Chapter 2: The Humiliating Scan
The first thing I felt was cold.
A deep, penetrating cold from the polished lab floor seeping into my skin, my back, my… my ass. The sensation was new—the bones there felt different, sharper against the hard surface, yet padded by a softness that hadn’t been there before. My mind swam up from a black pool, and with consciousness came a catalog of wrongness.
I was curled on my side. The giant flannel shirt was bunched under me, rough against my cheek. I blinked. Long strands of pale hair fell across my field of vision, a shimmering, blonde curtain. I blew at it, a weak puff of air from unfamiliar lungs. It fluttered and settled right back.
“Justin. Can you hear me?”
Mark’s voice was low, close. He was kneeling beside me. From this angle, looking up, he was a mountain. His face was all sharp angles and shadowed concern under the sterile lights.
“I passed out,” I mumbled. My voice. That high, smooth alien thing. It made my own ears ache. “I never pass out.”
“The neuro-shock was substantial,” he said, his tone clinical, but his eyes were darting over me, assessing. “Your brain is reconciling a completely new somatic map. It’s… a lot.” He held up a sleek, gunmetal-gray device, a handheld scanner with a soft blue emitter at its tip. “I need to get a full diagnostic. I need you to sit up.”
I tried. My arms, thin and reedy, pushed against the floor. A stab of weakness shuddered through them. My center of gravity was a lie; it was lower, and further forward. As I shifted, my chest moved. A heavy, loose, swinging movement that made my stomach lurch. I froze, a soft sound catching in my throat.
“Easy,” Mark said. His hand came out, not touching me, just hovering near my shoulder. “Just slow.”
I got myself upright, sitting in the puddle of my old jeans. The shirt hung off one shoulder, gaping open. A draft kissed the top curve of my breast and I slapped a hand over it, my face burning. Mark averted his eyes for a second, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“The clothes are a variable,” he stated, all business again. “The fabric density is interfering with the scan. You need to take them off.”
The words hung in the smoky air. I stared at him. My best friend. My buddy from college. The guy I’d drunk cheap beer with and argued about comic books.
“Mark…”
“It’s a medical scan, Justin.” His voice was firm, leaving no room for argument. It was the voice he used when a prototype was failing and he needed absolute focus. “I am not looking at you. I am looking at the physiological data. I need to see what it did. I need to know if you’re stable, or if we’re facing cellular degradation on top of everything else.”
The fear that injected into me was cold and pure. Cellular degradation. I pictured myself melting into a puddle of biomatter on his lab floor.
Shaking, I moved. My fingers, slender and tipped with neat, oval nails I hadn’t cut, fumbled with the single remaining button on the plaid shirt. It slipped from my grasp twice. Finally, it came undone. I shrugged the heavy fabric off. It slid down my arms with a whisper, catching for a moment on the new, prominent rise of my hips before falling away.
The lab air was seventy degrees, but it felt Arctic. It touched every inch of me. My skin erupted in goosebumps, a whole-body shiver that made the new weight on my chest tremble distinctly. I couldn’t look down. I kept my eyes locked on a blackened spot on the far wall.
“The jeans too,” Mark said, his voice tighter now.
I hooked my thumbs into the denim waistband, which was coiled around my upper thighs. My old boots were still on my feet, cavernous and ridiculous. I had to wiggle, a humiliating, awkward squirm, to work the heavy material down over my hips. The sensation of the rough denim dragging over the new, sensitive skin of my stomach, my thighs, was unbearably intimate. It caught on the curve of my buttocks—a curve that now felt expansive, pronounced—and then finally released, pooling around my ankles with my boxers inside.
I sat there, naked but for the gigantic boots, in the middle of the disaster zone. The silence was broken only by the faint tink-tink of cooling metal from the dead machine.
“Alright,” Mark breathed. I heard the scanner hum to life. “Just stay still.”
The blue light passed over me. It was a cold tickle on my skin. He started at my head, the emitter moving in slow, precise lines. I saw his eyes on the scanner’s small readout, not on me. The clinical distance was the only thing keeping me from screaming.
“Cranial structure… completely reformed. Dentition perfect. Optical function optimal.” He moved down. The light hovered over my chest. I stopped breathing. “Thoracic cage… significantly reduced. Organ placement… female typical. Mammary tissue…” He paused. “Dense. Healthy. Approximately a 32E.”
A number. A letter. They meant nothing and everything.
The light moved down my stomach, which was flat, but with a soft, subtle give that my old rigid core never had. Over my hips. “Pelvic girdle… unmistakably female. Wider iliac crest. Internal reproductive structures appear fully formed and… functional.”
Functional. The word was a punch to a gut I no longer possessed.
He reached my legs, which looked absurdly long and slender attached to this tiny torso, and finally, the boots. “You need to remove those. They’re blocking the scan of your lower extremities.”
Tears of pure frustration welled in my eyes. I bent forward. The motion made my breasts press together and against my thighs. The feeling was so profoundly other that I gagged. I yanked at the boot laces, my new fingers clumsy. I got them off, peeling away the huge socks. My feet emerged. They were narrow, high-arched, with pink, perfect toes. They looked like they belonged to a doll.
The scanner passed over them. “Metatarsals shortened. Overall skeletal reduction is… precise.” He finished the sweep and stood up, looking at the compiled data on the device’s screen. His face was grim, unreadable.
“Well?” My voice was a cracked whisper. “Can you fix it?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He walked to a clean section of workbench, pulled out a metal tape measure, and walked back. “I need full metrics. For the record. And for… for anything else.”
He wasn’t asking. He moved behind me. I felt the cold metal touch the top of my skull. He pulled it down my back. “Height: Five feet exactly.” The number landed like a sentence.
He came around in front of me, his expression impassive. “Arms out.”
I lifted my arms, horribly aware of the trembling in them, of the exposed, vulnerable hollows of my armpits, of the way everything shifted and settled with the movement. He looped the tape around my chest, just under the arms. His fingers brushed the sides of my breasts. I flinched. He didn’t. “Thirty-two inches.” Then he placed it around the fullest part. The tape dug in slightly, conforming to the soft, heavy shape. “Thirty-eight. That confirms the E cup.”
He dropped to one knee in front of me. I stared at the top of his head, my face on fire. The tape went around my waist, pulled snug. “Twenty-two inches.” His hands were steady, efficient. He moved it to my hips, at their widest point. “Thirty-eight.”
Finally, he measured my bare foot. “Size five.”
He stood, writing the numbers on a scorched notepad. “Estimated weight, eighty-five pounds. A perfectly balanced, if exceptionally slender, female form. Every reading is vitally optimal. You are, biologically, a healthy nineteen-year-old woman.”
The finality of it crashed over me. The data was a wall. There was no flaw, no error in the transformation to exploit. It wasn’t a sick body. It was a finished one.
“The machine used the last stored template,” Mark said, almost to himself. “Aesthetic optimization protocol. I was using it to refine sculptural composites for a project. It wasn't meant for… It must have defaulted to the most complete, ‘idealized’ form in its buffer.”
“Idealized,” I echoed. The word tasted like ash.
My legs gave out. Not a faint this time, just a total failure of will. I sank to the floor, the cold once again biting into my naked skin. The sensations were a torrent: the ache in my lower back from the new posture, the constant, gentle pull of gravity on my chest, the terrifying, empty feeling between my legs, the sheer, overwhelming lightness of my own bones. I was a ghost trapped in a living doll.
Mark stood over me, the scanner and notepad in his hands, a giant surveying the ruin of his friend. The lab lights reflected in his eyes, hiding whatever was churning behind them. He had all the data now. Every intimate, brutal measurement.
And the machine to change me back was a melted husk, still smoking quietly in the corner.