The screen knew exactly what was happening to me, and it wasn’t shy about sharing.
After a bit of initial trepidation, I discovered that I felt perfectly normal. Whatever was happening to my body was, at this stage, entirely invisible.
I decide to set myself up in the chair, with everything I might want. From the bathroom, I took a rolling stand mirror, and positioned it next to the chair. Straight ahead I saw the screen; to the left, I could see myself reflected, looking no different than I had this morning.
On my right I put a small end table, and then ordered a beer. Well, it wasn’t a real beer, since alcohol was not recommended during the conversion, but it tasted enough like beer to satisfy me.
And I watched the screen. Turns out, the progress bar came equipped with a lot of options, describing the conversion process in tremendous detail. I found out later that the description was created algorithmically in real time, based on what parts of the screen my eyes stayed on the longest, and how interested I seemed. Perhaps that’s why the results were so enthralling — they were programmed to be that way.
First, I got a primer on DNA. My genes, I was told, did not encode my body like a blueprint. Instead, they gave instructions on how to build that body from a fertilized egg. Instructions were turned on and off as they were used. Simply to change my DNA would not make any real changes to my body, at least not of the sort that a corporeal conversion required. Instead, a different type of instructions were required, something that could start with my current, adult body and change that into the final form I had chosen. When it was done, the DNA left behind would be identical to what it would have been, had I possessed my new form from birth. All thanks to a custom retrovirus, one that would infect only me and then die off.
I can’t imagine what sort of computing power must have been required to calculate that genetic code, and prepare the retroviral shell so quickly. I also wondered why it wasn’t going to take a decade or more for me to change, until the screen helpfully informed me that the room was being bombarded with a high frequency radiation which the retrovirus could consume. I would continue to eat and drink in order to maintain normal bodily function, but the change was powered by radiation.
Before I knew it, the progress bar read 5%. I was congratulated, and told that the retrovirus had now infiltrated every cell in my body, and that the actual conversion was about to begin.
It occurred in stages, and I will do my best to describe how it went, and add in detail from the screen. The biggest change, as it turned out, had nothing to do with the gender conversion. Apparently that was fairly simple, requiring some adjustments to a few organs and a bit of cosmetic rearrangement of fat. No, the big change was to my skeletal structure.
The human body is great at getting bigger, but it seems that getting smaller is a challenge. Three-quarters of the total progress would go towards shrinking me from six foot to five-four. From 5% to 80%, I gradually shrank. The change happened everywhere in my body at once, but not all at the same rate. For nearly an hour, my left leg was four inches shorter than my right. For a time, my hands stayed the same while my arms got smaller, leaving me with what looked like giant flipper hands.
Around 75%, the major changes had concluded. I was shorter, quite a bit shorter. I looked odd and out of proportion, but of course I was comparing myself to my male form. As the progress bar ticked up to 80%, some of the finer bone structure changes took place. In particular, my face began to lose its familiar expression, and reform into a shape that was decidedly feminine. At the end of the skeletal change, my silhouette was female, with wide hips and sloping shoulders, and my face was incontrovertibly a that of woman. But I still had a penis, still had the waist and muscles and other features that had been left over from my male self.
The next phase, or so the screen informed me, would be subtractive in nature. Apparently my body had dozens of pounds of extraneous fat, muscle, viscera, and general organ meat. Over the course of the next 10%, that matter was consumed. During this time, I spent more time looking in the mirror than at the screen, so I almost missed the tidbit that my brain had already shrunk. Or rather, it had been “consolidated”. The number of neurons and connections did not change, apparently. Funny that the screen failed to mention that until after it had already happened.
By the time the progress bar reached 90%, I was skinnier than I had been at any point in my adult life. My legs were skinny, my arms were skinny, and my waist was barely there. My skin was stretched tight across my widened hips, which looked even larger without a bit of a belly to offset them.
Finally, it was time for “gender conversion” to take place. It only took the progress bar from 90.107% to 90.448%, which I have to admit was a blow to my ego. But also fascinating — this one feature that separates the world in half, changed in such a short time, almost as an afterthought. Most of that time was invisible, as my testicles undifferentiated, withdrew into my abdomen, and reasserted themselves as ovaries. The external genitalia simply melted away into its new configuration.
I was not given leisure to inspect my new equipment for long. An alert told me that the additive phase was about to begin. It would make up most of the rest of the conversion.
I think, as a man, I had always thought of women in terms of what they lacked. No penis, no testosterone, no muscles. Even the vagina felt like a lack of a thing, instead of a thing itself. Perhaps that explains my fascination with breasts, which were the only obvious exception. But even those consisted of nipples like mine, and fatty tissue like mine. They were a difference of degree, and that was all.
I was about to learn how wrong I was. You wouldn’t think that hormones change things so much, but as my bloodstream filled with estrogen, I began to feel... well, different. My skin was different. Softer, yes, and I suppose you could say it was more sensitive. I was just aware of the difference, like if someone turned off a blue-tinted light bulb and turned on a warmer-colored one. Everything was the same; everything was different.
Before, my limbs had been defined by angles. Muscle and sinew attached to bone, and even if I was a little heavier than I was in my prime, muscle was still the primary factor in their appearance.
Not so anymore. My entire body was coated with fat. As I write that I sounds disgusting, but that’s not the way it felt. It was like an artist had drawn a hard line, and was softening it into a gentle curve. My calves rounded and my thighs smoothened and filled. The hard lines of my hip bones disappeared completely.
I was actually taken aback at just how big my ass got, flowing up from my thighs into two great mounds of flesh. At least, that was how it felt from the inside. Looking in the mirror, with a bit more objectivity, I could see that my butt actually looked amazing. Full, but not obscenely so, and well in proportion to the rest of me. Looking down at my own body, the angle was less flattering, and I could not help but feel like it was too much.
My waist thickened only a little, hiding my abdominal muscles and creating a curve between hip and torso, Iike inverted parentheses. My arms lost their stick-like skinniness, though they did remain slender.
I observed all of these changes, some as they happened and some after the fact, but the bulk of my attention was fixed on my breasts. The first thing I felt was a hardening of my nipples. In the past, I had felt something similar when wearing a loose T-shirt, but the sensation was so small that it was difficult to fix upon, and I had usually just ignored it.
That was no longer possible. They were hard and tight like a clenched fist. They darkened, and the dime-sized areolae expanded to the size of quarters. They stood out from the surface of my chest, pointing slightly away from each other. For a moment they stayed like that, two hard knots pushing the thickened nipple up and out.
Then the growth began. The hard knots spread out, above and below the nipple, and to the sides. As they grew they softened, though the flesh was still quite firm. My nipples were pushing away from my chest as the tissue continued to build. The growth appeared to slow, but with more territory to cover, it took more growth to make a noticeable change. In the mirror, I could see the bottoms of my new breasts begin to be pulled down by gravity. The skin at the base of each breast creased, and the bottom of the breast settled onto my chest.
With that foundation, they increased even further, building out and gaining volume. My nipples now rode lower on my chest than they had. They were thicker too, broader and darker.
Finally the growth slowed, and stopped. I looked down in amazement. How had I ever thought of these breasts as of middling size? They were utterly huge! I swung my shoulders from side to side, and watched as the boobs swayed back and forth, out of phase with the motion. I stretched my arms up and felt the skin tug them up, changing their outward shape. I cupped my left breast in my right hand, marveling at the weight of it. I noticed my right forearm pressing into the flesh of the right breast, an action that felt both completely casual, and immensely intimate.
The progress bar was over 99% now. The final phase was called “Finishing.” First, my hair dissolved. All of it, from the hair on my head, to armpits to crotch to legs. Even the thin hairs on my arms and cheeks was gone. A moment later, I felt a great itching on my scalp, but before I could even move to scratch it, a great quantity of dark brown, curly hair shot out. It tumbled down to my shoulders in an unruly mass.
My arms prickled as a downy, nearly translucent fuzz came in. More hair grew, in my armpits and crotch and down my shins. It was sparser than it had been, but otherwise little different. My nails grew as well, lengthening almost an inch.
A bell dinged. I had reached 100%. I approached the mirror, and a nude woman approached me from the other side. She looked a little wild, with unkempt hair, long unmanicured nails, and a fair amount of body hair. She looked surprised, and curious, and a little stunned. Just like me.
I stared for some time, moving a limb, turning my neck, standing on tiptoe, and watching my reflection do the same thing. As a result, it was some time before I noticed the screen. There was a new progress bar, which had reset to 0%.
“Mental conversion pending. Please lie down on the bed to begin.”
Mental conversion? That hadn’t been part of the deal, had it? I swiped the screen over to “Help” to find out more.
Turns out, part of the company-required parameters of the conversion was to give me a crash course in using and taking care of my new body. There was no way to create memories per se, but they could give me habits. Muscle memory, essentially. I would be able to walk like a woman, apply makeup, take care of my hair, and perform many other tasks that required a great deal of training and practice.
In many cases, I would not even know that I possessed a skill until I attempted to use it, and found that it came to me very easily. “Don’t worry,” the screen assured me. “You will still be you. The mental conversion will allow you to access the full extent of your new body, and will avoid the risk of dysmorphia that might otherwise result.”
Calmed, I went to the bed, pulled back the sheets, and got in. I rested my head against the pillow. The lights in the room dimmed automatically, and I began to feel unusually sleepy. The last thing I saw before my eyelids closed was a final message on the screen. “Mental conversion also includes sexual preference, so that your mental desires align with those of your body.” I had no time to consider what this meant before sleep took me.
