Where Serpents Walk

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PART ONE: Jammie POV.

There is a strange art to waking up. It’s a slow realization that you are in fact in your own human body, in your dreams you’re basically a brain in a jar right? Maybe that’s why we know solipsism isn’t true, we experience it every night. Your body is this alien thing that you have to work to understand that you’re part of, something that you slowly have to explore. The term ‘self-exploration’ often has other implications, but in this case its not like that, its like wandering through a dark forest, and hoping to make it out the other side. Figuring out every sleep deprived morning how to open ones eyes, how to move ones limbs, how the inside of ones mouth tasted, occasionally getting hints of worse things to come, like that its three in the morning, or that you fell asleep in your office chair. 

I think I woke up that morning with a thousand little thoughts crossing through my brain. Gavrian alarmists making their short form video content screeching about the ‘dangerous potential’ of human modification with their eyes and teeth so bulging and white. Ads on the subway for effeminate pink hair music stars, and for backwards loans, and for lawyers that will help you sue someone if you slip and fall on their property. Mytian cultists dancing and singing on the street, making most people walk to the other side to ignore them as they sung about and end of the world that would never come for them.

And as my thoughts made me feel more and more like a person, somehow my body took notice again, making me forget about all higher things as disturbingly I realized something: this is not my body. There was a body I had spent most of my life in, and this wasn’t that body, it wasn’t the body that I fallen asleep in. The room wasn’t my room either, it was a room in a nicer neighborhood then I was used to for one, some big tall glass building that I couldn’t afford, and it was almost certainly not the room I had fallen asleep in either. I don’t think I fell asleep in my normal body either, something told me that when I fell asleep I was a room that was just as alien but a lot less nice then what I awoke in, and that I was bleeding badly.

Around that time a nurse walked in my room, the new style ones in yellow plastic jumpsuits, not the old style kind in scrubs. Hospital. Yes, I was in the hospital that feels about right. I could think of a lot of reasons I could probably be in the hospital given what I knew of how I ended up where I ended up. I tried to say the word ‘injury’ as some sort of statement towards this reality, though I don’t think I had fully gotten used to my tongue yet, so instead it came out as a different, less specific word, perhaps just a series of noises. All of which reminded me of some experience when I was young, I think on a vacation to French Canada. Yet I hadn’t fully figured out all my memories.

The nurse spoke to me mechanically, that glassy eyed way workers like her do, the type of worker who could casually and dispassionately carry out a genocide; “Patient XK12-091, Jammie Erest, your anatomy transfer procedure has been successful. Recovery should take two hours.”

About ten years ago, medical science invented a procedure that can rewrite someone’s base anatomy. It can’t heal injuries, so limbs can’t be regrown, and scar tissue can’t be replaced with normal flesh. It’s also somewhat hard to acquire fully nonhuman anatomy. But as long as someone stays within the human limit, people are essentially able to freely transition between features as they please now; age, sex, skin color, body type, and any subtler details are now fully malleable. Even some pretty extreme deviations from the human form can be achieved through clever manipulation of human anatomy. These practices were controversial at first, but they’ve since become a rather common part of society, partly with just how useful they are for certain aspects of society. There’s a few conspiracy and prepper types who are still against such procedures, but for the most part they’ve become a universal part of human life, the type of technology that is not itself able to be debated but that debates are to be had within the universal context of. Things like gender identity, racial discrimination, and even the core of bodily autonomy are entirely alien debates to what they once were, or at least they’ve been well made to seem alien to all the progress that before was made to most people who think about such things.

The thing that makes anatomy rewriting so risky, is that the health problems compound the more one has it happen; waiting an entire year between times getting it is basically medically required, but technically the recommended time between procedures is ten years (though almost no one follows that regulation). The United States National Universal Healthcare Service requires a ten month wait for healthy patients and higher wait times for patients in worse health.

Two hours of recovery in the hospital bed let me fully think of what was happening to me and what it had taken for me to get there. Step one; I was Jammie Erest, I was twenty six years old, I had grown up in New Jersey but I had moved to Brooklyn when I had graduated college. Every day I commuted to work, which was in midtown, going from a small N and R station near my apartment to a much larger more chaotic station not far from Time Square. I was mostly able to take off work now because my office was between seasons. Seasons? I had to quickly remember what I did that would be defined by seasons. The more I realized who I was in those two hours the more my body felt wrong, the more I realized almost every part of it wasn’t something that I had before. I was born in the year twenty fifty nine, if I’m twenty six that means the year was twenty eighty five. My father was a socialist revolutionary in the late twenty forties, he wasn’t a solider in the revolution but he was part of the war effort, the revolution failed but was large scale enough so that the people involved were pardoned unless they committed a war crime, and a lot of democratic socialist reforms were pushed through immediately afterwards to prevent something like that from happening again, my father was cynical about anything like that lasting. Ah yes! I was a tv writer, that must be why I was between seasons. My body felt wrong. I had to think about anything other then how wrong my body felt. I tired to think of how my father was probably wrong to be cynical. I was able to have a life changing medical procedure for free, able to live on my own with a writers’ salary, in an expensive enough city. Why did I get the procedure that I did? I feel like he’d have something to say about it. I realized my father was no longer alive, in that peaceful mundane way that old people are dead, not the type of thing someone is meant to worry about, not something that should have made me so sad.

At some point I fully remembered; I had just undergone a nearly complete change in sex, and not really for normal happy reasons, for reasons that felt so uncannily wrong. It felt like everything clicked at once and so many parts of my body felt new and strange and unlike what they were supposed to feel like at all. For a second I became extremely aware of how much was missing, and I tried not to focus on the exact parts that were different, tried not to think about what was between my legs or the different shape of my chest and hips.

The state of gender after it became possible to completely change biological sex was rather odd. Technically a lot of standards about discriminating against people of a certain sex were entire gone, anatomical sex was seen as a choice, and you could be discriminated on the grounds of your choices. The idea that women were supposed to be treated a certain way was more common now that you could technically just choose not to be a woman. Or maybe misogyny is what it always was just with entirely new justifications for the same behavior. As for the acceptance of trans people it became kind of better and kind of worse. If you completely became a woman or completely became a man it wouldn’t even register as deviant to most people. But at the same time, there was pretty extreme bigotry against any androgyny or gender deviance that took transphobia’s place, hatred for bodies that mixed sex characteristics, or people whose clothing and behavior didn’t match their body’s sex were increased by a lot. Even completely binary gay people were often told it would be easier if they just changed their gender. Maybe it was always just the enforcement of gender norms, just now with new implications.

People will excuse anything as long as its fair. Before anatomical changes were so easy it was seen as fair to accept some level of gender deviance, by people who assumed that such people would be gender conforming if they could be. Before anatomical changes were so easy it was assumed that you had to treat men and women equally because nobody could control if they were a man or woman. Fairness does not care about happiness, it cares merely if you can conform, and if you do, so an increase in the ability of conformity in the population, just means the right not to conform is rolled back.

At least it was better then the other English speaking countries, almost any queerness or gender deviance is illegal in Britain, Australia, and Canada, with refugees emigrating from such places every day just to live somewhere where at least discrimination isn’t something written into law. Americans were the lucky ones, and the few Americans whose desires happened to conform to a socially acceptable niche happened to be the lucky ones.

For whatever reason I thought I could be one of the lucky ones.

When I was fully recovered I looked at myself in the mirror, awkwardly sitting up. Before I had much of a chance to pay attention to any of my different body parts I noticed that I was just ever so slightly stronger with my new body shaped the way it was. Which wasn’t certainly a downside, it just rubbed in the fact that I was someone different, when I had last fallen asleep my body had been that of a young woman, and now by all definitions other then whatever petty things I comforted myself that wasn’t what my body was. I could feel my shirt tight over my chest, my fingers wanting to trace the tight alien shape of my skin that I wasn’t used to, but my mind terrifying to conform anything I already knew was true. Actually seeing my face in the mirror was slightly comforting, I was recognizable as myself, the same long dark hair I was used to flowing down my neck. It was subtler in its changes, every shape, every curve of my skull slightly different, in ways too small for my to directly point out what was different, but all together creating an image of my face that was just slightly off. The thoughts of ‘that’s not me’ and ‘that’s what my face looks like’ equal in my mind, nothing wrong enough for me to focus on as a chance and somehow that making it all the worse, the wrongness harder to identify. I wanted to pull up an old picture of myself to compare but realized that would probably make whatever emotion it could be said that I was feeling worse.

I hadn’t undergone the transformation for any personal reasons. I was well aware, that I would be more privileged as a man, especially in the industry I worked in. This meant technically whatever my desires were, weren’t relevant.

Taking the subway home was odd. I didn’t know exactly how to sit comfortably in my new body yet, shifting awkwardly, and probably seeming uncomfortably feminine to the people around me. But what set in more was that people were looking at me and seeing me as a man, it made it more real somehow, that even casually, as the black tunnels that the trains roamed through slipped by, people looked at me and would naturally think of me as some guy in their heads. Even if I was a slender androgynous man, there’s still so doubt that they’d see me as a man.

It wasn’t the same as just being in a different body, it was something deeper to know that while my mind was basically the same, I was thought of differently by everyone around me then I ever had been before. It felt inhumanly wrong. It didn’t feel like I had done anything of become anyone else, but knowing what people saw when they looked at me felt was terrifying, it made it feel like the person I had been had just disappeared. Even the fact that guys didn’t look at me in any way I had to worry about wasn’t comforting the way it was supposed to be, it just made me feel disconnected from the world around me.

As I exited my station I noticed a girl was looking at someone with paranoid glances, shifty, and paranoid, and at first I had no idea what or who she was afraid of, and I wondered if there was someone who was near her who could be dangerous who I needed to watch out for too. And then I realized that it was me. And I felt like I did something wrong, and I wanted to apologize but I knew it would only make it worse. And I felt so horrible for wanting to be something that terrified people at all, that for some selfish reason out of desire for power and privilege, this is what I had decided to become. And somehow it dawned on me that I gave up every normal interaction I would ever have with a woman again, that I would never really be their equal again, but a dangerous looming thing. If my body was still as good at crying as it used to be, I would have cried so many tears.

Sitting in my apartment after everything had happened was a weirdly still experience. I didn’t have anything there other then my body. If I had a roommate or partner to work off of it would have helped because I would have had more of a distraction, more someone who could make it about my relationship with them, and not my relationship with my own body. There was no conflict outside myself to pay attention to, just my own will, my own regret.

I didn’t want to be uncomfortable, so I tried not to be. But it was like I completely forgot what a normal person did when they got home and tried to relax. I think I played at relaxing more then I actually did any relaxing things, went through the motions of a casual normal existence when my mind was completely elsewhere. I tried watching a streaming show but it was empty, I couldn’t watch anything I helped make, it would tie back to my own life choices, couldn’t even watch anything nostalgic for me because it would remind me of who I was at a certain part of my life and how I wasn’t that sort of creature anymore. I guess I just watched something mindless but watching something mindless just made me board, and letting myself be board just made me fixate more on my body.

I could feel that there was now an organ between my legs, feel it’s sensitivity, the space it took up, the way it wasn’t even possible for me to sit comfortably in the poses that I used to. The actual shape an appearance that I as an adult knew a human penis to have was almost forgotten in favor of the strange shape and how it felt, this completely new almost eldritch thing, that felt like I couldn’t not pay attention to it. Eventually it became all that I could think about as some sort of sitcom droned on in the background. It was the feeling of having body parts that I shouldn’t have, wanting to just take them off, and knowing that there was no way to do such a thing, not for at least a year, probably more. The feeling that this is what my body was going to be now, and the chance to stop it had already happily and casually slipped away from my hands, doomed by my own permission.

Eventually I got upstairs, I was tired, I had to sleep, and I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stand where I was forever. I considered just falling asleep on the sofa, it was the easy option, if I did I wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning myself or changing or anything that had to do with actually dealing with my body. If it wasn’t for my fear that it would one day become my routine to live in such uncomfortably I would have done it, it would have been so easy.

Washing up was easier then it could have been. I showered in the morning, something that seemed meaningless earlier, but I hadn’t realized was my last time getting to experience a body I was now totally cut off from in its fullness. And thanks to the dangers of eating or drinking before major anatomical changes I didn’t have to deal with using the bathroom in my new body, which would have probably been the worst way to be forced to observe my new body parts. Instead I just had to deal with myself in the mirror, learning how those little noises I made while walking up the stairs suddenly had a deeper voice to them, wondering how much less cute they were now. Feeling my new skin and feeling how it was suddenly a new texture, how every little part of me had changed. There was no stranger in the mirror nor any familiar face, this was really myself now, perhaps forever, the social consequences might actually be something for flip flopping.