I opened my eyes, blinked the bleariness out of them, and tried to stretch, only to find that my hands and feet were shackled. Still shackled. Oh, right, I remember now. I glanced down and saw breasts.
“Huh. What do you know. He wasn’t crazy.”
Then I looked around and saw my captor, walking swiftly toward me followed by his assistant. He was gleefully wringing his hands, and saying “Ah, I see you’re awake now, my pretty.”
“On second thought,” I muttered, “he wasn’t delusional about being able to do this, anyway. Jury’s still out on whether he’s sane.”
“As you can see,” my captor said, as his assistant held up a mirror to show me my new face and chest, “you are now a beautiful woman, anatomically correct and fully functional. Not only that, but my nanites are even now putting the finishing touches on your brain! Soon, if not already — I predicted a 94% chance that the change would be complete by the time you awoke, if you recall — you will be attracted to men — such as myself.”
He was the sort of guy my straight female and gay male friends would call “ruggedly handsome,” I supposed. Not your typical mad scientist, except for his expression and mannerisms. From what I’d gathered from his maniacal monologue last night (or however long ago?), he’d already used his new process on himself and his assistant, and I was the lucky bastard he chosen for the third, most daring test yet... and so on and so on. But...
“I’m not feeling it,” I confessed. “How is this process supposed to work?”
“Aha! Your curiosity about the products of my genius reveals a subconsicous attraction you have yet to admit to yourself! Listen and learn, my pet. The nanites seek out the structures in your brain encoding attraction to women and transform them into attraction to men, by linking the neural structures for sex and romance to a different set of mental images. Not only are you attracted to men now — or will be within minutes — but if all went as planned, I am your ‘type’, so to speak.”
The scare-quotes intonation on ‘type’ told me he was a lot older than he looked. “So,” I said, “if a man were straight, he’d come out of your process as a straight woman.”
“Exactly!”
“And if he were bi, his attraction for women would be replaced with attraction to men — maybe doubled? — and, again, straight.”
“Of course!”
“And if he were gay, he’d still be attracted to men afterward, so again, straight.”
“You see, I have all the bases covered.”
“And if he were asexual, like me, there’d be no effect.”
He started to say something, gaped, and stared at me. His assistant backed slowly away from him.
“What,” he finally said.
I sighed. Educating the public one person at a time was tedious, and I usually prefered to just walk away rather than explain, when possible. But there was no way to avoid it just now.
“Not everyone is sexually attracted to certain types of people,” I said. “A few people, like me, just aren’t interested in sex and aren’t sexually attracted to anybody. We can still make friends, and some asexuals — though not me, at least so far — can even fall in love. Platonic love.”
“Then the nanites...”
“Wouldn’t have anything to work with, I’m afraid. Sorry. Are you going to let me go, or experiment on me again, or just rape me instead of seducing me like you planned?”
“Of course not!” he said, offended, and for a moment I wondered which of my alternatives he was denying. Then: “I’ll have to start over from scratch. No, perhaps not from scratch, I can still use the old reprogramming code when the subject is straight or gay or bi, I’ll just have to figure out how to create sexual attraction from scratch when there’s nothing there... hmm, how to avoid overwriting something important with the new sexual attraction patterns...?”
He rambled on like that for a while and I finally interrupted.
“So, you don’t want to keep me prisoner and have to feed me the whole time you’re researching all that, right? It would waste a lot of your attention and resources, keeping me healthy and making sure I don’t escape. I promise if you let me go I won’t tell the police.” (Damn straight, I was going direct to the FBI.)
“Well... perhaps. Belinda, take her to room five, lock her in, and bring her something to eat while I consider the matter.” He turned his back on me and went over to a rack of computers and monitors while his assistant, muttering “I keep telling you, my name’s Bill,” unshackled me and helped me to my feet.
“So he transformed you too?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he hadn’t gotten the orientation thing perfected yet, so I’m still into girls. Too bad you’re not.”
“Sorry. You seem like a nice person. How’d you end up working here? — By the way, could I get some clothes?”
“Sure, we’re the same size. That’s not a coincidence, of course.”
“I guess we’re both his type?”
“Yeah. Come on, this way...”
“Why don’t we both just leave? It looks like he’s going to be distracted for hours.”
“I can’t — staying here’s my only chance to get back to normal. Dr. Possibility keeps promising me he’ll change me back, and even if he’s lying...”
“Okay, but can you at least let me go? You can pretend I surprised you and knocked you out.”
“You don’t want to change back? If you stick around, sooner or later I’ll be able to brew up a batch of the stuff he used to make himself look like that, and we can change back and escape then.”
“I’d rather be free than gamble on that. Who knows what experiments he might do on me while I’m waiting? Or on you, for that matter? And besides, I’m agender. Any kind of body’s fine with me, as long as it’s healthy.”
“Well... okay. Come on, my quarters are this way; I’ll — hmm. I guess to make this look good I need to take off my clothes and let you ‘steal’ them, right?”
So he gave me his outer clothes — he was wearing a lab coat over a green sundress, apparently required by his employer’s dress code — but kept his bra and panties on. I put on the sundress and his shoes, and gave him back the labcoat.
“Here, let me lie down on the floor outside room five, and you can spread the lab coat over me.”
“Sure.”
Once I’d gotten Bill arranged, I asked: “So how do I get out of here?” He gave me directions to the outer doors, and I left him.
Unfortunately, it turned out that we were in the middle of the desert. And though there was a jeep parked outside, I couldn’t find the keys, and Bill thought they were locked in Dr. Possibility’s quarters. Even though I packed up every bottle of water I could find before I left, by the time I got back to civilization, I was dehydrated and delirious, and thoroughly lost; I couldn’t give the FBI directions back to Dr. Possibility’s lair. I hope Bill is okay.
I love this! Hard to find good asexual, let alone agender, rep! Thanks for writing!!!