Too exhausted to actually plan out a dream, I ended up dreaming of Victoria being in the world of the Sea Men together with Nancy and Aries. The three of us were being completely flirty with the Sea Men, having sex with several, and each of us laying an egg before it was over. None of us implanted the eggs, though. Despite our tiredness, we were all aware of how realistic the dreams had become, and we were all afraid we would really produce children whose fathers would present them to us on a future visit.

In the dream, within her dreamworld, I tried to see how far into Victoria’s past I see. And it was what wasn’t there that stood out. There were memories, and more memories of Victoria’s than I could ever remember exploring before. I could actually follow my Victoria back a bit further now in her mind, before I could remember ever having dreamed of being Victoria, though not all the way back to when I first invented Nancy before we had even started school. But this Victoria, the one who I grew up being in dreams, was not, no way, no how, the same as alt-Victoria that I brought into the world the other day. Even if she had some of the same personality traits, it was clear that she followed a different path.

The portal people had come up with a different solution to the sewage problem. Rather than a system of pipes and waste processing plants and controversy over where those let out, they had genetically engineered their bodies so that they did not need any of that, or even toilets.

Monday, July 17, my bed-mate was just the doll again. I spent the day back out at well 2 again, but we resolved the problem that day and so they had me take Tuesday off. Since I felt like I had been neglecting her, I focused on dreaming about Victoria that night. Being Victoria had been awkward when I was working, and I’d had other priorities the last two weekends, so this was the first day that was convenient to bring her back since I’d figured out I had some control.

The character I dreamt of that night was one of the many not-quite-human species my wild childhood imagination had invented during the period after I had learned how sex works and was imagining other ways that it could work. Aries was not the ram from the zodiac, but a member of a species called the Sea Men. The pun on semen wasn’t intended at the time I named these people. They’re actually based on the seahorse!

When I awoke, Victoria was there in the place of the doll. Remember when I said her story was for another time? I guess it’s “another time” now.

Just when we thought things were getting normal, on Saturday morning before we left the house, another pickup towing a trailer showed up. It looked like our pickup and trailer, if we’d let hippies decorate the outside.

Ellen and I were both handy with tools, but only doing odd jobs. To take a chance at something better, we entered a do-it-yourselfer reality TV show. This type of thing wasn’t for everybody. We had to be able to spend weeks on location in Key West (because it was billed as an “island getaway” to draw in viewers), and even more time there if we won. So it was ideal for people like us with no steady work.

That was a lot of work, but it worked. There seemed to be a real world now that I lived in, with me the cartoonist Barbara and my husband Keith. As I had depicted myself, in my seventh life I made a living drawing The Watsons. But a lot had changed.

We sent people to explore the empty ships right away. And we found... more documentation. In the parts of the world needing cleanup over the facilities, all the large bodies capable of helping with the cleanup were deployed that way. But here, I was free to participate in another document translation effort.

We found there is an organized group spreading a link to a forum on Reddit called dollcrisis. They are using that as a central place for activities people are working together on. And it’s mainly about these facilities, because the other stuff like rescuing all our people and making alphabet pads for people who can’t speak, people mostly figured out already.

Soon it got dark outside, and the group kept going. One thing I noticed was that nobody got hungry or thirsty, and as it got quite late, not tired either. Apparently, freed from our human bodies, we did not have those issues anymore.

The next morning, our space suits arrived. All eleven of us were all together when we were trying on the suits. Our group of eight simply tried on the suits, without catheters, and made sure they fit. They were set aside for our return to Earth. The other group got fully ready for flight, with a near pass of their target to the station just an hour from when the suits arrived.

During 2035 there were 12 incidents in which a spacecraft was impacted by free-floating man-made materials in space, generally classified as “space junk.” This was a record number of such impacts, and everybody agreed a solution was needed, but what? 2036 managed to avoid breaking the record again only due to companies shying away from launches.

In 2037, Karl Greene proposed a solution.

Mad scientist John Crevil and his wife swapped bodies with billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife, but their plan to cause the Astorias to die in the Crevils’ bodies has gone awry, on top of an extra person getting involved. What else could go wrong?

Mad scientist John Crevil has figured out the perfect crime: Use gene-editing technology to swap places with billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife, and set them up to die after putting the Astorias’ into their own guises. What could go wrong?

The first day, we didn’t actually go in ourselves. We just poked equipment through the portal on poles of various sorts, and took readings from it. We didn’t get a GPS signal or cellular phone signal except for what came through the portal from here. By closing the door I’d installed, and using a longer pole, we concluded there was no trace of those signals.

We awoke fully transformed, at least in terms of the breasts and sexual organs. We stood and looked at ourselves and each other for a bit. And we liked what we saw. I had worn C-cup breasts with the falsies, but the ones that had grown in on my chest appeared a little larger and were probably D-cup. And before we got done admiring ourselves, Marco had his first erection, and I think he was a little bigger than I had been, unless it was just an illusion due to it being on his smaller body.

Over the next week, I started thinking about things. Who was I interested in? Was it boys, girls, or both? Did it even matter, since the whole town was family and they were likely all also being offered the chance to change bodies? Some of them wouldn’t, but they probably all had the choice.

But I wasn’t sure at all. I wasn’t really feeling that kind of feeling. Wasn’t sure at all who I might want to ask to date. I told Mom about it.

Ever wonder where all those lost socks go? They're right here!

I was a little worried about what was going to happen when I went off to college. But I had thought about it in advance. I had an interesting, critical choice. On my application, I could tell them I was a girl or that I was a guy, and trying to fill in that little box was what had me thinking.

One day I was talking with Anna. “You know, I never did figure out where vampires came from.”

“Did we have to come from somewhere? Couldn’t we have just developed, like humans did?”

“And what, we converted the apes and Neanderthals back before humans developed? That doesn’t seem right. Why does holy water have an effect on us? Are we demonic in origin?”

“Huh. I never really thought about that,” Anna remarked.

“Do you think Phil and Pam are going to work out long term?” I asked Anna.

“Probably. Did you see the way they were looking at each other last night when they left?”

“Yeah. They both texted me their thanks.”

“They texted me to say thanks, too. So ready to find two more tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Let’s go to the straight club tonight and find two more of those guys too shy to ask a girl out. If they have someone they were interested in, we try and set them up, and if not, we try to encourage them to ask someone.”