ReStorr: A Day In The Life free porn video

ReStorr could reverse the aging process and make you twenty years old again physically. The catch was it only worked on men...and it turned them into women. RESTORR: A DAY IN THE LIFE by BobH (c) 2015 - 1 - Mindy's legs were drawn up, knees level with her shoulders, as I thrust into her, both of us riding the wave of our lovemaking, totally lost in our passion. She climaxed ahead of me, crying out a few seconds before I ejaculated, arching my back as I did so. We held position as we came down from that high, she clenching and unclenching her pelvic muscles to squeeze every last drop of semen out of my slowly deflating member. I smiled down at her, gazing into that face I'd loved since I was a teenager, the face of my wife. "I love you," I said. "I love you, too," she replied, smiling back at me, her smile tinged with a sadness I shared. It was a special moment, with so much between us that didn't need to be spoken, so of course it was also the moment when my cellphone started buzzing. Sighing, I retrieved it from the bedside table. "Daniels," I said. "Uh huh. Yeah. OK. I'll be right there. Give me twenty minutes." "This is supposed to be your day off," said Mindy, clearly annoyed. "We were going to take the girls to see their grandmother together after going to the clinic for my results." "I know, honey, but a cop is always on call. I'll make it up to you, I promise." "You'd better, buster!" "Don't forget that Murphy's coming to dinner tonight." "I won't." I quickly dressed, donned my shoulder holster, slid my gun into it, and threw on my jacket. I shared a long, lingering kiss with Mindy then headed out. I decided to check in on our twin daughters Melissa and Megan before I left. Quietly, I opened the door to their bedroom. Padding over to the bed, I gazed down at them sleeping there. They were seven years old now, identical, and looked totally angelic. Smiling, I bent to give them each a gentle kiss on the cheek, then left the room as quietly as I'd entered. I made my way to the garage and climbed into my car. As I pulled onto the street, I called dispatch to let them know I was on the way. "Detective John Daniels now en route to crime scene," I said. "Acknowledged," came the reply, "Detective Murphy is already at the scene." That was unexpected. Eric Murphy was my partner, but he'd been out of town at a family wedding over the weekend and I hadn't expected him to be back by this early on a Monday morning. The crime had occurred on a leafy street when the victim, Jennifer Clarke, was on her way home to Beverly Hills. She was sitting in the driver's seat of her car when I arrived, puffing nervously on a cigarette despite claiming to be a non-smoker in interviews, as most young women in Hollywood did. Murphy was talking to her through the smashed side window while beat cops moved traffic on to keep rubber- necking to a minimum. They beckoned me to the curb, where I parked my car and got out. Even if I hadn't been given her name by dispatch I'd have recognized the victim, but then who wouldn't? Jennifer Clarke was the hottest young starlet in Hollywood. Only Emma Dante came close and, unlike Clarke, she was nowhere near as young as she now appeared to be. At only 23 years old, Clarke already had a string of major movie hits to her name. When I saw the bandage on her upper arm I immediately guessed what we were dealing with. "Mornin', Murph!" I said, walking up to the car. "Mornin', Johnny. This is my partner, Detective Daniels, Miss Clarke," he told her, "please tell him what you told me about what happened to you." "I'd been out at an all-night party and was driving home...." "You were by yourself?" "Yes." I jotted this detail down in my notebook. "Please continue." "I'd just pulled onto this street when cars shot out in front and behind me, blocking me in. I was too shocked to react before the driver leapt from the car in front and smashed my window with a hammer. He took my keys out of the ignition then pulled me from the car. He held me while the other driver stuck a syringe in my arm and took a blood sample. When that was done they got back in their cars and took off. It was over in seconds. Neither of them said a word." "Can you describe them?" "Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter." "Pardon?" "Those were the masks they had on. I think they were both white, but they were wearing gloves and I never saw any skin. If that wasn't real hair but wigs, well...who's to say?" "Height?" "They were both around five-ten, five-eleven, and they didn't seem too old. Mid-twenties, maybe?" "OK, well thank you, Miss Clarke. If you'll wait until the CSIs get here, I need to confer with my partner." "What do you think?" I asked Murphy when we'd moved away from the car. "It's not going to be identity theft - she's the right age but too high profile. And her lawyers would have a field day if anyone openly tried to copy her." "So illegal pornos, then?" "That would be my guess, yeah. The poor kid's going to be seeing herself in some real sleazy stuff in a month or two. So, what did you get up to while I was gone?" "Surveillance and drugs bust Saturday night. As well as the usual, we recovered two dozen vials of ReStorr." "Shit. Primed?" "Yep, and unlabelled," I said, grimacing. We both knew what that meant. "You have to wonder how the stuff is getting out there." "Yeah, you do. You had breakfast?" "Not yet, no." "Me neither. C'mon, I'll treat you. There's a McDonalds not far from here." "Hey, I'm just a simple cop from Boston. You're going to spoil me with all this fancy cuisine." "That's the plan, Johnny boy!" - 2 - While Murphy was getting us coffees and Big Macs, I settled into a window seat that gave a good view of the parking lot and regarded the big lug thoughtfully. Murphy was fifteen years older and forty pounds heavier than me and had been in L.A. ten years to my four. He was a New Yorker who had relocated following a nasty divorce, and I was from Boston. We never argued about anything except, inevitably, baseball. His previous partner had just taken retirement when I transferred out here from the Boston P.D., so he was a bit wary of me when we were first partnered up, but we hit it off almost immediately. There was a TV high on one wall of the restaurant, tuned to a news channel. The sound was down, of course, so you had to rely on reading the scrolling headlines to figure out what was being reported. A face appeared that I recognized. It belonged to Henry Johansson, the husband of the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, a great blond giant of a man and a major pro footballer back in the late eighties. The poor bastard had been abducted by Islamist rebels three months ago and nothing had been seen of him since. Every day we were expecting to hear he'd been beheaded and a video of the atrocity posted online, but so far nothing. According to the strapline, the rebels would be making an announcement about him later today. Hopefully that announcement won't take the form of a beheading video. "Here you go," said Murphy, laying the tray he was carrying on the table, "Scotland's finest." Yeah, we both know McDonalds isn't Scottish - we'd be chowing down on a McHaggis if they were - but this was Murphy's little joke and he trotted it out every time we ate in one, which was a lot. Murphy took a seat opposite me and had just unwrapped his Big Mac when a female voice said: "Mind if I join you?" It was Carla Fonseca, one of our CSIs. "Sure," said Murphy, "pull up a chair." Carla took the seat next to mine. She was a fine-looking woman and, obviously, extremely bright. "You on your way to the Jennifer Clarke assault?" I asked. "Yeah. I've been on call since nine last night, attended two homicides, and haven't eaten anything in all that time. I was driving past, saw you two jokers entering this place, and realized I really needed to get some food inside me before I went any further. So, Murph, I hear you went to the Deep South for a wedding last weekend?" "There's not much else that would get me to go to Savannah," he said, "but my grandfather was getting remarried, and I've always been fond of the old coot." Murphy had told me something of his family history. His late mother had been the oldest of two daughters of a wealthy, 'old money' Southern family. There had been some sort of huge falling out with her own mother, resulting in her leaving town. She washed up in New York, where she met and fell in love with Murphy's dad, who was also a cop. After Murphy was born her father reached out to her, but the relationship with her mother was never repaired. She died when Murphy was seven, and her mother died six years ago. Murphy's grandfather had to be in his eighties by now. "Got pictures?" asked Carla. "Sure do," he said, pulling out his phone. He scrolled through his photos until he found the one he wanted, then slid it across the table. "Here's one of me and the old guy." The photo showed Murphy standing next to a tall young African-American woman wearing an expensive designer wedding dress. She was stunningly beautiful. Seeing the expression on our faces, Murphy laughed out loud. "I know what you're thinking," he said, "you're sayin' to yourselves: 'we never knew Murphy's grandpa was black!'" "ReStorr...." said Carla, frowning at the photo, "he got himself ReStorred." A way of reversing the aging process was a holy grail that scientists around the world had pursued for decades. Seven years ago the Storr Corporation announced they had found a method that worked. Five years ago, after its FDA approval had been fast-tracked, ReStorr was launched. It would return the subject to their physical prime somewhere in the 18- 22 range. Age regression occurred at the rate of a week per decade, with no upper limit on how old an age you started from. Typically, you would shed a lot of weight during that time, and burning it off helped fuel the process. Conveniently, rapid hair growth was a side effect. Once begun, with a single injection, the process could neither be halted nor reversed. "Why shouldn't the old guy get ReStorred?" Murphy replied. "Wouldn't you turn the clock back if you could?" "Of course I would," Carla spat back, "but it only works on men, remember? And in making them younger, it also turns them into women. Murph showed me a photo of his Gramps one time," she said, turning to me. "He was bald, bearded, flabby, and wrinkled. Now look at her!" "It's not fair that it only works on men, but you know why that is," I said. "It does what it does by switching the DNA of the subject with that of someone else. Unfortunately, the subject must have a Y- chromosome and the donor must not, or nothing happens. So, yeah, it turns old men into young women. They get their youth back, but at the cost of their manhood. However, since the process doesn't work on women, it follows it's a one-time only deal. They don't get to do it again." "They still get a second shot at life, while we only get the one. It's like the ultimate in male privilege." "Yeah, I see that," said Murphy. "It says something about the world we're now living in that a guy could hit on a beautiful young woman with no clue that a few months earlier she'd been an old dude." "And I really don't need all those new young woman flooding onto the dating scene. It's hard enough out there as it is." Ah. Carla was in her late thirties and starting to fret about the fact she wasn't married yet. She had a string of failed romances behind her but had so far failed to find Mr Right. She knew her biological clock was ticking and had started to feel that time was running out for her. The ReStorred added insult to injury, first by getting a youth back that was denied to her, then by becoming competition on the dating scene. The process was relatively inexpensive, just five thousand bucks for that shot. Many older men baulked at the idea of becoming women at first, but the trade off - restored youth and decades more of life -was usually enough to sway most of them. It also helped that no-one who underwent the process suffered gender dysphoria as a result and, indeed, most became heterosexual women over time. Why this should be was a mystery, but it was enough to completely put some men off the process. ("You lose your dick and you start getting turned on by dudes?! No way!") "So what's the deal with your grandfather?" I asked Murphy. "Why'd she choose to be a black woman?" "It was a big F.U. to the rest of the family, most of who'd basically never hid the fact they were just waiting for him to die so they could get their hands on his money. When ReStorr came along, he took stock, realised the only ones who actually gave a crap about him were his staff - all black - and decided he liked them more than his family. After going through ReStorr, he - now she - fell for her gardener and it was their wedding I attended. The rest of the family were scandalized of course - in their world you never marry the help, and it's only OK to fuck them so long as no one catches you. My aunt, a hateful old bitch, looked like she was sucking on the sourest lemon ever. But then she's in her late fifties and her father is now a twenty year old babe and much hotter than she ever was. And yeah, I know you're not supposed to think your grandfather is hot, but she is. Is it wrong that looking at photos of her gives me a boner?" "Yes, it's very wrong," I said, "in so many ways, but also totally understandable. More and more people are going to find themselves with fathers or grandfathers who are now hot young women." "Yes, and they are all 'hot', aren't they?" said Carla, bitterly. "Well, yeah," said Murphy. "It's a one time deal, and if you get to choose whose DNA to use, why would you choose someone who wasn't hot?" "Or athletic," I said. "There's a lot of guys can't face the idea of being shorter or don't care about being pretty who go for the DNA of tall, solidly built women. There's probably actually more demand for that, in fact. As long as you're prepared to pay for it, you can find pretty much whatever you want." ReStorr had created a market for the DNA of those who were gorgeous, or who had been when younger. Those women were able to command top dollar for their DNA. The super-rich could afford to pay for exclusive rights, but where rights weren't exclusive a donor could sell samples of her DNA many times over resulting in a lot of doppelgangers. Not everyone was for sale of course, because not everyone wanted to see younger versions of themselves walking around. DNA could also be stolen, unfortunately, as had happened to Jennifer Clarke. Every new advance seems to also create new opportunities for crime. "Not everyone pays," said Murphy. "Some people keep it in the family and donate their DNA for free. A man could use his wife's DNA and become a younger version of her, or his daughter's DNA and become her twin sister if she was the right age. He could even become a younger version of a daughter over twenty five, or an older version of a daughter under it." Having vented her displeasure at the unfairness of ReStorr, Carla decided to change the subject. "How come you and Mindy are renewing your wedding vows this weekend?" She asked. "You've only been married eight years, so isn't it a little early for that sort of thing?" "Johnny's a hopeless romantic," said Murphy, "and anyway, there are folks out there who renew their vows every year. I'd think you'd find it sweet, Carla." "Yeah, well, don't mind me. I'm just a bitter old spinster." We could only afford a short break for breakfast so we ate in silence after that. When we were done we walked out to our cars together, and Carla took off first. "I recognize who your grandfather's DNA donor was," I told Murphy. "I figured you might." "That Miss World from twenty years ago whose asshole boyfriend threw acid in her face when she tried to break up with him." "Shonda Jackson," said Murphy. "She'd fallen on hard times. ReStorr coming along meant she had something to sell: her former beauty. Grandpa gave her twice what she was asking for it." I hated men like Shonda's ex almost as much as I did child molesters. How fucked up did your sense of entitlement have to be for you to believe you were justified in attacking and even killing women who rejected you? "Before we head back to the shop there's a stop I need to make first. Want to tag along?" "Sure. Where we going?" "Church of the Second Chance, on Willmott Avenue in Van Nuys." "Second Chancers, eh?," said Murphy, as I climbed into my car. "This should be interesting." As I headed off the lot I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw that Murphy had been delayed from getting into his own car by an incoming call. I saw him take the phone from his ear, gaze in surprise at something on its screen, then look up and frown at me. I had no idea what that frown meant, but I had a strong feeling I wasn't going to like the answer. - 3 - The Church of the Second Chance was located in an old warehouse. There were no windows at ground level and only a single door. I rang the doorbell, looked up into the overhead camera, and announced who we were. After a minute or so, we heard locks being undone and bolts pulled back, then the door opened. "Greetings, gentlemen," said the pretty young woman behind it, "do please come in." She was dressed in the collarless grey Nehru suit that was the uniform of church officials, her long her pulled back into a pony tail. Pinned to the jacket, over her heart, was the insignia of Second Chancers: the female gender symbol, with the arrow of the male symbol added inside the circle. She led us through into the main chamber of the building where women and their children were playing, and over to one of the offices off this area. Inside, sitting behind a desk and wearing the same suit and badge, her dark hair shoulder also pulled back in the regulation pony tail, was a woman as young and pretty as their guide. "Thank you Sister Fiona," said the woman, "I'll take it from here." She indicated the chairs in front of her desk, and as Murphy and I dropped into them introduced herself. "I'm Sister Susan, how may I help you?" "You run this joint?" asked Murphy, surprising me by taking the lead. "Yes, we're a young movement so it's one of only three in the greater Los Angeles area at the moment. We hope to have more as we continue to grow." "So you really believe that stuff you peddle about the superiority of women?" "For some of us, the transformation ReStorr bestows upon us is not just a physical one, but also spiritual. Which is why we regard it as a sacrament and are seeking permission to administer it in our churches." "That's not gonna happen." "I don't see why it shouldn't. ReStorr is already out in the wild. Attempts to maintain the restrictions on its use are like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Criminals are already priming it with stolen DNA and using it on others against their will. We would use it responsibly, to bring those who wanted it into the light. If you haven't been through it, you cannot imagine how profound an effect being made both younger and female can have on you. To those of us who fully open ourselves to the experience, it changes everything and it's completely impossible to view the world in the same light afterwards as you did before. The bible says that man came first and that woman was an afterthought, a variation God created from Adam's rib. We now now this is totally backwards, that the basic form of humanity is female with man being the variation - a necessary one, yes, but still a deviation from the norm. In that light, ReStorr can be seen both as a cure for maleness and also as a means of absolution." "Absolution? I don't...." "Can you deny that across the world men treat women abominably?" "No, not hardly. In our job you see things done to women that make you ashamed of your gender." "Exactly so. Renewed youth is the reward we receive for choosing to become women, for throwing in our lot with the oppressed. It's a sign from God of our absolution, and the only way we can be worthy of this blessing is by working to make things better for women everywhere. Hence this establishment also being a refuge for battered women, as all our church buildings are, the food and contraceptives we distribute to poor women, and the lobbying group we finance whose efforts are all directed towards striking down laws that limit or oppress women. This is our calling and, for all too many of us, our penance." "In what way?" "Most men mistreat women in some way, however minor. Some mistreat them in non-minor ways. As a young man I raped a woman. I was a teenager and alcohol was involved, but that's no excuse. That was forty years ago, yet here I am today, now barely older physically than I was then, and she isn't. If I'm to be worthy of this gift I don't deserve, if all of us are, we can do no less than we are." "Very laudable, I'm sure. Since you see ReStorr as a 'cure' for maleness, are you in favour of the bill going through Congress at the moment to allow HMOs to force it on elderly men?" "Of course we aren't. If choosing to become female of your own free will is evidence of enlightenment; forcing it on someone is wicked. We all know why it's even being considered. As you get younger, so the diseases and ailments that come with age also get rolled back though not, alas, physical damage such as loss of limbs. So of course the health insurance industry are lobbying Congress so hard to be allowed to cut off those elderly male patients who refuse ReStorr. A single five thousand dollar shot is a lot cheaper than most ongoing care for the elderly, after all. If they get their way on the bill they stand to save billions. In the short term, pension companies will also save billions since the first bill pertaining to the ReStorred that Congress passed gave those companies the right to suspend pensions being paid to them until such time as they once again reached the age they were when they took ReStorr. On the face of it this was entirely reasonable, but it does mean that anyone forced to take ReStorr will find themselves without a source of income and with job skills that are potentially decades out of date. They could end up young but destitute." Despite him only supposedly being along for the ride, I'd given Murphy his head because the Second Chancers fascinated me and I was always interested in finding out more about them, but it was time to get down to business. "We're here because your tip panned out," I said, "and we were able to intercept a shipment of illicit ReStorr. Needless to say, we're curious about where you got your information." "And I'll tell you," said Sister Susan, "but first let's talk about an old drug: thalidomide." "Huh? I don't...." "In 1960, to her great credit," said Sister Susan, ignoring my interruption, "Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey resisted corporate pressure and refused to approve the release of thalidomide in the USA. Have either of you ever heard of thalidomide?" "I have," said Murphy. "It was a tranquilizer prescribed to pregnant women that was found to cause serious birth defects. By refusing to buckle under corporate pressure, Oldham saved countless lives. That was the first month she worked for the FDA. The woman was a hero. The English weren't so fortunate, and it got approved over there. No one over here would stand up to that sort of corporate pressure today, and it would get approved." "Surely that would depend on who was in power?" I said. "No, its modern equivalent *did* get approved, and would've regardless of who controlled Congress. You still think there's a difference between Democrats and Republicans, don't you?" "Well, yeah..." "Ah, the innocence of youth! The only difference between them is that one pretends to give a fuck about people other than the wealthy, and the other one doesn't bother pretending. In reality they both suck corporate dick and bend over backwards to give big business everything they ask for. There's billions to be saved by making old men take ReStorr so *of course* they'll force that bill through. Plus, it creates shit loads more hot young women for them to fuck and to slobber over, so they're gonna see it as win-win." "I wouldn't have put it in such, ah, colorful terms," said Sister Susan, wrinkling her nose, "but yes, that's essentially how we see it, too. The modern equivalent of thalidomide that got approved was created by Crimax Pharmaceuticals. It caused birth defects in thousands of children. Crimax CEO Jonah Bowman was defiant in the face of criticism, contemptuous of it even. Being a loathsome human being is not a criminal offence in the eyes of the law, and Crimax somehow even managed to escape any penalties." "Lots of money pouring into various campaign coffers would be my guess as to why," said Murphy. "Mine too," agreed Sister Susan. "As you'll recall, there were those who decided to mete out their own justice on Bowman. Masked assailants broke into his home injected him with something, then fled. That was two years ago. Jonah Bowman used to be a handsome, fifty year old man. After being injected with ReStorr primed with the DNA of a young girl grossly deformed by his company's product he's become a twenty-year old version of her. Confined to a wheelchair because of vestigial limbs that leave her unable to do much, her malformed skull gives her a more than passing resemblance to the Elephant Man. That was the first time ReStorr got out in the wild, and it led to dozens of seriously spooked CEOs and other rich guys rushing to be ReStorred using female DNA of their own choosing so that a similar transformation couldn't be forced on them. The people who got to Bowman may have been social justice warriors, but within months criminal gangs had got hold of it, notably the Red Cobras." "Ah," said Murphy, "I'm guessing you heard about the ReStorr shipment from a Maria Doe who got free. Is she still here?" "Yes, but I doubt you'll get much out of her." "She talked to you." Given what a Maria Doe was, 'talked' was an unfortunate choice of word. "Yes," said Sister Susan, "but the Church of the Second Chance is known for helping women in desperate situations and being non-judgmental. You're the LAPD, and you're not." "We'd still like to see her," I said. "Very well, but only if she agrees to see you." She pressed a button on the old intercom on her desk. "Sister Fiona, would you see if Charlize will see the police, and bring her to my office, please? Thank you." "'Charlize'?" I said. "I know they're all physically identical, but calling them all 'Maria Doe' is dehumanizing. Despite what was done to them they're all individuals and they deserve individual names." "Yeah, but why Charlize?" asked Murphy. "There's a wall downstairs where we've pasted photos of lots of famous women from the past fifty years. It's there so they can choose a name for us to call them. She pointed to Charlize Theron." A few minutes after this, Sister Fiona led Charlize in. Hers was a face and a body I knew all too well having seen it on too many women in the past two years. There would be no point us asking her anything directly since she could not hear our questions and could not speak. Somewhere in Mexico lived a deaf mute woman who had been spectacularly beautiful in her youth. The Red Cobras had got hold of her DNA and they and their brethren in L.A. used it to mass-produce young clones of her, who they then distributed to various brothels they ran and forced into prostitution, either under threat of violence or by getting them hooked on crack. Charlize was one of those girls. The shipment of ReStorr we'd intercepted last night was almost certainly for creating more Maria Does like her. When ReStorr is primed with DNA it turns from yellow to green, and the lack of labels meant it didn't matter who got which vial since they were all primed with the same DNA and so would produce identical young women. "Ask if we can see her brand," I said. Sister Susan typed out our request on her laptop in Spanish then turned the screen so Charlize could see it. The girl nodded, then rolled up her sleeve. Burned into her upper arm was the symbol of the Cobras and below it a number. I took a photo of the brand with my phone. It did not look fresh. "Has she told you anything about herself, who she is?" I asked. "No, and she won't tell you either." "That means she probably started out as a member of a rival gang before being turned by the Cobras," said Murphy. "She might have a rap sheet as long as my arm, but we have no way of proving who she really is. Only the Cobras can do that." That was what the brand was for. They could no more tell one Maria Doe from another than we could without the number. "All we can say about her is she used to be a guy and she was over thirty." The older you were when you underwent the process the more years you clawed back and the longer your life, so many tried to leave it as late as they dared. The gender dysphoric - those who believed themselves born in the wrong bodies and who desperately wanted to be biologically and genetically female - were faced with an agonizing choice: undergo the process early and potentially lose out on decades of extra life, or wait until they were older but spend longer in bodies they hated. The preferred solution to this conundrum that many chose was gender reassignment without surgery when young, then undergoing the process when older. However, while there was no upper age limit for taking ReStorr, there was a *lower* one. It wouldn't work on you if you were still growing, so there was no point taking it prior to the age it would return you to - around twenty or so. There was also the fact that it took time for the gender transformation to occur. You got younger at the rate of a week per decade, and the gender transformation took at least a week. Which meant that thirty was the minimum age at which you could take ReStorr for a full gender transformation to occur. If you took it at, say, twenty five, that would only give you time for it to go half way and you'd end up half-male and half-female. There were of course people for whom this was a feature and not a bug. "Whatever Charlize may have been before, the church accepts her as a woman who needs our help," said Sister Susan, "and she will have it. So unless there's anything else, I'd say we're done here." Back at our cars, I confronted Murphy. "All the time we were in there I was sensing an undercurrent between us," I said. "Something is bothering you, Murph. Is it anything to do with that phone call you took as we were leaving that McDonalds?" "Yeah, Johnny, it is." He took his phone from his pocket, scrolled through the photos, then held it up to me. "You want to tell me what the fuck this is all about, partner?" - 4 - When Murphy turned up at our house for dinner that evening he came carrying a bottle of wine, as is traditional. Mindy greeted him at the door. " 'Evenin', gorgeous," he said, as she kissed him on the cheek by way of greeting. "Are the girls here?" "No, they're having a sleepover at a friend's house tonight." "Here, let me take that," I said, relieving Murphy of the bottle and leading him through to the main room where our other guest was waiting. "Oh, I didn't realize we'd have company," said Murphy, surprised. "Gloria Aldred," she said, rising from the sofa and offering him her hand, "John's mother-in-law." "Eric Murphy," he replied, shaking it and looking her up and down appraisingly. Gloria was an elegant, fiercely intelligent woman in her late-fities who looked years younger. "Gloria cancelled a date with her fiance to be here," I said. "I'm sorry to hear that," said Murphy, frowning, "not on my account, I hope?" "Actually, yes," said Gloria, "it was. John told me about the photo someone sent you, and I think I'm in the best position to give you an explanation. My fiance, Greg, is a decade younger than me but my first husband Arthur - Mindy's father - was a decade older. I was and am a successful businesswoman, and Arthur was a retired executive. We had, unfortunately, drifted apart over the years. By the time of that terrible day five years ago ours was pretty much a marriage in name only. You know what happened then, of course?" "The photo kind of gave it away, yes." "Do you know who sent it?" "It has to be someone from my old precinct back in Boston," I said, chiming in. "When they found out what we were doing a lot of people disapproved. It's why we relocated to L.A. Looks like one of my old colleagues wants to stir up trouble for me." "Hell of a photo to receive," said Murphy. "I'd imagine so," said Gloria. "Seeing the gravestone of someone who died five years ago when you regularly see them alive today has to be a shock. Mindy was caught in the crossfire during a shootout between criminals. It was a random, senseless death, and it broke our hearts." Murphy turned to face Mindy. "So if the real Mindy Daniels died, then who are you?" "Isn't it obvious? I am, or rather I was, Arthur Aldred. We couldn't bear to see those two little girls without their mother, so it wasn't that difficult a decision to take ReStorr with our daughter's DNA. They were young enough that when their mother apparently returned a few weeks later they were just overjoyed to see her and accepted me immediately. When they're older, we'll tell them the truth." "But, you and Johnny....?" "That wasn't part of the plan," she said, giving a little smile. I squeezed her hand. "The original idea was that I would stay in my own house and have the girls while John was at work. Naively perhaps, neither of us had expected an attraction to develop between us." "I knew she wasn't Mindy, not really, but she looked and sounded like the woman I had loved since we were teens, and she was being a mother to my children. In hindsight, we were mad to think I *wouldn't* fall for her." "I knew most men who took ReStorr ended up as predominantly heterosexual women, of course," said Mindy, "but I hadn't realized just what that meant, or how powerful the attraction would be. I don't think anyone who hasn't been through the process can understand how profoundly it affects you. You're still you but you're not the same person you were, and not just physically. Seeing John all the time, taking care of his daughters like they were my own, made it so easy to fall for him. I tried to resist what I was feeling, but I couldn't." "So when you got together, not all the cops you worked with were impressed, eh Johnny?" "This was in the early days, not long after ReStorr became widely available, and there was still a lot of prejudice, so no. Too many of them just saw it as me shacking up with my father-in-law, who now looked like my dead wife, and it freaked them out. Gloria was moving to L.A., so we decided to follow her out here. I didn't see any point in mentioning this wasn't the same Mindy who had always been my wife." "That's why the 'renewal' of your wedding vows this weekend," said Murphy, hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand. "It's actually the real, legal first wedding for you two." "He's finally making an honest woman of me," smiled Mindy, her eyes glistening. "So does this change anything, Murph," I asked, "about you being my best man, I mean?" "Of course it doesn't," he said, "and fuck the asshole who sent me that photo, but you coulda told me before, Johnny. ReStorr has made it a new world, and you should know me well enough by now to know I'm OK with that. But Gloria - what about you? This has to have been hard for you." "Just the opposite, actually. It was like having my daughter back. Yes, I know it's not her in mind, but it is her in body, and I'm grateful for that much. As for she and John getting together, I was delighted. I couldn't be happier for them, especially given their news." "News?" "I'm pregnant," said Mindy. "I got my results from the clinic today." Gloria's phone started ringing before anyone could say anything. I..ah, excuse me," she said, taking it. "It's Greg," she announced, "he's saying we should turn on the TV news." I found the remote and did just that. We came in as the report was being repeated. "...look again at the video released an hour ago by the Islamist rebels who have been holding Henry Johansson, husband of the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, for the past three months," said the announcer over footage of a tiny young woman in a black burkha, her eyes and the dark skin surrounding them the only part of her visible through the garment. Behind her was a bullet-pocked wall. "My name used to be Henry Johansson," she said in a midwestern American accent, "but no longer. Now, as penance for crimes against Islam committed by my former country, I am to be a jihadi bride. Death to America!" The camera then cut to a man dressed in the clothing of a mujahadeen fighter. "Let this be a warning to those of you in the West. You have bombed us indiscriminately, killing our women and children. Now your perverted science has given us the means to exact a small measure of restitution. Know that from this moment, each and every one of your men we capture will take the place of a dead woman and be kept pregnant replacing our lost children. Death to America!" I turned the TV off and for a moment we were all silent, stunned by what we had just witnessed. "Stockholm Syndrome," said Murphy, "we sometimes see it in our line of work: someone who begins to identify with their kidnappers." "Or it's brainwashing," said Gloria. "Either way, that poor man!" said Mindy. "There's no way of undoing what's been done to him, or even of identifying him now that he's just one more anonymous woman in a burkha." "You said it was a brave new world, Murph," I said, "now it really is." "Yeah, kid. Welcome to the future." *************** The End *************** Notes: 1) When the basic idea for this universe came to me the set up seemed simple: a treatment that made you young again, but only worked on guys and turned them into women in the process. A little more thought gave me a reason for this namely that the process required a subject with a Y- chromosome, and a DNA donor without one. And that was it. Simple, yes? But when I started thinking about the stories that could come from this set-up I got a little overwhelmed by just how many occurred to me - more than for any other 'universe' I've ever come up with. The first story in a universe establishes it and usually forms the 'bible' for it, so it has a lot of work to do. Which is why this one tells the story of a day in the life of two detectives, that ends up being entirely taken up with the impact ReStorr has had on their society. 2) Though both this tale and another of mine - 'Biofem' - feature a company named the Storr Corporation (for wordplay reasons) they take place in different universes since the societies they depict are incompatible with each other.