Vivid Dream Reality 1

by Savannah Maun

  “So you are more confident that you are physically changing and a doctor who is transgender friendly will immediately see the implications and be more eager to help?” Roni asked me.

  “Yes. That sums it up nicely. I suppose it is also true for other jobs. Hire someone transgender, with a possible company perk that would make them loyal for life.”

  “OK. I know what I am looking for.” Roni got up and started heading out the door. Then she paused at the door. Uncharacteristically uncertain. I think she stayed still maybe 10 or 15 seconds, debating with herself. Then she turned around and sat down again. There were tears in her eyes and a scared look on her face. “Could I be the transgendered person who hasn't had the op?” she said quietly, staring at her fingers in front of her. Then she smiled, still not looking at us. “I would be loyal for life.”

  “I don't have a problem with that,” I said. Similar words were uttered by Brett and Vee. Before we could say anything else she was up and out the door.

  “We will have to talk to her about the risks,” Vee muttered.

  “I don't think she will care, but, you are right, we will need to discuss them,” I agreed.

  We split up after that. We all had phones on us and as soon as more information was available from John and Wren's raid or Roni's search for an MD, we would be called back. In the meantime, Brett had work to do, Vee went off to have her one day game time in the modelling world and I picked up a hot chocolate and relaxed waiting for Vee to return.

  After about half an hour, Vee phoned me to join her. She was back in the room with multiple recliners. Kevin was sketching like crazy again, with Lee watching on. I passed him back his phone which now had my app installed. He passed it to Lee who plugged in my and Vee's measurements to create avatars of us both.

  Kevin looked like he hadn't had any sleep and there was a manic look in his eye. He was so focussed that I didn't want to disturb him. Vee, however, led me to a canvas with a cloth over it. She took the cloth off and there I was in all my feminine glory. He had drawn me in one of the more racy sets of underwear that I had modelled.

  “Wow.”

  “Wow, indeed,” Vee said. “I don't care whether the doctor needs it, I need it more.”

  Chapter 22

  “What do we do now, Vee?” I asked.

  “Let's go head back to Roni and see if she has anything planned for us. I suspect what happened this morning disrupted our schedule.”

  We knocked on Roni's office door and entered with her permission.

  “Hi girls, do you want an update?”

  “Yes, please,” I said. She gestured to sit at her desk, facing her.

  “John and Wren are on their way back. As expected, the doctor refused to give up any of his data, pretending that he had stored it elsewhere. Wren got on his computer and did her thing, she said it was networked with the other hospital computers so that was all she needed. For her, it is a bit of a waiting game to get the information that we want. He has to log back on and then she will be in. On the plus side, the MRI machine stores its images to a backup server and so they were retrieved. It is just raw data and needs the appropriate software and a radiologist to read it. We will probably get a radiologist report after Wren gets in. Any questions so far?”

  “Just glad no one got arrested or anything,” I commented.

  She chuckled. “John is too clever for that. Onto my searches. I have a few contacts in the TG community and one doctor has been highly recommended. Transitioned years ago, dedicated her life to helping others. I can't talk too much over the phone to her. John said, if it is any of the government agencies, phones will certainly be tapped, there might even be lasers on windows to hear our conversations. We should be safe in here though. So I have invited her here to discuss an important matter. She took some persuading, but she will be here tonight after her clinic closes. I was wondering if you could also come back tonight. Seeing is believing, I thought we could take her for a day 'holiday', and explain the situation.

  “Why not a week?” I asked.

  “Andi, we talked about this,” Vee said.

  “I don't think it is going to be a problem. Trust me.”

  She sighed. “Will you promise me that if you cry again, you will listen to me from now on. Follow whatever rules I decide?”

  I kissed her. “Yes. But if it works and I am fine, I will leave it to you to tell Katie.”

  “Chicken.”

  I just nodded my head agreeing with her. Katie had looked really fierce telling me that I wasn't doing that again.

  “Roni, if I spend a week in game time here, can I have more game time at home?”

  “Yes. The headsets are regulated so that you can only have 2 hours of logon time per day. Of course, if you switch headsets, there is nothing stopping you from having longer. We tell people not to have more than that because we are worried about the addictive nature of the system.”

  “How addictive is it? Should we be worried?” Vee asked. She had been using it for a lot longer than me and I got the impression that she had wondered if she was addicted.

  “That is a difficult question to answer. Anything that you enjoy can become addictive and the more you enjoy it, the more addictive it can become. The main issue as far as the authorities are concerned is whether it creates brain chemistry changes that would cause you to ignore societal rules. So far, there is no evidence that it does that. Apart from you, of course. And that is not so much brain chemistry changes as possible whole body and brain changes. I have been working with the lawyers drafting a document that I will have to sign to say I am aware of the risks and am going ahead with full consent before I can be part of your experiment.” She was smiling at this point.

  “I think we should discuss these risks with you, Roni,” Vee said. “Not to put you off, more, to make you aware.”

  “Sure, what do you think are the risks?”

  “We were discussing it with Katie. The only transformation that we have done and are fairly certain will become available, is to transform someone to copy a female elf body. We don't know what the differences are between humans and elves. In the game we are doing it in, all the female elves are lesbians, so that might be forced upon you. We may not have any control over which elf is chosen for your body to copy. You could end up looking drastically different from how you do now. No one would recognise you,” Vee pointed out.

  “All good points. Let me tell you a little about my life. I have always felt wrong in my body but never had a feminine look to me. I could never pass very well. Even after lots of surgery, not including the big one, but facial surgery, breast implants and Adam's apple shaving, I still get clocked occasionally. My family abandoned me when I came out and I haven't had the guts to have a relationship with anybody. I'm not a virgin, but my experiences have been brief and not very pleasant. I truly don't think I have anything to lose.”

  “What do you present as in the game?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, exactly as I am physically. Male with some female features. The Lagbit world treats me as male. As do all the others. I know from other's experiences that after my surgery, I will be treated as female in the game, but I will still look, like I look. Passing most of the time, not all of the time. The only reason I haven't done the surgery yet is that I am frightened of the pain. I keep on intending to do it and then put it off for an apparently good reason. It has happened too often for me to fool myself any more.”

  “Maybe it is fate. Maybe it was so that you could be available for us to experiment on.” I said.

  “I thought it was fate when I heard we both had the same first name, Vee. I never even thought of Vee as a shortened form. I really like it. Now, enough chatter, I need to get back to my research. I need to find a TG radiologist.”

  “Thanks for the chat, Roni. Do you know what we are supposed to be doing?”

  “Let me find out for you. Here we are. Well, what do you think about going through your entire experience with our game designers? Tr
ish wants to design a game called Andi's World which she hopes will allow you broaden the scope of your transformations and the other designers want to try and design a game that will allow someone else to do what you can do. Either of those would put less reliance on your VDR headset, which, at the moment is the lynchpin behind our hopes.”

  Vee and I looked at each other in agreement. “That sounds fine.”

  Roni looked at her watch. “Why don't you have lunch first and then head to the main meeting room. I will contact Trish and her fellows and organise for them to meet you at 2pm?”

  “OK.”

  We left and headed to the cafeteria. This time there was a very nice vegetarian option. Leek bake with various vegetables included and lentils to thicken it. Very nice. I was feeling hungrier than usual and went for a second serving, which meant we were a little rushed getting to the meeting on time.

  They recorded the meeting so I wouldn't have to go over everything again, still, it was tedious. They wanted as much detail as possible. Not only what occurred, but what I was thinking. This wasn't the first time I had gone through it, but it was the most detailed. They were trying to work out if they could recreate my story with someone else. Create a new story with a similar outcome and all sorts of ideas were flying around after I finished.

  They kept involving me, asking if I thought this would work, or that would work. The difficulty was that they had already tried multiple ways of changing how someone presented in the game with absolutely no success. Early on they had tried a healing game, where an angel would appear and lay hands on someone and heal them and see if that would change their image. It didn't work at all. They were trying to work out what the difference was between what they had tried previously and what had happened to me. The main difference was that they had never tried copying someone else's body image and they are aware that everybody's brain is different. It was possible that my brain was different in such a way that it allowed this to happen. One of those weird quirks.

  Following our discussion, Trish outlined Andi's world, based on what she had heard from me. She didn't think certain aspects were relevant, but the important thing was to create another game that could work that would fit into any headset. So she was going to change as little as possible. If it worked then they could tweak it, maybe make it more modern and luxurious. So it was going to be set in the same setting as Lagbit's world. Same settlement, same church orientated grounds, with priests and priestesses doing healing magic. There would be no sexual preferences expressed. It would be a human only world, no other races. There would be a high priestess who would be a mother type figure who was able to do transformation magic. There would be normal looking humans to copy based on, but not exactly the same as, dead actresses and actors.

  Even though she was going to be able to copy some of her previous work, it would still take her about a month of work with her team to get anything close to ready for trial. The others were going to try other ideas, but more as secondary projects, because they already had work in front of them. They were also going to have to add some of the workload that had been on Trish and her team so that they were free to work on Andi's world.

  I was getting hungry again. For some reason, my appetite had really kicked up a gear. I was tempted to go back to the cafeteria but we knew that Katie was going to prepare something again, so we had a driver take us back to Katie's penthouse. The driver was going to wait as we had to come back to the office for a late night meeting with the new doctor.

  Katie had prepared a lovely mushroom cheese pasta. She was still working out quantities and went with the general principle of making too much rather than not enough. It was just as well since I had seconds again. If I kept this up I was going to get fat, but I couldn't seem to help myself. Then we were taken back to the office for our meeting.

  Chapter 23

  When we arrived we were taken up to Roni and her office.

  “Hi girls. Dr Marsden is running a bit late and should be here in about 10 minutes. I have decided that I will go into VDR with you. You can give the visual impact and I can discuss what we are looking for and hoping to achieve. I don't like doing it, mainly because it makes me feel bad to be treated as a man. It also means that I will be outing myself to her. Is it OK if we just go for one day?”

  “Of course, Roni. It will still be a good test for me. If I can return without feeling bad about it, I'm sure I can convince my minders that I can do the full seven days later in Lagbit's world.”

  “Thank you. John also suggested that we don't go into any detail as to the process involved. We have already had one breach of security, albeit, from someone who is sworn to confidentiality. He wants the process to be need to know only. The doctor's main role will be to document changes, both so you know what is going on, but also from a legal standpoint. John will also want to know exactly what you told Dr Sinclair. Good news on that front. Dr Sinclair has accessed his computer and Wren now has complete control. She has already downloaded loads of information from his computer and is going through it. Not on her own, her team. They haven't left yet, they are still working on it.”

  “Any luck finding a TG radiologist?” Vee asked.

  “Not exactly, but sort of. We found a woman radiologist whose husband wants to become her wife. We have a meeting booked for tomorrow.”

  “What are we telling them?” Vee inquired.

  “Well, both the doctor and the radiologist could well be seeing things that do not make sense unless they know at least what we think is possible. So we will have to be fairly forthcoming, but, again, we are not going to be talking about how. The how needs to be kept secret. In particular, that the process, as it stands, needs both Andi and that original headset with Lagbit's world inserted. John is worried that if the secret is not kept, then, attempts could be made to steal the original headset and you, Andi.”

  “Surely John is just being paranoid,” I said, a bit worried.

  “I think it is hard for any of us to wrap our heads around how big a deal this could be. Let's take Katie, for example. Her situation is not unique. In this country, there are probably thousands in a similar way. Across the world, possibly tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Each in an incurable situation that makes their life so difficult. Each potentially with a family that would do anything, pay anything to help their loved one. The minimum that we are hoping for is that she would be able to live the majority of her life in a virtual world with no handicaps. The maximum is a total cure. And that is just one condition. This could revolutionize the medical world. What value would you put on that? Are you in real danger? Only if this knowledge becomes known. We have had a breach. At this moment, we do not know who else knows and how much they know. If it is the wrong people and they know too much, then yes, all our lives are in danger.”

  “We don't even know if it will work,” I said, maybe with a bit of a whine in my voice.

  “Obviously we need to find that out fast. Even the rumour will be enough to put you in danger,” Roni said seriously.

  I tried to think back to what we had disclosed to Dr Sinclair. “I don't think we told Dr Sinclair too much about how it all happened, but only because I don't think he was interested. He wanted to know who was responsible and what our physical capabilities were.”

  “I think he also wanted to know what else could improve. I remember him asking about the differences between humans and elves, so we must have told him something. I think he asked us lots of questions on what we had been eating and what drugs we were taking. Thinking back on it, I think he presumed that we had been experimented on by a pharmaceutical and he was being hired to identify the changes,” Vee added thoughtfully.

  “I suppose, to a medical doctor, the only thing that would account for the physical changes, would be drug experimentation. The talk of elves might be a way of describing someone who has enhanced eyesight, hearing, strength, agility etc.,” I observed.

  “Maybe we can use that. Sow a bit of disinformation,”
Roni said. “I will discuss it with John tomorrow.”

  Roni's phone rang. Dr Marsden had arrived and was being escorted up to her office.

  Dr Marsden, a lady in her early 50's, was led to us by a security guy, who knocked, opened the door and then left us to it.

  Roni was ready for her. “Dr Marsden I presume. We spoke earlier on the phone. I'm Roni.”