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You know, when you read "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" with a modern understanding of science, as a person who understands chemistry, biology, and psychology, the rational part of your mind will tell you it's not possible. That it makes for a fun story, but you could not drink a potion and transform either physically or mentally like the title character of that book. You can't change yourself like that. But the irrational part, oh it wishes you could. It looks at so-called "recreational" drugs, looks at the more controlled prescription drugs, compares effects, adds hypotheticals together, and suddenly it's convinced your rational part that maybe it is possible. And then your ego gets in the way. If it's possible, then couldn't you control it? Couldn't you learn from the lessons in the book and ensure that whatever transformation takes place, it is A) to your benefit and B) completely under your control? So, not really expecting a result, I did some tests. Did some research. Came up with something, fed a bit of it to an Algernon, I named her Allegra in homage, and the rat did seem to get a bit healthier, react to things faster. And just in case, I waited. Years. That rodent lived five years longer than any other lab rat I've ever worked with, and performed above-average on every physical and mental test I threw at her, with no major physical alterations or increased aggression, until the day she died. And I waited until that day before moving forward an inch. Allegra died normally, like any other rat. Her entire life was perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. It was just above-average for a rat in every way. I didn't tell anybody any of this, of course. But I was fairly sure that it meant I had something that was useable, something that I could try on myself without fear of any sort of Algernon or Hyde effect. No reversion, no loss of control. And so I found myself in my attic, standing before a beaker of yellow- green liquid, about to cross the boundary between science and science fiction. Everyone from H.G. Welles to Stan Lee wrote about things like this, but nobody had actually done it until me. I downed a dose that, adjusting for the weight difference, was about a quarter of what I'd given my test subject. It tasted like one of those energy drinks that college kids mix with liquor nowadays. I suppose it could have been worse. It could have tasted like the liquor that college kids mix with energy drinks. But it went down easily enough. There was no dramatic shift, no pain. I wasn't expecting any, because none had happened in the rat. I would start seeing and feeling the results by the next day. *** "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither as they pass, they slip away across the universe" My alarm. I don't like harsh alarm clocks. I like to ease into waking up, not jolt violently from one mental state to the next. So I eased myself up slowly as John Lennon's voice nudged me forward like it does most mornings. I looked into the mirror, and then jolted violently from one mental state into the next. "Jai guru deva, ohm. Nothing's gonna change my world, nothing's gonna change my world" My face. My hair. My shoulders. Everything was different. Smaller. Softer. I looked downright androgynous. What had gone wrong? "Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes, they call me on and on across the universe" I went over to my alarm clock and shut it off. I was beginning to feel a bit lightheaded, and the music wasn't helping. Nothing like this had happened to the rat at any point. Why was it happening to me? I pulled on a bathrobe and hurried to the attic to check my notes. Maybe something would indicate to me what had gone wrong. *** It was staring me plain in the face. I looked over my equations, my materials, and it was clear as day that what I'd drank would alter my form towards the female. It never manifested in Allegra because she was already female, but in myself it apparently had the effect of a physical transmutation. I had to reverse it before anybody saw me. This was a secret experiment, and I didn't want people asking strange questions. Fortunately, the other aspects of the formula appeared to work as I'd anticipated. I was thinking more clearly, more quickly, and noticing things that I hadn't before. Like the on-paper feminine affects of the draught that I hadn't figured out before. This made it much easier to prepare a formula that worked in the reverse: one which would negate everything that had thus far changed in me. I wasn't sure how long I could avoid people for, but I wasn't too worried: the speed at which I was working made me confident that I would have my new formula by noon, which was enough time to prepare the concoction by evening. I prepared it, drank the dose that my improved equations told me would precisely counteract the previous dosage, and went to sleep hoping to be normal when I awoke. *** "Words are flowing out-" My hand shot out and turned off the alarm. I wasn't interested in gentle rising that morning. I sprung up from my bed and looked in my mirror. And sighed in relief. I was back to normal. Well, almost. My nose didn't look quite right, a little smaller than it should, but other than that I was back to my normal self. It would have to be good enough. I returned to the attic to look over my work, see what I could do about clearing the "gender problem" from my formulations. But I found that it wasn't just my appearance that had been reverted: my mental capacity was back to normal as well. I could barely find the problem in my work, and that was only because I knew what I was looking for. I looked over the new notes I'd prepared just the previous day, and I simply couldn't follow my own thought processes. I couldn't even remember how my own logic had arrived at those solutions. I deliberated with myself for hours. Would I spend more time, more tests to create a new formula? Was I capable of it? Should I just give up now? No. I couldn't do that. At the end of the day, I knew there was only one option open for me. I turned to my computer, logged on to Twitter, and posted that I was going on an impromptu vacation without my cell phone. I would be available by email. Then I poured myself a glass from what was left of the first potion. I drank more this time, a three-eighths dose, to be certain that I'd have the capacity to clean out my formula of its unintended physical effects, and went to bed. *** "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither as they pass, they slip away across the universe" I knew what to expect that day, so I was calm. I rose from the bed slowly, calmly, and saw that, as was expected, I now looked like a full woman. No androgyny this time. My face was soft, my body was contoured, I definitely had a woman's breasts pressing against my nightshirt, and my whole form had shrunk. With a quick glance at some of the objects in the room I managed to triangulate that I was about five inches shorter. Then I stopped and thought about what I'd just done. Was it possible for any human to do those calculations that fast with only a fleeting look at some reference points? From memory of where they were before? Suddenly, I was very excited. If this was just a three-eights dose, imagine what I'd be able to do with a full dose once it was perfected. I didn't bother getting dressed. In my night clothes, I raced to the attic and started to work. My hands flew, my mind flew, I started writing equations, brewing formulas, labeling them. I almost couldn't keep track of my own thoughts. I was more productive in that one day than I would have been in a whole month in my regular form. For the first few hours it was exhilarating. But then, without slowing down my scientific thoughts, my subconscious began to get increasingly worried about the fact that my mind seemed to be on auto-pilot. That my own thoughts seemed to be functioning on a higher level than I was capable of following. I stopped working, took a last look over my notes, wrote out a simplified summary to help my less-able normal self to follow what I'd done, and drank an improved version of the formula I'd created to bring myself back to normal. And then I went to sleep. *** "Here comes the sun, doot'n doo doo, here comes the sun, and I say, It's all right" Oh yeah. I'd changed the alarm right before I went to sleep. The thought had occurred to me that George was definitely cuter than John, and I reprogrammed the clock so one of his songs would play instead. I shrugged that off. I shouldn't be surprised at those kinds of feminine thoughts after the physical changes I'd gone through, and I would soon be rid of them anyway. "Little darling, the smile's returning to their faces" My smile left my face as I looked into the mirror. I was androgynous again. How? Yesterday, when I was hyper-intelligent, I was sure I'd done the formula properly. I'd improved on it, even! I should have been 100% back to normal. I fumed up to the attic and looked over my work. Well, one thing was definitely back to normal: my intelligence. My notes and my work were as difficult to follow as they'd ever been. I couldn't divine what had gone wrong. Even from the summary I'd provided myself: the logic of the *simplified* version was too complex for me to follow. So I made a decision right then and there. I'd cut my losses. Jekyll's mistake in the book was to keep pushing when he knew he'd lost control. I wouldn't make that mistake. I would stop now, cold turkey. The only thing I needed to do was get myself back in order physically. I'd lock up my research, end my "vacation," and go about the rest of my life as though I'd never even tried any of this. I spent the day looking over all the notes, looking at the various liquids I'd brewed and poring over their labels and descriptions. I had to figure out, without any added intelligence, what was the right thing to drink. It was very late when, in a frazzled haze, I picked one, poured what I hoped was the right amount, and downed it. *** "Here comes the sun-" I shut off the alarm quickly. It felt like I only did that when I was fully male. But I looked in the mirror and I *was* fully male. Even the nose that was messed up the first time was the way it should be now. I turned back to the clock by my bed. I wanted to reprogram it, maybe to something that wasn't even The Beatles so it wouldn't remind me of this incident. But I couldn't. The controls were too complex. I couldn't figure out how to work my own clock. What had I done to myself? I turned on my computer and searched the internet for the clock's model number. I wanted to find a manual. And I found one. But I couldn't understand it. I panicked. What was going on? Had I gotten dumber? How? I'd followed my own instructions. I couldn't live like this. I was barely literate. I had to do something. I shouldn't have done it. If I'd been smarter, literally if I'd had my normal intelligence, I would have just cut my losses like I'd decided. But I wasn't in full control of my faculties, so I didn't. I broke the vow I'd made the previous day and entered the attic. I had no idea what beaker contained what. I couldn't even follow my own original notes. I looked from one label to the next in desperation. What if whatever I drank made me even dumber? What was I going to do? I looked at the last beaker. That was the one I'd brewed the first time: the original imperfect formula. It would definitely make me smarter, even if it was going to have side-effects too. I knew that much for sure. So I poured some out. Didn't measure the dosage. I couldn't even remember what the normal dosage was. I just poured and drank. *** *** *** By noon my thoughts had cleared. And I was also a B-cup. This was the first time I'd tried any of that stuff of mine in the morning, the first time I was awake for the change. It felt like I was simultaneously gaining something and losing it. I wasn't sure how far the transformation would go this time: I had no idea how much I drank. But I knew I had to start looking at my work and seeing what I could do to correct whatever was happening. I felt a little sharper than normal, but I looked a lot girlier. Not very much gain for a whole lot of loss. How had I gone off-balance like this? I dove into notes that slowly made more sense as my hands shrank before my eyes, as the hair on my arms thinned, as my feet slipped out of shoes far too big for them. I was determined. I wouldn't drink anything until I was 100% sure of what would happen. I had time so long as people thought I was on vacation. Around six in the evening, I decided to give myself a break. I went into the kitchen, tossed something into the microwave, and sat down. I pulled the little magnetic memo pad off the fridge, uncapped the attached pen, and started writing without thinking about it: "Don't worry, I'm in control now." I hadn't meant to write that. I hadn't meant to write that, what did it mean? My hand continued, undaunted, in a script that suddenly was not my own: "I said stop panicking. I'm handling everything." I tried to talk but I couldn't. I only formed the thought, "who are you?" And my voice answered. Not my voice. A feminine version of my voice. Out of my mouth. "I guess you could call me Allegra." And then my microwave let out its familiar electronic beep and I got up and took out my food. I didn't talk as I ate. I wasn't sure if it was me willing my hands to bring food into my mouth or if it was this Allegra, whoever she was. I finished and went back to the attic. I took out the summaries that I'd written in my most hyper-intelligent state. "Okay, now I get it." The words came out of my mouth, but I definitely didn't agree with them. "Like I said, don't worry. I'm going to combine a couple of these, and everything will be fine." Whatever was controlling me, I didn't trust it. But I couldn't do anything to stop my hands from pouring and combining liquids, taking chemicals that I didn't understand and mixing them with other chemicals I didn't understand. I distilled, I dissolved, I stirred, all without knowing to what ends I was doing any of it, or being able to stop. And then, finally, I stopped. And I poured out what I'd finished making. And I drank it. All of it. and then I went to sleep. *** "Here comes the sun, little darling, here comes the sun, and I say, it's alright. It's alright" That wasn't The Beatles. It was a cover. A woman's voice. I didn't remember changing the song. I wanted to get up, but my body stayed in bed. It waited until the song was over, and then I rose, gracefully, femininely. My lithe, female form looked strange in my male nightclothes. "Don't worry, I'm going shopping today." I was worried anyway. My body went into my closet and pulled out a T-shirt, sweatpants, and a pair of flip-flops. "This will be good enough for now," it said as it pulled too-big clothes over curves I would have killed to see on someone else. Then my body found my keys, went down to my car, adjusted the seat forward, and drove down to the mall. The whole time I was shopping, I could see numbers flash through my thoughts. Allegra was thinking, and thinking hard. I was only able to catch glimpses. Some of the numbers were related to the sales going on and what was the optimum price for the best value, but some of them were different. They were statistics. They were statistics for poker hands. As I was shopping, I was simultaneously divining the possibility of anyone having any hand in any situation. I couldn't understand how my mind could even contain that information, let alone derive it from scratch. "This is enough to start out with," my mouth assured me as I packed bags into the trunk of my car, now clad in a low-cut dress and matching sandals, along with lacy panties and a D-cup bra, "but I'm going to need a whole new wardrobe, so we're going to need some money." And then she drove out to the Indian casino on the outskirts of the city. She didn't win every hand, but the odds definitely seemed more in her favor than they should have been, and she walked out when we had about a thousand more than we'd walked in with. Not too much to arouse suspicion, but enough to cover twice over what she'd purchased at the mall. "Now I should let you know," she said during the drive back home, "that you'll never be in control here again. I'll let you stay, but if you get too annoying I'll have to make some changes, so you'd better behave." What did that mean? *** "Tonight you're mine, completely" Allegra had changed my alarm to Carole King. I can't help but think she chose this song because she knew the opening line would remind me of my current subjugated situation. "You give your love so sweetly" The second line wasn't one of my favorites at that moment either. The body I no longer controlled languorously rose from my bed, primped my hair, and floated over to my dresser, where it removed a set of clothes far more feminine than I'd ever intentionally put there. Silk blouse. Form-fitting slacks. My hands put them on my body without any impetus from my own thoughts. Allegra went up to the attic and went straight for the one beaker she hadn't touched the previous day: the one I'd prepared after that first transformation to revert myself back to male. For a brief moment, I thought maybe she was going to drink it. "No, silly," she said, "this is for something more important." She didn't consult the notes. She just worked from memory. Or maybe she was improvising: like a musician that knew their instrument well enough to come up with a brilliant solo from nowhere, she now knew the relevant sciences well enough that she was just creating formulas in her head. In my head. I just couldn't understand them After a few hours, the full contents of the beaker had been used to create several dozen small, white tablets. They reminded me of something from an old cartoon. "The secret compartment of my ring I fill," Allegra half-sung, obviously for my benefit, as she funneled the tablets into a jar, "with an Underdog super energy pill." I didn't know what they were for, but I knew they couldn't be good. The misappropriation of the quote from my childhood made me feel nauseous. But then she left the attic, put the jar of tablets into a purse, and took the car out. *** "You're going to hate me, but you need to understand that I'm helping them." We were pulling up to the campus parking lot at the university where I did my "non-recreational" research. "Your friends and colleagues will be among those who father the next step in human evolution." She stepped out of the car and made her way to the Dean's Offices. I knew there was a meeting of the heads of all the faculties going on that morning, so she knew it, too. I didn't know what she was going to do to the people in that meeting, and I was dreading finding out. They hadn't started yet. Everyone was in the hallway making small talk. Allegra blended in, moved past everyone, and slipped into the meeting room. She eyed the large pitchers of water in the center of the table and dropped a tablet into each one. What did those things do? "It's diluted now, so it's going to take a few days to manifest in most of them," she said in answer as she tiptoed out the back door to the room, "but I just increased the Darwinian scores of every man who drinks from that water. Granted, I decreased their intelligence as well, but that's necessary." Her words, echoing over the empty back hallway of the Dean's Office struck me harshly. These were my colleagues, my friends, and some of the smartest people I knew. What was she doing, taking out the competition? "I'm not taking out the competition, I'm just adding a little more sense to society," she assured me. "That pill will introduce a mutation to the Y chromosome of every cell in every individual who ingests it, assuming they have a Y chromosome. The mutation makes them far more sexually aggressive, far more potent, and far less intelligent. Within the year, every one of them will lose their posts. But within two, I guarantee you, every one of them will have impregnated a woman. Darwin: their genes, and this mutation, will prosper because any male who inherits it will reproduce more than the average male who does not." I was sickened. She was planning on dumbing down humanity! "Not humanity. I intend to maintain proper balance," she said with a grin as she stepped back into my car. *** We did some more shopping that day, went back to the casino and won another couple hundred. And then night fell and she got back into the car, but she headed the wrong direction for home. "What are your thoughts about men, sexually?" She knew I couldn't directly answer. She was looking for me to think something. So I thought the word "no." Images of men were presented to my mind's eye. All of them were certainly images Allegra had created for me. They were normal men, normally-clothed, like you'd see every day on the street. For every one of them, I thought "no." But then the images became different. Instead of being unfocused, now the eyes of every man were pointed directly at me. I felt a bit intimidated. I didn't like that feeling. "They're just admiring you." I didn't want to be admired. "Maybe try looking back instead of hiding. What if you found something in them to admire?" She was right: if I wanted to be the dominant party, I had to stand firm. Firm. The more I focused on the images before me, the less clothes the men seemed to be wearing. She was trying to trick me. It wouldn't work: I blocked the images. I simply wouldn't acknowledge them at all. "Think about arm muscles." I couldn't help it, I focused on the next man's arm muscles. "Think about chest hairs." And now I was focused on his chest. "Think about day-old stubble." His beard. "Aren't they worthy of your admiration?" I drank in the images. They were. "Hug the next one." I did. I hung off of his neck and put my head on his shoulder. He was completely naked. And I realized only after the embrace that I was too. And I started to feel a sort of tingling inside of me as I felt the image's erection slowly grow along my hip, and as the arms of this image wrapped themselves around my back, hugging my smaller form, I realized: my own self image was now the female version of my body. "Aw, that one's cute, isn't he?" He was. I felt nauseous again. *** She'd manipulated me. I knew she'd manipulated me. But I couldn't help it, I wanted nothing more than to rest in this fantasy's arms for the rest of my life. It sickened me, but at the same time being here was comforting. So despite myself, I gave a little mental whimper when the image abruptly disappeared. The car had stopped. I looked at where we were: it was a truck stop. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse before getting out of the car. I didn't like that. "Don't worry, you'll enjoy this if you let yourself." She seemed to be telling me not to worry a lot. She strutted into the cafe of the truck stop, looked around, and focused on the dirtiest, most unkempt guy in the whole room. I didn't like that. She flirted with him shamelessly, and got precisely the reaction she was probably aiming for. He didn't finish eating: he just paid his check and followed us out to the backseat of my car. *** The sensations were overwhelming for me, but Allegra didn't seem to react mentally at all. Was she that in-control of her thoughts? It was just like my fantasy- the fantasy she'd forced on me, I had to remind myself. It was a bit rougher maybe, but the feeling of being smaller, of hanging on to someone bigger than me, it was comforting at the same time as the sensations going on elsewhere were making fireworks go off. But why this guy? What was Allegra's plan here? She gave me control for only a few seconds. Right as we orgasmed. It was my scream, not hers, that came out. Her mind was calm the whole time. Calculating. Did she not want to show that kind of emotion? Or was she incapable of it? Or did she just want the satisfaction of seeing me orgasm at the hands of this filth bucket. When we finished the trucker got up, awkwardly fixed his pants, and went back to the diner. I'm sure this was the first time a random woman had come up to him, seduced him, and had sex with him. I could understand him being a bit unsure of what to do next. But Allegra knew precisely what she wanted to do next: she fixed our dress, took a notepad from her purse, wrote down the trucker's name, got into the driver's seat, and took us home. *** "I don't think you understand what I'm doing," she said once we were back on the road. "That man was among the dregs of society. Why would I give him the opportunity to impregnate me, right? Let alone the diseases I might catch." I waited. "Well, you don't have to worry about either of those. You and I can't get pregnant by having sex with a man, and we're immune to most diseases." What? "You remember that little pill from the university?" Was she taunting me? "We now produce, during intercourse, a chemical that has a similar effect. Not on the whole body, that would be too obvious. It just works on the testes." I *really* didn't like where this was going. "The man that you just had sex with will no longer produce sperm with his own DNA encoded into it. He will only produce sperm with ours. Every woman he impregnates will have only daughters, but they won't be his children: they will be ours. Genetically half us, half their mother. They will be brilliant: not quite as smart as me, but far smarter than their mothers or their supposed fathers. I will keep track of them, and when they reach a certain age, I will recruit them. They will not deny me, I know it." Every word that left my mouth made me more and more uneasy. "My daughters will reach the highest offices in the biggest institutions in the world. And they will all marry imbeciles. But only imbeciles with a particular mutation on their Y chromosome. The combination of a dumb, physically dominant male with a smart, motivated female to control and support him will become the new ideal. In modern society, it will out-compete all other couple combinations, and thanks to the men's increased potency and the women's ability to continue some of her most important work as she balances it with the issues of child-rearing and being the head of a household, which she will be more than capable of, after a few generations this scheme will have permeated all of American society and moved into other countries as well." Was that what she was doing? I was horrified. "And you know that we will easily live well past 100. We'll be able to see this happen, as it happens. All we have to do is keep planting seeds." *** *** *** Allegra moved out of my house. Didn't take any of my things, just took the clothes she had bought herself, bought a used car, and hit the road. If we ever needed money, she found a casino and won some. Never too much in a single day, but over time it added up and we moved around so often that nobody paid us any attention. Over the next few years, she distributed stupid pills among some of the most influential bodies in America. It caused numerous fiascos as companies and government institutions collapsed due to poor management, but Allegra said it would work out better in the long-term this way. Starting with idiots and taking them down would, in the long-term, make her new vision less viable. We had sex with a different man every night. *I* had sex with a different man every night. That was the only time Allegra gave me control, and she took it away as soon as I came. Each man seemed more disgusting than the last. But this, too, was part of Allegra's plan: she was surgically removing them from the gene pool while simultaneously increasing her own influence on the waters. She kept every man's name, kept track of each of them on a weekly basis: which had girlfriends, which were married, and, most importantly, which had children. Then she started keeping track of the Daughters. And from the day any man had sex with me, they only had Daughters. Sometimes she would check up on them. Usually the Daughters had more control over their parents than the other way around. In one disturbing visit, I saw a six year-old sternly lecture her own father on the wastefulness of a particular purchase. And he capitulated, because she was right. Several years later, we looked into a family that had three Daughters in their teens. They were talking about chemistry, a subject I had a PhD in, but at a level beyond what I could understand. All while they braided each other's hair and listened to trashy heartthrob music. The day after the first girl turned 18, we went to meet her. Her name was Bethany and she wouldn't listen to anything at first, but Allegra changed topics, started talking about more normal things. The two of them lost me after five minutes, and Allegra stopped the conversation after ten to ask her, "when was the last time you had a discussion at this intellectual level with anybody?" After that Allegra went back to laying out her plans, and the girl was very receptive. When Allegra told her that she'd marry an idiot she balked, but when she explained that she'd control the relationship completely she seemed to warm to the idea. She went to school with the son of my old dean. They didn't have any classes together, and they didn't even know each other. But Allegra told her to seduce him before they graduated, and she just gave a coy little smile and nodded as she looked at me like a secretary looks at her boss. "I've always wanted a big family," Bethany said as Allegra was walking away. And in that moment I felt nauseous, because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that before I died, the entire world would be controlled by Allegra's Daughters. Allegra turned back to her eldest Daughter, twisting her lips, twisting my lips, into a smile that somehow felt motherly and sinister at the same time. "Me too." *** By some cosmic coincidence, it was twenty years to the day since I first downed that fateful elixir that Bethany gave birth to the first child to be a product of a Daughter of Allegra and the son of the result of one of her pills. By now a good two dozen Daughters were in the know, and they had all come to the naming. Allegra had, too. It was the first time any of them were in the same room with another Daughter that they didn't share a mother with. Most of the chatter among the "normal" guests surrounded the fact that Bethany had still kept up her grades, and in fact was at the top of every class, despite getting pregnant during her freshman year, and despite many of her courses being intended for third- or fourth-year students. But the circle of girls, who claimed to be "online friends" but bore a striking physical similarity to one another, seemed bemused. Many of them were also college freshmen, and many of them were a good four or five months pregnant themselves, all in relationships with very specific absolute imbeciles of men, and none of them could understand what was so hard about balancing a relationship, a pregnancy, and a full course load. Watching so many of them together for the first time was magical. They had an instant connection with each other, and soon found themselves a group by themselves as the father of the child and the rest of the guests couldn't seem to get near without being overwhelmed. And, despite myself, I felt pride. Aside from being Allegra's Daughters, these girls were technically my daughters too. Not only did they carry my DNA, albeit in altered form, I'd watched each of them grow up as girls while Allegra was busy watching them grow up as geniuses. And Bethany was holding my very first granddaughter. The newly- christened Carmen was suddenly the most important thing in my world. For the moment I could put aside my fears for humanity, my unease at what these girls represented, and allowed myself to feel an upswell of joy at the miracle of life that was before me. *** Bethany had nine children and was governor of Pennsylvania by the time Carmen graduated high school. Any Daugther over the age of 30 was not far behind. Although all of the sons were dumb, the daughters were split equally between brilliant and above-average. Allegra had once clarified to me that if she'd given pills to idiots, the unaffected daughters would have been idiots too. Carmen, appropriately, was brilliant. It was interesting to watch the three groups of children interact. Every single family seemed to be full of healthy relationships, despite the differences in the children's abilities. The smart daughters looked out for their less fortunate siblings and those siblings simply accepted their diminutive role, even in families where the first smart daughter was the third or fourth child. It's an amazing thing to watch a sixteen year-old girl taking advice from her twelve year-old sister on every topic from math homework to who she should date, and never questioning the almost motherly role that was being filled by her younger sister. It's even more amazing to see that same twelve year-old practically guide her 18 year-old brother through every day life as if he were a pet dog. And yet, every moment of it was executed with absolute love. Although I had my pick of several graduation ceremonies that featured my grandchildren, I attended Carmen's: she was the first. After several dozen Daughters were indoctrinated directly by her, Allegra started delegating instruction. The number of Daughters grew exponentially over time, and she just wasn't physically capable of being in so many places at once. By now she'd started to take a more passive role, and just focused on the oldest of each generation. Carmen gave an incredible valedictorian speech, despite gasps of scandal from parents who were not expecting the visibly pregnant girl to have been the best student. She completely silenced those gasps with just her opening sentences and by the end every parent was convinced that she was not only the smartest student in the room, but likely the smartest person. They were not far from the mark. *** They all showed up to my eightieth birthday. Every Daughter, every child of every Daughter, girl and boy, and the thirty or so grandchildren that had been born. Most of the second generation didn't know who I was. But Allegra knew every one of them. She'd been keeping tabs and pulling strings, even as she receded from immediate control. It made the news. Who was this matriarch to whom so much was owed from so many seemingly unrelated successful women? Allegra had remained off the grid, eventually living on a large tract of land in Montana off of contributions from the Daughters, who had plenty to give her. Nobody outside of the family knew who she was, but they knew Bethany Wilson, who was in the middle of a presidential run that she was expected to win, and they knew Melissa Connors, who had produced half a dozen Emmy- winning prime time TV shows, and they knew Tabetha Meirs, who they had long since dubbed "the twenty-first century's Thomas Edison." To be honest, I was overwhelmed. But Allegra, as always, was in complete control and basked in the presence of her progeny. The aging element of my formula worked even more brilliantly than I'd expected. At 80, I looked to be in my early 50's. And the effect was passed on: Just shy of 50, Bethany looked to still be in her 30's. The news was all over that: a young-looking, attractive woman running for president? What was her secret? The "normal" girls had mostly gone into academics. That was something Allegra had planned: these girls would be "out of the way," but would still be helping the cause by bringing up the standard of education. She didn't force anyone to do anything, but if you give someone certain ideas at certain points in their childhood, it will affect their decision-making as an adult. The boys all had manual labor or minimum-wage jobs. But they were all good boys, and they were happy. *** When I reached 100, Allegra finally decided to stop my romantic liaisons. It was a big deal among the first generation. By now there were tens of thousands of first-generation Daughters, ranging from infancy to Bethany's age of 70. All of them technically sisters. I was amazed that, even now, there had never been any incest. But somehow Allegra had made a plan to avoid that, and the Daughters had somehow executed it. Bethany, now an elder stateswoman, had moved in with me. She was pregnant, she claimed for the last time, but she said that after being the first sitting President of the United States to give birth, too. This child would be her twenty-fourth. She was almost embarrassed by it, like having kids was a guilty pleasure. Most of the other older Daughters seemed to be the same way, each of them having more than fifteen kids. I started to wonder when menopause would to kick in, if it ever did. Carmen was now being talked up on the news as the "frontrunner," whatever that meant, for the next election. She wasn't really interested in running for president, but I guess the news people needed a story. She's happy for now staying in the Senate where she serves with several of her aunts and cousins. Congress, at this point, is not just majority female, it's actually majority descended from me. The Daughters represent both parties and still debate like Congress used to, just at a much higher level than I ever remember. A strange trend has come up among the second generation of Daughters. They've mostly been marrying much older men, partially as a part of the plan to make sure they don't date their own first cousins, but they were treating the men as if they were still children. They were dressing them in overalls, dictating how they wear their hair, getting them dye jobs and wigs if those became necessary, and generally making them look artificially younger. I guess it made sense: in their experience, instead of the mother having "pretty years," and beginning to age quickly while their father had a longer stint of "maturing" before they entered the "growing old" phase, their mothers had maintained their youths much longer than their fathers, many of whom by now had passed on quite a while ago. So instead of the women trying to artificially reclaim youth they already had, they had started placing value on keeping the men looking artificially young. *** America became the first country where a majority of single-income households had a stay-at-home dad, who focused on menial household tasks and keeping himself looking young. Even families that weren't at all related to me started emulating that model. A guy go out and start a new business? It would never succeed, why wasn't his wife running it? In a short century and change since Allegra started this whole mess, entire societal attitudes had flipped. By the time a couple reached the age of 50, the woman was generally more physically capable than the man because he'd begun to grow old while she was still in her prime. While men started becoming impotent in their 60's and dying in their 80's, women were living twice as long and remaining as fertile in old age as they were in their twenties, although it was generally recommended to avoid pregnancy after 100. Because of this, marriage trends shifted again: a "career-minded" woman wouldn't even think of a husband until her 40's or 50's, at which point she usually found some young thing to take care of. She would then have "only" five or six children, spread far enough apart so as to not overwhelm her husband who would be primarily taking care of them, all while doing complex jobs that their husbands didn't even want to try to understand. Society being what it is, the "normal" women who remained, and who were still a majority of the female population, tried to follow suit, but consistently found that they could only bring a single child, if any at all, into the world. I was 175 years old the day that Bethany came in to tell Allegra that, by her calculations, every living woman in the world carried my genes. And like this was some final indicator that she had been waiting for, it was that day when she died, and took me with her, leaving the world almost unrecognizable as the one I had been born into.