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.