Rajit has spent the two days before her death wondering how he will explain the fact that, as the autopsy demonstrates beyond a doubt, the patient now has a penis and is, in every respect, functionally and chromosomally male.
V.
IT IS TWENTY YEARS later in a tiny apartment in New Orleans (although it might as well be in Moscow, or Manchester, or Paris, or Berlin). Tonight is going to be a big night, and Jo/e is going to stun.
The choice is between a Polonaise crinoline-style eighteenth-century French court dress (fiberglass bustle, underwired décolletage setting off lace-embroidered crimson bodice) and a reproduction of Sir Philip Sidney’s court dress in black velvet and silver thread, complete with ruff and codpiece. Eventually, and after weighing all the options, Jo/e plumps for cleavage over cock. Twelve hours to go: Jo/e opens the bottle with the red pills, each little red pill marked with an X, and pops two of them. It’s 10 A.M., and Jo/e goes to bed, begins to masturbate, penis semihard, but falls asleep before coming.
The room is very small. Clothes hang from every surface. An empty pizza box sits on the floor. Jo/e snores loudly, normally, but when freebooting Jo/e makes no sound at all, and might as well be in some kind of coma.
Jo/e wakes at 10 P.M., feeling tender and new. Back when Jo/e first started on the party scene, each change would prompt a severe self-examination, peering at moles and nipples, foreskin or clit, finding out which scars had vanished and which ones had remained. But Jo/e’s now an old hand at this and puts on the bustle, the petticoat, the bodice and the gown, new breasts (high and conical) pushed together, petticoat trailing the floor, which means Jo/e can wear the forty-year-old pair of Dr. Martens boots underneath (you never know when you’ll need to run, or to walk or to kick, and silk slippers do no one any favors).
High, powder-look wig completes the look. And a spray of cologne. Then Jo/e’s hand fumbles at the petticoat, a finger pushes between the legs (Jo/e wears no knickers, claiming a desire for authenticity to which the Doc Martens give the lie) and then dabs it behind the ears, for luck, perhaps, or to help pull. The taxi rings the door at 11:05, and Jo/e goes downstairs. Jo/e goes to the ball.
Tomorrow night Jo/e will take another dose; Jo/e’s job identity during the week is strictly male.
VI.
RAJIT NEVER VIEWED THE gender-rewriting action of Reboot as anything more than a side effect. The Nobel Prize was for anti-cancer work (rebooting worked for most cancers, it was discovered, but not all of them).
For a clever man, Rajit was remarkably shortsighted. There were a few things he failed to foresee. For example:
That there would be people who, dying of cancer, would rather die than experience a change in gender.
That the Catholic Church would come out against Rajit’s chemical trigger, marketed by this point under the brand name Reboot, chiefly because the gender change caused a female body to reabsorb into itself the flesh of a fetus as it rebooted itself: males cannot be pregnant. A number of other religious sects would come out against Reboot, most of them citing Genesis 1:27, “Male and female created He them,” as their reason.
Sects that came out against Reboot included; Islam; Christian Science; the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church (with a number of dissenting voices); the Unification Church; Orthodox Trek Fandom; Orthodox Judaism; the Fundamentalist Alliance of the U.S.A.
Sects that came out in favor of Reboot use where deemed the appropriate treatment by a qualified medical doctor included: most Buddhists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; the Greek Orthodox Church; the Church of Scientology; the Anglican Church (with a number of dissenting voices); New Trek Fandom; Liberal and Reform Judaism; the New Age Coalition of America.
Sects that initially came out in favor of using Reboot recreationally: None.
While Rajit realized that Reboot would make gender reassignment surgery obsolete, it never occurred to him that anyone might wish to take it for reasons of desire or curiosity or escape. Thus, he never foresaw the black market in Reboot and similar chemical triggers; nor that, within fifteen years of Reboot’s commercial release and FDA approval, illegal sales of the designer Reboot knock-offs (bootlegs, as they were soon known) would outsell heroin and cocaine, gram for gram, more than ten times over.
VII.
IN SEVERAL OF THE New Communist States of Eastern Europe possession of bootlegs carried a mandatory death sentence.
In Thailand and Mongolia it was reported that boys were being forcibly rebooted into girls to increase their worth as prostitutes.
In China newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for a single dose. The old people died of cancer as before. The subsequent birthrate crisis was not perceived as a problem until it was too late, the proposed drastic solutions proved difficult to implement and led, in their own way, to the final revolution.
Amnesty International reported that in several of the PanArabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male and were not, in fact, women escaping the veil were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed. Most Arab leaders denied that either phenomenon was occurring or had ever occurred.
VIII.
RAJIT IS IN HIS sixties when he reads in The New Yorker that the word change is gathering to itself connotations of deep indecency and taboo.
Schoolchildren giggle embarrassedly when they encounter phrases like “I needed a change” or “Time for change” or “The Winds of Change” in their studies of pre-twenty-first-century literature. In an English class in Norwich horrified smutty sniggers greet a fourteen-year-old’s discovery of “A change is as good as a rest.”
A representative of the King’s English Society writes a letter to The Times, deploring the loss of another perfectly good word to the English language.
Several years later a youth in
