“It gets better. After she asked me, she brought out all these brochures.”
“Brochures?”
“For sperm banks. She even offered to make me an appointment.”
“Wow. And you didn’t take her up on it?”
“God, no! I’m only twenty-three. You think I want to have a baby?”
“Well—” Despite how awkward it would be, part of me relishes the idea of being a grandfather. Of course I wouldn’t really be the grandfather; I’d be Aunt Stacey.
“Don’t tell me you’re part of that old school who thinks every woman should have a kid before she’s thirty? I mean, you don’t want to have a baby, do you?”
“No!” I say maybe a little too quickly. My reasons are a little different than Maddy’s. Besides my body’s age, I’m not sure what would happen if I tried to carry a baby with FY-1978 in my blood. “I’m sure you’ll be a great mom someday.”
“Yeah, maybe. If we get out of here.” Neither of us says anything for a while after that. Then Maddy says, “I guess I’ll hit the hay. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” I say and then the door to my cell bursts open. A couple of Dr. Ling’s goons march in. Before I can get up, they yank me away from the wall by one arm. “Stacey?” Maddy shouts through the wall.
“It’s all right, Maddy. Everything will be fine,” I shout. I hope she can hear me as they drag me away.
***
The goons drag me through the door of an office. It probably used to be the principal’s office back in the day. Now it’s Dr. Ling’s office. He hasn’t done much with the space, just cleaned up the wooden desk and brought in a new leather chair. There’s also a lamp on the desk that provides the only light right now. The shadows from the lamp give his face a sinister look. That’s probably the idea.
“Have a seat, Mr. Fischer,” he says.
The only other chair is a plastic one meant to accommodate kindergartners. I feel like a fatty as I sit down on the chair and hear it creak dangerously. Not to mention the way my ass spills over either side of it. This is more intimidation, so that I have to look up at him as if he’s a lot bigger than me.
“It’s a pity my guards interrupted you when they did. Such a touching moment.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want?”
Dr. Ling nods and then opens a folder on his desk. “It seems we’re ready to begin trials of the new serum.”
“Hooray for you. I suppose that means my usefulness is at an end, right?”
“Not quite. As I said, we’re ready to begin trials. That does not mean the drug is complete yet.”
“If you’re not going to kill me, then what do you want?”
“I thought you should be here to witness this momentous occasion.”
“I’d rather you let me see my daughter.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll see her soon enough.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
One of the goons who brought me in returns. This time he carries a little TV set. He sets it down gently on Ling’s desk. Ling fusses with the cords before the screen comes to life. “Very good,” Ling says. He turns to the guard. “You may leave Mr. Fischer and I.”
After the guard stomps out of the room, Ling turns the TV so I can see it. The screen is about as grainy as the surveillance cameras in your local 7-11. I squint a little to make out a room similar to mine, with a chalkboard that dominates one wall.
In the corner is Maddy.
She looks about like I remember, though a little paler and thinner. Her hair is longer too, down to almost her waist. At the moment she has the hair on her right side pushed back as she presses one ear to the wall. “Stace? Are you all right? Are you there?”
“Her concern for you is very touching,” Dr. Ling says.
“Whatever you’re going to do to her, don’t,” I say. “She hasn’t done anything. She’s innocent.”
“We’re not going to harm her. At least not if my calculations are correct.”
“Calculations? What—?” I stop as I remember what Ling said. His version of FY-1978 is ready for trials. Human trials. He of course doesn’t want to use it on me and pollute the gold mine in my veins. And why try it on Qiang or one of his henchmen when he has a perfectly good guinea pig in Maddy? “No! You can’t!”
“Of course I can.”
I launch myself across the desk. Before my hands can grab Ling’s throat to wring the life from him, one of Ling’s guards yanks me back by the hair, hard enough that my scalp burns with pain. The guard tosses me back onto the chair. He doesn’t pull a weapon; he just crosses arms with biceps bigger around than my head. Any time he wants, he could snap me like a twig.
“Relax, Mr. Fischer. Your daughter should be fine.”
Or she could end up as a man, the inverse of what happened to me. Or she might gain another head. Or she might turn into a puddle of goo on the floor. No matter what, I know no good can come from her being injected with FY-1978. “Please don’t do this. Test it on me.”
“You’re much too valuable to waste on a first trial.”
“Then find someone else. Grab some bum off the streets. Just not my daughter. Please.”
“There’s no time for that, Mr. Fischer.” He opens another folder. “Your daughter is a fine specimen. She’s in remarkable health. You should be proud.”
“I am. That’s why you have to find someone else. There must be—”
“It would take weeks to find another specimen so suitable for our tests.”
“She’s not a specimen! She’s my daughter!”
“Be that as it may, she’s going to be a part of history now.”
The door to her cell opens and two goons as big as the one who looms over me storm inside. I feel a surge of pride to watch Maddy throw herself at them. She kicks one in the crotch and he doubles over. The other one she tries to hit in the throat, but he blocks the punch with one massive forearm. He shoves her against the wall as if she’s made out of straw. “You son of a bitch!” she shouts. “Try that again.”
He doesn’t need to. He reaches to his hip for his pistol. That’s enough to cool Maddy’s bravado. “What do you want?” she asks, her voice calmer.
“We only want to give you a shot,” Qiang says from off-screen. She appears on the screen with a syringe. “It won’t hurt.”
“I don’t want any more shots. I want to go home with my friend.”
“You will be able to go home soon,” Qiang says. “After you take your medicine.”
“Yeah, right,” Maddy says. “Where’s Stacey? What did you do to her?”
“Your friend is fine. We took her for some tests.”
“Probably to test if she can float with a rock tied around her ankle.”
“She is unharmed—for the moment. If you choose not to cooperate, we may be forced to take drastic measures.”
“Leave her alone! She’s just a kid.”
“We do not wish to hurt her, or you. Please, relax. Let me administer your medicine.”
I silently urge Maddy to hold out, to keep them from injecting her with the serum for as long as possible. But she doesn’t. She wants to help me, keep me safe the way I want to for her.
“All right,” she says. “Just make it quick.”
Qiang is quick. She brushes hair away from Maddy’s face with one hand. With the other she stabs the needle into the side of Maddy’s neck. As Qiang presses down on the plunger, I start to cry.
Maddy’s body goes stiff, her mouth locked in a wordless scream of pain. Qiang helpfully eases Maddy onto the floor, where she remains motionless for over a minute. Maybe we’ll be lucky and this batch will be a dud. Maybe nothing will happen to Maddy.
We’re not that lucky. The first changes are subtle. Her hair starts to darken. It goes from its natural light brown to darker shades until it’s black. Too bad that’s not all that happens. Next I see her face reshape itself. Her cheeks turn pudgier. As for her eyes, they seem to narrow as if she’s squinti
ng—
“She’s turning Chinese,” I whisper. I turn to Ling, my fists clenched. “You son of a bitch, what are you doing to her?”
“The serum uses gene therapy. I simply added some strands borrowed from Miss Qiang.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Imagine if my government had such a serum in its possession, one that could make its agents look like ordinary white Americans. Or black Americans. Or any other ethnicity imaginable. Are you starting to understand?”
I understand perfectly. Dr. Nath invented FY-1978 ostensibly as a cosmetic drug—a Fountain of Youth in a syringe. She had greater hopes to use it to treat cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. Dr. Ling’s come up with an entirely different use for it, one that might be even more profitable. A drug that could make it easier than ever for insurgents to infiltrate American society. The Chinese could use it to sneak over thousands of agents who could seamlessly blend in. So could anyone else willing to pay the right price.
“You watched a few too many James Bond movies,” I say.
“Perhaps, but you can’t deny the potential of this formula.”
“It’s fucking crazy,” I grumble.
I turn back to the screen to see the drug isn’t done with my now-Chinese daughter yet. Her pajamas look looser on her than before. As I watch, her hands and feet disappear inside the material. She’s probably in her early teens right now. I pray for that to be as far as it goes, but it’s not. Her body continues to compact within the pajamas.
Her head shrinks at the same rate. As it does, despite the differences from her changed ethnicity, I see the face of my little girl. My little girl from before I left her, when we were still a somewhat happy family. “Oh God.”
She gets even smaller, so small that the top of the pajamas go down to her ankles. She’s a toddler now, five or maybe even four. How much younger will she get? Will she revert back to an infant? Maybe she’ll disappear entirely.
But she doesn’t. Ling and I stare at the screen for a good two minutes to make sure she’s stopped shrinking. I let out a sigh of relief. My daughter might be a toddler again, but at least she’s alive.
Ling shakes his head. He takes a cell phone from off his belt. I can’t understand what he barks into the phone, but it doesn’t sound congratulatory. When he finishes, Ling turns to the guard. “Tell Miss Qiang to get some blood samples for me to study. And take Mr. Fischer with you. We’ll need his help to calm the child down when she wakes up.”
The guard seizes me by the collar. As he drags me away, I scream, “You son of a bitch! I’ll get you for this!”
Chapter 11
I pass Qiang in the doorway. She has a couple vials of little Maddy’s blood. “You monster! How could you? How could you do that to my daughter?”
Qiang stops. She looks back at Maddy on the floor, engulfed by her pajamas. “I am sorry, Stacey. I did not mean for this to happen.”
“You’re as bad as he is,” I hiss at her. Then the guard shoves me into the room.
They leave me alone with Maddy, though I’m sure Ling still watches us with his cameras. I rush over to her and kneel at her side. I touch one of her pudgy cheeks to make sure it’s still warm. I put one hand against the potbelly that bulges against the pajamas to make sure she’s still breathing.
I grunt as I lift her up. Despite a couple of weeks of recovery, I’m still weak from all that blood they drained out of me. I barely manage to get Maddy over to the gurney. She whimpers a little as I set her down.
I stay by her bed for a long time and remember how I used to watch her sleep the last time she was this age. Like then she looks so peaceful, so angelic that it nearly brings tears to my eyes. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful before or since as my little girl as she sleeps.
The tears start to flow again when she sticks her thumb in her mouth. I watch her happily suck on her thumb, a habit her mother and I spent a lot of time and effort to break her of. I finally started to dip her thumb in vinegar while she slept, so when she put her thumb in her mouth it would taste awful. A couple weeks of that and she broke the habit. I guess I’ll have to try it again.
As I used to do, I pull the blankets over her, up to her chin. Then I stroke Maddy’s black hair while she sleeps. “It’s all right, honey. Daddy’s here. I’ll find a way out of this for us.”
In her sleep, Maddy whimpers again.
***
I try to stay awake for when Maddy finally wakes up. As the hours go by, my eyelids start to get heavy. The sounds of her gentle breathing eventually lull me to sleep.
I wake up to a shriek. As I jump to my feet, I know the shriek came from Maddy. She screams as she stares at her tiny, chubby hands, the thumb of the left one coated in slobber. “Oh my God!” she screams. Her little football-shaped eyes focus on me. They’ve turned brown now instead of their natural blue. “Stace? What’s happened to me?”
“It’s all right,” I say.
“The hell it is! I’m a baby!”
“I know. Just calm down. Let me explain.”
“You know? Did you help them?” Her pudgy cheeks turn red and tears bubble up in her eyes. “Did you do this to me?”
“No, of course not. Dr. Ling had me in his office. I saw the whole thing.”
“What did they do to me?” She looks around frantically, for a mirror I’m sure. There aren’t any mirrors in here. No glass either. Then I see the metal tray from Maddy’s last meal.
“Stay right there.”
“Don’t go, Stace. Please.”
“I’m not going far, all right?”
“OK.”
I grab the tray from the corner of the room. It’s not a perfect mirror, especially in the dim light of the room, but it’s better than nothing. I bring it over to Maddy and press it into her hands. She holds the tray up in front of her face. The tears start to flow even faster. “I’m a fat Chinese baby!” she wails.
All I can think to do is pat her gently on the back. “I know, honey.” I pull her into a hug, to force her not to look at herself. “It’ll be all right. We’ll find a way to change you back.”
“What did they do, Stace? Tell me!”
I let go of her and then crouch down so my eyes are level with hers. “They gave you an experimental drug. It’s called FY-1978. It’s an anti-aging drug.”
“Anti-aging? It turned me into a baby!”
“I know.” I wish Dr. Palmer were here; she could explain it a lot better than I can. Even Dr. Ling would be an improvement right now. “That’s what it does, make you younger.”
“Why am I Chinese?”
“He put some Chinese DNA in the serum.”
“What?”
“I don’t really understand it either. All I know is they gave you this drug and it made you like this.”
“Why?”
“They used you as a guinea pig, to see if it worked.”
“It worked all right.”
“It sure did.”
Maddy picks up the tray again. After a minute, she hurls the tray away. “I don’t wanna be a baby!” she sobs.
“I know, sweetheart.” I hug her again. There’s not much else I can do at the moment. I rub her back, the way I used to when she would cry. “We’ll find a way to fix this. I promise.”
Like when she was a child before, she cries herself out after a few minutes. Once her sobs have turned to sniffles, she goes limp in my arms. I ease her back onto the gurney. I stroke her hair while she drifts into sleep again. Before she falls asleep, she whispers, “Don’t go, Stace.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
***
I keep my promise. There’s still nothing to sit on, so I sit on the floor. I lower the gurney as much as I can so she won’t have to look too far to find me. Then I wait.
As I wait, I stare at her. I try to memorize her new face so I can tell if anything’s changed. It seems like she’s stopped regressing, but what if she hasn’t? What if she gets younger? W
hat if soon she’s down to two years old? What if she becomes a baby again? I didn’t change many diapers the first time around; I can’t imagine I’d be any better at it this time.
The door opens after what I figure is at least three hours. I expect Dr. Ling’s goons to march in and haul me away. It’s just Qiang. Oddly enough she carries a pair of oversized department store shopping bags.
“How is she feeling?” Qiang asks.
“She’s sleeping,” I whisper.
“Good.”
Qiang sets the bags down by the gurney. Then she bends over the bed. She brushes hair away from Maddy’s face to feel her forehead. Qiang nods to herself. “No fever,” she says.
“She’s just tired. Regressing eighteen years will do that to you.”
“Yes, I am sure it is very difficult for her.”
“Like you’d know.”
“No, I would not. But you do. That is why I hope you will help her.”
“Of course I will.” I take Maddy’s hand, the one not in her mouth at the moment. “I’d do anything for her.”
“Good. After she has rested, we will need to perform some tests on her. Dr. Ling wants to verify that the regression has stopped.”
“Yeah, great. So what’s he going to do then?”
“That I do not know.”
Maddy mumbles something I can’t understand with her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes are still closed. She must be dreaming. From the way her body begins to twitch, I doubt it’s a good dream. I squeeze her hand. “It’s all right, Maddy. I’m here. You’re safe.”
She calms down a little at that. I keep hold of her hand and hope that will allow her to sleep peacefully. The poor kid deserves some rest after what she’s been through. Qiang is right that I know a little about what Maddy’s going through, but to go from a fifty-year-old man to an eighteen-year-old girl isn’t as difficult as Maddy’s transition will be.
While I hold Maddy’s hand and she dreams, Qiang unpacks the bags. The first bag contains clothes: shirts, pants, sweatshirts, pajamas, and even underwear all the right size for a little girl. Qiang unfolds a pink T-shirt with a unicorn on it. “I hope these will fit her. I could not be sure of her measurements.”
Chances Are Omnibus (Gender Swap Fiction) Page 32
