CONTACT REPORT
REPORT DATE: 03 March 2056
CONTACT DATE: 27 April 2024
STATUS: nominal

CONSENT PROVIDED: N/A (specify below)

PHYSIOLOGICAL: Blood analysis indicates subject continues to respond well to tx. 
Levels within expected ranges, no unexpected effects. Sleep appears improved 
from pre-tx condition. Blood glucose levels slightly elevated, likely due to 
recent dietary events (birthday party). Monitor and xref with proximal analyses. 
Tx administered, full dose per protocol. No outside contact.

ADDITIONAL: Consent in loco meo.

TEMPORAL: 0.261, trending positive. Still within AOR range for negative outcome.

RECOMMENDATION: Continuation of program as scheduled.

Every Saturday night for weeks now, he’s had the same dream. Not exactly the same, but almost.

She comes to him in the middle of the night. He doesn’t hear the door open or close. She is simply not-there one moment, and there the next, standing in the middle of the room. She looks down at him a moment, then crouches to his bedside. The faint light spilling through the bedroom window might make another face seem cold and harsh, but it sketches hers in pastels of blue and grey, all soft lines and curves, half in shadow. She smiles, rests a hand on his shoulder, and asks him something. He yawns and says yes. She nods and asks something else. He looks up into her eyes, blinks sleepily, and says yes again.

She brushes his hair out of his face, then reaches into her satchel. As his eyes slip closed again, he hears a zipper, followed a tearing sound. She lifts the sleeve of his thin t-shirt, and he feels something cold and damp scrub a spot on his shoulder. A moment later, something is pressed against that same spot, followed by a sharp sting. He makes a little moaning grunt, and she responds with a comforting sh-sh-sh, the way his mother does. He hears a soft, rising tri-tone—bi-bi-beep!—and the pressure leaves his shoulder. Another cold wipe, this time with a little more pressure, and then she pulls his sleeve back down. He hears the zipper again, and the soft rustle of her satchel.

Then he feels her hand resting on his head, softly stroking his hair as he falls back into sleep, and she whispers the only words he remembers upon waking.

“Soon, little one. Soon.”

• • •

The boy doesn’t cry. He never cries. Not when he stepped on a bee barefoot, its death-sting causing the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life. Not when his grandpa, who taught him to play poker and loved him unconditionally, died of cancer. Not when his mom told him they were moving to a new city, away from all his friends. Not even when a bully at his new school stomped on his transforming-jet toy, one of the only gifts he had left from his grandpa. He doesn’t cry.

He’s cried twice today.

First, on the schoolbus, stopped at a traffic light. The car in the next lane over had its windows down, its over-loud stereo playing a classic rock song his mom used to sing to him as a child, and he remembered being young and innocent and having no cares in the world, and suddenly his eyes were flooding with tears. He choked them back, blinked them away, denied them.

Later at home, watching TV with his mom, he saw a commercial for conditioner or something, showing a girl running through a meadow, laughing. The screen focused the girl’s face, bright and joyful and alive, and his throat seized up around a lump of stone, his vision blurred, and he had to excuse himself to the bathroom.

Alone, with the door locked and the fan running, the sobs tore out of him like a sci-fi monster as he leaned on the sink, face crumpled, eyes streaming. When he looked up, he saw a stranger’s face in the mirror, with wild, bloodshot eyes above tear-streaked cheeks.

He washed his face, then went back out to the living room couch, where his mother sat waiting. “Everything okay there, champ?” she said, concern in her eyes.

“Yeah,” he said, sitting back down and tucking his feet under him. “Everything’s fine.”

CONTACT REPORT
REPORT DATE: 10 March 2056
CONTACT DATE: 04 May 2024
STATUS: nominal

CONSENT PROVIDED: N/A (specify below)

PHYSIOLOGICAL: Blood analysis indicates subject continues to respond well to tx. 
Levels within expected ranges, no unexpected effects. Sleep appears improved 
from pre-tx condition. Blood glucose levels still slightly elevated, likely due 
to juvenile sugar intake. Monitor and xref with proximal analyses. Tx 
administered, full dose per protocol. No outside contact.

ADDITIONAL: Consent in loco meo. Subject claims to believe tx sessions are 
dreams. Unclear if belief is sincere or phantasmic. Some emotional outbursts 
noted; xref psych profile for etiology.

TEMPORAL: 0.293, trending positive. Still within AOR for negative outcome.

RECOMMENDATION: Continuation of program as scheduled.

“Yo, check it out. He’s got boobs!”

“What? No way!”

“Seriously!”

He shoves the sweaty gym clothes into his gym bag, He’s always hated gym, hated being unclothed in any way around other boys, hated the way they flaunted crude cruelty as signs of their burgeoning masculinity. This is worse, though. He can feel them staring at him—staring at the sore, swelling buds on his chest—and can hear their mocking, braying laughter.

“Oh, man, he’s got titties!”

“Dude, those aren’t titties, those are boobs! He’s bigger than my sister!”

“He’s got bitch-tits!”

He reaches for his t-shirt.

“What?”

“Bitch-tits. It’s when, like, you take a bunch of steroids to bulk up, and instead of getting all jacked, you grow boobs.”

He finishes putting on his t-shirt, then grabs his jeans and sits to pull them on.

“That’s not a thing.”

“It totally is! My brother’s on the weightlifting team, and he knows a dude who has, like, double Ds.”

“Dude, your brother smokes more weed than Snoop Dogg.”

“Fuck you, man!”

“If he were taking ‘roids, he’d be less of a wuss.”

He shoves his feet into battered low-top Converse and yanks the laces tight. One of them snaps off in his hand. “Fuck,” he whispers, then knots the broken lace to its stub end and finishes tying.

“Aw, he put ‘em away! C’mon, show us your tits!”

“Stop, man, I think he’s gonna cry.”

He trades his gym bag for his backpack, slams the locker shut, and snaps its combination lock closed.

“Oh, sorry, we didn’t mean to sexually harass you…”

He beelines for the locker room door, their jeers trailing after him.

• • •

He asks his mother about his chest, and she calls to make an appointment. His pediatrician, it turns out, had a cancellation for the following day.

“The condition," the doctor says in an incongruously robust, radio-announcer voice, "is called ‘gynecomastia’.” He’s middle-aged, balding, and white, blinking owlishly through a pair of browline glasses above a push-broom mustache that makes the boy think of a cartoon character. “It’s caused by an imbalance in hormone levels, and it’s not at all uncommon in adolescent boys. About one in three young men develop excess breast tissue at some point during puberty—” Something about the way he says puberty makes the boy squirm uneasily. “—and it’s nothing to be overly concerned about. We’ll run a few tests, just to rule out any possible contributing factors, but in the vast majority of cases, it resolves itself in time.”

His mother sighs, the tension draining out of her, and squeezes his hand comfortingly. The doctor keeps talking, his mother responds to a few questions, and time keeps passing, and he sits there in his scratchy hospital johnny, observing and hearing, but paying no mind to the conversation.

He doesn’t have cancer. That’s good! His… the lumps in his chest are perfectly normal. One in three, the doctor said. They’ll probably go away on their own.

Why does that thought make him so sad?

CONTACT REPORT
REPORT DATE: 17 March 2056
CONTACT DATE: 11 May 2024
STATUS: nominal

CONSENT PROVIDED: N/A (specify below)

PHYSIOLOGICAL: Blood analysis indicates subject continues to respond well to tx. 
Levels within expected ranges. Sleep continues to improve from pre-tx condition. 
Blood glucose levels still slightly elevated; may need to counsel re: sugar 
intake. Some secondary sex characteristic development, e.g. breast budding, 
Tanner stage 2-3 (see below). Tx administered, full dose per protocol. No 
outside contact.

ADDITIONAL: Consent in loco meo. Subject receiving negative social pressure from 
peers re: physiological changes mentioned above. Medical appointment with 
primary care doctor, timestamp 10 May 2024 12:30 PM; resulting dx gynecomastia 
(see aftercare summary attached). Further tests ordered; tx detection 
categorically improbable.

TEMPORAL: 0.493, trending positive. Still within AOR for negative outcome.

RECOMMENDATION: Assessment for disclosure, xref with psych profile on record. 
Continuation of program as scheduled.

Another middle-of-the-night, somewhere between Saturday and Sunday. He lies in bed, waiting, his posture relaxed, head tilted so he can watch for her. The faint bluish-white light through the window spills across the floor, which he’s now made a habit of tidying every Saturday afternoon.

The digital face of his alarm clock reads 2:36 when the air in the center of the room seems to pull inwards and coalesce, quickly and almost silently, into a human form. It’s her, of course. As with every time before, she pauses to look down at him, then starts to move to the bed.

“You’re back,” he says, softly.

She comes to a standstill. “You’re awake,” she replies in an equally hushed tone.

He shrugs. “I have the same dream every week, and I wake up every Sunday morning with a little spot on my shoulder. That’s the… injection, or whatever that device is?”

“Yes,” she says, without hesitation.

“Then it’s not a dream, is it? This is real?”

She snorts a little, almost inaudibly, and he realizes she’s laughing. “Very much so, yes.”

“What are you doing to me?” he asks.

She cocks her head to one side, and he sees, in the near darkness, a crooked smile on her face. “I think you already know.”

His chest tightens. He feels like a bubble of something—sound, emotion, tears, something wild and terrified and ecstatic—rises in his throat and threatens to burst out in a wordless howl. He needs to move, to do something, to disrupt the sensation so he doesn’t lose his composure. He sits up and turns his body to face her, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. “You’re… making me into a girl. With those injections.”

She nods. “Yes. It’s a little more complicated than that, but close enough.”

“Why?”

The woman is silent for a moment. “May I sit down with you?”

He shuffles up against the headboard, and she sits at the other end of the bed.

“I knew we’d have this conversation at some point. I’d hoped it would be later, but that was silly of me.” She smiles again, that same crooked, wistful smile. “You were always a sharp kid.”

“You say that like you know me.”

“I do. Almost as well as I know myself.”

He shakes his head. “What does that even mean?”

She looks at him a moment, then nods. “Okay, we’re doing this now.”

“Doing what?”

“Disclosure.” She smirks and makes that funny little snort-laugh sound again. “Sorry. Little in-joke, one that would take longer to explain than it’s worth. I’d ask if I can trust you to be quiet while I explain, but I know I can, and I’d ask you to keep all of this to yourself, but I know you will. Before I do, though, I need you to understand something. What I’m going to say is… a lot.”

He cocks his head at her. “You have a lot to say?”

She smiles in that indulgent way grownups do when they don’t want to call you a smartass. “Yes, but also, it’s going to be a lot for you to hear. It’s pretty heavy, and it’s going to bring up a lot of feelings for you. You okay to handle that right now?”

He shrugs. “Don’t know until I hear it, I guess, but you admitted you’re turning me into a girl and I haven’t freaked out yet.”

“That’s true,” she says. “So. I’m going to tell you five things, and once I have, your life is going to change forever. You might not believe them—or maybe you will, but won't want to—but they’re true. I need you to sit and listen. Don’t react, don’t respond, don’t ask questions; just listen, until I’m done. Can you do that?”

“Yeah—I mean, yes. I can. Yes.”

She smiles and reaches over to pat his arm. “It’s alright. You’re allowed to be nervous. I would be, in your position.” She looks away, takes a deep breath, exhales, and says, “Okay. Here are the five things you need to know. First: you’re a girl. You always have been, and you always will be. It’s an intrinsic part of who you are... and, on some level, you’ve always known this. Left to your own devices, you might’ve realized this, or admitted it to yourself, in your late teens, or your twenties. You might’ve taken longer. You might’ve even hidden from yourself until you died. That’s not an option anymore, though. In telling you this, I’ve taken that option away from you. Whatever you do going forward, whatever you choose, you’ll do with the full knowledge that inside, where it counts, you’re a girl, a woman.”

His eyes are wide, their corners prickling. He reaches up to rub them and is mildly surprised at his complete lack of surprise when his fingers touch wetness.

She looks at him, kindness and sympathy written on her face in the window light. “I know, it’s a lot. There’s more, but do you need a moment?”

He shakes his head gently. “No, I’m… I’m okay.”

“Okay. If you do need to take a break, let me know. Second thing, then.” She purses her lips, then says, “The injections I’ve been giving you for the past several weeks are part of a treatment protocol intended to help people like you bring their bodies into alignment with their own internal sense of gender, a process called ‘transition.’ This treatment is heavily tested, medically safe, and has no side effects, apart from the subject feeling a more holistic sense of identity, a congruity of mind and body." He blinked at her. "Sorry, that's a lot of jargon. You know how sometimes you feel like your happiness or sadness are on the other side of a window, so you can see them, but not feel them?" He nods. "The treatment will help with that. You'll feel more like yourself than you ever have before, and you'll actually feel all your feelings. The treatment is also entirely undetectable by the technology available to anyone you’re going to meet, which is why your doctor diagnosed you with gynecomastia. That’s a perfectly reasonable guess. It’s also completely incorrect. Your hormone levels aren’t ‘imbalanced.’ They’re being brought into line with the end goal of the treatment, which is the feminization of your physiology. There will be other changes over time. We’ll talk more about that later, but for now, that’s what you need to know: these treatments are what’s feminizing your body... ‘making you into a girl,’ as you put it.”

He opens his mouth— to ask something, he hardly knows what—then closes it with a snap.

She nods approvingly. “Time for questions later. I promise. Third thing: I said the treatment is completely undetectable by anyone you’re going to meet. That’s true, up to a point. What I meant is, it’s undetectable by anyone you’re going to meet for a long, long time. That’s because the treatment is based in a technology that won’t exist for another 50 years. Same with the device I use to administer the treatment, and with the method I use to appear and disappear from your room once a week.” She sighs. “There’s no non-clichéd way of saying this, so I won’t try. I’m a time traveller—sort of—from a point a little ways in the future. That’s another technology that doesn't exist yet, and won’t for a while. My mission is to administer these treatments to you once a week, and then, when you’re ready, to have this conversation with you to explain why.”

His eyes are wide, but he simply nods, and she goes on. “Fourth thing: I said I’m sort of a time traveller. It’s more accurate to say that I’m from another timeline. Do you know what I mean by that?"

The boy blinks, then says, "I think so? Like, there's a whole bunch of timelines and they're similar because they all split off from each other, but they're not the same because—"

She shushes him, then smiles. "You've got it. Close enough, anyway. In my home timeline, in the future, we have the ability to surveil and monitor a limited number of other timelines—most of them quite similar—and we can see how events play out in each one. Do you remember what I said about you figuring this out when you’re older, or never?” He nods. “That wasn’t a speculation, in each timeline we can access, the same people mostly all still exist. In some timelines, you work it out when you’re still a teenager. In others, you never do. In this timeline…” She pauses, then sighs. “In this timeline, you didn't make it. You struggled with the emotional strain of that incongruity until something breaks, and you took your own life.”

He swallows hard, and tries to speak, but his voice is a ghost of a whisper. His vision blurs as the tears return, threatening to spill over the floodgates.

She reaches over and rests a hand on his arm, makes that same comforting sh-sh-sh sound again, just like his mother. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay. We stopped it. That future? It’s gone. That’s why I came here: to give you the treatment, to prevent your timeline from going there. There’s more work we need to do, but that future has been undone. You’re gonna make it, okay? You're going to make it.” He swallows again and nods. She moves closer and raises her arm. He leans into her, and she embraces him, stroking his hair. “I know this is hard, kiddo. Believe me, I know. We’re almost done, though. One more thing, and then we’ll talk. Ready?”

“Yes,” he whispers.

“Okay.” She squeezes him once before releasing him, then scoots back to look at him again. “The terms we use to talk about gender incongruity in the future haven’t been coined yet, so I have to use the terms available to you now. Do you know what ‘transgender’ means?”

He nods, slowly.

“Right now, that’s the term used to describe people like you… and me.”

He blinks, his face going through several emotions in rapid succession, and she grins at him. “Yup. We’re both girls who were born in bodies incongruous with our intrinsic sense of self. That’s not the thing, though.” She closes her eyes, breathes in, and speaks. “Here’s the thing. In your timeline, where you live, there are two kinds of people who are legally empowered to consent to any kind of gender-affirming treatment.” She holds up a finger. “The first are adults.” She holds up a second finger. “The second are children who have the consent of a parent or a legal guardian. With me so far?” He nods. “Good. So, the ability to access other timelines changed that. There’s now one other class of person who can consent to treatment for a child: the adult that child would grow up to become.”

He sits bolt upright, smacking his head on the headboard with a hollow thunk, and they both jump at the noise. He rubs the back of his head, his mouth hanging open, his eyes still locked on her. Before any sound emerges, she speaks, softly, urgently.

“I know a million things are going through your head right now, fighting to be the first out of your mouth. I’m going to try to answer the first thousand as quickly as I can, before you have to ask. Yes, I’m you… or rather, I’m another version of you, from an adjacent timeline, one very similar to this. When I said I know you almost as well as I know myself, I wasn’t exaggerating. I’ve studied your life-track extensively, enough to know the differences and the similarities intimately. Our lives are like slightly shifted photocopies of each other, which is part of how I know you’re a girl, same as me. That’s part of why I gave the consent for your treatment: because I know what your life was like, and what it would’ve been like right up until the moment you died. We wanted—I wanted—to save you from that. So, I did.” She looks down and studies her own fingernails a moment, then continues. “I can’t promise your life is gonna be easy from here on out, but I can tell you that the bad future I mentioned, what we call a ‘negative outcome’ timeline, has been averted.” She looks up at him again. “Think of it as emergency lifesaving treatment. We knew you were heading for a guaranteed bad outcome, so as the closest we had to an adult version of you—what we call a 'proximal aspect'—I gave consent for treatment on your behalf, and we stopped it. But that’s as much as we can do… for now.”

“What do you mean, ‘for now’?” he says, his voice almost rising to a normal volume.

“We've moved you out of the path of the negative outcome: what we call the area-of-risk range, or AOR. It’s to do with timeline mechanics and probabilities and… ugh, not important. What’s important is, the bad outcome is averted, which means the emergency is over. The treatment protocol specifies that, once you’re out of AOR, we stop interfering in your timeline without your explicit consent. Your life is your own, from here on out.”

He shook his head, as if rattling something loose. “Wait, does that mean you’re done? You’re stopping the treatments?” He feels his face tighten, his heart racing.

She spreads her hands in a half-shrug. “That is one option, yes.”

“But… what happens if you do?”

“If we stop treatments, the physiological changes you’ve experienced thus far will resolve themselves. It'll be as though you'd had gynecomastia that resolved itself, just as your doctor said it would. Of course, you’ll still know everything we’ve talked about tonight, and you’ll still know what it feels like for your physiology to be more congruent with your sense of self. Based on our projections, that in itself is enough to move you out of the AOR.”

“Well, what are the other options?”

She smiles and says, softly, “There is also the possibility of continuing the treatment protocol.”

He waits, and when she doesn’t continue, he asks, “And what do I need to do to continue the treatment protocol?”

“You would need to consent to treatment,” she says evenly, “knowing what treatment entails, and what the end goal is.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” She holds up a hand. “Before you make any decisions, though, take some time to think it over. At a certain point, the physiological changes become permanent—or as permanent as medical science can make them, anyway—and would require other interventions to reverse if you change your mind.”

“Is that all?”

“No, that’s not all. There’s also the issue of growing up as a transgender girl in the first half of the twenty-first century. This isn’t a good time for us and, as much as I hate to tell you this, it gets worse before it gets better.”

 “How much worse?”

He sees a cold shadow pass over her face. “I’m not permitted to say much, but… a lot. Enough that I’m warning you about it.”

They sit in silence a moment, then he says, “Is it worth it?”

She sighs. “That’s a judgement call. I can’t tell you if it’ll be worth it for you. It was for me, but…” She spreads her hands again in the same half-shrug.

They watch as the alarm clock’s glowing red numerals flicker from 3:14 to 3:15. Then, in a barely-audible whisper, he says, “How much time do I have to think about it?”

“I can come back next week, if you’d like.”

He nods. “I think so.”

“Do you want me to administer the treatment before I go?”

In response, he turns to one side and lifts the sleeve of his t-shirt above his shoulder.

• • •

True to her word, the woman returns a week later.

The girl is waiting for her, sitting upright, one shirtsleeve raised.

The woman looks at her, eyes shining, and her face breaks into a wide smile. “Hey there, you.”

“Hey,” the girl replies.

“I take it that’s a yes, then?” the woman asks, pulling a small black case from her satchel.

“Yes,” the girl says. “I consent.”

“Alright, then.” The woman unzips the case, tears open an alcohol wipe, and swabs the girl’s shoulder. She presses the hypo to her shoulder, which triggers with a slight hiss, then the familiar tri-tone beep. She checks a screen on the back of the device, her face illuminated by its glow. “Your levels are good. Ease up on the sugar, though, wouldja?”

The girl sticks her tongue out as the woman swabs her shoulder again.

The woman puts the hypo back in her satchel, and they talk for another hour—or rather, the woman listens, and the girl talks, sharing feelings she's never been able to articulate before, in ways she’s never been able to before. They talk about the five things, about her transition, about her acceptance of her own girlhood. She talks, and the woman listens, and it’s good. Eventually, though, the girl’s flood of words slows, and she yawns hugely.

“And that’s my cue to go,” the woman says, standing. “You need to sleep. You’re a growing girl, after all.”

The girl giggles sleepily, then says, “You knew I’d say yes, didn’t you?”

“Mmm, let’s say I suspected you would.”

“Why?”

The woman winks at her. “Because I did, when I was you.”

CONTACT REPORT
DATE: 31 March 2056
CONTACT DATE: 25 May 2024
STATUS: optimal

CONSENT PROVIDED: Y

PHYSIOLOGY: Blood analysis optimal, levels within expected ranges. Sleep 
appears substantially improved from pre-tx condition. Blood glucose levels 
still elevated; advised to reduce sugar intake. Tx administered, full dose 
per protocol. No outside contact.

ADDITIONAL: Disclosure successful. Subject provides informed consent to 
full tx protocol.

TEMPORAL: 1.312, trending positive.

RECOMMENDATION: Advance to tx stage 2.

 

---

Author's note:

This story owes a vast debt of gratitude to Samantha Richardson's énouement, Alyson Greaves' The Sisters of Dorley series, and every '80s and '90s time travel movie I've ever seen.

In loco meo means "in my place" in Latin; cf. in loco parentis, "in place of a parent."

I enjoyed writing this. I hope you enjoyed reading it.