Transmutation

  At the front of the hall, on a stage behind a stack of microphones, Lori sat in panel with several others, in a rare press conference—for the purpose of answering questions from the public.

  The person first in line at the microphone spoke accusingly. “So Lori, you’re not really human. Right? You’re a simulation?”

  The hall yelled a mixture of insults and praises.

  Major Wood walked to the center of the stage and stared at the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen.”

  They quieted to hear him.

  He let his stare linger for a few seconds, then said quietly, “I’ve cleared halls before, and I will again, if you push it. We’re here to hear this panel and Lori’s responses.” He stated no threat beyond that.

  One person in the back raised a loud objection.

  Wood looked at one of his men, and the objector was removed.

  Wood looked at the audience again. “This is a private affair. It’s open to the public because Lori said so. Since she paid for the hall, it’s her call. But lets keep it down.”

  The grumble was tolerable.

  Wood left the stage.

  “So you’re not really human, are you?”

  “Yes, I am,” Lori said, at ease.

  “But,” the lady at the mike said, “you weren’t born human.”

  Lori smiled at her. “But I became one.”

  A moderator at the mike indicated for the lady to leave. “One question each, maybe with a follow-up.”

  The lady didn’t want to leave, but people in line behind her enforced it.

  The next lady at the mike asked, “Why did you want to have a dick?”

  The hall laughed.

  Lori cracked a smile. “Do you not like them?”

  “No, no. I mean, yes! But I don’t want to have one.”

  “At the time, I didn’t give it much thought,” Lori said. “my former species is intersex, and I just continued with that when I became human. But I came to like it. No problem. It’s just part of me.”

  “Don’t you ever want to be female?” asked the lady.

  The moderator shewed her away from the mike, and the next person walked up to it, a man. “Alright,” he said, “so didn’t you ever want to be just female?”

  Lori nodded. “I am female.”

  “And male?”

  Lori nodded. “I have those parts. But my gender identity is female. Together with my female parts, I think I’m well into the female area of a roughly bimodal distribution.”

  The man opened his mouth, but the moderator indicated for him to leave.

  The next: “So you’re still partly alien in the mind: You were intersex, and you still wanted to be.”

  Lori thought about it. “I don’t think of it that way, because intersex is a way that humans can also be. It’s not the difference, I’m seeing, here, between Ahleths and humans; it’s the similarity.”

  The man left the mike.

  There were hundreds of people in line eager to edge forward.

  “Where is your ship?” the next man in line asked.

  Lori smiled at him. “Right next to where it isn’t.”

  “Aw, come on!” he begged.

  The moderator tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t leave.

  “Lets see it, please? I mean, like, dude—that’s rockin’.” The moderator all but pushed the man away from the mike, but he shouted over is shoulder as he left. “You gotta share! It’d be cool if we could make some ourselves.”

  The next lady at the mike raised her issue very sweetly. She smiled. “Lori?”

  “Yes,” Lori said.

  “I think you’re cute, and I’m Marci Valentine Osbet from Chatsworth—”

  The moderator moved her away from the mike and the audience laughed.

  The next person at the mike was more to the point. “Lori. Hello. I’m Reverend Hal G. Maxwell of the God’s Way Baptist Church in Irvine, California. You’ve up and stolen the spotlight from the nation’s immigration problems, and I’d like to ask you to set that straight. Immigrants coming to this country fill our prisons and create crime on the streets—hell, their first act coming here is a crime if it’s illegal, and we just let ‘em skate by! We gotta get this under control. America is for Americans. Other folks want to have its blessings? Let ‘em create it in their own country!”

  The audience ripped into an uproar and had to be quieted by Wood and the moderators.

  When it died down some, Lori tried to answer. “I’m an immigrant—”

  The audience roared mixed emotions again.

  “I’m an immigrant,” Lori said again.

  “Then you should go, too!” said Rev. Maxwell.

  Moderators quieted the hall, started to remove the Reverend, but Lori indicatred he could stay.

  Lori tried again. “I’m not an immigrant to the U.S., as I was here when we founded the country. I’ve been a citizen longer than you—”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was a wife in Richmond. I didn’t fight in the Revolutionary War, but I repaired uniforms for my husband’s men. He was a captain.”

  “And he knew you were— How can you find men when you’re not really female! Other fairies—”

  No one could stop the audience yelling for a while. When it quieted enough, Lori continued.

  “I’m an immigrant to Earth, Mr. Maxwell. I am female—”

  “With a penis?” Rev. Max well asked.

  “Yes, with a penis—and the men I’ve married—and one woman—have been people of exceptional character, like my John.”

  There were a few cheers and chuckles.

  “You’re bi?” Maxwell asked.

  Lori raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t really thought so, really, but she was there. I just thought she was remarkable.

  “So what have I done here on this earth since arriving? I’ve been a physician, in some roles, saving lives. I’ve never been a soldier, but I’ve helped—on good sides, I must say—in intelligence, in support, administrations, both military and civilian positions. I’ve been a mother—”

  “You’ve had children?” Rev. Maxwell asked.

  Lori nodded. “Many times. Who led normal lives.”

  A lady yelled from the side. “And you let them die when they got old? You didn’t use the transmuter to save them?”

  “I let them lead their own, normal life.”

  Lori’s face took a pained expression. She shook her head to hold back tears, but they came, anyway. “Yes, I had to let them die when it was their time—the hardest thing for a mother to do. I won’t do that any more.” Lori looked around her on the panel. Someone on the end pushed a box of Kleenex to her, and she took one to dry her eyes.

  The next man in line took the microphone. “If you loved your kids, how could you let them die?”

  “Can’t you see I’m in pain over that?” Lori asked. “How do you think I could do that? Because the species I came from, that society, has learned from aeons of immersion with different planets that if we interfere, there can be trouble. It’s a heart-felt lesson we’ve learned the hard way. It’s the hardest thing— I hate death! That’s why I did this.” Lori spread her arms. “Gave Earth the transmuter. Do you know the risk I’m taking? What if Ahleths—?”

  “See?!” Rev. Maxwell yelled from the side. “You’re going to get us killed!”

  The audience roared again.

  Maxwel was ushered from the hall.

  The next questioner was a man. “If you lived with a family for decades, wouldn’t they see you not age?”

  “Good question,” Lori said. “The transmuter can adjust to making a body that is young and healthy yet looks elderly—that spry ‘young’ thing in her eighties, and remember that people didn’t tend to live as long as they do these days, even before the transmuter. So I did appear to age normally. Then when I moved, I would remake into someone maybe 20 again. It was never assumed I was the same person.”

  The next lady in line was
tall, transgender, “Hi,” she said. “I think you and I are the same. Thank you for being here.”

  “Thank you,” Lori said.

  “I mean you’re transgender, too.”

  Lori’s eyebrows went up as the thought. She cocked her head to one side for a second. “You know, I never thought about it that way.”

  The lady at the mike smiled.

  Someone from the side yelled, “Intersex isn’t trans.”

  Lori glanced at her and thought some more. “You know, I haven’t changed my gender, but I did change my species.”

  “Maybe you’re ‘transspecial,” the lady at the mike said. “’Trans-SPEE-shal,’ as in species, not ‘special.’ Well, special, too—”

  “Like we all are,” Lori said. “I guess I’m a trans person, also, then.”

  “Welcome trans!” the lady said.

  The audience was abuzz with comment.

  Lori got out of her chair and walked around her table to hug the trans woman at the mike, who hugged her back with tears.

  “Thank you for being here,” the lady said.

  “Thank you for having me,” Lori told her back, with a little kiss on the cheek.

  Lori went back to her seat.

  “Okay,” the lady said at the mike, “My real question.”

  “You’ve had your turn,” a man behind her said.

  “But that was a distraction,” the trans woman said. “It wasn’t what I intended to ask.”

  “It’s okay,” Lori said. “One more.”

  The lady smiled. “Okay. You mean there are other planets with people on them?”

  Lori nodded. “Several.”

  “People? Like humans?”

  “No. No. We—my cis species, as it were?—were not like Earth, either, in basic. But we did have a double helix, like you. It’s held that likely we were seeded by something common, that we have a common source or ancestor. And on some planets, ‘people’ are very different. Yet we’re all just beings, living. There are a great many ways life can develop, sometimes savage, sometimes compassionate, sometimes primitive, sometimes knowledgeable. It’s up to humans, themselves, to decide what kind of people we will be.”

  “Thank you,” the lady said sweetly, and walked to the side. Reporters gathered around her. Lori had actually hugged her.

  The next guy walked up to the mike.

  Lori asked him, “Are you trans also?” she asked him?

  The guy laughed a second, then showed her his left temple with no T on it. “Not yet, but I will be I sure hope.”

  The audience chuckled with him, goodnaturedly.

  The guy asked at the mike: “Are we likely to meet those people, from other planets? Maybe before we’re ready?”

  Lori shook her head. “No. Unlikely. Earth has been visited for a hundred thousand years or so, but it’s been us, the Ahleths. When we come here, we take your form so we can survive. We study, live, whatever. We’ve always been part of Earth, since then. But there are no others here, and the ones we know about are very distant. The galaxy is a huge place.”

  The next woman at the mike announced for all to hear, “I’m trans! I just did it!” she showed the camera her left temple with the T on it.

  Lori stood and blew her a kiss.

  Cory Peck bluetoothed the conference from his phone to his Tesla’s dash screen and listened to it on the car’s speakers as he drove from San Bernardino toward Lori’s new compound southeast of Santa Barbara, a good two hours away if he was lucky.

  “Estella, I’m coming!” Cory said into space. “Boy am I coming.”

  Rain clouds were moving in from the west, and in L.A., when it rains, people slow down on the freeway. “We can cure old age, now, but traffic or a cold? Hell no.”

  Cory heard the next person at the mike, a man. “The economy is disrupted. Health-related companies are going bankrupt. Incomes for millions are gone. Defense industries are building because of all the fights over this. It looks like wars are starting. The costs of food-related commodities have skyrocketed with anticipated demand. The President says we’re on the verge of an economic collapse.”

  “We’ll manage it,” Lori said. “I’m involved, too.”

  “Yes, but you’ve made yourself an instant billionaire with this machine of yours. What do you care?”

  “I care,” Lori said. “The reasons I’ve organized this into some wealth for me is for directly related R&D, but mainly so that I can make sure money is directed back to people affected. To date, I’ve sent some six billion dollars into restitituon funds for displaced employees, to lower food costs, to sponsor education in related replication areas of technology so we can develop societies that lack nothing they need, etc., and there will be more on the way as the enterprise grows. My money’s where my mouth is.”

  “Good broad,” Cory said to the car. “Way to go, John Faraday! Where the hell’d you find her?”

  Cory carefully used his turn signals to change lanes.

  The man at the mike continued on Cory’s radio. “Did they use terminology like that back when Ben Franklin was around?” he asked.

  Lori laughed. “No. But he had other things he’d say. He was funny.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Yes. Off and on.”

  The traffic picked up for Cory. He grabbed a french fry from the McDonalds bag in the passenger seat. “New, healthier fries! But I can eat whatever, as I can get a new body, later. Yo, the world ain’t what it was.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  Lori’s helicopter took off in the rain from the Los Angeles Convention Center and flew northwest, followed by her Body Squad in four Army helicopters.

  Headlines flashed, as they did about her. “LORI IDENTIFIES AS TRANS,” and “IS SHE STRAIGHT OR GAY?”

  Cory parked the Tesla at Lori’s compound and stood under his own umbrtella while he plugged it in, walked—nearly danced—his way toward the entrance.

  “Afternoon, guards! Great day!” he said to soldiers as he made his way with a playful smile. “Good afternoon,” he said to two ladies who were waiting under an awning for the rain to quit.

  Cory stopped to look at them. “What’s the matter, ladies?”

  They looked at the rain.

  “It’s okay,” Cory said. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t melt. Elphaba wasn’t killed.”

  The guard snorted a smile.

  Cory nodded to him. He got it.

  The ladies looked at Cory in question.

  “Elphaba. The Wicked Witch of the West?”

  The ladies looked at each other in confusion.

  “She faked her own death to escape the wizard. Dorothy didn’t know. Glenda told us all about it.”

  The ladies still didn’t follow.

  “It’s the plot of ‘Wicked,’ a Broadway play. It’s as valid as the book—”

  The ladies didn’t respond.

  Cory smiled and gave them his umbrella. “Here. Take this and enjoy.”

  “Thank you!” one of them said, and Cory walked on through the gate, in the rain, toward Lori’s house. The compound was about 300 acres, not quite square, set in a valley, surrounded by low, picturesque hills. There were about fifteen buildings, mostly used for replicating transmuters, infrastructure and support. There were only two ways to get in or out: one was just large enough for trucks, heavily guarded, and the other was the personnel gate Cory had used.

  Lori’s house, set to one side on a rise that overlooked the compound, was a little modest for a billionaire, just under 5,000 square feet, with a beautiful back yard, and entirely fenced in stone block.

  The compound had several hundred workers in it but the house was off limits to most.

  The gate to Lori’s house scanned Cory’s retinas and let him in.

  Lori opened the front door without waiting for Cory to knock. “Lori,” Cory said as if he lived there, “I’m home.”

  “Alright,” Lori said. “You’re essential to this program, and you’ve got
your hour. I’ve got a flight to make. What’s up?”

  “Supply going well? We on schedule?”

  “Ahead, actually. We’re shipping them out daily, and two other sites are making more.”

  “Good, good,” Cory said. “Minimal charging, still?”

  “We only ask for whatever people wish to give, and it’s working.”

  “Ah, good, good. Heard the conference on the web. You did great.”

  “Thanks. So what’s up? Why did you want me to block off an hour, here?”

  “You mind?” Cory asked. “The world’s gone batty for transmuters. All the fighting over religion, reproduction and resources— But when you get right down to it, if making sacrifices means you get to live, then—it’s amazing, but people will. They actually will. I’m dumbfounded.”

  Cory walked into her family room, yet remained standing. He looked at his own clothing, not quite wet enough to drip on her carpet.

  Lori followed, standing with him.

  “Yes,” Lori looked sad. “John didn’t—”

  “God,” Cory said. “It’s easy to forget, with all that’s happened. But you’re very much still a grieving widow.”

  Cory gave Lori a hug, and then Lori took a seat.

  Cory followed, in a vinyl chair opposite her. “Where’s Marie? I haven’t seen her around lately.”

  “She’s out back, I think. She’ll be around. She’s a little different, now. Since we got here.”

  “Okay.” Cory looked around the room for distraction. “Great.”

  Lori crossed her legs, waited. “So…? You want some tea? I’ll make some.” Lori got up.

  “Look, this isn’t easy for me,” Cory said. “Yet I don’t see why I should beat around the bush about it—though I like bush.”

  Loir blurted out a quick laugh. “Smart alec.”

  “Ha ha. I’m—”

  “Stalling over something, is what you are.”

  “Yeah—” Cory pushed his chair away from Lori a few inches. “Look, Lori. If I share something with you, will it stay between us? Can you—I mean really—keep it quiet? Not tell anyone?”

  “Ominous. But yes. You know I would. I kept my own secret for twelve thousand years.”

  “You mean about the—” Cory glanced spontaneously at her crotch, and quickly removed his gaze. “Sorry.”

  “No problem. It’s not new to me, but it is to you. And it’s okay.”