This ID has my face and name on it.
That ID also has my face and name on it, or rather my previous face and name.
This feels extremely weird.
Neither is wrong, but the new one is my current state and thus feels appropriate to use.
OK, all old IDs goes in the drawer never to emerge again, totally doesn’t feel haunted for some reason.
Nope.
Definitely not.
Opening the door after the doorbell rang that morning revealed a woman from Canada Post looking desperately confused with her truck idling in the background, it was the first time she had the day’s deliveries reshuffled to deliver a handful of letters like that.
Summers doesn’t fuck around that’s for sure.
Well, now I have all the things in my wallet match.
Boo yeah.
Class today was mundane again, with no math to make my brain be noisy about. Although it had what I hoped would be the last time I had to prove to a TA that I was who I claimed to be, at least this time I had IDs matching my claims.
I was weirdly buzzed to see Summers again as I was on the bus to the hospital, I don’t think there’s anything special on this visit though. There are some physicals and stuff scheduled for late next week because they are suppose d to be two or more weeks after the change from what I recall he said. I think this one is more supposed to be a check-in from the time allotted and the brief notes he gave me. Beyond whatever he has prepped for me, I do have some questions that I hope he might have answers for.
I had a sudden thought as I got off the bus that he had scheduled the appointment to work with my class schedule, without having asked for it. I will be the first to admit that is a touch terrifying, what other stuff can he do?
I am glad he appears to be on my side, not gonna lie.
As I was following the map the person at the front desk had given me to Summers office, I realized how different an experience it was compared to a week ago. I was still getting the same collection of stares and double-takes, but now they didn’t seem to bother me in the same way. Now It’s just rude of them, instead of soul-crushing.
Neat.
There’s Summer’s office at last, so I can probably wait without rude people staring.
I opened the door expecting the usual little waiting area all the other bits of hospitals seem to have, but instead, it was just straight up him at a desk looking pleased to see me.
“Oh, sorry if I interrupted. I didn’t see any chairs out front…” I said apologetically.
“Ah, not something you have to be worried about Sam. If I wasn’t ready for you, I wouldn’t be here. Now please, join me.” He said with a smile and gestured at the chair in front of his desk. “You seem to be doing a lot better than when I last saw you.”
“Yeah, I think so… “ I agreed while organizing my skirt beneath me on the chair in front of his desk. “I will admit I kinda had a bit of a mental health incident last night, but I feel better than I did a week ago for sure.”
“Oh. That’s unfortunate, is there something I can do to help with that? We do have coverage for therapy thanks to government-sponsored changee support programs, and I encourage you to make use of it.” He then paused with a raised finger. “However, I will admit for a lot of changees they’ve felt it important to get a few weeks of living in to get a feel for themselves first.”
I thought about what he said for a moment.
“It’s possible I should be getting professional help, but I will mention my roommates and sister have been helping out a lot.” I admitted sheepishly. “I have been coming to terms with a lot of things, sometimes too quickly, but I think I will get there with the help I am getting.”
“Well, that’s good to hear, just remember we are here to help you too.” He paused as he appeared to think of something and then started shuffling through some papers. “I looked into your concerns last time with emissions, and I was able to get the start of something going. Now, where is that… ah, here it is.”
He handed me a sheet of dense text and then drew my attention back before I could get into it.
“That sets out a plan where the government in perpetually is required to offset emissions generated by changees needs completely, it will be slipped in as part of another changee support bill next month. It’s possible you would have found out about it another way, but it isn’t really intended to make a splash in the news.” He said with a wink.
Holy shit this guy really doesn’t fuck around.
“Unfortunately, as to another topic we have discussed, I haven’t gotten any confirmation of any other synthetic life like yourself yet, and it’s looking pretty unlikely at this point.” He said with a sigh, before continuing.
“So, this also means that we will need to redouble our efforts to help preserve your health, I am going to have to insist you permit us to do a hefty collection of scans to allow us to be able to replicate parts for you as needed. The first ones start next week after the physical, so long as you consent to them.”
Roger was not wrong about Summers, he was already like five steps ahead of everything.
I guess I had an odd expression because he frowned.
“Is something wrong with that?”
“No, no, it’s just uh well that was the first thing I was going to ask you about,” I said with an uncertain smile. “I have had a few discussions on my uh… distinct mortality issues.”
“Well, that makes things simple then.” He said with a broad smile. “I wouldn’t worry about that, I have some excellent engineers as friends who I am sure will be able to make you everything that you need. Just give me a moment and we can move on to our next topic.”
He started searching through a series of binders on one of the side tables in the densely packed office, before emerging with a stapled bundle of papers, that he then set on his side of the desk while reaching to grab a pen from a mug of them next to me.
“Well, now I am going to ask you a series of boring and unpredictable questions but then it will be your turn to ask anything you want of me.”
It was a random scatter of questions that he insisted will let him know a lot about how well I was handling the change, it included stuff that made sense like how much I was eating but then also questions about if I had seen any cats. Nothing in them seemed particularly controversial either, there were no direct questions about physical differences or anything else that I could recognize.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Bizarre but whatever.
“Well, with that out of the way, we can turn back to a conversation that is driven by you.” He said while putting the filled-out answer sheets in a different binder than they started in. “Did you have any immediate questions?”
“Yeah actually, although the first one is a bit awkward.“
“Don’t be concerned about that, it’s my role to help you however I can. So please, ask away.” He said gently the smile not leaving his face.
“So far as external appearances go, I am female but like I was a guy before.” I started while rubbing the side of my neck. “I went looking around on the web, but I couldn’t really find anything about that sort of thing in the news. I would have thought it could be roughly as common as the hair or other DNA-driven changes.”
“Ah, now that’s an interesting case.” He said sitting back and intertwining his fingers, his smile slipping into a slight frown. “The short answer is that it is something that occurs in changees, but even compared to other more dramatic changes is very rare and is often intentionally not in the news.”
“So to start with the rarity aspect, I need to give a background first.” He started his expression turning thoughtful. “I am sure you know that we still don’t fully understand what causes a change to happen for an individual and why for most changees it is only ever something minor. There are beliefs that it seems to be dependent on how closely overlapped the person is with their counterpart in the other dimension, but without access to those people, we can’t know for certain. Even the idea of needing a counterpart isn’t a certainty, it could just be of gestalt differences for all we know but we usually still say counterpart for simplicities sake.”
He paused for a drink of water.
“A strong possibility that is gaining popularity is that we might have substantially more actual changees than is normally counted, it’s just that as far as they are aware there are no differences. If one’s body was changed but the only difference is that a hair on your arm moved a few millimeters over, one is either not going to notice or simply not care.”
“There are a lot more coincidences that need to happen for a person or object to dramatically change. If one’s counterpart is that much different then a casual overlap, it mostly appears to be ignored by our universe. It seems like for the people with dramatic changes it’s more a side effect of how hard the dimensions impacted in their relative areas. So in your case, you happened to be at the same relative location where the synthetic your body was based on was as those two parts of the respective dimensions were brutally forced into each other. Thus, the lack of similarity was overridden, and our universe was forced into bowing to the other.” He finished while hitting one hand into another.
“Mind you, a physicist would probably go into a frothing rage at my description.” He said with a conspiratorial grin. “I am giving a layperson explanation that I have managed to derive from listening to a great many people who know far more than I do on the subject.”
He then sat forward again, resting his hands back on the desk.
“Now, for physical gender changes, it appears our universe considers it a dramatic change as well which means it requires a hard hit, and for the counterpart to differ in just that way. Which for whatever reason is very unlikely, we simply do not have the information to know why.”
“As for the people a physical gender change does happen to, their individual reactions vary as wildly as you can imagine. The one commonality is that we try not to let news or social media get into a froth about it, it’s one thing to be mentioned in a statistic about hair color and another thing entirely to let some ghouls speculate if someone was transgender or were pretending before.” He sighed.
“Unfortunately on that topic, my colleagues and I are limited on scope to changee related matters. So I can’t whisk away society’s issues that necessitate us helping people on the quiet, but I can try to leave a door open. That offsetting bill for you also has a reading where it means that all future sources of emissions would require similar offsetting, but in practice, they will ignore my overreaching.”
“Uh, I can’t help but feel like you are admitting to being part of a conspiracy that can literally mess with everything.” I said taken aback.
“Ha, I wish.” He snorted. “I have connections and power out of the ordinary, but a lot of what we do is just keeping good operational security. The overwhelming majority of people will overlook a remarkable series of shocking changes if they are individually left without attention. It’s one of the reasons there are so many tragedies going on the world over that never make the news.”
“So maybe a small paper publishes about some individual getting their physical gender swapped because a reporter saw them or similar. We just make sure there’s no way to confirm it from official records. It’s part of why your ids were so fast to turn around, if you were to never mention it to someone as far as the official record goes you were only changed to being synthetic.”
“It’s not enough really, and I can’t exactly hide everything perfectly, but for most people that will keep them out of cruel eyes.” He finished looking at a distant point with frustration on his face.
“Is it fine for me to talk to people about it though?” I asked hesitantly. “I might be undoing your work.”
“Of course, it’s fine, it’s easy enough to spin some nonsense to keep it unique to you circumstance if needed. It won’t even be a lie with how much extreme shifts can change people.” He scoffed.
“I guess.” I said with a shrug.
“Now, having heard me rant on one subject do you have other questions?” He asked.
“Um yeah, but it might be just more of the first question, it seems like my being female is well… skin dee-“
“I will stop you there.” He said with a frown. “You might not have obvious primary sexual characteristics from the human point of view, but that could be just due to our lack of knowledge. Plus, you know I wouldn’t be one to allow judgment of you one way or another regardless.”
“But like I can’t even imagine-” I started not convinced.
“Sam, when you asked me to update your IDs you felt confident as to wishing to be known as female. Is that still the case?”
“Yes, but-“
“Then that’s all the answer I need at the moment.” He said gently.
I blinked at him a couple of times.
“Um, ok.”
There was a long moment when I was uncertain as to if I should press the subject, but I liked his answer honestly.
“Is it OK if I have another question?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Uh did you know of this manufacturer plate on the back of my head?”
“Oh? I did not, would you be ok with my seeing it?”
After nodding, he got up and looked where I directed him. He didn’t seem to offer any comment on the implied purposes of my creation but listened when I described some of the things I had experienced that seemed to line up. He did get a concerned expression when I told him about the armed man I had seen on Monday and suggested I let him know if I see him or someone like them again, he said he would try and jiggle some connections on the subject as well.
I also told him about a number of my more mundane experiences like hygiene or the feeling of water in my hands, he made notes and expressed curiosity but never pressed on any of them. The appointment sort of petered after that point out as I ran out of things I could remember to tell him, we were about time anyway so we called it done. My thoughts were still spinning on the bus home, but they didn’t have a painful edge to them, so I think I was feeling better having talked to Summers.
After a snack and changing into my running clothes, I headed over to Kat and Serena's for a run. This time we didn’t see any mysterious gunmen or other nefarious deeds being committed. It was mostly quiet and peaceful actually, although Kat was a bit apoplectic at learning of the Battle-Maid thing.
“You know you don’t have to be whatever that label implies right?” Kat was asking after calming down a bit.
“Yeah, I’m not exactly planning on being a maid or something if that’s what you’re asking. I guess it’s helpful to understand some of my reactions to things.” I hesitated then admitted. “I don’t hate the feeling I get from being with people enjoying meals, if stuff like that is the main thing to come of my… design I can be happy with it.”
“Well, let me know if it does become an issue.” Kat said unconvinced.
I realized I had some bait I could distract her with though,
“Oh, on a different topic. Summers was giving a description of clash occurrences that he thought would offend physicists.” I gave Kat a mischievous grin. “Would you like to hear it?”
Serena seemed to derive about as much amusement as I did from Kat’s further rants as to the complexities of physics revealed by the dimension clashes.
----------------------------------------
Friday classes were long but mundane, and as I walked back from the bus stop, I considered how bizarrely nice it was for it to feel like the first normal day I had experienced since the change. I didn’t have any appointments, self-discoveries, or chance encounters with people who knew me before. Just boring ole class than walking back through our neighborhood.
My thoughts of normalcy were interrupted by a white panel van rolling to a stop beside me, and the side door opening.
Person, one pistol in his right hand, second holstered.
There was a guy in a dress shirt and slacks, with holsters under his shoulders and wearing a black balaclava while pointing the gun in his hand at Roger’s tentacled head.
Fuck.