Saturday morning I woke up with the ache of a new cold and sniffled my way through my workout regimen; thirty minutes cardio with free weights, thirty minutes on the stationary bike, sweat pouring by the time I was done. Fantastic for a sixty-year-old with a damaged heart who’d dropped a hundred pounds in a year. The steam of the shower cleared my sinuses a bit and my nose stopped running, but the ache deepened enough that I rescheduled my barber appointment—whatever I’d caught I didn’t want to pass it to anyone else.
It was another excuse to not cut my hair. Last year we’d gone on a western movie kick on our Friday movie nights, and a teasing comment from May had put me onto a project to grow my already long hair out to a Sam Elliott style length. That and grow a trim beard. I’d finally decided enough was enough and it needed some trimming around the shoulders, but wondered if just that extra inch . . .
And thinking of yesterday’s movie night I texted Carl to let him and May know I’d caught something. I’d bounced baby Stephanie on my knee during the intermission and she’d sneezed in my face, but it had just been a nose-tickle; if there was any spreading of anything it would have been from me to them not them to me.
He texted right back.
An hour later my doorbell rang and I opened the door to collect the Tupperware bowl full of Seever’s Chicken Soup I’d known would be there.
I’d known the Seevers for two years, since the day they’d moved into the house that shared my west wall in our townhouse row after the Grants retired and moved to Hawaii. Carl and May together had knocked on my door with a Hello Neighbor! plate of cookies before they’d even finished unpacking. They’d knocked on the door of the home on their right, too, but Mrs. Thompson hadn’t answered and it had been left to me to tell them about the agoraphobic shut-in neighbor on their other side. That was fine; they’d cookie-knocked every other home on our picturesque stretch of Twain Street with its old townhouses and trees before the end of the week, thrown their first dinner party less than a month after their arrival, and then settled back to let whoever wanted to establish neighborly relations maintain the contact through their Facebook page, curbside conversations, and May-managed dinner network.
Except for me and Mrs. Thompson; for some reason they decided to keep trying with both their next-door neighbors. Mrs. Thompson still held out against quarterly cookies left on her doorstep but May had caught her with a few targeted waves through her living room window where she watched the street (she’d proudly announced that “Mrs. T” had waved back only last week).
For myself, I’d been too easy; Carl had discovered my interest in genre movies (sci-fi, fantasy, and western) at the Hello Neighbor! Dinner party, and my love of chess. We’d had regular movie nights at their place ever since and he dropped by for a beer and a chess game nearly every Saturday (with me canceling today for health reasons, obviously). Carl owned a successful startup cyber-security firm while May managed a home-based accounting practice and made most of their homemaking plans—like the remodeling, half of which she did with her own hands—and somehow I’d become the non-family member emergency contact for both of them.
I’d been there for the birth of little Stephanie, and they’d been with me through my massive heart attack (product of my former weight, hypertension, and undiagnosed depression, I’d been a mess) and subsequent surgery and recovery. Carl called me Old Man—my hair had started going gray at thirty-five —and May joked that if we were Catholic I’d be Steph’s godfather.
The late July weather being perfect for it, I tried to do some yardwork but quit by lunchtime and ate the soup. By nine o’clock in the evening I was running a high fever with waves of chills and the ache had gone deep into every bone, but my sinuses had fully cleared. In response to their update request, I texted Carl a
Climbing in was painful and for the first time I wished I’d gotten a long tub. The deep round tub had a bench level I could sit on, but it still drew my knees up halfway to my chest with the water to my shoulders. Pushing my aching hips forward on the bench, I leaned back in the steaming water and breathed through the bone-rattling shakes that came and went. The heat seeping into me helped, and as the shakes lessened, I started to feel sleepy.
I opened my eyes wide. Shit! I couldn’t fall asleep in the tub—I’d had a good business friend die from a drunken bath a few years ago; the autopsy had determined he’d passed out and drowned from inhaling just a cupful of bath water and that was not how I was going to go out.
Trying to stand I fell back to the bench with no strength in my legs. What the hell? Then the aches spreading through my body flared into white hot agony and I screamed as every muscle contracted at once. When the wave of unbelievable pain passed I sucked in a breath and, as, my vision started to gray out, managed to reach down and pull up the drain stopper. Breathing deep, I started counting, getting to fifty before the next wave of pain hit and everything went black.
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I hurt. Everything hurt, literally everything. Opening my eyes, I found myself slumped over in the tub, completely dry. Even my tangled hair was dry. Closing my eyes again—even they hurt—I just breathed and tried to move. Straightening and gripping the sides of the tub I felt stronger than before, and the lightheadedness was gone.
And my nose told me I’d pissed myself sometime after the tub had drained.
What had that been? I’d never felt anything like it before; not even my heart attack had felt like that, like every muscle in my body had been seizing and dying. Dying couldn’t hurt that bad.
Pushing strands of hair out of my face, I pulled myself up onto the edge of the tub to put both feet on the tiles. Standing, I kept a hand on the wall and stepped under the open shower, fumbling with the knob until the cold water hit me, and just stood there under the spray, aching and eyes closed as the water warmed, washing the dried sweat and piss off and chasing the last of my chills away. Shutting the water off I stepped around the glass divider and reached for a towel, missing on the first try and leaning in to grab hold and pull it to my face.
I opened my eyes. Under the fading whole-body ache something felt really, really wrong, the towel touching smooth skin on my chin and abrading my nipples where it fell against me like I’d scraped them on something. I looked down.
And screamed with someone else’s voice.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I had breasts, high and rounded female breasts, standing out from my chest. Not big breasts, but breasts. What the hell? I’d heard of gynecomastia—a guy with a sudden hormone imbalance could find himself growing a pair—but not overnight!
Staggering to the mirror I bumped up against the sink and the next wrong thing hit me, literally; the sink hit me at stomach level. In the remodel I’d had the new sink installed at hip level so I could wash my hands and reach for everything without bending over very far, and now my belly button didn’t quite reach the top of the porcelain. What the hell? And how the hell had I not noticed I’d shrunk just climbing out of the tub?
The steam-fogged mirror loomed as I held on to the sink, lightheaded again and trying to make my hand move to wipe the mirror clean, afraid of what I would see. Finally straightening and, leaning far over, I wiped off as much of the glass as I could reach.
And stared.
My trim beard and mustache was gone, my shaking fingers touching skin as smooth as if I’d never had to shave. Every age line on my face had disappeared with my chin-hair, too, and my formerly greying brown hair was as ginger as May’s. It had been long before but now it hung past my shoulders. And it didn’t end there; beneath my fingers my blade of a nose had shrunk to an up-tipped button, my lips had plumped, my chin had narrowed, my forehead had smoothed out and I was pretty sure my hairline had lowered. And it hadn’t been receding, before.
Staring back at me was a young woman’s face. A girl’s face. Stepping back from the sink and dropping the towel I looked down, knowing what I’d see.
My dick and balls were gone, in their place just pale smooth skin and a crease between my legs.
I didn’t scream again but I did gray out, sitting hard on the bathroom tiles before I fell.
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Eventually I had to move again, to do something besides just breathe and try to sit as still as possible as if by imitating a statue I wouldn’t think or feel anything. An errant thought made me carefully climb to my feet and check the tub, and yup, there was my facial hair, lying on the bottom. Every follicle must have fallen out along with all my body hair sometime after the water had drained. I hadn’t noticed what had fallen on me and got rinsed off.
Touching the swells of my breasts, I whimpered. They were still there, not going away no matter how hard I wished it; none of this was and I finally forced my mind into gear. How could this have happened? The only possibility that came to mind was I had to be a changeling. But that was impossible too, wasn’t it?
Research. I had to find out what this was.
Climbing to my feet and creeping into my bedroom, I opened drawers and pulled out a t-shirt and sweatpants and a pair of socks. The t-shirt hung down almost to my knees and I had to pull the drawstring on the sweatpants in tight to keep it from falling right off where before it had just rested on my hips and I had to roll up the bottom of the legs. The socks didn’t even try and stay up on my skinny calves or hug my now tiny feet. Sitting down at my desk computer—and adjusting my chair and the keyboard’s height so I could use it—I started web surfing.
The first changelings had started appearing just two years after The Ship crashed in New Mexico. I remembered the night it had happened—everyone did. The night had lit up like day when it had appeared from nowhere, bursting into the sky closer than the Moon. Its fast-decaying orbit had only taken it around the globe a couple of times before it plummeted into the atmosphere and smacked down in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.
The federal government had quarantined the crash zone, of course, and built a whole science community on top of it—finally letting in foreign scientists to study it only after half the nations of the world threatened to go to war with us if we kept them out. And we’d learned nothing at all from it.
Well, almost nothing. We’d learned how to make some nifty new alloys from studying the hull of the amazingly intact ship, but nothing else. Not how it flew, not how it traveled in space, not how it had survived the crater-making impact intact, not even how its power and computer and sensor systems worked. One scientist trying to explain the situation had said “We’re like a stone age tribe in Papua New Guinea trying to figure out how a crashed F-16 does anything. We wouldn’t even recognize what metal is, forget about controls and electric systems and circuits. I don’t think we’re going to understand anything about The Ship until we’re halfway to building one ourselves in a few hundred years.”
Since the ship had been unmanned when it crashed, we still didn’t know anything about the aliens themselves, either. It had living quarters, but they’d been utterly bare of personal artifacts and the only thing they’d told us was that the aliens were likely bipedal and extremely tall.
So, we’d just . . . gone on. We started watching the sky a lot more; someone might come along sooner or later to reclaim their misplaced ship. And every major nation was totally turbocharging their space program. We knew aliens existed, and absolutely nothing else. We were getting a trickle of material breakthroughs out of it, and that was it.
And then the first changelings had appeared.
The first was a telekinetic—a seventy year old Boston woman who could move things with her mind; pretty big things, though nothing she couldn’t have lifted with her own hands in her younger days. She’d experienced an attack like I’d just had, though she hadn’t described it as nearly so painful, and then she could just do it. The next changeling was a forty-year-old man in Manilla and after his attack he’d grown back an amputated foot and could regenerate from any physical harm that didn’t kill him, superhumanly quickly and without scarring. After that, changelings started appearing around the globe, all displaying some variety of psychic powers or biological enhancements. All were massively studied, nobody could figure out how they did any of it, but under MRI scans all of them revealed that a novel new node had grown in their brains. The Changeling Node.
A lot of “changelings” became celebrities—and the target of anti-changeling fanatics who believed the whole thing was a first step to the secret aliens taking over the world. Conspiracy theories aside, some people treated them like lepers while others mobbed them as if their gifts could rub off on them, even though scientists had ruled out any biological vector of contagion. Nobody knew how Changeling Syndrome spread, but you weren’t any more likely to exhibit it if you lived close to a changeling or even had one in the family.
But search though I might, I couldn’t find news of a changeling who’d transformed as I had. And how could this happen and not get noticed?
My cellphone buzzed on its recharging pad and I stared at it. It was after ten in the morning and Carl calling, and my brain fuzzed out again.
Finally picking up my phone with shaking hands, I opened the screen and texted him back instead.
I hit Send before I could chicken out. It was a Sunday morning; they’d both be home. Pushing my mess of hair out of my eyes I stood up, phone in hand, and forced myself out of my bedroom and down the stairs, keeping my left hand on the banister; my lightheadedness was gone, along with all but a residual ache, and my caution was over my steps. With my shrunken scale, the stairs felt wider and deeper and I didn’t trust myself not to misstep and tumble.
Dithering again in my living room I finally settled myself in my leather easy chair, sitting on the edge of the seat with my hands between my knees. If I sat back it would swallow me now. A couple of minutes later the lock clicked, the front door opening, and I heard their steps on the hardwood floor of the entryway. Opening my mouth to call out, I couldn’t. God. I tried again.
“In here!” My voice came out an unnaturally high squeak. There was a moment as I held my breath, and then Carl came around the archway with May right behind him. They stared at me.
“Who are you?” May asked.
“Um.” I swallowed, swallowed again. “I’m David.” I held up my cellphone as if it was some kind of proof.
Her mouth firmed. “That’s not funny, sweetie. We’re here to see David.”
“Yeah. I texted you.” My voice stayed high, not a squeak but higher and softer than it had been even before puberty. Reaching up, I touched my smooth neck. No Adams Apple, duh. I tried not to hyperventilate.
“May,” Carl said, “check upstairs. David!” His call down the hallway went unanswered and he disappeared to check the dining room and kitchen. May gave me an odd look before turning and mounting the stairs. I wondered if they would check every single floor, cellar to roof patio and under my bed, and slapped my hand over the hysterical laugh that came out a high giggle. May finally came back down and rejoined Carl at the foot of the stairs.
“Hi,” I said with a little wave. “Last night really hurt.”
Carl was a smart man but May got it first, her eyes widening. “Oh my God. David?”
“Stephanie’s middle name is Clara and she’s got a cut on the bottom of her left foot that’s probably going to scar and you’ll never forgive yourself for when she found that glass shard in the carpet trying to toddle.”
“Oh my God,” she repeated, turning to Carl. “She’s David. He’s a changeling.”