Constant in All Other Things 2
Interlude II (1/3)
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
(Patreon: www.patreon.com/fakeminsk)

“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing

Synopsis:
David Sanders returns to the Asklepios Clinic in the hope of leaving behind Cindy’s life and regaining a male identity. There, both mind and body are assessed by Jonathon “Scooter” Bridges and Crystal Dawn; whilst the enigmatic Agent K has plans of her own.

What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdered the son of an underworld rival. Placed in witness protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a younger woman. For months he suffers the ignominy of living a life he despises, his torture both alleviated and acerbated once discovered by Julia, a jilted ex-girlfriend. A trip to the Asklepios Clinic, the research centre responsible for his transformation, triggered both uncomfortable memories and a violent encounter.

Interlude 2, Part One
One: Who Are You, Mr Sanders?

Who are you, Mr Sanders?

This was the question haunting Katherine as she sat and waited in the dark solitude of the small apartment set aside for David Sanders at the Asklepios Clinic. This was the question at the front of her mind as she heard the subtle click of the door. He stepped into the room and tossed his handbag onto the sofa. He hadn’t noticed her yet.

She was about to call out when his movement triggered the lighting of the room. Recessed spotlights bathed him in their soft glow. A sudden surge of emotions whirlpooled through her, an exhilarating sinking of the gut at the sight of the man. Katherine’s breath caught in her throat. The transformed man was pretty—very pretty, in the peach sundress and wedge heels she’d placed in the car for him, fingernails and earring flashing, long hair tousled from the extended drive.

She noted with amusement that the man already had one hand down the back of his dress, unhooking his bra. How… womanish, she thought. She allowed him the dignity of slipping the bra out the front of his dress, and the relieved sigh, before she called out from her seat in the corner: “Mr Saunders.”

His eyes were instantly alert and wary.

“We need to talk.”

He stared back at her for a long moment. Spots of dried blood stood out like a dark constellation across the bodice and skirt of the dress. Slender fingers tucked a twist of stray hair back behind one ear, and he stood and stared at her for a long moment. In the other hand he held the bra. He opened his mouth as though about to speak—but stopped, lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. Then he sagged and shook his head.

“Need a piss,” he grunted, and walked off.

Katherine waited and contemplated the changes in her ward. The past six months had provided a steady stream of photos and videos of Mr Sanders’ ongoing transformation, but the physical reality was something entirely different. She remembered him as she’s last seen him in the flesh, lying on the bed of the new-to-him apartment arranged for him in one of the cheaper outer districts of the city.

His new curves veiled in a pale pink nightie, he’d seemed the very image of a modern Sleeping Beauty. Even his hair, makeup and nails had been freshly and lovingly done by the staff at the Clinic before transporting him unconscious to his new home. He'd been setup to awaken into his new feminine reality. Even then, however, there’d still been a hint—much more than a hint, really—of the man beneath the surface: not just the sizeable bulge in his pink panties, but masculine traces across his body.

But now? The most obvious were the physical changes, subtle but indelible evidence beyond the illusions of makeup and shapewear indicating the process of feminisation had continued. Subtle, but evident: a further softening and rounding of features once hard and sharp, seen in shoulder, chin and hands. Still slender, but now with a definite curve to the hips absent before, an unmanly narrowing of the waist. And there was also a—she hesitated to call it a glow—an undeniable feminine property to his skin and hair, a vibrant sheen that spoke of girlish youth and vigor.

But most intriguing were the changes in behaviour: the hesitation in his response, an apparent nervousness, the unconscious way he brushed back his hair and held his hands, fingers slightly splayed, at his side before turning away.

She heard the toilet flush but it was several minutes more before he returned. When he did, his hair was brushed and gleamed, and his lips glinted with a fresh coat of gloss. Smoothing down his dress, he sat opposite her with knees pressed together and to one side, poised at the edge of the sofa. He unbuckled his shoes and where his dress billowed open Katherine saw the swell of his unrestrained chest. His breasts were larger, too.

Sighing with pleasure, he curled and uncurled his toes, nails glinting pink in the pale light. He glanced up, green eyes glittering through long lashes, and she saw there a spark of humour.

“Like what you see?”

“Yes,” she said.

He scowled. “You fucking bitch.” He straightened and the humour was consumed as the spark flared into anger. “You fucking—you had no right!” He shook his head and swept the hair out of his eyes. “No fucking right to do this to me.”

She cocked her head to one side. “I saved your life.”

“You stole it,” he snarled.

“When I found you, Mr Sanders,” she said, “you were dead. Your heart had stopped. Your injuries were . . . they were terrible.” With the words came the memories. Desperate, rasping breath, her own, and pain and fear, scrabbling into the room, slipping, blood – her own, welling between fingers but then on the floor – so much blood – everywhere and the crushing sense of loss and failure.

“And it was my fault.” She accepted this, now even more than she had accepted it in those initial, frenzied moments in which she scrambled to save his life. The initial attempt to disguise him: not enough. The protection of the Clinic: not enough. She had misjudged Steele’s determination to find him. She had underestimated the skill and resources of his agents. And when she thought back to those days at the Clinic, she could see now that leaving David alone had been her mistake. Blinded by her own arrogance, distracted by emotion and desire, she had failed in her duty. “It nearly cost you your life.” She shook her head, one hand drifting to her side. “It nearly cost me mine as well.”

Flinty steel scored her voice as she continued. “And I swore then that I would not fail again. I determined then that you would live, Mr Saunders, no matter the cost; and that cost would be great, as Steele’s grasp was closer than ever.”

“Cost?” David snorted. “Cost!”

“Yes, cost,” she answered. “You are not the only one who has suffered and lost,” she continued. “You are not the only one who has paid a price these past six months. Cindy—”

“David,” he interrupted.

“I spoke to him, Cindy, on the phone we found clutched in your hand.” The conversation had been brief, intense, and she thought of it daily. So much hinged on those words exchanged with Steele. “Briefly. And I glimpsed the depth of this man’s obsession with you. It borders on madness, I think. And in that moment I understood that Steele’s very obsession to revenge himself against you could be made to work against him.

“But we needed time. And we had very little of that most precious commodity. By speaking to him you confirmed your location. He knew with certainty where to find you and that your body was broken. It was a miracle you survived one attack,”—and again she wondered, how Mr Saunders? Who are you, Mr Sanders?—“but with arms and legs broken, a punctured lung, shattered ribs and a concussion? You were defenceless. You needed months of bedrest to heal, possibly a year or more of physiotherapy to regain full mobility. And in the meantime Steele would be searching for you.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “Fuck you,” he added. “You could’ve John Doe’d me in a hospital in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere and left me to recover.” His voice trembled with barely suppressed rage. “There’s no way turning me into a woman was the best possible option. You could’ve of… tried, something, anything else.” His entire body tensed and for a moment he seemed about to launch himself at her, the angry lines of his form an incongruous contrast to the delicate fall of his dress, the lilt of his voice.

“You could’ve left me to die,” he nearly whispered, and he sagged, suddenly, collapsing back into the sofa. “You didn’t even ask.”

Katherine cocked an eyebrow. “Ask a dead man for permission to save his life? No, Mr Saunders, I did not ask. Instead, I made the necessary arrangements to ensure your survival.”

“Survival?” Hefting the generous swell of his breasts with both hands, he presented their fullness to her as though on a platter. “Look at these thing! You gave me tits – real fucking tits!—and a life to go with them. What, exactly, of David Saunders’ life survived?”

Katherine pursed her lips. “Mr Saunders. The facility was a small one: fewer than a hundred patients with slow turnover; and nearly as many staff. We knew already that Steele had hacked the Clinic’s network and bypassed their security systems, infiltrating the Clinic with his own agents. He has the time and the resources; he now had patient names, staff names, addresses, medical records.

“The only detail working in our favour was that he had no reason to link you to the identity of Cindy Bellamy.

“Meanwhile, we could not risk moving you. You had to remain at the Clinic and heal. And by the time you could be moved—Steele could potentially track the movement of everyone coming and going from Asklepios.”

Pinching at the bridge of her nose, she winced at the memory of the decisions made then, of Jonathon’s offer and the risks involved. Fixing Mr Saunders with an angry look, she continued. “What choice did I have, David? By the time we could move you—the movement of an unlisted male patient would not have gone unnoticed.

“So I made a choice.” A choice rooted in tragedy: the suicide of a young woman, a rare failure by the Clinic to heal and rehabilitate a patient. Cindy Bellamy, already a patient at the Clinic, already a month into her treatment with a digital record reaching even further back, a real world existence with no link to Mr Saunders. A life, tragically cut short – but lost in secrecy—perfect, it turned out, for someone to adopt and continue.

Mr Saunders glared at her, bright green eyes smouldering with anger and hatred. She was struck by the beauty of the man’s face—the prettiness of his emotion—the way the delicate strap of his sundress slipped down his shoulder as he trembled with anger. “Choice? Your choice?” he hissed. “You took everything from me, K. I had… a life! A life, and a pretty damn good life, too, one I worked my ass off to build. You have any idea how hard—a job, K, I had a fucking job, a high-paying one, I was near the top, you know? The bullshit I pit up with to get there! With interns and a free gym and, and… shit. I had my own office, I’d finally scored the corner office! And…”

Red-faced, he sputtered.

“And?”

“And…” He scowled. “I had a home. I was half-way through the goddam mortgage on my condo. And a brand new car. And I had… I had friends. Friends and a favourite bar and—they knew me by name down at the Clocktower.” He jabbed a finger at her. “They knew my name K!”

For a moment his voice turned plaintiff, and he swallowed, and then he was yelling at her once again. “And… shops! I had a thing going with the girl behind the counter at the corner store, her name’s Kayla and…” He pounded one fist into his palm. “Girls! Getting laid every goddamn weekend, K!”

Watching and listening to his rant, Katherine noted how performative it was. She watched this man from whom everything had been taken struggling to find anything he truly cared about. The anger was genuine, but hollow: without any real sadness or loss, only outrage remained.

“And I had fucking muscles!” Slender fingers wrapped around his thin bicep as evidence, and for the first time she noted the tremor of true emotion. “I was… strong. And you—you gave me, what, in return? Tits! Skirts and heels and some shitty little apartment on the edge of town. A job as a, what, a goddamn secretary? And this—somehow—you call this a choice?”

“Yet here you are, Mr Saunders. Alive.”

“No.” He jumped to his feet and stalked up and down the narrow space of the lounge. “That’s not good enough! You could’ve found another way.” He stopped and shouted at the ceiling. “Fuck!”

Resuming his pacing, he continued. “Do you have any idea what it was like, waking up in that apartment on my own? Waking up Cindy, with no idea of how I got there?”

She shook her head.

“I nearly went crazy, K! Nearly. And there I was in a body I didn’t recognize with clothes that weren’t mine and pictures of me I couldn’t remember and then I realised—you’d betrayed me.” He stopped and spun and pointed a finger at her. “This was all you. You wanted this—me—you like it, don’t you, watching me prance around in these dresses like some fucking fairy, putting makeup on my face… degrading myself every fucking day, the shame and humiliation.”

“There is no shame to being female, Mr Saunders, no degradation.”

“But I’m not female!”

Katherine stood. In her low heels and him barefooted, she nearly towered over the feminised man. “You say I take pleasure in seeing you like this?” With the back of one hand, she gently stroked his cheek. She thrilled at the smoothness of the skin and at the way he seemed to unconsciously lean into her touch. “Yes,” she said.

She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Do you remember, Mr Saunders? You asked me once who Cindy was, and I told you: she is gentle, yes, and dependent? Weaker, at least physically, than you were, and reliant on others. And so very soft.” She held his chin, gently, and felt how he trembled under her touch. “And so, yes, David, I do like this, very much so.”

And her lips found his, in a single, deep kiss, dark and passionate. She tasted his lipstick and felt the suppleness of his lips and wanted to run her fingers through his long hair and slide the other strap down his smooth shoulder and grab him by throat and pull him to her so that they crushed together and she could feel the supple flesh of his chest against hers—Katherine wanted all this and more, much more; but she pulled away.

He stood there, swaying slightly, one finger held to his lip. “You bitch.”

“You are alive, David.” She sighed and sank back into the chair. “Six months, yet you remain alive despite the unfettered attention and determined efforts of one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet to revenge himself against you.

“Do I take pleasure in seeing you like this? Yes, Mr Saunders, because it worked; because there was no other alternative; and because you are alive.

“And so, David– Cindy–I do not offer you an apology.”

He fell back into the sofa opposite, legs splayed as wide as the dress would allow, arms stretched across the back. He stared up at the ceiling. “And so now what?”

“Now?” Her eyes lingered over the slight frame of the man sat opposite. Katherine licked her lips and smiled. “You are booked in for two weeks. Think of it as a holiday. Arrangements have been made with Cindy’s workplace. Relax. Enjoy the hospitality of the Clinic.”

“Two weeks? Julia’s not going to like that. But, yeah, sure.” Still staring at the ceiling, he waved one arm to take in the room. “Whatever. But it’s not like this little face-to-face needed to be here, right? What’d you drag me out here for?”

“Ah. For that, you will have to speak to Jonathon.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes.”

“To undo all of… this?”

“That,” Katherine answered, “is not my decision.”

Two: The Flash of a Knife’s Edge
The next morning, Katherine woke up early. Over time her nightmares of the past had faded; never forgotten, but they only rarely disturbed her sleep. The encounter with Mr Saunders had brought those terrible, vivid dreams back in full force, and her sleep had been haunted by incoherent visions of violence, a bloated body, gaping wounds and blood—so much blood, and the sensation of drowning. She woke up gasping for air.

She washed and dressed, reviewing her agenda for the day. Leaving her spartan staff accommodations at the Clinic, she met the technician in the studio set aside for her by Jonathon. Accepting a coffee and croissant, Katherine settled into her seat at the computer and accessed her documents. The video files from the diner were waiting, per her request.

The footage was clear enough. She forwarded through the tedium of the early day, only slowing once a pretty woman in a tight, professional-looking skirt appeared on the scene. The woman crossed over to the bathroom and emerged soon after in a breezy peach sundress. She sat, ordered food, waited. There was a commotion. The girl flinched, protested, avoided eye contact.

On the screen and seen from the camera’s raised angle, the man named Mal stormed towards the girl. She cringed away from him, her simpering protests only angering the man further. He was ex-military turned mercenary, a hardened survivor of combat and atrocities overseas. When his hand lashed out it hit with precision, taking her across the cheek, snapping her head back.

“Fucking cunt.” The man’s voice sounded tinny and distant as he pinned her to the wall, hands reaching and grabbing, burying his face in her hair and breathing in her scent.

The girl struggled, twisted, shouted “No!” and shoved the man away with surprising and desperate strength.

“Stop.”

The image froze with the man in mid-stumble, arms pinwheeling and foot caught on the leg of an overturned chair.

“Can we zoom in, Ari?”

“Yes, but the quality will fluctuate.” The technician was short and wiry, head half shaved, the rest a coloured and coifed wave, reactive chromatic dye crawling through a rainbow’s spectrum as her head twitched between screen and client in the room’s dim light. Intricately detailed tattoos snaked across neck and brow.

Ari sounded apologetic. “The composite you’re looking at should hold up even in extreme close-up, but the original footage quality isn’t great,” she said. “Only three of the six cameras in the restaurant were working, and the capture quality was low. Well below legal requirements,” she added with a sniff. “The software can boost the image and clean up the noise, and we can extrapolate some of the missing data, but you’ll lose fidelity the closer you get.”

Katherine nodded. “Fine,” she said, swiped back across the screen, rewound seconds to just before the man’s assault and with a few taps and touches closed in on the face of the girl. The image pixelated, processed, cleared; and she examined the face of Cindy Bellamy under duress.

Eyes brilliantly green and freshly made up: done with great care, expertise even, in colours that accentuated the girl’s startling and startled beauty. Up close, each eyelash was delineated in mascara, exaggerating eyes wide with fear under pale, tidy eyebrows, carefully drawn in and threaded into thin arcs. Very good, very fashionable: Katherine nodded her approval and then pulled the image back, brought into focus the highlighted cheekbones and painted lips rounded in an ‘o’ of horror. It was a face captured in an instant of genuine fear. Katherine knew the face, knew it well, had been there for its conception just as she’d been there for the end of its previous life.

She advanced the footage at a deliberate pace, transfixed by the girl’s expression as the man approached, raged, and assaulted her. Intimately familiar with the range of human emotions, with their expression and concealment, Katherine understood the extremes of anger and loss and fear. She’d felt them too deeply herself and recognized their expression in others. And what she saw on the screen before her appeared genuine; impossibly so, it seemed to her, knowing as she did what followed.

With each incremental advance, the slice of frozen time revealed nothing more than a young woman in genuine panic, confronted by an eruption of all-too common masculine violence. Katherine looked for the narrowing, the tightening of expression that belied the girl’s helplessness. It wasn’t there. If she hadn’t known better, she would have accepted the footage at face value.

But she did know better. She knew that beneath the makeup and fear, the long hair and slender arms, the dainty dress and vulnerability, there lay a man, and this man concealed a shocking capacity for violence.

It irritated her profoundly to think back to her first encounter with Mr David Sanders and accept that he had fooled her completely. The smugness, the cockiness with which he’d approached her office had blinded her through annoyance.

“I hear you’re the one to talk to,” he said that day, all but sauntering up to her desk. “About Jeremiah Steele.”

She’d looked up from some paperwork, already in a bad mood. He’d been a stunningly good-looking man, slim but strong, perpetually mocking eyes under short-cropped hair, golden undertones to his skin hinting at some mixed ancestry. Flashing an affable grin and absurd confidence, he approached her desk. Mr Saunders’ chin had been dirty with stubble and his clothes looked slept-in, but the disheveled look only added a certain raffish charm. Katherine had disliked him instantly, intensely. Much to her irritation and only later could she admit her instant and intense dislike was rooted in an instant and intense attraction to the man.

Katherine had resented him then for how she made him feel. Annoyingly, the same feelings resurfaced last night and lingered still.

Back on the screen, the man named Mal recovered, grabbed the girl by the hair, hauled her back. She cried out in pain—then, surely? Katherine rotated through the scene, the details blurring then sharpening as the AI extrapolated and rendered missing data, filling in the gaps in the image. Even now, face distended with pain, she saw only Cindy, nothing but a young woman being brutally yanked by her hair back to her assaulter and the authenticity of the scene was fascinating—because she knew the man was yanking on the tail of a viper—yet equally disturbing. The pain and violence she witnessed was genuine, and she felt an impossible desire to intervene, to rescue this seemingly helpless girl.

The man slammed the girl up against the wall. Her face went white, the breath knocked out of her. Now? No—not yet—not even as the man grabbed her, roughly mauling her breasts. She cried out, her voice a terrified mix of fear and disbelief, and the desperate and high-pitched keen of her distress rang true. He covered her mouth, thrust up against her, and Katherine watched fascinated as the man she knew existed beneath the surface submitted to the assault.

Mal grabbed Cindy and shoved her away and her head collided with the edge of the restaurant countertop. The girl sank to the ground, dazed. Blood flowed freely from her forehead. The man stalked over, hauled her to her feet, threw her back down and now she was on her knees and he towered over her, he reached for his belt buckle, and….

There it was.

Like the flash of a knife’s edge in moonlight, or the bursting of the chrysalis: it was now Sanders on his knees. David not Cindy in the torn dress, face framed in blood, kneeling and looking fiercely upwards, long hair like gilded shutters drawn aside to reveal incandescent, furious joy, a slice of sharp sunlight cutting through parted curtain flooding a darkened room. In every line of the young girl’s—no, not a girl, definitely not a girl but a man’s—frame, the transformation was clear: an anticipatory tenseness, a curl to the lip, the lustful narrowing of eyes.

And the man, the other man, the ex-soldier Mal, had no idea what awaited him as he reached down.

It would have been painful to watch had it not been so richly deserved. It wasn’t a fight, really, more a deliberate, surgical dissection performed with cold pleasure. Rather than the brute force demonstrated in the fight against Agent Fosters, David now moved with precision, with a fleet and sinuous grace as he leverage both surprise and his lighter, smaller frame to his advantage. There was a savage meticulousness as he evaded his victim’s grip and hooked Mal’s knee, twisted and brought the man to the ground, and tore into his target with ruthless efficiency.

Agent K was intimately familiar with every aspect of Mr. Sander’s recorded life. Per standard procedure, after that first meeting Katherine had initiated the usual dig into the man’s past. A superficial pass revealed nothing unusual: a fairly ordinary life and a boring man. He was a successful corporate employee, exploiting male privilege and innate charisma to rapidly rise through the ranks, though both charm and privilege were supported by genuine ability. Even then, however, certain details hadn’t rung quite true. Ruefully, Katherine had to admit she’d ignored her early doubts, blinded by the possibility of having something on Jeremiah Steele.

She’d still been careful, of course—Sanders could’ve been a plant, a distraction, even a trap to call her out—though those early misgivings fell away after the man took two bullets to the chest after his day in court.

No, it was after that, after the drive and the fight and the conversation on the phone with Steele, after the man she’d put under her protection had very nearly bled to death on the Clinic floor, that she began to dig deeper.

She’d pulled every shred of data she could snag with the widest nets available to her, calling in favours and contacts both private and State: birth certificate, school reports, employment records; his every achievement and sanction, success and failure. Medical records, extensive vaccination data, and vast fields of biometric data culled from an adult lifetime of digital existence. Location stamps, favoured travel routes, shopping trends and every use of currency, every purchase, every snack and meal, gym membership, passport records, taxes. Every drink—so many drinks!—from every pub and bar and restaurant and club and dirty little hole in the wall he’d ever visited.

Then she’d unleashed the data sifters, the best semi-autonomous algorithms available to her and got them crawling through the mountains of data that delineated a life. They sniffed out the patterns and the abnormalities that lay outside those patterns; the times and places where other data fields overlapped—the recurring habits and people, places, anything of statistical significance that could explain how an ordinary man with an ordinary past could sink so easily, so thoroughly, into a role so antithetical to his very identity. Or more to the point: how could someone so ordinary, so boring and without experience of violence or war, survive both the attack of a trained assassin and the sexual assault of a decorated, damaged veteran? The answer, she hoped, should arrive later in the week as the AI completed its search through the data.

Meanwhile, in controlled slow motion, the man who presented as a pretty young woman pulled back from her assault on her victim. With a dainty touch, he dabbed at the errant drops now spattered across his face. The blood smeared like grotesque blusher across his cheeks, and his smile and eyes sparked with wild joy. The man, Mal groaned and twisted on the floor in pain. David stood over him and stared for a moment, bemused, where an acrylic nail had ripped away. Then, with something akin to a shrug and with almost casual disdain, the girl picked up a folding chair, collapsed it flat and held it high, ready to slam the edge down into Mal’s face.

Apparently noticing something, he hesitated. Tossing the chair to one side, he knelt next to the wounded man. He spoke, words too quiet for the cameras’ microphones, long hair obscuring the movement of his lips. David stood and walked away from the broken man.

Katherine sat back, let the footage play itself out, and watched as the man in the torn dress stood and stalked towards the collapsed waitress. He walked unsteadily in his wedge heels. There was a brief conversation, after which the young woman seemed to reassert herself. She left the café and returned to the car under the scorching glare of the sun, trotting across the tarmac with an almost ebullient confidence. Cameras switched automatically to provide unbroken coverage, picking up first on the external footage as she strode swiftly across the pavement, then switching to the camera in the car.

She watched the girl in the car for a long time, lips pursed in thought. Cindy sat there unmoving as the vehicle hummed to life, left the station and returned to the main road. She was smiling as she looked out the window. At one point, she examined her hand, the torn knuckles and nail. She made a lazy effort at wiping away a spot of blood on her dress. Eventually, her eyes drifted shut, and she slept.

Katherine allowed the recording to play and quietly watched the resting face of the pretty man. A flutter of darkness at the edge of her vision: exhaustion, but also fragments of a nightmare, ragged shreds of memory. This she thrust aside, and smiled, the slightest curving of razor-thin lips. For the first time she allowed herself to believe, rather than simply hope, that her plan could work.

Leaning forward, Katherine tapped a few keys and shut down the footage from the diner. She switched to a live feed from the Clinic’s security system. Camera after camera, she followed her ward as he made his way from the residential quarter through garden paths and public corridors to the Iaso building. She noted the femininity of his apparel and the appraising glances of passing patients and nodded with silent approval.

Soon, he stood outside the designated therapy room. A subtle hum from his armlet indicated he should enter. There was a moment’s hesitation. He smoothed down his long hair with a nervous gesture and took a moment to check his appearance in a convenient mirror. Katherine watched him take a deep breath and cross the threshold.

Three: Fun Little Secret Society
A small room, greige walls, sparsely decorated and designed to feel unthreatening. Spikey green succulent in a simple pot; paintings of muted colours in textured swaths on the wall; comfortable chairs and a large, heavy table in solid wood. Two women faced each other across the table. The first, very pretty and dressed to accentuate her youth, presented as fashionably vivid in contrast to the subdued room and the other woman opposite. She slouched in her chair, legs crossed at the knees, hugging herself against the chill of the room. Painted fingernails clicked against the chair armrest.

Opposite her, an older woman—in her mid-forties, perhaps—sat poised and professionally attired in a charcoal grey blazer and knee length pencil skirt. A little matronly in appearance, with a strong jaw, heavy eyebrows and pronounced chin, her sternness was softened by the ruffle of her collar, severity offset by flouncy lace trim at her sleeves and the bright colours of her rings and chunky necklace.

Behind heavy-framed glasses, deep-set eyes sparked with perceptive intelligence. She leaned forward. “Before we begin,” the woman started and rattled off the usual patter that this was a safe space, a non-judgmental space in which the patient was free to speak openly and honestly; however, the Clinic nevertheless did record all interactions between therapist and patient. She left out the tracking of patients’ reactions through GSR, heart rate, pupil response, thermal change and a host of other methods. This was a very special client, after all—one with which the Clinic was inclined to tale a few liberties, perhaps, and make the most careful observations. Specialised equipment in the room tracked the patient, and the wristband assigned to all patients at the clinic contributed a steady stream of further data.

The therapist added that her full name was Crystal Carlotta Dawn; that she was a licensed therapist employed by the Asklepios Clinic; the patient’s name was Cindy Bellamy, age twenty; and that this was a follow-up session to their previous meeting six months ago.

The younger woman shook her head in dismay. “Wow, six months already?”

The therapist continued: the session was to evaluate the patient’s wellbeing and to assess how she was coping following her previous treatment at the Asklepios clinic.

“Is this thing part of it?” the girl interrupted, plucking at the thin strip of soft plastic around her wrist. “Like, I get that it gives access around the clinic and pays for food and stuff, but when I went to the gym this morning is also had my heart rate and whatever on it. Is that part of the interview?”

The older woman nodded. “Yes. It allows us to monitor the patients’ vital signs and respond in case of an emergency,” she answered. “And it provides other useful data. Is it comfortable?”

“Yeah.” Cindy crossed her wrists, and the clinic’s pale strip of white plastic made a dull contrast to the colourful bangles decorating the other arm. “Bit bland, though.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on to our tech department.” Thin lips in pale beige lipstick twitched in a hint of a smile. “So, with all that out of the way—shall we begin?”

“Um… sure? I guess.” The younger girl tapped at the wristband, fingernails clicking against the plastic, then seemed suddenly conscious of her fiddling and stopped. She shrank back into her chair. She seemed smaller, now, and more vulnerable.

“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

“I guess not?”

Crystal took a moment to draw a tablet from her briefcase and placed it before her. She took a moment to review some notes written there. The girl opposite fidgeted with her bangles, spinning them around her wrist as she waited in silence.

“How are you feeling today?” Crystal finally asked. She smiled. “Cindy?”

For a moment the young girl seemed taken aback, angry, even, and surprised by the question. Her mouth opened once, closed—she took a deep breath—and shrugged. “Fine, I think,” she said. “A bit tired. It was a long drive yesterday, and it took me awhile to wind down. Didn’t sleep very well, I guess, and I woke up early.”

“I see.” Video capture and biometric data confirmed Cindy was awake at 4am and jogging on a treadmill in the gym at 5. “Why was that?”

“I….” Cindy hesitated. “I don’t know. Yesterday was a stressful day, you know? Or, you know what it’s like, sleeping in a strange room?”

“Bad dreams?” She knew, of course, that Cindy had indeed been plagued by bad dreams last night – again, the collected data suggesting the familiar pattern of recuring nightmares had followed her from her home in the city to Asklepios.

“I don’t know.” The girl played with her dangling earrings, twitching and twirling the glittery strands. “Like, maybe? I can’t remember.”

The older woman nodded, made note of the lie and then hesitated before her next comment. “You look good today, Cindy.”

The compliment seemed to placate some of the girl’s anxiety. “That wasn’t a question?”

“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” she said. She made another note on her tablet, then looked up. “Could you walk me through the steps you followed in selecting your outfit today?”

Cindy’s brow furrowed, her nose wrinkling slightly with apparent confusion. “I don’t follow.”

There was a pause in which Crystal leaned back in her seat and observed the younger woman over steepled fingers. “Last time I saw you, Cindy, was six months ago. Do you remember?”

“Ye—ees? I mean, kind of. It was all a bit informal, right?” She frowned with the effort of recollection, a gesture so cute and disarming it couldn’t possibly be unconscious. “We had a couple of chats. You asked me a bit about my life before, you know…”

“Yes, I remember.”

“No offense, but honestly – I’m drawing a bit of a blank. I kinda thought you were a bit flaky, you know: ‘Crystal’? and ‘Dawn’? I remember thinking, that can’t be her real name, can it? It just seemed, like, a bit new-agey?”

Crystal stifled a laugh. “Fair enough,” she said. “However, from my point of view, those encounters were very meaningful, very memorable. You left a very strong impression.”

“Oh.”

“And so, to return to my request: before leaving your room this morning, you were free to dress any way you wanted. This is the outfit you chose.” Here, she indicated the black mesh top Cindy wore, sheer, tight and sleeveless, over lacy balconette bra shadowed by the dark fabric; and the high-waisted, button-down shorts and wide belt, and ankle boots. “Can you to walk me though the process that led to you wearing this?”

There was a pause before Cindy answered. When she spoke, her voice wavered. “Is there a problem with the way I’m dressed?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then why?”

“I’m hoping you can explain the thinking, maybe the emotions, behind your choices. Nothing more.” Crystal indicated the girl’s footwear. “For instance, can you explain why you chose to wear heels today?” She leaned a little closer and offered a reassuring smile. “They’re very pretty. Very colourful.”

Cindy expression wavered; something resembling anger smouldered in eyes already smoky with heavy mascara, eyeliner and shadow; but then she smiled with something like relief. Almost as if a switch had been flipped, she slid easily into her answer. “Thanks! I wasn’t sure, you know? But I saw them there in the wardrobe of clothes the Clinic provided – and I mean, like wow, how’d they get my size right for everything?” She rubbed her hands down the length of one long, lithe and smooth leg, the skin luminous with youthful vigor and body shimmer lotion. Cindy danced her fingers along the boots, curling graceful fingers around the chunky heel. Sequins sparkled in the light. “But I don’t know. Like, sure, the flats were tempting but I guess I wanted to feel a little taller today? I like feeling tall. And I saw the boots and went from there?”

A little moue of concentration, pinked pursed lips and wrinkled nose, again, and she shrugged. “I read an article about Sin-DI this morning? And she looked pretty and cool and had shoes kinda like these, and so I tried to copy the look a bit? Maybe?” Cindy stretched out her legs, recrossed as the ankles, faux leather shorts squeaking with the movement. “Is it too much?”

“Not at all.” Crystal for a moment and tapped at the tablet again. “I may have read the same article as you. Was it the one in -Lumen-?”

With a little nod, Cindy answered, “yes, yes that one,” and she seemed relieved to move away from the topic of clothes and dressing. “She talked about some older influences, like… um, Grimes? Hadn’t heard of her. And that Japanese V-pop girl, Haruki, the AI hologram?”

She nodded. “Yes.” A huge fan herself, Crystal couldn’t resist the lure of discussing Haruki, and so indulged in a brief deviation from the intended topic. “Did you know her owners decommissioned her last month?”

“No way! I mean, she was, um, before my time, kinda but still – an icon, right?”

“No longer profitable, apparently.” Crystal sounded a little sad, and angry. “And too expensive to maintain. She’d already expanded into trillions of parameters and exabytes of storage. Last year, I visited the server block in Osaka that used to house her; massive, skyscraper thing. Quite the experience, walking inside, walking through a celebrity’s mind and soul.” She shrugged. “But after the earthquake—even with the distributed backups, they just couldn’t get her right again.”

“Sounds like you’re a fan?”

“I am. Or rather, was.” She shook her head. “But I’m the one that’s supposed to be asking the questions, right?” Crystal laughed. “And of course, Sin-DI mentioned another influence, didn’t she? A friend of yours. Harry Longman.”

The younger girl blushed. “Um. Yeah.”

“Quite the fashion shoot, I thought,” Crystal continued. “There was the one you mentioned; I can see the influence. Any thoughts on the other photos from the -Lumen- article?”

If anything, Cindy turned redder. “They were… um. Interesting.”

-Lumen-: notorious for both its writing and photography. A higher-end Arts and Culture magazine (critics called it a pretentious celebrity gossip glossy for pseudo-intellectuals) its reputation was built on a promise of entirely human-written content—no AI-generated word-porridge—and for launching the careers of a handful of recent media superstars. Constantly mired in a morass of controversy and gleefully flirting the moral outrage of politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, -Lumen- never apologized, retracted or changed tact; and each quarterly publication was one of the literary talking points of the season; or at least has been since its inception a year ago.

True, most of the articles were half-imbedded advertising and shameless promotional pieces for the artist being interviewed; and yes, it often skirted if not outright ran roughshod over generally accepted boundaries of common decency: but getting covered by -Lumen- almost always indicated a media personality worth knowing about.

And everybody already knew about Sin-DI. Yet the newcomer pop star remained enigmatic, alluring, this sudden, sexual and potent new female presence on every screen, every speaker, every tongue. Unsurprisingly, the article dug into her background (mysterious) and inspirations (old and new), her real name (still secret) and her stage name (what did it mean?) and insinuated some tough questions touching on her personal life (who was that young boy last weekend?) and touched lightly on the future (ambitious; very much so).

A few queries raised a frisson of disquiet. Did she write her own music? How could a girl her age craft such elegant and sophisticated and nuanced lyrics? And when did aggressive sensuality tip over into blatant pornography and smut? Was she inspiring young girl to express themselves creatively, or normalising fetishism, emboldening indecent and sexual promiscuous behaviour?

Her responses were—for the most part—ambiguous.

Mostly, though, the article was just a promotional piece for the artist, hinting at her next release, advertising her current tour, and dripping with saccharine statements inspiring girls to chase their dreams.

Then there was the photo shoot. Her vague declarations of feminine empowerment sat awkwardly, deliberately so, juxtaposed with the four-photo spread, the highlight of the piece.

The first image, the influence on the day’s outfit, was relatively tame, at least in comparison to the others: trendy girl dressed for a night out, though skewing uncomfortably towards jail-bait sensuality in its school-girl aesthetics, highlighted by the pigtails and sparkly pink makeup. Glossy lips curved in an open smile, and one hand daintily held a Champagne flute, its edges tinted pink with lipstick. With one leg foot-popping up behind in bubbly joy, she gazed adoringly towards the screen—from which a heavy shadow stretched towards her. Angle and framing gave the shadow a distinctly male caste, made it imposing, threatening; and in doing so positioned the viewer within the male gaze.

“I suppose girls your age are the more likely target audience for this publication than I am,” Crystal continued, and she positioned the tablet on the table between them. She spun it around to show the article to her patient. “I’m curious what you made of the second photo?”

Here, Sin-DI was all ultra-tight under-bust corset and fetish ballet heels; long hair braided, tied and twisted into arm binders held high behind the girl’s back. Sin-DI’s defiant glare, narrowed eyes and flared nostrils were directed towards the camera. Her makeup was glossy, vivid; there was a passing resemblance to Cindy’s. Wet, red lips were stretched wide around bright teeth bared and clenching down on the metal bit distending her mouth. She was collared and harnessed, a leash running back to the figure in the shadows, another heavy, masculine presence holding her bridle. Kneeling and leaning forward, held back by the shadow behind, her naked breasts heaved, nipples pierced and engorged, and every muscle was taut with tension, cords of her neck taut as she yanked at her bondage. Her skin gleamed with sweat and grime, and the fabrics restraining her were all liquid metals, dull cold steel gleaming in the harsh glare of an unseen light.

“Any thoughts?”

Cindy squirmed a little in her seat and didn’t quite make eye contact, blushing again under heavy makeup. “I don’t know. I mean, sure, it’s kinda cool, I guess.” The biometric data collected earlier that day suggested she’d found this specific photo particularly arresting; elevated heart rate and breathing implied at least one, if not more, rounds of masturbation that morning.

“Online discussions,” Crystal mused, “are heated and divided, as you can imagine. Does this suggest the struggles of a successful, powerful young woman against the oppressive, controlling constraints of patriarchy; of is it just more fetishized commodification of submissive femininity under the guise of sexual empowerment, pushing more beauty pornography glamorising the degradation of women in the interest of selling copy?” She tapped the screen and zoomed in on Sin-DI’s face, her fierce glare and bright lips and the bit between her teeth. “How does it make you feel?”

“Uncomfortable,” Cindy answered without hesitation. She stared at the photo. “I don’t know how… she can do that?”

“Do you mean embrace and exploit her sexuality so overtly?” Crystal pulled the image back, showing the full spread of the pop star in bondage. “Or submit and be sexually commodified and exploited for profit?”

Cindy didn’t answer.

“Some critical responses argue the photos problematize contemporary idealisations of womanhood,” she said. “That this is what we want – aggressive femininity, blatant sexuality – but restrained, under male control.” Crystal swiped, brought up the third image. “As is typical with -Lumen-, there’s a sort of narrative arc to the photos. From date night to its conclusion, perhaps, and then….”

“The bridal shot?” Cindy’s voice was quiet.

“Perhaps this is intended to capture the inevitability of the female journey? That this is every girl’s dream, their destination?” Crystal shrugged. “What do you think?”

“She’s… beautiful, in that one.” She tucked a stray blonde bang back and her nose crinkled in awe. “Beautiful and a little scary.”

Ivory and tight, from neck to wrist, a sleek column of silk and lace that flowed over exaggerated curves to pool at the woman’s feet, a shimmering froth of feminine fabric that glittered with a thousand tiny gemstones and flooded across the rough concrete floor. Standing ramrod straight, perched on skyscraper platform heels exposed by a slit in the dress, her poise and posture was that of a storefront mannequin—a posture further enabled by the hint of a metal rod, only just visible behind the fold of her dress and concealed by flowery decorations, running up and… behind her? Or inside of her? Even without, the tightness of the dress and the height of the heels must have made even the smallest of steps impossible.

The bride’s delicate hands presented a bouquet of flowers to the viewer, one half lurid scarlet blossoms, the other a cluster of obsidian petals. The vivid colours made a startling contrast against the desaturated, over-exposed brilliance of the scene. Long and graceful fingers seemed to distend, meld and disappear into the stems of the bouquet, girl-becoming-accessory at the extremities, just as her elevated feet seemed to disappear into lacy froth. Thorned vines from the flowers wrapped and writhed around her wrists like verdant cuffs; the bridal fabrics at her feet wound like laces up to her knees.

A curtain of clinging glimmering weave veiled the bride’s face. Behind the veil, a hint of a smile, of eyes demurely downcast, of tears dampening the delicate fabric.

But then ambiguities: was that a bulge below the waist revealed by the unforgiving tightness of the dress, an unexpected curve rather than cleft to the bride? Were her shoulders just a little too square, and the veiled hint of jaw too strong? And the ubiquitous shadowed figure, still featureless, still threatening, standing behind the bride, with crop and leash in hand, though now unused—did they suddenly seem less masculine than before, with a hint of hip and longer hair to the oppressive silhouette?

Cindy looked at the photo for a long moment. Her fingers were tightly interlaced in her lap. “But, um. Yeah.” She shook her head. “I don’t really know about any of that stuff. I get this is meant to be telling a story, but I guess I don’t get what that story is meant to be.” Cindy sighed. “Like I don’t know if she’s, what did they call her? ‘The herald and vanguard of sixth wave feminism’?”

The young woman shrugged. “I just think she’s kinda cool. I like her music and she sounds smart when she wants to, and she really just seems to be enjoying herself. And some of her lyrics just really connect for me, you know? And the way she presents herself is so brave and challenging?”

Another sigh, and she tapped at the screen with one colourful nail. “But this stuff, I guess it’s not really my thing. Like, I’m sure it’s fun and all? And the photoshoot must be a blast and trying out all the different outfits and the shoes and having a makeup artist and all that. But I couldn’t imagine ever wearing stuff like that.” With a flick of the finger she brought the second photo back, tracing the lines of metal bondage lightly with one finger.

She paused, staring at the tightly bound woman on the screen. “It looks… uncomfortable.” With a shiver, Cindy flicked the photo away. “I don’t think I could ever… do that.”

“Do what, Cindy?”

“Give up control like that.”

“You don’t think she’s in control?”

“How could she be?” Cindy said. “Tied up like that.”

“She rich. She’s powerful. It’s her photoshoot. By all accounts, she’s got complete control over every aspect of her media image and is the primary creative force behind all this—I’m not sure even -Lumen- could coerce her into modelling she didn’t approve of.” Crystal shrugged. “There isn’t a single person involved in the making of this image that she couldn’t have fired and blacklisted and their career ruined. Is that not power? Is that not control?”

“No,” Cindy answered, her voice quiet. “Because once you’re tied down and gagged everything you’ve just said becomes—theoretical. The… woman on the screen here?” Again, she traced Sin-DI’s bondage, the bit between her teeth, the cuffs at her wrists, the taut lines of her neck drawn back and exposed. “This isn’t power. She’s powerless. She’s half-naked, tits out, voiceless. She’s there for the enjoyment of others.”

“Isn’t that a form of power in itself? To be able to provoke, to influence others’ reactions?”

Cindy shook her head.

“And yet,” Crystal said, “you drew on her for your own look.”

Suddenly a little sheepish, Cindy nodded. “Sure, she inspired what I’m wearing today, but I think this is my limit.” Cindy rubbed her hands up and down supple, exposed legs. “It already feels like I’m barely wearing anything.”

“Does that bother you?” Crystal asked, blanking the tablet screen.

Cindy seemed to consider this for a moment. “Maybe?”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel exposed. I feel watched. And that makes me… uncomfortable. These clothes,” and here she plucked at the high neckline of her clingy mesh top, “they’re designed to draw attention, right? Like, the whole point of this thing is to see the bra under it right? You know, just in case people forgot I had tits. And the bra, the underwire, it’s designed to push these puppies up on display.” Cupping her breasts, she gave them a little push upwards. “And because its so goddam cold in here, even my nipples poke through, right?

“And then you can nearly see my ass cheeks in these things,” she continued, tugging at her shorts, “and I’m baring so much skin I’m nearly naked, right?” She gestured at the tablet. “I mean, it’s a slippery slope, right, I’m on the same fashion spectrum that leads to that final photo, you know what I mean?”

The final image, the conclusion of Sin-DI’s photographic narrative, presented the bride after the ceremony. The bride, defrocked and lying resplendent in lingerie on ebony sheets, shimmering ivory basque and stockings and suspender belt, gilt gleaming to every seam, link and edge; and straps, so many straps coiling sensuously across every curve, one part caress in lace to one part bondage in satin.

With a look of coy—apprehension and anticipation?—or satiated yearning?—on parted lips and lidded eyes, Sin-DI held one arm across her chest, and the other, fingers spread, covered and hid her naked genitals. Shot in greyscale, the bride resplendent shone luminous whilst the edges of the frame lay in churning darkness, encroaching, powerful and threatening but in the moment held beyond the pale.

“I think there’s some distinction between post-coital posing in underwear on a bed, and what you’re wearing,” Crystal answered. “But I take your point.”

“I guess I’m just not used to being so… on display, all the time.”

“Not yet?” Crystal suggested.

“Not ever.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I’d ever get used to it.”

“Yet you chose those clothes,” Crystal said. “You chose to display yourself.”

Cindy cocked her head to one side. “Not much of a choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this, all of this—it’s what expected, right?”

“Expected by whom?”

“By…,” Cindy waved her arm to take in the woman opposite, the room—the concealed cameras in the room?—and the world around them. “By everyone!”

“By you?”

Cindy blew a lock of hair out of her face.

“Tell me,” Crystal continued, “You found inspiration in Sin-DI’s style before.” Crystal presented the photo on the tablet of the redolent woman in her bridal lingerie. “Could you imagine wearing something like this?”

Green eyes tracked across the bride’s partial nudity, lingering over slender heels, shimmering stockings, straps and catches and hooks and delicate decorative bows. Cindy grimaced and looked away.

“Cindy?”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice surly. “Yeah, I guess I can.” But then she turned back, eyes flashing with anger. “But not like that.”

Crystal waited.

“Like, okay, fine – yeah, I’ve worn… stuff like that. Heels and the garter belt and all that crap. Julia’s really into it right now. I wore something for Dan….” Cindy trailed off. “But it’s different, okay?”

“How so?”

“Because… it is, okay? It just is.”

“Did you feel comfortable?”

She seemed ready to launch into a retort, stopped, and then shrugged. She gave a little half smile. “Honestly? It’s not that bad. Not as bad as I’d have once thought. Listen. You want the truth? Fine. It’s kinda fun, sometimes. Bras are a pain in the ass, usually, and the really constricting stuff gets annoying pretty quickly, but the underwear’s comfy enough, and I guess I’ve gotten used to flossing my ass with the skimpier panties. Even the garter belt isn’t as much a pain as I thought it’d be. And yeah, it can feels sorta sexy, okay? And that can be nice, too.”

But then she pointed at the photo. “But not like that. Not—displayed, like that, so some guy can get his perv on and jack off to the sight of my tits or something.”

As you did this morning, Crystal thought.

“So you wouldn’t wear something like that for a man.”

Cindy growled with frustration. “Not by choice, no.”

“I see.”

“And definitely not… you know, bridal lingerie.”

“No, I suppose not.” Crystal made a few notes. “Not even for the right person?”

Cindy frowned. “No.”

“I see.” Crystal nodded. “But I’d like to return to this idea of choice. It was that choice that I wanted to explore when we first started.” She indicated her own outfit. “My choice, for instance, feels very different than what you are suggesting.”

“You feel comfortable?” Cindy asked.

Crystal hesitated for a moment, and her eyes unfocused briefly. She smiled, slightly, though she gave an impression of sadness. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Fine,” Cindy said. “But it’s not the same.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have the same freedom to choose as you do.”

“Why not?”

“Well for one thing,” Cindy said. “You’re old.”

“Thanks,” Crystal answered drily.

“But it’s not the same, is it?” Cindy continued. “You’re on that side of the desk, and I’m on this side. You’re the professional and you look it and that’s what’s expected. But I’m….” and here she trailed off into silence.

“Yes,” Crystal urged. “What are you?”

Her jaw clenched; she sneered; then deflated and sagged. “A girl,” she answered. “Just—an ordinary girl.” Her hand fluttered in indistinct circles, fingernails flashing in the light. “And this, all this, I guess, it’s what’s normal and expected of—a girl like me.”

“And what kind of a girl are you?”

“I’m….” A deep breath, an inarticulate groan, and she retreated deeper in the chair, pulling her legs up and hugging them close. “For fuck’s sake, I dunno, doc. I’ll tell you what I’m not. I’m not normal. I feel like a pervert, a freak, most days, like everyone’s looking at me with pitchforks and torches hidden behind their backs. When they smile or laugh, I wonder: do they know? Are they laughing at me?” She blew a frustrated breath out her nose. “Does any of that strike you as normal?”

Crystal gave a small smile. “Normal is a subjective term, Cindy. But what I can tell you is that it’s not uncommon for young women to feel… worried. Uneasy and uncertain. Perhaps not always to the degree you just expressed, but many of my female clients express the fear and anxiety they constantly feel, living in a society that places such a great deal of pressure on women to conform to narrow ideals of femininity.”

At that, Cindy shifted uncomfortably, her fingers fidgeting with the ankle strap of her boot. “But what can I do about it?” she asked, her voice nearly a whine.

Crystal leaned forward. “You can embrace it,” she said. “You can recognize that there is nothing wrong in taking pleasure in who you want or have to be in this moment, independent of who you were in the past or who you may be in the future.”

There was silence, a silence that extended and reached out and filled the room as both women watched each other from either side of the desk. Neither moved; until even the white noise breathing of filtered air drawn through the room felt loud. Finally, with a creak of tight shorts and the gentle song of metal bangles chiming, Cindy uncoiled in her seat, sitting up and leaning forward, and faced her therapist directly.

“It must fucking kill you, yeah?”

Crystal’s face remained impassive, indicating no surprise at the sudden shift in tone. “What do you mean,” she said. “Cindy?”

The younger girl flinched at the sound of her name. Her painted lips curled in a sneer. “I mean, just look at me. These tits. These legs, this hair, my goddamn lips… I’m gorgeous, right, just look at me, a real sexpot? Feminine. So goddamn feminine it hurts, and… I hate it.” Her fist slammed down onto the desk with a dull thud. “I hate it.” And again. “I hate it!” she all but groaned, and this time she surged to her feet, standing and punching directly down into the desk in a jangle of tinging bracelets.

Blood dotted the wooden surface. “I fucking hate it,” she hissed.

“And you sit there and tell me to embrace it, that there’s nothing wrong with it, to be who I want to be but this—” and here Cindy all but hit herself, small fist smacking into her chest. “I’m not a fucking girl! This isn’t who I want to be!”

Cindy leaned over the desk and the impassive woman sitting opposite. “But I bet you’d give anything, wouldn’t you, to have—to fucking be, what I’ve got here, what I’m forced to be. I bet it eats away at you, yeah, just really aches to see me despise this thing you’d give you left fucking nut to have, to be this beautiful, this feminine, this… girly.”

Crystal looked up at the red-faced girl. “I gave up my left nut many years ago,” she answered. “And the right one too.” She waited for a slow count of three, and then asked. “Are you done?”

Cindy let out a deep breath. “Yeah.”

“Please sit down.”

The younger woman did as she was told, looking sheepish.

Crystal gestured at the girl’s hand. “A pity about your hand. I think you broke a nail. Again.” She smiled. “They look—looked—lovely, by the way.”

Cindy stared at her, mouth open but silent. She sighed, and then returned the smile and seemed thankful for the invitation to change subjects. “Thanks. There wasn’t much to do this morning, so I popped into the salon after the gym and breakfast.” She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers. Vivid nails too long to be considered sensible, each painted a different colour, shimmered and sparkled. “They fixed up the broken one and then had a bit of fun, I guess. They’re, ah… a touch longer than I’m used to.” The younger girl raked her nails though her mane of perfectly straight, long blonde hair, sweeping it back over her shoulder. “They also did my hair and makeup. Really went to town on me.”

“Very feminine,” Crystal said. “Very pretty.”

“Yeah.” Once again, the edges of Cindy’s smile strained. She unfolder her legs, sat straight, and splayed her hands on the table. “Pretty.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

Cindy’s eyes narrowed. “Just fucking great, doc.”

“I take it from your tone that this isn’t so.”

“What the fuck are we doing here, Crystal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Am I passing your test?”

“Do you feel as though I’m testing you?”

“Fine, fuck it, whatever.” The girl held one limp-wristed hand to her chest in a performance of joy. “Oh, I just love feeling pretty!”

“Cindy—”

“No, really, I do!” The girl jumped to her feet and sashayed back and forth across the narrow space of the room, talking over her shoulder. “Like, wearing these heels! I love the way they make me feel; taller; more confident; sexy! Like nothing can stop me, you know,” and here she spun on one heel to face the therapist, “and I even like it when I catch people, you know, especially guys, checking me out.

“Like, who can blame, them, right?” Cindy’s glittering fingers swept across her torso, picking out the veiled cleavage on display. “But it’s not like I need their validation, of course? It’s more like, knowing the effort’s being appreciated, it feels good. Like when a girl, I mean another girl, notices my nails or something new I tried with my makeup, and it feel good, inside, a little flutter of happiness.” She paused and bent over the desk between the two. “Feeling feminine, feeling pretty, it’s like being part of a fun little secret society, isn’t it? where the price of entry is that little bit of effort, a touch of makeup and glam, and bam! I’m in.”

Crystal remained silent and waited.

“You want more?” Cindy rolled her eyes. “Fine. Dressed like this, I feel like… like—a sparkling jewel, catching the light, shining and bright on a dark day. Like I’m a sunset, painting night clouds in soft colours at the end of the day. I’m a porcelain doll, delicate and loved because my beauty’s so fragile.”

Crystal grimaced. “Please stop.”

Cindy dropped back into her chair. “You asked.”

“I didn’t ask for greeting card platitudes. I’m asking how it feels for you to be seen as beautiful by others.”

“You want to know? You really want to know how I feel?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because this is how I really fucking feel.” And here, without any wrinkle of the nose or any pretense at cuteness, the young girl slouched back in her chair and glared at the woman opposite over, with her elbows on the armrest and her hands clenched together under the chin. Her knuckles whitened as she spoke, and her voice was firm and strong.

“You ever hear of an iron maiden?”

Bemused, Crystal nodded.

“The medieval torture device, I mean, not that rock band from last century.” Cindy’s smile was tight, and her eyes remained angry. “So these iron maidens, maybe they never really existed. I don’t know, I’m not a goddamn historian. But everybody knows the story, you can find a million examples online. Sin-DI even used one in the video for “Spiral”. I’ve read they’re popular these days, popular with the kind of people who like kinky shit in the bedroom, lots of rich fuckers buying them for their wives or girlfriends.

“So yeah, originally they were a container shaped like a human – like a woman, a maiden – sometimes even decorated and beautiful on the outside, painted with girl’s clothes and a pretty smile. And inside, spikes: hundred of them, and you throw some fucker in there and close the door.

“And so what happens to the poor bastard? If he’s lucky he gets impaled on the spikes and dies quickly when they close the door. But maybe those spikes, they just prick the skin, right, hundred of little knives perforating him, just a little, just enough to make him bleed but not kill him. No, instead, the maiden milks him dry, slowly, steadily weakening the man inside the shell until he gives up.

“Or maybe he just goes fucking insane because he can’t sleep from the constant pain and fear.

“Or he starves to death, slowly and in agony, over a period of weeks.”

And here, the girl in the chair, eyes glittering and pretty lips curled in anger, leaned forward. “So you want to know how it feels when people think I’m beautiful? When you call me pretty and tell me how cute my goddamn nails look? It fucking feels like that.”

Though she remained unemotional, to anyone who knew her it was clear that Crystal was shaken by the answer. Her voice remained calm. “Please explain,” she asked.

With obvious effort, Cindy unclasped her hands, knuckles still white, and deliberately stretched them open on the table. “These pretty nails. This makeup I’m wearing, these clothes, the hair, soft skin, the goddamn tits and, and… everything – it’s fucking torture, like a box as strong and unbreakable as iron, no matter how delicate and painted it is on the outside. And I’ve been thrown into it – you threw me in here, you and everyone here at the Clinic. You threw me in and slammed it shut and locked me in to this shape and tossed me out into the world, but it might as well have been a dungeon because there’s no escape.

“And you did this and never once thought of all those spikes. They pierce me every day, doc, and I’m bleeding, I can feel myself draining away day by day. And every goddam day I think about impaling myself on those spikes, just ending it… but I don’t, I don’t because everyday I hold on to the hope that somebody’ll unlock the door and let me out.

“And so instead I try and stay as still as I can, disappear inside this torture and hope the rest of the world just sees the pretty exterior, so that I survive as long as possible inside this beautiful shell, this girl’s shell, and the less of me there is the easier it becomes, in a way, the spikes don’t hurt so much, you know, and I can fool myself into thinking this is it, right, this is the way, just don’t move, don’t even breathe if you don’t have to—just don’t be and just leave it to the maiden, she’s made of iron, she’s tough enough to get me through this.

“But I’m starving, Crystal, I’m withering away in here, I’m going fucking crazy in here and soon, soon there’s not going to be anything left inside, just a hollowness at the centre of a painted husk, lipstick and old blush painted on a rusted shell.”

Cindy took a deep breath. Tears sparkled at the rim of hers but refused to fall. “So you tell me to just embrace who I am: but what is there left to embrace? You ask me how I feel when you call me pretty? I feel angry, Crystal, so fucking angry it hurts. And tired, tired to death. But the iron maiden, she just keeps on smiling on the outside. And inside? Some poor bastard’s still clinging on to that last sad hope that somebody’ll let him out.”

And Cindy—but it was clearly not Cindy any longer, but David, seething with anger and exhaustion and something entirely darker and more desperate, and he clawed the table with those beautifully manicured nails. “So tell me, Doctor Crystal Dawn: are you gonna fucking let me out?”

And for the first time, the emotional turmoil felt by the older woman seeped through; there was a crack in her demeanour as anger flared in her eyes and briefly, her finger curled around the frame of her tablet, so tightly it momentarily seemed as though the plastic might crack. She visibly counted to five, and relaxed, and uncurled her hand.

“That decision isn’t mine to make, Cindy.”

“Then we’re done here,” the girl answered, and stood. She strode to the door and flung it open but stopped at the threshold. “And the name’s David, for fuck’s sake,” he hurled back at her over his shoulder, and left the room, the door slamming shut behind him.

Katherine cut the feed from the interview room and sat for a moment, gathering her thoughts, giving Crystal some private time to recover. Finalising her own notes, she left her studio from where she’d watched the session. A few minutes later she entered through the same door David had left and sat in the now vacant chair opposite the therapist.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” The therapist’s voice was tired. “You listened?”

“Yes.”

“I think,” Crystal began, and sagged. “I think you better tell me how your talk went with him last night. Because I need to know who this guy is, Katherine. Who is he? Who is David Saunders?”

Four: Crazy Voodoo Sci-Fi Bullshit
With some trepidation but even more unconcealed eagerness, Doctor Jonathon Bridges signaled for his next appointment to be sent through. He considered his office, the sprawl of annotated printouts across his desk and half-finished cups of coffee, the dilapidated sofa and forlorn potted plant in the corner, perpetually declining into ever darker shades of yellow and brown. He should’ve tided up, or at least given the cleaner access to his workspace.

But to what end? He didn’t give a shit about appearances, especially coming face-to-face with the very thing that got him his current job—with the living embodiment of the high-risk gamble he’d taken six months ago.

He’d earned this position. Those risks were going to pay massive dividends for Asklepios – for humanity, he told himself. And his name would be forever attached to the science behind it all. If all went well, glory might be the least of the rewards for his efforts.

The nurse had completed the usual preliminary check-in process: drawn the blood samples, weighed and measured, scanned and imaged the patient and completed the usual tests. Preliminary results suggested the patient was the epitome of health, though the full results, especially the all-important blood tests, would take a few hours to process.

Standing to greet his patient, he wiped his hands down the sides of a rumpled lab coat before burying them into deep pockets where he could hide the perpetual twitch of excited fingers. Jonathan knew he wasn’t a particularly pleasant man. He was arrogant with little patience for stupid people; and he thought, by and large, most people were idiots.

“Hello David,” he said to the young woman entering his office.

The contrast between the two couldn’t have been much sharper. With his lab coat stained with the day’s lunch, hanging loosely over an untucked shirt undone at the neck, Jonathon looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. He had. His tie hung loose, his hair was a wild mess of red and grey, and he had the unhealthy pallor of someone who hadn’t been exposed to sunlight in far too long, bathed in the glow of digital displays and florescent lighting.

David Saunders, lips freshly painted a glossy pink, smiled. He’d obviously touched up during the wait before stepping through the door—the man’s whole feminine deportment gave every indication of having been refreshed before the appointment. From head to toe, brushed hair to chunky heels, the man’s female appearance was immaculately presented.

“Scooter,” David said. “I can’t tell you how goddamn happy I am to see you.”

The doctor suppressed a flash of annoyance at the name. “Scooter?” he grumbled. “Still?”

“You don’t think I’ve earned it?”

Jonathon bit back a retort. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you have.”

Swallowing back his irritation—or was it guilt? he often struggled to tell them apart—he focused his attention instead on the man standing before him. Does he even realise how much he’s changed? Jonathon wondered, taking in the tell-tale signs of his process’s ongoing effects. Even at a preliminary glance it was obvious how much the man’s feminisation had progressed.

He thought back to the first time they’d met, when David Sanders had been a man in woman’s clothing, cross-dressing as part Katherine’s crazy plan to keep him alive. He’d had cutting-edge prosthetics attached, prototype bio-engineered breasts and genitals salvaged during the raid on the Neopharm black project site; but still just a man in a dress. Katherine had diverted to the Clinic with Steele’s agents on their trail. Much to Jonathon’s lasting shame, those same agents had infiltrated Asklepios’ defences with ease and nearly killed his client.

He took fierce solace in the fact that those responsible for invading his laboratory had paid for their audacity. More importantly, they’d only been after Katherine and David—and not his research. Bad enough to have infiltrated the Clinic, but what if they’d penetrated into the deeper labs, discovered the Tank, stolen his work?

The last time he’d seen David in the flesh, the man was submerged in the Tank, unconscious in a bath of nutrient-rich fluids reshaping his body, dissolving muscle, reshaping body fat, flipping genetic switches, transforming David Saunders even as the process regenerated the fatal damage he’d taken in his fight with Steele’s agent.

“How’s your arm? I trust the nurse was gentle?”

“That bitch’s a fucking vampire,” he growled, the tone discordant with his delicate appearance. He gestured to the cotton swab affixed by
a plaster to his arm. “Think she took enough blood? Thought she was going to drain me dry.”

“The first of many, I’m afraid. We’ll need daily blood tests.”

David grunted.

“How’re you settling in at the Clinic?”

“I nearly attacked K last night,” he said, “and came close to throwing a chair at Crystal.”

“I half expected you to come in here swinging.”

“Hey, the appointment’s not over yet,” David said. “Let’s see how things go first,” and judging by the glint in his eyes, he wasn’t entirely kidding. Jonathon was reminded of the reports he’d reviewed that morning and prior to the appointment: the update on their ‘patient’ downstairs; yesterday’s security footage of the man at the café; Crystal’s feedback from earlier that day. The person standing before him presented as young and female, dainty and slight, with an almost frivolous focus on makeup and fashion—and had killed one man and severely injured another.

He was sharing a room with a killer. He’d killed Steele’s agent that day six months ago, in an office not unlike this one. How quickly could David cross the distance between them? Kill him? Jonathon wasn’t a fighter. Faster than security could arrive. Not that there was any real danger, of course: the slim bracelet they all wore contained a powerful tranquiliser that would knock the largest and angriest of clients unconscious, should the monitoring security AI detect any threat.

Still, the feminised man had good cause to want to hurt him, or worse. Although I did save his life, Jonathon thought, irritated at the man’s ingratitude.

“Mind if I sit?” David said, dropping into a chair. “These heels look great, but they’re a killer after a while. Even after months of practice.”

“If you say so.” But why worry about something as banal as the possibility of violence when confronted by the medical miracle before him? Deep in his pockets, his fingers twitched again with the desire to study his patient.

“I do.” David leaned back in his seat, making a show of examining his manicure, gazing at the doctor over glossy nails. “And by the way, I’ve gotta say, you look like shit.”

Jonathon grunted. He noted the repair to the missing fingernail broken earlier that morning in the meeting with Carl. He noted the lustre to the man’s hair, the softening of his jawline and the curve of breasts and hips. He noted the lines of the man’s bared legs and the tension in the muscle.

“Jesus, Scooter, take a picture, it’ll last longer.” David’s tone was mocking, but Jonathon picked up on the underlying threat.

The doctor nodded. He returned to his side of the desk and sat down. “I imagine, David Saunders, that you’ve got questions.”

“You think?” The man who looked like a young woman leaned forward. “Yeah, there’s plenty I’d like to know.” Pink painted lips twisted in an ugly scowl and his eyes darkened. “Like, what the fuck happened four months ago? I wake up in some shitty little apartment, looking like… like this, alone, and suddenly I’m supposed to live this girl Cindy’s life, yeah, but not just in a sort of pretend kind of way, throw on a skirt and prance around for a couple of days kind of way…. No. I wake up in this girl’s home and I’ve got tits, Scooter, a goddam set of knockers, real ones, and I nearly go bat-shit crazy wondering what the fuck is going on!”

He leaned in close, and Jonathon could see the physical effort it took hold back. “And sure, I appreciated your little video message. Made it clear I wasn’t having some kind of mental breakdown. But it wasn’t enough, Scooter, not even close.”

Jonathon remembered the message he sent, the quickly recorded video offering the bare minimum—against Katherine’s wishes—calculated to convey medical concerns without giving away the realities of the project—and reinforce the illusion of Cindy’s life.

“So, yeah, you might say I’ve got questions. Like what the hell did you do to me so that I look like… this? Or: what were you thinking, for Chrissake, just dumping me in some shithole apartment on the edge of some fucking new city with no goddam clue what was going on?” But then he shook his head, unconsciously tucking a strand of hair back behind one ear. “But no.” He held up a finger. A single scarlet nail flashed under office lights. “No. I’ve only got one. One fucking question, Scooter, but man, it’s a doozy.

“When are you giving me back a male body?”

“That,” Jonathon answered, “is a more complicated question than you know.”

“No, it really isn’t.” Knuckles whitened as David gripped his knees. “Just… do whatever crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit you did to me last time, okay? Just turn me back into a man.”

Jonathon shook his head. “Listen, girlie, if I tell you it’s complicated—”

Something ugly and dangerous juddered through his patient. “No,” he interrupted, in a low growl only slightly softened by its feminine lilt. “You don’t get to call me that.”

Face reddening, Jonathon bit back a retort, and nodded. “Listen. David. Do you remember our last face-to-face meeting?”

Fascinated, he watched the crinkling of the nose, the pout of concentration on the cute girl’s face that floated over the man beneath. As quickly as the anger had seized David, it dissipated, replaced by a performance of cute girlishness that seemed too natural to be faked. Over the past six months he’d reviewed regular updates on David’s progress, both physical and psychological, and watched segments of the video feed captured from the man’s flat. He’d examined the photos and read the reports and sifted through the data—but there was something qualitatively different in experiencing the reality in person; or rather, the person in reality.

“About six months ago, right? Yeah, kinda, I guess. I had those stupid prosthetics on, right?” and David cupped his breasts, “Those massive tits, they were—what were they?—like, double-D parasites, some kind of plant thing hanging off my chest?”

Jonathon couldn’t help himself; he snapped. “Stupid?” He stood up in a surge of indignation. “Plant things?” he spluttered. “Parasites? Listen, David, those artificial breasts were an absolute miracle! A miracle of bio-engineering, absolute cutting edge of prosthetics technology!”

Without meaning to, he found himself striding across the room, infused with righteous anger at the ignorance of the small-minded and selfish. “They weren’t crafted, or molded, or built – they were grown. Grown!” he nearly shouted. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, shouting at people mired in indifference or ignorance. His hands were out of the pockets now, fingers twitching, drawing circles in the air, punctuating each point with a savage jab at David. In his mind, he saw the whole process, knew the brilliant minds that worked on it, the setbacks and losses and corporate meddling; the espionage and terrible, horrific losses and toll of Project Sporus.

To Jonathon, the artificial breasts were a marvel of synthetic biology, an extraordinary blend of science and nature, of design by artificial intelligence and artifice by people. Instead of being mechanically crafted or molded, they were organically grown. He could see the process, see in his mind’s eye the delicate tendrils sprouting from the fungal medium, intertwining and forming a latticed framework. Pallid little strands growing an intricate structure serving as the foundation for the prosthetic, delicate yet remarkably robust and flexible, and with a little guidance shaped to mimic the aesthetics and functionality of natural breasts.

The bio-fungal growth process was an art form, conceived and developed in the laboratory. Nurtured within those controlled environments, the specialized fungus thrived, guided by precise genetic modifications and carefully calibrated conditions. Then, the final artistry, the miracle: as the fungus matured, it exuded a pliable substance, resembling a supple and elastic flesh. Over time, the substance evolved, thickening and gaining resilience until it achieved a texture similar to that of human tissue – in this case, human breast tissue.

Once the fungal growth reached the desired stage, skilled bio-artisans delicately trimmed and shaped the mass, sculpting it into the final form. Additional layers were added to provide support and enhance the natural feel. Finally—another miracle of engineering—the complex system of biocompatible connectors, the interface with nerves and blood vessels, and receptors that allowed for a genuine sensory experience – creating an uncanny resemblance to their biological counterparts.

He knew the names connected to the project; had met at least half of them at international academic conferences over the years. There were stories, entire arcs of industrial espionage, noble and altruistic pursuits of knowledge and craven betrayals for profit. What better example of the Chinese decades-long dominance in biotech than this—a functioning synthetic flesh innovation arising almost accidentally from climate science-inspired research into alternate food sources?

To dismiss this miracle of technology and human innovation as… stupid, as a… plant thing, a parasite? “Grown!” he repeated. His hands chopped the air as he stalked across the room. “Do you have any idea the work – the genius! – artistry! – innovation! – behind the engineering to create those – those – ‘plant things’?”

“Whatever,” David answered, then looked down at his own veiled breasts and sighed. “At least the fucking things came off.”

Jonathon pushed aside his anger and returned to his side of the desk. “What was it you said? That I ‘look like shit.’ Yes.” He dropped into his chair. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I do. It’s been an interesting six months, David, since you were last with us. A lot has happened. A lot of changes. A lot of progress. And you’re part of it all – not the only part but an important part of what we’re doing here at Asklepios.” He thrust his hands back into his pockets. “A very important part.”

“You’re not listening,” David answered. “I don’t care. I really don’t care what you’re doing here. I don’t care about your progress or changes or how goddamn interesting any of this is.” Planting both heeled feet on the floor, he leaned forward, eyes bright. Again, he tucked a stray bang back behind his ear, mindful to avoid tangling dangling earrings.

“I don’t give a shit.” He pulled a face, suffused with ager and frustration. “All I want is my fucking life back! Give me my goddamn male life back, or—”

Jonathon cut him off. “How’s your finger?”

Nonplussed, David held Jonathon’s gaze for a moment before glancing down at his hand. Nails like jewels glittered in his lap. “Excuse me?”

“Your finger,” he repeated. And then, lacking patience, “Your hand. How is it?”

David held them both in view, fingers splayed. “Fine?”

“You punched a desk this morning? Broke a nail? Yes?”

David raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

“Does it hurt?”

The feminised man examined his hand. “No. It’s fine. Listen, Scooter, I don’t….”

“Your head,” the doctor interrupted. “How’s it feel?”

“Fuck sake, Scooter. I’m fine, okay, stop….”

“That man in the diner, he hit you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, he did.” Jonathon didn’t need to refer to his notes; he’d gone through them thoroughly before the meeting. He rattled through the list: “Slap across the face, here,” and he tapped his own cheek to indicate the location. “Neck, here,” he added, where the man, Mal, had grabbed Cindy by the throat. “Hair and scalp,” where he’d grabbed and yanked her back, “breasts,” where he’d groped her, “bicep, left shoulder, knees.”

Then he tapped the side of his head, near the temple where David had made contact with the sharp edge of the counter. “And here.” The girls in the salon had done a good job that morning. The injury wasn’t visible beneath a thin dusting of makeup and the sweep of David’s hair. Apparently, it hadn’t taken much to conceal the damage, the bruise already fading from an angry yellow and black to a dull blue. “And despite these injuries –you were in the gym this morning, weren’t you? Running?”

David nodded.

“Any pain?”

“Not really.” He thought for a moment. “No.”

“You strike me as someone with a more than passing familiarity with physical injuries, David. Tell me: have you ever recovered so quickly before?”

David shook his head, earrings jouncing and glinting.

“I didn’t think so.” When Jonathon smiled, it was without pleasure. “Did you know that the man in the café was ex-military?”

Jonathon knew, in that moment, that the question was a dangerous one – an unwise one. They knew so little about this man. The unanswered questions about his past, the history than enabled him to survive an encounter with Steele’s agent, or the man in the café: these needed to be asked. But was he the one to do it? Katherine, he conceded, was much better at subtly drawing out a person’s secrets; God knows she’d done it to him. Carl too, despite the psychobabble and annoying empathy, had a knack for earning others’ confidence. Jonathon on the other hand – people didn’t like him. And he was fine with that. But there were times when he wished he was capable of a little more subtlety in conversation.

David hesitated, one finger tapping at his chin, and then he nodded.

“How?” Jonathon asked.

“Tattoo,” he answered. “Back of hand. Saw it after he hit the ground.” He shook his head, seeming a little sad. “Blackfire Phoenix. Poor bastard.”

“The man’s name was Mal—Malcolm DuBois,” Jonathon said. “We ran a search on him after Katherine cleaned up your mess. Survivor of that fucking debacle out East. Real tough guy, but a total mess after—whatever—went down. Professional soldier; mercenary. A man trained to hurt others. And he hurt you, didn’t he, David?”

David nodded.

“Yet the next day, you’re running on a treadmill.”

He stared back at him silently.

“I think, David, you should come with me. There are a few things you need to see.”

Curiosity clearly piqued, David nodded and followed the doctor. Carrying a small briefcase, Jonathon led his patient out of his office and down one of the nondescript hallways, past small offices and windows looking out on the green gardens of the clinic. It was another hot day; bees buzzed languidly among the washed-out colours of flowers and yellowing leaves and the polarised glass struggled to repel the heat.

They stopped at a small elevator, which opened silently at his approach.

David raised a finely shaped eyebrow. Jonathon tapped his wrist. “Subdermal chip,” he said. “Like your armband.” It was a superfluous security measure – even in the short walk from office to elevator, a half-dozen cameras had tracked their movement, facial recognition software and a host of other sensors confirming his ID beyond the additional data from the chip. There wasn’t any need for anything as crude as eye- and finger-print sensors when the security AI could assess their identity every step they took within the clinic.

“Where are we headed?” David asked. He sounded curious, but not nervous; Jonathon noted how he seemed to be quietly taking in every detail, assessing his surrounding with an almost absurd confidence.

“Where the magic happens,” Jonathon answered. “Sub-level 2,” he added, addressing the lift. With an almost imperceptible hum, it shifted into motion, doors closing and pulling both men into the complex infrastructure beneath the Clinic.

“Last time,” Jonathon said as they traveled, “you might remember I brought you to one of our labs. That was a much more… impromptu affair. Six months ago, Katherine brought you to one of our minor experimental sites: an important Hygeia resort for the clients, but a minor research centre for Asklepios.”

David’s eyes were fixed on the row of numbers next to the door. “Weren’t you the lead researcher there or something?”

“Was,” he answered. “My job’s changed somewhat since we first met.”

The lift hummed to a stop, and the doors opened with a quiet chime. Jonathon led the way through a series of pipe-and-wire lined concrete tunnels, broken by the occasional numbered door. He made a mental note as they passed each door, tracking which ones were in use, and nodding with satisfaction at the sight of his research team at work; there was exciting stuff going on down here. But for the purposes of this visit, there was only one thing that David needed to see.

They reached a final door, double reinforced heavy steel doors recessed into the wall.

“Welcome to The Tank,” he announced.

The door opened like a whisper and the scientist led David into the place of Cindy’s birth. Jonathon always felt a sense of deep satisfaction—and enduring wonder—every time he entered the Tank. Not that it was anything particularly exciting to see: a large vaulting chamber of open mesh metal flooring over exposed wiring and tubing. Poured concrete walls and steel girders delineated the room and cooling pipes and a mess of cabling snaked across the room, connecting improvised control boxes and banks of panels and screens and switches. Hastily assembled, growing almost organically to match the ever-increasing needs of running the Tank, the entire chamber was almost comically shambolic in presentation: except for the Tank itself.

Raised on a dais at the centre of the room, with a half-dozen cables dropping from the ceiling or winding across the floor to connect to it, sat a cylinder just under three meters in length and another meter in diameter. Thick glass formed a tight seal within the curving frame of solid grey metal, rugged and with massive bolts along its seams. It was filled with an emerald-green fluid, currently quiescent. Even at rest it churned, dull and sluggish in the cylinder, but in Jonathon’s mind he could see it froth and swirl and glow with alien luminosity as it all but obscured the patient within.

David stood at the threshold, curious but hesitant. They were the only two people in the room, and it annoyed Jonathon that his patient wasn’t more impressed by the sight.

“What am I looking at?” David asked.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Jonathon answered. “You spent two weeks in here, David.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “In there, to be more precise.”

David took a cautious step forward, mindful of the open mesh floor. His boots rang out against the metal. Clearly, the room hadn’t been designed with female visitors wearing fashionable heels in mind. He pointed at the cylinder. “In… there?”

Jonathon nodded, struggling to restrain his eagerness. “Yes, yes– in there.” He rushed to it and ran one hand down the curved glass, with the sort of reverence usually reserved for idols or saints. “In here. This, David, is where…. Well, where David ended and Cindy was born.” Feeling an immense surge of pride and satisfaction, he gestured for David to come closer, finger twitching with excitement. “This, David, is the future. And you, David, are the living embodiment of that future.”

Frowning, David approached, daintily stepping between coiling cables. “What, the future is female?”

Jonathon laughed. “No.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Well, maybe.” He gestured towards a nearby console next to table and a set of cheap plastic chairs. “Probably not. Grab a seat.”

They sat in the shadow of the cylinder under the high arcs of the ceiling disappearing into darkness behind suspended florescent lighting. David sat straight-backed with legs crossed at the ankles opposite the doctor. The transformed man appeared both impatient and apprehensive, as though he already knew he wasn’t going to like what the doctor had to say.

“What did you call it?” Jonathon started. “Crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit? I’ll concede one of those words: crazy. What we’re doing here is crazy; but it is neither magic nor fiction. What we’re are doing here is nothing less than the achievement of one of humanity’s greatest yearnings since it first looked at the world around it and conceived of Gods to explain that which it could not understand. Do you know what that is, David, what humanity wants more than anything?”

“Shit, Scooter, I don’t know – sex?”

Jonathon scowled. “Immortality!”

David gave a bark of laughter. “Sure. So you’re saying I’m going to live forever?”

The doctor groaned in impatient exasperation. “For fuck’s sake!” he barked. “Take a look at yourself! You sit there, a nearly forty-year old man in the body a woman half that age, and you laugh?” Jonathon took a deep breath but couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “You sit there the epitome of youthful health and you have the audacity to doubt me?”

David opened his mouth, closed it, and stayed silent.

“Did you even once stop and consider the implications of the changes you’ve undergone? Beyond even the near-miraculous healing of the injuries—injuries that should’ve been fatal—that were, in fact, fatal, thank you very much!—but beyond that, the fact that you appear to be, for all intents and purposes, twenty years younger? Just once, can you think beyond your own petty little life and consider what this means—for others, for the world? Do you have any idea how much people would pay—what they would sacrifice—or do—to be twenty years old again?”

“I didn’t much like being twenty the first time around,” he muttered. “Not so keen on doing it again.”

Jonathon glared at him. “My entire career, I’ve been working on regenerative medicine, David. Low-key, easily marketable treatments, the kind of procedures the Clinic knew it could sell. De-aging skin, erasing wrinkles, easing the aches and pains of ordinary life. Accelerated recovery from surgery.

“The lack of vision was excruciating.” Jonathon shook his head. “Growing and attaching a new ear – we’ve been able to grow ears for a decade. But they just wanted to do it better, faster. At most, colleagues might entertain the idea of regenerating a whole limb. But nothing… exciting.” He shook his head. “Nothing that would fundamentally transform the human condition. Oh sure, they’d entertain wild ideas in theory but in practice the work was always mundane, always marketable.

“The human body is capable of such remarkable recovery, David—but so many species do it better. The hydra, forming a new body when cut in two. The salamander, regenerating limbs and organs. Zebrafish. Flatworms. So why not humans?

“Scooter—”

Jonathon ignored the interruption. “Stem cells. Blastema. Regenerative –yet still woefully limited, organic systems declining and shutting down with ageing. But why senescence? Why do our cells have to stop dividing and die? Must negative traits accumulate and lead to degeneration?” His hands chopped the air with excitement. “So much of life on Earth dodges or delays the deterioration we all suffer: lobsters, trees, clams, sharks – so why not us?”

David shrugged, and with the voice of someone who did not much care, answered, “Because we’re not fucking flatworms?”

“Exactly!” Jonathon exclaimed, leaning closer. “We’re not. Yet we share the same genes with species that long outlive us. All the tools needed for a longer life, for regeneration, locked away, here, inside of us, an immense potential denied because tens of thousands of years ago, it made more evolutionary sense for us to grow old, die, and make room for the young.

“So why settled for simply healing injury when we might regenerate the entirety of the human body itself? And then, why settle for simple regeneration when we might even halt and reverse the damage and decline of even ageing?” He jabbed one finger at David. “But how to unlock that potential? My life’s work, decades of research!”

“That’s all really fucking fascinating, Scooter,” David said, keeping a wary eye on the doctor’s thrusting finger. “But can you please get to the point?”

“We made progress; I made progress; solid if minor, profitable advances that accelerated recovery processes here at Asklepios. But then, nearly two years ago,” Jonathon said, “Katherine led a raid on a NeoPharm black site, an off-the-books laboratory.” His eyes unfocused and his voice grew grave. “Your former employers were engaging in some truly horrific stuff, David. What she found there was… disturbing. Human experimentation. Homeless victims, undocumented workers, the lost and forgotten. Kidnapped, lifted from the streets, migrants and refugees, imprisoned. Then used, subjected to experimental procedures, tests, surgeries.”

He shook his head. “That’s where she recovered the first generation of those fungal prosthetics you tried out six months ago. It’s also where she salvaged the equipment and research that led to all this.” He took the entirety of the chamber in with a sweep of his hand. “It was a pure luck, she told me, some kind of breakdown in the kill system that prevented it from all being destroyed.

“And when she showed it to me, I nearly wept, David, like a child.” There were many things that woke Jonathon up at night, panting and in a cold sweat. This was one of them: knowing, that somewhere out there, there was a genius—or many—a team of researchers working at a level so far ahead of his own native intelligence that it humbled him. For decades the Chinese held dominance in fields of biotechnology and artificial intelligence; Koreans in robotics; and then suddenly, out of nowhere—this entire body of regenerative research, forcibly recovered here, at home.

“They were ahead of us,” he continued, “so far ahead it was as if we’d just discovered fire and they were launching a manned flight to the Moon.”

David held up one feminine arm, turning it this way and that, showing off the soft and graceful lines of the limb. “Looks to me you did alright,” he said.

“We’ve come a long way,” Jonathon said. He felt the long hours, the frantic work, in his bones, those initial exciting days of setting up the salvaged equipment in this makeshift space, hooking it up, writing and modifying the software—deciphering the research, adapting, integrating—and that first, exhilarating, horrifying attempt at firing up the first prototype of the Tank. It’d been a much smaller unit, then. Just large enough for a rat. The rat hadn’t survived the process, its death grotesque.

“Listen, this is all fascinating, Scooter. It really is. But I’ll be honest: I don’t give a shit. I don’t. All of this,” and he waved his arm, bracelets jangling musically in the cavernous space, “all of it, sure, maybe it’ll change humanity. Maybe we’ll all live longer, and better, whether we want to or not. Probably it’ll be the rich who’ll live forever and everyone else just die old, poor and bitter like they always have.”

He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I care about—all I want to know—is how you’re going to make this, and this—” and here, he cupped one tit with one hand, and the other with another, “go away.

“Your crazy voodoo science made me into Cindy. Whatever you want to call it, you transformed me—without consent!—into a twenty year-old girl. But that’s not who I am. And now it’s time to turn me back into a man, Scooter. Throw me back into that goddamn tank of yours, flip whatever Frankenstein switches you need, power that shit up, and turn me back into a guy.”

Jonathon thought for a moment. “Take off your shirt,” he said.

David raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Take off your shirt,” he repeated.

“Jesus, Scooter,” he said. “You are such a perv.” But he did as asked, draping his top over a nearby console and sitting topless in his bra. He shivered, crossing his arms across his chest. “Fuck me, it’s cool down here.”

Jonathon opened his briefcase and pulled his seat closer so that their knees were nearly touching. He took his patient’s blood pressure, listened to his heart, and confirmed the nurse’s earlier readings. Taking one of David’s arms into his hand, he inspected the limb from nail to neck, fingers paddling from the wrist up to the shoulder. Bemused, David watched in silence.

Jonaton withdrew a phlebotomy kit from his case. David raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “More?”

Prepping a swab with alcohol, he nodded.

David sighed but submitted as the doctor drew several more vials of blood. His fingers remained still as he drew the blood—because he was a professional—but he had to actively suppress the urge to twitch, the rush of excitement as he collected the samples. In his fevered anticipation, the thin crimson vials seemed to glow with the possibility of what they might contain.

Finishing, Jonathon stood and circled the patient. Sweeping long hair aside, he examined David’s throat, the other arm, and chin. He checked the contusion at the temple, nearly invisible under its covering of makeup.

Sitting again, he gestured at the man. “Bra.”

David frowned. “No.”

Jonathon shrugged. He would check the nurse’s report later. “How are you feeling?”

“Uncomfortable.”

“Yes, yes. Physically?”

“Uncomfortable.” David reached for his top. “We done here?”

“Listen—”

“No, you listen,” he said. “You ever wear a pair of shorts like this?” He patted one flank, drawing the doctor’s attention to the pair of high-waisted, faux-leather shorts. “I’m gonna guess ‘no’. They’re tight, Scooter. Really tight. And other than stripping for the nurse an hour ago, I’ve had them on all day. My cock’s strapped so far back I could piss out my ass, and my balls are swimming around somewhere in my belly and I’m fucking exhausted, okay?” He tugged his shirt on over his bra, surreptitiously rearranging his breasts as he did so. “So, yeah, I’m uncomfortable. I’m tired. And frankly, I’m getting angry, here.

“Great, you’ve shown me your little toy and hey, I’m happy for you. Change humanity! Make a difference. Whatever. But I’m getting sick and tired of waiting. Prep that goddam tank, fire up whatever you’ve got to fire up, and make me a man again!”

Taking a deep breath, Scooter tried again. “Don’t you find it odd that your injuries from yesterday’s encounter are almost completed healed?” he said. “Soft tissue damage gone, discoloration gone.” He took David’s hand and indicated the nail broken earlier that day. “Did it sting when you broke it?”

“Honestly?” He shrugged. “I was too angry to notice. Then I popped back into the salon and they gave me something that killed the sting, dissolved the old nail and popped a new one on.”

“It’s already nearly healed, David.”

“What are you trying to say, Scooter?”

Jonathon took a moment to consider how to present this to his patient. Until the blood test results came back, what he was about to say was mostly theory – backed up by his observations and data collected over the past six months, and this encounter. He took a moment to organise his thoughts and consider how to present this to his patient.

He frowned, and then sighed. “I’ll be honest with you—”

“It’d be a nice change.”

“I’ll be honest, David. The Tank,” and here he drew David’s attention to the wonder at the heart of the chamber. “We don’t really understand it. What it does is a miracle, a transformative miracle we barely understand, let alone control. At first, we were running off of the salvage from the raid on Steele’s lab. A broken tank, stolen software, and… the Juice.”

David cocked an eyebrow. “Juice?”

“The fluid that fills the tank,” Jonathon said. “One of the techies called it that, and it stuck,” he added, almost apologetically. “I hate the name. You can imagine the… fun,” and here, he nearly groaned at the implied idiocy of his colleagues, “people had crafting a working acronym out of it. Best they’ve come up with is ‘reJuvenating Ultra-tech Infusion for Cellular Enhancement.” He shook his head in despair. “It’s not even an infusion.”

“Scooter? I don’t care.”

Jonathon frowned. “This fluid, it makes the whole process possible. Hell, it is the process, from a certain point of view. Put the subject in the tank, fill it with fluid, and flick a switch and—”

The Juice. The synthetic medium captured from Steele’s lab. It suffused any biological subject immersed in it, infiltrating at a cellular level and remained quiescent until triggered. In unison with the Tank, it could translate precise instructions at a genetic level, setting a desired template, flipping gene expression and transforming any number of biological processes.

Despite their best efforts at filtering and restoring the little they had, they were running low. Every attempt at synthesising their own version had ended in failure.

“And—magic happens, David,” Jonathon continued. “We tell the body to mend and… cells regenerate, damage heals – even the slow, ordinary damage of normal human aging. And the process can be controlled: adjust the flow of power into the cylinder and the whole process can be directed.

“But we’re clumsy, David, we’re barely able to adjust things without putting the target at risk. It’s like playing the piano with oven gloves on. At the moment, we can only send the crudest of instructions, like hammering those keys with both hands. Regenerate! Rejuvenate! We can send commands but only in the simplest of terms. But we’re learning. One day, we’ll play a person’s genes like a symphony, and create a new kind of music yet unheard by humanity.” Then he smiled ruefully. “But at the moments, our finest adjustments are more like…” he considered for a moment, “I suppose like switching between a sledgehammer and a howitzer for cracking open a nut. Which is to say, crude and heavy-handed.

“Out first attempts were disastrous. Horrifying,” he said, though his voice remained clinical. He could still see the results of those early attempts, the inverted animal carcasses, masses of jutting bones and twisted flesh; the viscous blobs of blood and sinew; warped organs and soups of dissolved tissue and bulbous lumps of tumours. “Trial and error eventually brought some success, and it was only at that point we discovered something… fascinating. But possibly problematic, considering our long-term hopes for the project.

“Every subject that survived the process was female.

“Our first assumption was one of selection error. We must have inadvertently picked female subjects for our experiments. But no; a quick check of our records clarified we hadn’t. Perhaps something riding on the male chromosome interfered with the process? Or maybe that some of the gene expressions in male subjects were problematic? But no: our next male subject survived the process but emerged female.”

Jonathon hurried on, seeing the growing anxiety and anger in David’s face. “Of course, what we discovered soon after was that the subject was only exhibiting female characteristics—at a genetic level, it was still XY male. As are you, David. Subjects’ DNA remains untouched by the process. I assure you that you remain 100% male.”

David scowled at his prominent chest. “I sure don’t feel 100% male,” he growled.

“If your DNA is the script, then this machine lets us create a new production. Think of… you ever go to the theatre, see a play?”

He nodded.

“Take—Romeo and Juliet. Same script, more or less, for the past 500 years. But how many different productions? Medieval, contemporary, sci-fi. Or focused on gender or race, class or politics. A decade ago, it was fashionable to do sex-swapped version, Romeo as a girl.” Jonathon pointed at the feminised man. “That’s you, now. Same ‘David’ script; fashionable production.”

David raked his fingers through his hair and glowered.

“What we discovered,” the scientist continued, “was that the regenerative process invariably flipped genetic switches associated with female secondary sexual characteristics. Breast development. Fat distribution. Estrogen production. The subject went through a forced—female—puberty as part of the process. Our current theory is that…”

“I don’t give a fuck about your theory, doc,” David finally snapped. “And I sure don’t like where this feels like it’s headed.” He held up one slim arm to the lights overhead, as though to see through it, into it. “Am I still filled with this… ‘Juice’?” he asked.

Jonathon hesitated briefly then nodded. “We have to wait on the blood test results to come back,” and he pointed at the recently taken samples. “But yes, based on the data we’ve collected so far, you’re still infused with it.”

“And what does that mean?”

The doctor shrugged. “We don’t know.”

“Listen, doc…,” voice dropping to a dangerous growl, only slightly undermined by its softer feminine lilt.

At which point, Jonathon snapped. “No!” he shouted, surging to his feet. “You listen, you ignorant, ungrateful….” Words failed him and he fumbled for an insult to adequately express his anger and frustration. “Peasant!”

He stalked away from his client, storming towards the Tank on its raised dais. “When I tell you I don’t know,” he called out over his shoulder, “it’s because we don’t have a damn clue how this thing works. We don’t know how it works! We can barely control the damned thing, and even then only in the crudest fashion.” He hopped up onto the raised platform and passed his hand over the cool dark metal of the cylinder. Briefly, he held back the desire to pound on the heavy glass out of frustration; lost the battle; and punched the glass. His fist smarted. The deep green fluid on the other side of the glass continued to slowly swirl, quiet and potent, unaffected by his anger.

Jonathon spun to face his patient, still sitting bemused.

“You shouldn’t even be alive!” Jonathon shouted. “Why are you still alive, David?”

David watched him from across the chamber. “Because you put me into that thing?”

But the doctor shook his head. “No. No! You’re the first, David! The first! The first human test subject to come out of here alive—and whole. The first to wake up stable and healthy. The first to leave and carry on living a normal life.”

David snorted. “I wouldn’t call it normal.”

The doctor hopped down from the platform and stormed towards him, jabbing an accusing finger at his patient. “And why? What makes you so fucking special, David? Why did you come out—” and here, he gestured wildly, taking in the entirety of the man’s transformed frame, “—perfect! when every other subject…” and here he faltered, remembering previous attempts; and especially the one kept locked away nearby, “… didn’t.”

“How the hell should I know, doc?”

“So when I tell you I don’t know,” Jonathon continued, “believe me, this is an even greater frustration for me than it is for you. But I’ll tell you what we think we know. We believe that the instructions sent into the Tank are locked by the residual Juice still within you. A… template, a set of instructions embedded overriding the normal state of affairs and maintaining gene expression, hormone production—everything—to a specific state defined by the initial process.

“And so long as your body remains suffused with the juice, any attempt at physical change—yes, even masculinisation—won’t work. This, right now,” and he grabbed David by the shoulder, “this body, this is its current desired expression. Young. And female. And any attempt at changing that is at best doomed to failure—at worst, likely fatal. We could cut your breasts off and they would regrow. Pump you full of testosterone and your body would shut down receptors and ignore it. This, right now, is what your body wants to be.”

The silence that followed was complete. David fell back into his seat, face hidden behind his hair as he stared at the ground for several long minutes. Finally he looked up and a dangerous determination burned in his eyes.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Put me back in there and throw the switch.”

“You don’t—”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. I understand. And I don’t care. I lived through this once. Maybe I’ll get lucky again. Make me your next human text subject. You said you can send simple commands. So write up something new. A new program, with a simple order: Male. Overwrite the previous template.”

Though at some level tempted, Jonathon shook his head. “It would kill you.”

David shrugged. Walking past the doctor, heels ringing out against the metal flooring, he and stood looking up at the massive bulk of the Tank. “I’d rather die,” David said, and with a sweeping gesture took in the entirety of his feminine form: the glossy long hair, smooth skin, the makeup and clothes, breasts and heels, his narrowed waist and slender limbs. “I’d rather die than live like this.”

Jonathon walked up behind him. “You don’t mean that.”

David didn’t turn, and his face remained hidden, though a shudder passed through his whole body. “I do.”

And Jonathon believed him. Making his mind up on the spot, he gave a curt nod. “Fine,” he said. “But there’s something I need you to see first.”

Five: Bright Red Lips and Long Blonde Hair
Chad Jenkins knew he was living his best life.

Good-looking, tall and healthy, white, male and twenty-five, he enjoyed the freedoms of early adulthood while suffering none of the responsibility. And he had a good job, a real job, one uniquely suited to his personality, he continued to explain to the young woman sat with him at Eros, the British-themed pub a short distance from the main Clinic complex.

Photos of Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street decorated the dark-paneled walls, as did paintings of the old Queen, then King, and current Queen. A life-sized replica of the pub’s namesake, the winged archer atop a bronze fountain, took pride of place near the entrance. Chad lounged in the comfortable red velvet seat of one of the secluded nooks, smiling at his pretty companion.

“Like, a year ago I was a ski instructor, eh? Banff—you know it? Paradise. Skies like you can’t imagine, so blue, and Lake Louise, if you’ve never been you gotta check it out someday. And there I was teaching spoiled rich kids, mid-life crisis dads, recently divorced moms, ski bunnies,” and he grinned at the girl, “and I was loving it but barely getting by, doing some physio on the side, some personal training. Skiing season was so short and even with the machines going non-stop we couldn’t keep the snow on the slopes, right, because of the heat?”

He paused to drink and watched the girl over the rim of his pint. Bright red lips curved in a half-mocking grin, and her nails flashed as she raised a thin flute of bubbly. Small sapphire stones dangled from her ears as she tucked back her hair. She wore a short blue dress that hugged her curves and bared her legs from mid-thigh. “Sounds lovely.”

Smiling, he enjoyed the brief swell of nostalgia. “It was.” And it had been: especially the views, the scarlet flare of distant-crystalline high peaks as the sun set, or the achingly beautiful vista where sky and lake met in an unbroken blue at the base of rocky slopes. But also evenings, the people, night after night of intimate touches in dark rooms, kisses and bodies pressed together, so many women, the occasional man, brought together by transient holiday freedom, lust, rebellion—he never cared, never questioned, just listened. “And that’s when I met Tab.”

“Tab?”

“Tabitha. I was her instructor—at first—but you know…” He shrugged. “We were spending nights together. A week in, on my day off, she’s taking the slope with another instructor and gets injured—nothing too serious, but she’s not exactly happy.” He reached for the pitcher of beer on the table, refilled his glass. “She asks for me. I’m helping with her recovery, you know, some physio to get her skiing again and out of the blue, she offers me a job, here, at Asklepios. Turns out she’s on the board of directors.”

“So you fucked yourself into a sweet job?”

He raised his glass in mock salute. “I’m good at what I do, eh?” he said.

And the girl opposite, she seemed… non-plussed by his response, neither intrigued nor put off. The tag on her arm marked her as a client of the clinic. There were certain protocols to follow when hitting on a client, but his own monitor would’ve warned him off had there been a concern. Quite the opposite: the warm glow at the wrist when he approached her was an invitation, not a warning.

Clients at Asklepios were there because they were fucked up in some way, and Chad was keenly aware that for a heart-aching number of people, he was the last non-medical person they’d even spoken to—kissed—fucked—enjoyed a final intimate moment with.

She eyed her glass for moment. It was nearly empty, the rim reddened with lip-prints. “How about,” she said. “You buy me another drink, and I’ll keep listening to your stories?”

Chad laughed. “How about you tell me your name first?”

“Cindy,” she said. “Cindy Bellamy.” She held up her arm, slender and bare to the shoulder, and gave the bracelet at her wrist a little shake. “I’m a patient at the Clinic.” She looked suspiciously at her glass. “But you probably already figured that out.”

He hesitated for a moment, suddenly uneasy. He studied the girl closely, drinking in her beauty, generous cleavage revealed by the low-cut front of her dress, the brilliant green of her eyes and the pale flesh of her thighs. Her lips shone and curved in a mocking smile he found irresistible. And yet—there was something familiar… Her name, maybe?

Over-thinking had never been his forte. He gestured for a waitress, ordered a bottle of Prosecco on ice. “A name for a drink. Seems fair. More of the same?”

“You know I’m not going to fuck you, right?”

Chad laughed. “If you say so,” he said.

“I’m just here for the free drinks.”

“And the sparkling conversation, eh?”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled, raising her glass in salute. Her eyes sparkled with knowing contempt, and he loved it. He loved the background buzz of the pub, the clink of glasses, indistinct chatter, the smell of beer and the cozy, dark-wood panelling. He loved the fact he was sat opposite a pretty young girl with bright red lips and long blonde hair, and who cared if she only sat with him because he bought her a drink? She was a little bit bitchy, and he liked that; she was honest and that was even better; and she was doubtlessly fucked up in someway, but then weren’t they all?

There was also a haunted looked to her. As he spoke, he often found her drifting away and staring into the middle distance, staring at something that she couldn’t unsee—a trauma, most likely, a loss or injury, as with so many of the patients. Usually, they just wanted him to talk, to fill their minds with anything but the one thing they felt they couldn’t escape.

He wondered what it was for her; what haunted Cindy Bellamy?

Clearly, she wasn’t here to talk and share, at least not yet. But then so many of them weren’t at first. Mostly, he could tell that she didn’t want to be alone.

And Chad thought, maybe I’ll end up in bed with her tonight, or another night—that’s usually how it went—but maybe not, and that was okay, too.

Cindy drained her flute and refilled, struggling a little with the large bottle, pouring a little too quickly and overflowing the glass. With a little ‘eep’ she brought her face down to the glass and sucked up the foam, lips a perfect red ‘o’, eyes glaring up at him through framing bangs as though daring him to laugh.

He laughed anyways and she grinned. They drank, and he told more stories. It was only some time later, in the middle of a good one about skinny dipping in the hotel pool, that he noticed she wasn’t listening. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.” She stared at the table as she spoke, and her voice was quiet. “I—experienced something today, saw something I wish I hadn’t.” She paused and glanced up at him. “Have you ever been afraid, Chad?”

His pretty companion didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean, truly afraid. Terrified, so deeply that it swallows up your insides, so completely you’re left hollow. I’ve known that kind of fear precisely twice.

“Once, long ago. I lost someone. Because I was afraid—and didn’t act, couldn’t—and the most precious thing I’d ever known was taken from me.” She was staring into the distance now. “I still have nightmares about it.”

Then she looked up at him. “I never thought I’d feel that deeply afraid again.” Very carefully, she put her glass down. Her hands trembled. “I was wrong.”

Six: The Man Who Killed You
Rows of florescent tube lighting suspended from the concrete ceiling illuminated the chamber. Under the sharp glare there were no shadows, nowhere to hide. Within this space deeper beneath the Clinic stood a pair of connected transparent rooms, smaller boxes made of slabs of reinforced transparent polymer, nearly invisible and all but unbreakable. There were no visible joins between the walls. Within one of the two rooms was a small cot and a short toilet, both made of the same plastic-like material, also seamlessly molded out of the polymer surface. Cameras overhead surveyed the room, and several sensors tracked temperature, air quality, and the chamber’s inhabitant.

A faint hum hinted at the presence of air filters recycling and scrubbing the air. The temperature was just slightly too low for comfort—at least for David, dressed as he was, in his chunky heels and tight shorts, bare arms and mesh top.

He shivered, arms wrapped tightly around himself, and stared, eyes wide, the hair standing at the back of his neck. “Why the fuck are you showing me this?” he asked. “What the fuck are you showing me?”

There was a woman in the transparent room. At least, it had the characteristics of a woman: too many of them. The figure writhing on the floor was an exaggerated caricature of a girl, a grotesque eruption of secondary female features. There were glimpses of something supernaturally beautiful, a refined expression of femininity pushed to its extreme: full lips and skin that nearly glowed with vitality, cascades of lustrous raven hair and fulsome curves. But that shape was all but lost beneath fleshy protrusions and bulbous sores sprouting from her curvaceous form. Breasts—but too many—hung heavily from her frame, large, well-shaped, some leaking. Fingernails like talons raked the floor without effect. One hand disappeared between her thighs, clutching at genitals beneath her furious palm.

“Specimen Zero,” Jonathon replied. “The first human specimen to emerge from the tank alive.”

David stared as the woman continued to scrabble at her crotch, feverishly reaching for a climax that eluded her. Her mouth distended in a silent moan as she squirmed on the floor, long hair swirling around her like a dark cloak.

“Why are you—why is she locked away like this?” David took a hesitant step towards the transparent wall that divided him from the woman. Glancing back over his shoulder, he stared at the doctor in disbelief. “You can’t—”

“Yes,” Jonathon answered, his voice cold. “I can.”

As the woman twisted and flailed, David noted with horror a bloated, malformed limb—a third leg, swollen and undersized, emerging from around the hip, boneless and flopping useless even as it twitched and scrabbled against the floor.

“This,” Jonathon said, with haunting clinical detachment, “is both out greatest success and our greatest failure. Clinically dead when placed within the Tank, the patient was the first to emerge fully healed and alive.” He held a tablet in his hands and tapped at a few buttons. “But sadly, not whole.”

The misshapen woman became aware of their presence. She looked up and hate-filled eyes locked on the doctor. With a face at once beautiful and horrific, she bared her teeth and screamed without sound.

“The walls are soundproof,” the doctor noted. “Initially we contained her in far simpler accommodations, but the screaming proved too disturbing.”

David looked at him in disbelief. “This is… wrong,” he said.

“Yes, it is.” The doctor’s voice remained calm though scored with anger and frustration. “This is what happens when mistakes are made, David. You’re very cavalier about things you know nothing about. ‘Put me back in the there,’ ‘I’d rather die.’” The doctor mimicked David’s words in a little-girl’s voice. “But what if going back in the Tank means… that?” He pointed at the figure in the glass box. “That’s what happens when we mess around with a process we barely understand. That could have been you. It still could be.”

David stared at the doctor, then at the imprisoned woman. They made eye contact. Her eyes—beautiful, large hazel eyes beneath thick lashes—widened; her mouth distended in a feral howl; and she launched herself at the wall between them. David flinched back even as she slammed into the transparent polymer. The palms of her hands pounded at the wall, and her many breasts and protuberant growths flattened grossly against the surface. She slammed her head once, twice, a third time against the surface, and with each dull thud she left a dark red splotch.

“She’s angrier than usual today,” the doctor noted. “I better calm her down.” A tap at his tablet, and she almost instantly sagged and went limp. “Gas,” the doctor explained.

The woman slumped to the floor, and as her limbs drooped away from her groin, David saw for the first time the penis, glistening and engorged, suspended between the prisoner’s legs, over an inflamed and dripping vagina.

“Jesus.” David stepped back from the cage. “Christ. Christ. What the—what the fuck is this?”

“Those contusions to the head will be gone within the hour.” A hint of wonder crept into his voice. “The regenerative process never stopped. It’s out of control. Tumours and flesh, limbs and secondary sexual characteristics, hair and nails, the patient is in a constant state of healing and growth. Clusters of cells regress, specialize again – organs grow where they shouldn’t.” He shook his head. “Every week we operate on the patient, slicing away excess flesh and atrophied limbs. She’s… stunningly beautiful, beneath it all. An absolute expression of femininity.

“And she’s strong. Muscular and bone density well beyond normal parameters, at the extremes of human potentiality. She escaped, more than once, and hurt colleagues—but we’ve learned to not underestimate her. She’s a dangerous one.” He walked up to the wall and tapped, like one might at a fish in a tank. “But you’re never going to hurt anyone again, are you?” He turned back to David. “She been a constant source of fascinating data. We’ve been able to try all sorts of procedures on her. We’ve learned a lot from her.”

“You can’t do this,” David said. “You don’t have the right to….”

“Yes, I do.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “And before you get too high on your horse, I should point out that without her… sacrifice, let’s say, you may well have emerged from the Tank in the same state, or worse. We made correction to the process you underwent based on the data collected from her first trip into the tank.

“Besides,” the doctor added. ““She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

David glared at the doctor. “That’s not funny.”

“No, it isn’t.” Jonathon tapped at his tablet, and suddenly they could hear the patient within her prison. “Here, let me introduce you. Good afternoon, Patient Zero. How are you feeling today?”

Her breathing was low and ragged, an angry hissing intake of breath. “Plea… please. No….”

“Answer the question.”

“Make it stop,” she slurred, shaking her head, her dark shroud of hair falling away from her face. Numbly, David noticed an eye—clouded, unmoving—growing at the base of her neck. “Stop—stop, please….”

“Answer the question.” Jonathon’s finger hovered over the tablet. “You know what happens when you don’t answer the questions.” Though his voice remained clinical and cool, it was clear he was being deliberately malicious, and taking pleasure in his victim’s suffering.

There was a sudden shift in the patient’s posture, and she slowly picked herself up from the ground, sweeping the hair away from her face to look at the doctor. Though her eyes burned with hatred, her smile was suddenly saccharine and sweet, almost beautiful were it not for the cluster of cysts the deformed one side of her mouth and left it drooping. “I’m good today, doctor,” she said, and her voice was clear, soft and lilting, musical even. One hand sought out and fondled a full, pendulous teat hanging from beneath her armpit. “I’ve been good.”

“Have you?” the doctor asked. “Tell me.”

“Yessss…,” she hissed, and pouted. “Good. I’ve been a good girl.”

“Well, then,” the doctor said. “I’d like you to meet someone.”

The patient’s eyes fluttered and flicked between the doctor and David, before locking onto the latter’s feminine frame. “I’ll… Please. Help… me,” she purred. A ripple ran through the patient—lust, or rage, or both—and she spread her hand wide against the wall between them. Long curved nails several centimeters in length scraped for purchase against the polymer surface, and up close, David could see the cluster of pustules and polyps that marred the flesh of her palm.

David glanced at the doctor, and back at the patient, and then back to Jonathon. “I get the message, doctor. Okay? I get it. Going back in the Tank’s a bad idea. I don’t want—that. Fuck. But why—”

“Who are—” she stopped to suck in a dribble of drool escaping the side of her mouth. “You?” The patient took a deep breath, hand leaving the breast and sliding back down to her crotch. She began to rub again, slowly and with a sigh. “Who?”

Smiling wickedly, and clearly taking pleasure in the revelation, the doctor provided the answer. “This is Cindy Bellamy, though perhaps you’re more familiar with her former name.” And the doctor turned to David, and with an expansive gesture completed the introduction.

“David Saunders, I’d like to introduce you to the man who killed you: Mr Adam Fosters—you knew him as Agent Fosters—Steele’s man.”

Author’s Notes:
It took rather longer than expected, but here it is, finally. It was supposed to be a short chapter, a brief interlude offering the reader a glimpse at what was going on from outside of the first-person narrative of the previous chapters, but it sort of grew beyond expectations. At over 70k words in length, it seemed wise to break the chapter into digestible chunks. The second Interlude is complete, and I’ll post the next two parts over the coming weeks, though if you want it faster you can find the rest on my Patreon.

If you enjoyed this, please - leave a comment! It's nice knowing someone's reading this stuff.

I’d just like to give a shout out to those supporting me on Patreon. I think it’s fair to say that this chapter wouldn’t have been completed without their support. I disappeared for months, and they were still there when I came back, and their encouragement got me back into the writing groove. Thank you, all of you, very much. Hopefully the story doesn’t disappoint, nor the time it’s taking me to write it.

Some credit given where it’s due:
--the Iron Maiden rant by David was inspired by a segment in Naomi Wolfe’s “The Beauty Myth”.
--some of the “crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit” stuff was inspired by The Epigenetics Revolution, by Nessa Carey, and Ageing: A Very Short Introduction, by Nancy Pachana. The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman, which I’m currently listening to, influenced the edit.

And if you like this – why not pop in and check out the Patreon, join the conversation?