Going back to work the next day, Kevin suffered through what he suspected was more than the average woman’s daily share of staring from his co-workers. Presumably, if he stayed in Dakota’s body long enough, the novelty would wear off and he’d only have to suffer the “normal” level of guys staring at him. A couple of assholes had pointed questions or rude comments for him, but most of his co-workers were sympathetic with his predicament.
At supper that night, Bryce had amusing stories to tell about going to school as an “old man,” as he kept referring to his borrowed body. Forty-nine didn’t seem that old to Kevin, but he had to admit that Bryce’s body looked older than that. The man whose body Bryce was borrowing worked in a microwave factory, and seemed to have had a harder life than Kevin or Elise. “I’m older now than most of my teachers,” Bryce said. “Coach Argall excused me from most of P.E. because of my old joints. He said I should learn Tai Chi or some other old people exercise.”
“If you wind up staying in that body much longer, yes,” Elise said. “Let’s look into classes. Or maybe water aerobics, that’s easier on your joints too.”
“You think it’s going to be a while?” Bryce asked.
Elise sighed. “I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s less than a month.”
Kevin winced, thinking of Dakota’s impending period.
After Bryce went to his room, Kevin and Elise snuggled on the couch and watched a mediocre movie with half their attention. “Did they give you a hard time at work?” Elise asked after the movie got so boring they turned it off.
“A couple of guys, yeah, but most people were decent.”
“I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”
“It’s... when I’m focused on work, I can ignore it. But five times a day, at least, when I take a bathroom break or I catch a guy staring at Dakota’s boobs or see her face in the mirror, it just hits me all over again how wrong this body is for me.”
“It hasn’t gotten any better?”
“Well, it’s only around five or six times a day now instead of almost constantly. That’s better. But it’s still plenty bad.”
Elise hugged him harder for a moment. “I’m sorry. I wish I could make it better. We’re doing what we can as fast as we can, but... we still don’t fully understand how it happened, and until we do...”
“I understand. Don’t overwork yourselves. If it’s going to take a while, you need to pace yourself for the long haul.”
“Yeah.”
They cuddled on the couch for a while longer before going to bed.
* * *
Days passed, and then weeks, and the five or six panic attacks per day diminished to two or three (after spiking to more like ten times a day when Dakota’s period started). Sometimes Kevin could get through a shower or visit the toilet without having a panic attack, or notice a guy staring at him and merely sigh with resignation instead of feeling disgust and indignation. He got through his period somehow with help from Elise and one of his female co-workers, hoping fervently that Elise and her colleagues would get everyone back in the right bodies before Dakota’s period came around again. His co-workers got used to his new appearance, and stopped treading so cautiously around him, though only a few went back to treating him like before; most started treating him more or less like a woman.
Bryce was keeping in touch with Ayesha; they were apparently feeding each other’s messages through an online translator and were mostly able to get the gist through the imperfect and sometimes misleading translations. She kept Bryce’s appointment with Dr. Shaw, who sent a report to Bryce’s parents as well as to Ayesha. She seemed to be taking decent care of Bryce’s body, not skipping his medicines or treatments.
The news was full of stories about governments around the world pressuring InstaThere to fully compensate the victims of the mixup, which had included diplomats and other government officials from several different countries. That was in addition to the various lawsuits, both individual suits by wealthy individuals and class action suits from lawyers trying to get as many victims to sign on as possible. Elise brought home rumors from work about how InstaThere was internally responding to the crisis.
“My job is secure until we fix this thing,” she said, “and probably for a while afterward, assuming the whole company doesn’t go under from the cost of compensating the victims and the loss of business. But the best case scenario is that I won’t get a bonus this year, or probably next year either. And we need to prepare for the possibility I’ll lose my job. In any case, what we’ll get from the settlement won’t make up for what we’ve lost on our investment.”
Elise had joined the company relatively early, after they had teleportation consistently working for small objects but long before they’d successfully demonstrated safe teleportation of living creatures (first white mice in lab tests, then a photogenic collie for the public demonstration). They’d put most of their savings into her stock options for several years as InstaThere boomed, and they’d seemed comfortably set to send Bryce to a top-tier university and retire in their early fifties. But with the way the stock price had crashed since the disaster, and had only recovered a fraction of its pre-crisis value since the teleport network reopened, those plans were so much ash now. They weren’t idiots, they had diversified their retirement plans somewhat, but those more conservative investments had only grown slowly compared to the previously skyrocketing price of their InstaThere stock.
“We’ll get through it somehow,” Kevin said. “We can live on my income alone, though things could get tight.”
“How bad is it gonna get?” Bryce asked. “Give it to me straight.”
“If your mom loses her job, we’d have to cancel the streaming services, eat out a lot less, and put off replacing our cars,” Kevin said. “Which means you wouldn’t get one of our cars when you turn sixteen. The worst of it is that your choice of college might be more limited, if your mother still hasn’t found another job that pays as well.” And Elise and I will have to keep working until we’re sixty-five or older, he thought but didn’t say. “But we’re not going to go hungry and we’re not in danger of losing the house. Or not being able to pay for your medicines.”
Support groups for victims of the body-shuffle sprang up both online and in various big cities, and InstaThere, trying to salvage their reputation, offered them resources such as meeting rooms, web hosting, promotion, and free teleportation for people who lived in smaller towns or rural areas and wanted to go to support group meetings in a bigger city. Kevin was reluctant to get involved, other than lurking on one of the online forums for shuffle victims, but Elise strongly encouraged him and Bryce to go with her, the second Saturday after they all returned home, to a meeting of the group that met at InstaThere’s main office tower, a few miles from the R&D lab she worked at.
The group met in a large conference room on the second floor. One of the organizers was sitting at a small table near the entrance, with nametags and markers spread out before her, a legal pad and pen, and three boxes of donuts and other pastries, one marked “Gluten-free.”
“Welcome!” she said. “If you want to get our newsletter, sign up, but it’s not required. And you don’t have to put your real name on your nametag, just something we can call you if you don’t mind.”
Kevin, Elise and Bryce put their real names on their nametags and Elise put her email down on the legal pad. Then they looked around. There were around twenty people in the room. Glancing at a few of the people standing around and talking, Kevin noticed that about half had names that didn’t go well with their current body.
“Welcome, everybody,” said the woman who’d been sitting at the nametag table, standing up and picking up a microphone. “I see we’ve got a lot more people here this time. It’s a bit too many for everybody to have a chance to talk, so let’s split up into two groups. What about if everybody who got swapped into a body of the opposite sex gather over on that end of the room, and everybody who didn’t gather over here. I’ll lead this group and Avery will lead the other.”
Avery, wearing a middle-aged Hispanic woman’s body, raised her hand and led the way over toward the far end of the room. Elise said, “See you afterward,” and hugged Kevin. Then she and Bryce headed over toward the nametag woman’s end of the room and Kevin walked toward Avery, who was organizing a couple of people to rearrange the chairs into a circle. Kevin pitched in and sat down once the chairs were in place and everyone who’d swapped sexes had gathered.
“So let’s go around briefly and everyone tell a little bit about ourselves and how we’ve been affected by ending up in someone else’s body,” Avery said. Kevin figured Avery must be at least as old as his current body looked; all the Averys he’d known in school were female, but he’d heard of a couple of older guys named Avery, and apparently it used to be a male name until a couple of generations ago. But then Avery destroyed his inferences. “You don’t have to say any more than you’re comfortable with. I’m Avery, and I’m a thirty-four year old trans woman. The reason Mia asked me to lead this group is because I’ve got a lot of experience dealing with the gender dysphoria that most or all of you have been feeling — that’s the feeling that your body is the wrong sex for your mind, to put it simply. And it’s been great the last couple of weeks to be able to pass perfectly, and feel what it’s like to have a period, but I feel guilty about hoping this doesn’t get fixed any time soon. Okay, to my left?” She turned to the person on her left, wearing a rotund black man’s body, who said:
“I’m Callie, and I work in marketing at Coca-Cola. I don’t think I’ve been feeling that ‘gender dys-’ — what was it?”
“Dysphoria.”
“Right. Anyway, I’ve been feeling weird about this body, but the, uh, male parts don’t bother me, I think? But I’ve been feeling horribly guilty about how I’ve reacted to being black... I mean, I didn’t think I was racist, but...” She trailed off and looked down at her lap. “And being — overweight, too.” Kevin thought she’d just stopped herself from saying “fat.” “That’s not cool, but I can’t seem to stop feeling this way.”
Kevin was the next person to Callie’s left. He took a deep breath and introduced himself. “I’m Kevin, a CPA. I... I don’t really feel comfortable dressing like this, but apparently the person whose body I’m wearing is a minor celebrity in Canada and she insists on me dressing the way she would dress whenever I go out in public, in case photos of me end up on the Internet. And I’m having a lot of that gender dysphoria, though it’s a bit less frequent than it was right after the disaster.”
They continued around the circle. It seemed that Kevin’s gender dysphoria was worse than average, though almost everyone was feeling it to some extent. The exceptions were Callie and a game designer named Graham, who had the body of a red-haired girl in her early twenties. “Being a girl has been really neat,” Graham confessed. “I’m pretty sure I’m transgender. I considered whether I might be, back in college, but I didn’t really fit the criteria, or so I thought, and... but this is just so cool! The only reason I’m here is because this body has Crohn’s Disease, and that’s been kind of hard to adjust to...”
After everyone had had a chance to speak, Avery talked a little more about her experiences of gender dysphoria and gave them some tips on managing it and the other psychological problems that were likely to result from it, like depression and depersonalization. “For some people, the only thing that really makes it go away is physically transitioning to their real gender,” she said. “For others, just transitioning socially — changing your name, the way you dress, your hair and perhaps makeup — is enough to get rid of it or make it easily manageable. But there’s obviously a limit to how much of that you can do when you’re just borrowing those bodies. You can’t ethically start hormones or even cut your hair. But you can, and probably should, if you feel safe doing so, dress and present as your real gender. The person your body belongs to,” she said, turning to face Kevin, “just needs to suck it up and sort out any image problems after she gets her body back. If her fans are the type to get upset because a man is inhabiting her body through no fault of yours or hers, she’s better off without them. Your mental health is a lot more important.”
Kevin didn’t reply, but just nodded. He glanced down at Dakota’s probably-not-entirely-natural assets and wondered if any kind of clothing could hide them or even de-emphasize them much. But he could probably wear some sort of more masculine pants, at least... only he wasn’t sure if he should spend money on a new wardrobe that neither he nor Dakota would have any use for once Elise and her colleagues fixed this. Now, when the financial situation was so uncertain? Maybe not. But one or two outfits would probably fit the budget. And men could get away with wearing the same things multiple times a week, far more easily than women...
He realized he’d zoned out and forced himself to pay attention as Avery talked with Grace, one of the women who had landed in a male body, about the things she’d tried so far to make that body look somewhat feminine and what else she could do. After a bit, she talked in more general terms about things men who’d landed in women’s bodies could do. “I can’t speak to that from experience, of course,” she concluded, “but I can point you to some online resources for trans men, including a forum where the guys are pretty friendly and helpful to newbies.”
She gave over the rest of the meeting to letting those who’d ended up with diseases and disabilities they weren’t used to talk about their experiences. That turned out to be almost half, though not everyone had mentioned it in their initial introduction, in some cases because they thought that their new health problems were pretty minor compared to their gender dysphoria, in others because their problems seemed insignificant compared to Jacob, whose new body was blind, or Nera, who’d ended up in a very young body too immature to maintain bladder control or talk understandably without great effort.
After the meeting was over, Avery talked privately with Callie and Graham, while the rest got up and milled around, talking with each other or people who’d been in the other group, or left the room. Kevin went over and joined Bryce and Elise.
“That was good,” Elise said. “Did you get a lot out of it?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “I think I’ll probably come again.”
