The whole thing had been a great learning experience. We all saw a thing nobody could have ever expected existed, but there was more than that. The family understood why they had never seen the worms being born, despite seeing both young and adult worms, and also why we never saw them outside the pantry. It had been part of the worms’ care guidelines passed down over generations to just let them roam free in the pantry, and now we saw why. Undoubtedly one of our ancestors took the worms out of the pantry and saw them die quickly, and simply told the others not to do that.

One of Cassius’ comments was interesting. At some point someone shrank the room, clearly referring to what was now the pipe space, down from a room the size of the pantry to what it is now. I asked Mama Martina about that, but she didn’t know, and just as they didn’t have proper building plans, they didn’t have records indicating when that work was done.

She couldn’t even say whether it was done before, at the same time as, or after those pipes were installed. She did know, from some of the records the family had managed to keep, that because they were running a restaurant, they had indoor plumbing here drawing in well water before there was indoor plumbing in Sicily in general and a public water supply. So even that was a long time ago.

As far as finding companions for Cassius, we were quite hesitant. We had never even told non-family about the worms, much less that we had access to a whole vacant alternate Earth. An alternate universe, perhaps. But it turned out that three of the remote, transformed family members had trans children who were bullied for their beliefs, and who volunteered to be the beginning of a new settlement. One of them was a senior in high school and the others were in their early 20s and working to try to save up money for transformation via our service.

I was designated the leader of this project, and got the three prospective settlers to join a Zoom call.

“If you agree to this project, we’ll give you free sex changes using the same technique most people pay a lot of money for, making you fully functional members of the opposite sex. But you’ll be permanently moving to live in a parallel Earth which is accessible from our building. You need to understand that you are moving to a world in a natural state, with no technology, and as far as we are aware no other people, apart from Cassius, who may tell you stories of the other people who came with him long ago. You’ll be sealed in there with what you initially take. We can provide simple tools if you would like to build houses and such, and you can take some possessions with you, but nothing that someone from 2000 years ago would find out of the ordinary. Food is going to be all natural, fruits and vegetables which currently grow wild. Since all of your plans are to change sex once and then stay that way, you won’t be eating the worms, but if, as a group later on, you agree for one or more of you to change sex again, that’s fine too. And we expect that you are going to settle it. Since two of you are becoming women and one becoming a man, we expect he will father children from both mothers.”

“Wait, how many children?” one of them asked.

I made a snap decision and said, “Let’s say at least three from each woman. We want the population to multiply. If you want to have more, that’s fine.”

“Whew! I was afraid I was volunteering to have children continuously for the rest of my life.”

“What about clothes?” another asked.

“You can bring clothes with you, but there aren’t replacement clothes there unless you make them. The group who went through before adopted nudity pretty quickly.”

This got a bit of a chuckle from all of them, but they then agreed that they didn’t have a problem with it.

“Are there any other rules we have to follow?”

“Just basic civility. You aren’t going to harm one another, nor Cassius, the only resident there currently, nor force anybody to do anything they don’t want to do, apart from enforcement of the other rules. You won’t have much personal property; most things will be community property. But you aren’t to steal the possessions of others nor take community property for your own, except as agreed by the group. And Cassius is the king and judge. He may make other rules as he sees fit. If you have any disputes you can’t resolve on your own, he shall decide.”

After a moment, I reminded them of one other important rule. “Eating the worms will change your sex. You should not do so unless the group agrees. And you absolutely, positively cannot do so while pregnant. You will turn male first and then abort the pregnancy in a very messy way. One of the original group of settlers died this way.”

Their expressions showed they appreciated the seriousness of this rule.

“What if there’s an emergency?” one of them asked.

“Um, we’ll figure out some way for you to contact us.”

“What about our periods?” one of the women-to-be asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Cassius will be able to tell us what they did as women.”

“When are we going to do this?”

“This summer. Do you all agree to do this?”

Everybody agreed.

I said, “We’re going to let Amanda finish high school, but you should all start making plans. Let’s make the start of July a target date.”

There was enthusiastic cheering and I ended the call.

I went in and explained the situation to Cassius, along with the rules I’d made for the group to follow, and he found them fully acceptable.

In the last week of June the group started arriving, and we had the three of them transform with one of our usual pasta meals (on the house) and get used to their new bodies before sending them through. We also, after checking for obvious contraband, put all the stuff they were taking through, apart from clothes, in a section of the pantry for a few days and made sure it didn’t affect the worms negatively. Finally, on July 2nd we were all ready and I led the group inside, pulling a trunk of books my team had gathered for them as they each brought their own supplies.

As we went in, I explained, “This space will remain accessible to you through the portal, though it’s technically part of our Earth. We installed this red button here which activates signals in places our inn staff will see and hear. Use it only if there is some serious emergency you cannot deal on your own.”

I introduced them to Cassius.

“Cassius, these three are our new settlers. They have already changed sex and, at least for a while, intend to stay as they are now. This is Giancarlo, this is Amanda, and this is Arabella. I’ve already explained the rules to them and to you, but as a reminder, the two women have agreed to bear at least three children each to Giancarlo, which gives an idea how long, at minimum, we expect them to stay in their current sexes.”

“Welcome, friends,” he said to them.

Amanda commented on the unusual nature of Cassius’s speech.

“Oh, yes, Cassius speaks classical Latin. It is close enough to spoken standard Italian that you should all be able to figure out what he is saying, and he should understand you as long as you don’t try to use any modern terms. He can understand some modern concepts if you take the time to explain them to him, such as anything you brought with you. You’ll both learn a bit from each other.”

And I shut the door and never heard from them again. They never used the emergency call. As much as we were curious how the worms and this portal to another dimension came to exist, studying it in a way to figure that out was beyond the ability of anyone in the family, and letting outsiders in on this, even as a research project, would put our family secret at a serious risk.

Curiosity killed the cat, and we were not risking letting this cat get killed. When I explained that saying to the many Italian-speaking family members, I was told the Italian version: Tanto va la gatta al lardo che ci lascia lo zampino. Literally, the cat goes to the lard so often that it loses it paw. Not exactly lard, but a particular cut of fatty pork that was cured and eaten. The sense being that the cat grabs at this salty meat so often that its paw gets so heavily salted that it falls off. When they explained it that way, I realized that it really was the same saying, only it was weirdly specific in Italian.

Joanna left the group in front of me and they seemed relatively helpless, like babes who had never lived out in the woods. I had to tell them what food they could eat, how to drink water from the stream, how to clean their butts, and everything. But they adapted pretty quickly, and used the tools they brought with them to bring down some of the non-food-bearing trees and build some simple cabins. I hadn’t seen the need for ages, but they seemed to want them, and it was the nature of my people before I came here, so I could understand it.

A few weeks in, Arabella actually asked me a question with a non-obvious answer.

“How can I control my menses and keep from dripping all over?” she asked.

“Back when I and the other settlers were living as women continuously, we figured that out when we woke up to worms licking up our drippings. It turns out that all you have to do is put one of the worms up inside you, head first. It’ll drink everything you release that day. Put it in in the morning, take it out at night, and if you are still leaking, you’ll probably find more worms cleaning it up in the morning and you can put one of those in.”

“Disgusting!” Arabella said, while Amanda said, “Ingenious!”

But Arabella must have considered it better than the alternative, because as they walked away, she asked Amanda, “Can you put it in for me?”

The next time they came to me, Arabella was there to apologize.

“I’m sorry, Cassius, for saying your idea was disgusting. It worked quite well. To some extent I was disgusted by the worms crawling on you and even going in and out of holes in your skin all the time. But they did say you are 2000 years old. How are you still alive?”

“Oh, is it 2000? I lost track of the years long ago, and Joanna and her friends never told me, though I knew it was a very long time. But I’m still here because each time you use the worms, it rejuvenates you a little. If you use the worms a lot, they get a kind of affinity with you. If you use them so much that you extend your own life span well beyond the years of a normal man, their rejuvenation isn’t enough, and the worms will replace your internal organs to keep you going. But to get to that point, there were periods where I was changing daily, and I ate dozens of the worms daily instead of the one which would be sufficient for a change. I do recommend that after you produce the children you were contracted to make, you do change sometimes, but limit it. Monthly changes, not daily ones. Not overeating the worms just because you can.”

Five or six weeks later, shortly after they were done building their cabins, they also stopped bothering to wear any clothes. Based on how soon both of the women became pregnant, I assume that’s also when they started having sex regularly, and each of them probably only had to worry about their menses twice. They gave birth, two days apart, to a boy and a girl. Next they had two boys, and then a boy and a girl again. And this was when they came to me with a dilemma.

Giancarlo explained, “We know we should have more girls to propagate the species. We ended up with four boys and two girls. We could just keep having more children, but we also don’t want to make it too difficult for us to raise them all. We want to turn two of the boys into girls, but we can’t decide on a fair way to choose which ones we should change.”

I replied, “Well, you certainly have the right idea. When I came here, my group was supposed to settle the place also. When we started having children, we drew lots to decide who was going to be the man first, and once the other two of us were pregnant, I and the other woman drew lots to see who was going to become a man and impregnate the third one. That was our mistake, because we didn’t have other people here to tell us the rules. The woman who changed gave birth early, right after becoming male, and died during that process. Now, we know that you cannot change while pregnant, so you won’t have that happen. But it made the other survivor afraid to ever become pregnant, and I felt like I’d already done my turn, so we didn’t have any more children. And my son grew up male and also didn’t like the idea of becoming female.”

“So what do you suggest?” Giancarlo asked.

“Once they are eating normal food, turn all of the children female. You need not feed each one a whole worm; Joanna’s team told me they used a single worm to change up to four people. Once they are all weaned, you three should change sex periodically so they get the idea that changing sex is natural. Not all the time like I did, but enough that they experience each of you being both male and female. Maybe you can bear some children of your own, Giancarlo. Once they are of age, having grown up female all the time and seen you three change several times, so that they consider changing to be normal, then they can draw lots for an order to become male, and they’ll each get a year as male in which to impregnate the others.”

“That’s fair,” Arabella agreed.

“Yes,” said Amanda.

Giancarlo added, “I wanted to be male, but I’ve had plenty of time being male. I’ll gladly be female again to bear some more children to add to the pool.”

I said, “Let me add one more rule. In order to ensure women can never turn male when pregnant, they can only become male after their menses finishes and before they have had sex again. This should take away the anxiety over changing when possibly pregnant.”

They took my advice to heart. Giancarlo went female right away, and once her period was established, and the other women had each had a period pass, one of the other women went male for a couple days when they thought Giancarlo would be most fertile and presumably had a lot of sex those days, while the other woman cared for the nursing infants, taking turns doing so for three months, after which Giancarlo was pregnant and they all stayed female until the third pair of infants was about a year old, before beginning another cycle of impregnating Giancarlo.

Once Giancarlo was pregnant for the third time, they built one more building to serve as a schoolhouse. Arabella and Amanda alternated teaching the oldest children, and eventually all the children, and by that point Giancarlo joined in. They each changed sex once or twice a year, as I recommended. I also attended some of the classes, learning their language and the ways in which it differed from mine. History, too: The Roman empire fell, but the city of Rome still exists today, and after several other empires and periods when the empire was broken into smaller pieces, it is now part of one called Italy, and the language is called Italian, though it is quite similar to the language I knew. They use books they had brought with them as references for a number of subjects.

I didn’t specify what age was “of age,” letting them use their own sense for that. In Rome what that meant had varied. In some senses they could be considered adults as early as age 12 to 14 when they first started to show the bodily changes of adulthood, and sometimes they were betrothed to one another at this age. They usually did not marry until the women reached age 18, and the men not until they had returned from military service at age 22 or older, and sex was forbidden until marriage. Obviously there was no military service here, nor was there going to be conventional marriage due to my recommendation, which they were following faithfully.

But after they celebrated their 18th birthdays, the two born each year together with one of the original group built a house, and likewise Giancarlo’s single kids, with help from the others, each built a house, so that they had six more buildings. Once the third house was built, they invited me to the drawing of lots that decided the order they were going to be male, and the first six started mating. They had devised their own scheme, which was slightly different from the one I had suggested off-handedly, but was satisfactory. It made changing sex a ritual each of them performed occasionally, and it made them all female most of the time.

They chose to alternate years of mating and rearing children, to give them a chance to wean all the children, with everybody female during the rearing years. In the years they were mating, they made two men each year, so that each of the first six had birthed two children after the first three cycles. In the fourth cycle Giancarlo’s children joined in as all male at the same time, with the first six all female, to give each of them their third child. After another rearing year, Giancarlo’s children were made pregnant three years in a row, with two of the first six being men each year to father them. And after that there were two designated men each year, and any woman who wanted more children could mate with one of those any year except the one before they were designated to be male. Some of them did, but by that point they were starting to teach the new group of children, and they soon stopped.

They also realized the metal tools they had brought with them were ruined after the latest round of construction, and they dug out a book from their trunk on smelting, the art of making metal from ores. Smelting was practiced in my time, but I never learned to do it. But it wasn’t easy; they had to go dig ores out of rock in the mountains. They melted down and remade some of the ruined tools into ones that could help them extract the ores. After this group of children were all weaned, and most of them in school, they knew they needed a bigger schoolhouse, and some of them went into the mountains and mostly destroyed their remade tools in efforts that yielded enough ore to make about twice as many tools. This let them make a new set of saws and hammers and the like, as well as a new round of mining tools which were sturdier and lasted longer.

This group of children, 33 in all, had a wide spread in ages, 12 years from the oldest to youngest, with the oldest ones finishing school by the time the youngest ones were starting it. They agreed on a new birth plan. It had been quite difficult on them raising so many, with other necessities like mining added in on top of their other duties. The original plan had meant to make each generation three times as large as the one before it, by having each woman bear three children, with two out of every three people female at any given time. They had ended up each being a woman to bear three children, and they had done likewise for those children, some of them even voluntarily having more. They made new rules that reduced the requirement for each person to two children, and were better adapted to a rolling cycle of people coming into childbearing age. Now, they gave women more freedom when they had their children, but with deadline ages to have their first and second, and they could declare at the start of each spring whether they wanted to get pregnant that year. They likewise had a system for choosing certain people to be male each year, with rules to balance the number of children each one fathered.

Once while this generation was growing up they asked me to be a judge. Usually they handled behavioral issues on their own, including refusal to go along with the breeding program, but this time one of the children had killed another one. Daria was 15 years old, still a child under their definition, and not yet at the age where they had the children start changing, apart from the initial change to make them all female as infants. There was no doubt that she did it. The problem was that they couldn’t agree on what to do about it.

They had consulted with the three original settlers, who had agreed the punishment in the world they came from would have been some kind of imprisonment. If she had been considered an adult when she did it, in some cases that could have been life imprisonment or death instead of prison, but prison time was the standard. In the world I came from, there was no question; she would have been executed.

But they had no prison here. There were all sorts of objections to building one, ranging from setting a bad precedent, to allowing her to sit and do nothing not being a punishment at all since she wouldn’t be working to support the others.

They decided to tie her to a tree within my sight as an initial punishment. So close to me, worms were bound to crawl on her, and she was not allowed to remove them or kill them. Due to worms having replaced most of my organs, I didn’t really sleep anymore, and in addition, I could see in the dark enough to see what she was doing. I called out when she tried removing or squashing the worms and someone came to rebuke her for it until I had made clear that she couldn’t get away with it, even at night.

I pondered for two days and two nights while she remained there like this. The morning of the third day I told them I had decided on a punishment and they gathered the whole group around us to hear me tell it.

“Daria shall be punished by being forced to become like me. She will eat one of the worms every day for a year as the first phase of that preparation, and as a result change sexes every day. She will work to help you grow food during this time, as she will need more of it. Do not worry; I have many of the worms within me and we will make enough more in the second phase of the punishment to account for any loss. It might take more than a year, but at that point we will stop changing her and leave her female and let the worms start to lay their eggs in her womb.”

“No!” Daria screamed. She thrashed against her bonds and two of the others grabbed her, and I waited until she was still before continuing.

“The worms who do so will come back to me and let me know if she is ready for this, and if not, then she will go back to changing daily. Once she is a good host for the worms, I will send a worm each morning to lay eggs in her. From midday to dusk the worms will be born and wriggle out of her one at a time. This will feel good to her at first, like having sex, despite being revolting to her because worms are crawling out of her.”

Daria was no longer struggling and was instead staring open-mouthed at me.

“However, the extended period of the births will benumb her body, and over time due to the repetition she will cease enjoying the feeling. She will not be able to work during this time, but will be able to work in the mornings. After every 5 or 6 days of this, she will eat a worm, turn male overnight, and spend a day as male, eating another worm to turn female the next day. These cycles will rejuvenate her body and ensure she is capable of doing this indefinitely.”

“How long will this go on?” Daria asked.

“Forever. The repeated treatments will gradually change your body as it changed mine, and you will eventually become dependent on the worms, but the worms themselves will also keep you alive.”

“Forever?!”

One of those of her parents’ generation said, “You ended that other girl’s life forever. This is fair.”

The others agreed, and we fed her the first worm later that day. The punishment proceeded as I had planned, and after they started breeding within her, we had more worms than ever. Nobody else wanted to look at her while this was happening, so they set up a place for the birthing phases of her punishment facing me and a short distance away. And at first she hated it, but soon she enjoyed hearing my stories of the old times.

Not once did they press the button to get back to the world where I and the first ones were born. However, a couple generations after Daria’s punishment began, someone came through from the other side of the portal, another member of the family who controlled the place on the other side. Our colony here had become merely a legend to them, and he sought to corroborate the story that had been passed down over there. He left satisfied, and also with more of the story of how things developed here.

A couple more generations later, I was unable to keep track of all the people, and they had people in all stages of life at the same time. They spread across the whole island, and built boats to reach the mainland from which they could get to Rome itself. But it was just like here; there was no Rome, nor any other people besides the ones descended from the three pioneers.

Somehow there weren’t worms over there; the worms were apparently limited to the island. But the people who went brought some over and they adapted well. However, there were other animals over there, unlike in Sicily, and they had to keep the worms in an area that was fenced in to keep them from being eaten. The worms still got out sometimes by climbing over the fence, but it kept the bulk of the worms from being eaten by animals. Weirdly, they figured out how to make a wire screen to run over the top of the fenced area, and the worms still sometimes got out. But then, the people from the other world said worms got into the room facing their world despite it being an apparently sealed room. Maybe they walked through walls or teleported short distances or something. Even though I was basically made of worms now, I couldn’t ask them things like this.

But they wanted help propagating the species. With the permission of the elders of the group remaining in Sicily, Daria went with them, to help the colony of worms there flourish. They were maintaining the tradition on the mainland of having people change and live lives female frequently and male less often but as a part of everyone’s life, and they needed the worms to support more cities of people. I cried sometimes, because it is what my group of settlers from 2000 years ago should have become.