Soon enough, Anna arrived. We put her up in a room at the inn, and made our preparations. We let her get some sleep and prepared to start our study in the morning.
The first day, we didn’t actually go in ourselves. We just poked equipment through the portal on poles of various sorts, and took readings from it. We didn’t get a GPS signal or cellular phone signal except for what came through the portal from here. By closing the door I’d installed, and using a longer pole, we concluded there was no trace of those signals. Since you can get a GPS signal outdoors pretty much anywhere in the world, we assumed this meant this was nowhere on Earth, at least not today. Because it’s a completely unknown phenomenon, we did consider the possibility that it’s in the same place in a different time.
Next, we took some samples of the air, radiation readings, and a spectrum of the sunlight. All of these were in agreement with present-day Earth, except the air had less carbon dioxide and essentially none of what we consider man-made pollutants. So we again considered the possibility that it’s at another time, offset by thousands of years.
That night, we put out some cameras to take pictures of the sky and locate the stars. First, we did a visual comparison with a picture we took in our world at about the same time. The other side of the portal was clearer; more stars were visible because there was not the air pollution or light pollution of our Earth to disrupt it. But other than that it looked the same; to the extent we could see them (not blocked by trees and such) the stars visible in our world were all visible over there at the same relative brightnesses. Not only that, we were looking at the same part of the sky, meaning it was in the same part of the world. Mama Martina knew that what ancients called the fixed stars are not really fixed, and over time scales of hundreds or thousands of years, changes in the layout of stars in the sky can be observed. We did a little research: If the other side of the portal was at a different time, what stars would we expect to move significantly? We located those stars in the photos; they hadn’t moved.
It didn’t seem that it could be at a time when there wasn’t human habitation. The Romans were here 2000 years ago, and there were some stars visible with the naked eye which should move far enough in 2000 years that we would notice. It could be in the future, if Earth goes through a cataclysm between now and then that wipes everything out, but would the air pollution clean itself up? We decided what made the most sense (to the extent that any of this made sense) was that it was a parallel Earth, one where humans had not developed. Why there was a portal to such a place, when humanity had never encountered one elsewhere, was unclear. Maybe, as someone had done here, there was incentive to hide them all?
The second day, we went out, still in the hazard suits because we don’t know what other hazards we might encounter. And there wasn’t much. In fact, we didn’t see any animal life but the worms. There were trees and bushes and grass and other plants that matched Anna’s data of what was historically naturally occurring in Sicily; there were few of these today because of thousands of years of human habitation which destroyed many plant species and imported others. It was hard to compare the terrain, because thousands of years of human settlement had flattened many areas for habitation. The other side was hillier because it had not undergone such treatment. But the far-off mountains, including the very obvious Mount Etna, matched our world and supported the theory that we were on an alternate or parallel Earth. Except to get some more complete night sky pictures, we restricted our explorations to the daytime, as we needed to bring with us light sources in order to see anything at night, and this made serious exploration difficult.
The third day we traveled a bit further, and upon coming around an outcropping of rock, Anna let out an ear-piercing shriek. Antonio and I hurried to see what happened. Nothing had happened to Anna; it was what she saw.
Sitting on a rock with his back up against the taller outcropping of rock was a man. Maybe a woman; it was hard to tell. But he was covered with the worms, and some of them seemed to be going in and out of open sores on his body. And then to all of our surprise, since we had thought he was dead, the man moved an arm, and we all jumped back.
“We come in peace,” I said in English, almost immediately realizing the futility of it, but Antonio repeated it in Italian.
The man responded, at first we thought in strangely accented Italian. My group spoke mainstream Italian, the language from Rome most closely related to classical Latin, and not the Sicilian dialect, these days spoken only in a few areas, which had many words borrowed from other languages. This was not that dialect; it was closer to our language than that dialect, and different in other ways. After a bit we realized the man was actually speaking Latin, and that’s why we understood much of it. Italian is descended from Latin, as are Spanish, French, and several other languages, but Italian is least changed from Latin.
After asking him in Italian to repeat it, we put our language knowledge together to determine he had said roughly, “I agree; let us be peaceful. How have you come here?”
After we had a brief deliberation, since we had tested the air to be clean, we decided to one at a time remove the hoods of our suits to better converse with the man. Then Antonio said, “We discovered a portal hidden inside a wall of our building. Are there no other people here?”
“I am the only one left. I have been here a very long time; this is only a tiny fraction of it.”
He pointed to another section of the outcropping where there were rows and rows of ancient-looking tally marks, which I estimated as 300 per row, probably counting off a year of days per row. There were at least 40 rows of them going all the way down to the ground.
After making sure we were getting a recording of it, Anna said, “We have plenty of time. Tell us your story.”
“My name is Cassius. I was part of a group of Romans sent here to build more settlements. There were hundreds of us, but about 20 were in the area of your world you came from, clearing trees and brush to allow the building of houses. At one point we came upon a tree which was gnarled around some kind of a frame. As we cut the tree away, we realized the frame wasn’t actually a frame. It was just a hole in the air, and it connected the land to this other place. We were surprised to discover it was a different place, and after stepping through the hole, we could not see any of our other men except by looking through the hole.”
He paused for a moment as one of the worms crawled up to his mouth and went in, and he swallowed it.
“Why did you eat the worm?” Anna asked.
“I have eaten so many of the worms that I am more worm than man. I help them breed, and they feed me their old. But that comes later.”
“Certainly. Go on with your story.”
“After we reported the hole to the leader of our group, deciding this represented more land to clear, he sent half of us through to clear this side. It has all grown back, but before we stopped clearing it we had the area between this rock and the hole clear, and more than that on the other side. Just as the others did on the other side, we ate the food that was available. It was common to cook the fruits and berries of the trees with any small animals we could catch, but here there were only the worms, so we put several of them in the pot. The taste was fine, and we did not notice anything until morning, when we all awoke transformed into women.”
He paused as a group of young white worms emerged from a sore on his arm.
Anna told him, “We are aware of the sex-changing properties of the worms.”
Cassius placed his arm so that the worms could easily climb off his body, and when they finished, he continued.
“We were embarrassed, as this was not women’s work, but we put on our gear, though it did not fit our bodies well over our breasts, and continued our work. We all ate the worms again that day and woke up the third day here as men again. That day we experimented, by having half the men eat stew of only fruits and berries, and half only of worms, and when the men who ate worms changed, we reported it to our leader. He ordered us to stop work on the this side of the hole and all go back to the side from which we came, except the men who were women would eat the worms once more to change back into men. And for several days we stayed on the other side of the hole and cleared land there.”
He paused as another worm entered his mouth and he swallowed it.
“At this point, there was nothing marking the hole, but we remembered where it was. But one man forgot, one who hadn’t gone through the hole before, and he ran into the edge of the hole. It was invisible on edge and was so sharp it sliced him in two as if he’d been cut by the sharpest blade. Seeing that this hole was now dangerous in at least two ways, our leader ordered the hole sealed. We just enclosed it in a solid wooden frame at first. Later, when we were building houses, we built one around the hole. And at this point our leader asked if there were any of us who would like to colonize the other side of the hole on behalf of Rome, but telling us that he was going to close it off and we’d have to live out our lives until they came back for us. I and two of the others did, one of whom wasn’t part of the original group who changed.”
“Because you and they wanted to become women?” I asked.
“Maybe. It has been too long for me to say with certainty why we decided to do that, but at least we didn’t feel the idea of being women objectionable.”
After a pause, Cassius continued, “We built the room you see there, facing the portal from the other side, and a room of similar size on the other side, facing this side. After making sure everybody was on the side they wanted to be on and we had suitable tools, we closed it off from both sides, so the people on each side could reach only one room on the other side, and those rooms were located in the same space so that it looked natural. The edge of the hole itself was heavily encased in wood to protect against the sharp edge. The house was built of wood, surrounded by tar-sealed stone, so it should last a long time, and you can see that what we built still stands, though there are holes in the structure now. They never did come back for us, though. Many years later, on the other side, they collapsed our room down to just the tiny space accessible there now. But by that time only I was left here and I wasn’t using it. Maybe they came back that day, didn’t find me, and made the changes, but they didn’t leave other people here. But I think they forgot about us, and the change was made by somebody else.”
“What happened to the others who were here with you?” Anna asked.
“Well, that’s a long story. After we sealed up the place, we had fun for a while changing each night, and then staying as women for a while. We pretty soon stopped wearing clothes, and lived nude all the time. After realizing the worms worked if eaten raw, we decided to let one of us be male each night and have sex with the others, drawing lots to determine the initial order. This meant we cooked our meal without worms, so that one person wouldn’t change, and the other two ate raw worms. We did that for maybe a year before we thought seriously about colonizing the land, meaning having children.”
Cassius made a big belly-laugh and the rest of us laughed with him.
“None of us had ever thought seriously about becoming pregnant, since we grew up male, and in a year of having sex as a woman two out of three nights we had never gotten pregnant. But since we experienced menses during the periods we stayed longer as women, we thought maybe we needed to stay as women longer before a pregnancy would take. After drawing lots again, Lucius was chosen to stay male and the others of us female until both of us were pregnant. The plan was for Lucius to then become female, one of us pregnant women to become male to impregnate him, and female again later to give birth. I was one of the pregnant females, but we drew lots again and Marcus was the one chosen to become male.”
Now Cassius stared at us with a very grave look on his face. We knew what happened in our world at this point, so we could predict what he was about to say.
“Marcus did become male, but gave birth to the child during the night after transforming, the birth taking place through his penis. It left a huge wound where the penis should be, which caused Marcus to bleed to death. The child wasn’t developed enough to survive, and we buried both of them.”
All of us were staring at each other with mournful looks. The people on Earth who had done this had not been far enough along for their pregnancies to show. For someone more advanced to do it, especially with the very limited medical abilities of the time and even more limited supplies, we weren’t surprised to hear the person transforming died.
Cassius led us to a place nearby where a large flat stone and a somewhat smaller one were embedded in the ground standing on end, with no sign that the ground had been dug up, naturally, since it was 2000 years ago. We hung our heads in silence for a moment, then followed him back to where we found him.
“We understood then that allowing a pregnant woman to become male, even for a day, was not a good idea, and I stayed female until the birth. Lucius went male the next day and stayed male forever after. I stayed female after the birth to suckle my son, who I named Gaius, but I did not have sex. As far as I was concerned it was now Lucius’s turn to bear the next child. But he wouldn’t go female, so there were no more children. I changed female periodically after that and we had sex, but I changed back the next day to avoid becoming pregnant. Gaius was too scared of the idea of giving birth after we’d told the story, so he never ate one of the worms his whole life. And after Lucius was dead, I let Gaius have sex with me, on occasion, but always changing to male the next day so that I never let myself become pregnant.”
Cassius paused a bit, collecting his thoughts to figure out how to tell the next part of the story. After a few minutes he continued.
“Gaius and Lucius lived out normal lifetimes and died, but I lived on, still seemingly youthful after any normal person would have died.”
When Cassius didn’t lead us to their graves, Anna asked where they were buried.
Cassius responded, “I didn’t bury them. I left them to rot, in punishment for not doing their part to let our settlement of this place develop. We could have been the progenitors of a new civilization, but they didn’t want to take their turns. I laid them out beside the other graves, but they are long gone, even the bones.”
“I see,” was Anna’s response.
“I changed regularly, at least once a week and for some long spans daily, and decided that must have something to do with staying young, so I continued doing it. It was after Gaius died and I still felt young that I started tallying the days. It was 45 years before I ran out of room to mark them, and at that point I decided it was clearly abnormal, an additional side-effect from eating the worms, and I stopped tracking them. And I have lived here alone ever since then.”
“Wasn’t the loneliness awful? What drove you to keep going?” Anna asked.
“The repeated changes had other effects on my body. I started to understand the worms in a way I can’t clearly explain. I felt like I understood what the worms near me wanted, and while at first the worms were somewhat elusive, later it seemed like there were always worms available near me. After Gaius was dead, I missed sex, and I sometimes used one of the worms to pleasure myself. One day one of these worms slipped up inside me. I felt it squirm around for a bit and I was in ecstasy. The best sex of my life, and I’d had sex with the men thousands of times while they were alive. After about as long as I could stand it, the worm came out of me, and the worms avoided me the rest of the day. I thought I’d upset them, using them in that way, but the next day, I felt a wriggling inside me, and I discovered the worm I’d used that day was pregnant. The squirming was how it laid its eggs inside me, and those eggs hatched the next day. One or two at a time, the small white worms made their way out of me, giving me orgasms the whole while. Shortly after one made it out, another one started its journey, and it took from midday until dusk for more than 40 of them to escape my birth canal. I was so benumbed by the repeated orgasms I couldn’t move and sat there powerless as another pregnant worm crawled into me and laid its eggs for a repeat performance the next day.”
Cassius slumped back against the rock in imitation of the way he did in his story.
“So I started doing my eating and other activities in the morning, and spent the afternoon birthing worms in complete ecstasy, sleeping wherever I had ended up when the worms started coming out. This continued for a few days, and then one day no other worm pushed its way into my vagina, but one came to my mouth instead. I swallowed it hoping it wasn’t a death sentence, but no other worm touched me and I woke up male and not pregnant with worms the next day. They only let me have one male day, though, and after turning me female again, a pregnant worm came to me to deposit her eggs, and the cycle continued. I regularly had 5 or 6 days of birthing worms in a row, these periods separated by one male day and one female day in which a worm just laid eggs in me.”
We were all rolling in laughter, but Anna managed to ask, “How long did this go on for?”
“Many years,” Cassius answered, standing up and walking over to his panel of tally marks. He pointed to a spot in the second row. “I think it started around here. It was still going in that form after I stopped counting the days. Well, mostly in that form. By about here,” he pointed about a quarter of the way down, “My body was no longer so overcome by the sexual pleasure that I was unable to do anything after birthing a brood of the worms. This meant that if I wanted a day off, I could cover myself with a hand and stop worms from entering me. But I can’t say that I did that often. Frankly, I enjoyed the feeling, and I was rather addicted to it.”
Cassius sighed. “After about 100 years of doing this, now well past any human lifespan, my regular cycles of change no longer ran to completion. I stopped developing much in the way of breasts when female, and I grew only the tiniest stub of a penis when male. The female orgasms were still as strong as ever, though. And when I wondered why, I realized it was the worms. The worms were as addicted to having me as a breeding spot as I was to the orgasms their breeding inside me led to. And besides changing my sex, they had the ability to subtly affect my body in ways that were beneficial to them. They wanted to keep me around, so each worm eaten made me a little younger. They wanted me to enjoy giving birth to their babies, so they made sure the female orgasm function stayed in top form.”
“Does this still happen?” Anna asked. “If we wait until the afternoon, will we observe what you described?”
“Sadly, no. The worms couldn’t keep parts of my body functioning correctly over time. There is still a hole there where my vagina should be, and it’s one of the places the worms lay their eggs, but I no longer feel that pleasure. In later days, when I suffered injuries, the worms came to stop the bleeding, but they ate away a little of me and made new places to lay eggs. Even that doesn’t happen any more. I no longer have blood; it’s all been replaced by worm guts. The same greenish-yellow stuff that comes out of a cut worm comes from my body when it’s cut. I suspect lots of my insides have also been replaced by the worms, but I have neither the knowledge nor the tools to figure out what.”
“Interesting. I can bring some tools here and study you and help you answer those questions you have about yourself. It may take a few days for me to get the tools.”
“I would appreciate the knowledge.”
“Do you want to go back to our world? Or do you want other company here?”
“I cannot leave, unless we take many of the worms with us. They are a part of me and I am a part of them now, and we must stay together. As far as bringing others here, I am also not excited by the idea due to my interactions with the others who came with me going sour. If you could promise me they would be well behaved, that would be great. But I probably cannot serve as either a mother or a father now; they would have to make their own children.”
“We have many people from our world these days who eat the worms to change sex, including ones who become women and willingly have children afterward. They only change once, for life. We have been providing this service based on the worms that have come through the holes in the building, where we can access them in our world, which are many fewer than you have here, and so the changes are very limited in number. However, our world has changed greatly from the one you knew, and it would be a great shock to our people to come here with no other people, no inventions, and essentially no buildings. So I will have to find the special few who are both interested in changing sex and want to live a back-to-nature sort of life. I won’t send others through to live here who want to change everything. I can’t promise I’ll even find anyone suitable.”
“Thank you,” Cassius said.
Since he was content to remain there, we headed back through the portal and started work on a report for Mama Martina, to be shared with her permission with the rest of the family who still lived here, and probably nobody else. And we worked on determining what sort of scanning devices we could get. Upon reading our preliminary report, Mama Martina recommended we add to our team Carlo Maggliotti, a physician who grew up as a member of the family with knowledge of the worms, and let him determine what sort of devices we could scan Cassius with.
Carlo suggested ultrasound would be easiest, as the machines are portable and noninvasive. “But first, try it on a single worm to ensure the ultrasound waves are not harmful to the unknown physiology of the worms.”
We did this, using a few of the worms we brought in from the pantry. Sadly, we discovered that the worms died from the scans. However, one worm we brought in from the pantry died before we even scanned it. We determined that the worms only live for up to about 15 minutes on our side of the portal. We weren’t sure what it was about our world that was fatal to them. We had never noticed before because we always sliced them up quickly and dropped them in simmering pasta sauce. We had never tried to keep them as pets or anything. But it explained why they were limited to the pantry and nowhere else.
Bringing the ultrasound machine into the pantry, we got scans which did not harm the worms. The insides of the worms were surprisingly detailed. Anna pointed out they have much more internal structure than anything we call worms from our world. Some of those structures were identifiable as particular organs, some not. We determined that the worms have separate male and female individuals, unlike many species of worms which are hermaphroditic, having male and female organs at the same time. From this limited observation, we could not tell whether they change sex over time, which is also the case for some species of worms, and we thought likely for these, given their effect on consumption by humans.
Carlo also recommended X-rays, again checking the worms first, which provided less detail on the worms, since little of their body was opaque to X-rays, but was still useful as it showed things the ultrasound did not. There were other types of scanning devices, but they tended to be larger and impractical to take through the portal.
We went through and met Cassius with the machines. He was afraid of them at first, but he understood we only brought them to learn more about him, and didn’t object to their presence after their use was explained. And we quickly found that there was little left inside Cassius which resembles normal human organs. There were, however, hundreds if not thousands of the worms inside him replacing the heart, liver, stomach, intestines, and other organs. His brain was still normal, and his limbs were normal except where cavities had been carved out where the worms laid eggs.
With these scans done, we explained to him that the worms died after a short period on the other side of the portal, so he should never enter our world. We returned home, leaving him there. We prepared a final report to Mama Martina, who authorized sharing it with every family member now working at the inn, though they were not required to read it, and also to any family member who has ever changed sex via the worms, wherever they are. Since there was no real threat to us from the other side of the portal, we didn’t put in place higher security, and treated my locked door as sufficient.