Trans-Formed
© 2000 by Stephen Stonewall
Despite the masking icons, I could sense a troubled man when I merged into him on the cyber highway.
My regular cyber companion, Electron's Hell, was clearly not his usual self as we created a sub-world and shared neuron impulses in the middle of the cyber traffic.
"What's up?" I asked him as we finally paused to reconstitute our collective consciousness.
"?"
"Why the glum personality?" I pushed the point, "Is something getting you down, or has your latest personality upgrade relied too heavily on melancholia?"
He seemed surprised that I had noticed the difference. I was momentarily offended that he would have expected any less from such an old friend - what is the world coming to? After all, we had intertwined our consciousness some hundreds of times, so we really knew each other quite...well, intimately.
"It's my work..." he conceded, "It's been getting me down..."
"Tell me about it..." I asked him.
There was a moment's hesitation, and then I felt in him an overwhelming sense of relief that he had finally agreed to unburden himself to another person.
He upgraded our privacy protocols some five levels. Then, he became relaxed enough to talk.
"My work at Genesis On Demand...there's been a complication..." he began with a slight sense of hesitation.
He had previously told me all about his workplace, pretentiously advertised as GOD Inc. It was a standard commercial genetic laboratory, where they spliced DNA, boiled molecular soup, and generally played god with the genetic building blocks of life. Their aim was to create new life forms to suit their customers' wishes.
"What sort of complication?" I asked.
"I...messed up an order last week, while I was creating a new life form for a customer..."
I recoiled in surprise and horror. What had he done? Sent a new type of dinosaur rampaging through the suburbs of his home city? Given a few too many IQ points to a pre-sentient form of organic jelly that had subsequently invaded a food chain and refused to be eaten? Had he accidentally released a deadly new airborne plague into the atmosphere?
He sensed my thoughts and soothed my fears.
"Nothing so drastic...at least, not for other people. But I think I'm going to lose my job when the company finds out what I've done... "You see..." he admitted, "I kind of mucked up a body redesignation job for a customer..."
I knew of the type of work. It was the ultimate in plastic surgery or organ donation. Better than that, it had superseded those outdated modes of surgery because it allowed the doctor to create a new body or body part out of the customer's own genetic material.
"So what happened?" I asked delicately.
"It involved a Epsilonii..." he replied, and this time I was deeply shocked.
Don't get me wrong. I'm no bigot. I have nothing against green creatures with an IQ of 6001 who slurp sulphur fumes and disgorge piles of molten goo. I even intertwine with a few of them regularly on the cyber highway.
But I was shocked because I hadn't realised that Epsiloniis had sufficiently colonised Earth to permit medical interaction of the sort that my cyber friend carried out professionally every day.
"What happened?" I asked him again, realising that my vocabulary had become rather limited.
"It was an unusual request...more than just a body rebuild. You see, he wanted a full trans-species reassignment."
"What do you mean?" I was having difficulty with the concept.
"Exactly what I said. He didn't want me to rebuild his body or make him look like some famous Epsilonii holofiction celebrity. He wanted a full trans-species reassignment - his body changed into a fully functional human body!"
For perhaps the first time in my life since I was plugged into the cyber highway as an embryo, I was shocked into stunned silence. Milliseconds passed.
"...But how...? Why...?" I finally blurted, in a dull tone that resembled a proverbial village idiot.
"How?" he replied, "Easily, with the technology at my disposal. But why...?" he paused momentarily, "Because my customer felt trapped in the wrong body. He wanted to be human...he believed he was a human! So ethically, and financially, I was compelled to give him what he wanted..."
"You turned it into a human?" I gasped, "But isn't that illegal?"
"You don't know the half of it," he replied, "The Ministry of Planetary Migration forbids it on the grounds of racial purity. The Ministry of Health bans it out of fear of alien diseases. The Ministry of Religion bans it as immoral, unnatural and heretical."
"Then how did you get the medical clearance?"
"The Ministry of Economics has power of final say over matters that are...shall we say, financially beneficial to Earth. And this alien was quite rich..."
"But trans-humans are always easily recognisable. It's never quite possible to disguise their lung and chest adaptation from sulphur-to-oxygen breathers. What will happen when this creature is exposed and the crime is traced back to you?"
"You don't understand. The job I did was perfect! Absolute perfection! He looks human, he walks and talks and thinks and feels...and loves...like a human...he's a paragon of physical and intellectual beauty! He'll never be discovered...!"
I could sense his panic levels starting to rise again.
"But I don't understand..." I said slowly, "What's the problem, then?"
"But that's the crime of it..." he wailed, "You see, I've fallen in love with him! I've married one of my customers! There's going to be hell to pay when the boss finds out!"
Cemetery, Sleeping Ground The two men held hands as they stared solemnly at the gravestone.© 2002 by Jack B. Nimble
“Was the funeral sad?” asked Tom.
Ward nodded in reply, and spoke with a soft whisper: “The saddest day of my life.”
Tom smiled tenderly and squeezed his partner’s hand, “I’m sorry.”
Ward tried to return the smile.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said bravely, “It’s over now. It’s time for us to move on.”
Tom nodded in support.
They cast one last look at the gravestone. The name spoke softly back at them: Tom Smedley-Smyth, died 2035 CE as a result of tragic accident. Much loved partner of Ward Smyth-Smedley.
Ward let out a sob and rested his head on Tom’s shoulder. Tom reached up his hand to stroke Ward’s face.
“Come on, Ward, let’s go. I’ve seen enough of my grave.”
Together, they moved away, back towards the gates of the cemetery. As they left, Ward sadly reached up to touch a soft spot near his temple. His subconscious memory activator blinked once and shut down his hallucinatory memory recall. Tom shimmered and then vanished, returning to the sanctity of his widower’s special memories.
(These stories are two of the contributions which originally appeared in "Solar Spectrum #2", published in June 2002 and available for purchase from Spaced Out.)