Elise woke me up in the morning by poking his head in and calling: “Hey Andy. Get out of bed. We’re going to the gym”

“Ugghh” was my reply. “I’m tired. Can’t we skip today?”

“Prioritize your healing, dampen pain response, load some caffeine generating program then get moving. Daylight is wasting!”

“Oh alright. I’ll be right there once I figure out how to do what you just said.”

“I’ll help you.”

She threw a little something my way. It was another piece of software, shaped like a coffee bean. I ran the program and it presented a few options:
- Morning boost
- Day kickstart
- Adrenaline rush
- Full panic

“I suggest you go with the lightest option.” she said while leaving the room.

Running the boost program, I felt like I just gulped down a double espresso. It gave me the energy to get out of bed and into the bathroom to get ready. There I found myself wondering if I should grow my hair a bit more? I always thought Dani's hair was too short, I don’t know why.”

[Introspection: long good looking hair is an indicator for health and fertility and makes a female more attractive.]

Oh, was that the reason. I hate it when the inner voice is right. I still want longer hair. Wait a moment. What was that voice?

[Introspection: This software investigates thoughts and desires to show the source and your underlying motivations to expose hidden biases in decision making. It is installed yesterday afternoon.]

Oops. That was one of those things I got from Elise yesterday. Who knows what else I picked up.

After washing, I tried to bring some semblance of order to my hair. I understood now why my sister preferred shorter hair. I didn’t know how to handle longer hair … but I was now suddenly wrapping towels around my hair like I have been doing this my whole life. What was happening here?

[Mother: Don’t you worry, Mother is here.]

U-oh. Another piece of software reared its ugly head. I was regretting that wholesale import more and more. What does this one do?

[Mother: I’m watching over you dear, to make sure your posture, mannerisms and appearance are impeccable.]

Ah, that’s why it’s called mother. Can I turn it off?

[Mother: I’m sorry dear, I cannot go home for another three weeks, 6 days, 5 hours and 8 minutes.]

And now I’m stuck with a nosy mother in my head. Grmbl. But my stomach is saying food is needed right now. I better check the gauges. Whoa, 58,000 calories below optimal weight. I need to get out of here and eat. I quickly fixed my hair with knowledge I never had and ended up with a pretty nice braided haircut looking very presentable. My clothes had cleaned themselves tonight so I donned them.

[Mother: one moment dear.]

As I was watching in the mirror as make-up was appearing on my face. There was the classic eye shadow, mascara, bright red lips and a healthy blush. The whole complete package just faded in.

[Mother: I took the liberty to grow a chromatic skin modification on your face, dear, to make your appearance impeccable.]

Whoa, I now look like a model. It looked pretty good, but was so over the top. Mother needs to make this go away.

[Mother: I’ll make it look more natural, but I cannot approve of you going out without.]

The make-up changed to subdued colors and simple glossy lips. It would have to to. Or maybe I’m not fighting this hard enough.

[Introspection: you like the way you look now.]

I hate that inner narrator.
I was ready, so I opened the door and tried to peek out but my muscles felt weirdly sore when I tried to do that. My movement only seemed to work right when… when I tried to move in a very feminine manner.

Mother!!

[Mother: A lady going out in public should always walk with grace and dignity.]

I hate you!

[Mother: In time you will understand, my dear.]

Aaaaaah!

~o~O~o~

I gracefully strode out the door of my room, as if I had any other choice at the moment, and walked into the kitchen where the smell of freshly baked pancakes hung in the air.

Elise was sitting at the dinner table, trying to explain genetics to Tom. From her expression, I think it wasn’t getting through. And now Tom was now paying rapt attention to me, not to the genetic code floating over the table.

“Hey Tom. Are my clothes dirty?”

“Andy?”

I got a little sick when he called my Andy. I can guess the source of that little hint.

Mother? A problem with my name?

[Mother: A lady should not have a boy’s name.]

“Andy, you okay? Why are you made up like that? I mean...Er...It looks good on you. I just wasn’t expecting this.”

“Tom, can you call me...Just call me Amy. That’s a good enough name.”

“And you even change your name?”

“I have to adjust a bit to how I look now. Apparently it comes with the territory.”

I turned to Elise, and whispered “Mother”.

Elise looked a little amused and grabbed my hand to give it a little squeeze.

“Sorry. But you did this to yourself, Andy.”

“What’s happening?” Tom asked not understanding.

“Amy here has a behavior control program running in the background. It would be best to not comment if she acts or dresses a bit girly, you understand? She looks like a girl now and will act like a girl.”

“Can’t you just turn it off?”

“No. Believe me, I got stuck with that program once and you can’t get rid of it easily,” Elise explained ”It will block you trying to change also, I’m afraid. Mother can be rather insistent.”

“Excuse me, I have to consume some sugars. And by the way, you have to connect this sequence here and connect it up between these blocks.” I pointed to the point on the sequence on the table.

Then I saw the remains of a pancake breakfast below the DNA sequences on the table.

“My pancakes!! Did they grew okay?!”

“We … we might have eaten from them. There were so great.”

“WHAT!? My pancakes!!”

“Sorry about that. They are awesome. Especially the blueberry one is just heavenly.”

“But I wanted to taste them first. On that note, what exactly happened yesterday.”

“You came home, still in designer haze. You finished your pancake design and you really got lost in your design. Typically gadgeteer. Then you set them to grow in the kitchen, ate enough to feed a small army and fell asleep. That’s about it. We’re sorry we ate them, but we started a new batch on high speed. They’ll be ready soon, okay?”

“Okay then,” I said a bit said.

As Tom ran his simulation on the new DNA sequences, I went and plucked some freshly grown hot pancakes from the tree. I can’t believe it all worked as planned! With my own hands I made pancake fruit! I could touch them, smell them, taste them. This was sooo satisfying.

With my stack of pancakes I sat down next to Tom and started to much on my food. So good. All that calories really hit the spot. But Mother was keeping me from wolfing it down like I wanted to, so I was daintily eating them.

“Hey ...Amy. How did you make those pancakes? You make good stuff. Those things are great. And how did you get them heated on the tree itself?”

“I added a feature that if you put the grow speed to high it doesn’t grow the final structure overall, but makes macro cells stuffed with balanced nutrients and organic fuel packages formed from sugar. Then the fuel packages are combined. They basically bake the nutrients from the inside out into pancake while the produced gasses make the pancake fluffy. Easy.”

“Easy. Right. Elise is trying to explain how it all works, but I’m not getting it. I can see how the protein is encoded, but putting the proteins to work is beyond me. And you just bake stuff from the inside out.”

“I don’t know. It just all seems so simple. Elise, you must know.”

“You better ask one of the better head shrinks around here, but I’ll try. You know that your cells now have computers that extend your brain. They mostly do literally extend your brain from the top level onward. This is done in way so everything that makes you, well, you, your consciousness and personality, is exactly like it was before. By definition, that moves all the extra stuff into your unconsciousness. Unless you start messing with your brain yourself, the development of that outer brain is also done unconsciously. This usually manifests itself into giving you certain aptitudes. We didn’t chose those, but somehow it always happens. Tom, you have skills yet to discover. No need to worry. Amy, you ready? We’re going to visit another training ground today.”

“Ah, I need to freshen up for a second. Mother insists. Excuse me.”

“Meet us out front. I’ll look for James.”

~o~O~o~

We were walking through the jungle again. Now the shock of our first walk was over, I could make out a lot more details. There were so many different animals and plants could be found on the trees and ground.

“Elise, what are those berries at the bottom of the trees? Some of them are weird?” I asked.

“Those are meatballs. They are for the carnivores. They don’t have to eat other animals here. We don’t allow that in this region.”

“Like these animals understand that,” Tom scoffed.

“Remember, most animals also have the friend-or-foe system,” James pointed out. “They know that attacking a friend makes them a foe. It’s a bit harsh but getting eaten is not an option.”

“And these insects and birds. And those other creatures flying here. They have so many colors and unusual shapes. These can’t be natural,” I asked.

“No, most are not natural. They’re part of our restoration project,” Eline said with proud. “Many animals were extinct because of industrial waste and destruction of habitat. Of course, when you can change genes and essentially build any animal you want, some people tend to get creative.”

I was getting jealous. I wanted to make animals too.

“But where do you breed animals?”

“Well,” Elise said and paused dramatically. “You have a womb now. You can just breed them yourself if needed.”

“What?!”

“Oh, your face. You can actually do that, but using a large egg and breading room is much eas-”

We passed five teenagers that were giving us some really dirty looks. I even felt some pings on my nerves from their direction. Are they trying to breach my mind? It felt dirty. Then their eyes started to bug out and one of the girls looked like she was about to throw up.

James and Elise looked at Tom who seemed a bit too happy with himself.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We were attacked. It were just some petty cyber attacks. The teenagers here are a bit mad at Westerners and those associating with them. They feel like you took away their change to own a big house, big car and other goods. You can feel that in your systems.”

“They were not so good as they thought they were,” Tom answered.

“What did you do?” I asked Tom.

“They were throwing a bunch of simple attacks and sending packages intended to steal information. First I blocked them. Then I … Well, ahem, I used to visit some very dark dark web. Porn and much worse. It weren’t my proudest moment. I attached some of the darkest stuff I could remember to their return packages.”

“Hold on. You send the most nasty and darkest stuff the Western world can come up with and send it right in those fresh virgin minds?” I asked incredulously. Tom nodded. “Those poor kids. And how did you do that anyway. You just happen to do that in a few seconds?”

“I don’t know. When they started their attack, it just clicked. It was so easy to counter what they were doing.”

“Yar a hacker, Tommy” Elise said.

Tom pumped his fist in the air shouting “Yes!!”

“We’ll test how good you are when we get to the gym.”

“What was that yar a hacker thing?” I asked Elise.

“Oh, something from my youth.”

“Errr, how old are you?” I whispered.

“I was a senior doctor with Doctors without Borders assigned to this region at the start of the crisis,” she said.

"Didn't that happen more than 10 years ago?"

"Yep."

“Looking good,” I responded.

"Thank you."

~o~O~o~

We got to the gym without any further incidents, except Tom continuously saying things like “did you see that” and “hack the planet“”. Luckily he cooled down a bit from his little hacker high by the time we arrived, fortunately.

“I’m going to see if Obiefune is around here, to take care of our little hacker boy. I’ll be right back,” Elise announced. “See you in a sec.”

James signaled with his hand for us to follow. “We’ll go to the dojo for some training now. That was the original schedule anyway. That’s my favorite spot. In case you didn’t guess already, martial arts is my talent.”

“But I’m not dressed for any martial arts,” I complained.

“You have to be able to fight in any circumstances.”

“But this is a new outfit!”

“No worries. You can get a training outfit here.”

“But you just said -”

“It’s true. You have to be able to fight in any circumstances. Just not today. The women's dressing room is over there. The dojo is through that door. We’ll meet in the dojo.”

Right. I have to use the other room now. I slowly went to the indicated door. I looked down before opening the room. I’m wearing a skirt and I have difficulties seeing my feet because two somethings were in the way that wasn’t there several months ago. Yep, I have the right to enter here. It was still weird, but I pushed open the door and saw nothing remarkable. Then a voice behind me called out: “Can you move your white ass to inside the dressing room? You can admire the furniture there without blocking the door.”

A woman that looked like she was definitely an Amazon, except this was the wrong continent, was standing behind me, hands on her hips.

“Oh sorry,” I quickly blurted out while stumbling in the room.

“No problem. But I thought dressing rooms were pretty normal where you're from. This one was modeled after Western movies after all. Hi, I’m Kashish.”

“Hi, I‘m Amy. Nice to meet you. Ours are usually cheap plastic and chipped paint, not wood.”

“You build with what you have, and some materials are just more beautiful.”

“I have to agree with you. Great craftsmanship. Although you could grow these almost completely automatically when you add a few artificial sequences from to the third chromosome and … Sorry. Got carried away.”

“Ah, a baby DNA doodler. So cute,” she said with a smile. “My specialty is body sculpting.” She pointed at herself and asked: “What do you think?”

I let my eye roam her body that probably was inhabited by a goddess and declared “I'm so jealous right now.” The strange thing was I meant it. How does that happen?

[Introspection: comfort level with female form has increased to 67.96%. Expected final level of 91.8%]

What? But I’m a man?

[Introspection: The biological parts of the brain have been very responsive to female hormones. Current configuration is not male anymore.]

Oh. And now I realize that this goddess is undressing in the same room with me and I basically didn’t care. Some man I am. I might as well accept it.

“Are you alright? You’re not that jealous?”

“No. No, I just … I didn’t always look like this, and … It’s kinda...”

“No problem. Hey, I’ll give you a few design, okay?”

She made a flourish with her hand and three credit cards appeared floating above her open hand.

“Here’s a sample of my work.”

“I just have this one design. Hold on.”

After a little struggling with the system, I also had a card with a copy of the pancake design floating in front of me.

“It’s just a design for growing a pancake. It’s the first thing I made.”

“You don’t need to give my anything, but thank you.”

Her cards started to float towards me, and I pushed my cards towards her. I did made sure to check if auto install was turned off before receiving the cards.

[Received: auto lifting breasts - no more sagging for centuries]
[Received: maximized cardiovascular endurance - never let fatigue stop you]
[Received: intimate protection - vaginal shaped charges and labial electric charges]

“Shaped charges? Electric charges?”

“Guaranteed to fry anyone trying to touch you and blow away anything trying to force its way where it doesn’t belong. A girl likes to be safe.”

Yes, these mods are going on the queue.

“Oh yes. That’s safe. Thank you. But I was told there would be sportswear here I can use.”

“Those are in that cabinet on the right just in the last locker. Yes, that one, the one without any sign on it. Yes, a sign would’ve been handy.”

I opened the cabinet and found the clothes. There was a basic gi in there. I quickly put my normal outfit in the locker, set my bra to sport mode and put on the gi. Now I’m ready to fight! I said my goodbyes to Kashish and went to the ring. Mats. Tatami. Whatever.

~o~O~o~

“Hey James. I’m ready.”

“About time. Please run your warming up routine. Wait, what are you doing?”

“You said to warm up. We call it jumping jacks.”

“Ugh, not like that. Use your systems. We have much better routines then your bouncing around.”

“Oh, I found it. Here goes.”

And suddenly my muscles felt a bit like they were cramping up. My legs first and going up from there. Then the feeling was gone.

“I think it’s ready with warming up. Does this even work?”

“Of course. I designed it. Do you have any fighting experience?”

“Besides video games? No.”

“Video games? Which ones with fighting?”

“Errr. Street Punch. Russia Bash. Invasion. Strategic Defense.”

“Action themed and strategy. Hmmm. I can use that. Take this.”

A stack of isolinear chips appeared in front of James and floated over to my opened hand.

[Received: martial arts interface]
[Received: hand-to-hand basic training]
[Received: weapons basic training]
[Received: initiation kung fu]
[Received: advanced kung fu]
[Received: …]

I just received a life long of dedicated training. Nice.

“Hey James, why do you use those floating chips trick. Can’t you just e-mail them or something.”

“Of course I can. It’s just not considered polite to do so. We prefer a more personal touch.”

“Oh. You wouldn't like my boss then.”

“Your boss is rather irrelevant right now. Are you installing the packages I gave you?”

“Right. Just a sec.”

I quickly started the installation and felt dizzy. When it passed, I couldn't help to quote that new Disney movie Matrix Beyond.

“I know Kung Fu.”

James saw the same movie apparently.

“Show me.”

This challenge could not be ignored. As I tried to assume a martial arts position that I remembered from the movies, the fighting interface came up. I now saw a whole lot of options for kicking, punching, defensive positions and a lot more, but it was all grayed out. Only the calibration was usable, so I quickly used that. Suddenly my arms and legs started to move all by themselves doing a bunch of kicks, punches and jumps that are typical used for showing off. As the progress bar for calibration completed, all other options came online so I hit generic defensive position #3. Now I was ready!

“You will have noticed that using these functions means giving up partial control of your body to the semi-automatic systems. If you believe capable of handling this, try to hit me.”

Like the casual gamer that I am, I just start mashing virtual buttons. Punch! Kick! Punch! Punch! Block! Evade! I’m the avatar in my own arcade right now. It feels really weird to not be in total control of your movements but in exchange for some serious kung fu this is acceptable. But James was better. He was untouchable.

“Good enthousiasme but little control. Try to hit me.”

Time to double down. Let’s see how to so this a bit more tactical. I need a battle plan. Hmmm. Tactical analysis screen says preference for punches and right side attacks. I’ll try to work with that. Use the battle planner to come up with some good combos, queue them up and go. This time it was on! Well, until I got my legs kicked out from under me about a minute later.

“Good, you are using the tools available to you. Try again.”

Again I ran the analysis and planner. But this time I tried to keep my focus on the surroundings and analytics. I saw there was a battle awareness option to shift processing power around for greater efficiency. Now everything was happening in slow motion, like my brain was overclocking. Maybe it was. Now I could keep analyzing the fight and continuously adjust. Now I lasted five minutes before I got knocked down again. James suddenly changes fighting style and he got me.

“Again.”

“Just a minute.”

So I needed to add the other fighting styles into the battle computer, crunch the odds and try again. This was getting more complicated. There was also a cool array with moves for getting up in style. One backflip later and the fight was on again.

“Again.”

“Now do try to hit me.”

“Not good enough.”

“You almost got me there. Keep trying.”

After several of this, I just laid on the mat panting, barely able to move.

“You did great!” Tom said enthusiastically on the side of the room in his own gi. “It was streight up movie material.”

“Ugh. Thanks. How did your training go?”

Tom winced. “About the same as your fight here. It’s awesome to learn and do so much in so short a time. And then to get crushed by somebody so much better than you. Here, let me help you up.”

“Thanks. For a short time, it was great.”

“You did great. Amy. With more training you can become a good fighter. Hit the showers. Tom, when you’re ready.”

I got my legs under me and made my way to the showers for some heavenly hot water.

~o~O~o~

Ah, a good shower helped me feel a lot better and I was now dry and dressed in my ‘street clothes’. I did use up a lot of hot water. If that came from the rain and heated with solar power, I might have wasted it all. That made me feel guilty, so I did a quick check on the shower systems and found I could all access it.

Water reservoir was at 99%. Heat transfer was running, nuclear reactor within tolerances. Hold on. Nuclear reactor? And I just took a shower in that. I quickly went to the dojo as far as my still tired legs would carry me, just in time to see a blur of arms and legs until Tom landed on the mat. Poor guy.

“James, why do you have a nuclear reactor here?”

“Tom, time for a break. Amy, we use it for heating and electricity of course. Solar power is great for a lot of the things we do, but we must move more quickly so need more energy.”

“But it’s not safe!”

“Sure it is. You’re thinking of those clunky designs you have. And we keep everything deep underground in small devices, not that bomb in a building you guys used.”

“But the water could be radiated?”

“Did your senses indicate anything? Just check.”

Hmmm. I did find radiation sensors in my body. And the graphs said there was only background radiation. I hope these things are accurate. It was still creepy. And I was standing there with my hands on my hips scowling just like my sister does.

“What else is there underground,” Tom interjected. “I can’t image you just bury a reactor there.”

“You are right. Our labs and research facilities are also there. We have a visit scheduled for you in t-”

At that moment I saw a message being transmitted from almost every surface. I could make out it was an emergency code, but the contents was encrypted.

“What’s happening?” I demanded to know.

James was still standing there, silent and unmoving but encrypted communication was blasting to and from him. Then suddenly he moved.

“You have to get out of here. Tom, Amy, grab your stuff from lockers and meet back here. Quickly. Go. Now!!”