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?

In 2030, based on the observation that gene therapy was successfully using custom-designed viruses to rewrite a person’s DNA to remove harmful mutations or replace them with alternative, non-disease-causing genes, I had the bright idea of taking that a step further. What if I wrote a virus that completely replaced one person’s DNA with that of another?

It wasn’t that easy. The smaller changes didn’t trigger rejection by the person’s immune system, but the large scale change I was proposing, when tested on animals, did do so, sparking a nasty war between the immune system killing the modified cells and the virus modifying more cells and killing the patient. By adding an immune suppressant during the change, I was able to stop that and let the body cells and the immune system cells both get changed by the virus, resetting the immune system so that it considered its current surroundings acceptable.

That didn’t, however, immediately cause the patient’s body to resemble the target. It caused a very slow change, as new cells were produced and those new cells exhibited characteristics from the new genes. Yet another drug could send the replacement of body cells into overdrive. Combined with sufficient nutrition, this could actually change the body to somewhat resemble the target after 3 days, for the dogs I used. It even produced a working sex change when the target was of the opposite sex.

It didn’t fix any physical damage the body had suffered, though. If I gave it to a 3-legged dog, the dog didn’t regrow its missing leg. And it didn’t change the hair that was already there, but newly produced hair was of the color and texture of the target dog. Yet another drug I added to the mix stimulated the hair growth significantly, so if I shaved off the old hair before starting the treatment, the appearance was a good match. Another limitation was that it didn’t adjust well for sizes; if the target dog was significantly larger or smaller than the original, the treatment only changed it part of the way to the other dog’s size. It did well on the bulk, or density of the body, but it didn’t do much to make the dog’s legs or body longer or shorter. I thought this would be less of a problem for humans, who have much less variation in this regard.

Because of course I was going to use it on people. But I wasn’t likely to get volunteers to change themselves to become a double of some other random person, nor to let someone double their own body. The testers had to be the ultimate intended users of this treatment, me and my wife, Betty. I tested it first, becoming a duplicate of her. It took larger doses of the drugs, and I ate triple meals for a week to complete the process. But all of it seemed to work, including the new growth of hair. It didn’t reach her length, but I no longer looked bald and had enough hair to style into a short woman’s style at the end of the week. And a few weeks later I had my first period, showing that the recently grown female equipment was functional.

With that test proving successful, I injected Betty with a treatment based on my own pre-change DNA.

“John, are we going to be able to get back to our original bodies afterwards?”

“Remember, the plan is we’re going to disappear by becoming other people. But yes, if we chicken out, or something goes wrong with other parts of the plan, I have enough of the treatment and stored DNA to get us back to our original bodies.”

Her change worked as well, and I stayed in her body and she in mine while we worked on the next part of the plan, so we could both get as much experience as possible in bodies of the opposite sex. We swapped because our targets were oil magnate Jacob Astoria and his notably tall wife Margaret, who were close to our heights, but Margaret was close to mine and Jacob was close to Betty’s. In addition, Betty was more of a businesswoman capable of managing Jacob’s affairs, while as Margaret, I’d have no specific duties and could keep my eyes and ears open for any sign of anyone catching on to us while following her social circles.

Until I came up with this scheme, I hadn’t ever planned on needing to know how to use tampons, douches, or mascara, or how to put on a bra. It was necessary for this to work, though, so it was something I simply did, although at my age, the tampons were only going to be needed for a few years. Betty and I went over with each other in great detail everything we could possibly need to know as a member of the sex we weren’t born as, even when it seemed obvious, because we simply could not know what important thing we might not know otherwise.

Apart from that, we had three goals to work on during this time: To obtain the Astorias’ DNA, to study them enough to learn how to live their lives, and to figure out a way to get access to them to kill or kidnap them in order to take their places. Besides learning to live as the other gender, this is how we spent those months after our first change. It was a lot of work, but the goal was to become fabulously rich afterward, a thing we’d only need to do once.

We’d already done some preliminary work to make sure it was going to be possible. For instance, we’d learned the kind of security systems they employed. They’d bought into the face-lock concept, so when we had the right faces and had access to their physical devices, we’d have access to all their passwords and all their accounts. Now we were following them on 20 different cameras, most of them installed by landing magnetically locking, well disguised drones on their property, their vehicles, and other possessions. For some of them we had used various tricks to get into their home and Jacob’s office, and we also had a few that we stationed on rooftops that we used airborne sometimes. We learned their routines, their associates, their foibles and idiosyncracies, and every other detail we’d need to behave believably as the Astorias.

In doing this, we also made note of when and where we could get samples of their DNA. The best chance was when their chauffeur took one of their cars out to a detailing service where it was washed, vacuumed, and occasional care like replacing wiper blades was performed. That happened once a week, in a rotation among the cars, and at times which varied somewhat since it was when the chauffeur wasn’t needed to ferry one of the Astorias about, but we’d infiltrated the service and knew when the car would be coming. We just needed to have one of their employees call in sick so that they’d call someone from a temp service, and hack their phones so we got that call, to substitute myself as the temp.

This worked. Before I vacuumed the passenger cabin the Astorias used with the service’s own vacuum, I ran over it with a small device I kept in my pocket which picked up hairs and skin cells. We’d have to sort out whose was whose afterward, but they used all those cars enough, and they were essentially the only ones apart from the cleaning service ever in that part of each car. The two most common DNA signatures were guaranteed to be Jacob and Margaret, and sex chromosomes distinguished the two. I pulled off the capture of the DNA in this way around the end of the first month after Betty’s change into my body.

I got the treatments prepared within the week after that, though we studied the Astorias more before taking the treatments. It was almost two months after this, by which time I was fully comfortable living as a woman, before we decided that the one time a week they went out alone together for dinner was the best time to infiltrate. They were literally alone; Jacob drove to these events, rather than use his chauffeur, as they were “dressing down” events, usually at restaurants where arriving with a chauffeur would have looked out of place. It wasn’t fast food, but the Astorias were eating at restaurants where the check for the two of them only reached $80 to $100 after the tip was added. This also allowed the chauffeur and maid to have dates; it’s not clear whether the Astorias knew those dates were happening, but we knew.

While they were all out at one of these dates, we could use face unlocks to get past their gate and into their garage, wait for them to return, and ambush them when they arrived. They usually took time at home alone together after the dates, which would give us some time to figure out how to secure the Astorias’ bodies after we did the swap. We had a few plans for that.

We took our treatments, Betty first this time, to ensure she was a fully passable Jacob when the time came, and me a week later when she was through with her changes. We continued watching their routines with particular focus on these dinner dates during and after this time. This also gave us time to practice their mannerisms, on camera, with each of us helping to point out things the other was doing wrong and comparing them with video of the real Astorias.

It was on the sixth of the Astorias’ dinner dates after I turned into a duplicate of Margaret that we struck. It started out well. Betty’s face passed as Jacob’s to get us inside, and we stashed the car we came in behind the garage and went inside to wait. I carried a portable device which could only display one of our cameras at a time, though I could switch between cameras, and we watched to prepare for their arrival.

The first odd thing was that when they left the restaurant, Margaret was driving. She did drive sometimes, such as when she was going to a social event while the chauffeur was taking Jacob somewhere or needed to pick him up, but we hadn’t seen her drive home from one of these dates before. But we didn’t change our plans for this apart from us changing sides in the garage. I, as Margaret, was going to knock out Jacob and Betty would take out Margaret so that both of them would see their partner and not realize we were impostors until it was too late.

We weren’t prepared for them to deviate from their route and go pick up a person we didn’t know. This guy was young enough to be their son, though it wasn’t actually their only child, who was away at college.

“What the hell? Where did they find this guy?” I exclaimed.

“I’ve never seen him before, and didn’t see or hear them make plans to meet anyone else on this trip,” Betty confirmed. “Maybe someone called them while they were in the restaurant?”

“OK, snap decision time. Do we abort the mission, leave, and try again another week, or just try to deal with this guy somehow?”

“It’s too late,” Betty commented. “They are already too close for us to get away without being seen.”

“OK, ‘deal with it’ it is. Are we still doing plan A and just adding him to it?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Plan A started with us using tranquilizer darts to knock them out silently, bloodlessly, and quickly. The guns were single-shot but we each had a backup gun in case we missed. Now one of those backups would have to be used on the third person.

The chauffeur and maid arrived in one of the other cars, and we stayed hidden while they went back into the house. Eventually the Astorias’ car arrived and parked in the space it left from, and as they got out, I darted Jacob on the passenger side and Betty darted Margaret on the driver’s side and they both fell. The extra guy came out the rear door on the passenger side and he saw me and yelled “What the hell!” but I hit him with the second gun. It was apparently not a clean hit, because he started to run. There was no quick escape for him, though, because the Astorias had closed the garage door before leaving their car. Betty shot him with her second gun and that took him down.

So we were still on our modified plan. We loaded their bodies in the trunk of the car they just came out of, and Betty drove it, following me in our car, to our house. It had an attached garage and a secret entrance via a road through the forest behind the house which allowed us to get them in and out without anybody seeing us come or go.

The rest of plan A was that we would administer treatments based on my and Betty’s original DNA to make them look like us. Normally the cellular conversion drug would be administered orally, over several days, but we were going to give it to them intravenously all at once. It would work; they should end up looking like us. But without any food, their bodies would draw on their energy reserves, then fat cells, and finally on the body’s organ cells to try to fuel the conversions. They would essentially starve before morning, despite having just eaten an hour ago. A second dose of sedative would keep them from waking up before they died that way.

We’d planned to put them in our bed and let them die there, but that was before we had three of them. Instead, we put them in our lab, trying to make it look like I was trying to clone myself, with the young guy also becoming a copy of me. We didn’t care if he came out the right size or anything; he was supposed to be an experiment gone wrong. We laid him out on a table, naked, and put the others in clothes of ours loose enough to fit, and sat them in chairs. We took the clothes they came in back with us, since they were the Astorias’ clothes, after all. Likewise, we took Jacob’s wallet, Margaret’s purse, and other possessions they were carrying, and deposited the counterparts of those items that really belonged to us in places they’d normally be left within the house so it looked like we were at home normally and hadn’t been robbed. We confirmed the face-unlock worked to unlock their phones.

We still took a bunch of stuff with us that needed two trips to the Astorias’ car. We took everything from the young guy, since if he was a clone, he wouldn’t have any such possessions, and dumped that all in a dumpster along the way back to the Astorias’ house. We also took with us all remaining doses of the drugs, just in case we needed them again for some reason, our notes about the project, and everything linked to the extensive network of cameras we had used to watch the Astorias. I took my gun, and Betty grabbed the spare keys to our house so we could check here later if needed. The main keys were with my wallet and her purse, again to stage it as if they were home on a normal night.

But we abandoned everything else we were doing there. They’ll eventually be found dead there, assumed to be us and the result of a failed experiment, and we’d be severed from any ties to our past. We had done a lot of bad things in our lives, and while we’d never been caught on any of the major ones, it was only a matter of time before somebody connected one of those crimes to us... er, to John and Betty Crevil, who died in some experiment no doubt related to another crazy scheme of theirs. We locked up the house, left our car there in the garage, and went back to the Astorias’ house using their car, to start our new lives. It was pretty late by the time we got back, so mostly we just found our way inside to the Astorias’ bedroom (our bedroom, now) and went to sleep.

We started out following the routine we had seen the Astorias follow. They woke up to an alarm at 6:30, whether or not they had any morning appointments, showered in his-and-hers shower stalls, and dressed, selecting their own clothes like normal people. The only live-in servants were the maid, who was also the cook for most meals, and the chauffeur, who apart from managing all care for the cars, was also a handyman for some small jobs. Either of them might accept deliveries, which were most things, as the Astorias didn’t usually go shopping in physical stores.

By 7 the maid would have breakfast served, and the Astorias usually went downstairs for it a few minutes after 7. Betty and I used our time to check the Astorias’ phones, which again both face-unlocked to our adopted faces. There was a lot we wanted to do on those devices, but we couldn’t do it all before breakfast; we just checked for new messages (of which there was just one, for Jacob, related to a meeting he had later today) and reminders (plenty).

We walked down together at 7 and ate together. Lucinda, the maid, had it ready for us on the table and was over at the smaller servants’ table nearby with Harvey, the chauffeur, where they ate their own breakfasts. When it was done and Lucinda was cleaning up the dishes, Betty and I confirmed our schedules today with Harvey, in terms of where and when we needed him, and I mentioned to Lucinda that I was going out to a meeting at 1 so I needed lunch served ideally a little before noon. Of course, the Astorias had already let him know this schedule by email yesterday; this was merely to confirm he hadn’t missed a request and that our schedules hadn’t changed.

Since Jacob did not have to be in the office until 10 today, and Margaret had only a single social appointment today at 1, we went back upstairs, not to our bedroom, but to what they called a sitting room. We could page Lucinda to bring refreshments or whatever we needed up here, but otherwise she stayed out of this part of the house while we were using it, so it was a way for Betty and I to privately discuss the things we needed to do. We made checklists that included things like removing most of the cameras we’d used to track the Astorias, changing most of the passwords on their personal accounts in case someone else knew them, and putting some proper personal and household security in place which the Astorias had lacked.

We also pulled out the pad that let us watch through the cameras one at a time, and set it to look at the one we’d left in the lab our old home, expecting to see the trio dead on the floor or slumped in their chairs and on the table, but there were no people visible, alive or dead. That was worrying. They shouldn’t have been able to wake up before the cellular overdrive killed them, and nobody should have noticed their deaths yet for the bodies to be removed. We had wanted not to set foot in the place again to avoid the possibility of us being connected with them, but we were going to have to check that out somehow.

But we started with what we could do most easily, removing the cameras in the sitting room and our bedroom, and we decided to make a heavy old steamer trunk that resided in a corner of the sitting room the place to store all the artifacts of our past life when we weren’t using them. It was made of steel covered in leather, a heavy-duty unit which no doubt stayed there because it was too heavy for anyone to want to move anywhere. It had a decrepit old lock on it that was easier to break than to unlock with the key that was supposed to work with it, which led me to put a new padlock on the shopping list.

There was a single large book down in the bottom of the trunk before we put our stuff in. It turned out to be one of those fake, hollowed-out books, and it was where the Astorias had kept a pistol we’d never seen them use. Loaded, but with the safety on. When I lifted the gun’s case out of the hollow, under it was written a combination to a safe: 14-72-36. We hadn’t seen this safe during our surveillance of the Astorias, so it clearly wasn’t something they used often, which was probably why they’d written down the combination.

Writing it there went against one security practice we’d seen them use that we approved of: Each of them had an encryption app on their phone which they used to store infrequently used passwords they’d otherwise forget, in case the phone’s password manager failed to remember them to make available via their face unlock, and they put certain other secrets in there as well. A drawback, though, was that every time they changed one of those passwords or forgot one and needed to look it up, they had to type in their password, and they used one just complicated enough that they frequently got it wrong and used the “show password” feature to make sure they got it correct the second time. This had allowed us to capture the password from multiple views of it in the cameras. Jacob’s was the first half of supercali... and Margaret’s was the second half, both of them repeating the middle “istic” part, and each with certain letters (but not all possible ones) replaced by lookalike numbers and punctuation.

The combination to the safe should have gone in there as well, but likely the writing in the book predated the use of the app. This led us each to check out what was stored in that app. Jacob’s was almost literally a gold mine. Every credential necessary to access all of his money, along with dozens of other less useful passwords. And he had unique passwords on all the accounts that really mattered, so he wasn’t completely stupid with security. Some of them used those 6-digit codes as two-factor security, and notes with each account’s listing reminded him which account used which two-factor security app, of which he had three. There was surprisingly little else in there, but the safe combination was in there. Same combination. Also, there was a numeric passcode for the outside gate. I probably should change it, but I need to figure out who to update with the new code. There’s a gardening service who gets in that way, and some other service people.

Margaret’s yielded some of the same money passwords which were apparently for joint accounts, some different ones, the usual ones for other sites, the numeric gate code, maps with directions to two locations labeled with women’s first names, and notably, the password for her secret email account.

Margaret had one appointment every week which she always drove to herself and never told Jacob or Harvey about, and didn’t keep in her calendar. Betty and I had both assumed she was having an affair... enough so that we had agreed that if I found that she was having an affair, I needed to keep doing so to maintain our cover, at least until I had a good reason to break it off, and Betty would pretend she didn’t know about it unless presented with evidence of it some other way. She only ever accessed the second email account when Jacob was out, and for such short periods that we’d never gotten any real info about the contents, but we assumed it was related to the off-the-books meetings.

Since I could have had that appointment at any time, we went and checked that account right away. Wouldn’t do to stand up him up by failing to have looked up the time. But it turned out that it wasn’t an affair, not exactly. Almost all the messages in the account went to five people, all of them seemingly women. There were some pretty lewd comments, and occasionally pictures. After we read about twenty of the messages, and saw that the next meetup was tomorrow at 2 at one of the other women’s houses, Betty started an explanation, applying her insight about things women do.

“This can be a few different things. It could be a sort of girls’ night out, where they sit around and watch porn, share stories of their love lives or lack thereof, and other such things, but no actual sex. It could be that they hire a stripper, and basically have their own private strip club, especially if these are other rich women. It could be that they hire a gigolo, basically a male prostitute, who goes around and alternately has sex with the women. It could be a lesbian orgy, where they are all having sex with each other. And maybe something else or some combination of these. If you read more of the messages you can probably get a better idea.”

“Good thing we had sex in these bodies so I’d at least know what my female sexual response is like,” I commented. “We did see Jacob and Margaret have sex, though, right?”

“We did, but all indications are they are doing it less than once a month. Either Jacob is not interested, or nearly impotent, or Margaret is not interested, and I think what we saw in that email account rules out the last case. I’m pretty sure Margaret wanted more than she was getting from Jacob, and she’s getting satisfaction in one of the ways I guessed from these get-togethers. It’s not the case that Jacob didn’t have time for her because of his work; we saw that he did have the time and they had a reasonable amount of time together. But on that subject, I have to get ready to finally get out of here and off to my work appointments.”

So Betty did that and I kept reading. Ultimately I decided it was a combination of her suggestions. If the invitation didn’t say otherwise, it was a porn party where the women would masturbate and when they got especially turned on, possibly pair up. But sometimes they did hire a stripper or gigolo and the invitations said so. The meeting tomorrow didn’t have one, of course, because we would have seen it when we read the invitation. They only met at two of the houses, with names matching the maps I found in the password app.

But Margaret’s appointment today was merely a reading club. I hadn’t read the book, so I’d just have to follow along and if necessary admit that I didn’t find time to read it. I had hours before I needed to be there, but I wasn’t going to rush through the book now. I just read a synopsis online so I wouldn’t be totally lost.

I brought in the things from the car we had been too tired to move last night, most of which went into the steamer trunk. While I was at it, I also removed the bugs we’d managed to place on each of the Astorias’ cars, and while Harvey was taking one of the cars out for cleaning and Lucinda was making my lunch, I also removed the cameras from the downstairs parts of the house. I kept the pad out, plugged in to charge, and focused on our old lab just in case anything changed there, but each time I came back into the sitting room to look at it, the lab just seemed empty.

I also searched for the safe. Predictably, it was behind a painting, but there were at least twenty of those throughout the house and it took some time to find the right one. It was neither in the bedroom nor the sitting room, but the room they called the den, really Jacob’s home office where he did what little of his work-related activities that he did at the house. Margaret’s computer was in a similarly sized room, though appointed differently since she didn’t engage in the sort of business Jacob did. They didn’t seem to have a special name for it; it was just her room.

There was only one painting in the den, which was in clear view from Jacob’s desk, and it was behind that one. The contents were disappointing, about $5000 in cash and two boxes of ammo for the pistol and lots of empty space. I mean, when you had access to billions, five grand was disappointing. I checked to see if there was a false back or something, but that seemed to be it. I guess he didn’t have any secrets like Margaret did and was as straitlaced as they come. But I put a note on my list to find or draw up plans for the house so I could figure out where any other secret spaces might be.

Since Lucinda was already making lunch before I started the search for the safe, I wasn’t surprised to find it waiting for me when I went back downstairs. This meant the activities I’d been doing to get more familiar with details of the Astorias’ lives we didn’t pick up from the surveillance were on hold until later in the afternoon. I ate lunch, then grabbed my purse and the book I was supposed to have read and Harvey took me to the reading club.

The meeting lasted an hour, and I am not sure what Harvey did during that time, but he was there waiting for me when I came out. I did so carrying two books, the one discussed at this meeting and a new one. The club wasn’t meeting next week, so I had two weeks to read the new one. We bought the books at this club, and Margaret certainly could afford to. With about 3 books a month, she’d accumulated more than 200 of them over several years she’d been going, which filled a bookcase and had started on a second in her room.

On the way back to the house, Harvey said, “Jacob called while you were in there, and I’m going to have to go pick him up after I drop you off.”

So indeed, he pulled up to the garage, let me out, and immediately headed back out. Once they got back here, Betty (who I was now trying to call Jacob for our cover, though he was still Betty in my mind) and I headed up to the sitting room together and I shared what I’d discovered today.