[semi-orig] [ranma.virus] [lime] Interpersonal Effects

Disclaimer: All Ranma-1/2 plot elements used here are in fact the property of Rumiko Takahashi and her assigns, and are used without their knowledge or permission. This is fan-fiction: an open fan letter in prose. All use herein of the name, likeness or identifiable characteristics of any actual person or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

Once I'd crossed the state line into California, it was mainly downhill, but I still had a lot of scrub and desert yet to cross, and the mountain road had a lot of ridges and troughs to get the bike through.

I reached up to rub the latest bugs off my face shield, pushed the helmet firmly back down into my scarf, and squinted at the darkness ahead of my headlight. I idly poked at the scarf with my gloved fingertips as I rode, trying to seal out as much of the wind of my passage as I could. The night air was cold and damp, and I might just be male for the very last time; I wanted to stay that way as long as I could.

(She'd leaned in, cocking her head sideways to kiss me, then she lazily ran a finger along my mustache, before I flipped my face shield down. She whispered, low and soft. "Y'all come back, now, y'hear?")

Halfway to the state line, I'd pulled over for some coffee. Still, I wasn't exactly fresh. The slow brightening of the lights of the occasional approaching car headed the other way towards Nevada on this otherwise deserted highway, the steady purr of the bike under my legs, the cheery muted lighting of the meters before me, were all getting to feeling just a bit too friendly and comforting, so I tried to keep my mind active as a hedge against drowsiness.

Once the road leveled out, I adjusted the throttle clamp once more, keeping things close to the posted 65mph speed limit, and forgot about it. I had all day to make my schedule; pushing my luck by pushing my speed wasn't on my to-do list.

("It's California, remember," she'd said. "If you're not boring, or entertaining start to finish, they'll get even with you. I suggest boring, it's safer.")

There was one thing that the long boring stretches of a motorcycle trip were good for: thinking things over. It'd been a while since I'd done that, so there was a lot to mull over. Starting, I supposed, with Michelle.

("Yo! Hermit!" had been her call as she'd knocked on my bedroom door way too many times when I'd overslept. "There's a game show called Reality on the big blue screen and you're a contestant. Come out and play!")

I grinned into the close air in my helmet; Michelle was a bright spot, maybe the bright spot, in my life just now. Just how much she mattered to me had crept up on me, unnoticed, since we met in Los Angeles three years ago.

It was an easy-going relationship, that's why it had lasted so long. Neither of us really had the time or the patience for a high-maintenance romance, in fact we freely acknowledged finding each other on the rebound from breakups of such. Michelle didn't want some guy writing her script for her, and I'd decisively done my time in Barbie's Playhouse.

It helped that we had similar interests. We'd first met at a LASFS meeting, both of us heading out the door about a half hour in, collided at the exit, and traded sympathetic looks over the collision and the wasted evening with the Science Fiction Society before going our separate ways.

The next time we met was at the Dangerous Visions bookstore, both of us grabbing for the same just-published C. J. Cherryh book, one of her Downbelow Station series, good hardcore science-fiction with solid sociological thinking behind it. I let go as soon as I realized that another hand was responsible for its resistance. Then I looked at the book, looked at her, then I grabbed another copy. Then I eyed her, she eyed me, both of us still squatting to reach the bottom shelf, and both of us said simultaneously, "So..." and stopped, waiting for the other to continue.

She laughed, I laughed, and I stood and helped her to her feet. She said, "Let's go pay for the book so we can talk."

"I'd like that, thanks."

As I followed her on our way to the busy checkout counter, I had time to admire her figure and the way she carried herself, and the way she walked, a casual sashay that had an extra tension that said that she knew where she was going and knew she was on course getting there.

After we'd paid up, she grinned and pushed me ahead. "My turn to look." I tried to act casual, but probably came up looking as nervously interested as I felt.

She must've seen something she liked, because as soon as we were at the door she caught up and pointed down the street to where a pair of lonely tables were trying to be a sidewalk cafe. There we got coffee and pastries, and sat and talked for well over an hour, comparing favorite authors and series -- she couldn't see what I valued in the Sanctuary series and I wasn't too fond of later Asimov, but the Comyn and Chieri of Darkover struck a chord with both of us, as did Heinlein's works -- and life stories. I heard about her disastrous early near-marriage and she heard about mine.

Eventually we ran out of time; she had to go. We made a mock-formality out of exchanging phone numbers and email addresses, then we went back up the sidewalk together, heading for our separate vehicles, amazingly closely parked on the boulevard. She peered over the top of her car, watching while I unlocked my bike, unlatched my helmet from its side, and got the bike running.

"Hey, Chris-- got another helmet?"

I nodded. "At home. I think it'll fit you."

She smiled. "Good. Thanks!"

She waved, gave me a dazzlingly cheery grin, and got in her car and drove off, leaving me standing with a fully warmed-up bike between my legs, grinning like a fool. And that was how it all started.

("Standing there on that bike, I thought you were only going to make room for one other person in your life, and you were real picky about even letting anyone try out for the part. If it doesn't work out, you can get a sidecar, right?")

Now the bike was heading down into another mountainous trough, and I started seeing wisps of fuzziness in the air ahead of me. Not so much tendrils of fog, such as I'd seen in my stay in the Bay area, but a vague thickening and whitening of the headlight beam as I started to cut my way through the leading edge of a ground-hugging cloud. Or maybe that's what fog looked like when you only had one headlight.

I started staring ahead hard, trying to decide if I should drop my speed until I was through it and had full visibility again. The problem with that would be in finding another level stretch that really was level, one that was long enough for me to set my throttle clamp again.

Another problem was that I really didn't want to be in that fog, if that's what it thickened up enough to be, for a second longer than I had to. Despite the heat reservoir centered around my electric vest, my legs were starting to feel just the least bit chilled. The air got a little more raw and I clamped my legs harder against the water-cooled engine, trying to crawl out of the slipstream and stay warm.

Then, even as the bike started to nose up onto the adjoining ridge, climbing up out of the fog, when I was just starting to notice that the cold was getting through the scarf under my helmet, I shivered and changed.

Suddenly stretched out quite a bit further than I liked, I grabbed my handlebars tight and scooted my rump on the saddle, as much as anything to adjust my riding suit to my changed form. I slid up against my tank bag, maybe sliding my crotch up onto the tank a bit, seeking the lowest point on the saddle, while hoping that no kangaroo rats came out onto the highway to jump under my wheels before I got my foot back into position for controlled rear braking.

I sighed in my all-too-utterly-cutesy female voice, sounding even more cloying in the closeness of the helmet; so much for that. At least it was easier now for me to crouch low, letting much of the wind blow over my back while I stuffed the scarf in deeper around my now-thinner neck with one hand. Motorcycling and gendershifting hadn't exactly been a perfect combination. Only lately, though, was that at all an issue.

When my car finally quit, as junker cars do, I'd bought a bike, specifically out of disgust at what I'd ended up chauffeuring around to help me use up the car. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, to retake the lead in my own life. It worked as Barbie repellent better than I'd expected, though, and that was therapeutic, even though at the time it felt more cauterizing than cathartic.

Barbie hadn't appreciated what a helmet did to her precision hairdo, and even less what her image must be as she awkwardly swung her shapely leg over the saddle of something that wasn't even a Harley. Fashion dolls just didn't do that, not even in Malibu, not if they wanted to stay on the A-list. She'd stopped tossing out fresh bait every time I slipped the hook, leaving me free of the distraction and heartache of being demoted to her second-string man. Unbroken solitude was a lot healthier than sitting around waiting for a call that never came except when I gave up waiting.

That'd been in LA, where the biking weather was good all year round, other than rain in the winter, so it wasn't that impractical a solution to the unwanted-passenger problem. With her gone, it was just me and the bike for awhile, which was a lot easier than trying not to notice an empty seat next to mine would have been. People got used to my coming and going on bikeback, got used to seeing leathers hanging in my cubicle wherever I happened to be contracting, got used to me being just another quirky individual lost in the false homogeneity of Los Angeles, where honest quirkiness was usually less attention-getting than the much more common calculated kind.

Then came Michelle, and it was unexpected, if predictable in hindsight, just how little of that changed. I was still the longhaired weirdo, likely to show up in leathers, if you saw me at all, considering how much I detested just standing around doing nothing, and she accepted that. I accepted her cutesy bedroom, all pink hearts and candyland colors and Hello Kitty, and the utterly uncute rest of her apartment, all serious colors and office-modern furniture, and the bright red baby-dragon RX-7 parked out front, because it was just her, all of it. We didn't so much start a relationship as come into intimate alliance.

("I hope you're happy being you, because I'm too busy being me to take on the remodeling job. Think you can handle that?" She grinned, at once ferocious and affectionate, back at my grin. We threw that line at each other whenever someone implied that either of us could fit in more with just one little change.)

If we were going somewhere that looks mattered, or it was too wet for two-up riding in safety, or she knew where we were going better, she drove. If not, we rode my bike. There were a couple of evenings largely spent on a picnic blanket up on Mulholland Drive, looking down at the lights in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and other times when I shared my collection of decently swoopy canyon roads. Her arm would come up into my field of vision, pointing at some side road, I'd nod and set up the turn, and we'd go explore that road and see what its little world was like.

There were other evenings spent being around people in costumes from long ago, or far away, or even Japanese cartoons. She shared her collection of little out-of-the-way eateries with unique menus and good coffees, and her calendar of strange festivals and events. Sometimes we'd go home from one of those, and her hand or mine would just happen to be on the transmission hump, and the other's hand would quietly join it, just sharing by touch as well. Sometimes we found places to park the car or bike where we could be more expressive about it. Whether out and about, or quietly at home just reading side by side, we found that we fitted together well enough just as we were.

"You think we're supposed to be this happy together?"

"Well, no. All of my other relationships have ended up with me being miserable, so we're breaking with tradition. We must be doing something wrong here."

"Hm, better talk to the script writers about that."

"We fired them, remember?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, we'll just have to put up with a defective relationship, then. I'm happy with that if you are."

"Yup. C'mere and I'll prove it."

Of course we ended up moving in together. Part of it was economics; we had a lot more money to play with if we rented one place. The other part was our figuring out that we really did want to be together. We were both skittish about that; as usual, she was more vocal about it.

"This doesn't mean we're on the bridal track, you know."

"I know. I don't think I'm horse-broken, anyway."

"After all the time you spend in that saddle? Ewwww!"

So we settled into a closer rhythm, enjoying and supporting each other's quirks, sharing what we felt like sharing, refusing to worry about whether what we had was enough to last.

And then, of course, the whole world changed... literally. In just a few days, something in Japan called Nerimavirus spread worldwide; and then gender, and gender roles, were no longer something you were assigned at birth and only escaped by surgical mockup. Suddenly, all around us, more traditional relationships, marriages and families were coming apart at the seams, some of them heading for divorce even before the partners' forms unlocked. Two of our acquaintances attempted suicide and one of them achieved it on the second try.

I thought back to the time of my own change.

Even with the warnings on the radio and TV news, what little news I heard, and all the strangeness in the streets, strange even for greater L. A., I hadn't really been prepared for it, not even after the wooziness of that flu-like virus.

I didn't even really notice that there were new faces around the office.

Sick or not, I had work that had to get done. We were on a tight schedule with a close deadline and all-but-mandatory overtime was just around the corner as we all pushed hard to make our milestones. At least the software guys could take their coding home on a floppy. This job had me on the hardware side where I had to debug my FPGAs on the only working engineering prototype, surrounded by power supplies, meters, logic analyzers and 'scope, even if, thanks to the fever, I'd forget momentarily what a particular trace was showing or miss an event and have to do the test all over again. The software guys couldn't bring up their code on the testbed until I had working silicon. If all that doesn't tell you much, well, just believe me that I had to go to the lab to do my job and I couldn't take time off to be sick.

I was finally starting to get over the misery and the disorientation, and making some headway on getting those chips to do what I wanted. I had stumbled out of the lab, headed for the coffee center in the front office, when I was seized by a burst of sneezing, sudden and convulsive. I put out a hand to hold myself up against a support column, too dizzy to do anything else.

Someone, one of the secretaries probably, shouted, "Pull his pants down, he's gonna change!" Even as another sneeze blasted through my bleery consciousness, there was someone fumbling at my waist figuring out the catch on my belt-buckle, tugging at the buttoned top of my jeans, unzipping them and sliding them down my legs. "Underwear too, it'll cut into his skin!" I didn't have the mental clarity to understand what they were talking about, so I was really unprepared when, even before the sneezing fit stopped, someone pulled me into the ladies' room, where I suddenly found I belonged.

I went home shortly thereafter with my pants undone and my belt cinched tight around my new hips on a newly punched hole at the tip. I hung back in the traffic pack the whole way home, coasting into every stoplight, almost terrified at the thought of dropping the bike at a full stop by misjudging my length of leg and then being unable to pick it back up, and flashing my very vulnerably female butt to adjacent motorists while I tried to lift it. As it was, I almost did drop the bike when I parked it, but that was as much from the dizziness of the virus as from the alterations in my own frame.

Stumbling up the apartment stairs in loose boots, I kept my helmet on until I was safely hidden inside, irrationally convinced that everyone in the apartment court was staring at me. Once home, I still wasn't feeling any too great, quite aside from my sudden sex-change, so I took a hot bath, tried to find clothes I could wear, settled on a bathrobe, and went to bed. It was late afternoon when the phone woke me.

"Hullo?"

"Hi, who's this?"

"Hey, Michelle... Guess who."

"Chris? You weren't at the lab when I called."

"Yup. It was Nerimavirus. I don't look like the boy-next-door anymore."

"This I gotta see. I'll be right home."

"Are you sure--"

"You're not gonna cancel on me again, are you? I'll see you in a half hour, just let me pull some stuff together."

I'd cancelled the evening out when I came down with what I thought was flu, but Michelle stayed home with me anyway to make sure I was all right, saying something about her weird immune system that threw everything off. She'd fed me chicken soup and snuggled for a while that turned into overnight. She'd been pissed when I got up in the morning to go back to work.

Now I was torn between getting dressed for her and heading back to bed, where I felt I needed to be. After a fresh look at what I had in my drawers and closet, though, bed won out. I was already wearing the only thing I owned that'd fit right.

I roused again to the sound of the doorbell. It took a couple of tries for me to get both breasts to stay hidden in the bathrobe, so I opened the door just wide enough for her to get through with her arms full of packages, and immediately closed it.

She stood, looking at my face so intently that I got embarrassed and flustered. "It... it really is me, it's just..."

She nodded. "Yeah, I see. When?"

"This morning, at work. I came home when it happened. I... I got parts of the testbed to work, the software guys'll be able to use those parts to test their code..."

"Yeah, well, you've got more important things right now. Have you eaten?"

I shook my head. "Not really... still not much appetite. I just slept through the day."

"Good, I could see you needed it yesterday. So, you gonna get dressed?"

"In what? My shirts kinda fit, but none of my pants fit over my hips now."

"I figured." She looked me up and down. "I brought some of my gym sweats for you to wear. Looks like they'll be a bit big on you, but they'll do for now. Now hurry up and get dressed; we've got some serious shopping to do. Good thing you're a longhair; it makes things easier."

"Shopping?"

"Yeah, you need clothes for that shape. You're locked, right? Hot water doesn't change you back?"

"I didn't try. Didn't think of it. Lemme go check."

She dropped her packages and followed me to the kitchen. No, hot water didn't change me back. She handed me the bundle of clothes and I dropped the robe and clumsily climbed into them, feeling like I was an amateur in the presence of a professional. Or like maybe they were a going-away present; I wasn't sure how she would deal with this change.

She must have sensed my worry. As I straightened up, she looked me up and down, shook her head slowly and leered. "Will ya look at that... I got me a girlfriend."

"Is that something you wanted?"

"Well, I wasn't gonna bring it up.. but since you offered..."

"Another one of your hidden talents, I guess."

"Hidden? If you'll show me yours, I'll show you mine."

"I just did, and if you've got something to show you've been sneezing around behind my back."

"Well, no, but... Let's not let that stop us."

She thought a moment, then leered some more. "Hey, Chris? You know that thing you do to me right down here that gets me climbing the wall if you do it too long?"

"Yeah?" I looked up from staring where she had pointed, to see her glowering at me.

She grinned evilly. "Now it's my turn."

Then she frowned and looked at her watch. "First things first, though: shopping. We've only got about four hours. We can catch a burger on the way."

"Galleria? You said four hours."

"No, just Fallbrook. Galleria is an all-day trip."

"Gods... why that long?"

"You'll see. Time flows at a different rate when you're shopping. Get your jacket, then you can put your wallet in the pocket."

"Should I do something girly with my hair first?"

"No. Believe me, that'll be lost in the noise. This Nerimavirus has everybody too busy with their own changes to worry about yours; probably most of the people we'll see already have it. You would've got it a lot earlier, except you're such a hermit."

She was right; my modest appearance, however underdressed, was lost in the crowds of people at the mall, many of them looking as if they were accustomed to crossdressing even before the change. A new grunge movement had started, this time apparently with Nerimavirus as a motif, because most of the teenage boys hanging out around the teenage girls were wearing bras outside their other clothing, in a couple of instances upside-down, and almost every girl looked as if her first exposure to one was seeing it on her boyfriend. Some of the boys were wearing pantyhose around high heels. With all the costume reversals, it was impossible even at a third glance to tell who was born what, and maybe that was the point.

That's as much as I saw before we hit the first of several stores, immediately heading for departments I'd never even slowed down in before. Michelle knew where she was going, though, scooping up essentials and accessories for me to try out, and jotting down my measurements as fast as we got them. I had no idea there were so many, and I was starting to feel like a MIL-specified component by the time we were half-done.

"You forgot one measurement."

Seated on the little shelf in the changing-room, she looked up from her little notebook to where I stood with a tape-measure still looped around my bare breasts. "What's that?"

"Tolerance."

She was a tech writer; she knew enough about electronics to get the reference immediately. "And what's the value on that?"

"Just about zero, now. I think I've had my lifetime quota of shopping."

"Lifetime..." She laughed. "Girl, you have just begun to shop! Your head just hasn't caught up with your hormones yet." She shook her head and put the notebook away. "In a week or so you'll be looking at this stuff and saying, 'Is that all I have to wear?'"

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do it? Seems like a big waste to me, like a big costume party."

She thought for a moment, apparently putting her thoughts in my language, considering what she then said.

"Because it's a tool as much it's a costume. You dress a certain way for a certain occasion because you want men and other women to respond to you in a certain way in that setting. You need to build up a complete toolset, and you're barely getting started on that. As you get used to all this, you'll start to feel it, to feel when you're getting the response you want in a situation."

She paused; this one might have been a new thought for her. "Plus, you're dressing for how you want to respond to yourself. That's kinda what makes all the tooling work; you project how you feel about yourself and everybody reacts to that as much as the costume, maybe more. That's why you have to do the shopping; nobody else sees it like you do."

I grimaced. "And that means I'm supposed to chase fashions like Windows upgrades so I can feel good about my clothes, so I have to do it all over again in a year?"

"I don't. The difference with me is that I find stuff I like, stuff that works, and I keep it, and I make my own style, so it never really goes out of fashion."

I nodded; it made a lot of sense, in what it said about both her and us. "I guess that's part of that attitude that attracted me to you."

"You're still attracted, aren't you? While we're waiting, I mean?" A hint of worry showed in her expression; I could tell that the thought had crossed her mind that I might not care for women when I was one.

I looked her over carefully and felt answering feelings in interesting new places. "Yup, no worries there."

She grinned, reassured. "Well, so am I... but this isn't the place." She pointed. "C'mon, put something on those so we can go pay for all this and get out of here. We're not in Vegas yet."

I snickered and clasped my breasts in mock-modesty. "I didn't bring any pasties."

She raised an eyebrow. "Would you really go out there dressed like that?"

I thought about what pasties would cover, and I thought about people looking at me while I looked like this. Then I grabbed the sweatshirt and pulled it down over my face, hiding my flaming cheeks and too-vulnerable involuntarily-female chest. "No."

She smirked. "I didn't think so."

When we got in from our shopping, it was dressup time.

I looked down at myself, at the tags I had just removed from the new bra around my chest, then at the sweater she was holding for me to try on, then at the pile of still-bagged clothes and accessories on my bed. "I'm back in Barbie's Playhouse, aren't I."

"Not unless you want to be. I just want to see what you look like in this one outfit, and you do need to put something on. Knowing you, you'd probably grab the pajamas first thing and go hide under the blankets for the next week. With these clothes you can get back to that job you love so much while you wait for this thing to unlock."

A sweater and slacks later, we adjourned to the kitchen for something to fill in where the burgers hadn't. Michelle handled most of it; I was way too clumsy, bashing a hip on the doorway three times running just carrying stuff out to the table, and coming up short when I tried to get things for her with my no-longer-superior reach.

I was moping over my spaghetti when I noticed her eyeing me. "How do you feel?"

"Lost... I'm not sure who I am anymore."

"You and ninety-five percent of the planet by last count. Well, you look cute."

"Do I want to be cute?"

"Sure beats being ugly. Ugly girls get everything thrown at 'em that cute girls do, it's just nobody cares."

I got up and put my arms around her. "Michelle... thanks. Thanks for helping, and thanks for caring... and thanks for not caring."

She kissed me. "I love you, you know. We don't say it much, but it's still true."

I nodded. "I know. I love you." I kissed her back. "And we don't say it much, but I want this to last." Then I looked down at how, with me on tiptoe, my breasts were pressed against hers, and amended that. "Kinda."

She laughed and hugged me close. "No kinda about it. I'll take you any way I can get you."

"You really want me?"

She nodded. "As soon as you're up for it."

"I told you, there's nothing to 'up'."

"And I told you..." This time she spelled it out in simpler terms, in a kiss that didn't quit, giving me time to notice and accept the differences when both sets of lips were female.

We were both panting a little when we broke off, and not from lack of breath. I grabbed her hand. "My place or yours?"

It was the same old running joke we'd started sharing as soon as we'd moved in together, when we were trying out each other's bedrooms and beds for suitability for intimacy, then translated into a question of who was in the mood to lead.

"My place," she said huskily but firmly as she started to pull up the hem of the same sweater she'd helped me put on. "I know the road better, so I'll drive."

That began what felt like an endless period of worried wondering if I'd ever ever use a men's room again. Most people unlocked in two to four weeks; not me.

I suffered silently through the company-sponsored "welcome to womanhood" classes, which combined feminine hygiene and cosmetics, family planning, an overview of comparative cultural roles, and what constituted acceptable clothing for women in the workplace for what positions. The course was two-track, one track for those who now had two forms and needed to know how to manage the transitions, the other for those who, like me, had so far been permanently moved from one gender to the other and needed everything their mother would've taught them if they'd been born female. They signed me up me for the latter track. The fact that there were enough ex-men in my condition to make that track worthwhile to develop was anything but reassuring to me.

I got used to automatically heading for the other bathroom door, checking my face every time I went there, and all the while waiting for this thing to unlock so I could get back to something familiar on at least a part-time basis. The graphs they kept in HR showing length-of-lock changed over time as longer-term numbers became available, but the shape of the curve got steadily more discouraging, with a steep fall starting around the five-week point and gentling its slope around the six-week point. The line went nearly horizontal, well above zero, as it neared the part of the graph where I knew that one of the numbers in the "so-far-permanent" column was me.

Suddenly I was about the same size and build as the fairy-tale princess I'd left behind in Malibu. Unlike her, I adapted. With the sidestand down, I practiced sliding way over on the saddle to get my foot down as I put the bike into a stationary lean, then graduated to parking-lot practice. Then I chose some back roads to practice leans, and was pleased by how little my changed mass affected my countersteering of the bike. The only thing I ended up having to change was how many fingers I had to put on the brake lever to get a good controlled quick stop using both brakes properly; my shorter thinner fingers just couldn't clamp down as hard if most of them were still on the throttle.

I thought about getting a half-fairing to get some wind off me. The cruiser-style bike, with its low saddle, made stoplights almost as easy as when I was male, but, at freeway speeds, I expected to have a little more of a fight to stay upright against the wind on my front with my weaker upper body muscles. My smaller shape, though, presented less of a surface, so the effort was about even either way.

Over time I could feel changes in my thinking. I'd read about it and knew what to expect, so the fact that I was starting to act more like a normal woman didn't scare me, it was simply one of those "Oh, yeah, that... Funny that it'd happen to me" things.

Things like zeroing in on an aggravating bug in someone's program just because, looking at the source code, the handful of lines around it seemed to be out of harmony with everything else. Mentally stepping the code confirmed it, but it was a kind of holistic assessment, an intuition, that had discovered it.

Things like pulling together a one-day collaborative debugging session in the lab with several other engineers of various genders, birth genders and disciplines, a session which nailed a massive quantity of show-stoppers. It took me a day to realize that that much cooperative initiative, to say nothing of the close teamwork within the session, would have been quite outside my abilities before.

Things like modifying one of my oldest recipes, a rather overbearing spicy hamburger, because Michelle was right: its aggressiveness did make it hard to plan any other dish to go with it.

I actually remodeled my bedroom, pushing things like the oscilloscope, soldering iron and computers over into their own corner, turning a roll-top desk into a workbench that'd close, and making over the rest. I got good-looking curtains with a filmy inner layer, a new chair and floor lamp, and a real bed, not just a mattress on a door on some filing cabinets. My fascination with the hardware and software that formed my working world remained, but I just wasn't comfortable anymore in an environment so obviously work-driven.

Michelle look at the finished result, raised an eyebrow, and then said nothing, she just came up behind me and hugged me, kissing my neck. Then her hands got a little more assertive and we ended up stress-testing the new bed before the paint on the walls was even really dry.

That was pretty much when we moved to Las Vegas together, though we'd talked about it almost since we'd met. There were a lot of reasons, really; good jobs lined up for both of us, friends who were already out there, a Valley neighborhood that just wasn't the same anymore, plus a couple of incidents that brought home to me that, just because I was born male, it didn't mean I couldn't get raped by someone whose idea of "neighborhood spirit" included guns. The second time, it had been a group of girls that I'd passed, but they'd had hot water with them. It was one of the few times that I'd been happy to see LAPD show up with guns drawn. The areas of greater Los Angeles that we could afford just weren't places that we wanted to live, not the way life was to be lived in them.

We found a house on the outskirts of the city on one visit, brought everything over in a U-Haul the next week, set things up pretty much as we'd had them in California, and settled into being Nevada girls.

Then there was the long wait for Michelle's naturally high resistance to break down and admit the Nerimavirus. Not that we let it get to us. Easy-going, remember, plus that bisexual nature of hers. We enjoyed ourselves and each other in the bedroom however we could and made light of the situation everywhere else.

"Oh, I'm sure my manhood is catching up to me real fast. Any second now I'm gonna go leave the seat up in the bathroom."

"You do that and I'll use up all your razor blades on my legs."

"Hey, I haven't been that bad..."

"How'm I supposed to strangle you with my stockings and pantyhose if yours are already filling up the shower rod?"

"Well, at least I don't cover the bathroom sink with my makeup and stuff."

"The big dresser is covered with yours already. There's no room for mine."

"You're supposed to have your own, you know."

"My mother never told me about getting a dresser for my makeup!"

"Your mother is a guy, what does he know?"

###

The world around us went on as usual, adapting as little as necessary or responding in new ways which reinforced old themes, old relationships.

The Middle-East still had its troubles, still playing that millenia-old game of "more land for my religion", but the Israelis had stopped suicide bombings cold by anouncing that henceforce they would spray the blast-center of each one with Water Of Spring Of Drowned Piglet. There were two bombings in quick succession, in protest, both of which sites were duly sprayed, and then nothing.

The videotape of the second spraying, certified by interviewed witnesses and attending reporters, had featured a small goat tethered at the center of the blast zone. Its gradual change into a tiny pig settled any question of authenticity. One of the noisier mullahs had sworn to the local media that he had seen brave souls being ejected from heaven when their dispersed corpses were changed. He treated it as an outrage to be answered by a wave of suicide bombers, but apparently his followers thought otherwise. Maybe they thought he should lead the charge.

Other religions reacted in their own ways. There were whole religious communities in Utah, for instance, where surgical masks and gloves had become required apparel in public. The more extreme cases had taken to wearing disposable scrubs. Shopping in one of those towns, from what I could see on the newscast, looked like a mad scientists' convention crossed with a soap-opera. According to the report, they were almost completely infected anyway by now.

Then there was the Papal bull which announced that it was unnatural for people to spend any unnecessary time in their cold-water shapes. The rain continued to fall on the just and the unjust alike, and people changed, no matter how devout they were, if they weren't prepared for it. Perhaps the weather forecasters weren't Catholic.

Yet another nutcake religion sprang up in Southern California, one of whose rituals appeared to be walking out to the edge of the surf naked carrying buckets of hot water, and seeing how many times you could stand to change. It was probably a gag in the same vein as Church of Bob, one of those pointless routines valued for their pointlessness, but in California you could never be sure.

One thing it was proven to do was burn cellulite, so in LA, where exercise of any sort meant taking in the smog in athletic quantities, the procedure became very popular by itself.

###

Finally the blessed event occurred and it was a boy. She called me up just as I was grousing at some pantyhose for being so hard to get on. I nearly tripped over my SheerSilkLegs hobbles trying to get to the phone.

"Hey, Chris, can you take today off? I'm coming home, I think I'm coming down with the flu."

Saved by the bell. Big promotional dog-and-pony event or not, I had not been looking forward to being tested on Girl-In-Public-101 just yet; my hand with mascara was still anything but deft and Michelle said my sense of style still sucked, even with outfits she'd picked out and coordinated. Fortunately, I was just a surplus warm body for this event, with no real part in the presentation, so any real excuse would do.

"You think it might be the Nerimavirus?"

"Well, it is going around again, but we won't know until something pops up... but I thought maybe you'd like to be the first to know... other than me, of course..."

"And while I'm at it I can play nursemaid, right?"

"Well, you do fit the uniform just now..."

"Okay. You got it, babe."

"Let's see how long you can still call me that... Thanks, right now I just want to go crawl back into bed. Find some of those little water balloons of yours just in case."

"Water... Oh..."

"What, you didn't think about that part? Yeah, right now you're only nine-months-and-holding away from being a mother."

"You're sick."

"That's what I called to tell you, dear. I'll see you when I get there."

When she stumbled in the door, it was obvious that she was fighting something. She dropped her things on the table, slumped down into one of the chairs and dropped her head down into her folded arms. I put chicken soup and ginger ale down at her setting. "Here, drink these; nursie's orders."

She looked up blearily. "Where's your uniform?" She gestured vaguely at my shorts and T-shirt. "General Hospital would never approve of you dressed like that."

"I report to Major Disaster and he said I could wear whatever I thought was suitable."

"And that is..."

"Enough to cover my Privates."

I coaxed most of the soup and some of the ginger ale into her, then she headed for bed, trailed by me. "Hey, wear something loose."

"No way. I want my fuzzy jammies and slippers, I need to feel nice 'n' cozy."

"You don't get it. You have brothers; how big are they compared to you?"

"They're big."

"If this is what we think, you will be too. You gotta change into something loose before you change; you'll need the room."

"You're just trying to get a free peep."

"Might as well get 'em while I can."

"What? You think this glamor-girl is going to be an ugly guy? You'll be closing all the blinds to keep the Playgirl people from peeking in and bugging the neighbors."

She accepted the use of my bathrobe anyway, and then I kissed shut her bleary eyes and tucked her into bed, where she slept through most of the day. An effect of her almost never getting sick was that, when something did get to her, it wiped her out until she had fought it off. I checked her fever every so often as she slept, just as she had done mine. She roused in the evening, opening the robe and looking just as blearily down at herself. "Nope, no change here, not yet anyway."

"You've still got the bumps you were born with."

She hugged herself. "Oh, these weren't part of the package, they're aftermarket accessories. Guess they'll get recalled anyway."

In due time the sneezes came. For a good ten minutes, one every twenty seconds or so, until I was starting to get worried about its effect on her brain. They got more powerful, more convulsive, then there was one big one, and...

"Okay, look, it popped up, you're done." I looked away from it, and covered that by kissing him. I could somehow still tell it was Michelle, and that was an important reassurance to me just then.

He looked up at me blearily, squirming as he did so to ease the binding of the bathrobe around his suddenly-massive chest. He sniffed cautiously, but the sneezing had subsided.

"Yeah, I see. I think that last sneeze gave me a concussion. Somehow I do not feel macho or romantic right now. What I do feel is that I need to use the bathroom. You come in with me and coach me on this. C'mon, I never did this before."

I got him up out of the bed, then between us we got his arm over my shoulder; as expected, he was quite a bit taller now. He wobbled and lurched on unsteady legs, but we got him into the bathroom. With just the two of us living there, of course, the seat was down, and I got him parked and pointed.

"It's simple. If you're feeling that bad you just sit down like you always do, push it down... and try not to think about what any of this means."

"You mean like this.... Hey, how do they expect me to pee through this? It isn't cooperating!"

"Hmm, okay, change of plans: stand up, now we learn acrobatics. I told you not to think about yourself like that."

He didn't budge from the seat. "I wasn't, I was thinking about you!"

I looked down at myself, thinking of how I would look to me as a guy, and, okay, I could see his point just as well as I could see his point. It was my just-us-girls clothing, just T-shirt and shorts, and now something about his arousal was arousing me, causing my chest to assume the usual dotting-the-eyes mode.

"I guess you are feeling macho after all. You should still pee first. So what am I doing that's so bad? I'm not waving everything in front of you, am I?"

"Yeah, well, if you don't want to wave at me then go put a bra on or something."

I flexed my knees a little, making my boobs bounce up and down. "Like this, you mean?"

He laughed. "Yeah, now go away so I can pee!"

I sauntered out of the bathroom, eyeing him over my shoulder. "I'll be waiting for you..." I gave it my best sultry smoky voice.

"That'll cost you another five minutes, y'know," he growled.

I giggled. I couldn't help it; somehow, finding out that I could get that kind of involuntary response out of him was oddly reassuring, even as it made me feel girlish and nervous. "Just don't pee on the ceiling, dear."

When he finally emerged from the bathroom, Michelle took one look at where I was waiting in his bed, wearing nothing but a smile, and growled, "Okay, maybe I am feeling macho. Move over."

I fought down the little-me feeling that he provoked in me by getting assertive. I arched my back and leered up at him. "I thought maybe you'd see things my way."

He just smirked and gathered me in for a kiss, and then one thing led to another. He knew where my buttons were -- he'd had enough practice at that before he turned male -- but we hadn't quite found a strong rhythm when it was suddenly over for him, and then he went down like he was pole-axed. Left hanging like that, it took me a few minutes to regain control of my own body.

"...Michelle?"

No answer, of course. It was great having a nice big man on top of me as long as it was the girl I loved, even if I didn't quite get where I wanted to go this time, but it wasn't so great when I was trying to push that much dead weight off me so I could breathe. On top of that, I was swiftly developing an urge that his weight on me only made more pressing.

Finally I managed to roll him over enough to slide out from under him, and made two quick trips to the bathroom, one for the usual reason, the other to drop off his protection and get a towel to cover the wet spot.

By the time I got back to the bed, he was flat on his back, sprawled over most of the bed, and snoring. Loudly. I sat on the edge of the bed, debating whether there was room for me to curl up next to him, and trying to decide whether I'd be able to get to sleep with this new noise in our lives. Finally I went and curled up in my own bed, feeling very much more alone than I wanted to be, and wondering: had I really been that loud when I was a guy?

The weird sound that woke me up the next morning was my own shaver; it was the first time I'd heard it from outside the bathroom. I pulled on my panties and nightgown, grimacing at the fresh reminder of how girlified I was getting, went to start the coffee, then poked my head into the bathroom in time to see him peering into the mirror and cautiously rubbing his face, evidently disappointed at how much chin-fuzz remained after an electric had done its best; those follicles obviously hadn't wasted any time in getting to work on a beard. As glum as he was, though, his disappointment was obviously over more than that.

I pulled my Old Spice out of hiding and offered it. "Brace yourself -- it stings." It took some effort to get those words out; all of a sudden things were feeling Twilight-Zone strange, as all the mundane details brought home the completeness of our swapped roles. He was now a man and I was now a woman who felt like a little girl all too often, and here I was helping him complete the trade. It made the very air feel thick and alien.

He nodded and splashed some onto his hands, then rubbed his face. He pulled in a sharp breath, then continued rubbing for a moment.

"You took that like a man."

He scowled at his large muscular hands. "Not as if I had any choice." His normal humor had deserted him.

"About last night..."

His head lowered perceptibly; I'd guessed right about the problem. "Yeah, well, I'm sorry, it happened so fast I wasn't ready for it."

"It's okay, it takes practice, that's all, and I'm up for that!" I gave him my best cutesy smile, the closest I could come to a sexy one before breakfast.

He gave me a grimace that really tried to be a smile before begrudgedly admitting defeat. "Oh, I don't know, I thought there might've been more to it than that..."

"Nope, not without a lot of meditation and stuff. You get one big one, so you stretch it out seeing how high you can get your partner, it makes yours bigger."

"Sounds like an infomercial..."

"Yeah, well, I had to find out all that by myself, you get the gameplan for free. It's normal. It's why I was so into foreplay when I was a guy." There was that little-girl-lost feeling again, like I'd never refer to that in the present tense anymore. "Aside from watching you squirm, that is." I shoved the feeling down and gave him a leer.

"And the instant sleep afterwards? Felt like knockout drops or something."

"That's normal too. I always had to fight it so I could cuddle with you afterwards."

"And now I'm stuck this way for who knows how long. Hmph. It's not fair."

"Well, it's not all bad..."

"Yeah? How?"

"Well, you've got a girl who loves you, for one... and I know you like girls."

"In this form? I never said..."

"You didn't have to." I pointed to the uniquely male part of his nude anatomy and grinned. "Your nonverbal was awful loud."

"Plain awful, you mean."

"Hey, it was a good first try, way better'n mine was. If you want do-overs..." I lightly stroked that piece of his maleness with a fingertip and watched it flinch awake, It was Michelle, after all, and that was more important to me than the fact that it was a guy. "...we can have a rematch after breakfast."

I grabbed him around the waist and started pulling him out towards the kitchen where it was his turn to fix breakfast. "Part of what you're feeling might be hormones. I told you us guys are always on the rag, and you didn't believe me..."

He sat on the kitchen stool, using his long reach to easily get mugs from the shelf, and then to pass one over to me filled with coffee. He spoke over his shoulder as I put my coffee down on the table so I could help. "Is that it? Is that why I get this feeling like everything I am is an annoyance? And whaddaya mean, 'us guys'? You're not a guy now."

I sat down heavily, stunned by his words. "Well, I've been hoping I can rejoin the club... someday..." That lost feeling intensified and overwhelmed me in an instant, and I felt my eyes starting to tear up; I didn't try to fight it. It didn't even feel like there was any guy left in me to fight it with, so I just bowed my head to keep my tears to myself.

I heard the scrape of his stool, saw the blur of his movement through the tears, and in a moment I felt his arms around me, gently pressing me towards his chest. I heard him swallow and then speak huskily. "I, uhh... It must be the hormones; I haven't said anything so stupid and mean in a long time. I'm sorry, Chris."

I turned and buried my face in his shoulder, nodding acceptance of his words and trying to squeeze the feeling away as I squeezed away the tears. It was still painful to face, but the pain was made bearable as I was all-but-surrounded by his warm caring. If I had to be his woman, at least he was who was my man.

Michelle was right: it was all very unfair. He unlocked in a little over three days while I was still locked and had been for months. I heard singing in the shower; it took me a minute or so to realize that it was her high voice that I was hearing.

"Congratulations. Now you're just my rainy-day man."

"Step one. Now you hurry up and be my sunshine boy."

###

Sex discrimination faded, followed by the laws banning it. Then, depending on how you looked at it, it resumed.

"You won't get that job, programming, the way you are. Are you willing to stay female?

"You've got the job if you want it -- you're easily the best-qualified candidate for it on technical grounds -- but you'll have to be a woman to hold that position."

Given my stuck-female condition, of course, no one told me that, but I overheard enough stories about it from the guys around me.

Our brave new world, myself and others like me excepted, was filled with people who could now be either sex. Ignoring things like rainstorms and automatic sprinkler systems, it was even a matter of choice. Some had learned how to do it willfully without water. Seminars teaching just that were showing up next to crystal therapy and tarot classes in the listings in the backs of the quaint little newsprint magazines such as you'd find at the entrance to most any health-food store.

The business world had already responded to the chaos of the change by getting strictly down to business. Even in the technology sector, where there was a history of profitable tolerance for people who looked and talked funny while inventing new markets, the nonconformist was now icily ignored or sent home to change, cubicle space reverted from personal to corporate decoration, and talk about changing genders was quietly added to the list of forbidden sex-related topics of discussion in the workplace.

The new business suit was the same old male one, now usually a conformist charcoal grey and increasingly worn even by people who were female at the moment, but the trousers in that ensemble had been almost universally replaced by the belted tartan kilt, which was more accommodating of changes in hip sizes. The unisex work uniform was here after so many decades of talking about it, and for a while it looked like so many Scotsmen in every boardroom, and the only way to tell which ones were female in their private lives was to peek at the space above the knee-socks and try to figure out which ones shaved their legs.

Then the empire struck back, as far as I was concerned. If you had a science-fiction kind of mind, the kind that asked the next question and extrapolated and evaluated possibilities however unlikely, you could have clearly seen it coming. Everywhere below the boardroom and the top row of the organization chart, new hires were reporting for work female as a condition of their employment, and company handbooks were being rewritten to require it of existing employees. As long as it was a condition everybody could fulfill, legally it wasn't discrimination. Even if not quite everybody qualified -- and there were of course people out on the so-far-permanent side of the chart with me who were currently stuck male -- no court in this country was inclined to touch it. The affected individuals were all men, either immunes who were born that way or Nerimavirus victims who were stuck that way, so the groups who might have taken up the cause in an organized way were unable or unwilling to rally against a discrimination which went counter to the kind they were organized to fight.

Increasingly, too, governments were actively supporting women-only roles in the workplace as a means of controlling the birthrate. I understood the logic even if I resented the method: a woman could only produce one child at a time. A man could potentially father hundreds simultaneously, but he was unlikely to be given the opportunity if he had no means of support. If you only had decent clothes for one shape, that being the shape you wore to earn your living, you were less likely to spend time in the other shape.

Globally, then, all those jobs which could be handled around a pregnant belly and a nursing child were becoming women's work. The other jobs were men's work, but those were typically dirty, dangerous and low-paying. It meant fewer jobs for men in a technological society. That meant that more people who preferred to be men nonetheless became women during the workday in order to pursue their interests and hold down jobs.

I had already watched the entire engineering staff at one place "go girl" around me over a weekend, while I was still anxiously waiting to regain my male shape. From then on, every contract position I got had female shape and dress stipulated in the contract. Most workplaces now had only a ladies' room, with a hot-and-cold water bubbler strategically mounted outside.

Even if it had no bearing on my own condition, it all made my so-far-missing maleness feel more and more like a receding target, one I'd never quite reach.

I'd heard about the guy who started all this. He'd originally picked up this gendershifting thing from a place in China, a place called Jusenkyo, or at least that's what the Japanese called it. Since the guy whose blood had mutated the virus to do this to us all was Japanese, maybe calling the place by a Japanese name wasn't so inappropriate after all.

The new words used for new forms, now that water-changes had become forbidden topics in office discussion, were Japanese enough: otoko-girl and onna-boy. Michelle was now an otoko-girl when the water was cold, and I was stuck in the onna position and had been for what felt like forever.

I was in the shower, setting the temperature nice and comfy hot, not knowing that Michelle was running the dishwasher. When it filled up and valved off, suddenly the water was painfully hot. I screamed, in a lot lower voice than I'd had recently, and that's how we found out that I'd finally come unlocked. Neither of us got very much sleep that night, and we both called in 'sick' and stayed home to continue our welcome-home party.

We weren't home free, though. There was something wrong with my particular Nerimavirus change. The water had to be just that painfully hot to make me male, and almost any cold or even mildly warm water, even a misty breeze, made me female again. Given that I had to be female for my job these days, we still shared fashion accessories most of the time, even on weekends. It just wasn't worthwhile for me to try to stay male when we left the house, and I had to dress for that fact.

We could enjoy normal relations in private, for a while, at least, but about the only place the rest of the world saw my male face was on my dual-picture driver's license, which finally got a fresh mugshot of my birth form, not a copy of the California one. Then even that much compatibility started to wash away as my trigger temperature started to soar. It was getting so bad that I couldn't stand the necessary scalding more than once a week or so.

The light in my mirrors had been an irritant for some time now. It was the line of dawn behind me, naked sunlight trying to dazzle me with afterimages. That was one disadvantage of motorcycling: you were pretty much stuck in place on that saddle, and adjusting the mirrors on their stalks could be dangerous at highway speeds. I crouched further to try to get that bright sun out of my line of sight, the more irritating for being brighter than the road ahead.

As the sky lightened, the seeing got easier, and I eventually straightened back up. Now I noticed that the lights in my mirrors were flashing ones. I waited with the usual automatic mild anxiety for them to zap past me and get gone, but instead they pulled in behind me. It took me a few moments to realize that that's what they were doing.

Shit, I thought, I'm so close.. just another hour or less. Why me? Then I looked down at the speedometer, something I hadn't really done since I put on the throttle clamp, and saw why: 10-over. Busted.

I put on my signals and started slowing down to pull over, trying not to do anything that might appear to have any other intention. Meanwhile I mentally went through my short list of things to do to stay unharmed, things that mostly made me look harmless and cooperative. I'd had cops pull guns on me before when I was living in California, and I wasn't eager to repeat any of those close encounters with death. The last time, when Michelle and I were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and then suddenly staring down revolvers, was a big reason we'd moved to Nevada. Now I didn't want to give this one any excuse.

I found a paved expansion of the shoulder and pulled over to a stop, shutting off the bike and dismounting, immediately setting the sidestand and then sitting down on the ground near but not next to the bike, as the CHP cruiser rolled up behind me with its spotlight pointed at me, still visible in the early morning light.

The cop's subtle swagger, when she emerged, made it plain that she was a female-on-duty officer and male the rest of her life. I'd read about that. All law-enforcement officers in California had to work in their cold-water forms.

There was good logic behind that. A sudden change in the middle of an armed confrontation could put a bullet through the wrong person's head, and in California far too many police confrontations seemed to escalate to at least pulling out guns if not using them.

That meant that there were suddenly a lot more women working in CHP uniforms, and of course it changed things. As prevailing hormones altered working attitudes, CHP lost some of its brutal reputation, but picked up a ton of no-nonsense.

Now this barrel-chested no-nonsense lady cop eyed me as I pulled off my helmet and shook my hair into place, and I could see a subtle change in her bearing, as if she got slightly more protective and less confrontational.

I stifled the vagrant sudden image of the caricature small-town sheriff with her boobs drooping down to ether side of her fat gut. Under other circumstances it would have been amusing, but I could somehow sense I was being given some slack for being small, cute, female and cooperative. I didn't want anything running through my mind to cause my demeanor to change, and so cause a change in her behavior.

She eyed my dual-picture driver's license and noticed the similarity of the two names. She smirked. "Christopher, Christine... Chris. Hmph... Easy name to work with. You got lucky there." She looked it over some more. "Trigger-point 140? Deadband 30? I take it back, that's not lucky, that's gotta hurt."

"It's gotten worse since that test. It has to be boiling now. I'm on my way to get some J-water, it'll either make that easier or lock me up for good."

She winced in sympathy, looked down at my registration and over at the bike with its Nevada plate, then spoke into the radio clipped near her shoulder. The answer came back almost immediately, "no wants", as I expected.

She turned to eye me critically. "So what had you going so fast? You know you were speeding, this isn't news..."

"No, you're right, I was speeding. I didn't notice it until you came up behind me. I was riding male, then I ran into some fog. I didn't think about the smaller wind profile, so I didn't adjust my throttle clamp for it."

She scowled, thought a moment, looking down at the pad in her hand, then gave me a momentary searching stare. "I shouldn't do this, but..." She turned. "I'm going to let you off with a warning. Watch that speed, and don't let me catch you doing it again, because I'll come down on you twice as hard as I would in the first place." She strode off towards her cruiser.

"I'll watch it... Thank you."

At the open door of the cruiser, she turned, nodded, and said, "Good luck with that J-water. Hope it works."

If you want it and it's semi-legal, you can find it in LA. If it's illegal, you have to go to Las Vegas for it. Lock-water, for instance.

For those whose changes occurred randomly, or whose triggers were so close together and so close to room-ambient that they changed rapidly in normal humidities, lockdown was the only way to gain a level of stability that they could survive. A week of such rapid toggling usually left the victim looking anorexic as the body spent its resources coping with the changes.

Unlike the J-water, which came only from certain natural sources, lock-water was something produced, which meant that it was available in large quantities if you had the money and the connections.

I'd spent a fair amount of time on the Internet looking into all this when my condition first developed. Between web searches, newsgroups, IRC channels on little-known servers and the occasional logon to a popped-up Hotliner, I'd gotten my little handful of nicks and usernames known as somebody quiet, trustworthy, who had a personal interest in the fringes of all this. I'd even given advice and designs to some people whose information-gathering and software skills were much better than their hardware expertise, particularly on the analog end of temperature control, so I was known as something other than a schmoozing leech.

The word was that a Three-Letter-Agency or two had been using lock-water in pursuit of their agenda. Certainly the Taliban had toned down their rhetoric considerably after most of their leaders started showing up in burqahs. In one obstreperously Islamic country, the regular turnover in ayatollahs had become quite noticeable, so I guess they still hadn't figured where the water was coming from, or, more likely, how it was getting to its target. I spent some time swapping theories with some of the people online, but in truth I didn't really want to know. As far as I knew, I was just a graph's-end statistic to those TLAs, and I wanted to keep it that way. I had something to lose and I knew it. Maybe I had to follow orders even to being female when I was at work, but the rest of my time and my life were still my own.

Still, living in Las Vegas, I was able to chase down local leads for a couple of people who were pre-op transsexuals before Nerimavirus and who, after experiencing both sides, still wanted to go all the way. The money came in, the water went out, and my modest cut was clearly labeled "finder's fee", even if my invoice didn't specify where the other part of the payment went. I was very careful about handling it, since that wasn't the way I wanted to go. I wore full raingear over my leathers when I carried that stuff, and I kept my gloves on the whole time I handled it. The little jar went out packed in watertight wrappers and padded out with industrial absorbent; just because the stuff was nominally illegal and shipped without warning labels was no reason to take a chance on some UPS handler going home locked. I'd get email that the customer was happy and that was that, one less problem in the world.

It was on the Internet that I learned that J-water was freely to be had in Los Angeles. Unlike me, they wouldn't ship it by parcel post. They were legit, so they had to declare what it was on the outside of the package, and neither UPS nor USPS would touch it, so it had to go by ground transport in a messenger car or truck. That was an expense I wasn't willing to pay, not when LA was so close, so I'd prepared for a weekend return to Los Angeles.

Finally I had everything set up. I'd placed a will-call order at the store in LA that sold Jusenkyo waters, told them that I'd be in on Saturday. Now, all through Friday, I had to set myself up for this. Exactly how my virus-based changes would react with the real thing was an unknown. I couldn't even be sure that there'd be any change at all... but I had to try.

Michelle met me for lunch. She found me hunched in a very unladylike manner over a half-eaten cold-cut sandwich.

"You're really worried about this, aren't you."

I looked up and nodded. "Yeah... I'm scared, really. It's getting worse. I burn myself badly now every time I change back, and all it takes is a desk job or a little rain, and boom, I'm a girl again. This... this might fix my problem... or it might fix me."

"Well, what is it that has you so scared? Is it being female for good? Is that it?"

"Umm, well... that's part of it... but... it's us, really. I don't want to lose us, and I'm really getting the feeling that I might. You've been acting a little different lately..."

She sighed, stood up and walked around the table, elegant as ever. "Stand up."

I stood. She was wearing heels, I was wearing loafers. She pulled me into her embrace, hard, and I suddenly felt like a crash-dummy with a faceful of airbag.

"You bite me there and I'll kick you." It was our running joke about our sizes since my change; she was no doubt quite used to feeling my hot breath seeping into her bra. I snickered to cover up how very small and girlish I felt at such moments.

She forced my face up and kissed me.

"Now, look, Chris. You're a helluva guy when you're a guy, and you're my kinda gal when you're not a guy. I like you a lot; no, actually I love you. I really want you in my life; and I'm the kinda gal that really wants a man in her life. Now, right now I don't know whether that means we need a bed that sleeps two people or three... because right now you don't either. I can handle it either way, but I really need to know. We both do; this is tearing you up inside and it hurts me to see you this way.

"Now, you go on, go to LA and try your luck. If you come back looking like the guy I fought over a book with, I'll be waiting for you. If you come back just one of us girls, well, I'll be waiting for you, and I can change so we can play, but then we need to find ourselves a guy that likes both of us. You can handle that, can't you?"

"Yeah, if that's what it comes to... Yeah. I mean, I liked it when it was you..."

"Yeah, well, I like being a woman better. It's how I was raised, and it just feels better, even when I'm playing with you. But if it's you, me and the boy next door, you can take it and like it, right? So the sooner we know, the less chance we'll find us some smart guy that has us both creaming our jeans in both of his forms only to find out he got scooped up a week ago by a topless bimbo from one of the casinos, right?"

I gulped and nodded. "Why one guy?"

"Because if it was two guys they'd want to get exclusive, and I don't want to lose you."

"I... Me neither. If it comes to that."

She whispered. "You'd better not leave town without saying goodbye... Say, all night long..."

I tiptoed and kissed her. "Have the kettle and the burn cream ready."

"You got it, lover."

I followed the 15 down the big hill, then switched to the 10 outside San Bernadino. The 610 became the 210 long enough to get me through Pasadena. The urban canyon of the 134 through Glendale had always reminded me of the attack on the Death Star, up until it met the 101 coming up out of Hollywood and suddenly slowed to a near-halt like no tie-fighter fight I'd ever watched. If Luke Skywalker had had to fly through this perpetual jam, we'd all still be using AT&T.

After that near-ticket, I was edgy enough not to want to split lanes. I hadn't paid attention to LA in some time, so I had no way of knowing if they'd banned it here like they had in San Francisco. Despite the occasional Harley barreling down the corridors of cars at near-freeway speeds, and the occasional CHP doing the same, I felt more comfortable staying in-lane, drifting right and following the car in front of me to my exit.

I pulled off the freeway at my target, Coldwater Canyon Avenue. The last time I was in the area, this had been a grimy business/industrial strip with mere residential islands from the bottom to Victory. Now somehow the area had taken on an offhand tourist-attraction air, what with all the Chinese and Japanese decor. I suppose it was the name that had drawn them all to locate here. I rolled up the street, avoiding the usual midmorning jaywalkers and gawking at the strange new storefronts. Imports, eateries and hot tubs... Oh, yeah, California had gone in for hot tubs in a big way again. Even the more mundane businesses here seemed changed. Point-of-use water heaters and digital-readout controls were prominent in the display windows. There were even clothiers, but they specialized either in Chinese fashions or "shifters", a higher-priced way of saying "unisex".

Even after my absence, I navigated the Valley with ease and soon found the store I wanted, and claimed one of the few real advantages to motorcycling in greater Los Angeles. Even if there was no available parking for a car, there was a 75% chance that there was space for a bike to back up to the curb without blocking the adjacent cars in.

Once inside, I was finally able to ask a question that had been on my mind almost since I found out about this place.

"How do you stay in business? There can't be that many people with my kind of problem from the Nerimavirus, not even nationwide."

The person I asked that was the guy I'd talked to over the phone. He'd pulled out my will-call and opened it to reveal a small red jar with Chinese characters painted in yellow on the front. It also had a barcode sticker up one side and a band of pink all the way around the bottom. Now he pointed behind him to glassed shelves with a lot more of these red jars, with a rainbow of various color-bands and variations in the lettering.

"We get a lot of actors. You have any idea how many trained animals in the movies are people now after a hot bath? Look at all the credits some time. It's better work than being an extra, and the studios don't have to worry about the animal-rights crazies. It's extra, on top of Nerimavirus, so it comes off with open-water. Some people get work in half a dozen forms, and they buy J-water from us every time. It's a good business."

I'd thought the New Sexism was pretty lame; this implied a lot of people who willingly went through far greater changes to pull down a paycheck. I shook my head, pulled out my wallet and paid up.

He handed me my receipt and offered the package. "You want it now?" I nodded, and he took back the package, waving me to follow him. "C'mon out back, strip down however much you're going to, and I'll pour it on you while you stand in the shower. Just let me chill it down first so you get a low trigger temperature."

I followed, and waited while he did something with dry ice. That took a few minutes, after which he pulled open a massive rubberized curtain, disclosing a large shower stall behind it.

Modesty be damned: this was LA, the guy had probably seen everything twelve times over today... I stripped off everything and stepped into the shower he'd pointed out, to stand on the X made with black electrical tape. It was big in there, leading me to wonder about some of his customers and their paycheck-earning forms. I felt tiny standing there in the middle of it.

He gave me the kind of quick glance that takes pictures for later review, then just nodded and turned to set up the little jar over my head. "There's a 5-percent discount if you let us take the runoff and sell it as used."

"And if I say no?"

"Then it goes down the drain to confuse the alligators."

"What happens if I say yes?"

"Usually, nothing." He shrugged. "It's magic, so you can't ever be sure there's no coupling."

"As touchy as my situation is, I think I'd better pass."

He nodded, shrugged again and worked a valve; he'd expected that from me, probably. Apparently most of his customers didn't care. He pulled shut two layers of shower curtain behind him as he left the stall to go peer at me through a plexiglas window.

"You ready? Stand still, close your eyes, take a deep breath now and breathe out through your nose. On zero. Three... two.. one... zero."

He pulled a lever that tipped over the cold little jar of magic at the end of a long rod and it spilled down over my face and hair. Maybe it tingled a little, but that was it. No sudden changes in thinking, no new bizarre ideas about my role in life, no apparent change in height or build, nothing.

"Okay, here comes the shower. It starts cold, that's washing the stuff off you. You want me to turn it warm after that?"

"Yes." Still with my eyes closed, I was checking my body for any changes and getting my hands into position to tell me if this had worked.

I shivered when the cold water started. This wasn't a normal shower, it was more like a decontamination chamber. I'd seen five or six shower heads in my quick glance when I stepped in, and now it felt like every one of them was spraying everything it had at me.

Then most of the shower heads turned off and the water temperature rose. It got lukewarm and I got nervous, cupping my female crotch with one hand and one of my breasts with the other. The water got warmer and still nothing happened and my hopes started to sink. Just as it got near as hot as I like it in the tub, my skin shivered and suddenly the other hand had something pushed into it.

"Awright!!" That, in the voice I'd first settled into manhood with.

"It worked? Cool!" I could hear the grin in his voice. He wasn't so LA-blase after all, he was still human. "You got any clothes to wear like that, or you want to finish with cold water?"

"I've got clothes."

I spent a long while just walking and riding around with my feet fitting properly in my boots, smiling and taking in the prevailing weirdness that passed for normalcy in popular parts of LA, even North Hollywood. I'd been mostly stuck female for so long that it felt a bit odd not to be cringing away from the sprinkler system that turned on suddenly up ahead of me as if it was a disaster. I grinned, calmly walked into its mist, changed, stopped at the next hole-in-the-wall eatery for some moderately hot water, threw away the teabag that came with it, poured it into my hair and changed back. And grinned. Very much.

I thought about riding back male, but the difference in wind-profile on the way out was a forceful argument otherwise.

Frankly, I was tired. I'd gotten on the road after a pleasurably sleepless night and I wasn't all that fresh for interstate biking, but I didn't feel like I belonged in LA anymore. After the Nyanniichuan, there was nothing I particularly wanted in this city, I just wanted to go home, and the less I had to fight the wind of my passage to stay on the bike while doing it, the more likely I'd be to make it without a stopover.

I thought about calling her with the good news and then taking a motel room, but the thought of wading through our answering-machine screening, hoping she'd be there to pick up but never knowing, shot down that idea. I wanted to tell her the news myself, not have it relayed through a piece of tape. Well, that and I really wanted to be with her as soon as possible.

After stops at Winchell's, Thrifty's, Der Weinerschnitzel, and a gas station where I filled one tank, emptied another and changed shape, I was as ready as I was going to be. Hunkered down behind a tankbag stuffed with a supply of small munchies where I could get to them with gloves on, I turned my back to Los Angeles and ramped up onto the 101, squinting against the dingy timeless Southern California sky and watching my speed, bound for Las Vegas.

When I rolled up into our driveway in the early evening, she was outside washing her car. She eyed me as I parked the bike, seeing my curves and bumps through the leather and visibly trying not to let disappointment show on her face, but it was obvious to anybody who knew her well enough to love her. She looked down, busying herself with turning off the hose.

I pulled off my helmet and slipped it over my arm through the face hole, shook my hair free, and settled my expression. My fatigue was probably easy enough to see.

She finished putting things away and gave me an obvious inquiring glance even as she reached out a hand for mine. "Well?"

I grinned as I took her bare wet hand in my gloved one. I'd planned this as I rolled into the city; it better work. I had unzipped the main compartment of my tank bag after I locked the bike, and now I reached in and pulled out the paper coffee cup I'd gotten at the donut shop around the corner. I thumbed off the lid and poured the water onto my head and got taller.

She had sensed and seen my jubilance already and was showing a cautious smile; now her grin just wouldn't quit as she looked up at me. "Breakfast in bed for two, coming right up." That had to wait for a welcome-home kiss, though.

This story was already begun and framed several months before the events of 11sep01. I saw no reason to replot to take those into account. Consider this a timeline where the Nerimavirus outbreak prevented that.

My thanks for a reality-check preread by Brian Randall, and C&C from ffml beta-readers Tangent, DarkHorse, Michael Gilson and Xelloss Metallium.

C&C welcome: siaru@stormbringer.org