ReStorr: ...And Then There Were None 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. As time passed, it increasingly started to change society. This is the story of its effect on a group of ex-army buddies.... RESTORR: ...AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by BobH (c) 2015 - 1 - Madison, Wisconsin gets cold in the winter, real cold, with the lakes freezing over, but in spring there are few places in this world I'd rather be. It was spring now, and I was sitting at the bar of the Hyatt, sipping a fruit juice, and admiring the view. In this case 'the view' was a beautiful blonde sitting at a table over by the window. She was working on her laptop and would occasionally push that long, lustrous hair back with her hand, an action I found oddly mesmerising. Dressed in an expensive looking cream skirt suit with matching four inch heels, understated make up, and minimal jewellery, she looked every inch the professional businesswoman. She was also in her early twenties and so young enough to be my granddaughter. Sighing wistfully, I looked around the room, taking in the smattering of people at other tables, then turned my attention to the small TV over the bar. The sound was down of course, but the TV news strapline was scrolling across the screen, letting me know what the news items were about - not that I needed any such help with the item currently on screen. I'd been following the increasingly bitter divorce battle between acclaimed Shakespearean actor and movie legend Charles Dante and his current wife and was curious as to whether there had been any new developments. She was in her fifties and a former top model, while he was in his seventies and so one of my contemporaries. What made the divorce so fascinating was that they were fighting over her DNA. A woman's DNA has never been considered community property when it comes to dividing up marital assets, and that wasn't the case here, but Dante was offering a property split more advantageous to his wife if her DNA was included in their negotiations. So far she was resisting, but the money involved was pretty significant. "What is it with cheese in this town?" said a deep, familiar voice from behind me. I turned, getting to my feet as I did so to hug its owner. "Jim!" I said, "It's great to see you, man!" "Looking good, Ricky," he said, as he took the bar stool next to mine. "Well, as good as any of us can now we're all over seventy," I said. "Yeah, some people say 'black don't crack'," he replied, "but I'm looking plenty cracked." Jim Jeffers was tall, African-American, and still possessed the same impressive frame he had when I'd first laid eyes on him in 'Nam. "So you noticed the local cheese fetish, huh?" I said, grinning. "Pretty hard to avoid it," he replied, shaking his head. "As soon as I walked out of the airport I saw this guy with a big, plastic cheese wedge on his head, and just now there was another guy wearing a plastic tie that looked like it was made from a cheese slice." "This is dairy country," I said. "In fact back in the day my mother was Miss Dairy Queen. There's a big game here tomorrow, and all the cheese you've spotted is being worn by Badgers supporters." Jim shook his head again. "Hola, guys," came a new voice, "I'm glad to see I'm not the first to arrive at one of these shindigs for once!" "Junior!" said Jim, as we got to our feet to hug and shake hands with the new arrival. This was Miguel 'Junior' Vasquez, the youngest member of our squad. "Let's find a seat," I said, beckoning the waitress over and ordering a couple of beers for the guys and another fruit juice for myself. Doing this meant I was the last to get to the table they chose, which meant they also nabbed the chairs that gave the best view of the blonde I'd been admiring earlier. "Really?" I said as I joined them. "At your ages?" "Snow on the roof don't mean there's no fire down below," chuckled Miguel. "We all got snow," said Jim, "but Beau's the only one of us still got a full head of the stuff." This was true. Save for Beau, we'd all been afflicted with various degrees of baldness, even Sarge. And all of us except for Jerry had paunches. Oh for the trim waists we were fighting the Cong - and they were always the 'Cong' or the 'Viet Cong' in our squad. It wasn't something we ever discussed, but we never called them 'Charlie' or referred to them as 'gooks'. "Either of you heard from Beau since last year?" I asked them. "No, but then that's not unusual," said Miguel, "our annual get together is enough for him." Left unspoken was that the same applied to me. I used to see Sarge every day when I worked for him, but since retiring and moving back to Madison to look after my mother I hadn't kept up with the others. "How's retirement treating you guys?" I asked. "I'm still working," said Jim. "I passed a lot of the running of the garage over to my sons, but I still come in most days. We live in Detroit, so working on cars is in our blood. It would drive me crazy if I spent all my time at home, twiddling my thumbs." "Not me," said Miguel, "I'd happily spend my days meditating and tending to the temple." A native Californian, Miguel was a lapsed Catholic who was obsessively devoted to finding a new faith to replace the one he'd turned his back on. I had no idea which faith this 'temple' he'd mentioned was affiliated with, but it almost certainly wasn't the same one he had been a follower of last year. As a group we rarely discussed religion anyway, or politics for that matter. Some of us were Democrats, some Republican, but none of us hardcore, just as some of us were believers in one faith or another, some of us not. Me, I was one of those atheists that according to that insulting, bullshit saying you don't find in foxholes. Needless to say, I'm deeply amused there's now a group currently serving who go by the name 'Atheists In Foxholes'. "How about you, Rick?" asked Miguel. "Things are OK, I suppose," I said. "My mother is still as sharp as ever mentally, but physically not so much." "You keep in touch with Sarge?" asked Jim. "We exchange the occasional letter or postcard," I said, "which is how I found out he was divorcing Angie." "Really? When'd that happen?" "He told me a few weeks after our last reunion, and it was all done and dusted within a few months." "Damn, I liked Angie," said Miguel, "but then I liked Kelly and Rachel before her." "Well, they were all pretty much versions of the same woman," I said. "True that," agreed Jim, "he trades them in for a younger model every decade or so." "All of them 'Hitchcock blondes'," I said, "every one beautiful, elegant, and sophisticated. After catching Hitch's movies on TV as a kid and seeing Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren, I think they became his vision of the ideal woman, a vision he's never deviated from in all the years since then." "He had the looks and the money to attract women like that, so why not?" shrugged Miguel. "More power to him, I say." This was true. Given the film star good looks he'd had in his youth, and his family's wealth, we never really understood why he was with us there in 'Nam, but Carl Banks had been a damn good Sergeant. None of us at that table would be here today if not for him, me doubly so. After we got back I lost myself in drugs and alcohol to the point that I have few clear memories of the seventies at all. I was living on the street, and though the others tried to pull me out of that life several times, I always slid back because I wasn't ready to deal with the world. When I was, it was Sarge who saw to it I had somewhere to live and who gave me a job. I worked for him for the next thirty years. It was after I got clean that we started having our annual reunions. "I don't suppose Sarge'll be retiring anytime soon," mused Jim. "I doubt it," I said. "He doesn't need the money, but he loves making deals too much to give it up. Like you with cars, it's in his blood." "I wonder if he's got wife number four lined up yet?" said Miguel. "Wouldn't surprise me. Shame about Angie, though. What with death and divorce, and Jerry and his boyfriend having never made it legal, you're the only one of us currently married, Junior." I'd never married, and my last real relationship had been ten years ago. Most women couldn't deal with my demons, and I couldn't blame them for that. These days if I needed to scratch that particular itch I'd go to a prostitute. I'd lost my virginity in a Saigon whorehouse, so this wasn't something I had a problem with. An hour or so later, when Jim had just got in another round of drinks, we were joined by two new arrivals. I saw them before they spotted us. "Beau! Jerry!" I said, rising to my feet. "About time you two jokers got here." This was Franklin Beauregard 'Beau' Carter and Jerry Solomons. That meant the only person still missing from our get together was Sarge. "I bumped into this reprobate in Chicago, when we were both racing to make our connection," said Beau. "Gentlemen of our advanced years should not be subjected to such an undignified scramble. I swear, the smaller the window to make your connection the further apart the authorities at O'Hare put those aircraft. It happens so often you begin to suspect it's deliberate." "I fuckin' hate O'Hare," said Jerry, with feeling. "The guys running it should all be strung up by their balls." Short where Beau was tall, Jerry was originally from New York and despite having moved to the West Coast in the mid-eighties his accent and his attitude were as strong as ever. You could take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you couldn't take Brooklyn out of the boy. "We had a celebrity sighting of sorts," said Beau, as they joined us at the table. "'Of sorts'?" queried Miguel. "Private Caine Corporation jet on the asphalt," said Jerry. "very swanky. Looks like that limey billionaire's in town." "He's staying at this very hotel," I said. "He is?" said Beau. "I'm surprised. With his money he could afford something much grander." "Oh, it was him alright - Marcus Caine. I saw him check in this morning. As tall and as 'ruggedly handsome' as the press insist on describing him." "I wonder why he's staying here?" said Jim, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "That would be because he and I have a business meeting here tomorrow morning," said a female voice. We looked up in surprise to see the beautiful young blonde we had been admiring earlier, standing behind the remaining chair. Placing her computer bag and purse on the ground next to it, she pulled it out and sat down, tucking her skirt under her as she did so "Uhh...do we know you, miss?" asked Jim. "It's me, boys," she replied, grinning, "it's Sarge." - 2 - "ReStorr," I said, breaking the stunned silence, "you got yourself Restorred!" Restorr was a drug that would return a person to their physical prime somewhere in the 18-22 range. It worked by switching the DNA of the person with that of someone else. Once begun, with a single injection, the process could neither be halted nor reversed. The catch was that the person receiving the DNA must have a Y-chromosome and the person donating it must not, or nothing happened. Basically, it turned old men into young women. They got their youth back, but at the cost of their manhood. Since the process doesn't work on women, it also follows that it's a one-time only deal. No one gets to take that ride a second time. "When the choice was between staying the age I was with all its physical limitations and probably no more than another decade left to me, or becoming half a century younger and in the peak of health but at the cost of becoming female...well, for me it was a no-brainer." "What do we call you?" asked Miguel, staring at her in wonderment. "I'm Charlotte now," she said, "but with you guys I'll always be Sarge." "Wait how do we know you're who you say you are?" said Jerry. "This could be some kinda con." "That's easy enough to prove," she said, "I just need to tell a few tales from our days in 'Nam. For instance, remember that time you came into camp carrying a captured AK-47 instead of your regulation issue M-16? I asked you why, and you said 'Because it fuckin' works, Sarge'. Your M-16 had jammed during a firefight the day before, and that wasn't the first time it let you down, was it?" "No, it wasn't,"replied Jerry, nodding. "You could clean and oil it all you wanted and that fucker would still jam on you at the worst possible moment, whereas you could use an AK to hammer in fence posts and it still fired every time. It could take a lickin' and keep on tickin'." An exaggeration, but AK's were extremely robust. "It was against regs but I let you keep it. We had enough captured ammo to keep you supplied. I told you that as long as you pulled out your M-16 when there was brass around I was cool with it." "Hot damn, it is you!" said Jerry. "Wow...just wow." "You always said that my taste ran to 'Hitchcock blondes', Rick," she chuckled, looking at me, "well now I *am* a Hitchcock blonde." She certainly was and we were all staring at her, still stunned by the realisation this beautiful young woman was our Sarge. "If it's not too indelicate a question, what does it feel like," asked Beau, "being a woman, I mean?" "Being young and strong again feels wonderful, as if you were sick before and now you're well again. And it's surprising how soon you get used to being a woman, how quickly it comes to feel normal. It's been a almost six months now and I've long since grown used to waking up in a female body and seeing a woman's face staring back at me from the mirror. The weird part is the change itself. Age regression occurs at the rate of a week per decade. Typically, you shed a lot of weight during that time. I'm told that burning it off helps fuel the process, which makes sense. Rapid hair growth is a welcome side effect - I *love* having a full head of hair again - but going through the change is kind of surreal. You're shrinking, getting younger, and turning into a woman all at the same time. Your flesh and even your bones get reshaped, and at a rate that's almost perceptible from one hour to the next. Then there are the, ah, mental changes." "Gettin' turned on by guys, you mean," said Jerry, "something I have experience with." "Yeah, but you're gay," said Sarge, "even if you didn't realize it until the eighties. I was a heterosexual man and now I'm a heterosexual woman, but it's more than just that." "More?" I said, frowning. "What do you mean?" "I mean that I'm now a woman *mentally* too. For whatever reason, be it nature or nurture, men and women do not see the world or react to it in exactly the same way. I was raised male, but my...outlook, for want of a better word, is now more closely aligned with those born female. It's really hard to explain, but it's very real." "So Mark Christian might be telling the truth?" said Miguel. "Could be," said Sarge. "I hope so. Mark Christian was a convicted child molester who had been in the news recently after volunteering to undergo ReStorration in the belief that the mental changes it brought about would eliminate his pedophile urges. He claimed it had in fact done so, but it was early days yet and he was still being subjected to a barrage of psychological testing. "If he is, then it should become a mandatory treatment for pedophiles," I said. "I don't know about that," said Jerry, rubbing his chin. "I mean, forcing gender reassignment on someone? It sets a bad precedent." "Much as we might wish it otherwise, these people exist," I said, "and those urges don't go away. Either you kill them all or, when convicted child molesters are released after serving their time, they remain a danger to children. Yeah, there are obvious civil rights issues, but in this case protecting children has to come first. Nothing else seems to work." "But would it stop with child molesters?" said Jerry. "I hate those fuckers, but when you take that first step, when you give government the power to do something like that, the first step is never the only one." "One child molester, one bullet," said Beau. "I never had a problem with that solution myself." "My people have good reason not to trust 'final solutions'," said Jerry. This was drifting into a political discussion, something we tried to avoid during our reunions. Fortunately, we were saved by a member of the hotel staff coming over to us. "Your table is ready now," she said, "so if you'd like to make your way through to the restaurant....." With some relief, we got to our feet and followed her through to the restaurant and to our reserved table. Sarge sat at the head of the table of course, and I pulled out her chair for her. Yeah, I know she's our Sarge but she's also a woman now, and I still have the manners I was raised with: you eat at a restaurant with a lady, you pull her chair out for her. We all ordered steaks as usual except for Sarge, who ordered a salad. This puzzled me at first, then I realized she now had her figure to consider. The meal was enjoyable, and the more we talked the more we relaxed and accepted the young woman sitting with us. Despite how different she was on the outside now she was still our Sarge, still the person who had kept us alive in 'Nam, and we would love, honor and respect her as we always had, come what may. - 3 - Another year and another reunion. This time our rotation meant it was in San Francisco - Jerry's town. As usually happens, I was the first to arrive. I found myself sitting at the bar of the hotel, sipping a fruit juice, and concentrating on the small TV over the bar. The sound was off and the TV news strapline was scrolling across, telling me that the dark-haired young beauty on the screen was Emma Dante, the former Charles Dante. The bitter divorce battle between Charles and his wife had finally been resolved. She had agreed to her DNA being included in the settlement and Charles had reemerged as Emma, a young woman now physically identical to how his wife had looked thirty years earlier. I tried to imagine how it would feel to see a much younger doppelganger of yourself walking around, particularly when that doppelganger was your former spouse, but I couldn't. "Goodbye Sam, hello Samantha, goodbye Lou, hello Louise," sang a voice behind me, "suddenly, there's a new kind of company..." "Hello, Jerry," I said, turning on my stool to greet him. "Hulluva thing," he said, staring up at the screen as we briefly hugged. "Did you hear about General Minkowski?" "Can't be many people who haven't," I replied. General George Minkowski was a member of the Joint Chiefs who had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers, one of the conditions ReStorr stops in its tracks. So he got ReStorred. Not with the DNA of some hot young beauty, of course, but with that of an Olympic athlete six and a half feet tall. Since the transformation she had done some serious working out and was now a virtual Amazon, a woman capable of taking on - and beating - most men. Shame about the military buzzcut since she was actually not at all bad looking, but Gina - short for Georgina - Minkowski wasn't making any concessions to femininity at all. "It's some world we're livin' in now," said Jerry, shaking his head, "some world." He sounded bitter. "Something wrong, Jerry?" "It's Martin," he said, referring to his partner. "Has something happened to him?" "Goodbye Martin, hello Martine," he sang. "Oh." "Yeah. Just announced he was doin' it one day, out of the blue. I didn't leave Ruth and the kids, didn't tear my family apart just to end up with another woman." "I'm sorry, Jer." "Within a few months of us splittin' up she got married to a realtor, moved out to the 'burbs, and was already expecting their first kid. Maybe being a little suburban housewife and mother with the white picket fence an' all is what she always wanted, deep down. You think you know someone...." "Hello boys, mind if we join you?" said a female voice, in a throaty Southern accent. The speaker was a shapely young red-head in a loose green trouser suit and pals silk blouse. With her was an equally attractive Hispanic woman in a collarless grey Nehru suit, her long hair pulled back into a pony tail. Pinned to the jacket, over her heart, was the female gender symbol, with the arrow of the male symbol added inside the circle. I recognised it immediately and groaned inwardly. It was the insignia of the Church of the Second Chance, a group who viewed being ReStorred as a transformational religious experience and who regarded ReStorr itself as a sacrament. "It's you isn't it, Junior," I said, "and this has to be Beau." "Belle," laughed the red-head. "It seemed appropriate. I used to be Franklin Beauregard Carter; now I'm Francesca Belle Carter. Junior here has decided to switch from Miguel to Maura." "What decided you on getting ReStorred?" I asked, still trying to get my head around the fact this was Beau and Junior, and marvelling at how different they looked. "We've all had our three-score-and-ten," said Belle, "so why take a chance on your next day being your last? Taking that leap and turning the clock back half a century was something I'd been thinking about anyway, so when I saw Sarge last time, saw how comfortable she was with her new self...well, there didn't seem to be a good reason not to do it." "Same with me," said Maura. "But you were married!" Jerry protested. "How did your wife take it?" "Not well," she admitted, "and we're no longer together, but I knew this was my path and I had to take it." Riiight. The religious dimension supplied by the Church of the Second Chance would have given Junior the 'spiritual' cover she needed to justify the decision to herself. "Ah, I see you've met the girls," said Sarge, arriving on Jim's arm. "Look who I bumped into on my way in." "Hey, I may not be Marcus Caine, but I scrub up nice." "You already knew Junior and Beau were now women, Sarge." It was a statement, not a question. "Of course," she chuckled. "There's this thing now you may have heard of called email that lets us stay in touch with each other and - oh wait, that's right. You don't have a computer, do you? And you never answer your phone, a landline." I had an unreasoning fear/distrust of computers. The others always laughed at this, calling me a luddite. I decided to change the subject. "According to the tabloids, you and Caine were in the Bahamas together yesterday," I said, having followed their budding romance in the press over the past few months. "We were, and I'm flying back there tomorrow, but I wouldn't miss one of our reunions for anything." She turned a critical eye on the other women. "No make-up, I see. So although you could no longer deny the logic of getting ReStorred you're not yet ready to fully embrace femininity. Huh. Still, at least you're not totally rejecting it like General Minkowski." "Actually, I have to wear heavy make-up on my job," said Belle, "so it's a relief to go bare-faced occasionally." "What is your job?" asked Jim. "I'm a poledancer." "What?! No fuckin' way!" said Jerry, incredulously. "How the fuck did that happen?" "Getting ReStorred means you either get to cash out your pension or have it suspended until you reach your former age again. I chose the latter option, which meant I needed a job. Like most of us, I'd never acquired the computer skills the modern job market requires, so I asked for a position at an establishment for gentlemen I had long been a patron of." "A poledancing bar?" "Yes, though the way you say it makes it sound less salubrious than it is. I had studied the girls' performances over many years, knew all the moves, and reckoned that with a little practice I could be as good as any of them. I was correct. Perhaps not the ideal employment for a lady, but I soon became their most popular girl and I make a lot of money." I shook my head, marvelling at this. A poledancer. Wow. Our squad was now three men and three women, so when it came time to go into the restaurant for dinner it seemed only polite for us guys to offer the girls our arms. I reflected often on that afterwards, how easily treating them as ladies came to us despite us all having bonded as soldiers and known each other through years of male cameraderie. I also wondered if that was it for the squad, or if more of us would succumb to the temptation of ReStorr. -4- Yet another year, yet another reunion. Our rotation had brought us to Detroit - Jim's town. I was the first to arrive again, waiting for the others at the hotel bar while sipping a fruit juice, tossing back peanuts, and watching the small TV over the bar. It was showing a look back at Charles Dante's first year as Emma. That formidable acting talent in that young body had led to her getting rave reviews for her performance in 'Romeo & Juliet', probably the only time a Shakespearean actor has ever followed up their King Lear by playing Juliet. Hollywood wasn't slow to take notice either, and Emma had recently been signed up for the role of Supergirl in a three picture deal. "Lucky girl, " said a now familiar female voice. "Hello Sarge," I said, as she took the stool on my right. She was wearing a summer dress with a string of pearls and looked as poised and elegant as she usually did. I leaned in and kissed her cheek. "What, no kiss for me?" said a voice from the stool on my left. I turned to face a stunning young black woman I'd never seen before, one dressed in a tight fitting purple pants suit that emphasized her ample curves. I might not recognize her but I knew who she had to be. "Jim?" I said. "You, too?" "It's Jamelia now, Ricky, and of course me too. It took me a while to get with the program, but old and male or young and female is such an obvious choice. I reckon pretty much every guy will make it 'ventually. Now, 'bout that kiss...." I laughed, then leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. "Jeez, pretty soon I'm going to be the only one of us who still has a dick!" I said. "But not yet, you're not," said Jerry, arriving with perfect timing. "Jerry! Good to see you man!" I said. We all got up and gave him a hug in turn. "What's with Belle and Junior?" he asked. "I saw them heading up in the lift together from across the lobby, dressed to the nines. I took the next one so I expected to see them here when I got to the bar lounge." "They probably want to get in a quick make-out session in their room before they join us," said Sarge. "Make-out session? So they're a couple now?" I said, stunned by the news. "No, of course not; they both have boyfriends." "I don't understand," said Jerry. "Mostly of us become heterosexual women when we get ReStorred," she explained, "but that doesn't mean we forget having been heterosexual men. Though our main attraction may be towards men now, our history leaves us more, ah, 'flexible' about making out with other women when the opportunity presents itself. Belle and Junior were curious, our reunion provided the opportunity, so why not?" "You didn't all just get in today, did you?" "No, me and the other girls got in and got together two days ago. I paid for makeovers and bought wardrobes for everyone. I wanted to be sure they'd all be prepared." "Prepared? For what?" She spread out her hand. "That's an engagement ring!" I said. "Yes, isn't it beautiful?" she laughed, holding it up for us to admire. "Marcus finally popped the question two weeks and naturally I said yes. It'll be my fourth time down the aisle, but my first as the bride. The others have agreed to be my bridesmaids, and Belle will be my maid of honor, of course." "Of course." She had been Sarge's corporal in 'Nam, and so she would be the number two here as well. "When's the happy event?" "In three months time. And Rick, there's something I'd like you to do for me, too. My parents are long dead so my dad can't walk me down the aisle. Would you?" "Sarge," I said, "it would be an honor and a privilege." - 5 - I arrived at Marcus Caine's New York mansion in the chauffer driven limo that had picked me up from the airport barely ten minutes earlier and was immediately taken to the room where Sarge and her bridesmaids were getting ready. Here, I discovered one more bridesmaid than I'd been expecting.... "You, too, Jerry?" I said, facing the short, dark-haired woman who had just introduced herself to me. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," she shrugged. "Everyone else is gettin' Restorred and I was startin' to feel left out. With Martin gone I finally took stock of my life and thought 'fuck it; why not?'" "So what do we call you now?" "I'm still goin' by the same name," she said, "only now I'm spelling it like that actress on Star Trek: Voyager did...y'know, the one who played Barbie of Borg." "Seven of Nine," I said, "as played by Jeri Ryan." "Yeah, that one." "So you didn't want to try something different, maybe be a Nordic blonde this time?" "You kiddin', Rick? My Ma woulda hadda fit! She made it clear no son o' hers was gonna be a shiksa. He was gonna be a nice Jewish girl or else." "But Jeri, you were in your seventies. Surely it was up to you?" "Yeah? Tell that to my Ma." "I've met Mrs Solomons," said Sarge, "and she's a very intimidating woman. Believe me, the Viet Cong were less formidable." "Why would you want to change your ethnicity, anyway?" asked Junior. "I wouldn't." "Yeah," said Jamelia. "I never considered it for a second." "ReStorr gives you that option, and you've complained before about the shit you have to go through because you're black. Wouldn't you like to put all that behind you?" "Of course I would. Ordinary white folk don't appreciate half the crap you have to put up with as a black person in this country, from the name-calling to knowing too many cops will kill you at the slightest provocation for, basically, existing while black. But giving up such a big part of who I am would be too high a price to pay to make it go away. Also I'd feel like a coward, like I was running away and leaving family and friends to fight on without me. You've known me long enough now to know that's not who I am, Ricky." I nodded. There was a knock on the door. "Time to go, ladies and gent," said a voice. "This is it, squad," said Sarge, looking just stunning in her designer wedding gown, "time to assume the formation." The others lined up behind her, in their pastel bridesmaid's dresses, a mixture of nervousness and excitement on those pretty, painted faces. This was my squad, the guys I'd served with in 'Nam. Never in our wildest dreams back then could we ever have imagined we'd one day end where we were now. "Rick?" said Sarge, frowning at my hesitation in offering her my arm. "Before we do this," I said, reaching into a jacket pocket, "there's something I want to show you." It was a black and white photo from the late-forties, featuring a smiling young woman in a bathing costume. The sash she was wearing proclaimed her 'Miss Dairy Queen'. "She's very pretty," said Sarge, "but, why show us this now?" "That's a photo of my mother," I said, "but a few months from now it could just as easily be one of me." There was a moment's silence, then they all cheered me. "It's about time," said Belle. "Yeah, fuckin' A, man!" said Jeri. "I've wrestled with it for a long time," I said, "but the arguments for doing it are just so much stronger than those against. I'd have been ReStorred already if not for the promise I made to a certain blushing bride to accompany her down the aisle." Sarge gave my shoulder a little squeeze then, and I had to clear my throat. "Right then," I said gruffly, offering her my arm, "let's get this show on the road. It's time for you to become Mrs Charlotte Caine." So yeah, my mother agreed to give me her DNA. I can see how weird that might look to some, becoming a clone of your own mother, and a psychologist might ascribe all manner of psychosexual motives to my choice, but the actual reason is much more straightforward. The truth of the matter is she's my only living blood-relative, and this way our line continues. And who knows? Maybe I'll keep up the family tradition by becoming the next Miss Dairy Queen. **************** The End