Connie stood on the doorstep of Matt’s apartment, holding the tray of brownies in one hand and the gift bags in the other and trying to ring the doorbell with a finger of the hand that was holding the gifts. She managed it without dropping anything, and a few moments later, Matt opened the door.

“Oh my goodness, Connie, I saw your selfie after your change but you look so much cuter in person! Come on in, let me take that off your hands,” they said, taking the brownies from her. “Is this sweet or savory?”

“Sweet – it’s brownies,” she said, following him into the apartment. Ellen was sitting on the sofa; she waved to Connie, but didn’t say anything right away, perhaps because her mouth was full. And one of the aliens was sitting in the beanbag chair. She remembered Matt saying they’d made friends with one of the aliens at their job, but couldn’t remember their name.

“Any nuts or fun additives?”

“Hmm?” She was startled out of her thoughts by Matt’s question. “Oh, no, no nuts, no weed. Just chocolatey goodness.” She set her gift bags under Matt’s small artificial tree.

“Got it.” Matt set the tray down, wrote “brownies without nuts” on a post-it and stuck it on the table in front of the tray. “You already know Ellen, but maybe Ellen hasn’t seen the new you?”

“I saw your selfie post,” Ellen said, after swallowing her food. “But you look even better in person.”

“Thanks,” Connie said, her face feeling hot. “I feel great, too. I love being smol. And I’m stronger than I look.”

“And this is Perseus,” Matt said, gesturing to the alien. “Perseus, this is my friend Connie.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Perseus said in perfect American English. “Matt has told me about you.”

“Hi,” Connie said, taking him in. He was probably a Crab, one the founding species of the coalition of aliens who’d taken over Earth and started fixing humanity’s mess, but she supposed he could be a Owl or a Mantis who’d gone in for extreme body modification. He was typical of his species in having six legs and four arms, but atypical in being extremely fluffy; where most of the Crabs had hairless exoskeletons in various colors, Perseus had lush white fur all over his body and legs, though not his arms. Connie longed to pet him, but reprimanded herself for thinking of him like a cat or dog. Two of his arms ended in pincers and two in small, vaguely human-like hands, with three fingers and a thumb. And he had two mouths, one that was typical of his kind to eat with and speak his native language, and a human-like one for speaking English – or whatever other Earth languages he spoke. Connie had heard that around here all the Coalition aliens spoke at least English, Spanish, and Korean. “Um, how do you like Earth?”

“I am enjoying it a great deal,” Perseus said. “Most humans I meet are very nice, although in large groups you seem to have a problem with the worst of your kind gravitating to leadership positions.”

“Yeah, we’re kind of messed up that way. Thanks for saving us from ourselves, by the way.”

“You’re welcome, as far as my small part is concerned.”

“We’ve got three more people coming,” Matt said. “You know Todd, of course.” Matt, Connie, Ellen and Todd had all gone to high school together. “And there’s Ocean and Iris – have you met them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, Iris works with me and Perseus on panacea distribution, and Ocean I met at the trans group I keep bugging you to visit. Fae is an artist like you; y’all should have a lot in common.”

“Oh, cool.”

Connie looked over the goodies on the table, which Matt had arranged with savories on the left and sweets on the right, and served herself a plate of nachos, salsa, guacamole, and caramel fudge. Then she sat down beside Ellen on the sofa.

“I haven’t seen you in months,” Ellen said. “And things have been so crazy. What are you doing these days?”

“Well, after the Coalition abolished rent, I moved out of my parents’ house like a week later. I got an apartment over in Lilburn. And after they shut down the call center, I got a job planting trees. That’s over for the winter, though. I’m kind of between jobs for now, just living on basic income and doing lots of art now that I’ve got more free time.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen some of your art on the Discord. You’re getting really good. I really liked your Spectrum fanart.”

“Th-thanks,” Connie said, looking down at her lap. “She’s one of my favorite characters. When I was little I read my dad’s old Avengers comics from back in the 80s, and she was captain of the team for a while back then, when she was going by Captain Marvel. I wish Marvel would do more with her, but, well.”

“Yeah, but since intellectual property isn’t a thing anymore, Marvel doesn’t have any more right to say what she’s up to these days than you do.”

“I guess so. I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes to do a webcomic, though. I can draw pretty well now, but I’m not good at writing.”

“You can probably get better with practice, like you did with art. The stuff you’re doing now is worlds better than what you were doing in high school, and that was pretty good already.”

Connie felt like she was going to spontaneously combust. Her new body was an improvement in so many ways, but it also seemed to blush easier than her old one. “So,” she said, trying to change the subject to something less embarrassing, “what’s your life like these days?”

“Well, I broke up with Candace like two days after the Coalition arrived. And things have been chaotic enough since then that I haven’t really dated anyone else yet. I’m still working at the Publix in Brookhaven, but it’s not exactly a grocery store anymore, more like a cornucopia co-op. We’ve got five of them, and we’ve still got fresh milk and eggs but other than that pretty much everything comes from the cornucopias. Next Spring we’re talking about making it more of a farmer’s market.”

“Oh, cool. So what’s your job like now?”

“Basically making sure nobody takes more than their share of milk or eggs, and making sure nobody cuts in line for the cornucopias. And keeping the store clean, but robots do most of that. But hey, tell me about your new bod! I haven’t seen one of the transformation machines yet, what was it like?”

“Well, as soon as they started distributing transformation machines, I applied for an appointment, and they told me to come in three weeks later to the one in Austin. I don’t know why Austin, but I guess with the portals the distance doesn’t matter… anyway, I portaled out there and took a bus to the university where they had the transformation machine, and one of the Owls talked to me about what I wanted in my new body, and had me undress and lie down in the machine, and then I woke up like this!” She couldn’t help getting excited and uttering run-on sentences when she thought about her new body. She wanted to hug herself again, like she’d been doing several times a day when she was alone, but she worried it would look weird.

But Ellen was smiling at her. “I’m so happy for you. I know you’ve had a hard time with your parents and the insurance company and that terrible therapist, and you deserve this more than anybody I know.”

“Oy!” said Matt, whose own appointment with a transformation machine was still another two weeks out.

“More than anybody I know,” Ellen repeated. “You can wait in line behind the dysphoric trans folks and the therians.”

“But I want a prehensile tail now,” Matt said, pouting ridiculously. Ellen punched them gently in the arm.

“I apologize on behalf of my people,” Perseus said. “Probably by March, there will be enough transformation machines and people trained to use them that no one has to wait to use them. But for now distribution of panacea and cornucopias must take priority.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Ellen said. “You don’t need to apologize just because Matt is impatient.”

The doorbell rang and Matt went to get it. “Hey, Iris, come on in.”

Iris was a tall woman with long green hair in a braid. Matt introduced her to everyone except Perseus, whom she apparently already knew, and she set her contribution to the food down on the table and settled into the beanbag chair beside Perseus. To Connie’s surprise, she started petting Perseus, and he started… purring? It wasn’t exactly like a cat’s purr, but it was more like that than any vocalization she’d heard from a Crab. Not that she’d had a lot of contact with the Crabs before.

Todd arrived not long after that, and Connie got up to hug him. They’d been close friends in middle school and high school, though they hadn’t seen each other in person after that for several years until the Coalition started building portal stations. Just a few weeks ago, Todd had portaled in to visit her from Missouri, where he’d moved after graduation to work in his uncle’s car repair shop. And the day after her transformation, she’d portaled out to have lunch with him and show off her new body.

“Wow,” he said. “I know I saw you just a few days ago, but I can’t get over how unbelievably tiny you are. Matt, you got a magnifying glass around here?”

“Silly,” Connie said, feeling warm and fuzzy at the thought of being small and cute. “A magnifying glass won’t do any good, you’ll need an electron microscope!”

“My bad. I’ll just run down to the cornucopia and get one.”

Matt introduced Todd to Iris and Perseus. Todd soon got in a conversation with Perseus about job retraining for people in industries that were being phased out, like insurance, advertising, and police. With most cars being recycled and the remaining ones having their engines replaced with Coalition tech that wasn’t human-serviceable, Todd and his uncle were now retraining in bike repair. Of course you could put a damaged bike in a cornucopia and get out a new one, but as cheap as energy was getting to be as the new power plants gradually came on line, it wasn’t free, and repairing them when possible was more efficient. Matt talked about how they’d transitioned from nursing to panacea distribution, and how they’d met Perseus while doing that, and Iris had a similar story, though she’d been a respiratory therapist before the Coalition arrived.

Connie listened to that for a few minutes, nibbling on her nachos and guacamole, and then Ellen said, “Have you been paying attention to social media?”

“Uh, no, I try to avoid it these days. Too many people complaining about the Coalition fixing our mess.”

“Yeah, well, this has been going around and it’s pretty hilarious.” She showed Connie her phone screen, which was displaying a meme of some sort – there was a photo of a big, fancy living room with expensive-looking furniture, only there were spiky things in the middle of the sofas like you used to see on park benches, to keep homeless people from sleeping there. The overlaid text said “I built this house with my own earnings and homeless people have no right to live here.”

“Okay, that’s messed up, but I don’t quite get it?”

“Oh, it’s a quote from Kevin Gerbold’s recent meltdown on Substack – when the Coalition told him he couldn’t live in that enormous mansion by himself and had to take in some homeless roommates. Somebody got some screenshots of his living room from a documentary and photoshopped in anti-homeless spikes.”

Connie laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past him to try.”

“Yeah, he’s not the only billionaire that has gotten frustrated at not being in charge anymore, but his reactions are some of the funniest. Anyway… what’s been going on since you got transformed? Have your parents seen the new you?”

“No,” Connie said, her mood darkening a little. “I sent them the same selfie I posted on the Discord. They told me I wasn’t welcome to come home for Christmas.”

“Eugh, they’re the worst.”

“Eh, they’re not good, but I’ve heard worse. When I came out to them they just said I was imagining things and went on as if nothing had happened until I actually got a new body. Some trans people’s parents kicked them out after they came out, or put them in conversation therapy, or beat them up or worse.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t have to like them, though. They were mean to my friend.”

“I hope they’ll come around, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. Last time I visited them, after I got on hormones but before the transformation machines came along, Dad was ranting about how the aliens were ruining the economy, as if our home-grown politicians and billionaires hadn’t already wrecked it. And Mom was complaining about having their cars taken away and having to bike or walk to the portal station.”

“Are they refusing to use panacea for like, religious reasons?”

“I think maybe so? We didn’t really talk about it last time, and there might not be a next time…”

“It’s really sad,” Matt said. “Not your parents, they can go jump in a volcano for all I care, but some of the people with objections to panacea are decent, and – well, they’re going to be out of luck if they get sick with anything rare, with 98% of the healthcare industry shutting down. There might not be any specialists working on the rarer diseases this time next year. Most of what’s left even now is focused on people with dementia and other mental disabilities that panacea can’t fix.”

Perseus made a wiggling gesture with his eyestalks. “Yes, when we made the first version of panacea, we had studied human bodies enough to fix most problems that could arise, but the brain is very complex and there are some problems with it that panacea is not smart enough to fix. And when we improve the transformation machines enough to fix brain issues, there may be a long period of recovery where a person relearns lost skills.”

“So wait, you’re saying you’ll be able to fix dementia too?” Ellen asked eagerly. Connie knew her dad was suffering from dementia, though last she’d heard his other health problems had been fixed by a dose of panacea.

“We don’t know when, but it seems likely.”

Connie wondered exactly how they had studied human bodies enough to fix diseases that human doctors had never figured out. She was pretty sure she knew, and didn’t want to bring it up. In the early days when the Coalition’s drone probes were wandering all over the Earth and studying human behavior and languages, sometimes they would deploy a fast-moving portal to snatch up a human like in a butterfly net. Usually it was a human engaged in a crime or other bad behavior, like the manager at Connie’s old job who had been screaming abuse at one of her co-workers for not making enough sales, or the president who had ordered nuclear missiles launched on the Coalition mothership. But sometimes there was no obvious reason some people were snatched. There hadn’t been anyone snatched like that since the Coalition took over; they were in the process of reforming prisons to be actually rehabilitative instead, starting with the release of people convicted of drug or property crimes.

Ocean arrived then, a soft person with sea-blue skin and a crest of sea-green feathers instead of hair. Fae brought a tray of samosas and a bundle of small gift bags.

“…Ocean, this is Connie – she’s an artist too,” Matt concluded his introductions as Todd brought in another chair from the balcony.

“Cool,” Ocean said. “What media do you work in?”

“Mainly pen and ink and digital, but I want to start doing some oil painting at some point, now that canvases and paint are free. I got a few canvases and some paints from the cornucopia a few days ago but haven’t started a new project yet. Maybe on New Year’s Day?”

“That’s cool. I draw a fair bit, but I’ve gotten into sculpture lately.”

“Oooh, have you got any photos of your work?”

Ocean got out their phone and opened a photo gallery. Connie flipped through it and saw clay sculptures photographed from different angles: cats, birds, otters, humans, aliens. In return she took out her phone, opened the Discord server she shared with Matt, Ellen and Todd and switched to the art channel. “Most of the recent stuff in that channel is mine,” she said, handing it to Ocean. “By the way, when did you get transformed? I just had my appointment a few days ago.”

“It was almost two weeks ago,” Ocean said. “I went to the machine in Nashville.”

“Yeah, they sent me to the one in Austin. Not sure why Atlanta doesn’t have a machine yet. – Oooh, I really like this quokka sculpture.”

“So how’s everyone doing?” Matt asked a few minutes later. “Do y’all want to start playing games or do we just want to keep chatting for now?”

After some discussion, they split into two groups, Connie, Ocean and Ellen playing Nanofictionary at the kitchen table and the rest playing Settlers of Catan in the living room.

After the first phase, where they collected cards representing characters, settings, and plot elements, they took time to put them together into stories. Connie told a story of an explorer who discovered an island where people could change sex whenever they liked by eating the fruit of a tree he’d never seen anywhere else. He tried it out himself and found she liked being a girl better, and decided to stay and live there among the people of the island.

Ellen told a story about an ice miner in the Oort cloud who found a near-starving woman on a derelict ship, and nursed her back to health. After going on an adventure to get revenge on the pirates who had attacked the woman’s ship, the two ladies fell in love and got married.

Ocean told a story about a time traveler who, on a visit to his hometown two centuries in the future, met a ghost in the house he used to live in, who haunted him and kept reminding him of things about his past that he didn’t want to think about. It took some time for the time traveler to realize it was his own ghost, because they didn’t look much like him as he was now.

The last phase was a bit awkward, because when it was time to vote on the best story, Connie voted for Ellen’s story, Ellen voted for Ocean, and Ocean voted for Connie, leaving them with no winner. They had a laugh about it, and then Ocean dug through Matt’s cabinet of games to find something else to play.

“What about Race for the Galaxy?” fae asked.

“Oh, I haven’t played that in a long time. I’ll have to have a refresher on the rules,” Connie said.

“Yeah, that sounds fun,” Ellen put in.

Somehow the experience of playing Race for the Galaxy after the arrival of actual aliens in an actual starship was different than the last time Connie had played. But not as different as one might have thought. They talked about the prospects for humans doing space travel with Coalition tech at some point. They had said that after things settled down, they’d allow some humans to visit their homeworlds or some of their colony worlds, and eventually humans could join them in colonizing a new world when one of their ongoing terraforming projects was ready.

After Ellen won the game, they continued chatting for a while. The game of Settlers of Catan (or maybe the second game? Connie wasn’t sure) ended and Matt drifted into the kitchen.

“Everyone still having fun?” they asked.

“Yeah,” Ellen said. “Ocean’s telling us about faer plans for faer first marble statue.”

“Oh, neat! We’re just fixing to swap presents, if y’all are ready?”

“Sure,” Connie said.

So they gathered in the living room, and Matt put on a Santa hat and started handing out the gifts from under the tree. Given that anyone could get almost anything now, except weapons, from one of the cornucopias, Connie had decided she needed to give everyone something unique that they could only get from her. For her, as an artist, it wasn’t too hard to do a set of pen and ink drawings, colored with watercolor, but she wondered what the others had done.

After all the gifts were distributed, they all took turns opening one gift at a time. Ocean, like Connie, had given out small pen and ink drawings with spot colors; Connie’s depicted the sun setting behind a mountain range with a meadow and three deer in the foreground. Todd had knitted everyone stocking caps; Connie’s was in trans flag colors. Ellen had given everyone a flash drive with her music on it. Matt, though not the artist Ocean or Connie were, had given everyone drawings of silly cartoon animals – Connie’s was an adorable otter. Iris had also given out flash drives, with a couple of games she’d written.

Everyone was eager to see what Perseus had given, but no one opened one of his gifts until the fourth round of gift-opening. When Connie opened hers, she wasn’t sure what it was at first – it seemed to be a circular band of some sort of dark purple cloth, slightly cool to the touch. “What is it?” she asked.

“You put it around your head, covering your eyes and ears, and then tap the outside of it,” Perseus explained.

“Like a blindfold?” she asked, starting to put it on.

“Yes, I think that’s the word.”

It wasn’t hard to put it on; it fit her perfectly, and she tapped over her eyes. Immediately the darkness was filled with light and sound, a flying point of view over an alien mountain range. Her viewpoint moved through a mountain pass and descended through a coastal forest that looked more like a mushroom patch than an Earth forest and along a beach. She heard the wind rushing past and the cries of alien animals, a few of which she could see climbing in the treetops, scuttling along the beach, or leaping out of the water.

“Awesome!” she exclaimed.

“There are twenty-seven travelogues on each band,” Perseus said. “I recorded them all back home on the Crab homeworld, or on the Mantis homeworld, or on one of our colony worlds, some on walking tours and some by piloting drones. If you just put it on and tap once, you will get a random one each time, but if you tap again, you will cycle through them.”

“Wow, thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

After everyone had opened all their gifts, and shown off what they got to the others, and everyone had tried on their VR travelogue headbands, Matt asked, “Anyone interested in doing a carol sing?”

“Sure,” said Todd, and “Depends on the carols,” Ellen put in. Connie nodded.

“Nothing super religious, you know me,” Matt said. “Anyway, if y’all want to, I printed out lyrics and sheet music for a few favorites.”

“That sounds fascinating,” Perseus said, and no one wanted to harsh his vibe, so Matt started handing out the music sheets, and on the count of three they started singing “Frosty the Snowman.” Not everyone was on key at first, but they sorted themselves out by the end of the first verse and continued through several other songs. Perseus had a lot of questions about the lyrics, which Matt and Todd answered most of and looked up what they didn’t know.

After the carol sing, they started conversing again. Connie mainly talked with Ellen, but from the little bit of other conversations she overheard, Todd and Ocean were flirting. Matt was sitting next to Iris and chatting about games, with Perseus sprawled across both their laps and purring as they stroked his fur.

After a few minutes of that, Ellen said, “You want to go out on the balcony for a few minutes?”

“Sure.”

It was the farthest they’d been from a white Christmas in years. The Coalition had already sucked a lot of excess carbon out of the atmosphere, but it would take years to undo the climate change humans had effected over the past century-plus. This was hardly the first unseasonably warm Christmas in Connie’s lifetime, but it might be the warmest. So they were comfortable in shirt sleeves, standing on the balcony and looking out over the park and the houses and shops beyond it.

“You haven’t dated anyone since you came out, have you?”

“No, not since years before that. Not since Angie in high school.”

“Oh, wow, that long?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t be a good boyfriend when I wasn’t a boy but couldn’t figure out what I was yet. And then, well, things have been a little bit busy.”

“I ran into Angie a few months back at Arby’s. After the mothership deployed all those drones, but before they made contact, I think it was.”

“Oh, cool. How’s she doing?”

“Well, back then she was writing copy for a local advertising firm. I’m sure she’s doing something else now.” Advertising was one of the industries the Coalition had shut down immediately after taking over. “And she was dating a guy named Scott who worked at the same place, I think? I’m not sure I’m remembering his name right. He seemed like a nice guy. We talked about the Coalition ship and the drones, mostly, so I didn’t actually learn all that much about what she’d been doing since high school.”

“I’m glad she’s found a nice guy who’s actually a guy. What about you? Have you dated anyone since you broke up with Candace?”

“No, not yet. Do you think you want to start dating again now that you’ve got an affirming body?”

“I’m not actively looking, but I’m… open to possibilities.” Was Ellen suggesting…?

“Well, so am I.” And she put a hand on Connie’s, where it was resting on the balustrade.

“Then yeah, let’s… explore this possibility.” She turned her hand and clasped Ellen’s.

They heard laughter from inside the apartment, then footsteps. Connie kept looking up at Ellen, and didn’t turn to see who it was. She heard Matt’s voice saying “…Never mind, carry on,” and the door closing.

“Is it okay if I kiss you?” Ellen asked.

“Yes!” Connie squeaked.

It was a good kiss.