Doing Okay (Part 4)

View Part 1 of Doing Okay.
View Part 2 of Doing Okay.
View Part 3 of Doing Okay.

She suggested instead of taking the bus that we walk across the park back to her apartment -- which is where I had been staying since the Shift, of course. (For safety, I made her recite the address by memory along with several other facts.)

She told me how impressed she was with me, how I seemed to be adapting much better to being a woman than most guys she knew in my situation. I looked down awkwardly at the plastic bag from the deli with the hygiene products. I wanted so bad to hide them as she showered me with these types of compliments.

Then I looked up at her. She considered me put together? Was she looking at herself? I felt like I wanted to return the praise, but it seemed like it would be hollow. If she thought I was “put together” as a woman, I don’t think I had words to describe how well she made my body look!

The Goblin Princess (Episode 3)

The Data

The social networking company had been stealing data from people for years, but they were finally ordered to give it back to any user that requested it after years of court battles. Few people understood exactly what the court order meant and fewer still took the company up on their offer of returned data. But still some people did and the company needed a method for doing so.

Jennifer Kim was among the first to request her data back. The company was ill-prepared. They had countless Jennifer Kims in their database; they just needed her to go away -- so they hooked her up to the machine that would return her data to her, and told her to sit still.

Instead of returning her data to her, they picked a carefully selected alternate user instead. Jennifer would obtain the memories, personality, full data file, and (most importantly) the lax attitude of data security of user “Steve Johnson.” Sure, it would be like creating a second Steve Johnson inside Jennifer Kim’s body, and that might be a problem. But, according to the data, the company suspected the new Steve probably wouldn’t care. The company was rarely wrong with the way they interpreted the data.

Only One

Nate had read a bunch of these stories online about a massive number of people swapping bodies all at once. However, when he found him swapped into the body of a woman -- he seemed to be the only one!

No one around him seemed to be in a panic. He checked his phone for news articles, but there was nothing. His own body was clear across town, and so far it hadn’t given him a call. If there was at least one other person involved in this body swap, it had to be the woman he swapped with, right? She had to be in his original body and at least somewhat concerned about it -- shouldn’t she?

Retro Hell

Rob had found the retro game console in the trash. These things often sold on eBay for a hundred bucks -- not bad for something pulled out of the trash -- and a few hundred more if they actually worked.

He was lucky there was a game inside and that he had the right cords to hook it up to his television. The thing actually turned on, though the loading screen seemed to take forever.

He didn’t expect the console to glow and suck him inside. Being trapped in the cheap looking world of polygons wasn’t even the worst part of this, it was the fact that he didn’t even get sucked into the body of the main character! Instead, he was inside the body of a female NPC. He wanted out of this retro hell ASAP.