If you read Chapter 1 before the 27th of June, the now added scene is here to save you going to go back and find it. It slots in right before the scene where she leaves the motel.
Spoiler
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.
[collapse]
“A month after his disappearance Nevada State Police are expanding their search for missing Deputy, Christian Saint James.
“At the time of his disappearance the Woolsey County Sheriff’s office has shared that Officer Saint James was under suspension pending further investigation into a traffic stop in which a complaint had been lodged regarding excessive use of force and procedural irregularities. Chief Robberts, head of the Woolsey County Sheriff’s Office, stated that despite an otherwise exemplary record at the department, Deputy Saint James had been suspended, pending a thorough review of the footage. On the 23rd, a few days following his suspension, he was seen driving his pickup erratically in Middlegate. Reports from those who saw him at the QuickStop allege he appeared under the influence, and left the convenience store seemingly alone, heading south.
“The case takes a bizarre twist here, however. Last week, his pickup was found just off highway three fifty one. Dead at the wheel was a currently unidentified young woman. Woolsey County coroner stated they do not suspect foul play in the woman’s death, but the autopsy indicated that she was grossly dehydrated and severely malnourished. Individuals with knowledge of the case expressed concern that she may have been a kidnapping or human trafficking victim. They also state that while DNA analysis identifies a close match with Deputy Saint James, he has no known relatives fitting the woman’s description. Nevada State Police and the Woolsey County Sheriff’s Office urge any friends or relatives who might have knowledge of the woman’s identity to step forward.”