Pioneers part 10 of 15
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Pioneers, Part 1 Of 15 free porn video
=== Trust Machines: Pioneers ===
part 1 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
-----
This story is set in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel
to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers
who haven't read them.
https://www.deviantart.com/trust-machines/
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for
feedback on earlier drafts.
This story is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
-----
It was early September -- far enough into the school year that the
teachers weren't holding back on the homework, early enough that we
still had some pretty nice weather. Which I was missing out on because
I was sitting in my room doing homework, that Saturday morning when the
world changed and only a few scattered people noticed.
The first inkling I had of it was when Mom called me and said, "Tyler,
Andrew's on the phone."
I got up and went into the living room, where Mom was working on her
quarterly taxes at the dining table. She handed me the landline phone.
"Tell him you can't hang out until you finish your homework," she
reminded me unnecessarily. I nodded and took the phone. Most kids my
age had cellphones already -- most kids my little sister's age, for that
matter --but not me or Sophia.
"Hi, Andrew, what's up? I've got about another hour of homework before
I can hang out, but then we can do whatever until suppertime."
"Hurry it up," he blurted, "and then get your butt over here to the
library."
"What? Why? I thought you were coming over after you got done there."
He'd told me at school yesterday that he was going to get a ride into
town with his brother, who had a weekend job as waiter at the
Fisherman's Cove downtown. He'd hang out at the library for a while and
then walk to my house from there; we lived seven blocks from the
library, an easy walk in this weather. (He had just turned sixteen
after the school year started, and had a provisional driver's license,
but he didn't have a car yet.)
"There's something weird going on here," he said. "I don't know if I
should even bother telling you on the phone, you won't believe me...
I'll email you some photos. Just get over here as soon as you can,
okay?" He hung up without waiting for a reply.
I procrastinated on the Geometry homework long enough to check my email.
Andrew had sent several photos of a... big brown rectangular box,
sitting out in front of the library. It was occupying some space that
used to be lawn, accessible from the sidewalk connecting the different
parts of the parking lot to the front door of the library. And there
were several people crowded around it, looking at it. In the first
photo, it was just a big box with no obvious features; there were some
kind of markings in the middle of the wider face, but I couldn't make
them out. In the second, there were two big doors that had opened up in
it, and a woman was stepping into one while another woman was peering
into the other without stepping inside. I looked back at the first
photo, and couldn't see any seams or hinges where the doors would open.
The third photo showed a close-up of the markings in the middle of the
broad face. There was a Venn diagram, with the intersection of all
three sets glowing softly, and what looked like a slot. I couldn't tell
if it was intended to receive bills or coins or credit cards, or to
print out photos or receipts or something, lacking any indicator of
scale.
I couldn't make head or tail of it. I thought about searching social
media for posts about our town's library, but decided the faster I
finished my homework, the faster I could see the thing for myself.
Forty-eight minutes later, I was in the living room, saying, "I'm done,
Mom. I'm fixing to go over to the library to meet Andrew."
Sophia ran into the room. "You're going to the library? I wanna go
too."
I rolled my eyes. I love my little sister, but sometimes I'd rather
hang out with Andrew without her around. But Mom said, "I'll take you
later in the day, Sophia, after I finish this. Have you finished your
homework?"
"Almost," she pleaded.
"Finish it, and you can read or play games until we're ready to go.
Tyler, go ahead; be safe and have fun."
"Bye, Mom. Bye, Sophia." I was out the door like a shot before Sophia
could wheedle Mom into changing her mind. I never could, but Sophia's
adorableness succeeded once in a while, and I didn't want to risk this
being one of those times.
In the twenty minutes it took me to walk to the library, I had a lot of
time to think about what Andrew had meant, and what was up with that big
box. You probably won't believe me if I tell you that some of my
guesses were surprisingly close to the truth; but I chalked those
particular guesses up to wishful thinking and discounted them
accordingly, so I was as surprised when I found out what was going on as
anyone else who hadn't been secretly reading transformation stories on
the net ever since they figured out a way to circumvent the parental
controls.
When I got to the library, I was surprised to see a couple of sheriff's
deputy cars in the lot. I could see the box over near the front door,
and a couple of deputies standing by it; there were other people looking
on, but not as many as there'd been in Andrew's photos, and they were
standing further off. I didn't see Andrew. When I got close enough, I
realized that the deputies were stringing "Police Line -- Do Not Cross"
tape around the machine.
"Stay back," one of them said to me as I approached.
"What's going on?"
"Members of the public are advised to avoid this thing. You can go
around it to get to the library."
I went in the library, figuring that was where Andrew must be, and
looked around, first on the ground floor where the computer terminals
and the reference books were, and then upstairs where the rest of the
books were, but didn't see him anywhere. I was about to go downstairs
and look in the men's room when a guy I didn't recognize came up to me;
he looked kind of like a jock, taller than me by six inches or more, and
thirty pounds more muscular. He'd been talking in low voices with
another guy a lot like him near the graphic novel shelf. Both guys were
wearing T-shirts that had weird, abstract designs on them -- not the
kind of thing I associated with jocks.
"Hey, Tyler," he said in a low voice, and I wondered who he was. I
didn't recognize him; our school had over 1200 students, and I didn't
know all of them, but I was sure I knew all the guys that tall who
shared classes with me, plus a lot of my older brother Caleb's friends
and teammates. I noticed them for more than one reason.
"Yes?" I said.
"It's me, Andrew." I suddenly felt like my stomach was dropping out of
my belly. "That's Evan," he said, gesturing to the other big guy, who
came over toward us.
"Andrew Patton?" I said, gaping. "Evan Chastain?" Evan was a guy we
hung out with at school sometimes, but he wasn't a close friend like
Andrew.
"Yeah," Andrew said, grinning. "That thing out front changed us."
"And it changed a bunch of other people," Evan said in a somber tone.
"And everything was going great until it killed somebody, and then the
sheriff's deputies showed up and shooed everyone away."
"Killed someone?" I asked.
"Let's go somewhere we can talk and not have to whisper," Andrew said.
"Do you want to check something out before we go?" He and Evan both had
a couple of books tucked under their arms.
"N-no, that can wait... let's go."
We walked downstairs and they tried to check out their books. I say
"tried," because when they pulled their wallets out of their pockets,
they found that their library cards -- and money, student IDs, and
licenses -- were all garbled; none of the text was in English or even
the Latin alphabet, and the pictures on the money were *weird*. I
thought about offering to check out Andrew's books for him, but I didn't
want to pointedly snub Evan by not doing the same for him, and I didn't
know him well enough to be sure he wouldn't saddle me with late fees or
worse, lose or damage the books.
So we walked out of the library and saw that a county maintenance
department truck had arrived, and some workmen were unloading a roll of
chain-link fencing.
"Too bad," Evan said. "If that thing were safer, it could help a lot of
people."
"Tell me what happened," I demanded.
So Andrew told me how he'd arrived there that morning, before anybody
but the librarians (his brother's work shift started half an hour before
the library opened), and found the machine. A couple of other people
were looking at it, too, one of the librarians and the old guy who ran
the antique store down the street from the library. Nobody knew what to
make of it, but after they'd tried touching the machine in different
spots, the old guy touched the center of the Venn diagram and a slot
opened up like I'd seen in Andrew's photo. Then he put in a quarter,
and the Venn diagram vanished, replaced by several icons -- you know all
about them, but back then their meanings weren't as obvious as they seem
now. They tried pushing different buttons and by trial and error got the
doors to open.
The old guy and the librarian went in to investigate, and the doors
vanished, and Andrew was left standing there, wondering what was going
on, for several minutes. Another librarian arrived, and the earliest
library patrons, and some of them came over to look at the machine;
Andrew told them what he knew. Then the doors opened and two much
younger, hotter-looking people came out. They told people what they'd
seen and done, and before long other people were trying it out.
Andrew wanted to use it to buff himself up, but they'd told him you
couldn't design your own new body; you designed a new body for the
person in the other booth, and they'd design yours. So he wanted to try
it out with somebody he knew well, and took out his phone and called me.
But Evan arrived at the library around then, and they tried it out
together as soon as Andrew could tell him what was up.
Then, not long after they'd beefed each other up, a couple of women went
in the machine and only one came out. She looked into the other booth
and screamed. Andrew, Evan and the other spectators crowded around and
saw a little doll lying on the floor of the booth, maybe six inches
high, proportioned like an adult -- kind of like a Barbie, but without
that trademarked face or those ridiculous proportions.
Everyone was scared to use the booth anymore after that, and somebody
must have called the sheriff's department, because one deputy and then
another showed up a few minutes later and started questioning everyone.
After they'd answered the deputy's questions, Andrew and Evan went
inside and browsed while waiting for me.
By the time Andrew and Evan finished telling me all that, we'd walked
across the railroad tracks and Main Street to the coffee shop, got
something to drink, and sat down. I had to pay for their drinks because
of the wallet fiasco.
"What all changes did you see people make to each other?" I asked.
"Mostly they were old folks making each other young again," Evan said.
"An overweight guy and his girlfriend made each other skinnier and
hotter, and the girl had *ginormous* boobs after she came out, and she
was chewing her boyfriend out for making them so big. But one time a
couple of guys went in and one of them came out looking like a girl...
judging from his reaction, I think he really *was* a girl. He didn't
stay like that for long; after yelling at his buddy for a while, he went
back in with somebody else and got changed back into a guy, although he
didn't look much like he did before."
And it could change me into a girl, too, I realized -- if it didn't kill
me by turning me into a doll. I'd take that risk, but the sheriff's
deputies wouldn't let me.
The fact that the machine was being fenced off even as we spoke, and
that Evan was there, made it an easy decision to once again put off
telling Andrew I was probably trans. I'd started to suspect it a couple
of years earlier, and I was pretty sure by then, but I hadn't told
anybody yet, except for some friends I'd made online.
Another thing I hadn't told Andrew before, that hadn't ever been
relevant to our friendship until now, was that I was attracted to guys.
But now Andrew and Evan were both seriously hot, which was making it
hard to concentrate on what they were saying.
"Hey," Andrew said when they'd finished telling me about all the people
they'd seen transformed, "let's see if anybody online knows anything
about it. I posted those photos I sent you on Reddit a couple of hours
ago; lemme check that thread..."
But his phone, when he pulled it out, showed the same kind of weird
foreign language text and abstract icons that were on his T-shirt and
the cards and bills in his wallet. Evan's phone was the same.
"Look it up on your phone, would you?" Evan said to me.
I blushed as I said, "Ah... Mom and Dad won't let me have a cellphone
until I'm sixteen."
"Seriously?" Evan said. "That sucks." Andrew, who already knew about
my parents' strictness, just nodded.
-----
We wound up going back to my house and using my laptop to check for
replies on Andrew's Reddit thread and look for other news about the
machine. That necessitated telling Mom and Sophia who these two strange
guys were, and about the machine and most of what Andrew and Evan had
told me.
Mom scolded Andrew roundly for getting into such a machine without
knowing anything about it, where it came from, who made it or how it
worked. She didn't scold Evan directly, because she'd never met him
before, but she gave the impression he was just as dumb as Andrew. When
we finally escaped to my room and looked up the Reddit thread Andrew had
started, we found over a hundred replies; most of them were random
speculation, but a few later on featured photos other people had taken
of machines like it -- a couple in indoor malls, one on a courthouse
lawn, one in a park.
They'd all appeared overnight in small towns around the size of ours or
a little bigger in at least four countries (by the next day we knew it
was a lot more). The redditors told about how they and other people had
transformed each other and what had followed. Mostly people started out
making each other younger and better-looking, then some started making
more drastic changes -- there were photos of furries that skeptics
claimed were expert cosplay, but were supposedly transformed people;
there were people with blue or purple skin and women with three or four
breasts; there were dogs and wild animals like bears and wolves, posing
calmly for the camera in a mall or in front of a courthouse, and videos
of animals doing arithmetic for the camera to prove they were
transformed people. And there were several sex changes. But eventually,
the authorities stepped in and cordoned off the machines. In at least
one case, it had been precipitated by someone getting changed into a
pair of underwear.
Nobody had any idea where they came from. A bunch of people pointed out
that the technology was way beyond anything we could do, or were
anywhere close to being able to do. They talked about the lack of any
text on the outside or inside interfaces, and the way money and ID cards
got garbled in the process of transformation, and said the makers of the
machines didn't speak any Earth language. On the other hand, the green
and red buttons inside had meaning not just for Earth, but for a
specific range of Earth cultures. Some drew the obvious conclusion that
aliens had introduced them, others thought it must be humans from the
future or from a more advanced alternate timeline. Almost all the
speculations you've heard in the last few years, we saw in that one
Reddit thread six hours after the first machines were discovered.
It was hard to keep the disappointment off my face as I thought about
the chance I'd missed. Andrew and Evan, of course, thought I was
regretting not getting to bulk up into a six-foot hundred and seventy-
pound stud, and I didn't disabuse them of the notion. Finally, after
we'd overdosed on Reddit and Twitter and Tumblr (hashtag #vennmachine
showed up pretty early, along with some others based on proposed names
that didn't catch on), we played video games for a while, and Andrew and
Evan borrowed our landline to call home and tell their parents where
they were and what had happened. That led to a whole mess with them
trying to prove to their parents who they were that I'm not going to get
into here. My big brother Caleb got home from football practice in the
middle of that, and my dad not much later.
-----
I fell asleep that night scheming about what I could do with a set of
wirecutters and a trusted accomplice. My choices basically came down to
Sophia or Andrew. I was pretty sure Andrew would be okay with me being
trans; I'd have to tell him after I transformed, anyway, if I didn't
tell him first in order to get his help to transform. I hadn't told him
yet because... well, I was a coward. And I'd talked to people online
who told me that friends they'd known and trusted for years had turned
on them, said and done the most horrible things, when they came out. I'd
been figuring I couldn't actually do anything about it until I was
eighteen and not living at home, at the soonest, so there was no urgency
about telling my friends. But now -- I had to tell somebody in order to
change, and then I would have to tell everybody why I'd changed.
Sophia would be delighted to have a sister. She'd complained often
enough, when we were younger, about only having brothers, especially
after Dad tore me a new asshole one time for playing dolls with her. But
even though the neighborhood between our house and the library had some
of the lowest crime in the area, I wasn't sure I wanted to take my
little sister out after midnight and make her an accomplice to breaking
and entering. Taking the risk for myself was one thing, but I didn't
want to risk Sophia getting hurt or arrested.
Caleb was obviously not an option, nor were Mom or Dad. I thought Mom
might be slightly more likely to be okay with me being trans than Dad or
Caleb -- but I wasn't anywhere near sure enough to tell her, or ask for
her help breaking the law to get at the machine that could give me the
girl body I needed.
As it turned out, all my scheming was unnecessary.
==========
My new short fiction collection, "Unforgotten and Other Stories", is
available
now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format.
Smashwords pays
its authors higher royalties.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/954949
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WYC2DN9
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short story collection at the
URLs
below.
The Bailiff and the Mermaid
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/563926
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B012WO9EAI
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bailiff-and-the-mermaid-
trismegistus-shandy/1122419525?ean=2940152061574
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/319765
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CUPYSFG
When Wasps Make Honey
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/319769
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CU584JM
A Notional Treason
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/401272
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I15RG6C
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-notional-treason-trismegistus-
shandy/1118399590?ean=2940045604819
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/435313
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5CL1B0
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-weight-of-silence-and-other-stories-
trismegistus-shandy/1119459843?ean=2940045924528
Arisha
- 14.11.2021
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