This choice: Reintroduce yourself as Jennifer Taylor. • Go Back...Chapter #8Reintroduce yourself as Jennifer Taylor. by: Seuzz   As reluctant as you are to give up on your dream of returning to your old life, Mark's idea seems the most practical. So, with your acquiescence, he starts writing letters and emails that will secure the documents that will let you reappear in public as "a" (not "the") Jennifer Taylor.
Jillian, meanwhile, surprises you by coming over one evening with an armful of fashion magazines—and porn magazines. "What are you blushing at," she asks with wide-eyed candor. "You're going to want to look good, but you also won't want any unrealistic ideas about what a girl looks like under her clothes."
So you spend the next several days trying out various "looks": as a pert-nosed, freckle-faced red-head with curly hair; as an olive-skinned Hispanic girl with long, dark tresses; as a dimple-cheeked blonde. (The latter could be Jillian's kid sister, and is the most easy "look" to establish.) Mark and Jillian help you out, making suggestions and offering critiques, though when it comes to sculpting everything below the neck you prefer to work alone, or at least insist on Mark absenting himself. He grumbles a bit that you're not thinking him a "gentleman," and pointedly starts referring to you as "Dude" in casual conversation, but otherwise he takes your request with good grace.
It also turns out that he and Jillian have not been idle with the experiments you set in motion. It's interesting that they should almost accept you as a colleague, but they show no little pride or excitement when they describe the progress they made during the months you were regenerating. The theory is ill-understood, and the practical expression is grotesque and horrible to look at, but Mark and Jillian have found a way to crudely replicate dead but quasi-organic materials. Jillian has adapted the SX-2 so that it can dissolve cotton and wool and other fabrics; when bound with Mark's organic base material, the reduced substances regenerate as themselves. The process can't be used to manufacture multiple copies—you only get back the item you've destroyed, and you still have to expend almost ten times the original's mass just to get the original back—but you can still retrieve the destroyed original. Mark beams while holding up a pair of Levis for you to inspect. "Just to look at them, you'd never know they grew out of something like that." He nods over to one of the regeneration trays, where a hideous yellow blob is being fed an IV drip. "When it's done," he adds, following your glance, "it should be a sports jacket."
"Well, it's not going to put the Chinese seamstresses out of business, but it's a start," you allow.
"The only problem is that they're really uncomfortable to wear," interrupts Jillian. You look at her curiously. "It's hard to explain," she says lamely. "You don't notice when you're just casually touching them, but they get ... sticky ... somehow, when you wear them for long periods of time."
"Prolonged exposure to them may be hazardous," Mark observes. "They'll have to be extensively tested."
"Huh." You take the jeans and peer closely at them. "I thought you said it only worked on natural fabrics. How did you replicate the metal buttons? And wouldn't they have had polyester or something in them, somewhere?"
"They look like metal, but they're not," says Mark. "We disassembled an earlier pair and had a look. They look like the original materials, but under a microscope you can see the structure is entirely different. By the way, stay out of any threshing machines, if you can help it. If you cut replicated materials up, they melt away into goo."
"Thanks for the warning," you reply sardonically. "Not that I was going to go diving into any farm machinery." You slip out of the pants you're wearing. "We might as well see how they react to me."
You pull on the jeans. They were originally some of Mark's, so they are too long and baggy on the female form you are wearing. "I see what you mean about them being 'sticky,' you observe. It almost feels like—"
With a gasp, you stop. The jeans feel like they are binding to your legs and hips. You tug at them; with a wet ripping sound they pull away from your skin. Their surface feels slightly oily under your hand.
"What's wrong," Jillian asks in alarm.
"Touch them," you say. "Do they feel right to you?"
"They feel like ordinary denim," she replies as she strokes them with her palm.
"They don't feel greasy?"
"No."
You frown and continue stroking fabric that to you feels slick and grimy. As you do so, you notice that the pants have begun to conform more tightly to the contours of your body. You continue to stroke and press, and note with fascination—and a little fear—that the folds and wrinkles smooth out. You tug at the calves and press on the seat.
"My God," Mark mutters. "They're morphing."
"They've never done this before?"
"No. I mean, I've put them on and worn them about the house, and they always just looked and felt like jeans."
But they are now almost skin tight against you. Cautiously, you concentrate and are surprised (but not deeply shocked) to find that you can change their color, lightening their shade. Concentrating further, you are able to make them shorten and the legs separate into a jeans skirt. More concentrating, and a little tugging with your fingers, and you are able get them to fray until they look like cut-offs. You slip them off, and they silent unfold back into the original pair of jeans.
There's silence for a moment. "Well," Jillian finally says with a sigh. "That will save you some wardrobe expenses."
* * * * *
She and Mark are not able to get the jeans to reproduce any of the tricks you can do with them: apparently the material interacts with your own substance so that you can "direct" them somehow. But they are not completely flexible under your control: though they can shrink and expand and change their shape somewhat, they still remain pants of some kind; the same is true of the t-shirt that Mark has modified. But he and Jillian—out of a sense of curiosity as much as anything else—set about making you a basic, shapeshifting ensemble: a skirt, some slacks, a blouse, a dress, socks and stockings, underwear, and leather sandals. (Tennis shoes, it turns out, have too many artificial elements, and metalwork is still beyond the technique's capabilities.) But you also augment this wardrobe with some regular clothes.
And by the end of the week, you settle on a shape for "Jennifer Taylor": a girl of regular size, apparently seventeen or eighteen years old, with ample but not enormous breasts, slim legs and arms, and a nicely concave torso. Her eyes are green and set in an oval face with high cheekbones and good teeth and framed by shoulder-length auburn hair that has a gentle wave in it. "You don't look anything like Jennifer," Mark observes, "but I guess that's a good thing." He says nothing, and tries to mask it, but you can tell that he finds this new "Jennifer" quite attractive. So do you, of course.
Though you're not returning to your life as "David," you do insist on being able to return to the high school, so once Mark has enough counterfeit documents in hand, he enrolls you at Eastman High. It's the first week of February when he drops you off, on a Monday morning, in front of the school.
The buildings look slightly different as you eye them; you've been away for a couple of months, but you also reflect that you are a couple of inches shorter than you had been, so that makes things look a little bigger and more askew. But it's the same bustle of students, now bundled up in jackets and coats against the winter air, and you've no problem picking out familiar faces: jocks like Kyle Lakewood and Andrew Claskey and Hank Greene; cheerleaders like Jessica Pearce and Rhianna Miller and Alyssa Randal; brainiacs and marginal students like Eddie Wasnowski and Kelly Trask and Joshua Cheswick and Eloise Stroud; "popular" students like Lisa Rickover and Faye Griffin and Cooper Black and Mitch Kendall and Elisabeth Pruit. You even catch sight of Caleb and Kevin.
It's strange to think that you know all of them—or at least know about them—but that they won't know you. You are a "new" student, and are not even the same gender that you were before. This is scary and depressing, but also liberating, when you think about it. Normally you'd go in search of Caleb and Kevin and Matt, or Dana and June and Melissa. But there's no reason for that. You are, to all appearances, a beautiful girl now, and with Mark and Jillian's brains, and (in the deep background) the masculine confidence of Kevin Liebrecht and Eric Sanchez, there's no reason you couldn't introduce yourself comfortably into the upper social echelons of the school. Alyssa Randal, for instance, you see now holding court with some of her minions. Alyssa has a sharp eye and a tart tongue, but if you made a good first impression on her, she'd surely get you introduced to everyone else who counts.
But you also miss your old friends. Especially Dana ...  | Members who added to this interactive
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