Chapter 2: The First Look
The smoke tasted like melted plastic and failure. Mark stood with the heavy fire extinguisher dangling from his hand, white powder dusting his shoes and the base of the unit, which now hissed faintly. His eyes were fixed on me, wide and unblinking, as if I were a ghost that had walked straight out of his worst nightmare.
Or, I realized with a sickening lurch, his wildest fantasy.
“Talk to me, Justin.” His voice was low, controlled, but it frayed at the edges. “Do you feel pain anywhere? Nausea? Dizziness that isn’t just… psychological?”
I tried to square my shoulders, a gesture that used to feel confident. Now, it just made my shoulder blades pinch together strangely and caused a shift in the weight on my chest that made me gasp. The sensation was alarming, a deep, internal movement followed by a soft, lingering oscillation against the inside of my gigantic shirt. “I feel… wrong,” I said, the high, clear sound of my own voice still a shock. “Everything is the wrong size. The air is different. I’m cold.”
“Your basal metabolism has likely increased,” he said, already shifting back into scientist mode. It was his refuge. He set the extinguisher down with a clunk and went back to the primary console, his fingers flying. “The new cellular structure is burning energy at a younger, more efficient rate. The clothes aren’t helping.”
He gestured vaguely at me, still swallowed by the fabric of my old life. My t-shirt’s collar was so wide it kept slipping off one shoulder, exposing a sharp collarbone and the smooth curve where my new neck met… everything else. My jeans were a joke, held up only by the clenched fist I had around the bunched waistband at my hip.
“I need a full-spectrum bioscan. Now.” He didn’t look at me as he said it. “The initial flash-read was superficial. I have to check for internal coherence, organ alignment, neural pathway integration. We have to make sure you’re… stable.”
“Stable.” I barked a laugh, and it came out as a hiccuping, girlish sound. “I’m a foot shorter and missing my dick, Mark. Define stable.”
He flinched. “I mean alive. And not about to degenerate into a puddle of undifferentiated cells. The scan requires direct skin contact. No non-organic interference.” He finally turned, and his gaze was professional, forced, landing somewhere on my chin. “You have to take the clothes off.”
The air in the lab, already thick with smoke and ozone, became heavier. The hum of the machines seemed to amplify. I just stood there, my small hand clenched in the denim, the other unconsciously pulling the shirt collar back onto my shoulder. It immediately slipped off again.
This was Mark. My best friend. We’d shared apartments, gotten drunk on cheap beer, seen each other through bad breakups and worse coding projects. I’d seen him in his boxers a thousand times.
But I wasn’t Justin-in-boxers anymore. I was… this.
“It’s me,” I said, but the voice undermined the statement completely.
“I know,” he whispered, and for a second his mask cracked, revealing a depth of anguish that startled me. “Which is why I need to know you’re okay in there. Please.”
The ‘please’ did it. It was so un-Mark-like, so nakedly scared.
My fingers felt numb and clumsy. I let go of the jeans and they immediately sagged, the coarse denim scraping down my hips, catching for a moment on the pronounced swell of them before dropping in a heap around my ankles. The cool lab air hit my legs, my thighs. I looked down. My legs were slender, pale, almost gleaming under the sterile lights. They curved in ways that were entirely foreign, tapering to ankles that looked breakably delicate.
I had to step out of the jeans and the puddled fabric of my boxers. My old sneakers were already off. My feet, now bare, looked ridiculously small on the dark gray floor. Size five, maybe. They were narrow, with high arches and neatly aligned toes. I had never noticed feet before in my life. Now I couldn’t stop staring at my own.
Swallowing hard, I gripped the hem of the t-shirt. It was faded black cotton, a logo for a band we’d seen a decade ago. I pulled it over my head.
The movement was trapped in the fabric for a second, and I felt my new hair—long, thick, and startlingly heavy—tumble free down my back. The sensation was a cascade of subtle tickles along my spine and shoulders. I stood there, the shirt in my hands, completely exposed.
The cold wasn’t just on my skin now; it was in my bones. I was trembling. I could feel every breath I took as a distinct, expansive motion in my chest. The air touched parts of me that had never felt air before. My skin was everywhere, a map of hypersensitive new territory.
I didn’t want to look, but my eyes were dragged downward.
My chest rose and fell in shallow, quick rhythms. The sight was disorienting, a surreal sculpture attached to me. They were full and high, with pale, pink nipples tightened from the chill. They seemed to obey a different gravity, a gentle, pendulant weight that shifted subtly with every tremor. I’d seen breasts before, of course, but understanding them as a visual object was a universe away from housing them. They were mine, and they were utterly alien.
My stomach was flat, concave even, dipping in sharply beneath my ribcage before flaring out again into the sudden, dramatic curve of my hips. My waist felt impossibly small, a constricted band I could have spanned with my hands. My hands were spanning it, I realized, my fingers pressing into the soft flesh above my hip bones.
And lower.
The thatch of coarse hair I was used to was gone. The landscape was bare, shaved smooth, revealing the vulnerable, simplified anatomy beneath. A neat, vertical seam nestled between the wide, subtle sweep of my hips. I felt a deep, internal clench, a muscle memory that had no corresponding physical memory. It was an empty, open feeling. A missing piece.
“Christ, Justin,” Mark breathed. The clinical distance was gone from his voice.
My head snapped up. He was staring, his scientific pretense evaporated. His gaze wasn’t lewd. It was stunned, travelling over my form with a kind of devastating, comprehensive assessment. He saw the engineering masterpiece his machine had created, and the human wreckage it had caused.
“Just run the scan,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. The action pushed my breasts together, creating a deep cleavage I felt more than saw, and did nothing to combat the chill. My thin arms provided no real cover.
He jerked into motion, snatching up a handheld wand connected to the main console. “Stand on the marker,” he instructed, his voice tight.
A blue circle of light illuminated the floor a few feet away. I walked toward it, and the experience was a revelation in imbalance. My center of gravity was lower, in my hips. Each step sent a tiny, jostling wave through my chest and a different, softer sway in my rear. I was aware of my backside in a way I had never been, a presence that had its own separate momentum. I stepped onto the circle.
A ring of light rose from the floor, passing up my body from toes to head. It was warm, tingling.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, staring at the main holoscreen. A 3D rendering of my body spun slowly. It was ludicrously detailed, showing skeletal structure, musculature, a shimmering outline of organs.
I saw the numbers populate on the side. He read them aloud, tonelessly.
“Height: Five feet even. Weight: Eighty-seven point four pounds. Skeletal density: within healthy female parameters. Adipose distribution…” he trailed off, then cleared his throat. “Female-typical. Musculature: significantly reduced lean mass from previous baseline. Cardiac, pulmonary, renal… all optimal. Reproductive system…” He stopped again, his jaw working. “Fully developed. Ovaries appear active. Healthy. Fertile.”
The word hung in the air like the smoke. Fertile. My knees felt weak.
The scan completed. The ring of light vanished. I stood there, shivering violently now, utterly exposed in every conceivable way.
Mark put the wand down slowly. He ran both hands over his face, then let them drop to his sides. His shoulders slumped. “You’re perfectly healthy,” he said. “A perfectly healthy nineteen-year-old woman.” He looked at me, and his eyes were hollow. “Your mind is the only thing I didn’t scan for. I don’t have a baseline for that.”
“It’s me,” I said again, helplessly. “It’s still me in here.”
“I know.” He let out a long, shaky breath. Then he moved, walking not to me, but to a sleek cabinet on the far wall. He keyed in a code and pulled out a large, folded item. A thick, plush towel. He approached me slowly, as one might approach a spooked animal, and held it out.
I took it. The terrycloth was blessedly soft and warm. I unfolded it and wrapped it around myself, tucking the corner in above my chest. It swallowed me, too, but in a comforting way. The softness against my new skin was almost overwhelming.
“I’ll find you some clothes,” he said, already turning away, his back rigid. “Something that fits. Then we’ll figure out what the hell we do next.”