, everything. Everyone except for the new boy in the Observation Branch. Perhaps it was fake, but he had a smile on his face, like he was glad that this was happening to him, like he was glad to be here, like there was nothing horrible about this place at all.
It was an even mix of guys and girls, all with long hair, soft skin, and no body hair whatsoever, but he didn’t know any of their names - the only name he knew was Caroline. The lack of social activity was getting to him a bit; it seemed like all he was allowed to process and consume was information, as if friendships and bonding and emotional fulfillment during this time meant nothing.
He did have awfully big shoes to fill, however, that was true. And being prepared to lead a systemwide government agency would definitely be difficult.
He gave himself a good look in the mirror for the first time in a while… there were more things. His face was unrecognizable, like the person staring back at him wasn’t really him, like his face belonged to someone else. He’d expected it, braced for it, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. It was all wrong. The eyes were too wide, the lips were too thick. His entire face was too soft - not just because of the new skin, but because his very bones and fat distribution had been altered. He didn’t know that could be done.
The eyes were wrong, too. They were the same color as they’d always been, but there was something indescribable about how the irises had been altered. They were a window to someone else’s soul now. Even his hairline was different, his widow’s peak gone. He wanted it back, but not even a razor could help him anymore.
If he squinted at the face, he could see…
No. They wouldn’t make his body defective. They wouldn’t curse him with Gender Variant Disorder. They weren’t that cruel.
He stripped down, looking for the anatomical signs that he was still a guy.
Penis? Yeah, he still had a penis. Balls? Present - hairless, but present. Chest hair? Nonexistent, but that was to be expected. Flat chest?
He could see them.
Not very big, but undeniably there.
His breathing accelerated as he stared at them like a deer in the headlights. They were there. He was becoming a woman.
How could they do this to him? They were mutilating him, turning his own body against him, transforming it into something alien that he’d never desire being. He would never be a man again. He would never pee standing up, he’d have to deal with all this painful period stuff, everything. He’d never be able to get someone pregnant. Body hair wouldn’t look good on him anymore.
The worst part about this was the familiarity he was going to lose. Being a man was like home. His body was like home. Above all, his manhood was the last remnant of his former life. It was his rock, his island of stability, a piece of driftwood in a raging sea.
For the first time in years, Nathan wept.
When he realized how girly he sounded, he wept even harder.
—
“Why the hell are you turning me into a fucking girl?!!” Nathan screamed at Caroline, his voice too androgynous for his tastes. He couldn’t drop it any lower than it currently was.
“You see, modifying peoples’ DNA is difficult and expensive. The more modifications, the more steps you need to take to ensure that you have a viable strand. Making someone unrecognizable is tough. Changing a sex chromosome is the easiest way to do that. Most bang for your buck, if that makes sense.”
“But what about GVD?” Nathan asked, holding back tears.
“You get used to it, Nathan. I promise you that.”
“But that’s not how it works! I’ve read the medical textbooks. You - you can’t just get used to Gender Variant Disorder. It only gets worse while you ignore it!” he stammered.
“Let’s just say… we have our tricks, Nathan. Everything’s going to be just fine in a couple of months. I promise,” was the reply. As much as Caroline attempted to be reassuring, it didn’t work.
Nathan wasn’t convinced. And he stayed not convinced for an entire day.