Nano (2 page)

For some reason, that conversation had an effect on me.  Weeks later I was still thinking about it, and about Natalie.  Poor Natalie, whose desires were so unusual she had to resort to the ultimate self-abnegation - surrendering her identity, exchanging it for a life in which she had no options left - to fulfill them.

And yet I realized that she was possibly the happiest person I'd ever met.

I went back the the Maynard house, during the day.

Natalie received me in the study.  Curiously, she wore a maid's outfit, albeit a very skimpy one.  I sat down; she remained standing.

"May I get you a drink, Mr. Smith?" she asked.

"Don't you have help for that, Natalie?" I asked in return.

"It's one of my duties.  During the day the staff may assign me to any household duty they like - today it's parlour servant.  I'm on my lunch break or I wouldn't be able to see you.  I make a good martini, if you'd like one."

She went to the bar and mixed a martini, put a twist of lemon in it, and returned.  She knelt in front of me, holding the drink up.  I took it.  She remained on her knees.

"Um, wouldn't you like to sit?  Your husband isn't around."

"I can't, Mr. Smith.  John made a few changes to my nano regimen the last time I sat in a chair.  I can't do it any longer.  It makes me nauseous.  I'm quite comfortable kneeling; don't let it bother you."

"I suppose you don't drink for the same reason."

"Yes, Mr. Smith.  Cigarettes and alcohol throw me into convulsions."

"Could you just call me Sam?"

"No, I can't, Mr. Smith.  As I said, John made a few changes - "

"To your nano regimen, I know, I know.  You know, it's a little annoying, all this crap.  How do you put up with it?  Why the hell does John like it?  I can't figure it out."

"Which is why you came, I imagine, Mr. Smith.  Have you thought about what we talked about last time?"

"Yes," I admitted.  "Tell me, Natalie.  Are you happy?"

"Yes, Mr. Smith," she said.

"Why?"

"Because I can't change my emotions, Mr. Smith.  I can't hide from them.  I can't take nano because I would need the encryption key that made me what I am to do so, and only you John has that.  So I'm stuck with my feelings and emotions.  It had been a long time since the only thing I could say were my own were my feelings.  Nothing else belongs to me here.

"You have to remember that, while some of the things I feel now are nano-induced, they might as well be real, since I have no way of escaping or finding respite from them.  I can't take a pill and feel differently.  And since I've been conditioned to find happiness on my knees, at the mercy of a man who treats me like something lower than a dog - even our bullmastiff can run freely about the house, while I'm usually chained - then happiness is what I feel.

"That's the gentle way of explaining my decision - the one that reflects well on me.  Here's another way of looking at it:  I simply couldn't hack being a man.  I wasn't strong, just rich.  I had wealth and that gave me power; I used both irresponsibly.  In a just world I should never have had either.  I grew to hate myself and the life I led because I knew it was a lie.  My mistreatment of Natalie was just the latest in a long history of injustices I perpetrated against women - and men too, but women especially.  Natalie was unhappy but could have left me.  There were others I kept forcibly.  It provided a sheen of masculinity and virility; but I knew that by all rights I should have been the one on her knees, in chains.

"Now I am kept forcibly.  The tools I used to have women at my beck and call now render me utterly helpless.  Natalie married me for my money, you know.  She wanted wealth and power, however she could get it.  Now, as my husband, he has what he wanted in the purest way possible.  I have also given him a rather extreme means of revenge upon me for what I put him through.  

"He's a better man than I ever was.  Being a woman - a slave - isn't easy, but it's what I deserve.  Now I feel like my physical form - weak, dependent, fragile - finally matches my true character.

"And John now has what he wanted.  He's much more truly John Maynard than I ever was.  Where I subjugated women as a form of overcompensation, he does so because he has the right to do so.  He is superior to me, and his control over me is a reflection of his superiority, rather than a feeble act of bravado."

I left Natalie bewildered and a little bemused.  I went back to work, giving her little thought; I had a backlog of clients to tend to.

But her words came back to haunt me.  And I began to realize that my attraction to her and her story, her motives, was more than just idle curiousity.

Several months passed.

I wasn't really sure why I was doing this.  It felt like a strange obsession.

The encryption key on the nano I'd worked up for the job would unlock automatically after one year.  Until then it couldn't be broken, not even by me, and would prevent further physical modification.

The nano would transform the subject into a eighteen year old girl.  Five foot even, 95 pounds, 34-17-33.  Doing the waist so narrow required pushing the internal organs around a little, but women in the 19th century had gotten by with even smaller waistlines, and this one, encoded into the DNA, wouldn't require a corset.

I'd never had transgendered inclinations before in my life.  Strange now that I'd become so captivated by the idea.  I told myself it was an experiment - I wouldn't really understand Natalie unless I spent some time in her shoes.  But some part of me knew that to be a lie.  The motivation was much harder to pin down.  I felt like I wasn't really in control of what I was doing.

All I knew was that for the past three months, every time I tried to put this project aside, it consumed me, and I thought about it compulsively.  I justified going through with it, telling myself it was either that or go crazy resisting the urge.

I never once considered, however, that perhaps my wanting desperately to go through with this was fuelled by anything other than personal motive.

Long brown hair, olive skin, brown eyes.  Small feet and hands.  Full lips on a tiny face.  The simulation looked pretty good.

The nano included behavior modification as well.  Highly submissive tendencies, shyness, an ingrained deferentiality to men, a highly keyed sex drive.  Punching it up that high gave her the libido of a thirty year old woman or an 18 year old boy.

I did a complete set of paperwork on her.  She was a matriculating freshman at NYU, and I'd rented a tiny apartment for her in the East Village.  She had a monthly stipend from her scholarship that would keep her in beans and rice, and not much else.  Everything looked legal - sort of.  Forging an identity from scratch always leaves holes.  Anne-Marie La Fontaine died shortly after her birth, and it was concievable that this fact could be dug up.

I'd fitted my nano-lab and apartment with DNA locks designed to deny access to Anne-Marie La Fontaine's particular DNA signature.  Anne-Marie wouldn't be able to access either location until the locks deactivated a year from now. The lab would be rented out to Johnny Dentz, a friend in the business I sometimes did jobs with. My bank accounts were frozen for the same period.  Sam Smith was taking a sabbatical in Asia and wouldn't be returning for some time.

I awoke feeling like I had just run a marathon.  Every muscle in my body ached.

I was lying on my back on a gurney in a pool of sweat and mucous.  The overhead flourescents drilled holes in my brain, and I covered my face with my arm.

A small arm, drenched in sweat.  With little tiny hairs.  I remembered.

I sat up groggily and swung my legs over the side of the gurney, feeling hung over and clumsy.  My little bare legs dangled, my feet a good foot further from the floor than when I'd lain down before.

Breasts.  I cupped them with my tiny hands; they were soft and heavy and felt bizarre.

I sat for a moment, fighting the temporary sense of vertigo all radical transformees felt.  I let it pass, then slid off the gurney and planted my feet on the floor.

Okay.  Time to get this shit off of me.  I walked gingerly to the shower.

I turned on the water and let its hot steam wash off the considerable residue the nano had pushed through my sweat glands to the surface of my skin.  Most of it was lying in a pool on the gurney, material discarded by the nano as being superfluous to its mission of reshaping me into something 80 pounds lighter.  Tissue rendered into a fat-like substance, mixed with chemicals and hormones, enzymes created by the nano and discarded, the job done.  I knew if I ran the stuff through an analyzer I'd find a lot of testosterone, broken down and rendered inviable, muscle proteins broken into small enough pieces to sweat out, and other biological detritus.  The radical reshaping was done by the nano; my pituitary gland, now fed instructions from XX chromosomes, would regulate my body's hormones as if I were any other teenaged girl.  Which, in fact, I was.  Biologically I was indistinguishable from a born female, even upon the closest examination.  The distinction was purely semantic.

That's why what I just did to myself was very illegal.   I was an unregistered nano-mod; a tax-evader's wet dream and Government's bane.

My DNA now was so different from what it had been that there was no way to connect me with Sam Smith.  You could tell that nano was present and active, under a microscope, but since it was now in maintenance mode, it would appear to be therapeutic nano - to manage my weight, or mood, or something else quite legal and unobjectionable.

My hair had grown about eight inches in the two days I was comatose, and had turned from a grey-blond to nut brown.  It would keep growing another ten inches over the next few days, then slow to normal growth rate.  The nano was programmed to keep hair length down below the shoulder blades, so even if it cut it short the nano would kick back in, and my hair would return to the programmed length.

Similarly, my physical strength was monitored my the nano.  If I joined a gym and worked out every day for a year, I would end up without an ounce of extra muscle tone or strength.  The nano would disassemble the new tissues as soon as my body developed them.

Soon the floor of the shower was covered with sticky goo.  I let it wash down the drain, turned the spigots off, and grabbed a towel.  I dried myself as I stepped out in front of the sink and mirror.

The sink was a foot higher than it had been before.  I reached over it and used the towel to wipe off the steam, noting the way my breasts swayed forward as I did so.

The girl staring back at me was Anne-Marie, all right.  No way around it.  I'd chosen a composite of several natural girls I'd nano-improved to make Anne-Marie.  They had all been beautiful, but, of course, wanted perfection. I preferred using their pre-nano DNA as source material.  The result of mixing the DNA from these sources was a healthy prettiness with a few flaws.  I noted the freckling around my chest and on my cheeks, and my lopsided smile, with the practiced eye of a nano-surgeon.  I liked what I saw, which was good, since I wasn't in a position to change it now.

I dried off clumsily, my hands overreaching in the wrong places finding curves blocking the places they were accustomed to moving to.  I brushed my hair inexpertly - I would need to comb it in a few days, I realized.  Better get used to it.

Now.  I went back out to the lab, opened a closet and pulled out the brown paper bag containing the accoutrements of my new life.  Shoes, panties and a sundress, and a purse.

I slipped the panties - I'd perversely chosen a bright pink thong, to remind myself what was happening - over my ankles and pulled them up over my hips.  The thong strap slipped between my buttocks and nestled comfortably there, while the elastic rode high on my flared hips, scooping low to expose my belly button.

I pulled the sundress over my head and let its silk fall down the length of my body.  The white fabric sat smoothly on my breasts, and the hem tickled my thighs.

Okay, now the shoes.  I'd chosen heels, I think just to piss myself off.  I put these on and took a few steps forward, immediately regretting it as I swayed into a lab table.  They were the only shoes I had here.   Hmmn.  A little practice was in order.

I looked at the clock.  4:30 PM.  I had a half hour before the night alarm would activate; since my DNA no longer matched the list of approved night visitors, that meant I had a half-hour before the alarm went off.  I did a few runway walks to gain my footing, then gathered up my male clothing and effects and threw them in the small incinerator I kept to remove nano-waste.  I stripped the sheets from the gurney and threw these in too, then turned the incinerator on.

I activated the air-scrubbers, which would filter out the rest of the stray DNA.

That done, I picked up my handbag, screwed up my courage, opened the lab door, walked through it, and shut it behind me.

I turned and tried the door.  Though unlocked, when I touched the handle I heard the lock engage, then disengage when I removed my hand.  I knew that even using a stick or something to open it wouldn't work, since it worked on the presence of DNA in the room and touching combined.

I turned around and leaned back against the lab door, breathing heavily.

One long phase of my life was over, at least for the time being.  Now I was someone else.

The doorman glanced at me as I walked out of the lobby, but I sensed the look was more for the purpose of ogling me than anything else.  He frightened me a little.  I stepped out onto the street.

Washington Street, where my lab was housed, was a daytime cocktail of dock workers, homeless and the stray office worker leaving for home early.  I immediately felt vulnerable in my little white dress and heels.  I clutched my bag and headed east on King Street, pretending not to hear the catcalls from the construction crew sitting on the back of a flatbed and smoking.

Those first few minutes were hard.  It wasn't until I'd reached 6th Avenue that I felt somewhat safe.  I sank into a park bench on the wide median and let myself address the sudden emotions that two block walk had induced in me.  I was shaking.

I'd never been in a position before where talking back to a man was not only inadvisable, but dangerous.  That scared me, but what scared me even more was the instinctive urge to go to them and submit to their questioning deferentially.  This, I expected, was not what most women felt in these kinds of situations.  Rather, I blamed the nano-conditioning I'd programmed.  I'd experienced nano that made you strong, or confident, or a prick, or a saint, but never nano that made one want to submit oneself to the tender mercies of a bunch of assholes.

The strange thing about it, of course, was that it felt completely natural.  My brain was telling me those thugs should be shot with a firearm, but my body was telling me that they had every right to ogle me, to address me with the slurs they used.  Or maybe...not that they had the right, but that it excited me.

The thought of going back and submitting myself to their gaze, their words, their hands - stop it! I told myself.  So, I thought.  That's what Natalie feels.  I never thought something as humiliating as that could be so arousing.

I stood up again, blushing and confused and flushed.  With a shock I realized my panties were damp.

I continued moving east, through Soho, then northwards into the East Village.  One thing I noted rather quickly was that my sense of fashion didn't fit at all.  On a street awash in middys, pierced navels, leather pants and skirts, and boots, I looked like a stripped down version of a bodice-ripper novel.  And a very short one at that.

The novelty of being short didn't last long.  I missed the luxury of being able to see further down the street than the backside of the guy in front of you, who really wasn't that big, just much bigger than you.  I felt surrounded on all sides, like a little kid.

Soon I made my way to the brownstone on East 6th Street, turned my key in the lock of the front door, and made my way up to the fifth floor apartment.  The smell of Indian food from the shops downstairs permeated the building; a condition I would later discover to be permanent and often overwhelming.

I got into my apartment.  200 square feet of blissful privacy, furnished by one Sam Smith.  Thank you, Sam, I thought, as I locked the door.  Already I felt the man I had been just a few days earlier was almost a stranger.  He and I simply had no shared points of reference.  He was strong, middle aged, wealthy, masculine; I was eighteen, tiny, fragile, and poor.  Our instincts were different; our reactions to stimulus different - and now I was attracted to men, not women.  The shock of these drastic changes was exhausting.  I got onto the bed - the only piece of furniture that fit - and promptly fell asleep.