Some of the women I have met and even work with really do not like men and refuse to consider that not all are intrinsically "evil". Heck, in my experiences, the majority isn't evil, though I've met a few who stand out as people to avoid.
Given the above, I seldom considered how rabid some women are about their anxieties vis a vis men, and, in their efforts to avoid dealing with them, some of these have shown themselves to be about as evil as the kinds of men that are.
People vary, for instance.
And, when it comes to populations, the bell curve rules, albeit not in Arkansas, where a judge broke it up into seven baby-bell curves.
Yeah, I know, my husband told me that I wasn't particularly immune from over-reacting, either. Admittedly it has been a lot easier on us over the last year and a half, but, as you'll see, there are good reasons for that.
So there I was, wearing my husband's shape, arriving at a girl's sports camp and some fucking arrogant bitch claiming to be a real woman popped me with both barrels, two deer slugs slamming into my chest. This is good for ruining your whole day, did you know that?
Now, before this incident, I had no practice whatsoever in being dead, ya dig? I had a moment of life to to look down at the big holes in the chest that my husband usually wore before I blacked out.
Yes, I meant it when I said I was wearing my husband's shape. I am a "TGer", often called a "tigger". In other words, I'm full of what was first called the "youth bug", based on what happens to adults that get infected. Given many of the side-effects that teen carriers live with, it has also been called the "bunny bug" since it encouraged any and all infected teens to fuck like bunnies.
Six months after the first recorded infections the bug got a new name: the "transgender" or "tigger" bug. Later, when my husband and I got infected, I got to fuck my husband with his dick and balls right into the vagina I used to have. All right, so he was fairly reluctant until I brought my tongue into action first and taught him what I liked.
The stresses and how some folks responded to the sudden change from being a man to a woman-- though seldom vice-versa, even with our current society-- taught us a very important yet unexpected lesson: infected people were very hard to kill.
Hell, successfully killing a tigger is unwise. Normally the nanites will be spread via sexual contact, which isn't very demanding or stressful for the person freshly infected, but dead-- and even seriously injured-- tiggers will spread a cloud of nanites which will infect others nearby, and the progression of the infection is not as gentle or as gradual. For injured tiggers this is not much of a problem but a dead tigger's body has been found to be turned into a bomb. Dead tiggers have a tendency to explode.
So, if that fucking moron with her shotgun had actually been successful in her desire, not only wouldn't I be around to write this, neither would she... or any of the others who came running to look at what she'd shot.
The detonation of an infected person's dead body is usually a spectacular event.
So there I was, effectively dead. Only I wasn't quite dead. I was merely "mostly" dead, a completely different situation.
And I didn't need Miracle Max, much less a prince or princess to kiss me to return me to life. All the nanites needed were time, coolant and some raw materials to work with.
Despite our lack of understanding how the full-scale drexlerian nanotechnology worked in implementing the nanites of the transgender/"tigger" bug, we've learned most of what we "know" the way Yogi Berra advised, years ago. Yes, you can learn a lot just by watching. We've also had to learn to avoid intervening.
We certainly didn't yet understand the limits of this mysterious plague but we were slowly understanding the rules. While I'm certain that the nanites running around inside my my body must have limits, in this incident I fell short of becoming a lost cause for them. So, as the EMTs and police arrived, my special ID bracelet must've told them the story and so my body was packed off and placed where it would undergo reconstruction by the nanites. Admittedly, I was later told that my body spent an hour in the bomb squad's blast range before they agreed that I wasn't likely to explode.
When it comes to reconstruction, we've learned that heat is the key problem for the nanites, so a bath of cold water is a good start, simply to carry off the heat generated by the process of regeneration as it progresses quickly, and, even with little extra cooling, regeneration simply takes longer. Having extra raw materials-- meats and the like certainly do not hurt-- available will make it more convenient for the person being regenerated, all so that they don't awaken with an incredible appetite. In the last two years of this whole youth/bunny/transgender nanite infection in the world, we have learned how to make recovery from what would be a fatal injury to a "normal" easier for one of us, the infected.
My "dead" body, in a state of nanite induced biostasis, eventually got wheeled into the local ER... which didn't have much practice dealing with tiggers. Fortunately, it isn't hard to get the necessary revival information, and, so, within 24 hours, I "woke up", fully recovered and with only a hazy memory of the event that put me here.
It was kind of them to let me have a copy of the video disks they made during the restoration of my life and I knew that the CDC had first dibs on this information. My husband, still wearing my feminine body shape, was there waiting for me when I "returned" to life. It was a good thing, too, given how horny we were by this time.
That's another reason we're called tiggers: we have a lot of energy. Granted, a lot of it is sexual. No one has been able to explain why. There's no "control" mechanism we can use to test any of the theories. Our sex drive "just is" and isn't something amenable to being turned off.
Those who'd been around my body in the first half hour or so were, by the time I'd awakened from "being dead", infected, and already through the first phase of reconstruction. This would really fuck up that bitch who'd shot me, but she was not the only "victim", but she got the blame for this sudden outbreak. That shooter was only the first of thirty-five people to become infected by my near-demise. The first-responding police, EMTs and forensics crews were not pleased, nor were some of the female student-athletes I had come to do physicals on... or their parents.
There has been some... prejudice... against tiggers, here in the North-East US. We're segregated school-wise, especially for Middle and High Schools, and even some of the more prestigious colleges won't even admit tiggers. I'd swear that we'd be facing witch trials if it weren't for the dangers implicit in trying to torch one of us. I really suspect we are up against the "American Puritan Ethic" but another part of that situation is how men and women change shape, though the prejudice didn't start there.
When I finally got to go back out to that camp to perform the needed physicals, eleven of the twelve "star players" were infected and in the throes of the "bunny" bug behavior. The rest of the girls lucked out by not being infected, and, so, could still play.
You see, given some of the changes these nanites do to a human body, various sporting officials were automatically disqualifying tiggers in competitions against "normals". These freshly infected girls were quickly quarantined from the others before being sent home to their families to keep the infection from spreading further into the team.
So the "star" players were, for the most part, gone. All due to an over-zealous bitch who thought she was protecting these girls from a "man".
Ha!
I got to talk to her afterwards and learned that she was not just a rabid "libber" (something becoming more and more obsolescent in the world today, given the transgendering aspects of the nanite infection) but was also apparently a rabidly rigid lesbian, too.
Strictly lesbian women-- and homosexual men-- can't survive past a "switch point", and, when I'd been shot, I had less than a month to go before my husband and I would flip back. This meant that my "killer", unless she consented to a sexual liason with a male, didn't have long to live.
My observation of this woman now wearing a fresh teen-age body didn't connect well to the grizzled she-bitch she had appeared as an adult. I did remind the cops with a warning about what happens when a person with the bug doesn't have any heterosexual contact.
Y'know, I have to hand it to some people, they really do have courage in their convictions, even if it's stupid. The woman who chose to shoot to kill me died because she couldn't tolerate the idea of having sex with a man. Fortunately, she didn't do much collateral damage when her body detonated since they transferred her to an isolated prison set aside for tiggers, just to keep the opportunities for new nanite infections down.
By that time, though, I was becoming a woman again.
It's strange how this whole damn mess started and how I caught the bug.
I was working the ER when a gunshot victim was wheeled in, her body merely punctured in a non-threatening wound. Given some time in rehab she would likely get almost all function back in her leg. We started an IV so we could provide her the antibiotics she'd need and prepped her for surgery.
At that point she was out of my hands.
Until the next afternoon, there was no reason for me to remember her until some heavies with FBI windbreakers had me in for an interview. Given the work that I'd done and the fact that it was all charted out, there wasn't much for me to add. When I asked what was going on I was told that we were seeing something that looked like a biological weapon.
It would have been far more helpful if they had told me what the real symptoms were instead of trying to instill fear and anxiety... so, over the next two days, some of the younger doctors allowed patients that came in who were badly injured die, all because of the terror instilled by the federal agents.
When the news finally hit and we were brought up to date on the reality that this so-called "biological weapon", it did seem like a boon in how it healed people and cured them of disease, all while regressing their bodies to what one researcher theorized as the "optimum size and energy" and still be adult enough to have sex, some of us doctors felt like we'd be obsolete soon.
Well, Duh!
Now that I knew where to look for the "grapevine" on this new infective agent, I kept track. Watching the CDC reports on this one were interesting as I saw all kinds of differences between the "raw" data and what the CDC was actually reporting. The data going in seemed to make some kind of sense but I could see oddness in the reports coming back out.
What did I mean by that, you ask? To me, it was obvious that politics was spinning whatever data was getting released to the general public and the way it was released seemed to be influenced, to my eye, by religious dogma. It felt like there was enough spin in these reports to have shorten the earth's day by at least 4 hours, if it could have been coupled anywhere near the axis of the earth.
The first panic publicized was the lynching of a tigger in Downtown Dallas. What made this a stupid effort to "punish" those carrying these nanites was that the injuries done to the carrier ended up spreading it far and wide; almost all of the members of the mob caught it and then gave it to their families.
The spin on that story wasn't done to keep a lid on the infection. Oh, no, it seemed that the idiots in charge, while trying to build up a new boogeyman for the public to hate and oppress, ensured the spread of this agent. There were more lynchings in various places, including some very picturesque little towns. The problem spread.
I found out, indirectly, that some doctors who provided the New York Times with analyses contrary to the pronouncements of the CDC and effectively confirming political filtering of those announcements were found dead of road accidents after the fact.
We doctors live with statistics. We breathe it. We have little choice but to pay close attention to it, all because no two human beings are ever quite chemically identical. All of us have little variations, even in that 10,000 atom molecule of hemoglobin, and that's not even counting our genetic endowment. Given that every patient is unique, we have very little choice but accept probabilities in treating them, all because people vary . Treating a patient is an emergent process because, for any individual, their response to a drug regimen will usually be idiosyncratic, if not unique.
So, like I said, we know statistics. Admittedly, we don't know them as well as an actuary does, but, hey, an actuary is just a person who found accounting far too exciting.
When 100% of the doctors who tried to clue in the big news publishers somehow die, all in road accidents, especially given I knew one of them who, as I recalled, didn't even own a car, there is a level of certainty that some kind of cover-up was in progress.
Some portions of the country are more amenable to political manipulation, somehow correlating with how gullible the population is in such regions. At the same time the use of lynch mobs eventually died out since the newly infected "victims" of infection jumped from being in the crowd to become the enemy.
What no one had expected was one of the side effects of the nanites had to do with clearing the cobwebs out of a "victim's" head. Additionally, these nanites didn't like psychoactive drugs or even alcohol. Oh, sure, caffeine and sugar were well tolerated but other drugs made those who were infected ill if not extremely sick. In any case, people who had nanites in their bodies thought more clearly and could pay attention to more things than they had as "normals", which fuelled the real rebound.
Sometimes I think of the rebound as irony in action: those who listened to rabble rousers and who got infected by participating in beatings, stabbings and shootings of people infected with the Youth Bug were suddenly suspicious of what they'd been told, given that they were suddenly victims of the very same rabble rousers.
At the three month mark after the first infections, we got reports that some of those infected turned green. By this time the efforts to manipulate the news wasn't working for the political/religious "leadership" of the US and so we in the medical community were able to talk to each other again, freely.
It's funny how those who died after turning green were found to have been strictly homosexual or non-sexual.
The second phase of resistance started at this point, as the nanite infection was called a "homo-killer", which fell into the avowed "family values" of the political leadership.
We doctors liked some of the cures effected by this new agent but were wary of infecting someone unless they had no chance through existing protocols. We all learned a lot from each forlorn hope, discovering what is survivable and what isn't.
The moves to intern those infected into encampments that, to many, sounded like "cleansing" were aborted quickly given that each state was expected to pay for it and to take the legal risks. The President's own home state of Texas started to work out an implementation plan to keep the "fuckers" away from the "decent" folk; this plan died shortly after one tigger blew himself up while upwind of government offices. Over night the Texas Governor and Legislature changed their minds.
So enlightened self-interest was working well.
There was still pressure to do something terrible to the infected population. In hindsight, I wondered why no one considered the same quarantine measure for HIV infections, though the nanites cured that.
What we really needed was some kind of quarantine and treatment for those who supported ignorance, political extremism and arrogance.
Oh, wait, that was redundant, wasn't it?
In any case, the wheels were coming off of the politicizing of the "young'uns" and some were wondering if catching this bug would be a good thing.
That's when the first change hit and scared the most arrogant spitless.
If it weren't for the fact that the political manipulation over the previous six months hadn't made people suspicious of any "call to action" from the current political/religious leadership of the country, this would've driven people wild.
Some towns went from 5% tigger to 95% tigger when some of the men discovered that they had been transformed into having the body of the first woman they boffed with the bug... and tried to kill themselves before their wife could notice.
One school had a single girl's body replace all but three of the boys in the school. Women, though, didn't always switch. That was an interesting statistic for us to study as we tried to figure out the rules.
Well, interesting to me since I'm a woman.
Somehow, though, identity was retained-- these nanites made such massive changes to the host body but didn't change patterns on the iris, the retina or the fingerprints. The DNA also didn't vary, so the genome stayed the same but the body changed.
One odd outcome of this was the loss of "glass ceilings" since gender was, very suddenly, no longer relevant. Many of the executives who'd arranged to be infected weren't about to lose stature when they showed up as women.
While political posturing had little choice but to mellow out, the religious ideologues were working overtime, doing their best to stir up the gullible. Fortunately the ranks of the gullible had eroded due to the simple expedient of becoming infected simply by following orders to be abusive.
Things stabilized, for three months, and then came the next switch. It was... weird. People accepted it. Excepting the places where schools did get segregated and where the TeeGee-ers, soon to be called tiggers, were being encouraged to move out of various neighborhoods, other places didn't really care enough.
Oh, yeah, schools did do their best to manage classes with bunny-tiggers (whose sex drive wouldn't diminish despite the changing) by giving them an opportunity to maintain sexual satisfaction and so cut down on pheromone production, which was, to my eye, risky... but far less offensive to me than total quarantine.
It took over a year for things to change for me. A year. I got along, treating normal patients, when my husband, an EMT, got caught in the fall-out from a tigger that died in a car wreck and fire.
It took a couple of days for our schedules to sync but, when we "got it together", the next day, I got younger. I was a tigger, just like my husband. Tiggers were no longer merely a curiosity to me.
For a while there I was not minding it at all. I did have to jump my husband pretty often, just to keep us both from going crazy from sexual need, which protected people of the opposite sex that we worked eith or otherwise came in contact with. I can't explain it any more than anyone else can, but something in these bugs made even the most boring vanilla sex a complete thrill.
By this time the religious folks were on the defensive, just trying to keep people from getting infected. I really think they should have figured this out in the first month or so before they tried to take the offensive, but, hey, stupidity is most common in those who think they know all of the answers.
And the day I woke up and got his body I got to use his dick on him. I liked this. It was fun to have a dick. I spent the whole day exploring what this body could do, including being able to easily piss while standing up, drawing patterns in the urinal. I also got some strange looks when I found myself having to back out of the women's room and walk into the men's room.
Men are weird. I mean it.
I'll admit that the first time being a man was fun and my husband didn't mind my attentions, even though he did draw the line at giving me a blow-job just like I was reluctant to go down on his pussy.
Political pressures didn't last past the next election, though there was some talk of denying tiggers the right to vote because "we were physically under-age".
Somehow I suspect that even had tiggers been disenfranchised that the election, what with all of the re-counts and then having to be re-done with a closer eye on the equipment, the political landscape would have changed anyway. The press found the differences between the first pass at an election and the second pass suspicious given how the machines were reporting close results while the re-run, done all on paper, showed a real landslide.
Everyone remembers the first post-tigger president was a complete non-entity, but, the next president after that had a lot more sense and a clean criminal record.
I've learned how good it is to be a tigger. For instance, I don't get sick. I'm not sure I can get sick. This is one reason I have been sent to deal with infectious diseases. I won't go into details of dealing with an Ebola patient that got dumped into my lap. Sadly the nanites couldn't do much for him by the time we stopped dithering but we did save his wife.
Another benefit is that food can be pretty far gone and still be pretty good. The back of the refrigerator does not scare me if I'm hungry enough, for instance, though I'll say that it's not my first choice. A cost of this infection is a need for more food than "normals" to keep the nanites fed.
NASA re-ran a lot of their early "human limits" research to compare normals and tiggers. In terms of metabolic demands, we tiggers come in behind, and, so, put a lot of demand on a life support system.
Enough people who pursued the opportunity to become tiggers are space cadets. Having myself been bitten by the space travel bug long before the nanites nailed me, I wished for a way I could fly.
I didn't find it, despite the hints in front of my nose, but other space enthusiasts did.
No one can explain why, but our nanites gave us an advantage after all.
Wanna guess what happens if you freeze a tigger? Or put one in an oxygen-free atmosphere?
Normals can't hibernate, at least not without serious technology to support them. We can. Put us in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, we sleep. Too much CO2? We sleep.
If it weren't for all of the other side effects of the swarm of nanites living within my body, I'd have suspected they were created for space-flight.
And I hoped to be there to make the trip to Mars with my husband. I might travel as a funny-shaped lump of flesh in cryptobiostasis, but I could make the trip.
The future is a lot easier to live with when you have a dream to sustain you. In the meantime? We'll enjoy our lives.
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Loose Change Part: Universe: tigger Summary: Dreams and Realities Keywords: scfi tg viol mf Revision: $Revision: 1.3 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: looseChange.x,v 1.3 2006/07/01 02:50:54 jcl Exp $