When last we saw our protagonist:

I was heading home a short time after Marc left to work on the exterior bay door motors. I was contemplating our situation. It was frightening, the terror I felt when face to face with a woman. Just the thought of one scared me. I hadn’t met up with any other genders yet, so I didn’t know how much they would bother me. The thought of caused fear in an inverse funnel between me and a woman. A bisexual man bothered me a little bit. Then a gay man, followed by a genetically male gender fluid, to intersex, with all the layers in between. The pattern reversed through the genetically female genders as the funnel got wider and wider, until it reached a completely heterosexual female

When I reached the ‘u’ shaped corridor running between levels, I turned to go to my apartment. Now that we knew what was going on, I was a little more at ease. I came face to face with fright again, however as I turned left into the corridor. I was standing almost nose to nose with two women. All three of us screamed and the women spun on their heels and started running downhill to the upper level.

I stared at my hand, unbelieving. When they turned, one of the women’s hands brushed mine. A moment later, my vision began to blur and it felt as if my body was being taken apart and put back together.

When last we saw our protagonist:

A screen came alive and we saw a man. A human, but not someone we knew.”

“Hello, people of N21,” he said.” I am President Freeman of Earth. I know when you were sent away, Willem Wallace, or ‘Caesar’ as you referred to him, was the ‘Chancellor’.

“Approximately three hundred years after you left, Wallace had shown enough of his character to make those of us still on Earth recognize what you had long ago seen. There was an uprising, and we were able to remove him from power. He was in prison until we received a signal from you.

“Every computer around the world came on at the same time, and showed Wallace seated at his desk. He told us that we were all going to join him in a celebration of your exile. We saw what your camera’s recorded, Wallace telling you he wanted to ‘play’; the death of your maintenance worker. Then we saw a bay of the station open, and the people dying on the floor.”

For a moment, Freeman stopped. He looked somber, then rubbed his face with his hands.

“Wallace was questioned at length. That was an experience I never want to have again. He was, quite simply, insane. He wanted to toy with you as a cat toys with it’s prey. Revelling in your suffering was what he wanted most of all.

“He tried to bargain with us with his knowledge. He wanted freedom, but we refused. It took several months to obtain what we wanted. He spent that entire time in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t pretty. What we got from him, we want to pass on to you.

“There are several… surprises, in the computers of the station. They have been left there. There seems to be no way to remove them from the memory. Even a complete shutdown will reload the same information when you start them again.

“Much of what is programmed will be worse that what has already happened. Some not as bad. We will append a file to this message that will tell you what we have found. I hope you can find something on board that we didn’t think of here.”

When last we saw our progagonist:

John looked around at those closest to him. “Well?”

What a question. Do we open it or not? We had thought we were prepared, but were we? We didn’t want to die. We truly had nothing to lose, but life itself. To hold on for more, or not?

Very quietly, and with more calm that I found somewhere, I said “Open it.”

Chapter Two

The sky was nickel green even through the sepia, and the atmosphere overhead above seemed to boil. There was no sun to speak of, only the glow of LED's from a million different monoliths that made up the skyline. They dominated everything and were singularly brutal. Little care was given to aesthetics; this was entirely unlike the cities he remembered.

Zane lives two generations into the future.
By now, mankind has access to many marvels.
Not so Zane. As a welfare recipient, he lives with the bare minimum.
When he gets an interview for a maintenance job, he vowes to do whatever it takes to get it.
Though soon, he wonders why his potential future boss calls the job yoga-dance-doll ...

An cryogenic experiment, A brave volunteer starts to dream about being the opposite sex. Is it malfunctioning equipment or intentional or something entirely different all together.

Chapter One

Sean was falling.

He felt nothing, but nonetheless he was falling. Of that Sean was certain.

-

Instinctively, she lay on the floor and put her hands over her heart. She tried to calm herself, but waves of fear kept washing over her. Everything is wrong, she told herself. I’m alone at the butt-end of the universe, and I don’t know what to do.

The night before the teleport cycle, they switched back.
Linnea found it a bit disorienting, being back in her own body again.
She saw what Darlene meant by a mess of weird sensations.
She caught herself wondering whether living in a synth body was the better deal.
Alarmed, she shook off the question and tried to forget it.

“Uhh, okay,” Linnea agreed, not without grave misgivings. She felt that she’d already opened Pandora’s Box. Now, she found that the box was full of smaller boxes, all of them belonging to Pandora, and each one more portentious and potentially dangerous than the one before.

Carlus scratched his head for a moment, then said, “I get it. You’re the only girl, and you want a friend. But you know -- in spite of how she looks and acts -- she isn’t real. She looks like a person, but she’s not a person.”

VENNgence Is Mine 3 revised

A Trust Machines story

This should be the last installment of Marvin's story. Thanks to dkfenger and trismegistusshandy for pointing out the errors and giving me some helpful suggestions.

Any errors left are mine.

While college campuses have changed with the times, Venn Machines have sped up those changes.

Like with the rest of the world, most people look exactly the way that they want to look.

     
How do the friends get along?
     

Right to Life: The Brain Donor

Chapter 2 - Recovery.

I spaced out for the next few days. Orderlies came in and changed my bedding, nurses fixed my colostomy bags, and drained the catheter bag. I got sponge baths, and they manually manipulated my limbs, so my muscles wouldn’t tighten up and atrophy. All the while, I sat there in a fugue. Things happened, and I was aware of them. But I didn’t give them any thought, and I certainly didn’t respond to anyone.

“Too much pillow-fighting?” he asked with a grin as we walked back toward our van.

 

I swatted him on the arm. “I’ve been to two girl sleepovers so far, and neither involved a pillow-fight.”

 

“Man, you got cheated.”

     
Oh my, what did she go and do?
     

Moss felt an enormous sense of gratitude when Barfield raised his head and asked his guards, “Do you think I could get a cup of coffee?”

“Uh… yeah,” the first guard said, and Moss could see the two guards mentally struggle to find a joke connecting coffee and Uranus.

I sat in my bed, in my tiny apartment, wondering where it had all gone wrong. I'd been doing that a lot lately. I was halfway to heaven, a little over fifty years old, and I couldn't help but think that they were, pretty much all of them, wasted years.

“M-meredith,” Dad said, and my heart skipped a beat. Even with the little stutter, it made me feel so wonderful to hear Dad use my real name for the first time.

Unfortunately, Moss had no anchor or listener or witness. He was alone in an office where he could fire anything he liked straight through to Uranus. There were no checks and balances. Uranus can’t talk back.

What is happening with the others?