Numeric ID: 11
Date Received: 19 APR 2000
Revised: 5 JUL 2000
Idea From: Ellen
Written By: Ellen
Email To: /dev/null

     The knock at the door proved to be Jim, who looked almost as
relieved as I felt.  "He's gone, thank God," he said as he came in and
shut the door.
     "Thank God," I echoed.  "I'm starving, though."
     Jim looked around, blowing the air out, and then looked back at me.
"I don't feel like cooking anything right now.  Want to go out to eat?"
     "Do I have to do it as Stephanie?" I kidded him.
     He laughed.  "I don't give a shit if you go out like Bozo the
Clown, Brad.  Whatever you want.  Just make it quick, I'm hungry.  Oh,
and I gotta call Steve," he said, smiling at the thought.
     That was all I was going to get out of him for a while, I thought,
so I returned to my room, which smelled a little funny and felt somehow
cold and abandoned.  I almost laughed as I pulled off the robe and
nightgown, and I was fumbling with the bra when Jim knocked on the door.
     "Hey, Steve wants to see you like Stephanie," he called through the
door.
     "Well, fuck him!" I shouted back.
     Jim laughed and laughed for a long time, but I still hadn't gotten
the stupid bra off when he knocked again.  "Come on, Brad, please?"
     "Whyyyy?" I whined.
     "He just does.  Come on, please?  For me?"
     To make a long bargaining session short, the next time I had a hot
dinner date it was going to be at a very nice restaurant on his credit
card; and I had to let Jim re-do me as Stephanie again.  But this was
the LAST time.  I made sure he was clear on that last part.
     This time, I let him do most of the work.  I felt a little weird
about putting on girl's clothes in front of him, but that went away
after a while.  It really wasn't any different than changing in front of
him in the dorm room, and I'd gotten over being shy about that after the
first few months.  Like, March.
     Steve came in eventually and watched for a while, too.  Jim did
whatever it was on my hair, and we both had to work on my makeup, since
I could not let him get near my eyes with the brushes.  Eventually,
though, we got done, and Jim stood me up in front of Steve.
     "Whoa," he said, sounding impressed.
     "And aren't we just the perfect couple?" Jim said, and put his arm
around my waist and pulled me close.  I smiled and tried not to get
dizzy.  Which is why I didn't notice the camera until the first flash
blinded me.
     "You FUCKER!" I shrieked at him, and tried to duck or hide my face
or something, but Jim was holding me in place until Steve snapped off
two more frames.
     I was gonna say to hell with it and go take a shower and wash all
the shit off, but Jim picked me up and shook me until he'd changed my
attitude.  When he got done, I would have agreed to anything to stop the
nauseating movement.  Which is how Steve finished the roll of film.
     Eventually, we all walked out to the car.  I was feeling better
than the last time I'd done this, and so I was more worried about it,
but it was close to lunchtime and there wasn't anyone outside.  We got
into Jim's car, and off we went.
     The two of them figured out where to go; I didn't care, I just
wanted to eat something.  Preferably a lot of something.  We ended up at
Landry's, which promised seafood.  That was more than fine with me.  I
was starving!
     It took me a long time, relatively speaking, to dissuade myself
from having two lunches, but I finally decided on a small steak and a
large lobster.  I finished those about the same time the two of them
finished their much smaller portions.  "Jesus," remarked Steve, "aren't
you feeding her?"
     "Oh, I guess I forgot to refill her bowl," Jim said, and ruffled my
hair.  I protested, and he stopped, I guess when he remembered which one
of us was going to have to brush my hair again if it got messed up.
     "I'm still kind of hungry," I mentioned apologetically, and that
really caught their attention.
     "How can you be hungry after that?" Jim asked, pointing at my
plate.  I had, just barely, managed to avoid wiping it with bread, but
everything edible was gone.
     "I dunno," I admitted, "but I am."
     They both rolled their eyes, but I got a piece of pie a la mode,
which went down the same way.  Then, thank goodness, I was full.  Full
enough that I could barely move.  I swore my stomach was bulging as they
helped me outside.
     I slept in the car on the way home, and I barely remember the two
of them stuffing me in my own bed before going off to celebrate their
reunion in Jim's.
     I don't really remember anything coherent of the next week or so,
except pulling all the clothes and stuff off at one point, and stuffing
it in a laundry basket for return to whoever had lent it to us.  I had
my own bathroom, and I guess Jim saw or heard enough of me after that to
be reassured that I wasn't dead.  There's also vague memories of waking
up starving, and then just playing refrigerator lottery until I was
full.  That's not healthy in a house full of guys, by the way.
     Jim, meanwhile, was so involved with studying and reuniting with
Steve - apparently, one night wasn't enough for either of them - that he
barely worried about me, especially since food kept disappearing out of
the refrigerator and I kept using the bathroom.  And whenever he came
in, he says, I'd wake up enough to curse at him.  I would call him a
liar, but Steve and a couple of other people backed up his story.
     Anyway, it was Saturday morning - a week and a half later - when I
rejoined the ranks of the living, or the conscious.  I guessed what day
it was because I heard cartoons outside in the living room.  I still
felt like shit; I already had a headache and muscle pains all over.  I
went to the bathroom, sitting down in case I got dizzy, and spent the
time drinking water and stuffing pills down my face.  I wasn't hungry so
much any more, but I was incredibly thirsty.  And, I kept pissing and
pissing.  I sort of wondered if I'd ripped a pipe and it was just going
in one end and out the other, but eventually I stopped pissing before I
got done drinking, so I figured not.
     When all that was done with, I decided to go outside and say hi to
Jim, since I had this vague sense that it had been a long time.  When I
stood up to pull my underwear back up, though, I noticed that the T
shirt I was wearing was one of those long ones like girls wear to sleep
in sometimes, because it kept getting in my way.  And I had breasts
again, which I did not find amusing.  "Oh, ha ha," I said to myself.
Obviously, Jim and/or some of his friends had snuck in and re-done the
Stephanie thing as a joke.  I didn't think it was that funny; in fact,
it sort of creeped me out.
     So when I finally got my underwear up, I stomped out of the
bathroom and out of my bedroom.  "Hey!" I snapped at the guys on the
couch.  I had to hold on to a table, but that didn't make me feel any
better about things.  Or any less angry.
     They looked over at me and started to say something nice, but I
wasn't feeling nice, so I interrupted them.  "I know you think that
'Stephanie' thing is funny, but this is going too far, okay?"
     Jim looked at me quizzically, while Steve just looked at me.  "What
the hell are you talking about, Brad?" Jim asked.
     "The boobs?  The shirt?" I pointed out, and shook the tail of the
shirt, which was long enough to cover my underwear.  Unfortunately,
shaking it dislodged the briefs, which slid down my legs almost
instantly.  "Shit!  Did you switch my underwear too?" I snapped as I
bent over to pull them up again.
     I don't know what Jim was going to say, because Steve said in this
real innocent tone, "Brad, weren't you taller than that?"
     "What?" I snapped at him, because my head hurt and I felt really
picked on, like 'Why are they doing this shit to me?'
     Jim caught his thought, though, because he jumped over the couch in
one bound and had grabbed me by the arms.  I was going to say something
REALLY nasty when he did that, but the expression on his face stopped
me.  I don't think I'd ever seen anyone that frightened in real life
before.
     Then he was yanking the T shirt up and off, and then I was naked,
before I understood what he was doing.  "What the-"
     "Holy mother," Steve said in this faint voice.  And he was looking
at me.
     And I had no clue, none at all.  "What!?"
     Jim cleared his throat, and then said, "Brad?  Look down."
     "What-"  But I looked down.
     No bra.  Those lumps were growing out of MY chest.
     I wanted to scream some more, but part of my brain had a different
idea, and I passed out.

     The next parts, I only heard about, because I was unconscious the
whole time.  I guess that was probably for the best.
     As I fainted, Jim caught me, and they put me out on the floor.
They got a tape measure, and I was four inches shorter than my driver's
license said I had been.  Then the ambulance got there, and I was off to
the hospital.
     The hospital had a problem believing them, because people don't
just start shrinking and growing breasts.  That lasted until a piece of
flesh fell off, and they traced it to my penis, which looked like it was
peeling.  Except the chunks were WAY too big for a sunburn or anything
like that.
     That got me stuck in an isolation ward, and Jim and Steve run
through the decontamination routine and stuck in another one.  Jim said
he felt glad that a male doctor had been in the room when 'it' fell off,
because anything that could cause parts of a penis to fall off scared
the hell out of both of them, more so than the changes they had already
seen.
     Some basic tests showed that I was fevered, dehydrated, seriously
malnourished, and not quite the same person I'd been earlier.  I was
also having high blood pressure and a really fast and weak heart rate,
which was not good.
     Examination of my bedroom in our apartment - by guys in hazmat
suits; I'm sure this amused the neighbors - showed that the bed was
literally covered in, and surrounded by, skin I had sloughed off.
Examination of my bowels and urine showed that I was literally pissing
myself away; they were finding things like protein and calcium and
phosphorous and other things, in amounts that you just did not find a
body dumping.  I seemed to be disintegrating.
     The three of us got flown to Fort Dietrich the next day, and dumped
in the hot ward hospital of USAMRIID.  That's where they deal with
things like Ebola and Four Corners Virus and stuff like that.  I was
considered a deadly biohazard, myself, and Jim and Steve were only a
little better off.
     The CDC, meanwhile, spent quite some time interviewing our friends
and families and testing the hell out of them.  This REALLY didn't amuse
Jim's dad, especially when his son's homosexuality not only came out but
was put down in the official literature.  Of course, all his yelling and
screaming was toned down a little by the fact that they almost turned
him inside out in the testing.  He was, of course, one of the last
people to see me before I started mutating.  He wanted to kill me too,
but they wouldn't let him, first of all - I was too valuable as a
research subject - and they told him that all the blood might give it to
him, they weren't sure.
     After a lot of phone calls, Jim was allowed to make the rest of his
classes 'incomplete' instead of flunking them.  He'd have to take the
finals when he got out, but for some reason none of the professors
wanted to come by Andromeda General to quiz him.  Especially when they
heard about what their colleagues, the ones Jim had taken the finals
for, had been going through.  The CDC was more than thorough.
     I kept getting smaller, as my bones restructured themselves.  My
skin kept coming off, too; they had to restrain my hands, because I was
scratching myself so much, but then they had to come in with brushes and
do it to me themselves.  I got rashes and stuff if they didn't.  It was
coming off almost in buckets, and in clots instead of sheets like a
sunburn.
     My penis went with the skin, in little chunks; it took them a while
to notice that I was starting to 'bulge' at the wrong place down there,
and then they kept a watch on it.
     One day, some male doctor was poking and prodding at the area, and
it split open, like a budding flower, and ended up looking a few moments
later like a fairly normal female vaginal opening.  The doctor passed
out, and broke the seals on his suit when he collapsed on the floor.
The rest of the staff thought he'd 'gotten it' and went crazy.  He was
not a happy camper when he woke up, because they were running every
single test they could think of on him, and he was strapped down to a
bed in the hot ward in the room next to mine.
     After two months, Jim and Steve were let out, because they didn't
show any of the symptoms I did.  I was still only intermittently
conscious, and they kept me sedated anyway, to keep me from freaking.
Apparently, people do that sometimes in the isolation wards.  The doctor
in the next ward seemed to be trying hard to go insane, anyway.
     When he got out, Jim studied and took his finals, and passed with
B's. Amazingly, he and Steve didn't break up because of the whole thing.
Jim's dad was still ready to shit bricks, but apparently Jim's mother
'convinced' dear old Dad that his son was the important thing.  I bet it
had something to do with threats of more tests, but I can't prove that.
And, both of them still had penises, which I'm almost certain had
something to do with his acceptance.
     Near the end of the summer, they thought they had isolated the
organism that had caused me to start mutating.  They didn't call it
'mutating' of course; that would have been understandable to laymen.  It
was a HUGE bacterium, and it had a set of human DNA in it.  Eventually,
they figured out that the extra DNA was from one of my own sperm cells.
Don't ask me how they figured this out; I'm not a microbiology major.
     Anyway, said bacterium was not only replicating itself but spitting
out viruses loaded with copies of this DNA, and they were invading every
single cell of my body and either changing it before causing it to
divide once, or killing it; one or the other.  The doctors figured out,
with some isotope studies, that it was re-doing my entire body, one cell
at a time.  Well, millions of cells every second, but they were all
being replaced.  Even the nerve and muscle cells, which should not have
been able to grow again. Everything.
     They cultured the apartment, Jim, Steve, Jim's dad, my family, our
friends, our teachers, our neighbors, the deli Steve worked at, and
everyone else they could find, and every place I had been for a month
beforehand, and this bacterium was not there.  They couldn't find it in
nature, at all.  I was the only source for it.

     When they had gotten too many questions from people, they passed it
off as a completely unknown infection that they didn't even know what it
would do to people.  It sounds counterintuitive, but when the press
found out that only the one person had been affected (me), and I wasn't
available for interview or pictures or anything, they dropped it.  I
think the CDC or someone planned it that way.  Of course, I wasn't dead,
but it wasn't like I was going to contradict the story anytime soon
either.
     I might have talked anyway, if they'd found me, but the lab people
really had me under at this point.  They fed me through tubes, and took
care of my bodily wastes through means I did not ever ask about, and
even brushed my teeth every so often and bathed me once a day.
     Even my fingerprints were changing, slowly.  Once they had the
idea, they took a card once a week, and each week you could see it
changing.  That was creepy too, but then, everything about me-the-case
was creepy.
     The bacterium didn't work on anything else at first, until they got
the idea of pulling my DNA out of it.  After that, it didn't work on
anything but chimpanzees and four other kind of primates.  Really close
genetic relatives, except for one weird one that was like a macaque or
something.  In all of them, the same thing happened: about a week after
infection, the critters would start eating like there was no tomorrow,
and get fat, and then spend all their time sleeping and eating/drinking,
and they would start changing.  The small ones got through fastest, and
by the time I was done, some of them had already recovered before I did.
The bacterium self-destructed when the changes finished, although they
figured anyone who had had it carried a few left over.
     It worked on females as well as males, but all the females ended up
female.  Half the infected males went female; the other half died.  And,
they all had birth defects that they hadn't had before.
     A little checking, I have no idea what it actually involved, showed
that the bacterium was picking up a gamete from the reproductive cells,
and re-writing the whole body to agree with that genetic code.  That
meant that I, and all the other test subjects, ended up as sort of
children of ourselves - half of our genes, doubled up.
     And the gamete (half of me) that it had gotten, had to have been an
X-chromosomed sperm cell, because it was turning me into XX, instead of
XY like I had started out.  Apparently, I was also getting some kind of
karmic payback, too.  Instead of the half-dozen 'birth defects' I should
have had just by chance, and that the monkeys did have, I had none.  If
it had gotten a Y, and turned me into YY, I probably would have died
like some of the other monkeys did.  So that's why they started calling
me 'Lucky'.
     And, if the animals weren't fed by tubes or IV's or enough pellets
in their cages, then they died of starvation.  At least once, one of the
subjects killed and ate one of the other ones.  Jim was very very glad
that he'd kept buying food for me when he heard that.
     Luckily for me, they did tests with the post-mutated animals, where
they stuck the animal in a cage along with several 'fresh' animals of
the same or different kinds.  Nothing happened, as long as you don't
count a few rapes of new-made females by overly horny 'fresh' males.
They started equalizing the sex ratios in the cages after the first two
times that happened, and even that stopped.  And the rapists didn't
transform either, even though there was blood and saliva and other
things 'being exchanged' through the whole process.  So apparently the
animals couldn't transmit it afterwards.
     All this meant they might let me out.

     I woke up a week earlier than their predictions.  I still felt
pretty sick, but not as bad as I had.  Naturally, I was confused as
hell, which wasn't helped by the Valium and other drugs they had me on.
     I think it took me about a dozen tries to understand what had
happened to me.  Even now, I don't understand the microbiology behind
it, or why they went so crazy over what happened.  I thought for a while
it was because it caused penises to fall off, but that wasn't it.
     I didn't have any real questions about what had happened to me,
after I'd taken a look.  My penis was gone, and everything else looked
completely utterly normal female.  Though I wasn't used to looking at a
girl from this perspective, I could tell.
     I woke up alone, and apparently in the middle of the night, because
it took them over an hour to send someone in to talk to me.  In that
amount of time, I had figured out that I had been 'out' for months, and
that (of course) I wasn't at home any more.  I figured it was some
hospital like John Hopkins, though.
     There wasn't a phone, or mirrors, or windows, or much of anything
that I could see.  I wanted really bad for a nurse to come and remove
some of the tubing they had attached to me, but there wasn't a call box
either.
     When they finally did notice that I was sitting up, it was pretty
much too late for them to try and 'calm me down' or cushion the blow or
anything.  The nurse scared the hell out of me when I saw her, because I
was trying to see what the genitalia looked like on this body when she
came in - it's always scary to be caught looking at 'naughty bits', even
if they are yours - and then she was dressed in a space suit.
     Even though I almost pissed myself from the fright, and despite the
fact that I was on enough drugs to calm down the entirety of Congress, I
managed to talk the nurse into unplugging me so I could walk around.
They did have a bathroom, but by the time she finished undoing
everything I didn't really want to go any more.  I was afraid to touch
anything, and I HURT down there.
     Then they started interviewing me.
     That phase lasted a month.  I hated being treated like a talking
lab animal, but there wasn't a lot I could do about it, until I figured
out how to throw up spontaneously.  Yeah, what a party skill.  At least
it would end the interrogation sessions when I got tired of them; they
didn't want to hang around the stomach acid, which might just eat
through their suits.
     They kept trying to figure out where I might have picked up this
bacterium, but they knew more about my movements and activities the
month before I got ill than I did.  I couldn't help them.
     And I wasn't as depressed as I should have been.  Nobody was quite
sure why, until I told them I'd had a sense of 'changing' while I was
out, and that it felt like a LONG time had passed, like months.  It had
been four, to be exact, and I guessed two, but even so.  So it was like
I had some kind of advanced warning of how I was going to wake up and
what it was going to feel like.
     Not that it wasn't bad at times.  I really missed my penis.  That
sounds dumb, but amputees miss their body parts too, and I'd lost this
one without even knowing it.  I mean, I'd been pretty level-headed, and
I hadn't been some kind of crazed sex fiend, but, I mean, it was my
PENIS.  And it had fallen off when I was unconscious.
     That's just depressing.
     And, of course, I wasn't too happy with the replacement.
     Especially when I had a period.  That scared the hell out of me and
everyone else; most girls having their first period get scared when they
find out they are bleeding, but any adult can tell them what's going on
and help them out.  Except, of course, I was the first female-bodied
individual to have a first period in the hot zone labs.  The monkeys
apparently had the same reaction to stress that humans did - stop
menstruating - and apparently being locked in a cage after this weirdo
thing got through with you was stressful enough to stop it completely.
     I know if _I_ had been locked in a cage with a trio of horny male
chimpanzees that I would have been seriously stressed, myself.
     And so nobody knew, when I started bleeding from that slit in my
pelvic area, if it was me menstruating, which would have been
sort-of-normal, or me bleeding for some bizarre reason, which would have
been a potentially lethal situation.  There was much excitement until
they tested the blood and figured out I was menstruating.  I didn't want
to know how they knew, either.
     I was suicidal for a while, until they changed my medication and
got a psych to help me out, but they said that was pretty normal for
being stuck in the isolation labs as long as I had been.  Oh, wonderful;
I was only normally suicidal.  I would have slit my throat or something
to demonstrate that what I was feeling was NOT normal, but they didn't
have anything like that around.  Because, of course, it was only normal
to feel suicidal when you were literally treated like poison by everyone
around you, and so they kept all the sharp things away from the
patients.
     Perfectly normal reaction.
     No wonder the doctor in the next room kept screaming and cursing.
     Any reservations I'd had about being stuck with needles went away,
when it was happening every four hours.  What began to annoy me were the
ones who weren't that good at it; usually doctors, for some reason.
There's a big difference between a good stick and a bad one.
     They let me start wearing scrubs, after I kicked some doctor when
he told me 'no you can't' for the fifth time.  I was 'a little stressed
out', I told the psych.  Actually, I was just tired of being naked.  It
was bad enough being a girl; it was a whole lot worse being a naked one
who was constantly being monitored and filmed.  I almost asked the psych
if they had a WebCam site up, with me in the starring role, but I
decided I didn't want to know.  What if they did?  Knowing it for sure
would be even creepier than just thinking about it.
     Someone had shaved my head and kept it shaved while I was
unconscious, and it bothered me almost as much to see myself bald as it
did to see the rest of the changes.  They stopped shaving my hair, but
it was still bugging me, until someone got me a wig.
     I was real glad I wasn't going to have to try and justify any of
this to an HMO.
     And, it creeped me out that I felt better with the wig on, for the
first couple of weeks; in other words, I felt worse about feeling
better.  That seemed unfair.  As soon as I could, I started leaving the
wig off and had my own hair, but it was still almost a Marine boot camp
buzz-cut.  I looked like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens 3.
     The loss of height didn't bother me nearly as much as losing my
hair, and I figured out why it didn't, all by myself.  I'd been this
height before, sometime in the past, so it was sort of like a reprise to
be this height again, instead of something completely foreign.
Admittedly, five foot four was not the manly ideal, or even my previous
five ten, but...  If I'd had my way, I wouldn't have this at all, of
course.  Being shorter wasn't nearly the trauma that some of the other
things were.  For a while, it just looked to me like they only picked
tall people to work in here.  I thought that was unusual, but not any
weirder than some of the other stupid Army stuff I'd heard about.
     The breasts were really annoying for the first week, but I
instinctively learned to do the same things normal girls do to protect
theirs.  It's not hard to learn a lesson with that kind of punishment
as reinforcement.  And it was a LOT of pain if I messed up and, say,
slammed my arm into one while crossing them.  A few of the doctors - all
males - wanted to sedate me more or give me painkillers or something,
until a woman doctor told them that she'd had the same kind of learning
curve when she was growing up.  It just happened a whole lot faster with
me.
     Feminine hygiene was just disgusting, but the same doctor said I
had to know about it, because did I want to know what a vaginal yeast
infection felt like from the inside?  I winced when she said that, like
two of the (female) nurses did at the same time.  That was sort of
funny, when it happened.  So I learned more things I didn't want to
know.
     They let me talk to Jim and my folks on the phone sometimes, but no
one could tell them when I'd be let out, until about a week before it
happened.  I don't know what changed, but they just announced that
unless something really unusual happened in the next week, I'd go home
Friday.

     Nothing did.
     When the day came, they gave me some real clothes and shoes, and
then helped me through the airlocks and outside.  They even let me walk
around and feel the grass and trees and stuff before they took me to the
airport, and I flew home with my psychiatrist in the next seat.
     It was late October, and I was as female as female could be, at
least in the physiological or biological sense.  I'd had a little memory
loss, but not much, and I felt like the same person I had been; mostly
like a guy, I guess - what does a girl feel like? - but that wasn't what
my body was, any more.
     My parents had been told, and seen pictures, and heard my voice on
the phone - which had never come back down from when I had mono - but it
was still shocking to see me at the airport.  They looked almost the
same to me; they said they wouldn't have known who I was if they hadn't
seen recent pictures of me AND the psych.
     'Strained' is what you might call how it went after that.
     And, none of my old clothes fit any more.  I talked to the psych,
and the psych talked to the bureaucracy, and they sent along some money
to get some clothes for myself that fit.  Me and the psych went
shopping - my parents wouldn't come - and I had to get girl's versions
of everything, because the guy versions didn't fit quite right.  That
was depressing in the extreme.  My dad almost had a fit when he saw some
of the labels, but what was I supposed to do?  Nobody had a better idea.

     I spent a while with them, but it was really a strain on everyone,
and so after a couple of weeks I called Jim and asked if I could move in
with him again.
     He said yes.
     So it was only a few days after that that we went out to eat again,
me and Jim and Steve, and I was a girl again, just like the last time.
Except, this time I was shorter, and my hair was short because it still
hadn't recovered from the shaving I'd gotten, and I wasn't wearing a
dress, and I wasn't nearly as happy about it.
     At least the food was good.