Chapter 1: The Device and the Swap
The crunch of gravel under tires was an event out here. I paused the Twilight Zone episode—some guy looking terrified into a mirror—and went to the window. Andrea’s little blue hatchback was kicking up dust down my long driveway. Good. I’d texted her about the find, and she’d promised to come see it, said she needed a break from the city.
I watched her pull up and kill the engine. She popped out, all sharp angles and confidence, grabbing her overnight bag from the back. Then the passenger door opened.
Jen.
Jen Mooers emerged slowly, like she was afraid the ground might give way. She had a simple duffel bag clutched to her chest. I felt a mild, familiar surprise. Andrea hadn’t mentioned bringing her. Not a problem, just… Jen was so quiet. The kind of quiet that made my own social clumsiness feel louder. Still, she was Andrea’s friend, which made her okay by default.
I opened the heavy front door before they could knock, the cool air of the house rushing out to meet the late afternoon heat.
“Hey,” I said, nodding at Andrea, then offering a smaller smile to Jen. “Hey, Jen. Didn’t know you were coming.”
“Last-minute thing,” Andrea said, breezing past me and dropping her bag with a thud. She looked around my living room, her smirk firmly in place. “God, Justin. It smells like old paper and optimism in here. And is that… gourmet popcorn?”
“Truffle salt,” I said, shutting the door. Jen was still hovering on the threshold, her wide hazel eyes taking in the shelves, the posters, the glowing console lights of various repaired gadgets. “You can come in, it’s not gonna bite.”
“Sorry,” she murmured, gliding in. She moved like a ghost, barely making a sound. She was wearing a dress that seemed both too plain and somehow too… much. It hugged her curves in a way that was hard not to notice, the neckline dipping just enough to suggest the swell of her breasts. I looked away, back to the safer territory of Andrea’s knowing grin.
“So, show us this world-changing artifact,” Andrea demanded, plopping onto my sofa and stealing a handful of my popcorn. “Or is it just another broken Speak & Spell you found in a ditch?”
“It is not a Speak & Spell,” I said, feigning offense. I went to the locked display case beside the main bookshelf. Inside, on a velvet pad, sat the Device. It was the size of a hardback book, rectangular, made of a dull grey metal that didn’t seem to reflect light so much as swallow it. One side was smooth, featureless. The other had a single, glass-coated button and a small, dark screen that currently showed nothing. “Found it half-buried near the east creek. No markings. No seams. Power source unknown. Composition unknown. It’s completely inert, but the materials… they’re not from around here.”
Andrea leaned forward, her playful skepticism giving way to genuine curiosity. “Weird. Looks like a prop from a cheap sci-fi movie.”
“That’s what I thought. But it’s… heavy. Dense.” I unlocked the case and carefully lifted it out. It was cool in my hands, a solid, reassuring weight. “And it does this sometimes.”
I carried it to the coffee table and set it down. As if sensing proximity, the dark screen fizzed to life. Symbols flickered across it—sharp, angular glyphs in a violent shade of electric blue. They meant nothing to me, but they pulsed with a quiet, innate power.
“Whoa,” Jen breathed. She had crept closer, standing just behind the sofa. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, her full lips parted slightly.
“See?” I said, a burst of pride warming my chest. “It’s something.”
Andrea reached out and poked it with a fingernail. “Does it do anything? Or is it just a fancy paperweight that glows?”
“I haven’t figured out how to interface with it yet. The button doesn’t depress. The surface doesn’t respond to touch. It’s a puzzle.”
“A puzzle,” Andrea echoed. She stood up and started circling the table, studying the Device from all angles. Then her eyes, sharp and mischievous, landed on a separate, smaller object I’d left beside my reading chair. It was a remote-like thing, connected to the main Device by a thin, hair-like filament of the same strange metal. I’d postulated it was some kind of control unit or diagnostic tool.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oh, that came with it. Seems like a peripheral. Doesn’t do anything either.”
Before I could stop her, she’d swooped over and snatched it up. It fit in her hand like a TV remote. She aimed it at the main Device on the table and shrugged. “Maybe you need to point and click.” She jabbed her thumb at the single button on its surface.
Nothing happened.
“Told you,” I said, a little relieved.
Andrea sighed, a melodramatic sound. “Boring.” She waved the remote around absently. Her gaze flicked from me to Jen, who was still staring, captivated, at the glowing symbols. A wicked grin spread across Andrea’s face. “Maybe it’s not for the box. Maybe it’s for people. You ever see that old movie? The Monkey’s Paw? You point it and make a wish.” She swung the remote to point directly at my chest. “I wish Justin would finally get a fashion sense.”
She clicked the button again.
A low hum filled the room, vibrating up from the floorboards into the soles of my feet. The main Device on the table blazed, the blue symbols flooding the room with a cold, actinic light.
Then the world dissolved.
It wasn’t pain. It was a total, catastrophic sense of displacement. My vision swam, not with spots, but with a nauseating kaleidoscope of overlapping images—my living room, Jen’s terrified face, Andrea’s shocked one, all seen from three different heights at once. My hearing compressed and stretched, Andrea’s “What the hell?!” sounding both miles away and inside my skull.
The physical sensation was overwhelming. It felt like being yanked through a keyhole made of molten taffy. Every particle of me was scrambled, pulled apart, and shoved into a container that was all wrong.
With a soundless snap, it stopped.
I was on my knees on the hardwood floor. Gasping. The world had resolved, but it was different. My perspective was all off. I was lower to the ground. The coffee table loomed like a piece of furniture from a giant’s house. My own body—my tall, familiar, lanky frame—was kneeling a few feet away, staring back at me with my own blue eyes wide with panic behind my glasses.
No. Not with panic. With a kind of breathless, stunned… thrill.
I looked down.
Small, pale hands were splayed on the floor. Delicate wrists. A swath of soft, chestnut hair fell around my shoulders, smelling of coconut and something floral. My throat felt tight, constricted. A jolt of wrongness lanced through me, a primal, dizzying shock.
I pushed myself up. The movement was alien. My center of gravity was lower, centered in my hips instead of my chest. There was a heavy, soft weight on my chest, pulling forward. I looked down again and saw the swell of breasts straining against the fabric of Jen’s dress. 36DDD. The words popped into my head, clinical and horrifying. They jiggled, a slight, unsettling bounce with even the tiny motion of straightening up. I could feel the strap of a bra digging into my shoulders, the lace of it against my skin.
“Holy shit,” a voice said. It was high, soft, feminine. It was my voice. Coming from my mouth.
I clapped a hand over it. The lips under my fingers were full, soft. My jaw was smaller. My tongue felt different against my teeth. “What…” The word came out a squeak. Higher. Definitely higher.
Across from me, my body—Justin’s body—stood up in a clumsy, uncoordinated lurch. It—she—looked down at the long-fingered hands, patted the flat, hard chest, touched the scruffy blonde beard. A slow, disbelieving smile spread across my face. A smile I’d never worn.
“Justin?” Andrea breathed. She was backed against the sofa, the remote dangling from her limp fingers. Her eyes were darting between us, the reality dawning, wiping all the humor from her face. “Jen?”
“I’m… I’m in here,” the voice from my body said. It was Jen’s cadence, her soft inflection, but filtered through my vocal cords. It sounded utterly bizarre. She—Jen-in-me—looked at her hands again, then down the length of my torso, to my legs. A blush crept up the neck of my body. “Oh, my God.”
I tried to take a step and almost toppled. My feet. They were tiny, encased in strappy sandals. The arch was all wrong. The balance was off. I stumbled toward the large mirror hanging on my wall, my new hips swaying in an unfamiliar rhythm. Each step sent a new shock through me—the brush of my own thick thighs against each other, the shift of weight on my pelvis, the faint, constant awareness of… absence. A new, hairless configuration between my legs that felt terrifyingly vulnerable and utterly, profoundly strange.
I reached the mirror and froze.
Jen Mooers stared back at me.
Her face was pale with shock, eyes wide. My consciousness was staring out through her hazel eyes. I saw the subtle sprinkle of freckles across her nose I’d never noticed before. The perfect bow of her upper lip. She was devastatingly beautiful, and I was trapped inside her.
I watched the reflection’s hand—my hand—slowly rise and touch the curve of the jaw. The skin was impossibly smooth. I turned slightly, saw the way the dress clung to the generous curve of her hip, the small of her back. I was inside a work of art, and it felt like a prison.
“This is not possible,” I whispered. The Jen-reflection mouthed the words.
Behind me, I heard an odd, stifled sound. I turned.
Jen-in-my-body was watching me. Herself. Her expression was a turbulent mix of terror, awe, and something else… something heated and private. She was looking at her own body with a kind of possessive wonder. She took a stumbling step forward, my long legs covering the distance easily.
“Are you…” she started, then swallowed, my Adam’s apple bobbing. “Are you okay? In… there?”
The concern in her voice was genuine, but it was undercut by the dizzying wrongness of hearing it come from me. My own face was looking at me with a tenderness I’d never shown anyone.
A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my new throat. It came out as a light, almost giggly sound. “Okay? I’m five-foot-four. I have… hair.” I ran a hand through it, the long strands slipping like silk through my fingers. “Everything… bounces. I can feel my own heartbeat in places I shouldn’t have.” The words were tumbling out, fueled by a rising panic. “My center of gravity is in my ass. My ass, Jen!”
Andrea found her voice then. The shock was receding, replaced by her innate, chaotic adaptability. “Well,” she said, her voice trembling slightly with the sheer enormity of it. “On the bright side, Justin… you’re finally hot.”