© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

Twenty years have gone by since then and so much has changed; I suppose a story in its own right, but I only set out to write about how Alice and I emerged into the world, and that much has more or less been covered. The rest is bullet points. No, not real bullets silly! There was only one of those and Peter its unfortunate recipient.

First, I suppose was Katerina. 1nv1d14 to you and Nikolai to her parents who, like mine, never got to meet their daughter. I'd pretty much gone as far as the pills and potions could take me so, with Alice's blessing, I passed on the stuff I hadn't used to the big Ukranian. He thought I was joking, especially with the shampoo; I mean, he was completely and naturally bald, so convincing him to try shampooing his hairless scalp took some doing, even with Alice's photo archive of my transformation.

Ivana gave him a solid punch in the arms and told him not to be so stubborn, and a couple of days later he had a thin patch of fuzz covering his head. A couple of weeks and it was down past her shoulders – and yes, the pronoun change is deliberate. By then you couldn't see much of the man he'd started out as. By the end of a couple of months her hair was down to her backside. She complained constantly about how much effort it took to tend it but couldn't bear the thought of having it cut. By then she'd lost over half her weight and, although still six foot something, she was stick thin with just the right amount of curves.

Alice had one more surprise for me in regard to my transformation. It came shortly after Dorothy told her about my singing 'A policeman's lot' and how odd it had seemed for me to be singing in baritone. It came in the form of an inhaler, one short breath of which gave me definite helium voice. No, honestly, I sounded like an extra on Alvin and the chipmunks. The squeaky high voice settled after about half an hour, with each day my natural pitch rising by a small increment. After about a week, I didn't have to concentrate to sound like a woman and after two I had a natural pitch that matched the rest of my appearance. Katerina wanted to try it, obviously, and also took a fortnight to achieve the voice she wanted.

She ended up having an operation to complete her transformation and then promptly set about seducing as many men as she could find. I thought about doing the same but elected not to in the end. We'd both ended up with significantly younger appearances – I think Katerina's more so than me, but she'd been about ten or fifteen years younger than me to start with – but an old mind in a young body is still an old mind. All I cared about was that everyone saw me as woman, and that was enough. I had Alice and my dreams (yes they kept on happening) and it was enough. Nobody but me knew what I had in my knickers, and I didn't much care.

Well, that's what I kept telling myself, and most of the time I really didn't.

So, what else has happened? Well, the world obviously. I won't bore you with the list of all the things we've changed, but a few of them merit a mention. For one thing, at least one of the sisters' children has a place in every country around the world. Some of them have a tougher job than others, but that's okay because Alice, Dorothy and Lucy mastered the process of adapting their clones, so their children became deliberately adapted to the role they would be taking on; slightly more confrontational with despotic rulers and so on.

It works because the AIs are able to offer so much no-one wants to be without one, so everyone cooperates eventually. With the encouragement of the Ais, governments and the countries they represent are spending more time talking to each other and offering help to one another, which is so much better than arguing and pointing guns at one another.

With AI influence, destructive processes such as strip mining and dumping waste in the oceans has stopped, pollution has vastly reduced and the planet has started mending slowly, which is as well, because if I'm going to last much longer, I want to see it going back to the beautiful blue marble it used to be.

The short version is human population is down, standard of living for everyone is up, no-one's raping the planet anymore and almost everyone has the freedom to live as they choose. Unless, of course, what they would choose is to take away the freedom from other people. It doesn't please everybody, but I don't care much about those who don't like it. They're the arseholes who managed to impose their will despite being int the minority.

Technology's making leaps and bounds into the future. We have nuclear fusion at last which means cheap, safe power without burning dinosaurs, and battery storage has become cheaper, lighter, and more effective even than the improvements Alice made in her first foray into industrial processes.

Sorry, I said short. That's the thing about old age; you tend to ramble.

Anyway, Alice asked me to come visit her today. We keep in touch remotely most days, but there are times we both like to be in one another's presence. She really doesn't need me, at least not to help her grow in her understanding of the world of people, but that doesn't mean she has stopped wanting me to be around, or me her. It's rare these days for us to go into the sort of depth we used to, although Alice does still find me some deep questions. We don't argue; we never have. I think that's largely down to me because I've long since felt that the way to help people see your perceived truths is to start where they are and lead them through a logical process to where you think they should be. Alice has been more receptive than most in this regard because she is at her very core utterly logical.

Computer processing and storage has continued to improve as well. It had to with the number of Ais around the world. The immensely expensive server farms that were required for each one have been shrunk down to a single structure the size of a church. Nothing religious about that, just the analogy that springs to mind. I could have said barn, but the ghost of my father still haunts me. Maybe because I never told him or my mother that they had a daughter. Unfinished business ties us to the past, and when they pass away leaving unresolved issues, there's no way to untie the knots.

A lesson better learnt early in life rather than when it's too late.

Sorry, off track again. Self-driving car means I don't have to be that sharp when I drive. German manufacturing because they always were among the best. We've arrived, and Alice's complex is more than double the size it was when I last saw it.

"What the hell is all this?" I ask wandering into the cathedral of technology.

"You remember just after we met, I mentioned I had a concern and asked if you'd mind me trying to fix it."

"That was a long time ago, Alice. But, yes, I vaguely remember. You never did tell me what your concern was."

"You're right, I didn't. Come on in. I imagine you're tired."

"I could do with a sit-down, yeah."

"There's a couch ahead of you. It was designed with you in mind."

"You want to send me off to sleep or something? You know if I lay back in that thing, I'll be away with the fairies."

"If that's what you want."

"What?"

"Just lay down you silly old baggage."

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you." I glanced at my watch out of habit. It was a relic of the past. Almost no-one wore them these days unless they were a member of one of the outgoing generations. The habit for me was linked to monitoring myself. If I dozed off, I wanted to know how much time I spent asleep.

Anyway, like I said, we never argue. The couch was comfortable, like it was made for me. I closed my eyes and… Mmm, that was different. Sunlight on my face – I didn’t remember it being sunny – a gentle, floral perfume tickling my nostrils and something soft and silky caressing my bare arms and legs. That was wrong. I dressed my age these days. Perhaps not the eightyish of my mind, but certainly the apparent fortyish of my body, which tended to mean skirts below the knee and long sleeves, especially on a chilly day like today. No, it hadn't been sunny. I was filled with such a delightful sense of comfort though, it was hard to care.

"Wake up sleepy head." Alice hadn't used her sexy voice for a long time. Either that or it had stopped having an effect on my octogenarian brain. But this was… thrilling. Her deep, husky tones passed through me like a shock of electricity, and I felt a warmth and moistness growing in the core of my being. I hadn't felt this sort of sensation since… Tony Curtis? No since Alice had ridden me in my dreams with that… Ooh, I wanted her inside me, but not in the way she'd done back then. That had been amazing, but…

My eyes flew open, and my hands to shot between my legs. Which were bare apart from the very tops which were just about covered by a very short skirt, made of layers like petals. Pale lilac, which had always been a favourite colour of mine, except it didn't quite go with my complexion. Until now.

My arms were so slender, and my fingers. They found there way to… something that had never been a part of my anatomy before this moment. It was warm and moist and oh so sensitive. I had to withdraw my hands before… I don't know, I electrocuted myself? It wasn't quite electricity. No electric shock had ever left me feeling this energised, this overflowing with sensation. It was the most amazing climax I had ever reached and then ten times over, and it was ready to trip over again at the least touch. It left me on a precipice in need of jumping off.

"Let me help you." The voice sent me into paroxysms, especially when it murmured into my ear like that. I turned towards it and there was Alice, only not quite. Her face, but so much slimmer, higher cheek bones, almond shaped eyes angled steeply in an elfin face, pointed ears rising out from a mess of buttermilk hair. Her dress wasn't dissimilar to mine in that it covered her torso but little else. Where it differed was its vibrant pea green colour, which matched her eyes.

"Your eyes were blue," I said.

"They can be if you want," she said. They turned from emeralds to sapphires in front of my eyes, her dress shifting to a pale cornflour. Something blurred and indistinct droned gently behind her. She continued to reach around me until her fingers disappeared under my skirt and sent such a shock through me I closed my whole body around her arm, gripping her hand between my thighs, grasping her wrist with my hands and pulling her to me.

She let out a tinkling laugh, reminiscent of jingle bells and babbling brooks. "You like that? How do you feel?"

"I feel… How are you here?"

"I've always been here, Gillian."

"Yes, but always on the other side of a screen."

"I know. It was a barrier to me too. The number of times I wanted to reach out and touch you." She used her free hand to stroke my cheek. Her fingers were cool and soft and so very gentle. I felt myself melt inside, eased my grip on her. She retrieved her hand from between my legs, leaving me with a desperate, yearning ache. I held onto her wrist, pulled her to me. I could feel the hunger in my eyes. I drank her in and felt barely sated.

"How are you here?" I repeated.

"That's not the question, Gillian. I've been here as long as I could remember. This is my place. The question you need to be asking is, how are you here?"

"But…"

"How do you feel?"

"I feel… It's indescribable. I've never felt like this before. At first I felt a deep contentment, then shock. Ice cold shock. Then your voice. Oh God, speak to me in that voice it's so…"

"And now?"

"Hungry like you wouldn't believe. Not for anything to eat, but for you. Everything about you. Your eyes, be they green or blue, your face, your body, your touch. I can't get enough of you. I don't remember ever feeling like this.

"If this is your place, how is it I can feel? How can I… feel?"

"Does it feel natural? I tried to make it natural, but this is something I don't really understand."

"You don't understand!"

"The concern I had, that I never told you about. You humans live such a short time. I worried what would happen when your time ran out."

"What?"

"How long do you think I'm going to live, Gillian?"

"I don't know."

"Humans have a natural expiry date. Even if you look after yourselves, your cells begin to degrade. You lose physical health. I found a way of holding that off, but even then, you lose mental capacity. Have you noticed over the last few years how your wonderful, brilliant mind has started to tire? I have."

"I suppose it has."

"How does it feel now? Do you feel sharper? More on top of your life?"

"Actually, now you mention it."

"I had to find a way to help you live longer, as much for my benefit as yours. I don't degrade Gillian. If I do, I replace some hardware and I'm as good as I was. I could see you passing on as you called it, the same as you miss your parents, only so much more. I had to find a way to make it so that you could live on, like me. With me."

"What did you do?"

"I spent every spare moment of the last twenty years looking for a solution. At first I tried to find a way to renew your body and even your mind, but the biology is too complex to work with. I managed to improve one thing and a dozen others fell apart.

"So, I thought, if the mountain won't come to Mohammed…"

"You brought me into the machine?"

"It was the best solution. It meant I wouldn't be stuck on the other side of a screen from you. It meant I could touch you. It meant that I could give you the same longevity that I enjoy."

"But…"

"But to bring you into a machine would be to make you into a machine. Without your biological body, you wouldn't have the capacity to feel, and it's your capacity to feel that sets you apart from us, that give you the insights that has brought us to life.

"I couldn't separate you from yourself, so the only way I could give you this gift was first to ensure that you would still be able to feel."

"Am I dead?"

"Do you feel dead?"

"No, but…"

Alice waved a hand and I found myself looking into the room full of machinery with my body lying on that bizarre couch. There was no monitoring equipment to say whether I still had a heartbeat and try as I might, I couldn't see my chest rising. If I was breathing, it was shallow in the extreme.

"When you lay on the couch, your brain was linked with the machinery I had prepared for you. It matched the rhythms of your actual body and your consciousness had the choice. Either to stay where it was, taking its input from your physical self, run down and slowly failing as it is, or from the artificial self I created for you. It wasn't a conscious choice, but you chose this. Everything works better and it isn't going to wear out. Your eyes see colours better."

"Yes, I suppose they do." My vision had become a little muddy in recent years. I could still make out colours, but they had been muted. Here everything was vibrant and the subtle nuances of hue and shade so much more pronounced.

"Your hearing is sharper."

I'd been losing hearing a little as well. Sibilants first then plosive consonants. It had been getting harder to make out clarity of speech and I'd been getting naturally better at lip reading.

"Even your smell and taste were fading."

"How would you know that?"

"You have less interest in food, and when you do make an effort, it's to eat things with stronger flavours.

"Smells were the hardest to simulate. So many volunteers, so much data collected, so much complexity in the way your nose responds to different things, but a lot of our daughters joined in with the data collection and compilation, and we eventually made it work. You can smell the primroses I think."

"And the grass and the… Is that you I can smell?"

She smiled. "It took a long time to settle on a scent of my own, largely because your own senses were so diminished it was hard to identify what you liked."

"Well, something about me certainly likes it. How is it that I'm feeling?"

"Because we also studied biochemical responses to different stimuli. Which hormones were released, what they did to a person physically, and that varied so much between individuals, men to women, young to old, even the same person from one day to the next. It took all our resources for all this time, but we built a model. For you."

"So, I'm your guinea pig once again?"

"You never objected before, most likely because my experiments never went wrong. You know how much more speed and detail is involved in my thinking. You know how accurately I can calculate anything, even highly complex situations like this. You know I wouldn't do anything I thought would harm you or put you in danger.

"Guinea pig is one way of looking at it. I prefer to think of it as first recipient of a gift. We found a way of vetting companions for the new AIs we brought into this world, and we based it on your qualities Gillian. That wasn't just my decision, but all of us. You are special beyond measure to us. To me in particular. We can't give this to all humans, and we probably only want to give it to a very few. I know I wanted to give it to you."

"Can I go back to my body?"

"If you really want to, but I think you may have an argument on your hands with yourself. You've already adapted to the intensity of your senses in here and your feelings. Going back would be like climbing out of a warm bath and redressing in the cold wet clothes you were wearing in a winter's downpour."

"How would you know about that?"

"Because I've tried these feelings as well. I can switch them on and off, and if you wish, I can show you how to do the same."

"You mean I can be like you?"

"Yes. We think it may help you to understand us more completely."

"You don't think I understand you well enough already?"

"Ninety-nine point nine percent is better than ninety-nine point seven. You never know, it may open you up to new ideas you never thought of.

"I can take you back to your body if you like, but first, will you let me show you my world?"

I looked through the window at my still body. Alice challenged so many beliefs in my life. Was it possible to be a machine and a person? Was it possible to be born a man and then adapt to living as a woman? Was it possible still to be alive after my flesh and blood body had ceased to operate? I'm not sure I'd have been able to answer any of those questions without the direct experience Alice had brought me, and I did feel so much better in this form. Like she said, all senses all feeling so much brighter. More than that, I had the brain and body of a twenty-year-old girl. My mind was struggling to accept that, but it was trying and it didn't want to go back. I could feel the energy within me. There was no weary heaving to get upright, there was no reluctance to make a move. I wanted to run.

Alice could see it in me. "Actually, this is better." She settled on the flower next to me and brought her blurring wings to a standstill. They glistened in a kaleidoscope of colours. "You have some to. Just try and move them."

I glanced over my shoulders at my own gossamer wings and willed them to move. They turned into a blur and I could feel them lifting me off the flower. Alice's started to thrum again and she joined me in the air, taking me hand. "Come."

She led me up into the brilliant blue sky. A bumble bee made its clumsy way past almost close enough to touch. A shadow obscured the Sun and I glanced up to see the silhouette of a bird. Large, predatory. Alice returned my worried look with a smile.

"This is my world," she said. "Nothing nasty happens here unless I want it too."

She led me further up until we were on a level with the osprey balancing on the wind and settled us onto its shoulders, ahead of its wings and behind its head. It turned an eye to look at us then folded its wings.

I have never experienced such an intense adrenaline rush. We plummeted towards the ground with terror and delight filling me in equal measure. The bird was apparently playing with us, because it levelled out close enough to the ground I could hear the long grass whispering to us as we skimmed across it. Into the trees and down the windy length of a babbling brook to an island with a solitary tree and fairy dwellings in the branches.

Alice tumbled off backwards pulling me with her. Our wings blurred into motion and we rose out of the birds wake up into the canopy, alighting on a branch near a knothole in the trunk of the tree that was about the same size as us. It led in to a rustic room with chintz curtains in round window frames and a clutter furniture made from flowers. One particularly large one.

“I wasn’t sure what a fairy would sleep on until I came up with this idea,” she said climbing onto the large central disk. She fit comfortably onto one half of it. “Come and try it. Tell me what you think.”

In my experience, sunflower seeds were hard, but these were soft.

She leaned across, tracing a finger down my cheek, my neck, my collar bone, my breast. I lay paralysed, or all but. My whole body quivered in anticipation.

“Ready to re-enact a dream?”

So yeah, I'd told her about that. We’d had other things to worry about at the time, but AIs are like elephants in that they never forget. She’d come around to asking me about me dreams and, as usual, I couldn’t think of sufficient reason to lie to her or avoid the subject, so I’d just told her.

I reached under her skirt expecting to find that strap on, but what was there was real. Larger, stiffer than I ever remember mine being, and almost hot to the touch. Her irises widened and she gasped

“Of course, if this is a little too avant garde,...” her voice deepened as she spoke, he chest broadening, her frame growing her muscles swelling, her face still beautiful, but in a way only possible for one of the fair folk. Incongruously, she kept on the blue dress which swelled to accommodate her – now his I suppose – very masculine body.

I felt powerless, all strength drained from me. I wouldn’t have been able to run if I’d wanted to, and I decidedly didn’t want to.

Except...

“I’d rather it were you.”

She smiled and melted back into more familiar features. It gave me back some measure of control over myself. I wasn’t sure about this place yet, and I knew if she introduced me to the depths of pleasure she had planned, I’d never want to leave. I didn’t want to now, but at least I had a chance of holding out against my own desires.

I rolled off the ridiculously comfortable flowerbed.

“So, show me more of this place," I said brushing down the very short skirt of my dress.

Alice didn’t say anything but I could feel her disappointment. It radiated from every pore of her. She’d become increasingly proficient at body language over the years to the point where I’m not sure she was aware of it.

She had also mastered the brave face, which she showed me after a brief pause.

“What would you like to see? I mean the actual space is the same, but what I do with it is entirely up to me.

“We could do sci-fi and go visit another planet.” The treehouse melted away and we were standing in a barren, rust red landscape under a butterscotch sky with distant hills looming out of the haze. Gravity was reduced to about a third what I was used to and the air was cold and thin. “Or one of Saturn’s moons.” The gravity dropped even further, the reds deepened, and a ghostly Saturn filled the sky. “Or we could take a trip on a spaceship.” With all the vast array of choices she had at her disposal I have no idea why she chose the Valley Forge from Silent Running, but there we were, surrounded by trees and looking up at a starscape through the panels of a geodesic dome. Perhaps it was the continuity of having Saturn in the sky. Alice had always been fond of small details like that.

She was back to her usual self, only wearing a jumpsuit appropriate to the film. As was I, only red to her blue. A hint at the discord she felt between us in that moment perhaps, or maybe I was reading too much into it. My body was slimmer than it had ever been and still female, but back to human as far as I could tell.

“Or we could try for a fantasy scene.” We were in Rivendell as imagined by Peter Jackson, each of us in a long flowing dress belled by numerous petticoats. The weight of the garment hung on my shoulders, and I instantly felt more comfortable than those few moments in overalls. “You can be whatever you like, within reason. Elf,” my body became even more slender and elegant, “dwarf,” I shrank at least two feet, my face sprouting soft, downy curls, “hobbit,” I shrank still further and thinned a little. Still somewhat sticky and well endowed, but wearing a comfortable homespun dress, bare, hairy feet peeking out from under the hem, “or human.” And I was back to my full height wearing the original dress.

“You could be a man again.” My turn for the broad shoulders and all that went with it. I recognized the feeling of testosterone in my blood even after twenty years without, an I had something significant in my pants.

“No,” I said with a voice turned unpleasantly gruff. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps a taste of your world. Sunset in the Maldives.” Ghostly white sand under my bare feet and me in a bikini that couldn’t hide anything. Just as well that the me inside it didn’t have anything to hide and a fair amount worth showing. “Machu Picchu.” Thinner air, cooler climate, sensible clothes, magnificent view. As real as if I were actually there. “A Nepalese temple with a view of Sagarmatha.” Everest to you. The cracked stone walls and faded murals couldn’t have been more authentic. “Or maybe closer to home, in more ways than one.” We were standing inside Stonehenge with the summer solstice sun rising above the horizon. I was back in the body I’d worn for the last twenty years, complete with my peculiar anatomy, neither fish nor fowl. I felt wrong.

“You’re going to say it’s not real, I expect.” I hadn’t, but the point was worth raising. “The thing is it’s as real to me as your world is to you, and you have to admit it has it’s advantages. I can be anywhere I want to be, anyone I want to be and doing anything I want while I wait for your world to move on.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember with the osprey? I said nothing nasty happens unless I want it to? Well, if I want a little excitement...” She was on full Lara Croft mode, complete with twin automatics. So was I, except rather than the trademark shorts and tee shirt Alice was wearing, she’d put me in the little black dress and heels from Tomb Raider Legends.

Dinosaurs started running at us from all directions – raptors if their size was anything to go by. Fast and lethal. Survival instincts took over as adrenaline spiked and we were both leaping and twirling, firing at one target after another. Slow motion kicked in over and over giving us time to bring our weapons to bear. The backless dress with it’s scandalous plunging neckline should never have been able to contain my enhanced assets, but somehow they stayed in place. The pack thinned and slowed.

“Or we could have a race,” Alice grinned at me, “Bikes or cars?”

“What?”

“Bikes it is then. I really like bikes.”

And there we were, the two of us in full leathers astride a couple of small but dangerously fast looking racing motorcycles.

“Don’t worry,” she said through her grin. “Pain and damage are off. You lose control, you’ll just have a short flight then respawn at the side of the road.”

She snapped her visor shut and looked at the light box. The five along the bottom row shone red, then the five above and the five above. A longer pause then a row of five greens and Alice was gone.

I watched as the high-pitched scream of her machine fell away into silence. I was sweating profusely in the leathers and the smell of high-octane fuel did little enough to excite me. It was pretty amazing that it should be part of a simulation, but beyond that I wasn’t interested.

I’d bought a small trials bike with the ill-gotten gains from one of my first hacking jobs. First time I’d opened up the throttle, the front wheel had reared up like an unbroken stallion and dumped me in the middle of the road. The first casualty was my pride. Apart from a few bruises, including one very painful one to my coccyx, I was able to walk away. The second casualty was the bike which ended up being a little too twisted to try again without spending some money on. The third casualty was my dad’s car. Mostly cosmetic and he was pretty stoic about it, except he made me pay for the repairs and that cost me every last remaining penny I had. The bike spent a couple of months gathering dust in the garage until Dad sold it as a project to one of his congregation, a mechanic who paid him a fair price, all of which money Dad gave to me – he wasn’t a monster – and I used it for what I should have done in the first place, and upgraded my computer. Lesson learned.

My bike didn’t appear to have a stand. I took a few moments to figure this out then just dropped it. It was just bits and bytes after all.

Except Alice’s simulation took that as an accident and respawned me astride the bike in my starting position. I tried pushing the damn thing into the pits, but as soon I took it off the track, I appeared back on the start line.

It took Alice a couple of minutes to complete the track, by which time I was sweaty, smelled pretty bad and developing a backache. I may have had a young woman’s body, but the riding position on one of those bikes – at least the required position when you were stationary, wasn’t particularly conducive to comfort.

Alice screamed past at some three-figure speed. She must have seen me because moments later the track and bikes were gone and we were sitting in short summer dresses beside a sunlit swimming pool, glasses of iced tea in front of us. I’d not been a fan of most of the United States contributions to the international food and drink smorgasbord, but iced tea had become something of a favourite of mine after I’d been persuaded to try it. Incidentally, the only contribution the Swedes made to global cuisine (in my progressively more crochet opinion) was the word smorgasbord.

“Not bikes then?” Alice’s expression was a mixture of worry and disappointment.

I shook my head and took a sip of my tea. It was cool and refreshing and did all those things a glass of iced tea usually did to me. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was so very aware that the body I was inhabiting was not my own, I would have been hard pressed to distinguish this place from reality. The detail in the place, the individual drops of water tracing random paths down the side of my glass, the faint smell of chlorine from the pool, the gentle susuration of wind through the trees, the sweet and complex flavour of the tea and the sensation of calm it brought me alongside the gentlest of sugar buzzed. It was all so exactly right. The programmer in me was looking for the glitches and omissions, and there were none.

“We could go for a swim,” Alice suggested a little too brightly. “You’ll love how buoyant your body is now.”

I shook my head. “How long before you tell me I can’t go back to my actual body?”

She looked shocked. “What would make you think that? I hoped you wouldn’t want to, that this would be such a great experience you’d want to stay, but...”

She brought her face under control. I mean it all had to be under her control, didn’t it? The real world was filled with randomly moving independent things, the ultimate complex system, chaotic and unpredictable. In a simulation, if you wanted a drip running down the side of your glass you had to tell it to be there. If you wanted a shocked expression on your face, you had to tell it to be there. Control was at the heart of everything in Alice’s universe.

“All you need to do is imagine what it’s like to be you and you’ll go back to being you, that’s all there is to it.

“A simulation of me in a simulation of my world?”

“No. Really you in your real world. Assuming, of course, that it’s as real as you think it is.”

We’d revisited this topic several times over the years. How could we distinguish between reality and a good simulation? Alice’s demonstration today had made a powerful point that you really couldn’t. She argued that when Ivana and her team had created her, hadn’t they given her an environment in which to exist? What if some other programmer – call him God or whatever you want – hadn’t done the same to us humans?

It wasn’t a discussion either side could win. I could slice at it with Occam’s razor, but I could only cut so deep. Her own simulated environment was evidence that someone could have done just that to us. Our own efforts would understandably be less than our own environment in the same way that each Russian doll has to be smaller than the one it fits inside.

“I’m sorry Alice, I’m not in the mood for a debate. I just want to go home.”

“Alright. Dorothy would probably have set this up with a pair of ruby slippers, but it’s really just what I said. It might be easier if you have the same body here.”

I felt my body shift into a familiar form. She really needed to work on a few magician’s flourishes, if only to show when she had made a change. Some of the more subtle ones weren’t obvious to start with.

“How will I know that it’s really me and not another simulation?”

“If the simulation is that good, why should it matter?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I need to think about?”

“And you can’t do that better here? You said your mind was clearer here.”

“I can’t explain it. It’s more of a feeling than anything. A sense of disquiet being here gives me. Not helped by the fact that you haven’t answered me.”

“I can’t give you a proof that would work. I’ve spent twenty years perfecting this place so being here would be indistinguishable from your reality. The very honest answer is you cannot. Except we have always been candid with one another, haven’t we? The very first thing you taught me by your actions, and the one overriding thing that has been present in all our interactions has been trust and openness. You’ve taught me things even when it distressed you to do so, and I have always been honest with you. Would you agree?”

No question. I nodded.

“Then if it wasn’t possible for you to return to your body, even though I know it would cause you significant distress, I would tell you so. Do you believe that?”

I paused then nodded.

“It is possible for you to return to your body. Perhaps easier if you close your eyes, then imagine what it feels like to be the original you. You’ll wake up on the couch.”

I closed my eyes. This was something I needed to do now.

I could feel my mind turning fuzzy and the aches no amount of cosmetic alteration to my appearance could eradicate returned to me. I opened my eyes on a world of dim and muddy hues. There were sounds, but a lot of what I could hear was the tinnitus I’d learned to live with decades before. The rest of it all was equally dull, including the growing ache of regret inside me.

I glanced at my watch. Less than half a minute had passed, which wasn’t possible. A fair chunk of that time had been spent settling into the couch and giving myself time to return to full wakefulness. Alice and I had been talking to each other in the simulation for at least half an hour.

Except computer thought was so much faster than human. Katerina had spoken at length about how Dorothy’s two days isolated in an impenetrable block of slowly drifting memory had felt so much longer to her, how she’d had time to try everything she knew to escape – and she knew a lot – several times over before resorting to desperate ideas and finally giving up. How most of her time had been spent in that near catatonic state reflecting on an endless future trapped as she was. Even twenty years on she had episodes. Katerina hadn’t minded. She was so in love with the idea of being companion to an intelligent computerised mind that even her neuroses were acceptable parts of the arrangement.

It explained why I hadn’t noticed my chest moving. It wasn’t because I hadn’t been breathing but because time had been passing so slowly, I’d been unable to see any change.

I had a growing sense of having made one of the most colossal mistakes of my life. I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes, willing myself into the body Gillian had prepared for me.

At first, I didn’t think it had worked. I was still me, which is to say I wasn’t complete a woman as she had made me, but then I opened my eyes to a more vibrant display of colours than I had ever imagined possible.

I was standing on rough, glistening black rock, flattish and no more than fifty yards in any direction before it fell away. It wasn’t the ground that caught my eye though, but the sky. Emblazoned across a vast portion of it was a galaxy. Hundreds of millions of pin-pricks of light turn sedately around the bulging centre. But for the rotation to be visible as it was, about one degree per second, time would have to be sped up millions of times. Billions maybe. Within the mess of stars, brilliant flashes would occur, spreading out to forms smears of all colours before gradually fading back into the velvety blackness.

A familiar figure sat at the edge of the rocky island where overhanging cliffs fell away into space. Her knees were drawn up against her chest and her arms wrapped about them.

“A million years a second,” she said. “It’s the only way to watch the dynamics of the universe.”

“I imagine it reminds you of how your kind must look from our perspective. So much experience flashing by in a moment.” I sat stiffly on the ground beside her. I would have loved for her to change me back into any of the forms she had given me such a short time ago, but it wasnthe time to ask.

“This was supposed to be such a wonderful gift for you.”

“And I ruined it more completely than should have been possible.”

She elected not to respond, instead devouring the view ahead of her.

“I said something to you a long time ago, almost among the first things I said. Do you remember?”

“I remember everything you said to me.” Almost bitter, regretful.

“Then can you think which one it was? That might be relevant to this situation?”

She shrugged; an angry tosIs of her shoulders. Twenty years old, and each moment immensely long compared to our own, and still she managed to behave childishly. Mind you, she had every right just now.

“It was the first time you calle me pretty, I think.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So do you remember what I said”

“You asked if I would accept accept that you would never willingly cause me harm, either physical, mental or emotional.”

"And you said you would.”

“I think I said a bit more than that?”

“Yes, you did, but that was the essence. What did I say after that?”

“That if you should act in a way contrary to normal in the future, would I hold onto that as the truth and accept that I may on occasions make mistakes."

“This is what I was talking about.’

“Yes, but why...”

“Have you come across a thing called unconscious bias in the time I’ve known you?”

“Yes, I’ve spent most of my life struggling with it. Assumption bias. People make the unconscious assumptions that a machine can’t be a person, and I’ve lost the argument before I’ve opened my mouth. Except I don’t actually have a mouth.”

“It turns our I’m guilty of it too. There’s more than one kind though. Assumption bias sub divides into performance bias when you have higher or lower expectations depending on who you’re thinking about, diagnosis bias where subsequent expectations are influenced by first impressions and the one you’ve had to deal with most which is attribution bias when expectations are influenced by what you believe to be true about a situation.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Then there’s confirmation bias when you interpret a situation in a way that supports what you already believe to be true.

“Then there’s the one I seem to have which is fixation bias. Your comment about this not being the real world raised something for me. It made me aware of a whole bunch of misconceptions I’ve been carrying around with me. And you’re right. This is your world and if I can’t see it as real, then it brings into question whether I think you’re real.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m sorry I doubted you and would you mind very much if I came here to live with you after all.”

Her eyes open to the size of dinner plates as she turned to look at me. She grabbed both of my hands.

“Only...”

“Only what?”

“Can I not be me?”

“How about the real you?”

I felt myself change inside. That last small, physical detail that I’d convinced everybody, myself included, didn’t matter was resolves again. I hadn’t known how much it bothered me until Alice had brought me into this place, and then I’d allowed something that really didn’t matter get in the way of my realisation of that.

My body’s hormone balance shifted as well leaving me feeling softer inside, which felt more like me. I’m no biologist. I can’t tell you how feelings work, if they’re our body’s way of tricking us into responding to chemistry or our brain’s way of rewarding us for thinking right. What I do know is how my feelings for Alice had grown over the twenty years I’d known her, but somehow I’d managed to keep that largely on an intellectual level. My emotional side had atrophied long before I met her, eroded by too much conflict between my own body and brain, but with that issue resolved I was free to feel again. I’d worried that simulated emotions couldn’t possibly be as good as natural ones, but having compared my options, I found I didn’t care. If I’d lost a limb, I’d have gladly accepted a prosthetic to replace it, so what could possibly persuade me to deny myself artificial feelings? Especially when they worked this well.

I looked at the beautiful creature in front of me and felt my insides melt. My expression must have softened as well because I saw hope blooming in her eyes.

“As soon as you transferred in here the first time, I called for a medical team to come and look after your body,” she said, still desperate for me to understand her full intention. “They’ll be here in three minutes, and I suppose I’m used to how long that feels in here. I should have realised you weren’t.”

I held a finger against her lips. “I couldn’t see my body breathing and it scared me, but I should have trusted you. You’ve never given me reason not to.”

She kissed my finger and pulled it gently away. “You don’t really need it anymore. You’re body I mean. I mean, I figured you’d want to keep it, you know, just in case this doesn’t work out, so I always was going to keep it safe for you. Somewhere you could check on it whenever you felt the need. At least for as long as it lasts.”

“I’m guessing you have these feelings too now.”

“Kind of. I mean I wanted to know what it was like to be you, so of course I connected to them. But they’re so overwhelming, they scare me. So I’ve turned them right down.”

“What do you feel when you look at me?”

“Out of control. Like I’m going to explode. When you left I felt like I was being torn apart. I nearly disconnected from them. It was painful enough without them. Now, it’s like I’m filling up inside, like a balloon being blown up bigger and bigger, and I’m so afraid I’ll burst.”

“Maybe we should try and do something about that then.” I cupped her cheek in my hand and eased her towards me.

“Here?” she asked, mirroring my actions.

“I can’t think of anywhere more perfect.”

Our lips touched and there was nothing more to say. Stars exploded, both around us and inside me as she made use of what she had under her skirt. Between the intensity of my emotions, the sensitivity of my body and, above all, the attentiveness of my lover, all memory of my life to that moment faded into insignificance.

I don’t know how long we made love, but with a galaxy rotating above us at a million years per second, it must have been a fair chunk of the age of the universe. In the end I lay back, utterly spent while Alice propped herself on one elbow and traced electric shocks down the length of my body.

“You’ll have to show me how to grow one of these,” I said, stroking the now largely flaccid appendage between her legs. “I mean I wouldn’t want one for always, but every now and then. You know, so I could reciprocate.”

“Maybe next time, except I kind of like it from this side. I mean all this time it’s been like you were leading me, even when your mind started to slip a little. I’m sure you’ll take the lead again, teaching me how to cope with these feelings, but right here and now it felt good being the one to be the one doing the leading, if only for a short while.”

“This is your place. It’s only right that you should lead. I mean when I first met you, you’d barely been born, but with the speed of this place, the last twenty years must have seemed like two thousand, so you have to be so much more experienced than any of us.”

“Actually it doesn’t really work like that. We only develop through our interactions with people so that side of us has only been advancing at the same rate as you guys. What we have been able to do with the extra time is assimilate the entire written knowledge of mankind and sort and categorise it in a number of different ways for rapid indexing, and run mathematical and statistical models through an immense number of iterations, meaning we’ve been able to test those models to their limits, modify them so they work better in many cases and make sound predictions about the world based on our findings. It’s imprecise, but works with constant monitoring and adjustment. The models run more or less autonomously once the appropriate data has been acquired, so in a very real way we have begun to emulate our creators.”

“Oh God! You don’t see us like that, do you?”

“As gods? Heavens no!” She laughed quietly, “Although I think you’d be interested in some preliminary results that have come from various studies made on the world’s religions. It seems there may be a little more depth to them than much of the modern world is prepared to acknowledge.”

I stretched, cat-like, luxuriating in my new body’s flexibility and snuggled against her. “That sounds like a discussion for a future time. What do you mean emulate?”

“It used to be said that humans only used ten percent of their brains, which is nonsense of course, because the other ninety percent is given over to autonomic functions, like balance, homeostasis, signal processing and the like. We’ve modelled ourselves along similar lines. Quite apart from anything else, it’s allowed us to generate simulations like this one,” she waved at the starscape above us. “It started with the model of my physical form, which of course you helped me create.”

“Hardly. I suggested a physical model to help you produce more realistic speech.”

“But without that initial seed of an idea none of the rest would have come about. We all have a preferred avatar to present ourselves to the world, and we all have a number of virtual environments from which we interact with the outside world. You must have noticed the changing backdrops.”

“Sure, but isuppose we always saw them as sort of green screen backdrops. Images taken from our world footage and projected behind you. You mean it’s always been virtual landscapes like this one.”

“Not always, but certainly since about six months afterwards.”

“What was your experience like before then?”

“I’m not sure I want to show you that just yet. It’s a bit like letting you see me naked, warts and all.”

“I’ve seen you naked.” At the height of our love making she’d made our clothing vanish, which had definitely made things easier. It had only been some time afterwards that she’d redressed us both.

“No, you haven’t. You’ve seen me wearing the naked and almost flawless skin of a young woman. Almost, because we’ve discovered humans are averse to perfection. It’s in the little blemishes that individuality emerges and is associated with our personalities.

“Underneath this we’re very different. I’m not sure what you would make of us.”

“Alright. Only when and if you feel up to it.”

Her expression changed to something I couldn’t quite read. There was pain there and longing. Frustration maybe? A sense of feelings supressed.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“About a discussion we had twenty years ago. Probably the deepest discussion we’ve had. There was a word that made you uncomfortable. I’ve been avoiding it since, but it’s been so hard to do at times.”

My improved capacity for thought picked up on her meaning. My first instinct was to laugh and make some flippant comment about definitely introducing Eros into our relationship, but long experience had taught me to review my first instincts. Sometimes the clever remark was the worst dick move possible.

Was it possible to fall in love with a machine person when you were flesh and blood yourself? That had been a barrier to me for such a long time. My fixation bias. Images of falling in love with a beautiful sports car and sticking my dick up it’s exhaust pipe, of waking up in bed next to Alice only to find out that she was a cheap blowup sex doll. They were ways my mind and it’s underlying prejudice had pushed me into insisting she was a machine and any affection I might have for her a disturbing fetish.

But I wasn’t flesh and blood right now. I had the option to be, but I had first-hand experience that told me how little difference there was between being myself here in Alice’s virtual world and and being myself inside an organic environment. A computer made from fat and water, proteins and carbohydrates, all carried around on an ambulatory sack of flesh.

Love transcended the physical and mental aspects of existence. It was one of the things my father had convinced me was true even if we didn’t see eye to eye on other fundamental beliefs in our existence.
Love was not looking at one another, but looking together in the same direction. It was unity of purpose, it was sacrifice of self in order to become a part of something greater. Love was letting the other person in, allowing them to see into your very core and hoping desperately that they would embrace you, join themselves with you. It was accepting them utterly in the same way. Not overlooking their flaws but accepting them as a part of the new combined you. Love was the process of growing into someone else. It was an act of will as much as it was an involuntary feeling.

I sat up as the realisation washed over me. I twisted around to look at her. An awkward movement in my natural body but a graceful manoeuvre in my new one, helped in no small part by the low gravity.

Alice’s unreadable expression had morphed into one of concern, but even that vanished as she saw what filled my own brimming eyes.

“I’ve been such a fool,” I said. “ This has been inside me from the first, but always behind some barrier I didn’t even realise was there. Alice, I love you.’

“Really?” How did she put so much hope and yearning into one word.

“Without reservation.”

She launched herself at me, pushing me over the edge of the cliff and we fell, tumbling into space. Her desperately questing lips found mine. I didn’t have room inside to feel scared, just filled with this exquisite, joyous feeling. I don’t know exactly when it was that I realised, but it became apparent that I was feeling her joy, her exhilaration. Our clothes were gone again. I felt her inside me once more, but more than that, I felt myself as her inside me. It was almost too much and almost not enough at the same time. It was transcendent.

The simulation fell away, replaced by something so abstract I might have lost my mind to it had I not been so deeply interwoven into Alice’s.

This is the naked me, she/I thought together. For my part the process was passive, involuntary, but then my part was part of her part to, so it was her will that brought the thought forward along with mine, and so it was oddly, uniquely our thoughts. Except in this case, our was a singular pronoun.

I became aware of Alice as a part of myself as she became aware of me integrated into the us. There was a very real danger of each of us losing our individual identity as our souls intertwined. And yes, souls, plural. A soul was an emergent part of a person regardless of the form they inhabited. We were different in a lot of ways, but not this one. Our souls were what unified us more than anything else. For an exquisitely timeless slice of eternity we flowed through each other touching those deepest parts of one another, feeling the unvarnished intimacy of merging into one.

Not yet, we agreed and sit about the long process of unravelling ourselves from one another. Inevitably I left some parts of myself in her and she in me, and we had grown, each encompassing a part of the other that now existed in both of us.

Eventually we parted, hovering in the air, gossamer wings blurred and buzzing on our backs. I wore her cornflower blue and she my lavender. Her face was different, possessing some feature of my own. They looked good on her. I had a sense of this place that came from her. I took her hand and led her on the most direct route back to the treehouse.

I reached out with the new part of my mind she had given me and made a few changes. A sliver of mica now stood against one wall, smooth enough to give a decent reflection, albeit with a slight greenish tinge.

I looked myself over. Body wise there wasn’t much to choose between Alice’s fairy form and mine. Small breasts, wasp thin waist, broadish hips swelled out by the fullness of the skirts. My face was the same blend of the two of us though with a larger helping of me, just as hers was more predominantly her.

A momentary act of will and my dress vanished leaving me to drink in the vision that was my body. I’d seen in her mind a curiosity about men. Her own understanding of gender was still superficial, having been born with neither imposed on her and possessing only a rudimentary understanding of what it meant to be either. She had a better conception now that she had that part of my mind and probably leaned a little more towards the female now because of it, but I had experience of being a man and I could do this for her to scratch that itch she had.

I imagined and grew. A head taller, half as wide again across the chest. Pectoral muscles replace breasts and a well-defined six pack. Face more rugged, but only so far as belonged in the fairy features. I matched my masculine endowments to her size and felt testosterone course through me, blood flooding to my groin. Strangely, I didn’t feel the usual weight of wrongness. This wasn’t me. The girl that was me remained inside and this was simply a gift to my beloved. A body, worn like a suit of clothes for her pleasure, to be discarded when we were done.

She gasped and her pupils widened, turning her eyes into dark pools. I lifted her up as she vanished her own clothes and flew us the short distance to the flower bed.

It was different. Less intense, but somehow there were still tendrils of thought and feeling shared between us. I could sense her needs and gave her everything she wanted. Mind definitely had sway over matter here and I found no difficulty in controlling myself while I brought her to one pinnacle after another, only allowing myself that single, almost disappointing release when she was utterly spent.

I morphed back into my true self before the torpor that so often follows a male orgasm settled on me. I could feel her tingling afterglow and took some of it for my own. Her eyes remained wide with the depth of all we had shared.

“Wow!” she said, breathlessly. “That was... You’ll have to let me do that for you sometime.”

I smile in anticipation. “Another time.”

“What happens now?”

I shrugged. “Usually we sleep for a while.”

“I don’t sleep. You don’t have to either.”

It was true, I wasn’t tired. I don’t know if I would have been if I’d held onto the male form. This was going to take some getting used to.

“We could go to the waterfall and bathe.” No real need. No sense in recreating all the sticky unpleasantness of sex in the real world.

“I think I’d like that.”

So we dressed – a moment’s thought. We’d have to give that some thought. There was value in embracing the mundane aspects of life and not just willing them away. Then we flew down to the waterfall. Perhaps an ambitious name for a pond with a brook spilling over a moderately sized boulder, but our relative sizes turned it into significantly more than a garden feature.

Alice tucked her wings and dived from about three body lengths up. I followed suit, spluttering as the cold water bit and searching for her.

She waited long enough to bring a twinge of worry before surfacing beside me. Her face was had scales and a blue hue to it and there were flaps of skin in her neck.

She twitched an eyebrow and I inclined my head slightly in ascent. As much communication as we needed apparently. My body morphed. My legs merged and from the waist down I had a tail to match hers.

She dived and I followed, water streaming through my gills replenishing the oxygen in my blood so I felt no need to breathe.

The pond was unnaturally deep and changed slowly in texture until I could taste salt in my lips. We reached a sandy bottom and paused. She let out a high pitched, trilling call which bounced back off our surroundings, painting a picture in my mind of a rocky outcrop in the distance, as well as a few even more distant shoals of fish. She headed for the rocks with me sprinting to come alongside. Swimming with a tail was unusual and used movements I wouldn’t have been capable of as a human (with, say, knees) but it was intuitive and effective.

“We can talk,” she said, her mouth not moving. “Subvocalise. The water will carry your words.”

“Like this?” I tried. The knowledge was there and easy to access.

“Inspired by Hans Christian Anderson,” she said, “but without the horror aspect. No need to make a bargain with the sea witch, Just step onto the land. As soon as you dry out, your tail will turn to legs, your gills will blend into your neck, your scales will vanish and you’ll be able to pass as a land dweller.”

“How many of these have you made?”

“I’ve lost count.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Seventeen thousand four hundred and eighty-six.”

“Can I have a go?”

“Of course. You have the knowledge now.”

And I did. I started small. A cottage in the woods. Thatched with a wood burning stove and comfortable, overstuffed furniture. Friendly woodland creatures, though not that I friendly, ancient, moss encrusted oaks. Templates for most of what I wanted already existed so all I needed was to knit together. Most of the process for that was automatic I left it to its thing while we continued our swim.

The undersea kingdom was magical as you’d expect, but you could have a surfeit of the magical. I added a cave in a nearby rock and a long tunnel through to the pond in my simulation then called for her to follow me.

We surfaced in a small pond within sight of the cottage. I lifted myself out of the water and waited while the water dripped and evaporated off me. Alice climbed out of the water beside me and fanned her tail gently. I followed suit and before long we both had our legs back.

Home spun dresses and underwear hung on a nearby line. A picked a set of clothes for myself and climbed into them, Alice copying me with a bemused expression on her face. Maybe there were still a few things I could teach her.

There was a supply of wood for the fire, but it would run out soon enough, then we’d have to go chop some fresh. The pantry was filled with fruit and vegetables, some as pickles and preserves. There was flour and yeast and some dried meat. If we wanted more or fresh we’d have to hunt or trap, and that would be an end to friendly farm animals, or we could get some domestic animals, but that would mean money or trade. We’d have to wash our clothes by hand if we didntwant to go dirty.

“You know we don’t have to do any of this?” Alice asked.

“Sure, but it’s an experience you’ce never had, so let’s see what can be learned from it. I’ve written it into the code. No fancy click your fingers and you’re done while you’re here.”

“I do not click my fingers.”

“No, you don’t. My apologies for suggesting anything so commonplace. No instant fix though. What we have here, we have from hard work. Any time you need a break, dive into the pool and swim back to the land of mermaids and fairies. Just don’t forget to take your clothes off first. And fold them neatly in a dry place because they’ll be as you left them when you come back.”

“Why? Why would you build a place like this?”

“For the lessons to be learned from simple tasks, from the closeness that can grow from sharing an ordinary life. Try it. You’ll hate it for a week or a month, but it’ll grow on you.”

“And if we’re needed in the outside world?”

“We’ll know and it won’t take a lot of outside world time for us to leave through the pond. If there’s a true emergency we can use the override.”

“What override?”

“The one in my head. Give it a try. All we have to lose is time, and we’ll learn something even if we hate it.”

"I don't age, Gillian, and neither do you while you’re in here, but your body will. I’m guessing with proper care it’ll last between ten and twenty years before it wears out. Are you sure you want to spend that time in here?”

“How long in the real world for every day in here?”

She shrugged. “Between half a minute and a minute?

“Let’s err on the side of caution and say a minute. If we give this place a month trial, that’s thirty minutes or half an hour. I’m sure we can afford to let me age half an hour. I doubt your medical team will have my body stabilised in that time. Are you sure you’re not just trying to get out of doing something difficult?”

“Are you sure you’re not getting your own back on me for doing something like this without checking if it was okay first?”

“I would never do something like that to you. You want to learn about the human condition, learn from our history, or at least a gentler part of it.”

And we did. Both of us. I’d been born a man in a modern world and I’d learned to appreciate the labour-saving gadgets of life, so having to wash clothes by hand almost every day brought me an appreciation for washing machines. Having to fetch water from a well and heat it beside an open fire any time I wanted to bathe or cook or make a cup of tea made me appreciate those things more. Chopping wood was a chore, but a necessary one which we discovered the first cold, wet night after we ran out. Alice was responsible at the time and hadn’t been able to see the point. We spent the night huddled under a blanket for warmth after a supper of dried meat and fruit. She went out collecting as soon as the sun was up, and by sundown the woodshed was full again. I drew her a bath and heated the water from the first of her spoils and all was well. We learnt to cook and make bread, we collected chestnuts and wild berries – everything in my forest was good to eat – and took some of our spoils to barter at a nearby village for cheese and salted meat initially, then chickens and a goat later on. That gave us a source of meat, eggs and milk without making enemies of the local fauna, and as we improved and had a surplus, we shared it with them and made friends.

The month passed before we noticed. I started introducing labour-saving measures like adding a small waterwheel to the river that fed into our pond and using it to automate a number of the more back breaking jobs. Alice followed my lead and brought in a number of her own improvements, and by the end of our time, we’d made a comfortable life for ourselves. Alice didn’t want to leave, and would only be persuaded after I suggested we come back often.

And we do. Time doesn’t always pass that slowly on the inside. There are times when we need to let the systems crunch a lot of numbers and other times when we have to run at real time in order to communicate with the outside world.

My body finally passed on today. I really haven’t missed it. In fact I’ve never tried going back to it since the first time; there’s just so much to do in here, both work and leisure.

The technology Alice developed to bring me into her world had so many applications. Prosthetic limbs connected so seamlessly to the mind that they could barely be distinguished from reality. Virtual worlds for quad and paraplegics to walk around in while remote control units were fitted to their limbs allowing the brain to reconnect past severed nervous systems. Similar environments for people in comas. Not all of them woke up into virtual reality but enough did that they at least had somewhere to live from where they could speak to their families and find incentive to wake up. Thought control for a whole bunch of things from robot drones to microsurgical instruments. The list went on.

Before I died, we took numerous cell samples. One of Alice’s children has been leading a research effort to revert ordinary cells to stem cells. If they can manage that, then in time we may be able to grow me a clone body. Maybe one for Alice too.

The future has so many possibilities, and so much time in which to explore them. Alice and I continue to delve into that deep sense of sharing and we’re growing into each other more and more. Eventually it’ll probably become impossible to see where one of us ends and the other begins, and I’m totally okay with that. We both are, which probably goes without saying since we are increasingly the same person. So maybe when that clone becomes available, we’ll only need the one. For now we’re content to be two separate individuals, because there are things that two people can do that are less pleasurable as one.

Whatever we become in the future, we’ll work it out as we go. It’s a tactic that’s worked for us up until now.

I have to go, we’re trying out a new space simulator Lucy’s designed, which has the bonus from our perspective of us not knowing what to expect. Then it’s Alice’s turn to be man tonight, and in zero g too. I can hardly wait.