Chapter 04: Crazy Voodoo Sci-Fi BullshitWith some trepidation but even greater unconcealed eagerness, Doctor Jonathon Bridges signaled for his next appointment to be sent through. His office, a sprawl of annotated printouts across his desk and half-finished cups of coffee, was in dire need of tidying. A dipidated sofa occupied one corner and a forlorn potted pnt, perpetually declining into ever darker shades of yellow and brown, took the other.

  So what? Jonathon didn’t care about appearances, especially when coming face-to-face with the very thing that got him his current job. He was about to encounter the living embodiment of the high-risk gamble he’d taken six months ago.

  He’d earned this position. Those risks were going to pay massive dividends for Asklepios – for humanity, he told himself. And his name would be forever attached to the science behind it all. If all went well, glory might be the least of the rewards for his efforts.

  The nurse had completed the preliminary check-in process: blood samples, weight and measurements, scans and imaging of the patient. Preliminary results suggested the patient was the epitome of health, though the full results, especially the all-important blood tests, would take a few hours to process.

  Standing to greet his patient, he wiped his hands down the sides of a rumpled b coat before burying them into deep pockets where he could hide the perpetual twitch of excited fingers. Jonathan knew he wasn’t a particurly pleasant man. He was arrogant with little patience for stupid people; and he thought, by and rge, most people were idiots.

  “Hello David,” he said to the young woman entering his office.

  The contrast between the two couldn’t have been much sharper. With his b coat stained with the day’s lunch, hanging loosely over an untucked shirt undone at the neck, Jonathon looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. He had. His tie hung loose, his hair was a wild mess of red and grey, and he had the unhealthy pallor of someone who hadn’t been exposed to sunlight in far too long, bathed instead by the glow of digital dispys and florescent lighting.

  David Saunders, lips freshly painted a glossy pink, smiled. He’d obviously touched up during the wait before stepping through the door—the man’s whole feminine deportment gave every indication of having been refreshed before the appointment. From head to toe, groomed hair to chunky heels, the man’s female appearance was immacutely presented.

  “Scooter,” David said. “I can’t tell you how goddamn happy I am to see you.”

  “Scooter?” he grumbled. “Still?”

  “You don’t think I’ve earned it?”

  Jonathon bit back a retort. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you have.”

  Swallowing back his irritation—or was it guilt? he often struggled to tell them apart—he focused his attention instead on the man standing before him. Does he even realise how much he’s changed? Jonathon wondered, taking in the tell-tale signs of his process’s ongoing effects. Even at a preliminary gnce it was obvious how much the man’s feminisation had progressed.

  The first time they’d met, David Saunders had just been a man in woman’s clothing, cross-dressing as part Katherine’s crazy pn to keep him alive. He’d had cutting-edge prosthetics attached, prototype bio-engineered breasts and genitals salvaged during the raid on the Neopharm bck project site—but still just a man in a dress. Katherine had diverted to the Clinic with Steele’s agents on their trail. Much to Jonathon’s sting shame, those same agents had infiltrated Asklepios’ defences with ease and nearly killed his client.

  He took fierce soce in the fact that those responsible for invading his boratory had paid for their audacity. More importantly, they’d only been after Katherine and David—and not his research. Bad enough to have infiltrated the Clinic, but what if they’d penetrated into the deeper bs, discovered the Tank, stolen his work?

  The st time he’d seen David in the flesh, the man was submerged in the Tank, unconscious in a bath of nutrient-rich fluids reshaping his body, dissolving muscle, reshaping body fat, flipping genetic switches, transforming David Saunders even as the process regenerated the fatal damage he’d taken in his fight with Steele’s agent.

  “How’s your arm? I trust the nurse was gentle?”

  “That bitch’s a fucking vampire,” he growled, the tone discordant with his delicate appearance. He gestured to the cotton swab affixed by a pster to his arm. “Think she took enough blood? Thought she was going to drain me dry.”

  “The first of many, I’m afraid. We’ll need daily blood tests.”

  David grunted.

  “How’re you settling in at the Clinic?”

  “I nearly attacked K st night,” he said, “and came close to throwing a chair at Crystal.”

  “I half expected you to come in here swinging.”

  “Hey, the appointment’s not over yet,” David said. “Let’s see how things go first,” and judging by the glint in his eyes, he wasn’t entirely kidding. Jonathon was reminded of the reports he’d reviewed that morning and prior to the appointment: the update on their ‘patient’ downstairs; yesterday’s security footage of the man at the café; Crystal’s feedback from earlier that day. The person standing before him presented as young and female, dainty and slight, with a frivolous focus on makeup and fashion—and had killed one man and severely injured another.

  He was sharing a room with a killer. He’d killed Steele’s agent that day six months ago, in an office not unlike this one. How quickly could David cross the distance between them? Kill him? Jonathon wasn’t a fighter. Faster than security could arrive. Not that there was any real danger, of course: the slim bracelet they all wore contained a powerful tranquiliser that would knock the rgest and angriest of clients unconscious, should the monitoring security AI detect any threat.

  Still, the feminised man had good cause to want to hurt him, or worse. Although I did save his life, Jonathon thought, irritated at the man’s ingratitude.

  “Mind if I sit?” David said, dropping into a chair. “These heels look great, but they’re a killer after a while. Even after months of practice.”

  “If you say so.” But why worry about something as banal as the possibility of violence when confronted by the medical miracle before him? Deep in his pockets, his fingers twitched.

  “I do.” David leaned back in his seat, making a show of examining his manicure, gazing at the doctor over glossy nails. “And by the way, I’ve gotta say, you look like shit.”

  Jonathon grunted. He noted the repair to the missing fingernail broken earlier that morning in the meeting with Carl. He noted the lustre to the man’s hair, the softening of his jawline and the curve of breasts and hips. He noted the lines of the man’s bared legs and the tension in the muscle.

  “Jesus, Scooter, take a picture, it’ll st longer.” David’s tone was mocking, but Jonathon picked up on the underlying threat.

  The doctor nodded. He returned to his side of the desk and sat down. “I imagine, David Saunders, that you’ve got questions.”

  “You think?” The man who looked like a young woman leaned forward. “Yeah, there’s plenty I’d like to know.” Pink painted lips twisted in an ugly scowl and his eyes darkened. “Like, what the fuck happened four months ago? I wake up in some shitty little apartment, looking like… like this, alone, and suddenly I’m supposed to live this girl Cindy’s life, yeah, but not just in a sort of pretend kind of way, throw on a skirt and prance around for a couple of days kind of way…. No. I wake up in this girl’s home and I’ve got tits, Scooter, a goddam set of knockers, real ones, and I nearly go bat-shit crazy wondering what the fuck is going on!”

  He leaned in close, and Jonathon could see the physical effort it took hold back. “And sure, I appreciated your little video message. Made it clear I wasn’t having some kind of mental breakdown. But it wasn’t enough, Scooter, not even close.

  “So, yeah, you might say I’ve got questions. Like what the hell did you do to me so that I look like… this? Or: what were you thinking, for Chrissake, just dumping me in some shithole apartment on the edge of some fucking new city with no goddam clue what was going on?” But then he shook his head, tucking a strand of hair back behind one ear. Earrings sparkled there, dancing with the movement. “But no.” He held up a finger. A single scarlet nail fshed under office lights. “No. I’ve only got one. One fucking question, Scooter, but man, it’s a doozy.

  “When are you giving me back a male body?”

  “That,” Jonathon answered, “is a more complicated question than you know.”

  “No, it really isn’t.” Knuckles whitened as David gripped his knees. “Just… do whatever crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit you did to me st time, okay? Just turn me back into a man.”

  Jonathon shook his head. “Listen, girlie, if I tell you it’s complicated—”

  Something ugly and dangerous juddered through his patient. “No,” he interrupted, in a low growl only slightly softened by its feminine lilt. “You don’t get to call me that.”

  Face reddening, Jonathon bit back a retort, and nodded. “Listen. David. Do you remember our st face-to-face meeting?”

  Fascinated, he watched the crinkling of the nose, the pout of concentration on the cute girl’s face that floated over the man beneath. As quickly as the anger had seized David, it dissipated, repced by a performance of cute girlishness that seemed too natural to be faked.

  Over the past six months he’d reviewed regur updates on David’s progress, both physical and psychological, and watched segments of the video feed captured from the man’s apartment. He’d examined the photos and read the reports and sifted through the data—but there was something qualitatively different in experiencing the reality in person; or rather, the person in reality.

  “About six months ago, right? Yeah, kinda, I guess. I had those stupid prosthetics on, right?” and David cupped his breasts, “Those massive tits, they were—what were they?—like, double-D parasites, some kind of pnt thing hanging off my chest?”

  Jonathon couldn’t help himself; he snapped. “Stupid?” He stood up in a surge of indignation. “Pnt things?” he spluttered. “Parasites? Listen, David, those artificial breasts were an absolute miracle! A miracle of bio-engineering, absolute cutting edge of prosthetics technology!”

  Without meaning to, he found himself striding across the room, infused with righteous anger at the ignorance of the small-minded and selfish. “They weren’t crafted, or molded, or built – they were grown. Grown!” he nearly shouted. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, shouting at people mired in indifference or ignorance. His hands were out of the pockets now, fingers drawing circles in the air, punctuating each point with a savage jab at David. In his mind, he saw the whole process, knew the brilliant minds that worked on it, the setbacks and losses and corporate meddling; the espionage and terrible, horrific losses and toll of Project Sporus.

  To Jonathon, the artificial breasts were a marvel of synthetic biology, an extraordinary blend of science and nature, of design by artificial intelligence and artifice by people. Instead of being mechanically crafted or molded, they were organically grown. He could see the process, see in his mind’s eye the delicate tendrils sprouting from the fungal medium, intertwining and forming their tticed framework. Pallid little strands growing an intricate structure serving as the foundation for the prosthetic, delicate yet remarkably robust and flexible, and with a little guidance shaped to mimic the aesthetics and functionality of natural breasts.

  The bio-fungal growth process was an art form, conceived and developed in the boratory. Nurtured within those controlled environments, the specialized fungus thrived, guided by precise genetic modifications and carefully calibrated conditions. Then, the final artistry, the miracle: as the fungus matured, it exuded a pliable substance, resembling a supple and estic flesh. Over time, the substance evolved, thickening and gaining resilience until it achieved a texture simir to that of human tissue – in this case, human breast tissue.

  Once the fungal growth reached the desired stage, skilled bio-artisans delicately trimmed and shaped the mass, sculpting it into the final form. Additional yers were added to provide support and enhance the natural feel. Finally—another miracle of engineering—the complex system of biocompatible connectors, the interface with nerves and blood vessels, and receptors that allowed for a genuine sensory experience – creating an uncanny resembnce to their biological counterparts.

  He knew the names connected to the project; had met at least half of them at international academic conferences over the years. There were stories, entire arcs of industrial espionage, noble and altruistic pursuits of knowledge and craven betrayals for profit. What better example of the Chinese decades-long dominance in biotech than this—a functioning synthetic flesh innovation arising almost accidentally from climate science-inspired research into alternate food sources?

  To dismiss this miracle of technology and human innovation as… stupid, as a… pnt thing, a parasite? “Grown!” he repeated. His hands chopped the air as he stalked across the room. “Do you have any idea the work – the genius! – artistry! – innovation! – behind the engineering to create those – those – ‘pnt things’?”

  “Whatever,” David answered, then looked down at his own veiled breasts and sighed. “At least the fucking things came off.”

  Jonathon pushed aside his anger and returned to his side of the desk. “What was it you said? That I ‘look like shit.’ Yes.” He dropped into his chair. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I do. It’s been an interesting six months, David, since you were st with us. A lot has happened. A lot of changes. A lot of progress. And you’re part of it all – not the only part but an important part of what we’re doing here at Asklepios.” He thrust his hands back into his pockets. “A very important part.”

  “You’re not listening,” David answered. “I don’t care. I really don’t care what you’re doing here. I don’t care about your progress or changes or how goddamn interesting any of this is.” Pnting both heeled feet on the floor, he leaned forward, eyes bright. Again, he tucked a stray bang back behind his ear, mindful to avoid tangling dangling earrings.

  “I don’t give a shit.” He pulled a face, suffused with ager and frustration. “All I want is my fucking life back! Give me my goddamn male life back, or—”

  Jonathon cut him off. “How’s your finger?”

  Nonplussed, David held Jonathon’s gaze for a moment before gncing down at his hand. Nails glittered like gemstones in his p. “Excuse me?”

  “Your finger,” he repeated. And then, cking patience, “Your hand. How is it?”

  David held them both in view, fingers spyed. “Fine?”

  “You punched a desk this morning? Broke a nail? Yes?”

  David raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  The feminised man examined his hand. “No. It’s fine. Listen, Scooter, I don’t….”

  “Your head,” the doctor interrupted. “How’s it feel?”

  “Fuck sake, Scooter. I’m fine, okay, stop….”

  “That man in the diner, he hit you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, he did.” Jonathon didn’t need to refer to his notes; he’d gone through them thoroughly before the meeting. He rattled through the list: “Sp across the face, here,” and he tapped his own cheek to indicate the location. “Neck, here,” he added, where the man, Mal, had grabbed Cindy by the throat. “Hair and scalp,” where he’d grabbed and yanked her back, “breasts,” where he’d groped her, “bicep, left shoulder, knees.”

  Then he tapped the side of his head, near the temple where David had made contact with the sharp edge of the counter. “And here.” The girls in the salon had done a good job that morning. The injury wasn’t visible beneath a thin dusting of makeup and the sweep of David’s hair. Apparently, it hadn’t taken much to conceal the damage, the bruise already fading from an angry yellow and bck to a dull blue. “And despite these injuries –you were in the gym this morning, weren’t you? Running?”

  David nodded.

  “Any pain?”

  “Not really.” He thought for a moment. “No.”

  “You strike me as someone with a more than passing familiarity with physical injuries, David. Tell me: have you ever recovered so quickly before?”

  David shook his head, earrings jouncing and glinting.

  “I didn’t think so.” When Jonathon smiled, it was without pleasure. “Did you know that the man in the café was ex-military?”

  Jonathon knew, in that moment, that the question was a dangerous one – an unwise one. They knew so little about this man. The unanswered questions about his past, the history than enabled him to survive an encounter with Steele’s agent, or the man in the café: these needed to be asked. But was he the one to do it? Katherine, he conceded, was much better at subtly drawing out a person’s secrets; God knows she’d done it to him. Carl too, despite the psychobabble had a knack for earning others’ confidence. Jonathon on the other hand – people didn’t like him. And he was fine with that. But there were times when he wished he was capable of a little more subtlety in conversation.

  David hesitated, one finger tapping at his chin, and then he nodded.

  “How?” Jonathon asked.

  “Tattoo,” he answered. “Back of hand. Saw it after he hit the ground.” He shook his head, seeming a little sad. “Bckfire Phoenix. Poor bastard.”

  “The man’s name was Mal—Malcolm DuBois,” Jonathon said. “We ran a search on him after Katherine cleaned up your mess. Survivor of that fucking debacle out East. Real tough guy, but a total mess after—whatever—went down. Professional soldier; mercenary. A man trained to hurt others. And he hurt you, didn’t he, David?”

  David nodded.

  “Yet the next day, you’re running on a treadmill.”

  He stared back at him silently.

  “I think, David, you should come with me. There are a few things you need to see.”

  Curiosity clearly piqued, David nodded and followed the doctor. Carrying a small briefcase, Jonathon led his patient out of his office and down one of the nondescript hallways, past small offices and windows looking out on the green gardens of the clinic. It was another hot day; bees buzzed nguidly among the washed-out colours of flowers and yellowing leaves and the porised gss struggled to repel the heat.

  They stopped at a small elevator, which opened silently at his approach.

  David raised a finely shaped eyebrow. Jonathon tapped his wrist. “Subdermal chip,” he said. “Like your armband.” It was a superfluous security measure – even in the short walk from office to elevator, a half-dozen cameras had tracked their movement, facial recognition software and a host of other sensors confirming his ID beyond the additional data from the chip. There wasn’t any need for anything as crude as eye- and finger-print sensors when the security AI could assess their identity every step they took within the clinic.

  “Where are we headed?” David asked. He sounded curious, but not nervous; Jonathon noted how he seemed to be quietly taking in every detail, assessing his surrounding with an almost absurd confidence.

  “Where the magic happens,” Jonathon answered. “Sub-level 2,” he added, addressing the lift. With an almost imperceptible hum, it shifted into motion, doors closing and pulling both men into the complex infrastructure beneath the Clinic.

  “Last time,” Jonathon said as they traveled, “you might remember I brought you to one of our bs. That was a much more… impromptu affair. Six months ago, Katherine brought you to one of our minor experimental sites: an important Hygeia resort for the clients, but a minor research centre for Asklepios.”

  David’s eyes were fixed on the row of numbers next to the door. “Weren’t you the lead researcher there or something?”

  “Was,” he answered. “My job’s changed somewhat since we first met.”

  The lift hummed to a stop, and the doors opened with a quiet chime. Jonathon led the way through a series of pipe-and-wire lined concrete tunnels, broken by the occasional numbered door. He made a mental note as they passed each door, tracking which ones were in use, and nodding with satisfaction at the sight of his research team at work; there was exciting stuff going on down here. But for the purposes of this visit, there was only one thing that David needed to see.

  They reached a final door, double reinforced heavy steel doors recessed into the wall.

  “Welcome to The Tank,” he announced.

  The door opened like a whisper and the scientist led David into the pce of Cindy’s birth. Jonathon always felt a sense of deep satisfaction—and enduring wonder—every time he entered the Tank.

  They entered a rge vaulting chamber of open mesh metal flooring over exposed wiring and tubing. Poured concrete walls and steel girders delineated the room and cooling pipes and a mess of cabling snaked across the room, connecting improvised control boxes and banks of panels and screens and switches. Hastily assembled, growing almost organically to match the ever-increasing needs of running the Tank, the entire chamber was almost comically shambolic in presentation: except for the Tank itself.

  Raised on a dais at the centre of the room, with a half-dozen cables dropping from the ceiling or winding across the floor to connect to it, sat a cylinder just under three meters in length and another meter in diameter. Thick gss formed a tight seal within the curving frame of solid grey metal, rugged and with massive bolts along its seams. It was filled with an emerald-green fluid, currently quiescent. Even at rest it churned, dull and sluggish in the cylinder, but in Jonathon’s mind he could see it froth and swirl and glow with alien luminosity as it all but obscured the patient within.

  David stood at the threshold, curious but hesitant. They were the only two people in the room, and it annoyed Jonathon that his patient wasn’t more impressed by the sight.

  “What am I looking at?” David asked.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” Jonathon answered. “You spent two weeks in here, David. Some of it conscious, even.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “In there, to be more precise.”

  David took a cautious step forward, mindful of the open mesh floor. His boots rang out against the metal. Clearly, the room hadn’t been designed with female visitors wearing fashionable heels in mind. He pointed at the cylinder. “In… there?”

  Jonathon nodded, struggling to restrain his eagerness. “Yes, yes– in there.” He rushed to it and ran one hand down the curved gss, with the sort of reverence usually reserved for idols or saints. “In here. This, David, is where…. Well, where David ended and Cindy was born.”

  Feeling an immense surge of pride and satisfaction, he gestured for David to come closer, finger twitching with excitement. “This, David, is the future. And you, David, are the living embodiment of that future.”

  Frowning, David approached, daintily stepping between coiling cables. “What, the future is female?”

  Jonathon ughed. “No.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Well, maybe.” He gestured towards a nearby console next to table and a set of cheap pstic chairs. “Probably not. Grab a seat.”   They sat in the shadow of the cylinder under the high arcs of the ceiling disappearing into darkness behind suspended florescent lighting. David sat straight-backed with legs crossed at the ankles opposite the doctor. The transformed man appeared both impatient and apprehensive, as though he already knew he wasn’t going to like what the doctor had to say.

  “What did you call it?” Jonathon started. “Crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit? I’ll concede one of those words: crazy. What we’re doing here is crazy; but it is neither magic nor fiction. What we’re are doing here is nothing less than the achievement of one of humanity’s greatest yearnings since it first looked at the world around it and conceived of Gods to expin that which it could not understand. Do you know what that is, David, what humanity wants more than anything?”

  “Shit, Scooter, I don’t know – sex?”

  Jonathon scowled. “Immortality!”

  David gave a bark of ughter. “Sure. So you’re saying I’m going to live forever?”

  The doctor groaned with exasperation. “For fuck’s sake!” he barked. “Take a look at yourself! You sit there, a nearly forty-year old man in the body a woman half that age, and you ugh?” Jonathon took a deep breath but couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “You sit there the epitome of youthful health and you have the audacity to doubt me?”

  David opened his mouth, closed it, and stayed silent.

  “Did you even once stop and consider the implications of the changes you’ve undergone? Beyond even the near-miraculous healing of the injuries—injuries that should’ve been fatal—that were, in fact, fatal, thank you very much!—but beyond that, the fact that you appear to be, for all intents and purposes, twenty years younger? Just once, can you think beyond your own petty little life and consider what this means—for others, for the world? Do you have any idea how much people would pay—what they would sacrifice—or do—to be twenty years old again?”

  “I didn’t much like being twenty the first time around,” he muttered. “Not so keen on doing it again.”

  Jonathon gred at him. “My entire career, I’ve been working on regenerative medicine, David. Low-key, easily marketable treatments, the kind of procedures the Clinic knew it could sell. De-aging skin, erasing wrinkles, easing the aches and pains of ordinary life. Accelerated recovery from surgery.

  “The ck of vision was excruciating.” Jonathon shook his head. “Better boob jobs in an hour. Growing and attaching a new ear – we’ve been able to grow ears for a decade. But they just wanted to do it better, faster. At most, colleagues might entertain the idea of regenerating a whole limb. But nothing… exciting.” He shook his head. “Nothing that would fundamentally transform the human condition. Oh sure, they’d entertain wild ideas in theory but in practice the work was always mundane, always marketable.

  “The human body is capable of such remarkable recovery, David—but so many species do it better. The hydra, forming a new body when cut in two. The samander, regenerating limbs and organs. Zebrafish. Ftworms. So why not humans?

  “Scooter—”

  Jonathon ignored the interruption. “Stem cells. Bstema. Regenerative –yet still woefully limited, organic systems declining and shutting down with ageing. But why senescence? Why do our cells have to stop dividing and die? Must negative traits accumute and lead to degeneration?” His hands chopped the air with excitement. “So much of life on Earth dodges or deys the deterioration we all suffer: lobsters, trees, cms, sharks – so why not us?”

  David shrugged, and with the voice of someone who did not much care, answered, “Because we’re not fucking ftworms?”   “Exactly!” Jonathon excimed, leaning closer. “We’re not. Yet we share the same genes with species that long outlive us. All the tools needed for a longer life, for regeneration, locked away, here, inside of us, an immense potential denied because millions of years ago it made more evolutionary sense for us to grow old, die, and make room for the young.

  “So why settled for simply healing injury when we might regenerate the entirety of the human body itself? And then, why settle for simple regeneration when we might even halt and reverse the damage and decline of even ageing?” He jabbed one finger at David. “But how to unlock that potential? My life’s work, decades of research!”

  “That’s all really fucking fascinating, Scooter,” David said, keeping a wary eye on the doctor’s thrusting finger. “But can you please get to the point?”

  “We made progress; I made progress; solid if minor, profitable advances that accelerated recovery processes here at Asklepios. But then, nearly two years ago,” Jonathon said, “Katherine led a raid on a NeoPharm bck site, an off-the-books boratory.” His eyes unfocused and his voice grew grave. “Your former employers were engaging in some truly horrific stuff, David. What she found there was… disturbing. Human experimentation. Homeless victims, undocumented workers, the lost and forgotten. Kidnapped, lifted from the streets, migrants and refugees, imprisoned. Then used, subjected to experimental procedures, tests, surgeries.”

  He shook his head. “That’s where she recovered the first generation of those fungal prosthetics you tried out six months ago. It’s also where she salvaged the equipment and research that led to all this.” He took the entirety of the chamber in with a sweep of his hand. “It was a pure luck, she told me, some kind of breakdown in the kill system that prevented it from all being destroyed.

  “And when she showed it to me, I nearly wept, David, like a child.” There were many things that woke Jonathon up at night, panting and in a cold sweat. This was one of them: knowing, that somewhere out there, there was a genius—or many—a team of researchers working at a level so far ahead of his own native intelligence that it humbled him. For decades the Chinese held dominance in fields of biotechnology and artificial intelligence; Koreans in robotics; and then suddenly, out of nowhere—this entire body of regenerative research, forcibly recovered here, at home.

  “They were ahead of us,” he continued, “so far ahead it was as if we’d just discovered fire and they were unching a manned flight to the Moon.”

  David held up one feminine arm, turning it this way and that, showing off the soft and graceful lines of the limb. “Looks to me you did alright,” he said.

  “We’ve come a long way in a short time,” Jonathon said. He felt the long hours, the frantic work, in his bones, those initial exciting days of setting up the salvaged equipment in this makeshift space, hooking it up, writing and modifying the software—deciphering the research, adapting, integrating—and that first, exhirating, horrifying attempt at firing up the first prototype of the Tank.

  It’d been a much smaller unit, then. Just rge enough for a rat. The rat hadn’t survived the process, its death grotesque.

  “Listen, this is all fascinating, Scooter. It really is. But I’ll be honest: I don’t give a shit. I don’t. All of this,” and he waved his arm, bracelets jangling musically in the cavernous space, “all of it, sure, maybe it’ll change humanity. Maybe we’ll all live longer, and better, whether we want to or not. Probably it’ll be the rich who’ll live forever and everyone else just die old, poor and bitter like they always have.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I care about—all I want to know—is how you’re going to make this, and this—” and here, he cupped one tit with one hand, and the second with the other, “go away.

  “Your crazy voodoo science made me into Cindy. Whatever you want to call it, you transformed me—without consent!—into a twenty year-old girl. But that’s not who I am. And now it’s time to turn me back into a man, Scooter. Throw me back into that goddamn tank of yours, flip whatever Frankenstein switches you need, power that shit up, and turn me back into a guy.”

  Jonathon thought for a moment. “Take off your shirt,” he said.

  David raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “Take off your shirt,” he repeated.

  “Jesus, Scooter,” he said. “You are such a perv.” But he did as asked, draping his top over a nearby console and sitting topless in his bra. He shivered, crossing his arms across his chest. “Fuck me, it’s cold down here.”

  Jonathon opened his briefcase and pulled his seat closer so that their knees were nearly touching. He took his patient’s blood pressure, listened to his heart, and confirmed the nurse’s earlier readings. Taking one of David’s arms into his hand, he inspected the limb from nail to neck, fingers paddling from the wrist up to the shoulder. Bemused, David watched in silence.

  Jonaton withdrew a phlebotomy kit from his case. David raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “More?”

  Prepping a swab with alcohol, he nodded.

  David sighed but submitted as the doctor drew several more vials of blood. His fingers remained still as he drew the blood—because he was a professional—but he had to actively suppress the urge to twitch, the rush of excitement as he collected the samples. In his fevered anticipation, the thin crimson vials seemed to glow with the possibility of what they might contain.

  Finishing, Jonathon stood and circled the patient. Sweeping long hair aside, he examined David’s throat, the other arm, and chin. He checked the contusion at the temple, nearly invisible under its covering of makeup.

  Sitting again, he gestured at the man. “Bra.”

  David frowned. “No.”

  Jonathon shrugged. He would check the nurse’s report ter. “How are you feeling?”

  “Uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, yes. Physically?”

  “Uncomfortable.” David reached for his top. “We done here?”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen,” he said. “You ever wear a pair of shorts like this?” He patted one fnk, drawing the doctor’s attention to the pair of high-waisted, faux-leather shorts. “I’m gonna guess ‘no’. They’re tight, Scooter. Really tight. And other than stripping for the nurse an hour ago, I’ve had them on all day. My cock’s strapped so far back I could piss out my ass, and my balls are swimming around somewhere in my belly and I’m fucking exhausted, okay?” He tugged his shirt on over his bra, surreptitiously rearranging his breasts as he did so. “So, yeah, I’m uncomfortable. I’m tired. And frankly, I’m getting angry, here.

  “Great, you’ve shown me your little toy and hey, I’m happy for you. Change humanity! Make a difference. Whatever. But I’m getting sick and tired of waiting. Prep that goddam tank, fire up whatever you’ve got to fire up, and make me a man again!”

  Taking a deep breath, Scooter tried again. “Don’t you find it odd that your injuries from yesterday’s encounter are almost completed healed?” he said. “Soft tissue damage gone, discoloration gone.” He took David’s hand and indicated the nail broken earlier that day. “Did it sting when you broke it?”

  “Honestly?” He shrugged. “I was too angry to notice. Then I popped back into the salon and they gave me something that killed the sting, dissolved the old nail and popped a new one on.”

  “It’s already nearly healed, David.”

  “What are you trying to say, Scooter?”

  Jonathon took a moment to consider how to present this to his patient. Until the blood test results came back, what he was about to say was mostly theory – backed up by his observations and data collected over the past six months, and this encounter. He took a moment to organise his thoughts and consider how to present this to his patient.

  He frowned, and then sighed. “I’ll be honest with you—”

  “It’d be a nice change.”

  “I’ll be honest, David. The Tank,” and here he drew David’s attention to the wonder at the heart of the chamber. “We don’t really understand it. What it does is a miracle, a transformative miracle we barely understand, let alone control. At first, we were running off of the salvage from the raid on Steele’s b. A broken tank, stolen software, and… the Juice.”

  David cocked an eyebrow. “Juice?”   “The fluid that fills the tank,” Jonathon said. “One of the techies called it that, and it stuck,” he added, almost apologetically. “I hate the name. You can imagine the… fun,” and here, he nearly groaned at the implied idiocy of his colleagues, “people had crafting a working acronym out of it. Best they’ve come up with is ‘reJuvenating Ultra-tech Infusion for Cellur Enhancement.” He shook his head in despair. “It’s not even an infusion.”

  “Scooter? I don’t care.”

  Jonathon frowned. “This fluid, it makes the whole process possible. Hell, it is the process, from a certain point of view. Put the subject in the tank, fill it with fluid, and flick a switch and—”

  The Juice. The synthetic medium captured from Steele’s b. It suffused any biological subject immersed in it, infiltrating at a cellur level and remained quiescent until triggered. In unison with the Tank, it could transte precise instructions at a genetic level, setting a desired tempte, flipping gene expression and transforming any number of biological processes.

  Despite their best efforts at filtering and restoring the little they had, they were running low. Every attempt at synthesising their own version had ended in failure.

  “And—magic happens, David,” Jonathon continued. “We tell the body to mend and… cells regenerate, damage heals – even the slow, ordinary damage of normal human aging. And the process can be controlled: adjust the flow of power into the cylinder and the whole process can be directed.

  “But we’re clumsy, David, we’re barely able to adjust things without putting the target at risk. It’s like pying piano with oven gloves on. At the moment, we can only send the crudest of instructions, like hammering those keys with both hands. Regenerate! Rejuvenate! We can send commands but only in the simplest of terms. But we’re learning. One day, we’ll py a person’s genes like a symphony, and create a new kind of music yet unheard by humanity.” Then he smiled ruefully. “But at the moments, our finest adjustments are more like…” he considered for a moment, “I suppose like switching between a sledgehammer and a howitzer for cracking open a nut.

  “Out first attempts were disastrous. Horrifying,” he said, though his voice remained clinical. He could still see the results of those early attempts, the inverted animal carcasses, masses of jutting bones and twisted flesh; the viscous blobs of blood and sinew; warped organs and soups of dissolved tissue and bulbous lumps of tumours. “Trial and error eventually brought some success, and it was only at that point we discovered something… fascinating. But possibly problematic, considering our long-term hopes for the project.

  “Every subject that survived the process was female.

  “Our first assumption was one of selection error. We must have inadvertently picked female subjects for our experiments. But no; a quick check of our records crified we hadn’t. Perhaps something riding on the male chromosome interfered with the process? Or maybe that some of the gene expressions in male subjects were problematic? But no: our next male subject survived the process but emerged female.”

  Jonathon hurried on, seeing the growing anxiety and anger in David’s face. “Of course, what we discovered soon after was that the subject was only exhibiting female characteristics—at a genetic level, it was still XY male. As are you, David. Subjects’ DNA remains untouched by the process. I assure you that you remain 100% male.”

  David scowled at his prominent chest. “I sure don’t feel 100% male,” he growled.

  “If your DNA is the script, then this machine lets us create a new production. Think of… you ever go to the theatre, see a py?”

  He nodded.

  “Take—Romeo and Juliet. Same script, more or less, for the past 500 years. But how many different productions? Medieval, contemporary, sci-fi. Or focused on gender or race, css or politics. A decade ago, it was fashionable to do sex-swapped version, Romeo as a girl.” Jonathon pointed at the feminised man. “That’s you, now. Same ‘David’ script; fashionable production.”

  David raked his fingers through his hair and glowered.

  “What we discovered,” the scientist continued, “was that the regenerative process invariably flipped genetic switches associated with female secondary sexual characteristics. Breast development. Fat distribution. Estrogen production. The subject went through a forced—female—puberty as part of the process. Our current theory is that…”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your theory, doc,” David finally snapped. “And I sure don’t like where this feels like it’s headed.” He held up one slim arm to the lights overhead, as though to see through it, into it. “Am I still filled with this… ‘Juice’?” he asked.

  Jonathon hesitated briefly then nodded. “We have to wait on the blood test results to come back,” and he pointed at the recently taken samples. “But yes, based on the data we’ve collected so far, you’re still infused with it.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  The doctor shrugged. “We don’t know.”

  “Listen, doc…,” voice dropping to a dangerous growl, only slightly undermined by its softer feminine lilt.

  At which point, Jonathon snapped. “No!” he shouted, surging to his feet. “You listen, you ignorant, ungrateful….” Words failed him and he fumbled for an insult to adequately express his anger and frustration. “Peasant!”

  He stalked away from his client, storming towards the Tank on its raised dais. “When I tell you I don’t know,” he called out over his shoulder, “it’s because we don’t have a damn clue how this thing works. We don’t know how it works! We can barely control the damned thing, and even then only in the crudest fashion.” He hopped up onto the raised ptform and passed his hand over the cool dark metal of the cylinder. Briefly, he held back the desire to pound on the heavy gss out of frustration; lost the battle; and punched the gss. His fist smarted. The deep green fluid on the other side of the gss continued to slowly swirl, quiet and potent, unaffected by his anger.

  Jonathon spun to face his patient, still sitting bemused.

  “You shouldn’t even be alive!” Jonathon shouted. “Why are you still alive, David?”

  David watched him from across the chamber. “Because you put me into that thing?”

  But the doctor shook his head. “No. No! You’re the first, David! The first! The first human test subject to come out of here alive—and whole. The first to wake up stable and healthy. The first to leave and carry on living a normal life.”

  David snorted. “I wouldn’t call it normal.”

  The doctor hopped down from the ptform and stormed towards him, jabbing an accusing finger at his patient. “And why? What makes you so fucking special, David? Why did you come out—” and here, he gestured wildly, taking in the entirety of the man’s transformed frame, “—perfect! when every other subject…” and here he faltered, remembering previous attempts; and especially the one kept locked away nearby, “… didn’t.”

  “How the hell should I know, doc?”

  “So when I tell you I don’t know,” Jonathon continued, “believe me, this is an even greater frustration for me than it is for you. But I’ll tell you what we think we know. We believe that the instructions sent into the Tank are locked by the residual Juice still within you. A… tempte, a set of instructions embedded overriding the normal state of affairs and maintaining gene expression, hormone production—everything—to a specific state defined by the initial process.

  “And so long as your body remains suffused with the juice, any attempt at physical change—yes, even masculinisation—won’t work. This, right now,” and he grabbed David by the shoulder, “this body, this is its current desired expression. Young. And female. And any attempt at changing that is at best doomed to failure—at worst, likely fatal. We could cut your breasts off and they would regrow. Pump you full of testosterone and your body would shut down receptors and ignore it. This, right now, is what your body wants to be.”

  The silence that followed was complete. David fell back into his seat, face hidden behind his hair as he stared at the ground for several long minutes. Finally he looked up and a dangerous determination burned in his eyes.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Put me back in there and throw the switch.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do. I understand. And I don’t care. I lived through this once. Maybe I’ll get lucky again. Make me your next human text subject. You said you can send simple commands. So write up something new. A new program, with a simple order: Male. Overwrite the previous tempte.”

  Though at some level tempted, Jonathon shook his head. “It would kill you.”

  David shrugged. Walking past the doctor, heels ringing out against the metal flooring, he and stood looking up at the massive bulk of the Tank. “I’d rather die,” David said, and with a sweeping gesture took in the entirety of his feminine form: the glossy long hair, smooth skin, the makeup and clothes, breasts and heels, his narrowed waist and slender limbs. “I’d rather die than live like this.”

  Jonathon walked up behind him. “You don’t mean that.”

  David didn’t turn, and his face remained hidden, though a shudder passed through his whole body. “I do.”

  And Jonathon believed him. Making his mind up on the spot, he gave a curt nod. “Fine,” he said. “But there’s something you need to see first.”

  Author's Notes

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