Block walls covered in scabbed brown paint mark the edge of the lot. The Motel script on the end of the building that’s just about still standing, so faded it’s barely distinguishable from the surrounding desert and scrubby ground, tells me this is the place. Despite being the only man-made structure decaying on the horizon for the past few miles, I still almost drove straight past it. Twisting the wheel at the last moment, cutting across the white lines with gravel pinging against the body, praying no police were lurking. Although where they’d be hiding, I don’t know. It’s so fucking flat out here.
I’m not sure which is older: the building, the faded sign out by the highway, or the car I’m dragging unwillingly into what was once probably a parking lot. Now the lot’s a mixture of sand, holes and the odd scrubby bush. Like the hotel itself, in the haze of the summer heat, it’s hard to tell where it ends and the desert restarts.
I eye the building skeptically. If I hadn’t called from some rando’s phone two towns back I’d think the place closed decades ago. But the faded sign in the reception door does say ‘open’ and someone picked up when I called. Moving is already a nightmare, rivulets of sweat running down my back not from the heat but from the fever that’s building. I can’t really feel the pain yet, but my joints are stiff and — I suspect — swollen. The OTC shot of ketorolac I took a couple of hours back’s quickly losing its battle against the virus.
I stick my face almost against the air vent, trying to dry the sweat off, trying to cool myself a little before I walk into the hotel. Hoping to look a little more normal. Less like I’m either high or dying. The car’s AC has been working overtime — my priorities picking the car were ‘common’, ‘cheap’ and ‘will get me the fuck away from there’. Maybe I should have paid more attention to creature comforts — checked the AC really worked.
I guess with my face crushed hard against the grille I can feel that it’s kinda cold? Maybe?
I’ve pushed the timing way too far. I needed distance between me and the lab. Between me and what was once home.
Between me and Oaklen’s fucking guards.
And places that still run on cash? They’re hard to find. Nearly everywhere’s tracked, geolocked digital payments and trying to avoid that’s been a nightmare. Planning and paranoia’s paid off, so far, and up until now I’ve been able to avoid anything traceable. I even stuck my old phone behind the fender of a pickup truck — one sporting anti-trans bumper stickers. Should be fun for them if Oaklen does try to track me down.
I do have what’s hopefully a new ID set up. I paid enough for it, and I’ve promised more once I’m using it. Well, I have two, really. Although the one for here’s less likely to hold up for more than a basic credit check. The other one though, along with that ID there’s shiny new cards linked to a shiny new bank account, and to a shiny new phone, a new watch, new life.
The further away from the labs that I can be before I actually test that ID’s separation from my soon to be former self, the better. So even here, untraceability is the key. Moreso, I guess, because I sure as hell won’t be able to move once I’m in the room.
To do that, I need to get in the damn room.
Which is across the parking lot.
One hundred feet, maybe, in the middle of the day.
Maybe whoever’s behind the desk will believe I look like shit because of the heat.
Door open, legs out, take a step.
And another.
And another.
Now it hurts. My joints yell every time I try and move.
Not just my joints, my entire fucking skeleton is screaming at me.
I stagger to a stop. Standing stock still. Burning under the cloudless sky.
Locked in place by agony. I know it hurts, but I can’t stay here.
I’ll die if I stay here.
Take a step. Take a step, bitch. Fucking take a step.
There.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Gravel and broken glass crunching under foot.
Sweat pouring down now, running down my neck, down my back, soaking through the shirt.
My hand — clammy — slips on the worn smooth pull on the reception door; brushing against the accumulated black crud that’s crusting the borders of where everyone touches. Takes a few tries to get a grip. I resist the urge to just let go and drive on. Head out to the horizon. Truly disappear. Odds are I’ll collapse and die in the desert heat if I try. I’m barely keeping it together now — thoughts moving like molasses. Driving? Even if I manage to stay on the road I’d probably run out of gas, and that’s best case if I stay conscious.
And, I remind myself, there’s a reason I chose this place, and that reason sure as hell wasn’t the reviews.
The reception area looks like it was last cleaned when the place was built. Probably not even then. Dry dirt and cracks make up the pattern on the floor and sitting behind a desk with peeling laminate is a lank haired teenager who’s playing something I don’t recognize on a tablet that might need carbon dating. I wait optimistically for some acknowledgement of my presence — something that it fairly quickly becomes apparent isn’t going happen without more action from me.
It’s only when I try to speak that I realize my voice is almost unusable. It’s barely there at all; hoarse and scratchy. My throat feels like I’ve poured molten lava down it. “I called about a room. Wanna pay for it in advance. In, uh, cash.” I eventually scrape out.
“$150 a night prepay and we need a card on file for damages regardless.” The teenager doesn’t pause the game or look up. Nods in the general direction of the desk and I realize there’s a screen built into the surface. I swipe off the layer of dust and pick one of the empty ground floor rooms. Work my way through the registration without entering a single truth.
“Hey. I don’t want the room serviced. I’m gonna be working like crazy and don’t want interruptions.”
“Uh hu.” He says, which I assume means someone will be round in the morning completely ignoring my instructions.
“Uh…I also have some stuff I need to get in. Is there anyone who could give me a hand?”
“This look like Motel Six?”
“Extra hundred bucks in it?”
The game pauses and he looks up at me at last. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah, not been feeling great. Probably that thing that’s going round.” My voice squeaks on ‘going’ and I barely get through ‘round’. I’m not sure if I can even speak anymore. Thankfully he just ignores it and schleps out from behind the desk.
“Better not be catching.” He says slamming through the door with too much force.
#
Steven or Sven or Simon or whatever the fuck he was called does the bare minimum to get the cash. The boxes make it into the room, with him side-eying me the whole time. I guess the labels give away that something’s weird. Well, there’s that, and the fact that by the end of the process I’m barely standing (and working really fucking hard to resist screaming in agony). As the door slams, I slam a dose of Neoeridine into my leg. I know it won’t really work. It’s basically just a dolled up morphine and that’s never going to be enough. Knowing what I had in mind I tried to grab some Dolosiran — one of the few actually decent drugs Neuragene had in trials. A little temporary gene silencing to turn off pain transmission. But that stuff was locked down in a separate lab and the guy running it already thought I was some kinda untrustworthy. Which, I guess, fair.
What I managed to get was some Vessaderm — proper cutting edge shit. Mucoadhesive liposome, as the paper would describe it if we ever shared anything, and if it’d finished its journey to being patented and, more importantly, once we’d hidden the code for it in a bunch of obfuscation. The guy running that project is creepy as fuck though, and there’s no way I was gonna ask for it. “Hey Tyler? Can I get some of the spray that nukes your voice? Makes it so you can’t scream?” Not a good plan. Instead I managed to snarf one of the partially used test sprays. Just a couple of sprays to paralyze my vocal cords — then there’s no screaming for me for the foreseeable future. No screaming, no talking, nothing but the odd hiss.
I don’t want is to scream like the test subjects did and find myself with some shithead neighbor calling the cops, or worse, the medics. The spray’s warm. Almost feels like honey which, given how my throat currently feels, is rapturous. For the first time in hours I take a drink and it doesn’t feel like I’m sipping on broken glass.
Exhaustion’s wearing away at me and I know there’s not long left before I can’t push any further. As a last step I take a few minutes to shuffle some electrolytes and water by the bed, and MREs and protein sticks in a place where I should be able to reach them. Stab an IV in my arm and hook up some fluids. Then I’m done.
If it works and I survive, great. If it kills me, and I don’t then it’s still better than this life. If my body fights it off — if I walk out of this room the same as I came in there’s every chance of Oaklen finding me. But if it works? No facial recognition system’s going to pick me up. No gait surveillance will identify me. I’ll be flagged as someone new, sure. But there’s nothing that ties me to Dr Tavish Shah. I can just be…me.
There’s a sudden crack of pain sparking through my hips. My vision whites out for a moment and when I blink back into existence I barely register the room. No idea how long’s passed. It’s not long before another ripple of agony overtops the Neoeridine. All I see is sparks and bright white again, the room fading into the distance as all I am, all I can think of, all of me is pain.
Thank fuck for unconsciousness.
#
Ugh.
A thousand pin-footed centipedes are, I would swear, trailing across every inch of my fucking body. And it wouldn’t be so bad if the bed was comfortable but it’s rock fucking hard and cold and clammy-itchy-damp-scratchy. What the fuck does this place use for their sheets? Scouring pads? Slimy tacky damn scouring pads.
I’ve been laid here for — fuck knows how long — and the bed tastes like desert sand and mud and mold and dog shit and cockroach remnants and probably a million other things I wish I hadn’t experienced.
I pull my eyelids open, squinting despite the half-light. My eyes feel like someone’s taking a razor to them with each photon that hits my retina. 8.17. The clock says it’s 8.17. Is it evening? Is it morning? And wait a fucking second; I can see. Without glasses, I can see? I stare at the clock again, the red led eight-segment display glowing, edges of the numbers sharp as a tack.
Fuck me, do I have 20/20 vision? Now if only seeing didn’t hurt quite so damn much we’d be onto a winner. I close my eyes and rest my head on the pillow again. Only, I don’t. The pillow’s missing. It’s just this revolting flavor cheap sheet with the texture of ribbed sand paper. Ribbed for her discomfort, I guess.
I risk moving an arm to try and seek out the pillow. My shoulder sends panicked warnings as the joint flexes. The slow traversal of my limb over the fabric feels like my skin’s being pressure washed from my body. Inch by inch I swing it round. There’s no pillow. There’s no headboard. I can’t even find the fucking edge to the stupid shitty twin bed. God damn it.
Fine.
Fine.
I unwillingly scrape my eyes open again, blinking them furiously against the light.
Wait.
Why is the clock up there?
Oh.
Ohhhh.
I’m back on the damn floor.
I know this floor far too intimately because it’s at least the fifth time I’ve come to, drool pooling, tongue stuck to the floor, sweat soaked and disoriented. After churning through fever blurred memories I eventually recall trying to make it to the bathroom. Hanging in the air above me is the empty bag of saline, pool of blood by my arm where the IV ripped out.
When I paced it out before I collapsed it was, what, four feet to the bathroom door. Maybe six to the toilet. But actually it’s infinitely far. Especially since it involves sliding my way around the boxes of MRE’s stacked in the way. I’d curse who put them there, but I know who it was, and I know how much he cares, so it’s not worth it. I don’t have the energy to waste on such pointless nonsense anyway. At least I remembered to drag the bottle of electrolytes with me from the nightstand for the journey. Scooping it up from the carpet I take a swig. Yum. Warm knock-off Gatorade. Better than carpet.
I’m not grateful to whatever it was that dragged me from unconsciousness. It might have been the pain? Or the whine from the AC struggling and losing. Maybe it was the sound of the two people having way more fun than me in the next room? The screams of ecstasy do make a great counterpoint to the hiss of agony whenever I consider moving. I try for a noise — vocal cords still disabled. Good.
I really do need to take a piss though.
And sweating into the so-called carpet I can probably get away with. It’s brown and already stained to hell, so they probably won’t notice the fresh stains from my personal swamp. But urinating on it? I’ve already got the blood from my vein to clean up, if I live, which is looking optimistic, I guess. But it’s not the clean up, or the fees that’ll bounce off the card anyway, it’s that I’d probably wake up with my face buried in the piss-soaked-patch next time. And that seems like an unpleasant addition to the cockroach soup currently in my mouth.
I try and sit up to take another drink but I feel like I’ve burned through every millijoule of energy I had already. Whatever day or time it is I still need to eat and drink. The virus is rewriting me; rewiring me; forcing my body backwards through time before ramming it forwards again at speed.
I know I need protein to feed it, and fluids. That’s why I risked buying enough MREs for me to not leave the room for weeks. That’s why I have enough IV fluids, Gatorade, water and energy drinks here to last out the f’kin apocalypse.
But all I have in my head is pain.
My entire body is being dismantled and reassembled without anesthetic or analgesia or even a fucking quart of neat ethanol.
Sure, I did this to me, but counterpoint: unimaginable, inexorable pain.
I get why they screamed, since I would lay good odds that Oaklen didn’t give them the sexy painkillers, no matter what he said to me. He probably ordered fucking saline shots so I’d see something going in while he claimed it was some fancy fucking shit.
Fuck him, and fuck me for helping.
I’d scream. Not intentionally. I know I can’t but sometimes I hear a hissing noise coming out and eventually realize that it’s coming from me. For a hot minute when I was planning I thought I’d have to use a biteblock. For a less-hot minute I thought I’d have to use a bite block and intravenous nutrition. Thankfully the math worked out on MREs, and the spray does its shit. Don’t want any enemies of the people rocking up and dragging the poor infected trans woman to jail. Yeah, I designed it with lousy transmission, and yeah it’s almost impossible to catch it, and while it would be fucking funny to have the gender police spreading a gender virus, being patient zero isn’t on my priority list.
The crawl to the bathroom takes about six hours, I think. It’s either six hours or twelve hours or eighteen hours or some period longer than that with a day — or a night — in between. It’s fine. I’m sweating out most of the fluids anyway. And what else ‘m I going to do with my time? Stay awake for the pain? Line up every NHL game I missed while working? I’m too busy trying not to piss on the floor and to remember to eat something, drink something, not die.
When I finally make it back to the bed, I slump back out of consciousness for who the fuck knows how long. I paid extra for no room service. I’m pretty certain that the reception kid would have called the police were it not for the hint that there might be a bonus in it for him if I enjoyed my stay uninterrupted.
So far no one’s attempted to clean the room which has roughly the funk you’d expect. That’s the first thing I truly notice. My sense of smell changing. And then there’s my skin. It’s softer and more sensitive. Just what you want for hauling your carcass over a carpet with roughly the texture of an auto body rasp.
#
It’s unfair.
Unreasonable.
The universe is just being a capricious asshole.
The pain’s part of expunging who I was. And yeah, sometimes it’s almost unbearable. But the fact that it hurts — that was a given. I knew that before I started. Oaklen might have fucked with the for-how-long data, but I knew it would be bad. You can’t expect remodeling your bone structure not to hurt.
Whiny bitch I might be, but I accept the pain.
And the nausea? The occasionally pissing blood? All of that. All of that is okay. Would I prefer not, but this is the choice I made and the price is fucking high, but fine.
The thing is I know I’ve changed. From little things: my skin, my scent, my sense of taste, all that stuff, to the big things: my hips, my legs, my hands, my fucking tits (now I have tits!). All that’s changed too. And yes, it is all what I wanted. But...
Look, if you’ll bear with me a moment, I know it sounds bigheaded, but I’ve been really, really fucking clever. Disabling SRY is easy. Obvious. That’s like babies first CRISPR hack. It’s the one you can find folks trying in shitty little back alley labs and order as an injection off the internet. Ask any senior taking biochem and they’d suggest it — but that’s most of what Neurogene’d done with HMSV-1. That was pretty much all their crappy little virus did. Yeah, it had a few other little tricks up its sleeve, but nothing interesting.
And the success rate sucked still functional balls. Like 70% of the time people’d just get vague oh I’ve got some virus symptoms, then fight it off. What good was that?
So yeah, my plan: Take the testes and turn them off, permanently. I’d say make them ornamental but, well… I had other plans for that biomass. Once you’ve turned off T production, why not go ahead and switch off SOX9 — that’s the thing that keeps testicles…uh, testicles, basically. And that’s good, but what’s better is also turning on FOLX2 — which says ‘hey body, make ovarian tissue’. Start shifting that useless tissue to doing something useful.
At least, useful to my mind.
Already I had a virus that was much better at femming a (soon to be former) boy.
It wasn’t even that hard either.
But where I really got clever was when I thought of fucking with some embryonic bone remodeling using CYP—
Shit. Sorry. I just get kinda excited by how fucking comicbook superhero it is to remold your body to match your self. Like, genuine futuristic shit. Even the old skool way, using like 1950s horse piss and an angle grinder on the bones was cool. Gets you epigenetic change. But I knew we could do better.
The original HMSV-1 was just the same stuff that happens anyway with HRT. Not even particularly quicker. They’d invested however many millions on some bluesky project for Oaklen — well, that’s what they claimed — and all they had this basic bitch virus made by some mid-tier biochemist that — if it worked at all — made you feel vaguely crap for a few days and then after that you’d slowly kinda shift sex, basically the same as if you took HRT.
But then I had this epiphany — for pretty much all trans girls HRT does the shit it needs to. Even if the Venn digram of “actually just looks like their mom” and “believes they still look clocky as fuck” is almost a single circle… but what if I could tweak shit to undo the sex driven bone formation? All that stuff that folks worry about — all those expensive surgeries? Just briefly turn back on the embryonic development stuff – just for a hot minute – and restructure the body. I could make all the changes happen faster. And yeah, it’ll be rough as fuck. But nothing that modern medical science can’t fix with fancy painkillers and IV fluids and nutrition.
After trying it, I think maybe an induced coma might be nice.
So I had a bit of a think and… Yeah, yeah, I was playing God.
And it’s worked, as well as I fucking planned it to. I can feel it in my shape. In the way I move. When I lie on the bed, I can feel the shift in position to accommodate the body I inhabit being so entirely different.
What’s so fucking unfair is I want to see it.
I want to revel in this part. In seeing the new me rendered from the old biomass.
I should be able to look at me reformed and renewed and run my eyes over the me I worked so fucking hard for. That I burned every boat I had for.
But I can’t.
My new phone’s not here yet, so I can’t even take a naked selfie to sneak a proper peak.
All I’ve got is the mirror which is some kind of unbreakable plastic thing that looks like it’s been left out to be sandblasted by the desert. The damn thing’s almost opaque it’s got so many scratches.
Still, the first hour I could stand, could walk, could actually move myself without wanting to paint the walls with vomit, I hauled myself in there. Stood facing me. Squinted through the scratches. Saw the formless brown girl in the mirror; her posture all wrong, her physicality distorted by heat warped acrylic, each movement costing her more than she had to spare; but she was there.
She’s been there every hour, every day I’ve managed to drag myself to the crappy little bathroom. Each day a little more of her, a little less of him.
And now I can see my breasts when I look down. When I run my hands across me I feel my curves. A delicious absence where my penis was, inviting lips when I stroke my fingers lower. But all I really learned from that fucking mirror is…I was one of the people who got a rash. Red blotches scattered across my ass, my lower back.
They’ll fade.
I hope.
Assuming that the test data on that was accurate. Which it probably was? Oaklen was too busy yelling at me about everything else to waste time fucking with that.
So yeah, I learned that I got a rash.
Still no idea what I really look like.
Fuck you mirror.
#
“Where’s your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yeah, the one who paid for your room.” The word ‘bitch’ seems implicit. Great, my first experience of the world as the woman I’m gonna be and it’s a fucking incel. “Made me drag in a bunch of boxes for him. Looked like crap, though. He better not be dead in the room. I hate when we have to clean that shit up.”
“Uh, friend. Not boyfriend. “ I realize my mistake as soon as the words leave my mouth. “He’s a friend of my boyfriend’s. Funny enough, we met through work.” I tack on the statement quickly. His face running back to disinterest and disdain from his flicker of craven desire. It’s insane because even after the shower I look like shit. My hair’s a fluff ball — the hotel’s three-in-one goop has done it — and me — no favors. I didn’t blow dry it. I guess I need to learn how to look after hair, because I can’t go round looking like this. But I’d guess he’s having a dry spell — maybe even a drought — the way he’s looking at me, despite that, despite the no makeup and despite the fact nothing I bought fits.
It’s all either way too big or too small. The shirt’s way too tight, the shorts look like booty shorts tight across my ass. Everything from before is too long — if I could even get it over my hips. Everything I guessed at is too small.
Fucksake.
I resist the urge to say ‘Eyes up here, asshole,’ and instead manage, “He ain’t dead in the room, sweetheart. He had to head back to work a couple of days ago. He said to give you this.” I hand over the two hundred bucks I hinted at for a quiet stay. “’nother five hundred in the mail in a week, so long as we both have nice quiet drives home.” I add.
He smiles, predatory.
I realize five hundred is probably less than he’ll get for turning me in, even though he’s no idea what he’s turning me in for.
I decide to change the plates on the car the minute I’m out of sight.
Change the car too, next chance I get.