Gender Swapped By Aliens!
By Ivana Johnson
The invasion took place at two-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. By two-thirty-one, nearly the entire Earth was under their control. No one knew it—not yet.
I was in my office, listening to Mrs. Handsworth complain about her husband’s inadequacies. There was a moment when she stiffened and then put a hand to her temple, as if a migraine had come on. “You all right, Lydia?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said.
The rest of the session went by as normal. After I sent Mrs. Handsworth home with an appointment in two days, my secretary motioned to two burly guys in cheap suits. “These gentlemen are here to see you. They’re police officers.”
“I see,” I said. It wasn’t unheard of for the police to ask for my opinion on a case. They did usually call before they showed up. “What can I help you gentlemen with?”
“You can come with us downtown. We got some questions to ask,” the one said with a voice like gravel being ground under a car tire.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“You going to come quietly or we got to get rough?” the other cop asked. From the way his fists were clenched, he would have liked to do the latter.
“There’s no need for threats,” I said. “Mabel, cancel my appointments for the rest of the day. And tell Denise I might be late getting home.”
“Yes, Dr. Cauffield.”
The two cops were polite enough to let me put on my coat and hat before they led me down to an unmarked car waiting by the curb. I still hadn’t noticed anything different, but that was the beauty of their tactics; they were so subtle that ninety-nine percent didn’t even notice.
“So what’s this about?” I asked once the car was underway.
“Just keep your trap shut,” the burly cop in the passenger’s seat said. His tone made it abundantly clear that he would waste no time silencing me if I didn’t comply.
The first strange thing I noticed was when we went past city hall. The US, state, and city flags were there, but a fourth one rose above them all, a yellow flag with a pair of black triangles on it. I hadn’t ever seen a flag like that before, but I knew better than to ask these two cops.
When we cruised past the police station, I knew something was wrong. “Wasn’t that—?”
“Pipe down, Doc,” the cop in the passenger’s seat growled. He reached into his jacket for his service pistol. “One more word and I splatter your brains over the car.”
I sagged back against my seat, not daring to make another sound; I didn’t doubt this cop was serious and that he had probably carried out the same threat before. The car finally stopped at an old slaughterhouse on the outside of town. A slaughterhouse was appropriate because of what they were doing inside the building wasn’t much different, though less bloody.
The cop on the passenger’s seat got out to tear open my door. He yanked me out of the car before I could try to make a break for it—though I hadn’t really considered doing so. I made the mistake of asking, “Are you going to kill me?”
The cop cracked me across the jaw with the butt of his pistol. Pain flared in my jaw. I went limp in the cop’s grasp for a moment, not that it mattered to him; he kept dragging me along, through a side door.
The hallway I would come to know so well was metal polished to a high shine, contrasting sharply with the outside of the building. The other cop opened the door to Room 5 to let his partner sling me onto a rough wooden chair. “What the hell is going on here?” I shouted. “What are you going to do to me?”
“They aren’t going to do anything,” a woman said from the doorway. With a wave of her hand, the cops shuffled away. The woman was ordinary enough: short brown hair, lavender pantsuit, and reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. On the left breast of her suit jacket was a silver pin stamped with a number: 47. In her hands she held a folder that presumably was about me. “Hello, Dr. Cauffield. I’m sorry our agents were so rough with you.”
“What’s going on here?” I asked again.
The woman took a seat at a rickety metal table. She continued to study the folder for a few minutes, seemingly oblivious to me. I was about to ask for an explanation again when she took off the glasses and then looked up at me. She blinked a couple of times, her eyes turning entirely silver like liquid mercury.
I leaned back in my chair, not sure if I were hallucinating or not. She leaned forward, those liquid mercury eyes still fixed on me. “I’m afraid there has been a problem, Dr. Cauffield and we simply can’t allow there to be any loose ends.”
“Are you…are you going to kill me?”
“I certainly hope not.” She gestured to her eyes. “As you might have guessed, I am not human. I am an agent of the Zargon Empire. We have annexed your planet.”
“Annexed Earth? I don’t remember—”
“Oh, no, do not misunderstand me. There was no war. No treaties. We have long since stopped using such primitive methods. We don’t use flying saucers or giant robots like in your movies.
“Our method is what is called a Reality Distortion Generator. You can think of it as a mass brainwashing. As soon as our generator reached the proper orbit and launched the signal, nearly your entire species was reconditioned to accept us as their overlords.
“There are, unfortunately, some whose minds for one reason or another resist the reconditioning. These dangerous individuals must be rooted out and dealt with as swiftly as possible.”
“And I’m one of these dangerous individuals?” I asked. I couldn’t help chuckling at this; I had never even gotten a parking ticket.
“It takes only a few individuals questioning the new order for things to unravel. That is why it was so important for those brutes to take you from your office.”
“This doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that you’ve somehow changed history so that your people have conquered Earth?”
“Yes. It’s much easier and less bloody than actually doing so.”
“And what am I supposed to do? Swear a loyalty oath? Sign a nondisclosure agreement?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. In circumstances like this, when a mind will not accept reconditioning, we must attempt to do so manually.”
“How? You going to shoot me up with drugs?”
“Again it’s not that simple. To recalibrate your mind, we are going to assign you an entirely new life. Once you accept that, then you can be reconditioned.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will soon enough.”
From a pocket of her pantsuit she took out what looked like a PDA, but it was obviously much more advanced. She began to tap at the screen until the screen turned red. My vision turned red along with the screen. With a scream, I tumbled off the chair.
My entire body felt as if it had been lit on fire. Through the haze of pain, I could see my body changing. My arms got shorter, pulling inside my sleeves. My chest was similarly shrinking, as were my feet. I looked like a child wearing his father’s clothes.
Only when those clothes fell away could I see what I had become. The slender arms and legs, the wide hips and slim waist, the pair of little round lumps on my chest all led to one conclusion: I had become a woman! I put a hand with manicured pink nails to plump lips and then let out a shriek like Denise when she saw a spider.
The only positive was that I was fully dressed. I was wearing a drab business suit with a knee-length skirt, nylons, and black shoes with a short heel. There was even a string of pearls around my neck.
“What did you do to me?” I shouted in a voice very much like my wife’s—a woman’s voice.
The woman tapped the screen of her PDA, the wall behind her turning into a mirr
or. In that mirror I could see my tormentor and a tiny, middle-aged Asian woman. I staggered past the table to study myself closer in the mirror. Over my brown, football-shaped eyes were round spectacles that perched on nearly the end of my tiny nose. My hair had turned black and grown out, though it was still short—for a woman at least.
“Your new name is Lynn Fong. You’re thirty-nine years old. You’re a fussy little bureaucrat for Clifton Pharmaceuticals—accounts payable division. You’ve worked there for fifteen years, ever since you graduated from the University of Southern California—”
I turned from the mirror to shout, “What about my wife? Our kids?”
“You don’t have any family, just a pair of cats. You’ve never been much good at physical intimacy, poor dear.”
“No! This isn’t right!” I lunged for her. My hands brushed against the fabric of her suit, but then she was across the room.
“The sooner you accept your new life, the sooner all this will be over,” she told me. “Thanks to that little outburst, I’m going to make a note in your file.”
She tapped the screen. Right away I felt a sharp ache in my back. My hips widened, my waist thickened, and my breasts sagged on my chest. Turning to the mirror, I saw hair streaked with gray, thicker glasses, and deep wrinkles etched on my face. The woman explained, “Now you’re forty-nine. I could very easily make it seventy-nine and give you dementia, but then what use would you be?”
“I’m not going to accept this. I’ll never accept it.”
“We’ll see. After a few days you might like being a post-menopausal woman.”
The door to the room opened, allowing the two “cops” who had brought me in to stomp inside. They looked a lot bigger now that I had gotten smaller. I imagined they could snap my feeble body as easily as a twig.
“Come on, Granny,” the nastier of the two said. “Time to get you home.”
The woman said nothing to me; she only nodded as they dragged me away. They carried me out the way they had brought me in. As we neared the car, the one carrying me smashed my head against the door. My head spun once and then everything turned black.
***
I woke up on a bus stop bench. For a moment I naively hoped it had all been a nightmare. Then I saw the saggy little breasts inside the white blouse I was wearing and the skirt and nylons covering my legs. It had all really happened. Somehow aliens had taken over the planet without firing a shot and for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, they had changed me into a middle-aged woman.
Next to me on the bench was a brown leather briefcase, a tag on the handle indicating it belonged to Lynn Fong. That was the name they had given to me. They had assigned me an entirely new life, one markedly different from my own.
The briefcase didn’t have a lock on it, allowing me to open it. Inside was a calculator, pencils, pens, and other office supplies. There were memos too, each with the header for Clifton Pharmaceuticals. That was where I was supposed to work now, in the accounts payable department from what the woman had told me.
What about my real family? Had they all been assigned new lives? Had Denise been assigned a new husband? Did Michael and Tammy have a new father? Or had I simply disappeared?
There wasn’t a phone in the briefcase. Then I saw a purse on my other side, a clunky black bag that seemed appropriate for a frumpy middle-aged accountant. I opened the purse to find the sort of things any woman would have: lipstick, mascara, tissues, a compact, and even a tampon I hoped to never have to use. There was a billfold, inside which I found an ID card that gave my new address: an apartment on the east side.
I was about to give up when I found a phone in the outer pocket of the purse. It was an old flip phone that probably couldn’t even get on the Internet. A “fussy little bureaucrat” like Lynn Fong wouldn’t throw away a phone just because it was several generations out of date.
I opened the phone and then started to punch in the numbers. My finger hesitated over the last digit. I suddenly had a nervous flutter in my stomach. Even if Denise were still the same, how would she recognize me? I would sound like a stranger to her, a strange woman no less. I couldn’t even count on being able to persuade her with memories of our old life together, not if they had altered her memories.
I flipped the phone shut and then sighed. A bus squealed to a halt in front of me. Pain shot through my back as I got to my feet; I would have to get used to not being as spry as I used to be—at least until I could find some way to change back.
I stumbled as I started up the steps. My face burned with heat as I rearranged my bags and then my skirt. “Sorry,” I mumbled to the driver before I righted myself and then made it up to the main deck. My face turned even warmer as I dug around my purse to find the exact change needed.
“Come on, lady. We ain’t got all day.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. My fingers seemed to have turned to Jell-O, unable to get a firm grip on anything.
“Here, let me,” a man said. Coins dropped into the bin.
“Thank you, young man,” I said before I could stop myself from adding the last part.
“It’s no problem, ma’am.” The man was probably in his late twenties, with slicked-back hair and a wispy beard like so many of them wore these days. I felt even warmer as he smiled at me. There was a stir of longing between my legs—until he discreetly motioned for me to shuffle down the aisle, to a seat.
“Oh, yes. I’m so sorry.” I giggled like an idiot and then trudged over to the nearest seat. The nice young man took a seat in the back, as far from me as he could get. I cursed my stupidity. Of course he wouldn’t be interested in me in that way. To a boy his age I was just a senile old woman holding up the line; he had simply done a good deed for his elders.
As I settled on the seat, it struck me how my thinking was already changing, becoming like that of a middle-aged woman. I had only been Lynn Fong for half an hour and already I was adopting her personality. It would make for a fascinating paper for a journal, except that to the world I was no longer a psychologist.
I sighed and then forced myself to think of more relevant issues: how to get my life back. These aliens were the only ones who could do that. There had to be some way to reason with them, to make a deal for my family. Except to make a deal, I would need to have some form of leverage and clearly I had nothing to bargain with.
Well, there was one thing. They didn’t want me to spill the beans about their little scheme. If I threatened to do that, maybe I could convince them that it would be better to let me have my family back. It would be a risk, but it was all I could do.
The bus let me off about a block from Clifton Pharmaceuticals. I stumbled a few times in these unfamiliar shoes that were on equally unfamiliar feet and legs, but I at least managed to avoid falling on my face. The younger people around me probably sneered and thought I should get a cane or walker like other old geezers.
My new feet were aching by the time I reached the front gate. I scrambled to find an identification badge for the guard, but he just grinned at me. “Morning, Ms. Fong.”
“Um, morning,” I mumbled.
“You’re looking a little frazzled. Cats keeping you up again?”
“Oh, yes. The cats,” I said with a dull chuckle.
“Have a good day, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” The guard raised the gate to let me stagger through the parking lot, up to the shiny glass tower that was the company’s main headquarters. Like at city hall, there was an extra flagpole, that yellow flag rising above all the others. That was obviously the Zargon Empire’s flag, the new overlords no one seemed to realize had never existed until about sixteen hours ago.
Another security guard greeted me as I stumbled through the front door. “Morning, Ms. Fong.”
“Morning.” I flashed him a smile. Lynn Fong seemed pretty popular around here. I gave an exaggerated sigh and then motioned to my purse. “I can’t find anything this morning.”
“I can get you a temporary badge i
f you need one.”
“That shouldn’t be necessary. I’m sure it’s in here somewhere.”
I set my purse on a table in the lobby. I took everything out one item at a time. By process of elimination, I finally turned up a badge with my new name and face on it. That face had a few less lines and gray hairs to resemble how I had first looked as Lynn Fong. I clipped the badge to the front pocket of my suit jacket and then returned everything to my purse.
“Looks like you found it,” the security guard said.
“I knew it was there somewhere.” I gave him a wry smile and then hurried away. I had no idea what floor accounts payable would be on, but there was a helpful directory by the elevators. While I waited with dozens of other businesspeople, I consulted the directory. The text near the top was fuzzy enough that I had to squint to make it out. Finally I squinted enough to make out that Accounts Payable was on the twenty-sixth floor.
When an elevator door opened, there was a stampede to get inside. A younger woman motioned frantically to me. “Come on, Ms. Fong.”
I scuttled through the elevator doors, making it through just before they could crush me. “Thank you…Jo Ann,” I said, reading her badge. Someone had already punched the button for the twenty-sixth floor. “I wasn’t sure I could make it.”
“I have those reports ready for you,” she said. She must be one of my new coworkers.
“That’s good.”
“I’ll email them to you first thing.”
“Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure how familiar I was supposed to be with this woman, so I tried to keep things neutral. The elevator came to a stop; we both had to slide back to allow other people to squeeze out of the cramped elevator. This continued until we reached the twenty-sixth floor, where we were the ones who had to force our way out.
We emerged into a sea of gray cubicles. In my gray suit and graying hair I could blend in pretty well with the cubicles. Not knowing which one belonged to me, I followed Jo Ann, hoping to end up in the general area. Along the way we passed a variety of men and women, most of whom were already at work crunching numbers in Excel.
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