To do anything you needed your identity card, which contained all your physical data, including your photo, but no name or personal details. That was on a programmable little microchip in the card itself which could be changed automatically should someone else find himself or herself in your body. Not to report a change was a crime punishable by being locked in an undesirable body and packed off to a lifetime of meaningful labor under the shine of beautiful Momrath.
The next day I asked our hosts how it would be possible to lock someone into a body, and was told that some people, through sheer concentration and force of will, could essentially “cut off” your Warden beasties from sufficient contact to make a switch. These people, called judges, were on call to the government; they didn’t judge but merely carried out sentences. Top judges working together could actually force a transfer, too.
And of course there it was. Older, undesirable bodies were always around, and you could reward the faithful with a young, new body while shipping the malefactor off to Momrath until he or she dropped dead.
Chief industries were light manufacturing in general, computers and computer design, weapons, tools, all manner of wood products, seafood protein, and fertilizer. They even exported some of this stuff beyond the Warden system, something I hadn’t realized was possible. It was even possible to “sterilize” some types of things, mostly inorganic compounds, and keep them together and working. That led to an obvious connection. That very human robot that had broken into the defense computers, for example. Was it possible that somewhere here among the more primitive machines, at least one place was turning out these sophisticated robots to some alien-supplied design? And if so, was there here some sort of programming genius capable of turning out robots so real they would fool even close friends and family, as had the alien robot? It sounded and felt right. No violent criminals here, they said. Only technological ones. The best.
By our fourth day all of us were becoming bored and restless. As much as could be learned in any brief period bad already been taught us, so obviously we were being kept here at this point only for reasons not yet revealed by our hosts. For me, the wait was getting dangerous, since several of the prisoners had formed casual liaisons and I’d been propositioned repeatedly. Pressure mounted as I became a “challenge” to a couple of the men. I had no desire for any such experience, not in this body, but the situation was causing a social gap to open between me and the others. I wanted this waiting over with and for us to be out in the world as soon as possible.
I also wanted classification, something they certainly should have been able to do long before now, considering all the tests. I’d tried to angle the aptitude parts heavily toward computers and math, since not only was that consistent with the individual I was supposed to be but also that was where the greatest potential for moving up and finding out things might be. Besides, I’d listed a high level of expertise on many of the older-type computers in use here.
Near the end of the fourth day it hit me just what we were waiting for. Obviously, if some measure of control was needed, they didn’t want to throw us Cerberan virgins out before we knew just what the Warden facts of life would be. Close proximity, they’d said.
All those cots all close together.
Acclimation, they’d told us, took three or four days, so it was about right. They were waiting, then, until the morning when all or most of us woke up in different bodies.
That thought brought up a mental dilemma for me. If we had to switch to leave, I’d rather leave as a man—but because of the personal problem I noted, I’d been sleeping off in a corner nearest the other women but more or less to myself. How many days would it take? I wondered. And did I have the skill and the guts to get on with this? I finally decided I had to give it a try or be trapped on the wrong side. So I picked my man carefully with an eye to age, looks, physical condition, and the like. Fortunately, my candidate, Hull Bruska, was a shy, somewhat gentle-seeming man who had caused me the least problems. His crime was even more remote from people than Qwin’s had been. Apparently he’d managed electronically to tap and shift small parts of planetary budgets into frontier accounts, all from a small repair service on one of the civilized worlds. He was somewhat proud of his accomplishment, and not at all hesitant to talk about it. The cause of his downfall, ironically, was that he was too successful. Too much money showed up in the accounts of several frontier banks, the kind that attracts security police just because of the size of the assets. Obviously he needed to use more than the four banks he did to spread it out. When a bank’s assets quadruple in less than two years without apparent cause, you know somebody’s going to ask how, but Bruska’s forte was machines, not the fine points of getting away with the spoils.
Curiously, he had no real plans for the money. He’d done it, he told me, mostly out of boredom. After nine years of repair and redesign of financial computers he’d simply worked it out as a mental exercise, “more or less for fun.” Then when he’d put his plan into action just to see if it would work, and it had, doing it again became sort of irresistible, almost to see how much he could get away with. “I wasn’t really hurting anybody,” he explained, “and there was a tiny bit of satisfaction in fooling the whole Confederacy, of putting one over on them. Kinda made them human.”
I liked Bruska, who also enjoyed talking about himself enough that we never got through the hand-holding stage that night. He was shy enough as a man that maybe, I hoped, becoming a woman would open up a whole new social life for him.
We slept very close, my cot against a wall and his next to mine to minimize any risks on my part. I fell asleep that night hoping against hope I’d get lucky, and quickly.
DATA REPORT INTERRUPTION. END TRANSMISSION DIRECT TRANSCEIVER, AS SUBJECT LEFT. ORIGINAL BODY, ORGANIC TRANSMTITER LINK BROKEN. SUBSEQUENT REPORTS VIA READOUT BY SUBCONSCIOUS DEEP-PROBE HYPNOTIC COMMAND INTO DEVICES SUPPLIED, CUED, NATIVE AGENTS IN OUR EMPLOY. RUN NEXT SEQUENCE READOUT. SUBJECT UNAWARE OF COMPULSION OR READOUT.
CHAPTER FOUR
Settling In
All but four of us changed bodies during that fourth night. Luck being with me, I was once again young, male, and Confederacy standard, although Bruska didn’t really accept the swap with good grace. They separated all of us quickly to minimize the trauma, and I was assured that good psychs would help those who needed it to adjust.
They did a complete set of tests once again, mostly on the psych side, to determine if any of us not showing severe distress were actually hiding it. Naturally I passed with flying colors. I was overjoyed at my carefully planned result.
I also found that the two most objectionable men had changed with their female partners during that night, which I considered poetic justice. Let them find out how unpleasant men like them could be from the other side; then perhaps if they got to be men again they’d be better and more considerate.
The small ID card was simply placed in a slot. I was told it would work from any slot for it, in stores or even to unlock doors, if you first called the number of the Identity Placement Bureau and told them which slot you were using. Basically, Bruska’s name and computer code were erased from the little chip and mine were placed there. They did a check with the brain-reading machine to make sure all worked okay, and it had, so at last I was given an assignment.