Mad scientist John Crevil has figured out the perfect crime: Use gene-editing technology to swap places with billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife, and set them up to die after putting the Astorias’ into their own guises. What could go wrong?
In 2030, based on the observation that gene therapy was successfully using custom-designed viruses to rewrite a person’s DNA to remove harmful mutations or replace them with alternative, non-disease-causing genes, I had the bright idea of taking that a step further. What if I wrote a virus that completely replaced one person’s DNA with that of another?
It wasn’t that easy. The smaller changes didn’t trigger rejection by the person’s immune system, but the large scale change I was proposing, when tested on animals, did do so, sparking a nasty war between the immune system killing the modified cells and the virus modifying more cells and killing the patient. By adding an immune suppressant during the change, I was able to stop that and let the body cells and the immune system cells both get changed by the virus, resetting the immune system so that it considered its current surroundings acceptable.
That didn’t, however, immediately cause the patient’s body to resemble the target. It caused a very slow change, as new cells were produced and those new cells exhibited characteristics from the new genes. Yet another drug could send the replacement of body cells into overdrive. Combined with sufficient nutrition, this could actually change the body to somewhat resemble the target after 3 days, for the dogs I used. It even produced a working sex change when the target was of the opposite sex.
It didn’t fix any physical damage the body had suffered, though. If I gave it to a 3-legged dog, the dog didn’t regrow its missing leg. And it didn’t change the hair that was already there, but newly produced hair was of the color and texture of the target dog. Yet another drug I added to the mix stimulated the hair growth significantly, so if I shaved off the old hair before starting the treatment, the appearance was a good match. Another limitation was that it didn’t adjust well for sizes; if the target dog was significantly larger or smaller than the original, the treatment only changed it part of the way to the other dog’s size. It did well on the bulk, or density of the body, but it didn’t do much to make the dog’s legs or body longer or shorter. I thought this would be less of a problem for humans, who have much less variation in this regard.
Because of course I was going to use it on people. But I wasn’t likely to get volunteers to change themselves to become a double of some other random person, nor to let someone double their own body. The testers had to be the ultimate intended users of this treatment, me and my wife, Betty. I tested it first, becoming a duplicate of her. It took larger doses of the drugs, and I ate triple meals for a week to complete the process. But all of it seemed to work, including the new growth of hair. It didn’t reach her length, but I no longer looked bald and had enough hair to style into a short woman’s style at the end of the week. And a few weeks later I had my first period, showing that the recently grown female equipment was functional.
With that test proving successful, I injected Betty with a treatment based on my own pre-change DNA.
“John, are we going to be able to get back to our original bodies afterwards?”
“Remember, the plan is we’re going to disappear by becoming other people. But yes, if we chicken out, or something goes wrong with other parts of the plan, I have enough of the treatment and stored DNA to get us back to our original bodies.”
Her change worked as well, and I stayed in her body and she in mine while we worked on the next part of the plan, so we could both get as much experience as possible in bodies of the opposite sex. We swapped because our targets were oil magnate Jacob Astoria and his notably tall wife Margaret, who were close to our heights, but Margaret was close to mine and Jacob was close to Betty’s. In addition, Betty was more of a businesswoman capable of managing Jacob’s affairs, while as Margaret, I’d have no specific duties and could keep my eyes and ears open for any sign of anyone catching on to us while following her social circles.
Until I came up with this scheme, I hadn’t ever planned on needing to know how to use tampons, douches, or mascara, or how to put on a bra. It was necessary for this to work, though, so it was something I simply did, although at my age, the tampons were only going to be needed for a few years. Betty and I went over with each other in great detail everything we could possibly need to know as a member of the sex we weren’t born as, even when it seemed obvious, because we simply could not know what important thing we might not know otherwise.
Apart from that, we had three goals to work on during this time: To obtain the Astorias’ DNA, to study them enough to learn how to live their lives, and to figure out a way to get access to them to kill or kidnap them in order to take their places. Besides learning to live as the other gender, this is how we spent those months after our first change. It was a lot of work, but the goal was to become fabulously rich afterward, a thing we’d only need to do once.
We’d already done some preliminary work to make sure it was going to be possible. For instance, we’d learned the kind of security systems they employed. They’d bought into the face-lock concept, so when we had the right faces and had access to their physical devices, we’d have access to all their passwords and all their accounts. Now we were following them on 20 different cameras, most of them installed by landing magnetically locking, well disguised drones on their property, their vehicles, and other possessions. For some of them we had used various tricks to get into their home and Jacob’s office, and we also had a few that we stationed on rooftops that we used airborne sometimes. We learned their routines, their associates, their foibles and idiosyncracies, and every other detail we’d need to behave believably as the Astorias.
In doing this, we also made note of when and where we could get samples of their DNA. The best chance was when their chauffeur took one of their cars out to a detailing service where it was washed, vacuumed, and occasional care like replacing wiper blades was performed. That happened once a week, in a rotation among the cars, and at times which varied somewhat since it was when the chauffeur wasn’t needed to ferry one of the Astorias about, but we’d infiltrated the service and knew when the car would be coming. We just needed to have one of their employees call in sick so that they’d call someone from a temp service, and hack their phones so we got that call, to substitute myself as the temp.
This worked. Before I vacuumed the passenger cabin the Astorias used with the service’s own vacuum, I ran over it with a small device I kept in my pocket which picked up hairs and skin cells. We’d have to sort out whose was whose afterward, but they used all those cars enough, and they were essentially the only ones apart from the cleaning service ever in that part of each car. The two most common DNA signatures were guaranteed to be Jacob and Margaret, and sex chromosomes distinguished the two. I pulled off the capture of the DNA in this way around the end of the first month after Betty’s change into my body.
I got the treatments prepared within the week after that, though we studied the Astorias more before taking the treatments. It was almost two months after this, by which time I was fully comfortable living as a woman, before we decided that the one time a week they went out alone together for dinner was the best time to infiltrate. They were literally alone; Jacob drove to these events, rather than use his chauffeur, as they were “dressing down” events, usually at restaurants where arriving with a chauffeur would have looked out of place. It wasn’t fast food, but the Astorias were eating at restaurants where the check for the two of them only reached $80 to $100 after the tip was added. This also allowed the chauffeur and maid to have dates; it’s not clear whether the Astorias knew those dates were happening, but we knew.
While they were all out at one of these dates, we could use face unlocks to get past their gate and into their garage, wait for them to return, and ambush them when they arrived. They usually took time at home alone together after the dates, which would give us some time to figure out how to secure the Astorias’ bodies after we did the swap. We had a few plans for that.
We took our treatments, Betty first this time, to ensure she was a fully passable Jacob when the time came, and me a week later when she was through with her changes. We continued watching their routines with particular focus on these dinner dates during and after this time. This also gave us time to practice their mannerisms, on camera, with each of us helping to point out things the other was doing wrong and comparing them with video of the real Astorias.
It was on the sixth of the Astorias’ dinner dates after I turned into a duplicate of Margaret that we struck. It started out well. Betty’s face passed as Jacob’s to get us inside, and we stashed the car we came in behind the garage and went inside to wait. I carried a portable device which could only display one of our cameras at a time, though I could switch between cameras, and we watched to prepare for their arrival.
The first odd thing was that when they left the restaurant, Margaret was driving. She did drive sometimes, such as when she was going to a social event while the chauffeur was taking Jacob somewhere or needed to pick him up, but we hadn’t seen her drive home from one of these dates before. But we didn’t change our plans for this apart from us changing sides in the garage. I, as Margaret, was going to knock out Jacob and Betty would take out Margaret so that both of them would see their partner and not realize we were impostors until it was too late.
We weren’t prepared for them to deviate from their route and go pick up a person we didn’t know. This guy was young enough to be their son, though it wasn’t actually their only child, who was away at college.
“What the hell? Where did they find this guy?” I exclaimed.
“I’ve never seen him before, and didn’t see or hear them make plans to meet anyone else on this trip,” Betty confirmed. “Maybe someone called them while they were in the restaurant?”
“OK, snap decision time. Do we abort the mission, leave, and try again another week, or just try to deal with this guy somehow?”
“It’s too late,” Betty commented. “They are already too close for us to get away without being seen.”
“OK, ‘deal with it’ it is. Are we still doing plan A and just adding him to it?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Plan A started with us using tranquilizer darts to knock them out silently, bloodlessly, and quickly. The guns were single-shot but we each had a backup gun in case we missed. Now one of those backups would have to be used on the third person.
The chauffeur and maid arrived in one of the other cars, and we stayed hidden while they went back into the house. Eventually the Astorias’ car arrived and parked in the space it left from, and as they got out, I darted Jacob on the passenger side and Betty darted Margaret on the driver’s side and they both fell. The extra guy came out the rear door on the passenger side and he saw me and yelled “What the hell!” but I hit him with the second gun. It was apparently not a clean hit, because he started to run. There was no quick escape for him, though, because the Astorias had closed the garage door before leaving their car. Betty shot him with her second gun and that took him down.
So we were still on our modified plan. We loaded their bodies in the trunk of the car they just came out of, and Betty drove it, following me in our car, to our house. It had an attached garage and a secret entrance via a road through the forest behind the house which allowed us to get them in and out without anybody seeing us come or go.
The rest of plan A was that we would administer treatments based on my and Betty’s original DNA to make them look like us. Normally the cellular conversion drug would be administered orally, over several days, but we were going to give it to them intravenously all at once. It would work; they should end up looking like us. But without any food, their bodies would draw on their energy reserves, then fat cells, and finally on the body’s organ cells to try to fuel the conversions. They would essentially starve before morning, despite having just eaten an hour ago. A second dose of sedative would keep them from waking up before they died that way.
We’d planned to put them in our bed and let them die there, but that was before we had three of them. Instead, we put them in our lab, trying to make it look like I was trying to clone myself, with the young guy also becoming a copy of me. We didn’t care if he came out the right size or anything; he was supposed to be an experiment gone wrong. We laid him out on a table, naked, and put the others in clothes of ours loose enough to fit, and sat them in chairs. We took the clothes they came in back with us, since they were the Astorias’ clothes, after all. Likewise, we took Jacob’s wallet, Margaret’s purse, and other possessions they were carrying, and deposited the counterparts of those items that really belonged to us in places they’d normally be left within the house so it looked like we were at home normally and hadn’t been robbed. We confirmed the face-unlock worked to unlock their phones.
We still took a bunch of stuff with us that needed two trips to the Astorias’ car. We took everything from the young guy, since if he was a clone, he wouldn’t have any such possessions, and dumped that all in a dumpster along the way back to the Astorias’ house. We also took with us all remaining doses of the drugs, just in case we needed them again for some reason, our notes about the project, and everything linked to the extensive network of cameras we had used to watch the Astorias. I took my gun, and Betty grabbed the spare keys to our house so we could check here later if needed. The main keys were with my wallet and her purse, again to stage it as if they were home on a normal night.
But we abandoned everything else we were doing there. They’ll eventually be found dead there, assumed to be us and the result of a failed experiment, and we’d be severed from any ties to our past. We had done a lot of bad things in our lives, and while we’d never been caught on any of the major ones, it was only a matter of time before somebody connected one of those crimes to us... er, to John and Betty Crevil, who died in some experiment no doubt related to another crazy scheme of theirs. We locked up the house, left our car there in the garage, and went back to the Astorias’ house using their car, to start our new lives. It was pretty late by the time we got back, so mostly we just found our way inside to the Astorias’ bedroom (our bedroom, now) and went to sleep.
We started out following the routine we had seen the Astorias follow. They woke up to an alarm at 6:30, whether or not they had any morning appointments, showered in his-and-hers shower stalls, and dressed, selecting their own clothes like normal people. The only live-in servants were the maid, who was also the cook for most meals, and the chauffeur, who apart from managing all care for the cars, was also a handyman for some small jobs. Either of them might accept deliveries, which were most things, as the Astorias didn’t usually go shopping in physical stores.
By 7 the maid would have breakfast served, and the Astorias usually went downstairs for it a few minutes after 7. Betty and I used our time to check the Astorias’ phones, which again both face-unlocked to our adopted faces. There was a lot we wanted to do on those devices, but we couldn’t do it all before breakfast; we just checked for new messages (of which there was just one, for Jacob, related to a meeting he had later today) and reminders (plenty).
We walked down together at 7 and ate together. Lucinda, the maid, had it ready for us on the table and was over at the smaller servants’ table nearby with Harvey, the chauffeur, where they ate their own breakfasts. When it was done and Lucinda was cleaning up the dishes, Betty and I confirmed our schedules today with Harvey, in terms of where and when we needed him, and I mentioned to Lucinda that I was going out to a meeting at 1 so I needed lunch served ideally a little before noon. Of course, the Astorias had already let him know this schedule by email yesterday; this was merely to confirm he hadn’t missed a request and that our schedules hadn’t changed.
Since Jacob did not have to be in the office until 10 today, and Margaret had only a single social appointment today at 1, we went back upstairs, not to our bedroom, but to what they called a sitting room. We could page Lucinda to bring refreshments or whatever we needed up here, but otherwise she stayed out of this part of the house while we were using it, so it was a way for Betty and I to privately discuss the things we needed to do. We made checklists that included things like removing most of the cameras we’d used to track the Astorias, changing most of the passwords on their personal accounts in case someone else knew them, and putting some proper personal and household security in place which the Astorias had lacked.
We also pulled out the pad that let us watch through the cameras one at a time, and set it to look at the one we’d left in the lab our old home, expecting to see the trio dead on the floor or slumped in their chairs and on the table, but there were no people visible, alive or dead. That was worrying. They shouldn’t have been able to wake up before the cellular overdrive killed them, and nobody should have noticed their deaths yet for the bodies to be removed. We had wanted not to set foot in the place again to avoid the possibility of us being connected with them, but we were going to have to check that out somehow.
But we started with what we could do most easily, removing the cameras in the sitting room and our bedroom, and we decided to make a heavy old steamer trunk that resided in a corner of the sitting room the place to store all the artifacts of our past life when we weren’t using them. It was made of steel covered in leather, a heavy-duty unit which no doubt stayed there because it was too heavy for anyone to want to move anywhere. It had a decrepit old lock on it that was easier to break than to unlock with the key that was supposed to work with it, which led me to put a new padlock on the shopping list.
There was a single large book down in the bottom of the trunk before we put our stuff in. It turned out to be one of those fake, hollowed-out books, and it was where the Astorias had kept a pistol we’d never seen them use. Loaded, but with the safety on. When I lifted the gun’s case out of the hollow, under it was written a combination to a safe: 14-72-36. We hadn’t seen this safe during our surveillance of the Astorias, so it clearly wasn’t something they used often, which was probably why they’d written down the combination.
Writing it there went against one security practice we’d seen them use that we approved of: Each of them had an encryption app on their phone which they used to store infrequently used passwords they’d otherwise forget, in case the phone’s password manager failed to remember them to make available via their face unlock, and they put certain other secrets in there as well. A drawback, though, was that every time they changed one of those passwords or forgot one and needed to look it up, they had to type in their password, and they used one just complicated enough that they frequently got it wrong and used the “show password” feature to make sure they got it correct the second time. This had allowed us to capture the password from multiple views of it in the cameras. Jacob’s was the first half of supercali... and Margaret’s was the second half, both of them repeating the middle “istic” part, and each with certain letters (but not all possible ones) replaced by lookalike numbers and punctuation.
The combination to the safe should have gone in there as well, but likely the writing in the book predated the use of the app. This led us each to check out what was stored in that app. Jacob’s was almost literally a gold mine. Every credential necessary to access all of his money, along with dozens of other less useful passwords. And he had unique passwords on all the accounts that really mattered, so he wasn’t completely stupid with security. Some of them used those 6-digit codes as two-factor security, and notes with each account’s listing reminded him which account used which two-factor security app, of which he had three. There was surprisingly little else in there, but the safe combination was in there. Same combination. Also, there was a numeric passcode for the outside gate. I probably should change it, but I need to figure out who to update with the new code. There’s a gardening service who gets in that way, and some other service people.
Margaret’s yielded some of the same money passwords which were apparently for joint accounts, some different ones, the usual ones for other sites, the numeric gate code, maps with directions to two locations labeled with women’s first names, and notably, the password for her secret email account.
Margaret had one appointment every week which she always drove to herself and never told Jacob or Harvey about, and didn’t keep in her calendar. Betty and I had both assumed she was having an affair... enough so that we had agreed that if I found that she was having an affair, I needed to keep doing so to maintain our cover, at least until I had a good reason to break it off, and Betty would pretend she didn’t know about it unless presented with evidence of it some other way. She only ever accessed the second email account when Jacob was out, and for such short periods that we’d never gotten any real info about the contents, but we assumed it was related to the off-the-books meetings.
Since I could have had that appointment at any time, we went and checked that account right away. Wouldn’t do to stand up him up by failing to have looked up the time. But it turned out that it wasn’t an affair, not exactly. Almost all the messages in the account went to five people, all of them seemingly women. There were some pretty lewd comments, and occasionally pictures. After we read about twenty of the messages, and saw that the next meetup was tomorrow at 2 at one of the other women’s houses, Betty started an explanation, applying her insight about things women do.
“This can be a few different things. It could be a sort of girls’ night out, where they sit around and watch porn, share stories of their love lives or lack thereof, and other such things, but no actual sex. It could be that they hire a stripper, and basically have their own private strip club, especially if these are other rich women. It could be that they hire a gigolo, basically a male prostitute, who goes around and alternately has sex with the women. It could be a lesbian orgy, where they are all having sex with each other. And maybe something else or some combination of these. If you read more of the messages you can probably get a better idea.”
“Good thing we had sex in these bodies so I’d at least know what my female sexual response is like,” I commented. “We did see Jacob and Margaret have sex, though, right?”
“We did, but all indications are they are doing it less than once a month. Either Jacob is not interested, or nearly impotent, or Margaret is not interested, and I think what we saw in that email account rules out the last case. I’m pretty sure Margaret wanted more than she was getting from Jacob, and she’s getting satisfaction in one of the ways I guessed from these get-togethers. It’s not the case that Jacob didn’t have time for her because of his work; we saw that he did have the time and they had a reasonable amount of time together. But on that subject, I have to get ready to finally get out of here and off to my work appointments.”
So Betty did that and I kept reading. Ultimately I decided it was a combination of her suggestions. If the invitation didn’t say otherwise, it was a porn party where the women would masturbate and when they got especially turned on, possibly pair up. But sometimes they did hire a stripper or gigolo and the invitations said so. The meeting tomorrow didn’t have one, of course, because we would have seen it when we read the invitation. They only met at two of the houses, with names matching the maps I found in the password app.
But Margaret’s appointment today was merely a reading club. I hadn’t read the book, so I’d just have to follow along and if necessary admit that I didn’t find time to read it. I had hours before I needed to be there, but I wasn’t going to rush through the book now. I just read a synopsis online so I wouldn’t be totally lost.
I brought in the things from the car we had been too tired to move last night, most of which went into the steamer trunk. While I was at it, I also removed the bugs we’d managed to place on each of the Astorias’ cars, and while Harvey was taking one of the cars out for cleaning and Lucinda was making my lunch, I also removed the cameras from the downstairs parts of the house. I kept the pad out, plugged in to charge, and focused on our old lab just in case anything changed there, but each time I came back into the sitting room to look at it, the lab just seemed empty.
I also searched for the safe. Predictably, it was behind a painting, but there were at least twenty of those throughout the house and it took some time to find the right one. It was neither in the bedroom nor the sitting room, but the room they called the den, really Jacob’s home office where he did what little of his work-related activities that he did at the house. Margaret’s computer was in a similarly sized room, though appointed differently since she didn’t engage in the sort of business Jacob did. They didn’t seem to have a special name for it; it was just her room.
There was only one painting in the den, which was in clear view from Jacob’s desk, and it was behind that one. The contents were disappointing, about $5000 in cash and two boxes of ammo for the pistol and lots of empty space. I mean, when you had access to billions, five grand was disappointing. I checked to see if there was a false back or something, but that seemed to be it. I guess he didn’t have any secrets like Margaret did and was as straitlaced as they come. But I put a note on my list to find or draw up plans for the house so I could figure out where any other secret spaces might be.
Since Lucinda was already making lunch before I started the search for the safe, I wasn’t surprised to find it waiting for me when I went back downstairs. This meant the activities I’d been doing to get more familiar with details of the Astorias’ lives we didn’t pick up from the surveillance were on hold until later in the afternoon. I ate lunch, then grabbed my purse and the book I was supposed to have read and Harvey took me to the reading club.
The meeting lasted an hour, and I am not sure what Harvey did during that time, but he was there waiting for me when I came out. I did so carrying two books, the one discussed at this meeting and a new one. The club wasn’t meeting next week, so I had two weeks to read the new one. We bought the books at this club, and Margaret certainly could afford to. With about 3 books a month, she’d accumulated more than 200 of them over several years she’d been going, which filled a bookcase and had started on a second in her room.
On the way back to the house, Harvey said, “Jacob called while you were in there, and I’m going to have to go pick him up after I drop you off.”
So indeed, he pulled up to the garage, let me out, and immediately headed back out. Once they got back here, Betty (who I was now trying to call Jacob for our cover, though he was still Betty in my mind) and I headed up to the sitting room together and I shared what I’d discovered today.
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.
Mad scientist John Crevil and his wife swapped bodies with billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife, but their plan to cause the Astorias to die in the Crevils’ bodies has gone awry, on top of an extra person getting involved. What else could go wrong?
I showed Betty the empty lab in our house visible in the camera we left there.
She thought about it for a moment and then commented, “I’m concerned about this, but I’m not sure how concerned. If they are alive, they can cause trouble, but how much trouble? If everyone thinks they’re us, they can go on living our lives and not bother us. But they wouldn’t, of course. They’d want to reclaim their lives. This means that we need to move on to plan B, killing them directly.”
“But we have to find them now, since they aren’t in our lab.”
After dinner, we headed over there. There was no sign of a break-in the way we’d expect if the police had entered. The lab was neat and undisturbed. It really looked like they had simply somehow not died and walked out of here. The car was gone, as were my wallet and Betty’s purse, but they left our phones, which we now took. But where did they go? Since they hadn’t taken our phones, we didn’t have an obvious way of tracking them. Ironically, though we’d put trackers and cameras on a bunch of their things, we hadn’t put one on our own car.
We searched the other places we’d seen the Astorias go, near Jacob’s office, near Margaret’s friends, and even passed by the police station and didn’t see our car.
“I wish we knew where that young guy lives. They could have gone there.”
“Too bad we threw away all his stuff,” Betty responded.
This led us to go look for the stuff. We found what we were pretty sure was the right dumpster. We searched under all the bags, and through a couple bags of trash that had broken, but we didn’t find any of it. Either it was the wrong dumpster, or it was dumped between last night and tonight.
Eventually, we headed home, to the Astorias’ house. Betty drove and I started making a list of the most important passwords of the Astorias to change first in the morning. But we were tired after a crazy first day of trying to live the Astorias’ lives and passed out as soon as we got to our new bed.
When we got back to my home, the Astorias started going through the lists of passwords they had stored in their phones, logging into every site, and changing every password. This took hours, because there were a lot of them, and on the less important sites they just put an F in front of the old password. The F is for Fail, they said, though whether they felt like they’d failed or the crooks did, I’m not sure. Anything that managed money or could be used to reset passwords for other sites got a whole new unique password. I changed my email and my banking passwords. It didn’t seem like they’d really messed with my stuff, but I did it just to be safe.
When it got to be normal hours to contact people, Margaret contacted Susan and had her tell all the other women attending the party today that if “Margaret” showed up it was really a guy transformed into her, and to be as mean to him as possible. Then, since she’d cut the impostor Margaret off from her schedule, she provided a schedule of appointments for a week to follow to give to the impostor. So after getting him good, they’d let him in on the fact they knew he wasn’t the real Margaret, and what could John do?
A couple of those women were wives of Jacob’s co-workers, and Jacob separately contacted some people and told them things only Jacob would know to help convince them of the story. So they were going to get at Betty while using entirely proper work behavior as well. And they left his work password alone, but they had the IT admin reduce him from CEO’s privileges to those of an intern. Betty would be able to read and send email and meeting invitations and pretty much nothing else.
With that done, we went out and the Astorias both got new laptops, figuring that they would treat the old ones as compromised whenever this was over, and spent the rest of the day setting them up. Except that when the impostors were at Jacob’s work and Margaret’s party, the Astorias let their chauffeur and maid in on it as well. They were easy to convince, as they’d noticed something off about the couple in the morning, and were told to maintain cover, but to let us know if they deviated from routine.
The plan was to make it so bad for the Crevils trying to live the Astorias’ lives, with little benefit from it because they were cut off from all the real money, that they came begging to undo the whole thing. Of course, we wouldn’t let them get away scot free; they’d just find some other suckers not as well prepared.
We all went to bed around 8 tonight, sleeping long to try to get back onto a normal schedule.
When we awoke and started trying to follow the routine, we couldn’t find the Astorias’ phones. We found our phones, which were in the pile of stuff we left beside the bed when we got home, and where I’d made the list last night. But neither Jacob’s nor Margaret’s phones were anywhere to be found.
I started trying to change the passwords I could change from the computers, but I was too late.
“Crap!” I shouted. “They already started changing their passwords!”
“Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing,” Betty said from the other room.
“So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. We can still access their credit cards and live off what the help provides, but that’s nothing like we were trying to get. And we can still maintain our schedules, as long as we know them. I have a first meeting at 1 today. I’ll try to get there a little early and see if I can get someone there to reset that password, if it’s been changed”
“I know I’m going to the secret sexy party at 2 today, and that’s all. And I remember where that is. But I don’t know how long we’ll be able to do this, and once we can’t, we’ll be found out.”
“We might be able to reset some of the other passwords by showing up in person. Like go to one of the banks with ID and get them to reset the password for me, and make a new email account to link to it. Hey, wait, where’s my wallet?”
“My purse is still here. But there’s no wallet inside. We were robbed!”
“They must have come by during the night and taken their phones and wallets. They would know how to bypass whatever security they have, after all. At least they left us our phones.”
We went down for breakfast, and made plans for an early lunch and for Harvey to take Betty to the office, and I verified I still had a car to drive to the party. Then we went back up to the sitting room to ponder how we could proceed. Unfortunately, we didn’t really figure anything out.
It got worse when I went to the party. Apparently it was surprise gangbang Margaret day. All the other women had strap-ons, and it seemed like they were trying to embarrass me. It worked. And at the end of it, the host Susan handed me a printed copy of my appointments for the next week. Somehow, the Astorias had contacted them and convinced them I was a fake and they gave me this so I could keep following Margaret’s schedule without access to any of her email or anything.
Betty had it just as bad at work. Jacob’s work password wasn’t changed and she could still log in and get his appointments, but everybody in the meetings was constantly grilling her for information that Jacob would know but she didn’t. They must have contacted Jacob’s co-workers as well. Fortunately, she had Harvey’s phone number on her computer at work and she could use the phone there to call and get picked up.
We tried to think of a way out of the pickle we had gotten ourselves into, and every idea sounded bad.
We could change ourselves back to our original bodies. But they had our car and our wallets and knew where we lived. We might be able to make that work by reporting all the cards lost and reporting the car stolen. Or taking one of the Astorias’ cars and holding it hostage until they returned ours. This might work, if we had somewhere else to flee to, because otherwise we’d just get caught.
We could change ourselves into another couple. We had identified a few other candidates and still had the notes about it in the steamer trunk, but we had reasons why we thought each was less likely to work than the Astorias.
We could try to negotiate something with the Astorias. It didn’t seem likely that it would go well.
We could try to commit crimes in their identities to make them look bad, but if they have gone to the police already, with their friends and co-workers supporting their claim of stolen bodies, doing so would confirm it and we might get arrested still in these bodies.
We could try to hold the maid and chauffeur hostage as a bargaining chip in negotiating with the Astorias.
But then I hit on the idea I was sure was right.
“You know, Lucinda is close to your size and Harvey is close to mine. We could swap places with them, and set up a surrender but let them get arrested in our places.”
Betty responded, “What, and live out our lives as their servants?”
“What I was thinking was we later run another swap with the Astorias. This time make sure they’re dead. Make it look like Lucinda and Harvey were having kinky sex and both suffocated or something.”
“That could work. And we put out a call to replace them, hire new servants who have never known the Astorias as anyone but us.”
“Sure. If we want,” I agreed.
“Do you have the equipment to make another two sets of serum?”
“The lab’s still there. I can just go over there and make it.”
“What about timing? We can’t sit around here a week changing and letting everyone see us doing it.”
“The Astorias showed that people can survive changing in a day, so we give everyone high doses of the cellular overdrive drug, and buy loads of food to let us all survive the change. Tomorrow’s Friday, we set it up then and run the change over the weekend.”
We spent the rest of the evening working out the plan. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it looked better than any of our other ideas.
Betty went to Jacob’s work most of the day due to a 9 AM meeting. Margaret had only one appointment, and that was just hairdressing, and I called in and postponed it to Monday so that Harvey could do it after we changed him into Margaret. So I was free to run around most of the day doing stuff to set up.
I snagged some of Lucinda’s DNA from her bed while she was cooking breakfast, and Harvey’s DNA from the driver’s seat of the car he usually took Jacob to work in. I set up the DNA extractions at the lab, and came back to the Astorias’ house for lunch. In the afternoon I went back out to the lab and finished the serums, and made sure I had enough of all the other drugs and supplies needed to pull it off. There was one more drug I needed to go find, one that made people more suggestible, that we hoped would allow us to convince Lucinda and Harvey they were really the Astorias for long enough to get them put in jail for our crimes. Once I had that, I went and got loads of bread and other sandwich fixings, potatoes, pasta and jars of pasta sauce, and other easy-to-prepare bulk food. I had to sneak the 16 pounds of lunch meat into the fridge, but everything else could sit in the car until we sprang the plan.
Betty wasn’t happy after suffering another gauntlet at the office, but I had been able to set things up, and before we went to bed early we confirmed our plans.
The next morning, we got up at 4 AM so we could knock Lucinda and Harvey out for an hour each with the Daramine and administer the drugs. I gave each of us 30% of the full dose of the cell stuff needed to run the change, with another dose of 30% to be administered today, so that by tomorrow morning they’d mostly look like the Astorias and the remaining two doses would be a step-down. We also started our own changes, and brought in all the remaining food from the car.
Lucinda was due to get up shortly after her sedative wore off anyway, but unsurprisingly Harvey woke up before 6 due to his hunger. We were sitting there with sandwich fixings at the table.
As Lucinda awoke, surprised to see us already up and eating, I said, “There’s a new disease going around. It makes you really hungry but people are OK once it is over. It looks like Jacob and I both caught it, so I went out and bought some extra food. I hope you don’t have it too.”
Lucinda said, “I am really hungry. I probably do have it.”
“Well join in. There is plenty.”
Lucinda grabbed a plate and made two sandwiches out of the stuff I’d set up like a buffet line. She was working on her next two when Harvey awoke and I repeated the scheme with him. They had bought it, and this was without the suggestibility drug.
Once Lucinda’s hunger was down to a tolerable level, she got going with the cooking and made the four of us a triple-sized pancake breakfast, and we had a whole tray of baked potatoes, a big pot of pasta, and other stuff throughout the day. We weren’t constantly eating, but we had a large meal every couple hours. They didn’t act suspicious when, after I went out for a bit in the early afternoon, I administered “treatment” to all four of us which was actually to keep up the cellular regeneration that was changing all of us into one another.
Overnight, we knocked them out again, redressed them, and swapped places so they were in the Astorias’ bedroom and we were in the servants’ quarters. We administered the suggestibility drug and the next batch of the cell regen booster at 6 so they’d wake up hungry when the sedative wore off, and ready to be molded into Jacob and Margaret mentally.
At 7, we had plates on the table heaped with pancakes waiting for them, and Betty was in the kitchen cooking up a batch for herself and me.
“What’s going on?” a confused, female Harvey asked as he came down, still in Margaret’s nightgown that we’d dressed him in overnight. Lucinda, dressed as Jacob, followed behind Harvey.
“We’re still sick with that illness that makes us hungry,” I replied. “But Margaret, your plate is on the table waiting. Yours too, Jacob. Dig in!”
The servants addressing them by name was the norm here, and they knew that, even if a part of them felt like they should be on the other side of the exchange. They seemed confused but, no doubt hungry, they sat at the main table and started eating, and shortly, Betty served up our meals, too.
We needed less food today, so our hunger was sated, for now, with just the triple-sized stacks of pancakes Betty had made for us all.
While Betty was cleaning up the plates, Lucinda asked, “What are we going to do today?”
I responded, “I think we’re just going to stay here and wait out the sickness. It’s Sunday and you probably don’t have any appointments anyway, and tomorrow you should feel better. If you need to you can cancel those.”
And I grabbed “their” phones from the chargers, which were really ours, and handed them to them. Before we started the latest change, we had enabled the face-unlock thing that seemed universal here. We’d observed Lucinda and Harvey’s phones were set up the same way and we were able to get into them that way this morning. We’d set the names on our phones to Jacob and Margaret Astoria, based on new email accounts, and we logged out of our real email accounts on those phones. We put in the calendar invitations we knew about, the things we did last week and the ones on the paper I was handed at Margaret’s party and what Betty had written down from her calendar at work (at least, we’d written in the descriptions and times) along with Margaret’s rescheduled hairdressing appointment. They wouldn’t have any access to the Astorias’ real email, but this only needed to work for a couple days.
The face-unlock worked, and I think they looked at their empty calendars for today and their appointments for tomorrow.
“Oh, I get my hair done tomorrow,” Harvey commented.
We had trimmed their hair last night, cutting off what was their old hair and leaving the differently colored and textured new hair from the start of the treatment. The new hair was in its fully natural state now, which is OK for a man’s straight hair that just needs to be combed, but different for a woman’s hair. Of course, this just meant she would have nice looking hair when she was arrested, but Harvey didn’t know that.
We went through most of the rest of the extra food during the day, and the last cell regen treatment, which would among other things get the new organs working. By the time Harvey made it to jail, she’d be ready to have her first period. I don’t know what the heck they thought when they went to the bathroom today, but I know Lucinda had a penis and Harvey had a vulva when we dressed them, even if they weren’t fully formed yet.
By the evening they seemed to be accepting their new positions, and went up to the Astorias’ bedroom like it was their own. When we went to bed, for once we didn’t have to have a long discussion about what we were doing. Things seemed to be going according to plan and we didn’t have to mess with other people’s bodies during the night.
They awoke as normal, informed me of their appointments, and ate the breakfasts Betty had made for them. I took Lucinda to Jacob’s work for a 9 AM meeting, and Harvey to the hairdresser for a 10:30 appointment, waiting for her to come out nicely styled. You could look at her and actually believe it was Margaret Astoria when she came out. Betty had lunch ready for the three of us when we got there.
When I retrieved Lucinda from Jacob’s work that afternoon, I noticed police cars staking out the house. Clearly the real Astorias had gone to the police and this was all about to end, so I emailed Jacob from my real email to his that I was surrendering. I also emailed them from Harvey’s account, continuing a thread he had already been having with them before I started the second swap, saying “The impostors appear to be giving up.” We encouraged the two fake Astorias to go sit on the porch. It wasn’t long before we heard the police doing their thing, and the two confused former servants were taken away.
Not too long after that, the police knocked on the door, and I answered it to find the real Astorias, looking like the real us, with the policeman introducing each one, and we welcomed them back.
Mad scientist John Crevil and his wife swapped bodies with billionaire Jacob Astoria and his wife, but they got found out, and performed a second swap into the bodies of the Astoria’s chauffeur and maid in order to try to escape. How’s it all going to end?
Thursday, I started going back to the classes I’d missed for two days, while the Astorias used my apartment as a base of operations.
They kept me updated. On Thursday, the fakes went to their appointments as expected, and no doubt figured out we’d contacted everyone they were likely to meet and convinced them what had happened, either telling them to play it cool, or to make life miserable for them while still seeming to behave normally. Friday, the fake Jacob still went to work but the fake Margaret postponed her hairdressing appointment to Monday. No doubt that one was doing something, but we weren’t sure what.
With enough people to support them, the Astorias went to the police Saturday morning and explained everything that had happened. By that evening, the police called back to say they had confirmed their outlandish story and they had the Astorias’ home under surveillance with unmarked cars.
Sunday they reported that nothing happened. Nobody came or left in the first 24 hours of them watching.
Monday morning they went out to their expected appointments. With the cooperation of Jacob’s co-workers, they had plainclothes officers in the building observing and ready to put the impostor under arrest if he caused trouble or tried to run. But nothing like that happened. The co-workers reported the fake Jacob was acting even stranger than before, and tried to get out of everything he couldn’t do by saying he forgot rather than pretend and make stuff up. Margaret’s hairdresser also noticed her hair was shorter than it should be, as if she’d had another trim since she last saw her, and appeared not to be styled at all. She said fake Margaret acted like she’d never been in a salon before. That didn’t seem right; the impostor Margaret’s hair on Thursday had been styled when she arrived at the party, so the women there said. Clearly she’d been to some salon. Maybe at the party they had messed it up so much in their torture of her that it came out that way. We couldn’t explain the shortening. Had she gotten something in it and trimmed her hair as a way of removing it?
But the police said they were ready to take them in, convinced by behavior that everyone thought was weird and out of character, so Monday after lunch a squad car came and picked them up from my place to take them back home. Around 4 the Astorias called and gave me the password we’d agreed upon to say the fakes had been removed. They were back in their own home and invited me over. They wanted to reward me for all my help. Also, they had left their new computers at my place and asked me to bag up anything that didn’t belong to me and bring it over. That was all their clothing as well, even though it was the Crevils’ clothes. I figured they needed it because they were now the wrong sizes, unless they wanted to cross-dress.
I drove over. They let me in at the gate and I parked in front of their garage and walked up to the front door. The people I’d been living with for much of the last week, who looked like the Crevils even though they were really the Astorias, were waiting for me, along with their servants, a maid and a chauffeur they introduced me to. Their maid was also a cook, and served us all dinner.
After we ate, Jacob announced, “I want to reward you, now that all this is through. I think a hundred grand is good enough that we don’t have to try to account for how much of your money we spent trying to survive.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
He set up the wire transfer on his new computer while the maid took things away, I entered my information when he got to that point, and then they went to their bedroom for a little bit.
When they came back, Margaret said, “We found some clothing from our wardrobes that we can wear for now, so that we don’t have to wear the Crevils’ clothes all the time until we can get our correct bodies back. Speaking of which, Lucinda, Harvey, did you see them stash anything here that could have been used in their body-changing routine?”
The help both professed ignorance.
“I guess we will have to do this the hard way.”
We split up, the help searching downstairs and me with the Astorias upstairs, looking for anything out of place. Since I didn’t know what things should look like here, I was helping them with specific tasks like moving things.
They found a big stash of items in a trunk in what they called the sitting room, including syringes and various vials of medication. There was also some camera equipment and a pad that appeared to be set up to view them. We also found some of those cameras around the house, and when we asked the maid and driver, more cameras like that were all they had found. Someone from the Police Department had given them a card with a number to call, and they did and had someone come out and pick this stuff up.
Jacob explained to the officer who came to pick it up, “We don’t know what this medication is, apart from that it doesn’t belong here, but we recognize that these vials could represent our key to getting our old bodies back, if there’s a way. But we need someone qualified to examine it.”
“Of course,” the officer responded. “We’ll have someone look at this, and it’ll provide evidence at trial, but we also want to help you get back to your right bodies, Mr. and Mrs. Astoria. The same investigation should help both causes, but we’ll make sure if there is a chance to get your bodies back that we don’t lose it.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t know how they got all these cameras in here. The maid and chauffeur don’t know anything either. We don’t have recording cameras around here and there isn’t a log for the gate camera. All things that we mean to fix.”
The officer left with all the stuff we found, and soon afterward I left too, so everybody could get to their own beds.
I couldn’t believe it when that guy Fred showed up. It looked like he hadn’t changed at all. I don’t know how the treatment could have failed so completely. It’s done something on every other person and animal who has taken it, even in the cases where I didn’t administer it right and it killed the subject.
And then Jacob paid the guy a hundred grand. If we could have taken his place, we could have gotten that and escaped clear away. But we didn’t even know where this guy was living in order to make a swap, and we didn’t collect his DNA before trying to change him.
Then they got to searching the place, and since they were clearly going to find the cameras we hadn’t already removed, we picked out the ones from downstairs while they worked on the upstairs. They weren’t much good for us at this point anyway, and they would help build the case against the fake Crevils.
And then the police took all the treatments away. That was going to make our plan to swap with the Astorias harder. I was going to have to start all over, and probably without access to our old lab that the police were surely cleaning out at this moment. We had the five grand we’d taken from the safe, the small amount of money Lucinda and Harvey had saved up, and fortunately, thanks to smart thinking by Betty, the key to about 10 grand worth of bitcoin in an account we used for gray and black-market purchases like some of our drugs. It clearly wasn’t enough money to set up a full lab, but maybe I could set up just the things I needed to make up new batches of treatments. At least getting the DNA was going to be easy now.
We let that kid Fred get back to his schooling. Those two impostors were going to go on trial at some point, and he’d be called to testify then, but he wasn’t the person we needed right now. We needed several different people, really, but he wasn’t one of them.
I contacted my office, where I’d been working with several people already. Some of Margaret’s dresses fit me now, just a bit longer than they were meant to be. With Mrs. Crevil’s underwear under them, and her shoes, I could still attend my meetings. I planned to get out the next weekend and get some more clothes that actually fit this body.
The people who managed my appointments were contacting all the people I had those appointments with to let them know I was going to be female. I provided a selfie I’d taken and a link to the news coverage to send these people. And I was going to have plenty of those in the next couple weeks, since all the people who’d met with the impostor were rescheduled for real meetings.
Margaret canceled some of her appointments, including the sex parties she’d only just revealed to me before all this happened. I promised her that if we got our proper bodies back I’d make love to her more often, and offered to do it with the bodies we had now, but she was too freaked out by the idea. To tell the truth, I was scared of that, too, but now that I realized how much I had neglected her, I wanted to try to make it up to her. Margaret kept other appointments, and also made an appointment for me with her hairdresser tomorrow morning, so I’d only attend one meeting with whatever my hair looks like now.
Lucinda and Harvey seemed a bit shaken up by it all, which is understandable, but they were carrying on with their duties. Still, Harvey didn’t have any accidents and made all our appointments on time. Lucinda’s cooking was a little off for the first few days, but she got back to normal soon.
We arranged with a security specialist, Jane, to meet us at the house Friday afternoon, when I managed to not have any appointments after 2 PM. She’d heard the story, but we told her the details of how these impostors had managed to look so much like us they defeated our face-based ID system.
Jane explained, “What they did to defeat face unlock isn’t strictly necessary. A really good rubber mask could do it as long as the shape of the head under it is right, and that could be tricked by putting it on a mannequin head or a molded one of the right shape. You really shouldn’t depend on that. Fingerprint unlock is much better and harder to get around, but it isn’t a good choice for you right now since this treatment that changes your appearance has changed your fingerprints so that they neither match your originals nor those of the impostors, and you’re hoping to have this done again to restore your appearance.”
“So what other option do I have?” I asked.
“There’s only one suggestion I can offer better than ‘just use passcodes’ and that’s RFID keys. These can be on a card in your wallet, or if you want it to be more convenient, they make tiny RFID keys you can have implanted under your skin, such as in a fingertip. They are passive computer chips that run off the power emitted from a radio signal and respond to a proper cryptographic challenge as used in some other security systems. But the chips can fail, so you need a backup mechanism to unlock your phone. It’s possible to set up a system where it sends a message to a trusted third-party security provider, who will email you a code that is good to unlock your phone for, say, 30 minutes. Provided you can access your email from another device, this can be your failsafe. Then you can turn off the RFID lock and just use a passcode until you can get the chip replaced.”
“OK, I guess that works.”
Margaret agreed, “Yes, I think so. I’m willing to do that.”
“For your gate, I’d recommend a two-factor system. An RFID card combined with a passcode. The standard rule is something you have and something you know, so that stealing the device or learning the passcode alone isn’t enough. If you have services authorized just to come into the yard, you can send them RFID keys. You can authorize as many different keys as you want, and deauthorize ones that have been stolen or whose holders are no longer trustworthy. You can assign different passcodes to different keys, and change those along with the compromised keys. And the individual keys are cheap, pennies a piece, really.”
“That sounds great.”
“Finally, you have to have some kind of logging. Ideally, you have cameras recording pictures of everyone coming in and going out, in other sensitive locations on your property, logs of which RFID keys were used and when, and access logs on sensitive accounts. I can show you how to set all that up.”
Between the meetings with Jane and clothes shopping, my weekend was filled. She had the system installed over the following week and activated the following weekend.
I knew Harvey’s routine, which was pretty much ferry the Astorias around to their appointments, service one car once a week at a time I wasn’t needed, make sure either I or Betty was around to receive deliveries, and once in a while to be here to help install some kind of hardware. Harvey had in his phone everything I could need to know about the locations I needed to go for them, and I pretty quickly learned all the frequent ones and expected I could go look up the infrequent ones when they showed up without raising any doubt.
The security people Jacob brought in installed their own stuff and had their own tools and ladders, and I didn’t have to help at all there, except to be here when they wanted to authorize me for the security system. Jacob does not suspect me at all, and being here got me deeper into their new security system than I was into the old one.
Meanwhile, I was able to work in side trips on the way to pick up one of the Astorias or after dropping them off to set up a post office box, and pick up some deliveries there, and start setting up my minimalist lab in my quarters. It’ll take a few more weeks to get everything set up.
Several days after we turned the stuff over, the crime lab people called. They had found someone who could analyze the contents of the vials, and came over to discuss it.”
“This was indeed a kit to change people into other people. Six of the vials have custom viruses designed to completely replace a person’s DNA with that contained in the virus. Such viruses are used medically, but usually just to edit out and replace specific problematic genes, usually the ones that cause inherited diseases. There were also some with animal DNA; I am not sure if these would work on people at all, but if they did anything, they would surely kill them. There were three other drugs. One was an immune suppressant. This was probably needed to keep the body from rejecting or destroying modified cells before the change was complete. Another speeds up the process by which cells are regenerated to replace other body cells. Just changing the DNA wouldn’t change your appearance, but by forcing the body’s cells to all regenerate, they would effectively make you look like an identical twin of the person whose DNA is in it. There can still be differences in appearance, because not every aspect of your appearance is based on genes, but it would be a pretty good resemblance. So this is almost certainly what was done to you. The last drug was a sedative.”
“Daramine,” Margaret interjected.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“The young man who was with us found a wrapper for a package of it in their lab, and he was familiar with the stuff due to a kind of insomnia he has.”
“There were also Daramine darts here, which would be what you reported being attacked with in your garage at the start of the whole incident. But we are most interested in the DNA in the viruses. We’ve sequenced the DNA contained in each virus, and there are 6 different human genomes. Two of them match the DNA of the suspects we have jailed now. That is presumably your DNA, since they look like you now. We are hoping to match the other people. We assume two of them are based on their original DNA and were used to change you. The last two might be other test subjects they used before you, or they could be other people they tried to change into. So we’re going to try to get DNA samples from your friends and co-workers in case they were looking for other ways to get at you. Please let them know we will be making such requests so they understand why.”
“Will do.”
An officer who came with this analyst took samples from me and Margaret, and since they were here now, from Lucinda and Harvey as well. And other the next week they visited my workplace and at least twenty other people who knew us, collecting samples from everyone.
The cops came and wanted DNA samples, and we couldn’t not give ‘em, as it would immediately throw suspicion on us. We’re going to be somewhat suspected anyway, as the pair in jail would have gotten their wits back by now and be describing how we swapped with them. Probably nobody would believe them now, but when they find that some of the serums match our DNA, that will lend weight to their story.
Importantly, though, it means we can’t pull the final switch with the Astorias now, even though I will have everything ready to do so by this weekend. Anything happens to any of us now, and the survivors will get grilled so that we’d be found out for sure. We have to let things simmer.
It’s possible we’re gonna get grilled anyway, so Betty and I have been reading through all of Lucinda’s and Harvey’s email history, like cramming for an exam. We want to know everything it’s possible for us to know that they would know.
It wasn’t long before the police came back, confirming the last two sets of DNA in the viruses were Lucinda’s and Harvey’s, and also that the people they had arrested were claiming to be Lucinda and Harvey, who’d been tricked into being changed into our real bodies. The police wanted our help to try and determine whether they’d really done another swap, or whether they had the real crooks in jail now and they were just claiming they’d been swapped. In any case, they came and picked up the two who appeared to be Lucinda and Harvey now and the four were all being kept in separate cells where they couldn’t communicate with one another.
The police wanted help from me and Margaret to question them about things the real Lucinda and Harvey would know and the fake ones wouldn’t. If they had done another swap, they would have had access to Lucinda and Harvey’s phones for a little while, since they had copied us in setting up Face Unlock, and ordinary secrets like passwords and stuff in email might be compromised. They probably also observed Lucinda and Harvey while they were watching us and had learned their routines. They would have needed to know theirs as well as they knew ours in order to interact with them and fool them that they were us, and that’s why they swapped with them as a Plan B, or tried to, or claimed that they did. Whatever actually happened.
But they wouldn’t have had time to go through everything, so we thought back to memorable things that happened years ago, back when it was unlikely they had been observing us. We were also able to get in touch with their parents, who’d know things we didn’t even know that would be able to identify them.
Meanwhile, the FBI seized all the viruses and drugs, claiming quite reasonably that if they really worked then it was a national security issue, but they still promised us to get us back to our original bodies when they were done with the investigation, if possible. At least we had the country’s top medical experts working on it.
At the same time, everybody I worked with was getting used to my new appearance. Our case had become headline news, which was actually good because it was easier to work with the many clients I worked with when they had already heard what happened to me. Margaret had helped me pick out a small new wardrobe, a week’s worth of skirt-suits I could wear to work and some casual clothes, and taught me how to apply some basic makeup. If I was stuck being a woman, at least for a little while, I was at least going to be a presentable one.
The one thing we weren’t doing was sex. Even though I had once volunteered to Margaret to do it, I wasn’t comfortable having sex as a woman at all. The closest I got was that I had masturbated to what was apparently a female orgasm. Margaret, in John Crevil’s body, wasn’t invited to the parties with her girlfriends. I had agreed that she could go again when she got back to her real body, if she wanted to, and she wasn’t sure that she would. She had masturbated to generic gay porn in that body and had come once as well, but felt too weird to keep doing it. We could both at least say we had experienced orgasm from both sides of the fence.
Drat! Once the maid and chauffeur had gone to jail, the drugs we put them on wore off, and they told the police what we did. If this had been our original plan, we would have known it wouldn’t work, but this was just a hastily improvised alternate plan after our original plan fell through. The police came to take us in, too, and we had to go peacefully, because it’s what they would have done. And then they put us all in solitary so we couldn’t plan out our stories or anything.
A few days later they brought in the Astorias in our bodies, and several other people I was supposed to know. People the real maid would have known. I’m sure I did a crappy job pretending to be her and we were cooked. I knew her routine, but not her past.
When the police questioned the people in jail with the help of all the people we had gathered who the real Lucinda and Harvey would know, they easily determined that the Crevils had performed another swap.
The Crevils, caught red-handed, or at least wrong-handed, in bodies that provably did not belong to them, both pleaded guilty to get a lesser punishment. Part of that deal included helping the FBI learn how the technology worked and, under the FBI’s supervision, being put back into their own bodies. This failed in a bizarre way. Scientists investigating the results discovered that remnants of the viruses that had changed them to Lucinda and Harvey were still in their bodies, not completely eliminated after their last changes. This caused them to become what geneticists call chimeras; they had some of Lucinda’s and Harvey’s DNA and some of their own. Surprisingly, the body was able to handle this; the immune system reboot worked, resetting them to a state that tolerated both bodies’ DNA. The Crevils then stayed that way, unwilling to risk further changes. They were going to be locked up for the rest of their lives, but not in a regular prison. They stayed in a special medical facility where the results of all the changes could be monitored.
This let the FBI plan how they were going to change the rest of us back. John and I could change back immediately, because we’d been in the Crevils’ bodies throughout the whole adventure. But Lucinda and Harvey had to stay as us for two weeks to avoid becoming chimeras.
I had to cancel all my appointments for a week, because apparently that was the normal time the drugs took to change people’s bodies. But now I’m back in my own body, and going to work again wearing my usual clothes.
During the time Lucinda and Harvey looked like us, we all wore name tags. They borrowed our clothes, which we gladly lent them for the time needed to get everybody changed back safely. It was good that we were so close, like an extended family, and we could laugh about the confusion that occurred during that time. Eventually we all got changed back into our proper bodies.
We don’t know what the government’s going to do with the technology now. Undoubtedly there will be spies who change into genetically exact doubles of people they are impersonating, and probably ones with the skills to learn how to impersonate those people better than the Crevils could do, or only for a short time. But they know now that a round trip to impersonate someone and back to their original body takes more than a month, if they want to do it safely.
Private research into how to do this is also banned, but no doubt people are going to figure it out and we’re going to face a future in which nobody can ever be fully sure their friends are who they think they are. But people are adapting. It’s already a thing that people use secret spoken passwords, handshakes, and other such techniques to verify to their close friends that they are the people they are supposed to be.
Margaret and I, along with Lucinda and Harvey, are glad to be back in our own bodies. Since I learned how I wasn’t satisfying her sexually, I make time to have sex with Margaret more often, and do other things to please her. She still goes to some of those parties with her girlfriends that are no longer secret, but with my full knowledge she is doing it. They let me come along once, on the condition that Margaret and I have sex in front of the group.
Fred never fully lost his body due to his condition that makes his body cells live longer, get replaced less frequently, and be totally immune to the drug that accelerates cellular replacement for most people. However, his DNA did change, and the FBI were able to isolate his original DNA from his apartment as the common sample that didn’t belong to one of us or one of the Crevils. They gave him a treatment to restore his DNA so that he would stop slowly changing into a wrong-size duplicate of me. Four months after we originally planned it, we had Fred back over for the three-way encounter that we had originally planned for Margaret’s 40th birthday.