CW:

I pulled up to the gate and showed the guard my invitation; she waved me through and directed me to visitors’ parking. At this angle, the Lamp didn’t look as much like an old-fashioned Arabian oil lamp as it did in certain photographs, but you could see how it got that nickname; all round and bulbous in the center, with a long curving balcony-thing about three or four stories up.

And, of course, there were genies inside.

I parked and looked in the rear-view mirror, combing my hair and straightening my tie. Nobody was quite sure how much the genies understood about human gender — obviously not enough — but to whatever extent they did, I had to give the right impression. These stupid breasts might be immune to hormones or mastectomy, but I’d bound them down as tight as I could — which left them still pretty noticeable — and I’d worn not just masculine clothes, as I did every day, but formal clothes, a suit with jacket and tie.

At least the nanites didn’t insist on long hair. When I got it cut, it stayed cut for as long as you’d expect. And I got it cut pretty often these days; when I had a male body, I didn’t have anything to prove and I might sometimes let it get a little shaggy between cuts, but not now, not if I wanted people to see me as a man despite my messed-up body. Of course, some people were understanding enough once I explained; transgender people had never been so high-profile, even though there were now less than one percent as many as there used to be. And straight, cis people seemed oddly more understanding of trans people who’d only had to put up with it for a few months than they had been of those who’d suffered through it their whole lives. People are weird; it’s no wonder the genies haven’t figured us out yet.

Time to do my part.

I walked up the sidewalk from the visitor’s lot to the main entrance. One of the genies’ human employees greeted me at the front desk, and I showed him my invitation. He looked me over and nodded. “The Dazhenir are expecting you, sir. Right this way...”

He led me down a winding hallway to a round archway into a big room roughly the same shape as the Lamp as a whole. Five of the genies — the Dazhenir — were sitting, or crouching, on big ottomans around the room; there was an empty human-style chair in the center. “Good luck,” my guide whispered, gesturing toward the empty chair.

I walked in and sat down.

“Connor Tallman?” they all said in unison.

“Yes.”

“Tell us what you wish.”

I took a deep breath, and tried to remember the speech I’d been rehearsing. But I’d gone blank on it all of a sudden. I’d have to improvise.

“Okay. So, a few months ago, you granted a wish to a transgender person. She explained how some humans have the wrong body, the wrong biological sex — it doesn’t fit their minds, their personality. And our doctors had figured out how to sort-of kind-of fix their bodies, with cosmetic surgery and hormones; they weren’t fully functional, they couldn’t reproduce, and sometimes they didn’t look quite right but at least they were better off than before. But then you, um, gave us these nanites —” (The folks on the forum had said I should say “gave us” rather than “infected us with”; at least I remembered that part of the speech.) “After that other wish somebody made last year, the paraplegic veteran? And it made people’s lost eyes and limbs and stuff grow back, which was great, but it also made trans women’s penises grow back, and trans men’s breasts grow back, and they really weren’t happy about it.”

“This was explained to us, and we corrected our mistake.”

“But, see, the patch you gave us for the nanites didn’t just fix their bodies. Whatever method you used for detecting trans people and deciding to change their biological sex to match their minds... it wasn’t perfectly accurate. You got it wrong about one percent of the time. And I’m one of the false positives.”

 

* * *

 

Two years ago

It hadn’t been so bad when the genies first arrived. There was some suspicion about their intentions at first, but after a while all but the most paranoid accepted that they hadn’t come all this way to conquer Earth, not when they had plenty of terraformable (or wherever-formable) planets much closer to home. They wanted to help, they said, and after they granted our first few “wishes”, most of us believed them.

They’d fixed global warming, to start with, by scattering thousands of little machines around the planet that sucked carbon out of the atmosphere and spat out diamonds. Not just rough industrial diamonds, but big jewel-quality diamonds. Everybody who didn’t work in the diamond industry and some who did thought that was a good thing.

And then they’d released those nanites that infected all of humanity within a few months, growing back lost limbs and curing a lot of diseases, though not all. Practicing Jews and some others weren’t happy about circumcisions being undone, but someone made another wish and the genies released a patch for the nanites’ software that said not to undo any further circumcisions. Those who wanted to got re-circumcised and it stuck, that time. But the post-op trans people had a more serious problem; many of them had spent their life savings on surgery that was undone in a few days, and it was almost a year before a trans person was selected in the wish lottery.

In the meantime, somebody wished for an end to racism. The genies’ understanding of the causes of racism lacked in subtlety and nuance, because their solution was another nanite patch that randomized everyone’s skin colors. I had pastel green skin for several months before somebody else wished away the spectrum of unnatural colors, and we were back to the old “red and yellow, black and white” — but still randomized, and changing every few months. By the time they released the software patch to fix gender dysphoria, I’d gone from pastel green to Swedish pale to a Hispanic light brown, none of which bothered me much; everyone else had the same problem, which made it not much of a problem.

Those software patches for the nanites took a few weeks to propagate to all the humans on the planet, starting in the places where the genies had built their Lamps. So by the time my nanites got infected with the latest patch, I’d already heard about it on the news. At that point there wasn’t any hint of its being sometimes inaccurate; all the people interviewed were trans, and happy to have their bodies fixed even if in some cases they weren’t happy about being abruptly uncloseted.

When I first heard about it I’d texted my friend Sheila to ask if she’d gotten the patch yet. No, but she was going to take a trip to Minneapolis (the nearest big city to the North American Lamp) and meet up with some local trans people who’d definitely gotten it. She’d never had the full surgery, but she’d been on hormones since we were in high school and had facial and vocal surgery in her mid-twenties, and the genies’ first nanites had undone all those years of progress. She’d been utterly devastated; she hardly went out in public for a week, she was so depressed.

A few days after she contracted the new patch, she called me again, burbling with delight; she was already showing symptoms. I had dinner with her a few days later, and she was already looking more feminine than I’d ever seen her.

The next day at work, I noticed I was still hungry after I’d finished the lunch I’d brought. I got some chips from the vending machine, finished them off in short order, and made two or three more trips to the vending machine in the course of the afternoon. I finished off a whole frozen pizza for supper, where I’d normally eat it over the course of two or three meals. By then I was getting a little suspicious; I remembered Sheila talking about how hungry she got after she was infected with the new patch, before she started changing. And next morning, when clumps of my beard were falling out, my suspicions grew more definite.

But why?

 

* * *

 

Now

“You were not transgender, and yet our nanites changed your sex?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Or babbling. Get it together, man, a hundred thousand people worldwide are counting on you.

“This is perplexing. Our scan of your brain indicates the usual markers of a female identity.”

“Your scanner is wrong. I’m a guy, damnit!” And when had they scanned me? Just now? When I walked through the archway into this room? When I walked through the front door? It didn’t matter; I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. I couldn’t get angry with them.

 

* * *

 

Five months ago

“You shaved your beard,” my co-worker Roger remarked in surprise.

I was pretty sure I already knew what was happening, but I wanted to buy time to deal with it. “It was getting annoying with all this hot weather we’ve been having,” I lied.

“Yeah, I thought the genies were supposed to have fixed global warming.”

“It took us a century or two to screw up our atmosphere; it might take them several years to fix it,” I rejoined. I wasn’t sure why I was defending them; I wasn’t feeling very well disposed toward them at the moment. Habit, I suppose.

I got through the work day somehow, rushed home, and stripped off. When I repeated the measurements I’d made that morning, they confirmed my suspicions: my nipples were definitely getting bigger, and my genitals smaller. And there were lots of little chest hairs in the lining of my shirt, which had fallen out in the course of the day.

I called Sheila and told her what was happening.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “Connor, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did,” I said, not quite realizing at first what she meant.

“I mean, about being trans... I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. I know what it’s like to be afraid to tell people, even people I know I should be able to trust —”

“Sheila, you’ve got the wrong idea,” I interrupted. “I know the genies’ new nanites are supposed to look at people’s brains and figure out their gender identity... but they got it wrong in my case. I don’t want to be female. This is scaring the shit out of me; I finally know what you felt like all those years... at least sort of.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry. I should have known better than to make assumptions like that... Oh my God, what if it’s because you were hanging out with me while I was changing?”

“Has anybody else you’ve been with had this happen?”

“Not that I know of...”

“Or other trans people you’ve talked to?”

“No.”

“I’ve been searching online and so far I haven’t found any other accounts of people like me. But it’s hard to tell because I keep finding so many stories about real trans people getting changed; if there are others like me they’re not easy to find.”

“Well. We can keep looking. Meanwhile, there’s somebody else I want you to meet.”

 

* * *

 

Now

“Our sources indicate that many humans whose gender identity does not match their biological sex have denied this in order to avoid shame or social stigma. Is this the reason you assert that you are a guy?”

“No! I’m cool with transgender people. I’m just not one of them. Or I wasn’t until you changed me.”

“We apologize. We thought we understood how to tell male from female humans, but we were mistaken. We must do further research.”

 

* * *

 

Five months ago

So Sheila made some phone calls, and a couple of days later, I met her for supper again after work. The person sitting with her looked kind of androgynous, but was wearing unambiguously masculine clothes, and had hair even shorter than mine. (I’d just had mine cut, the day after I noticed my beard falling out.)

“Hey,” Sheila called, “this is Stan. Stan, this is Connor.”

“Sheila told me something about you,” Stan said.

“Is the same thing happening to you, then?” I asked.

He smiled — I thought he might have been suppressing a laugh. “No; just the opposite. Until a few days ago I had the same problem you’re about to have.”

The light went on in my head; he was like Sheila, only he’d been born with a female body where she’d been born with a male one.

“I thought he could maybe help you out,” Sheila explained. “You know, with making yourself look as masculine as possible under the circumstances.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’d rather find a more permanent solution — the genies messed me up, so presumably they can fix me — but that will help in the meantime.”

“How much have you changed so far?” Stan asked.

I squirmed in my seat. “The, um, breasts are still small enough to hide, but they’re getting bigger every day. My scrotum’s empty and my penis is still there, but pretty small.”

He nodded. “Depending on how big they get, we might still be able to conceal them with the right binding and clothes. At worst, we can probably de-emphasize them. What are you using to bind them right now...?”

 

* * *

 

Now

“Listen,” I said to the genies, “gender identity is really complicated. Maybe you can refine your brain-scan criteria and have fewer false positives and false negatives the next time around, but I’m pretty sure there will always be a few mistakes if you’re using some automated process to decide whether and how to transform people. Why not just ask us?”

“There are too many people dissatisfied with their bodies to deal with one by one,” they said. “Wishes must be for general solutions to problems affecting ten thousand or more humans. There are too few of us on your planet to spend our limited time helping individual humans, however much we regret inadvertently harming them. The overall amount of suffering has been reduced.”

“Then give us the means to change ourselves. Give us devices we can use to reprogram our own nanites.”

“Another human has already wished for this. Unfortunately, there is danger that antisocial humans would find a way to use such a technology as a weapon against others of your kind.”

They’d refused to give us new energy sources for the same reason. “You can’t fix it so nobody can use it except on themselves?”

“Not at your present level of development. Your minds are not orderly enough to reliably control technology with your thoughts.”

“Then can you at least let us turn off the part that makes hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery ineffective? Let the people who slip through the cracks in your filter get fixed up the old-fashioned way, if you won’t help us directly.”

“This too could be weaponized.”

“How?”

“The same technology could be used by antisocial humans to prevent other humans from healing after injuries to the reproductive organs.”

“Oh. Yeah, that would be a bad thing. Well...” I paused in thought. All the things I’d planned to ask for had fallen through.

 

* * *

 

Five months ago

The genies had given us several new technologies for growing more food with less damage to the environment, and they had been in use for at least two growing seasons in most parts of the world. But food still wasn’t getting distributed everywhere for political reasons, and the genies weren’t willing to intervene directly to stop that. There were still places suffering famine or malnutrition because local warlords would steal all the food coming into the area and make sure only their followers got any.

And the reports coming out of those areas said almost nobody was changing sex there, unlike everywhere else.

That decided me. I’d stop giving in to the huge appetite my nanites had given me, and see if I just stopped changing, or if I suffered from malnutrition and starvation. I saw my doctor every day and had blood tests, and ate a carefully measured diet, just what someone my height and weight ought theoretically to need and not a bite more.

That lasted four days. The blood tests didn’t show any obvious problems — my nanites weren’t breaking down fat and muscle to use for fueling the transformation, which had ground to a halt. But the hunger — it got worse every hour, until I thought I couldn’t stand it, and then it got worse again. Hunger was keeping me awake half the night and I was stumbling through the day at work, bleary and falling asleep for a few moments here and there. My incipient breasts didn’t get any bigger, but they didn’t get smaller either, and my scrotum remained empty.

After four days of that, I decided it wasn’t worth it. The nanites had already cost me my manhood, in a real sense; my toddler-sized penis hadn’t had an erection since my beard started falling out, and probably never would again even if I managed to keep it from going all the way and turning into a clitoris. And I’d have to live with this gnawing hunger for the rest of my life, making it impossible to pay attention to or enjoy anything else. One morning I gave up on the diet, ate all the food I had in the house in one sitting, and went out for another breakfast. I then stopped by a convenience store and bought two bags of chips, a can of peanuts and a package of jerky to snack on at work.

Within another four days, my transformation was complete.