Hotwire

It was a rough neighborhood. While Nathaniel had grown up here, it was a place he had told himself he was never coming back to. The Great Shift had other plans.

It wasn’t just that he had found himself thrust back into one of the roughest areas. It wasn’t just that the Shift happened in the middle of the night. He also found himself in a woman’s body. All those things added up seemed like a recipe for disaster, and Nathaniel decide he wasn’t going to stick around.

Of course, growing up in a bad neighborhood ha given him some useful skills. There was the time some guy taught him how to hotwire a car -- he was certainly using that skill now. He knew it probably wasn’t ethical, but feeling safe while in a strange, unknown body was a higher priority right now.

The Swap (Part 1)

Freshman year. Right after coming back to campus after winter break. The swap happened. It had been three days since that swap. I was in Li’s body, and she was in mine.

“Every day I see you, it looks like you just woke up. A little makeup wouldn’t hurt, you know?” She said while staring me dead in the eye.

“Pastels?” I asked, basically responding with my own criticism of how she was dressed in my body.

“Your mom sent it.”

“It’s fine. It’s passable.”

We both knew we were pushing the limits of what would be an ‘acceptable’ look for the other. Neither of us really wanted to embrace our new bodies; we just wanted to swap back!

So Much Worse

A few minutes ago I had woken up in a weird lab in the body of a woman. It felt so strange, and I immediately started complaining and cursing. The mad scientist seemed to appear out of nowhere, telling me to shut up or he’d make it so much worse.

I wish I had listened.

I soon found myself waking up a second time. The world was blurry and the colors were muted. Things seemed bigger. I saw the body that I had been in not long ago -- I could recognize the clothing. It was acting strangely -- panting, making whining animal-like noises.

Then I realized exactly what kind of animal the body was acting like, because I realized what kind of animal I had become! That mad scientist had put me into the body of a dog! Maybe being a woman wasn’t so bad after all!

Continuum Medical Services

Dude!

“So, you’re saying that on this website, you can literally modify your features to make you look in any way you want? And people will always think you were like that? I dunno. It seems a scam to me.” Mike mused as he looked a the laptop open in front of him.

“Dude!” His roommate Jason exclaimed, “Look at me! I pushed that thing to the limit and turned myself into a chick! The only thing I didn’t realize was that it was one time only, and now I’m stuck like this!”

“You haven’t...always looked like that?”

“It may change what you look like, but it doesn’t exactly transfer the needed life skills over. I had to figure out how to put on a bra this morning, Dude! And that’s still the least of my problems! I need to figure out my cycle and birth control pills and so many other things I wish I didn’t need to know.”

Unearned

The Great Shift had happened hours ago, swapping the bodies of all the locals and tourists on the small island. Most people had gone home or returned to their rooms, but Austin just sat on the edge of the resort property the entire time since the Shift. He hadn’t budged.

It had only been a few days prior when he realized a truth about himself -- or perhaps herself would be more apt -- the realization of being a trans woman. She hadn’t started any sort of process yet; she hadn’t even picked out a new name. As a result, the sudden shift of being in a woman’s body was still...difficult.

The problem wasn’t with the gender of her new body -- that was obviously the good part. The problem was that the body still wasn’t hers and it didn’t feel like hers; it felt stolen, unearned, and fake. Austin didn’t miss her old gender in the slightest, but she did miss her body...

Experiment in Empathy

It was meant to be an experiment in empathy, a way to help their failing marriage. It had been three months now since Beth’s husband, Mac, had been turned into an exact copy of Beth. The only problem was that the copy of her body also meant he had a copy of her brain. For all intents and purposes, he thought he was Beth and always had been.

As a result, they often argued about who the real Beth was and who was really Mac. And the fact was, they didn’t really know. Beth began to question her own identity. Maybe she was really Mac, and she just didn’t know it -- though she’d never reveal she thought that to him. Mac (of course) had the exact same thought. So they both kept insisting they were Beth -- the REAL Beth.

Even the scientists weren’t sure which was which, and refused to force either of them to go back to being Mac for ethical reasons. The marriage continued to be just as tense as ever.