The Governors

When I had done the work Alyssa had wanted, I got transferred to Enforcement. As a trained portal spy, I was considered an excellent candidate for that job, and I usually worked eight one-hour shifts a week, at different times and usually two on the same day so I had three days completely off, in order to check on people doing different jobs. Each Monday morning I’d get a list of assignments for the next seven days, except if I was supposed to check on someone on Monday that assignment would arrive Sunday morning. If it was cafeteria work, I could just arrange to eat there that hour, but most other jobs required portal spying.

I worked at that for a while, but I’d been in Trans-Sylvania for slightly less than a year when I got a private communication from the governors. At first, the governors had been only a vague concept to me. It wasn’t until I was working for Alyssa that I’d seen anything from the governors, and then it was second-hand stuff passed on from Alyssa. When I was an Enforcer, I’d seen group emails sent to everyone in Enforcement from the governors.

This time I was being called in for a private meeting with them, and I was told it wasn’t about my job, or at least, not my current one.

They had to tell me how to find them, which wasn’t obvious at all since they lived behind a secret door on level 4. At the end of the hallway beyond rooms 4396 and 4397, where every other corridor ended in a wall, this one continued on another room-length or so, and where it then ended, if you looked closely, was a door the same size and shape as the entire hallway. There was a completely unmarked spot on the wall you could tap to reveal a numeric keypad, and a 5-digit code they gave me caused the whole door to crack open a bit, and I could push it open the rest of the way.

The first person I encountered was a woman sitting alone at a desk, who introduced herself as Time, but explained it was spelled Tempus, in Latin. After I introduced myself as Brandy Kelly, she directed me to another door which led into a room where the three governors sat on the strangest chairs. Imagine a rolling office chair, but above the head on the back and beneath both arms were solid gold-and-gem covered sections like you might expect to see on a throne. Each of the three governors sat on such a rolling throne. They wore simple brown robes, what looked to me most like a monk’s robes, though it was clear two of the three were female. In terms of appearance, they looked like ordinary people.

They introduced themselves as Eye, Ear, and Brain, but that was again the translation effect. They spelled their names out as Oculus, Auris, and Cerebrum to make clear they were speaking in Latin. The jeweled panels above their heads at the tops of their thrones resembled the eye, ear, and brain that they were named for.

Cerebrum, the male one, said, “We have become aware of a situation in the human world that you first brought to the attention of other vampires.”

I nodded, and when he didn’t immediately continue, I said, “The hater government.”

“Yes. We are concerned enough about this to take action, despite the threat doing so represents to our secrecy. It is something that we have done only rarely.”

Auris said, “The last time we did so was during World War II. In that instance, we passed along critical information on German activities by posing as spies for the Allies. We had spied on both sides, and were able to find all the right passwords and contact points to be accepted as such. But we only did so where the Allies’ own spying operations failed and we thought the need was critical, to avoid revealing our hand.”

“What is your plan now?”

Oculus answered, “We maintain certain operations in the human world that even most vampires do not know about. You might call them black ops. One of those operations has taken place at a medical research lab at which we have influenced human researchers to attempt to develop a vaccine for a communicable disease the exact nature of which we haven’t fully revealed. That disease is actually vampirism, the condition which is applied to humans when we convert them. The human researchers only know that it causes a spontaneous sex change and makes them fatally allergic to sunlight.”

I nodded. Up to this point it made sense.

Cerebrum continued, “The researchers have been asked to find a vaccine against the sunlight allergy in the hopes that we can use exposure to the disease as a mechanism to cause sex change. We have provided them with test subjects from among human criminals whom we have exfiltrated from their imprisonment. Most of them are rapists, so the forced conversion may be worse than a death sentence to them, and so our consciences are less bothered by the possibility of the testing becoming fatal. The others are generally murderers and were already subject to either life or death penalties.”

Auris provided the test results. “A number of the test subjects perished, but the researchers have now produced a vaccine which can be taken half an hour before conversion which allows the sex change to continue, but prevents any of the other effects from occurring. No immortality, no fatal allergy to sunlight, no power to generate portals, nor any of the other effects which you are no doubt aware of. In other words, a 100% success even beyond the effects that we were able to tell the human researchers about.”

Oculus continued, “Upon successful conversion of subjects who would have made good vampires, we were able to simply substitute them in place of their former selves. The distortion field we take advantage of when converting vampires to effectively erase them from history adapts to effectively treat them as if they had always been of the other sex. We have also tested it on some with a single strong connection such as a spouse or romantic partner which keeps them from being candidates for our usual conversion. The test subjects in such a state have been able to maintain their lives, minus the aspect of being trans. They and their partner are aware of the change, but the rest of the world simply adapts.”

When they stopped, I asked, “So what’s the plan? Give this treatment en masse to trans people?”

Cerebrum answered, “Yes. We would give it to these candidates with a single strong connection first.”

“And later?”

“We gradually start giving it to people with stronger connections, and eventually to minor public figures who are known to be trans. We expect that the history-changing effect won’t be strong enough to change those people in everyone’s mind. In this way word will get around that the treatment exists, but not where it’s coming from or how people get it. At that point we contact public figures who express that they want it, even if they weren’t publicly trans before. Gradually, we let word spread to the point that everyone who’s not living under a rock knows this is happening. And finally, we treat the president.”

“What the heck is that going to do?”

Auris replied, “Our analysts think there’s no way the history effect can undo any of his actions as president. There are simply too many people affected and too much of a record of what he did. But the president is widely known as a flip-flopper. He’s also known for just rolling with it when something he does doesn’t turn out the way he planned, and trying to make people believe that what happened was what he wanted, or if he did something wrong, trying to make people believe it was right. So we need to simply come up with a way to make him think that getting into our sex change program was a result of something he did. Or get him to outright ask for it. And then he’ll bend over backward to undo all the actions he has taken as president and protect trans rights.”

“What’s that going to mean for the future of Trans-Sylvania? If humans can change sex without becoming vampires, who are we going to convert?”

Oculus said, “We think we can make the opposite drug, one which can remove the forced sex change aspect of vampirism while leaving all the other aspects. Then our vampires can simply have their ideal bodies, whether those bodies are of the opposite sex to their human bodies or the same sex. Then we’ll simply be looking for the outsiders, ones without close ties, and whether they are trans will become irrelevant. Trans-Sylvanian society will change, but probably for the better.”

“And what’s my role?”

Cerebrum answered simply, “We would put you on the front line, doing sex-change conversions of humans after administering the drug to them.”

“Would I be living in the human world full time, then?”

“No. We would train up a staff to do these conversions the way we do for other jobs, though they wouldn’t all have the whole story we’ve told you. They would simply think they are helping humans who want sex changes who we can’t take in ourselves. You would have a shift, possibly two-hour shifts on different days at first but scaling up to one eight-hour shift a week as we get more patients. You would portal through to an office in the human world and treat the patients the human staff bring in for you, and portal back here when your shift is through.”

“When would I start?”

Oculus said, “We have to work out scaling up production of the drug, so we have hundreds or ideally thousands of doses a week rather than dozens a month as we have now. When we do, we’ll start going out and inviting in some of the many, many candidates from recent years we have rejected because they were too strongly tied to a single partner. It’ll probably be a couple months.”

Human Convertees

It was eight weeks to the day when the governors called me again to say I would start in one week, and I wrapped up my work in Enforcement. After we cleaned out the cabal within Onboarding who were covering for each other to shirk off work, while I occasionally found jobs not done, there were no serious offenders and nobody deserving of more than a warning.

At first, they had me working 1-3 PM on Tuesday through Friday. But it wasn’t in any particular place. They had candidates lined up in many different cities, just in the USA at this point, and on the first day I didn’t actually see any of them, but they showed me the places and let me memorize them for the purpose of making portals between them. It was like a bunch of different doctors’ offices and I had a room in each where I was going to be biting an unconscious patient who had been administered the drug far enough in advance for it to have taken effect. They gave me a pinprick test device I used to make sure each patient was ready before the bite. I also had a room in each building that was supposed to be my office, where I was portaling in and out from, so I didn’t arrive that way in front of non-vampires. Some of them probably wondered how I got in and out of the building, but they didn’t see it.

When they scaled it up a bit more, there were larger facilities in each major city and I was assigned a four-hour shift in one of them two days each week and I’d just go around from room to room where they had many patients waiting. Dozens of us provided sex changes to many thousands of humans.

And it got the effect we wanted. While each of the people converted only closely associated with a few people, word got around. This put us into the next phase of the plan, where I was taken off this mass conversion duty, though others kept doing it, different vampires doing eight-hour shifts different days of the week to fully staff the largest centers. Instead, I went into individual service converting people who were better connected. This meant I converted many fewer patients, and I often went to their homes and administered both the vaccine and the bite myself, waiting the time needed for the vaccine to take effect.

Because it took only a couple days for them to recover and become fully functioning members of their new sex, at this point word spread fast. Within a month it went from “a lot of people knew” to “everybody who wasn’t hiding under a rock knew”.

They found that they had to build up the work toward the president in stages, but as predicted, when sex changes became easy and fully functional, a lot more people were interested in them than had ever publicly indicated it before, and we found suitable candidates in lower levels of the administration before working our way up to members of Congress and the Cabinet.

Eventually, almost three years into his second term, during one of his Cabinet meetings, with three secretaries changed male-to-female and one female-to-male, all of them generally looking around age 30 rather than 50 to 60 before the change, the subject came up.

“You who have changed sex, are you getting officially recognized in your new sex? I thought we outlawed that.”

One of the changed ones now named Brenda answered, “We are, but we don’t know how it’s happening. The process knocks you out for a couple days, and each of us woke up to find we had birth certificates and IDs showing our new gender. All our records were updated without us having to do it.”

“They just knock you out and you wake up as the opposite sex? And is the younger appearance part of that, too, or are you getting better makeup or something?”

Sydney responded, “The younger appearance is part of it, too. I don’t know how, but it seems to make you look like someone you want to look like, including the age.”

“Well, I am not so sure about the being a woman part of it, but I could deal with that if it makes me younger. I can imagine myself as a very nice looking young woman. Very nice looking. Can you put me in touch with the people doing this?”

“I can try,” Gene replied. “I don’t actually know the people who did the job, but one of my friends who was changed put me in touch with them. They visited me at my home, not here.”

“Oh, but the White House is my home now. These unknown people can’t just waltz in here. Maybe in Florida, at my home there. I’d still have the Secret Service but it would be a lot more plausible for them to reach me there. Do we have anyone in the Secret Service who’s changed? That’s under you, isn’t it, Charles?”

“Yes, I am the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“No, but I do recall some changes among the Secret Service. Recent ones. I had actually been meaning to bring those to your attention, but the moment hadn’t come up.”

“Let me plan a vacation to Florida and you see if you can get those Secret Service officers appointed there.”

The President

He basically did it himself. He set up the trip, got converted guards put on staff, and started undoing all the anti-gender-change rules he could, everything that was done by Executive Order, before we even approached him. Same-sex marriage was back at the federal level, too. He asked Congress to undo what was done by law, too, and some of that had started. It might have been fun just to leave it like that and leave him male, but with his flip-flopping ways, we really needed to go through with it to make him stick with it.

I had been the one who converted both of the Secret Service officers he had there, so during one of my trips to the human world I called them. I had them set up his doctor to care for him during the change, and I confirmed a time when one agent would be at the gate and one at the house. Rather than portaling in secretly, I drove up and walked in like a normal person, and had an escort right to where he was sitting.

“Mr. President, I understand you’ve been looking for our sex change service.”

He gave me a “Who, me?” sort of look for a moment, but then he said, “I hear it will make me look younger as well.”

“That’s true, though the strength of that effect varies. I can’t promise you a specific age, but I know that the people we have changed generally come out liking their new look. Usually we only offer this to people who are more interested in the sex change, but we are making an exception for you.”

“Thank you. What do I need to do?”

“The process will knock you out for a couple days while your body changes. Dr. Samuels will be here to monitor you during that time, but I really just need you to go lie down somewhere where you will be comfortable.”

He called Samuels, who confirmed he was on his way. Then he led me to a bedroom, where he stripped down to his boxers, climbed into bed, and covered himself up to the shoulders.

I explained, “I will inject you with two drugs. The first one will knock you out. It doesn’t make any visible changes by itself, but it prepares your body for the active drug. Then I will have to wait half an hour and test your blood to confirm your body is ready. Then I will administer the second drug, and leave. It’s 100% effective and does not need any further tests, but Samuels will be here to tend to your needs and probably hook you up to an IV.”

He just looked at me and smiled and said, “I’m ready.”

So I did the deed. During the waiting time I was more tense than I had ever been in my entire life, but nothing went wrong, the vaccine worked, and I gave him the bite and got ready to leave. The timing with Samuels was perfect; he arrived just as I left.

Aftereffects

Some people were surprised, but knowing both that this sex change service was available and the legal changes he’d made caused many people to expect that this was going to happen. Some rumors circulated before she went public, but it was five days after my bite before America saw its first female president, who arrived in a way nobody could have expected during the last election.

She didn’t do it halfway, either. She had a wardrobe full of fabulous dresses by the time she went back to the White House and started doing presidential duties once again.

Her party was stunned. They had only barely started undoing the things they had done by law during this presidency, the most controversial changes that were easy to revert with minimal support. Now that this had happened, it caused a rift. The Republican Party had not been a true party for a couple decades, but rather a loose coalition united under a single name, and that coalition was now unraveling.

One faction was the traditional Republicans, those who had been here during the Clinton years, when the party felt weak and starting to slip away. Most of them were here only because they considered themselves Republicans, even though the core of the party had shifted. Some of them were the least willing to go along with the hater issues, while many were simply glad they had the numbers to have a party. This group wholeheartedly supported the new female version of the president.

Another faction was the Religious Right, a conservative Christian group. They were also part of the traditional Republican base, but they had lost touch with the more liberal Christians who accepted female ministers, sex change, and same-sex marriage. They had mostly supported the president because of his anti-gay, anti-trans views, and they completely condemned what was happening now.

The more liberal Christians had been split in recent years, some remaining with the party because of their support for religion while others hopped over to support Democrats due to disagreement with the hater agenda. This group now strongly supported the president, regardless of their current party affiliation.

Another faction didn’t have any one name, but was a collection of groups such as the Proud Boys who mostly represented a desire to restore the Confederacy, or the ideas it stood for. They varied in exactly how they hoped to achieve this, some being more political and others looking to start the Second Civil War. What they had in common was hatred of other groups, though some expressed that hatred more toward Blacks, some toward any non-Whites, some toward LGBTQ people, some toward Jews, etc. The current president was largely responsible for bringing this faction into the party and it was with its help that he had been elected twice. They felt completely betrayed by the president’s actions, and she had had to call out the National Guard to put down three uprisings and prevent the Second Civil War from starting to fight against the Republican Party and herself.

Finally, there was Big Money. None of the president’s actions had had any particular effect on their goals, and while they had effects on the markets, those effects were both up and down in different sectors. They continued to support her.

The result was that she no longer had support within her own party for what she wanted done. In fact, her party couldn’t muster enough votes on their own to pass anything. However, there were plenty of Democrats willing to undo the harm that had been done. The repeals and reinstatements of previously repealed laws passed with bipartisan support.

Interestingly, this happened just as the primaries for the next election were starting to happen. Due to the 22nd Amendment preventing the current president from serving a third term, she wasn’t a candidate. But the changes in party alignment caused by this event threw the election into chaos. It had been assumed that the current president’s selected vice president would be the next presidential candidate, and nobody had bothered to enter the race against him, apart from one token opposition candidate from the traditional wing who had most strongly opposed the hater policies. Now, with the newly female president turning the party agenda on its ear, several candidates from the traditional wing of the party also jumped in.

These candidates split the vote in the early primaries, but the results determined who had the most support among them, and quickly the losers dropped out and pledged support to one front-runner, so the Republican primary became a two-man race. The party divide became clear between those aligned with the current president and those aligned with her vice president. And it also quickly became clear that those aligned with the current president were winning.

When the supporters of the president secured a majority of delegates for the convention, those on the other side started getting desperate. It had seemed like they had everything, and suddenly it all was lost and now it seemed like they’d get nothing. They called on the vice president to help, and they didn’t get the response they were looking for from him. He was, after all, only there because the previous version of the president, before her sex change and attitude shift, had selected him and essentially anointed him as a successor. As far as he was concerned, things changed and he lost and he accepted that. He made a concession speech on live TV.

And this led to the more violent elements among his supporters to start rioting. They didn’t have any particular plan, though, in part because they were dozens of little fringe groups rather than any organized resistance. The National Guard had to be put out again, in places along with the Army, local SWAT teams, and other groups such as the Texas Rangers. In some areas the local law enforcement was on the side of the rioters, which led to the bloodiest battles.

They had to move the Republican convention to Chicago, since the planned location in Atlanta was deemed too dangerous. With the Republican candidate supporting the changed version of the current president then accepting the nomination, the Democrats had to figure out, “Now what?” This was so different from what they had planned on that they weren’t even sure what was the right strategy for the campaign. Both sides actually supported a lot of the same viewpoints, with establishing peace within the country a major concern.

Where the parties differed was in economic policy. The Republicans still favored big business and the Democrats still favored policies supporting the common people. But both sides pledged an end to discrimination and racism, and no tolerance for the rioters.

They managed to quell the fighting before the November election, but still had National Guard and other forces stationed to keep peace outside thousands of polling places. Hundreds of people who tried to disrupt the elections were arrested. None were killed by forces maintaining the peace, but five suicide bombers killed themselves and eighteen other people and injured forty-six other people.

Some of the bigots did manage to nominate a candidate for one of the third parties, but all he managed to do was split the Republican vote, or get votes from those who would not have voted otherwise. He got more votes than any third-party candidate since Perot, but still ended up mainly as a footnote in history. The economic differences and the Republicans’ loss of the votes from the bigoted faction combined to allow the Democrats to win. It was close, though, and the states they won differed from any recent pattern.

There were still 37 congressmen from the bigot faction, hailing from areas where there was no strong opposition candidate, and thirteen senators, all of whom were not up for reelection. They were the only ones to vote against further reforms. Some of these passed into law protections for LGBTQ people that had only ever previously been done by Executive Action, ones which had been undone at the start of the previous president’s administration, then reinstated after her transformation.

The first US president elected as a female addressed the nation after her first hundred days in office:

I am pleased that I now lead a more united country than we have had in decades, and I have my predecessor to thank for that, even though such thanking would have been unthinkable two years ago. Sometimes, people change.

But some people have not changed. The rioters attacked people of color, of differing sexual orientation from themselves, and in some cases attacked indiscriminately. They attempted to sow fear and hatred within our great nation, and in some cases still do so to this day. They are the reason we still have the National Guard patrolling our streets and standing watch over our schools, post offices, mass transit systems, and other facilities in parts of ten states.

We made a mistake eight years ago in not pursuing justice vigorously after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Only a few dozen out of the hundreds of rioters that day ever served any jail time for their deeds. But one of those unprosecuted people had a rather sudden change and turned her life around, and in doing so, turned this country’s course around. In recognition of that, I am prepared to offer a deal for amnesty.

I have been in contact with the people who provided the service to my predecessor which allowed her to turn her life around in this way, and they are willing to offer the same to anyone willing to repent. You agree to give up violence, stop the hate, and live your life peacefully on the other side of the gender fence, and as long as you hold to those vows, you’ll not be prosecuted.

Don’t think you can hide. Our technology is much better than it was eight years ago, and we’ve identified over 95 percent of the people responsible for the violence against our country since last summer. We didn’t come after you yet because, frankly, we’ve been busy. Unless you were caught in the act or you committed murder or rape, you’ve been ignored so far, but we are stepping things up now. Currently only about a hundred of the last year’s rioters are imprisoned or in the process of being prosecuted. The thousands of others responsible for arson, vandalism, assault, and other serious crimes in pursuit of making our country hate again are in our sights.

But you can go to I will change dot gov and register your desire to really change yourself in more ways than one and stay free. Those of you who are innocent but simply want to change, there’s a place for you there too. That’s I will change dot gov.

I was the vampire (still not identified that way, of course) who had spoken with the president prior to her speech to allow her to extend this offer. We kept that promise, but only a handful of the rioters accepted the offer, and most ended up in jail by the end of this new president’s first year in office. But we were plenty busy with the remainder of the transgender people of the United States. And once the US demand started dying down, we went on to the rest of the world.

We still found candidates to make into new vampires among those who really needed a new start on life. We got the cure working that prevented the forced sex change. It let them be whoever they wanted to be, but about 15% of them wanted to be the opposite sex and changed anyway.