Mad scientist John Crevil and his wife Betty have pulled off the perfect crime: They used gene-editing technology to make themselves perfect doubles of billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife Margaret, used the same technology to make the Astorias look like themselves, and left the Astorias knocked out so they are unable to find the nutrition needed to survive the changes. Or have they? They were worried when an unknown extra person unexpectedly stepped into the fray.

“Urrrrgh. Wha happen?” I groaned.

I looked around. I was lying on some kind of table, and I was naked. Two people were sitting slumped over in chairs on one side, presumably the couple who had hired me.

“Oh, righ. Impastas knock us out.”

The last thing I recalled, we had pulled into a garage, and as soon as we got out of the car, a pair of impostors who were spitting images of the couple who had picked me up appeared, shot them with tranquilizing darts, and then shot me as well. This clearly wasn’t the garage, so they took us somewhere and left us there. Didn’t tie us up, though.

The table I was lying on was pretty high, and in my dazed state from being drugged, I was quite unsteady, but by rolling over onto my stomach and lowering my legs over the edge I was able to come down gently while holding myself up on the table until my feet hit solid ground.

I went over to check on the couple, but they were out cold, and didn’t wake up to shouts or slaps to the face. Speaking of which, their faces looked weird. They didn’t look the same as they did when they picked me up. I was pretty sure this was the same couple, though, despite the changes. They surely weren’t the impostors!

A bit steadier on my feet now, I explored the room. Some sort of medical lab. Lots of equipment, medical supplies, including a mini-fridge with some medications that needed to be kept cold. As a medical student, I knew what some of these things were.

The wrapper for a package of Daramine darts was on the table. I knew the dosage in these darts would only keep someone down for an hour or two. I looked for a clock and was surprised to see it was past midnight. Or noon, perhaps. It was about 9 when we arrived at the garage, so if the clock was right, they either hit us with additional darts or gave us something else, too. And that explained why I was awake and they were out cold. I have an unusual condition which causes my body to produce high levels of caffeine, levels that would be considered unsafe for most people, but my body handles it. Because of that condition, I’ve never slept even once without taking a sedative, and I was pretty aware of the different sedatives on the market even before I started studying medicine. Daramine is counteracted by high levels of caffeine, so it doesn’t do much for me. That was why they needed two shots to take me down in the garage while my hosts each went down with one. If they gave these two enough Daramine to keep me under for three hours, they would be out until noon, at least.

Unless, I realized, I gave them a heavy dose of caffeine. Did they have coffee in this lab? I looked around and failed to find any, but there was one door in the room, which wasn’t locked. Outside it looked like the basement of a house: slightly irregular cement floor and walls, random junk piled in places, and a home furnace. And stairs up, which I followed to find that I was indeed in someone’s home. Perhaps the couple that kidnapped us, so I proceeded cautiously.

My exploration did not turn up any more people in the home, and there was a kitchen with a coffeemaker, so I started a full pot brewing with a double supply of coffee grounds and then carried my hosts up here one at a time and got them seated at a table at what I supposed was a dining room nearby. I also cut a length of tubing from the supplies down there. My plan, since they were out cold, was to use the tubing to pour coffee directly down their throats, after cooling it to a level where it wouldn’t burn them. I found a funnel in the kitchen that would work with that. I wanted to concentrate the caffeine, so after it was brewed, I started a second double-strength pot and put the first batch of coffee on the stove to boil off a lot of the water. After I took it off the heat for a few minutes, I cooled it by filling a tall glass with ice cubes and then the coffee. That added some water back to it, but it was a lot more concentrated than it came out of the coffeemaker.

I confirmed it was at a drinkable temperature, and then I maneuvered the piece of tubing into the man’s esophagus. I think it was the man, anyway; he was the one dressed in male clothing. Once I was sure I wasn’t about to pour warm coffee into his lungs, I added the funnel and poured in the drink, about the equivalent of 20 cups of coffee, and not recommended except for the fact that I believed he had a high amount of Daramine in his system, which would react with the caffeine rather than give him the world’s biggest buzz.

As I worked on the second batch the same way, the man awoke, so I treated the woman the same way. Pretty soon I had both of them awake.

“Can you confirm your identities?”

The one I thought was a man said, “Margaret Astoria.”

The one I thought was a woman said, a bit more sleepily, “Jacob Astoria.”

“Given your groggy state, I am going to assume that is correct. I’m Fred Johnson, the man you contacted, Margaret, for what was to be a three-way sexual encounter with you and your husband. Unfortunately, we were attacked and kidnapped in your garage.”

They both nodded, presumably remembering these events.

Margaret spoke, “Yes, Jacob asked me what I wanted for my 40th birthday, and that is what I chose.”

“I don’t know where our kidnappers went, but I awoke beside you maybe half an hour ago in the basement of this house, where some sort of medical lab is set up. I also am not sure what they did to us, but I awoke just as naked as you see me now, and you two were in the clothes you have now, apparently cross-dressed.”

Margaret looked down at the clothes they both were wearing and said, “These aren’t our clothes.”

Jacob piped up to say, “I’m starving. Is there any food here?”

“Jacob, yes, I saw some food.”

He went to explore the available food, and brought a loaf of bread, packages of meat and cheese, some spreads, lettuce, and tomato back to the table, and found a knife in the kitchen to slice the tomato and one to apply the spreads. I helped him slice the tomato to avoid him cutting himself in his still somewhat sleepy state. As soon as he had one sandwich made, he started eating it, and Margaret made her own. When they finished eating, they laid out the rest of the loaf to make four more sandwiches, two for each of them. I was a little hungry myself, and found a second loaf of bread and additional sandwich fillings and brought them to the table so I could make one sandwich for myself, then handed them over to the Astorias, who made even more sandwiches out of them.

When I was finished with my sandwich, I said, “I don’t know what they did to you. Your faces look strange, and not like they did before the kidnapping. But it clearly has made you ravenously hungry. I don’t seem to be affected as much.”

Jacob shrugged. “All I know is I’m still hungry.”

We moved on to pasta and other food that was available when the second loaf of bread was exhausted. And over the next three and a half hours, as they ate all the remaining food in the house, apart from a small amount that I ate, I swear I saw them change appearance more.

When the food ran out, I told them, “OK, we need to talk. There’s no more food here, so we are going to have to go outside the house to get more. Also, it’s 4 AM, and I am not sure what’s open, or for that matter where we even are.”

Jacob responded, “I’m still hungry, but I don’t feel like I’m starving the way I did when you first woke me up.”

Margaret agreed, “Likewise, I still want to eat more but I don’t have to do it this moment.”

“You two should look at yourselves in a mirror. You are changing. You changed from before we were attacked to when I woke up, and you have changed further since then. Margaret, you do not look like a woman now. You look like a man. You even have beard stubble. Jacob, you look like a woman now. You have breasts.”

They were both curious, and agreed with my assessment when they looked at each other. So we explored the rest of the house and found a bathroom with a mirror so they could each look at themselves.

“But I don’t look like you,” Jacob commented. “I look like some other woman.”

“That’s true for me too. I look like some other man,” Margaret responded.

I added, “I still look like myself.”

Margaret looked at me. She had seen me before because I had performed at one of the parties she attends at times with 5 other women. That was how she thought to contact me for what we were supposed to have done last night.

“You are right. You still look mostly how I remember you.”

Jacob commented, “I’ll have to trust you on that, but thanks for coming clean and telling me about those parties.”

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore. The way I look now, I’m sure I’ll be uninvited to future events they host.”

Jacob needed to use the bathroom, so we let him, and Margaret found another bathroom elsewhere in the house. Meanwhile, I looked around and found a bedroom, and found some men’s clothes that fit me, sort of. Not a perfect fit, but I was no longer naked. There were women’s clothes in there too; it was a couple’s bedroom.

When Jacob and Margaret returned, they confirmed they both had changed genitals, completely changed as if they had been born that way. They also went in the bedroom and confirmed the other clothes there fit their new bodies perfectly.

As we continued to explore the house, we found a man’s wallet and a woman’s purse with the usual contents, including IDs for John and Betty Crevil. My two friends now looked enough like the photos on those IDs to easily pass as them. Surprisingly, the wallet and purse also each had about $100 in cash, some cards, and car keys. Sure enough, there was a garage attached to the house with a car that either of these keys started.

“So they’ve turned you into these other people. Why do such a thing?” I asked.

“They’re stealing our identities,” Jacob commented. “My real identity is a very wealthy person.”

“That makes sense. So the Crevils are probably the ones that did it. And they’re probably planning to kill us in some way that looks like an accident so everybody thinks they are dead. We have to get out. The house could be rigged to explode or something.”

“Nah, not so dramatic,” Margaret responded. “They went through the trouble of actually making us look like them. They aren’t going to kill us in a way that obliterates our bodies. But you are right that they probably are planning to kill us somehow. They’ve left us all their stuff. They even left cash behind; they want us to die in a way that looks normal.”

“Maybe they already tried,” I commented. “In the basement where they left us, I found a package for the darts they shot us with, which used a sedative called Daramine. I have a condition in which my body makes high levels of caffeine naturally. It means I have to take sedatives just to sleep every day. But never Daramine, because caffeine renders it less effective. In concentrations like caffeine is found in my body, it makes it last only about 20% of the time it would for a person with a more typical level of caffeine. If I hadn’t woken up when I did, and force-fed you the equivalent of 20 cups worth of coffee each, you’d still be asleep now, and maybe dead, if however they accomplished the body changes made you need so much food.”

“But why didn’t they do the same to you?” Jacob asked.

“They probably did. A side-effect of my condition is that my cells age and are replaced very slowly. This first exhibited itself as being slow to heal, like in hemophilia, but doctors eventually figured out it is not hemophilia, and instead is caused by the same condition that makes the caffeine. It’s not caused by the caffeine, but rather by what causes my body to create all the caffeine. If they gave us something that makes the cells get replaced quickly, it would basically have no effect on me, but it would have caused you to be so incredibly hungry like you were.”

“Did that make us change?”

“It might have, if they changed all your DNA first.”

“How would they change our DNA?”

“Some companies are starting to test treatments that cure genetic-based diseases by rewriting certain bits of DNA. This would have been more extreme; it would have had to replace your entire sex chromosomes and large chunks of other chromosomes that control our appearance. Maybe the whole genome. I don’t know anybody who’s done that. But with the normal changes, they give doses of drugs that speed up the cellular replacement process to make the treatment effective sooner. Typically it makes them replace all their body’s cells over a week or two and you have to eat double or triple for that time. They must have given you 20 times the usual dose so you’d change overnight, and that’s why you ate so much. And if you were kept asleep all the time with no food intake, you’d have starved to death.”

Jacob commented, “I guess we’re very lucky to have encountered you.”

Margaret pointed out, “Is there any of their stuff that we want to take, besides the money and car? Something else that will help us?”

The three of us searched the house. We pretty quickly found their cell phones... but we couldn’t unlock them.

“Damn, no face unlock,” Jacob complained.

“You had your phones set to unlock by recognizing your faces?”

“Yes,” they both responded.

“That’s bad. It probably means they have gotten into your phones.”

“Crap. I wonder how far they can get just with that?” Jacob worried. “Those devices have the two-factor authentication apps for financial accounts, but they would also need the passwords, which are all different, difficult, and the only place they are stored is in an encrypted file with a longer difficult password. Hopefully they won’t get into that, and the accounts will remain untouched until we can find a way to get our phones back.”

We gathered some of their clothes (double the male clothes, for me) so we’d have something to change into. Margaret reminded Jacob about feminine products, which naturally were present in a home where a woman lives. We also looked around for any documents about their plans to steal the Astorias’ identities, but found nothing. Before dawn we headed out and parked at a restaurant nearby which wasn’t open yet to try and figure out what we could do.

We had two hundred bucks and a car, but no usable phone among the three. We didn’t have access to any of our own accounts, but we potentially had access to the Crevils’ bank accounts and credit line if they had left us anything. I didn’t even have my ID or house keys, but if I could get back home somehow, we could get on the internet and do things like report our cards stolen. And I could write checks against my account if someone would take them in this day and age.

We had the Crevils’ ATM and credit cards too, but without their PIN codes, which we failed to find written down anywhere at the house, we couldn’t use the ATM cards. We could attempt to buy things on the credit cards, though. And we could go to their bank when it was open and try to get new cards or withdraw money or something.

But the first priority was to get more food. Though my two friends no longer felt starving, they still felt hungry, and it was likely that whatever was done to transform them was going to cause them to need even more food before it got back to normal. We didn’t know this part of town, and the stores we passed were all closed, but I knew of a 24-hour grocery store closer to my home, so we headed there and picked up about $100 worth of the cheapest and most filling foods and took them back to the Crevils’ house to cook them, even though we worried they’d come back to kill us.

After going through about half as much food as they had the first time, and a regular breakfast for me, we no longer felt hungry, and I hoped it was over. By that point there was daylight and, properly fed, we realized we had other resources. Specifically, I knew the five other women Margaret had the parties with. Margaret thought I was changing appearance too, but at a much slower pace than them, and I still looked enough like myself to convince the others who I was, along with facts only the people who’d attended those parties would know.

“We should go to Susan’s house,” Margaret said. “She lives alone and there’s nobody else to bother there. Don’t go to Jane’s; she’s got family who don’t know about those parties.”

So we did, and Susan invited us in and we told our story over her breakfast.

“I understand why you don’t want to talk to the police, Margaret, as your story is truly unbelievable and they’d just consider you a crackpot and not bother the impostor Astorias about it. But what you should do, Fred, is go to the police with your story. You were drugged, kidnapped, robbed, stripped, and dumped at the Crevils’ house. All of that is true, even though you are leaving out some details. They can help you get back into your place, with the level of security a normal person would have, and help you report all the stolen cards. And maybe you can help John and Margaret at least report some of their stuff stolen online, anything they can log into without needing two-factor codes. Or find phone numbers to call in or something.”

“Yeah, that makes sense, Susan. Thanks,” I told her.

The others gave their thanks as well, and we followed her advice. The police were able to get my phone company to tell them where my phone was pinging cell towers, and that it hadn’t moved since shortly after it was taken. So they searched that area and found all my stuff, even my clothes, dumped in a dumpster. They hadn’t even taken my cash from my wallet. Three hours after reporting this to the police, we all went over to my place, where I was able to get in just as if I’d never lost my stuff, and I confirmed they hadn’t messed with my accounts or anything.

“Well I guess that’s it. I have all my stuff back. I guess they didn’t really care about me. They were after you and your stuff.”

Margaret responded, “They didn’t expect you to be there. They probably knew we went out to dinner like that some nights, but we didn’t usually come back with anyone else. In fact, I don’t think we had ever done so.”

“I’m glad to continue trying to help you, but I don’t have a plan.”

Jacob said, “We’re going to have to go to the police at some point, but we have to come up with some evidence to support our story to make them believe it.”

Margaret added, “We have some knowledge we can use. We know about the security systems over there, and we know our backup ways in for if we ever got locked out or something.”

“You really remember all those codes?” Jacob asked.

“Yes. You may not, but I do. I know the code for the gate, and the code that opens the garage door in case the remote fails. I know where we keep the spare key in the garage to get into the rest of the house. If they have our phones in there, we go in and take them back while they are sleeping.”

“I’m glad you remember all that. I would have needed to look it all up on my phone, and obviously I can’t. But yes, if we take our phones back, and if they haven’t messed with all the passcodes yet, I can secure all my money. Then we can figure out what to do about them looking like us and living in our home.”

I butted in, “That’s really all the security you have?”

“I thought it was enough,” Jacob replied. “They would have to know 6 digits to enter at the gate and 5 more, I think, to open the garage, and know where we hid the key or break in, and breaking in would set off alarms. Our locks aren’t simple ones like the one on your door; they’re tied into an alarm system that goes off if they try to break down or cut through a door. The windows are similarly alarmed. And if either panel has more than a few wrong codes entered in a short time, that also sets off an alarm.”

“Fair enough.”

I spent the rest of the day quizzing them on every aspect of what we would encounter and what their plan was to break into their own house and steal their own phones back. We had lunch at the usual time, with them only eating double portions. In the afternoon, we moved the Crevils’ car a block away at a place where it was legal to park all hours, and where it would not make it as obvious where I was. If they had so thoroughly ignored me, as it seemed, they might not find us here, even if they found their car. Then we went out in my car to buy a few things to support the plan. We continued discussing the plan and even mimed going through it all, with the Astorias describing the exact steps they would have to take within the house.

We ate dinner, this time everyone eating a normal sized meal, and immediately after dinner we all slept, me on my couch and the Astorias rather cramped on my bed together. I explained to them about my condition, how it led to me waking up hours before the Crevils probably expected us to, and showed them the sedative I had to take, so I knew I was going to sleep for exactly 7 hours.

At 2 AM we were up again to go break in. And it went off without a hitch. I waited in the car while the Astorias went in each carrying a reusable shopping bag I had loaned them and a flashlight we’d bought. In 10 minutes from when they left the car, they came back, each having their phone, backup phone, and wallet in the bag.