Diary of a Mad Scientist

From the diary of a mad scientist:

by Mark Gooley

23 February:

I went into the laboratory as usual this morning. Imagine my surprise to find my assistant, Gronk, on the floor, quite dead. I have been patching it together pretty often in the past few years, and it was bound to die for good sooner or later, but I was quite taken aback. I could find nothing of its patched-together body that was worth saving, poor creature, so I dragged its corpse to my acid vat and covered it with the best nitric. When it was dissolved, I admit I shed a tear as I added the slaked lime to neutralize the acid. Into the sewers it went, except for a flask I kept as a keepsake. I think Gronk would have wanted it this way. Now to construct a new assistant.

24 February:

I think I know where to get the makings of an assistant. I am an adjunct instructor at the local university, and when I looked over today's class of burnt-out graduate students I had an inspiration. Most of them have tolerably healthy bodies and good brains. If I could incite a few to suicide, I could construct a replacement for Gronk out of the bits and pieces. I recall some work I did on a device to generate despair. If I can find my old notes, I might be able to do something with this.

25 February:

Very tired. I spent the day building the despair generator. There is a suitable area on campus -- high dorm buildings and laboratories full of grad students -- which should yield some useful self-defenestrations. Tomorrow night I will strike.

27 February:

Success! I installed the despair generator (it works by inducing the appropriate brain waves in the subjects) atop a high laboratory building near the graduate dorms. In the evening I started it by remote control. In a few seconds a feeling of utmost depression and uselessness swept over me, which I was able to resist only because I knew it to be artificial (that, and through my iron will). After a minute or so, windows in the lab towers and dorms started to open, grad students to climb out, and their bodies to fall to the ground like so many autumn leaves. I darted out from my hiding place in a clump of bushes and harvested parts of brain from several bodies, gathering plenty before anyone else arrived. An entire brain would have been better, but I did not want to arouse suspicion. The other parts of the body are less critical, and can be obtained by a little assiduous grave-robbing.

28 February:

I have pieced together a working brain from the bits and pieces I so hurriedly harvested. A very nice job I made of it. Now for the grave-robbing. I wish that people wouldn't waste money on embalming -- it makes these things so much more difficult! I looked at myself in the mirror today: I'm really getting fat and out of shape. It strikes me that I had been letting poor Gronk do all the physical work around here. I must find some way of getting fit again: a device for bodily metamorphosis? I hate physical exercise. It will not be easy digging up those parts for the new assistant.

2 March:

Recovered at last from the physical and mental exhaustion involved in grave-robbing and reviving parts. All last night I was wishing for the strength of Gronk at my side...but of course, were he still alive there would be no need to procure body parts. The cold weather had slowed decomposition, but the ground was still hard, even over the fresh graves. I was barely able to dig up three fresh young corpses and harvest the better parts: by the time I had the third coffin open, I was trembling from sheer fatigue. Somehow I filled in the graves again, got the parts home and in the proper solutions.

3 March:

A nice leisurely day hooking bits and pieces of bodies together. All of the parts are from male bodies, and they fit together rather well. The cranial cavity needed a bit of work to hold the patchwork brain, but not much. I don't see re-animation as being very difficult in this case.

4 March:

I started the re-animation this morning. Everything is going well so far: the old equipment that got Gronk up and about is still in excellent shape, though it looks a bit quaint. I looked through my old notes on bodily metamorphosis. I'd forgotten how far I had progressed. The biggest problem was storing information about the new structure the body is assuming: making a human or animal into a duplicate of another was practical, given the presence of the original. But I have no penchant for impersonation. Had I been willing to prostitute my genius to commercial ends, and been able to find a discreet clientele, I could have made several fortunes by changing old women into twin sisters of their pretty granddaughters, vain women into copies of fashion models, would-be transsexuals -- bah! Foolishness.

5 March:

My new assistant is definitely alive, already healing with that unnatural speed that still amazes even me. Its body does not look scarred or particularly deformed: a good job. It should wake up within a few days, and given the quality of its brain, it might even be coherent by then. Training Gronk was quite a task, but I have hope for better things this time.

6 March:

Altogether an amazing and gratifying day. I went into the lab. today and found my new assistant sitting up in bed! "What happened to me?" it asked. "And this sounds crazy, but who am I?" After a moment of gathering my wits, I told it a carefully-edited version of the truth, omitting anything that might hint that I had had anything to do with the deaths of the persons from whom I constructed it. It was quite grateful, happy to be alive, and oddly excited about being an assistant to what it calls a "mad scientist." As far as its scrambled brain can recollect, it was unhappy and "burnt-out" as graduate students, dissatisfied with its work and its advisors. Most of it was computer scientists and electrical engineers: not what I would have chosen (why didn't I check before inducing those suicides?), but it seems intelligent and obedient, and I admit that my knowledge of computers is slight and outdated. Not as strong as Gronk, either. We agreed to call it (or, I suppose I would start saying, him) Fred.

7 March:

Fred is a wonder. Apart from his lack of physical strength (not greatly stronger than I am, tall and gawky and spindly), he is much superior to Gronk. We had a look at my bodily-metamorphosis equipment, which I keep down in the caves beneath my laboratory, amongst my older apparatus. I explained the problem of storing body-images: how can you transform a body without an original to provide a template? What if you want to make only a few alterations? "You need a computer, Master," he told me. I took him to my computer complex and showed him my IBM 360. He laughed for an entire minute and said that it would never do. He says that he can get something running on it, but that I will have to buy a newer machine if I want to do any serious work. Fortunately I have vast sums in my Swiss bank accounts, thanks to some consulting work for various individuals and governments, and the estimate Fred gives for what we will need is quite reasonable.

9 March:

Very busy, both of us. It's quite different having an intelligent assistant with the minds of grad students. More expensive, to begin with: Fred lives on Twinkies and Coke Classic and delivered pizza, when poor Gronk was satisfied with gruel and the occasional blind cave fish. The pizza-deliverymen are quite afraid of my house, what with the permanent fog and thunderclouds I generate around it, and it takes large tips to keep the pizza coming. Also, Fred does not obey orders blindly, but thinks first: this could be a problem when I need a special job done, but it should prevent certain blunders, such as when Gronk handed me the wrong brain and instead of putting my old-lady colleague into the beautiful coed's body, I put in an aging prostitute. The prostitute disgraced the body somewhat before I could put things right, but eventually I got Julia's brain into that darling, empty little head: she (now known by her body's name of Tiffany) is still stunning, publishes voluminously, and is happily married. But with Fred there everything would have gone smoothly. Fred says that the 360 should be able to handle a small metamorphosis, and that we can store the body patterns on magnetic tape: about 50 reels of it. "Not enough memory, too slow, can't do computer-aided design of bodies, Master." I gave him carte blanche as to equipment, and I have placed the necessary orders. Seeing Fred struggling with the ancient 360 and still getting results has given me faith in his abilities.

12 March:

No entries for a few days -- but we have a success! Fred and I are not strong enough to move the metamorphosis-equipment, so he ran data lines down into the caves. We scanned a small blind newt native to the caves, putting the pattern of its body onto magnetic tape (46 reels, but the tape drive handles only low densities). Then we captured a cave fish and read the newt's pattern off the tape. The metamorphosis seemed to work, but when it was complete and we took the restraints off the new newt, it scurried off down the cave, eventually falling into one of the cracks in the floor that go down to volcanic fire. When Fred saw this, he laughed uproariously for a long time, explaining later that it reminded him of something in some of his former lives.

14 March:

It's amazing what a bit of bribery will do. Our new computers are already here, to Fred's amazement, and he is hard at work installing them. He says that we will be able to do computer-aided design of new body-forms, store and edit body-patterns, and perform remarkable transformations. I have great confidence in him. The amount of Coke Classic he consumes is remarkable; whenever I warn him that it may endanger the health of his re-animated body, he shrugs and opens another can.

15 March:

Fred is tireless, it seems. Most of the machines are up, though the machine room is littered with pizza scraps and empty Coke Classic cans. I sense that he has an ulterior motive for working so hard: is he unhappy with his body? The scarring is minimal, he assures me that no part of him is in pain, and he easily could pass for a normal human being. I decide to let him become whoever he likes once the process is perfected, as a reward for his assiduous labors.

16 March:

I am rebuilding the metamorphosis-bed while Fred works on software for design and control. He is using an existing CAD package that I bought at enormous expense, but he says that it will save him months of work.

17 March:

The equipment is ready, but Fred says that the software will take a while, perhaps a week. I cannot accuse him of malingering: he is working up to twenty hours a day, hardly eating, and writing vast amounts of code. He suggested, over Coke Classic during one of his rare breaks, that I occupy myself with other things while he finishes this difficult project. Very bored, I captured a stray dog and metamorphosed it into a copy of my cat, but my heart wasn't in it, though the new cat is delightfully confused. I need something else to work on.

18 March:

Very melancholy. I bother Fred, keeping him from his work. I long for a wife: typical of me when I am unoccupied. There is a pleasant but homely young woman, named Catherine, in the course I am teaching at the University: she appears to be interested in me. When the metamorphosis equipment is working, I can make my body strong and attractive, and once she is in love with me, alter her suitably. She has just the sort of mind, I believe, that would fit nicely in the sort of body I find beautiful.

24 March:

No entries for a while...I cannot work. I drove to town, car and self properly disguised, and picked up a whore. She was appallingly stupid and ill-mannered, and I lost patience with her before we could even have sex. I took her home, used the proper equipment, and now I have a second copy of my cat. If she is well-behaved, I will forge a copy of my cat's pedigree papers and sell her for a good price: with only a cat's brain, she is hardly in a position to incriminate me. Fred says that he is almost finished. The bill for delivered pizza is astronomical, but when I complain, he justly notes that the computers were far more expensive.

25 March:

"Master," suggested Fred, "why don't you build a portable body-scanner so that you can copy people without kidnapping them?" Fred is getting a bit above his station, I thought angrily, but by now I am starting to see him more as a colleauge than a creature. Of course his suggestion is excellent. He will have to build the data-storage mechanism, but today I put the rest of the works into the case of a video camera. People will think that I am taking videos when in fact I am copying the patterns of their bodies onto videocassetes as binary data. Most amusing.

27 March:

A very rewarding day indeed. I went to a downtown park with my "video camera" and "filmed" several attractive young women as they ate lunch. One 8mm videocassette stores enough data to let me reconstruct a human body, and the scanner runs through it in half a minute. Perhaps I aroused their suspicions, what with changing tapes after less than a minute of use, but I pretended that the "camera" was malfunctioning. Back in the lab, I took the copy-cat that had been the stray dog, strapped it to the metamorphosis-bed, and gave Fred a tape of a lovely brunette. In a few minutes we had the process going quite nicely, and in less than an hour the body of the woman lay there, nicely-shaped, charming with its frilly dress and long dark hair and careful makeup, all exactly as I had scanned it. The mind of the dog was quite confused at this second change of form, and incapable of handling the complexities of a human brain and body. It lay there, a stunned expression on its pretty face, moaning softly, still an animal inside. I caressed it in ways that would have evoked at least a severe slap from its original, but it just whimpered. I was not at all tempted to have sex with the lovely body the dog now wore, though with someone like Catherine looking out of those eyes, I would not even have hesitated. I offered it to Fred, but he declined: strange, because he seemed aroused by the sight of it. (Something is peculiar about Fred; I suppose I will soon know just what.) After a quick physical examination of the body (simply that of a healthy young woman, I found), we changed it back into a cat's. As for cats, the former whore makes a superb one. She knows how to use a toilet, likes being cuddled, and is quite even-tempered. I will sell my original cat and keep her instead.

28 March:

It was bound to happen: Fred has cracked. I came down to the lab this morning. Fred was in his quarters with the door open. He had put up an old mirror he must have found in the caves, and was preening himself before it: in women's clothing! Once I had overcome my initial shocked amusement, I questioned him and found that:

1. part of his brain had come from a woman,

2. another part had come from a would-be transsexual,

3. I should be pleased that he could not merely extract clothing from

the body scans, but scale it up to fit him, and

1. he would like to become a woman as soon as possible, and would

have already changed had he considered it safe and practical to

operate the equipment alone.

I was at a loss. A female assistant would be quite distracting, I told him. Pressure of overwork had caused him to crack; he didn't really want to be a woman, did he? I forbade him to attempt a change of body without my permission, or even to wear female garb. He sulked and said that it was his desire for womanhood that impelled him to finish the job in a fraction of the time he would normally have spent. I remembered my promise to myself to let Fred be who he wished, and reluctantly told him that if he still felt this way in a few days, he could change. He was grateful, and immediately put on proper clothes and got to work. The pet store paid an excellent price for my original cat. The transmuted whore is much superior.

29 March:

Fred furtively fondles a pair of black lace panties, but otherwise is holding to his cooling-off period. He is improving the CAD software considerably, and this afternoon designed a body that looks quite like that of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel on "The Avengers." It would be most distracting to have such an assistant, but I suppose that I can tolerate it if Fred does not suggest I impersonate Patrick Macnee as John Steed. We scanned my body; tomorrow I plan to do a bit of editing and assume a more-athletic form.

30 March:

[in a smaller, delicate script:] I am greatly annoyed. Fred swears that it was not his fault, and fortunately for him he is right: I was careless. Still, I am certain he considers this poetic justice after I delayed his change of sex. At present I have the body of a tiny but flawlessly beautiful child-woman, perhaps sixteen: I am too disgusted at my femininity to give more details. The computer is down, so that return to a proper form will have to wait until we can get a repairman here. We had edited a scan of my body, reducing its age by a few years, removing fat, adding muscle, and so forth. The computer began giving warning messages on its console about a potential hardware error, but I, hoping to impress Catherine in class tomorrow with my physique (wearing, for once, a T-shirt instead of coat and tie), insisted on going ahead with my alteration. Then I put into the drive what I thought was the proper tape, had Fred strap me to the metamorphosis-bed, and let myself be changed. The metamorphosis takes place with the subject conscious but paralyzed and insensible of pain: I could tell that I was changing too much, but was powerless to stop that; Fred was afraid to interrupt the process. When the change was complete, Fred, embarrassed, handed me a mirror. Though furious and disgusted, I looked adorable: this made me even angrier. I minced, damning my new body, over to the console, found the correct tape, and put it in the drive. Fred ran a set-up program -- and the machine crashed. Diagnostics showed a major hardware failure which Fred could not repair, "even if you were willing to void the warranty." I tore my dress to ribbons in my anger. Fred told me that he had designed the body for his own occasional use, and offered me clothes from the extensive wardrobe he had already created for it: they ranged from little-girl to happy-hooker, but all were intensely feminine and delicately perfumed. I tried to strike Fred, but he gently restrained me. Eventually I resigned myself to the situation and a blouse and skirt.

31 March [still the delicate feminine handwriting]:

Worse and worse. The repairman made a pass at me, curse him, and could not even fix the machine: a new board should arrive tomorrow. I think that I could use another cat, and the repairman looks like a good candidate. Or perhaps poetic justice would require him in my situation, only irreversibly. Of course I missed teaching my class today; with the help of a vocoder I imitated my usual voice and called in sick. Fred suggested that I venture out, hoping that I would see why he finds womanhood so attractive a prospect. I did go out, attracting much unwanted male company, so that by the end of the day, several admirers were dying of slow poisons unknown to (conventional) science: one bright spot in an otherwise miserable day.

1 April [handwriting back to normal]:

Finally myself again -- actually, the improved version we designed to impress Catherine. Fred was most trying: "They called and said that the board won't be ready for a few more days," he said. A string of most unladylike curses came from my stupidly pretty mouth, intensifying briefly after he added, "April Fool!" The repairman patted my buttocks when he arrived with the board: only my iron self-control prevented his immediate death. With everything up and running, I went through my metamorphosis. My muscles are now most impressive, and I look and feel much better. Fred insisted on assuming his Diana-Rigg-as-Emma-Peel body, right down to the dated Sixties hairstyle and clothing. He (she?) has talents as an actor, and slipped into the Emma Peel character at once, duplicating the accent and mannerisms. Fred addressed me as "Steed," a few times, until I rebuked him. Fred as a woman is certainly a distraction.

3 April:

Catherine is interested in me! She approached me after class and asked whether I had time to discuss certain points of the day's lecture at greater length. Eventually we decided on having dinner together tomorrow. I hope that I can soon take her into my confidence and put her onto the metamorphosis-bed. Fred (he wants to be called "Mrs. Peel" or even "Emma," but I politely refuse) is helping me design Catherine's new body, which is precisely that of my ideal woman. I can hardly wait to see it wear her expression on its face. We planned the revenge on the repairman. Fred will assume a girlish form and entice him into my van, and we will take him to the laboratory and make a few changes in him. But not tomorrow.

4 April:

I have fallen in love. Apart from her physical appearance, which I can quickly rectify, Catherine is the perfect woman. Our dinner went exactly right, and afterwards...I cannot hope to describe it, so I must not try. This is simply the best evening of my life so far. I will go and put some little endearing touches on her new body. 6 April: Being in love had not slaked my thirst for revenge on the computer repairman. Fred, reluctantly leaving the Diana Rigg body he now considers his proper one, put on a child-woman body very like my erstwhile prison, only with a different face and voice. We simply pretended that the van had trouble, and stopped it near the man's house. Fred, girlish and dressed revealingly, lured him out to the van, tricked him into going inside -- and soon we had him neatly gagged, bound, and blindfolded. It took only a short while to transform him into a diseased, aging, alcoholic whore of about 40, with a brain too weak to plot against us even if he suspected that we were responsible for his metamorphosis. We drugged his new body and left it in a room in a cheap motel nearby. Very tidy, I must say. I left a few remote-controlled TV cameras behind to see what the repairman would do.

7 April:

Catherine says that she is "busy"; she is no more specific than that in refusing me another date. I love her so deeply...but I have a horrible feeling that my love is not reciprocated. The antics of the repairman are delightful. After a few screams upon awakening as a woman, he pulled himself together and made the best of things. Fred and I had left a little money and a few bottles of cheap gin in his room: I am not a cruel man. By evening he was plying the trade suitable to his body: a fast learner. His body is a slightly edited version of a whore I had scanned in the park: somehow, the body pattern seems to retain some of the knowledge and memories of its original. This would make impersonations much easier.

9 April:

Catherine is going out with another man. How can she betray me like this? How can the other man find her beautiful? He cannot change her body the way I can; he would be stuck with her as she is. I am uncertain of what to do. The campus could use another squirrel, certainly, but what then? A missing or additional whore or two does not matter, but I think that the repairman's disappearance is quite enough for now. Perhaps I could step into the shoes of Catherine's friend: would his body retain enough memories for an effective impersonation?

10 April:

A bit of investigation reveals that Brad, Catherine's boyfriend, is all but engaged to her. I have no choice: I must become him or lose the woman I love. Too distraught to think clearly, I have let Fred devise the plan.

11 April [in slightly different handwriting]:

I am now Brad, the original Brad now being one of those reddish fox squirrels (I have grown tired of all those grey squirrels on campus), living off popcorn in garbage cans and handouts from coeds who do not realize that a squirrel is simply a rat with a bushy tail. This diary is the only thing that connects me with my past life. As I had hoped, this body retains enough of Brad's memories and persona that I should have no trouble being him. The changes went well. Fred, though it pained me, assumed Catherine's form and lured Brad to our van. From then on it was all routine: a careful scan of Brad's body, transformation of Brad into a squirrel, transformation of myself into Brad, and a false Catherine and a false Brad releasing a false squirrel on the Quad before kissing each other good night. Fred can occasionally impersonate my former self until the end of the semester, when it can resign and quietly vanish. As Brad, I find that I am something of a scoundrel, and have been toying with Catherine though she is deeply in love with me. I have a little black book of girls who are willing to have sex: most unusual. Clearly this new self with Brad's body is a great improvement for Catherine: a man who really loves her, and can make her beautiful.

12 April:

A date with Catherine. She notices the change in Brad. We kiss deeply for a long time; I let my Brad-persona do the work. She offers sex: it's Puritanical of me, but I am shocked and have to hide behind my false self. I had blocked it out, but my Brad-memories clearly show that she has had sex with Brad enough times that he had lost count. Slut! But to stay in character I accept her offer. I enjoy the result, but she is disappointed at my performance: too much of me and not enough Brad for her. I am greatly disappointed in her, but still very much in love.

15 April:

No entries for a few days. Fred has completed my tax return and filed it; Brad had not even begun his before his squirrelhood, but though I am now he I have not bothered to complete it. By hours of mental effort I have been able to access Brad's memories, as stored in this brain, and the more I know the more disillusioned I grow with Catherine. Apparently her looks belie a huge sexual talent and appetite and diversity of taste that I find revolting. Brad found this titillating, and it seems that Catherine really did love him, but I cannot bear it. If I let my Brad-self take over, I could marry her, but I would be condemned to life as Brad with a woman who -- it is too disgusting. Now what? Having this brain seems to have sapped my native ingenuity. I have contacted Fred.

16 April:

Fred has come up with a plan. He assumed the form of a young woman and the clothes of a pizza delivery girl, and came to visit my Brad-self; the disguise was not really necessary, but Fred thinks of himself as Emma Peel and loves cloak-and-dagger work. Fred suggests that Brad commit suicide, leaving a note blaming Catherine for his plight; Catherine can then commit suicide out of sorrow. Of course, what will really happen is that first Brad's and later Catherine's body will be found, suitably poisoned or whatever, but that I will become my real self again and Catherine will be safe and sound in my laboratory. It is quite tidy and I agree to it at once; in my gratitude I even call Fred "Mrs. Peel," give his girl-face a chaste kiss, and do not object when he calls me "Steed."

18 April [back to the former handwriting]:

Myself again at last! The harder part of the plan is yet to come, but I feel confident of myself now that I have my original brain to think with, and very confident of Emma (as I now call Fred out of gratitude: he -- I mean she -- is very pleased with this). Everything went well. Still Brad, I went drinking, pretending to get drunk. After a few hours, I left a bar and collapsed in front of my van (it was suitably disguised), where Emma, now an Amazon of a woman, picked me up and took me to Brad's place. Once there, she all-but-carried a mindless, drunken, and poisoned Brad body into his apartment, along with a suicide note I had written, arranged them artistically, and left. In a few hours I was back in my usual form, and Emma was back in her Diana Rigg body. This settles Brad nicely. Now for that slut Catherine...

19 April:

Catherine is distraught, according to what I can tell from the little TV cameras I planted in her apartment when I was Brad. Good. She is not in a mood to see anyone, which is even better: Emma and I had not hoped for such luck. We are almost ready to strike.

20 April:

Catherine is safe and sound in the laboratory, in an artificially- induced sleep. The operation went rather well, I think. We had diverted all her phone calls, with Emma, suitably Catherine-bodied, answering them all and warning off all friends and relatives (just to make certain). Meanwhile I did some visiting and scanned a few of her woman friends. Emma and I became two of the stronger-looking ones, much as I hate being female, and we got into a copy of the car owned by my original and drove to her apartment, a mindless Catherine-body in the trunk. We were most welcome to Catherine in our friendly bodies, and we even convinced her to come down to my car for a ride. After that it was simplicity itself to substitute the false Catherine for the real one and fake the suicide. I'm not certain if the note that Emma wrote while she was Catherine will pass muster, but we can hope.

22 April:

What to do with Catherine? Probably I should have just left her alone after Brad's "suicide." (The lone fox squirrel is doing very nicely, by the way -- quite as well as what is now my cat.) At any rate, I am now stuck with a woman I no longer love and who never really loved me. The sentimental side of me is leaning towards making her into a female fox squirrel; the nastier side, an old hag. The police seem to be quite unaware of anything out of the ordinary.

23 April:

I finally decided what to do with Catherine. I had cobbled together the body of a toothless, senile, incontinent old hag, ready for the nursing home, but unfortunately I am sentimental: I looked at Catherine's unconscious form, and knew that I could not do that to her. I considered rousing her and explaining the situation: "As far as anyone knows, you're dead. Brad killed himself. I can change you into anyone you like, whenever you like. Can you love me?" But it never would have worked: within a week she would have wanted menage a' trois with Fred -- I mean Emma -- there, and inside of a month she would have been trying every possible form of sex in every possible body. Nympomaniacal slut. Then I had an idea. Emma, changed for the day into Linda Thorson as Tara King (I humored her and called her "Tara"; she insisted on wearing a wig even though she could have had any hair she liked), was very helpful. We designed the ultimate super-normal stimulus: long platinum-blonde hair, ice-blue eyes, 40"-20"-40" figure, incredible face, firm limbs, perfect skin: not my type at all, but the stereotypical Beautiful Woman writ large. The brain we designed to support an IQ of about 85: if she acted like a mindless bed-hopper, she should be one. The metamorphosis went quickly and smoothly. Tara designed and became an intelligent version of the blonde, and checked into another cheap motel; after nightfall I brought the new Catherine there. I forsee a great career for her as a whore, and perhaps a porno star. Let's see how she handles the change.

24 April:

The changed Catherine, as seen through our usual concealed TV cameras, is very much confused: as with the computer repairman (I saw him soliciting downtown: he's found his niche), the loss of identity is a big shock. But the repairman had appropriate memories in his new brain; Catherine has only her own, dimmed by a greatly reduced capacity for thought. After a few hours she left the motel; I think she is visiting her old haunts. Will she try to convince her friends that she is Catherine? Will she suspect me of a hand in her metamorphosis? I hope that it will not be necessary to make a squirrel of her as well.

25 April:

I was working alone, and the woman of my dreams -- dark-haired, pale, slender, intelligent expression on an exquisite droll face -- walked into the lab. She looked at me, eyes brimming with desire, and said, "I love you." Of course it was Emma. I fought back my own desires and turned on her with rage: "How dare you mock me by becoming such a woman? Go back to your usual form at once!" She broke down in tears and crushed herself against me, sobbing, "But I really do love you, and I'm not like that horrid Catherine. Please..." My resolve broke and I consoled her. But I am a cynical man of science nevertheless, and I noticed a few things about Emma's body. She redesigned the body that Catherine was to have worn, attuning it exactly to me: the pheromones it secretes, the size and shape of its mouth, the pitch and timbre of its voice, the contours of its figure, and no doubt its sex organs -- all designed expressly to arouse my senses, to fit against my body. Changing myself would be useless, because Emma could simply make a few alterations to herself, tit for tat. I explained to Emma that I could hardly love a creature I had assembled out of corpses: she snuggled against me and laughed (exactly the laugh I find most attractive, curse her!), "Does this feel like a corpse?" All afternoon she flirted delightfully, and very much against my wishes I found myself feeling more and more affection for her. How did Emma learn to become so completely feminine?

26 April:

A remarkable day. Emma remains as my dream-woman. She must have fine-tuned and greatly increased the levels of her pheromones during the night, because all day she gave off an enticing aroma which stirred my lustful instincts. I also caught her tinkering with equipment in her quarters (now a charmingly tidy, feminine place, unlike the lair it had been for Gronk or the grad-student room of Fred): I guessed that she had found a way to scan, edit, and alter personalities as well as bodies, and is transmuting hers into one that I cannot hope to resist. I should have kept her under tighter discipline when she was Fred. Early in the afternoon, the transformed Catherine showed up. Apparently we had not made her new brain weak enough, and she had guessed my complicity in her metamorphosis. Of course I invited her in. In her dumb-blonde voice, fighting by sheer will the limitations of her altered brain, she made her accusations: accurate and fairly complete. Fortunately, the deductions had taken all her brain-power, because she had stupidly come alone, and actually expected me to restore her and Brad (how happy she was to hear me say that Brad was alive! Of course, his squirrelhood has no doubt damaged his mind irretrievably) out of the goodness of my heart! I suppressed my laughter, tranquilized her with a dart from a handy little dart-gun, and called on Emma. Emma's new device is indeed for alteration of memory and personality. I praised her initiative, and showed her Catherine. Emma immediately started editing a persona she had been toying with: that of a vain, stupid woman, its memories a patchwork of those of several women she had scanned. A few minutes in Emma's room with a metal cap on Catherine's head ("It looks like something out of a cheap horror movie, but it works," said Emma) replaced every last incriminating memory. Yet another cheap motel, yet another change of Emma's body into a copy of Catherine's... this is getting repetitive, and we are fast running out of motels nearby. I trust that we are rid of Catherine at last.

27 April:

Emma continues to make little changes in her body and persona, observing my reactions and adjusting herself accordingly. She is set on being my wife. She has scanned several hundred personable women, choosing attractive aspects from various selves and making them part of her own. Should I submit? Emma grows more exquisite every day. Very little of Fred remains in her, apart from Fred's raw intellect -- and I suspect her of enhancing that artificially as well. I checked our archive of body tapes, and every last scan or design that incorporates part of Fred's body is gone: erased, the label removed, the tape usually reused. But there is still in me a deep revulsion for her: she was once a number of graduate students, all male apart from one who contributed part of her brain, whom I incited to suicide and harvested bits and pieces from. Could I love that? And what if her persona shifts radically and she becomes a man again? Unlikely? I fear that I am beginning to love her. No, not beginning to...I love her madly, despite my disgust.

28 April:

I have capitulated. Emma came into the lab this morning, reeking of enticing pheromones, wearing a simple blue dress, unspoken love radiating from her face. My heart melted and in seconds we were kissing passionately. The next thing that I can remember with perfect clarity is being in my bed, Emma at my side, both of us quite exhausted: it was well into the afternoon. We must concoct an identity for Emma. Her knowledge of computers should help in altering the appropriate databases. Once she has an official self, we can be married.

30 April:

We have done no work at all in the past few days. Emma is everything I could desire in a woman. She has some wonderful ideas for a honeymoon, involving portable metamorphosis-equipment in motel rooms, frequent changes of form for both of us, and a trail of delightful mischief across half a dozen states. Late yesterday afternoon she altered her hair, complexion, and eyes, becoming a green-eyed, pale-skinned redhead, but otherwise unchanged: stunningly pretty.

2 May:

Great fun yesterday. Emma spent the morning breaking into various computer systems, altering databases to create her new identity. I tinkered with viruses in the lab. I think that it should be possible to alter a rhinovirus (such as causes the common cold) to carry and deliver some most interesting genetic information. After lunch, Emma came in, changed into a delicate black woman of great beauty, with cornrowed hair and a frilly white dress. I became a well-muscled young black man, and we enjoyed a romantic afternoon and evening in town. It was especially amusing to go to a sleazy nightclub and see a stunning blonde stripper: Catherine! Emma giggled deliciously and I roared with laughter as the altered Catherine disrobed, rather clumsily I thought; the bouncers looked at us strangely, but one does not interfere with the sort of man I was. As we left for home, a drunken man took me to task for laughing at Catherine, calling me "nigger." We had been black for all of twelve hours, but I brook no insults. Because there was nobody else in sight at the moment, I made short work of him, and we trussed him up and took him home. Late this morning he awakened as a pleasant if slightly overweight black woman of forty or so. Enough of these alterations could end racial unrest forever. I think that we have run out of cheap local motels, however.

3 May:

Emma has finished creating her new identity, at least as far as computer records go. She has a driver's license, Social Security number, excellent credit history, academic record showing a B. A. at a large but respected public university, and so forth. Forging and inserting paper documents will take more time, but she now has an official existence. I think that a civil ceremony will do quite nicely: just a quiet little affair with the minimum of fuss. Emma, clever woman that she is, has acquired an excellent understanding of genetic engineering by scanning the mind of a young woman doing research at the University. She simply inserted the copied knowledge into her own brain. I hope that Emma's mind is able to take such shocks: I myself would find it difficult to endure the degree of mental alteration that she has undergone in order to become her magnificent self.

4 May:

Darling Emma is a very great help. Together we decided on a new goal for our research: viruses that spread metamorphic disease. Emma agrees that by an extension of our work on metamorphosis, we can engineer viruses that cause their hosts to undergo drastic changes of body. A modified cold virus, spread in the usual way, could be designed to do the following: cause a week or two of cold symptoms, appear to be gone, but over the period of a month force its host's body to acquire whatever form it encodes. The metamorphosis might vary from a change of hair color to an entire remodeling of the body, from the skeleton out. Thus we should be able to infect as much as we like of the human race with a virus that changes people into copies, say, of a particular young woman. Or why not a mass change of race somewhere? I don't mind being a power for good as long as I can wield power. This is going to take time. Meanwhile I have some scores to settle with the university's president and certain members of the faculty. Emma and I have only some rudimentary plans, but...

6 May:

Not bad for an impromptu caper! Yesterday I hid in the bathroom of the Administration building on campus, impersonating the President. The real President came down; he refuses to use his private loo because he does not want to be thought an elitist. It was a simple matter to substitute myself for him, leaving the real President to be picked up by a sturdy young woman janitor (a male janitor would have been less conspicuous, but I cannot bear the thought of darling Emma as a man; it might also damage her still-delicate persona). Emma took him back to the lab and altered his persona heavily; it would have been easier if he had had latent homosexual tendencies to begin with, but she seems to have done an excellent job. Another substitution in the bathroom, late in the afternoon, finished the job. Today the President joined the Gay Students Group in their protest march. Emma and I, ourselves for once, watched as he carried a sign in one hand and playfully caressed the GSG treasurer with the other. Most amusing. Later came a statement to the press: everything we could have hoped for. I doubt that he will have his job tomorrow.

7 May:

A miscalculation. Apart from the President's wife, who is distraught, nobody seems to mind the President's confessions of homosexuality. They are all too busy praising his nerve and honesty and all that; he has been offered the Presidency of a more-prestigious school. This is a poor sort of revenge; worse, his charming wife, for whose sake I tolerated the old jackass for so long, is the only one wronged. Perhaps I can make a fine young coed of her and give her another chance in life. Emma has designed a lovely body for her.

9 May:

Very busy. The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was our next target, and the result seems more promising. This time Emma, wearing her body and carrying her house key (easier to copy than living flesh), walked into the old lady's house late at night, used a bit of anesthetic gas to ensure a sound sleep, carried her into her own dowdy car...very tidy, especially because she has an attached garage with a garage-door opener. A few discreet bugs around her office show that the Dean is already chasing the younger men on her staff. Even it this never erupts into a scandal, it is most gratifying. Out of curiosity I dallied a bit with Emma while she still wore the Dean's shape: quite disgusting; even when Emma used all of her considerable charms, sex was out of the question. Good progress on the viruses. A few small-scale experiments in a day or so? Still unsure of how to change Jane, the President's wife, into a pretty coed. The metamorphosis is the least of the problems, of course. Can she keep her mouth shut? I don't want to alter her persona or memories: will she acquiesce in her new state? Another faked suicide, too...entirely too many suicides on campus. Perhaps she could "die" of a brain hemorrhage?

11 May:

We went ahead and changed the President's wife. Jane worked for the data processing department: I scanned her as she left her car; Emma made a ready-to-die copy of the body, and put it in the janitor's closet in the proper bathroom. It was a simple matter of anesthetizing Jane, putting her in a trash can, leaving the false body to die in a bathroom stall, and taking home the real one. We arranged a false identity for Jane: a transfer student, about to start the summer term but hanging about for a month beforehand in order to get oriented. We gave her her own apartment, a car, a nicely-stocked bank account, a scholarship and a low-interest student loan. This morning she awoke as an enchanting green-eyed blonde; on her nightstand was a long letter explaining her situation. After some bewilderment and fright she read the letter, which calmed her greatly. In minutes she was posing at the mirror, stroking her thighs and breasts, delighted with her fine new body.

12 May:

Jane dropped by. I pretended not to know her, but she said, "I know you won't admit you're behind this, but I just want to thank you for making me who I am today." She gave me a hug and a chaste kiss, and promptly left. Life would be so much easier if only people would be content with being who I make them. Emma and I infected a cat with a blood-borne virus intended to change it into a rare type of Siamese. This could be a tidy little business: infect stray animals and sell them at a premium once they have changed. It should take a few days to see whether it really works; after that we can go on to humans. We are applying for a marriage license. I think that the honeymoon can wait fow a few weeks.

14 May:

The cat is showing definite signs of metamorphosis. It will take a good while for its coat to grow out: not really a practical method. Still, the prospect of being able to transform thousands or millions of people by simply releasing a virus... A young man has come forward and accused the Dean whose sexual appetites we augmented of forcing him to have sex with her at gunpoint. Emma and I laughed ourselves silly. Emma and I will be married tomorrow. Just a quiet little civil ceremony. She is making her bridal gown now.

17 May:

A lovely wedding. Emma made a charming bride. After that, home and a lot of sex. Not much to say: Emma is in every way the woman of my dreams, and I am overjoyed that she is my wife. I have built a virus that causes its host to become a young, female version of itself. It is spread by sexual contact or injection into the bloodstream. Using the latter method, Emma and I, disguised as beautiful blonde twins, infected half a dozen sexually-active men in a city several hundred miles from here. Even with a temporary alteration of my personality to make myself feminine, I found it even more unpleasant than usual to be a woman. A prompt return to normal and a marathon of sex with Emma soon made me feel much better. In several weeks we should see profound changes in our subjects, and in a few months the epidemic of womanhood should be well under way. Time to go on a honeymoon while we wait for results.

19 May:

Getting things ready for the honeymoon. I think that we can set up a decent laboratory in the van in case we want to do a bit of tinkering with viruses, and Emma is working on a miniature machine for metamorphosis: small enough to fit in a few large suitcases. The only difficulties I see are in disguising the van in case of trouble, and covering our tracks when we do metamorphoses in motel rooms. But Emma and I could both do with a little excitement, and I am confident that we can escape from the police or even, if necessary, from prison.

21 May:

I have covered the van with a thin shell full of embedded electrodes; at different levels of electric field, the shell changes color from black to red to the successive colors of the spectrum to white. Also we have a stock of false license plates and driver's licenses, which should prepare us for most contingencies.

22 May:

Emma has had a brilliant idea: a car is so much simpler than a human or even an animal body. Why not store the patterns of assorted cars and trucks, and have our van metamorphose as well? This will mean delaying our honeymoon for some days, but we should be much safer: in a matter of a few minutes we will be able to change from a young couple in a Porsche to a pair of grandparents in a dowdy Cadillac. That leaves only the problem of where to change the car.

25 May:

No entries for a good while: Emma and I have been very busy. A few days ago she assumed a pudgy, plain-faced body and a dull demeanor, hoping that such a guise would keep my mind off her and on our work. It helped somewhat, but her delectable self kept slipping out and inciting me to lust. I think that we have everything working properly: our car can change in under five minutes, and it can perform a metamorphosis (much more slowly) on anyone sitting in it. Some hyperspatial trickery provides a place to stow our equipment and some extra mass (can't make a VW Beetle that weighs as much as a panel truck, or vice versa, so that this is essential).

26 May:

I awoke this morning to find Emma her beautiful self again. But I felt very strange. Something had happened to my mind: my thoughts had become sharper, clearer, faster...I had also acquired a vast body of mathematical knowledge that I had no memory of having learned. Suddenly it struck me that Emma had altered my brain and mind as I slept. I stared accusingly at her; she took my head in her delicate hands and pressed it to her bosom. "Now you have a really adorable mind," she said, stroking and kissing my hair. Incredible ideas course through my head. Everything I do seems strangely easy. I keep seizing Emma and giving her passionate kisses, from a mixture of extreme gratitude and voracious love.

27 May:

Tomorrow we leave at last! I have a little surprise for Emma, who is annoyed that we can't take much along: a little hyperspatial portal that provides a doorway from its location back to the lab. This is also a useful way of escape: we can step through the portal, vanish, and have the car self-destruct. Very tidy, and I owe it all to Emma's reworking of my mind.

29 May:

A wonderful honeymoon so far. Emma became a 18-year-old blonde bimbo with a superficially stupid persona, I became a twenty-ish, muscular lout, we made a Ferrari of our van, and off we went. The hyperspatial compartments are very handy when you're driving something with as little luggage space as a Ferrari. We scanned a few pretty girls at the gas stations (a Ferrari uses a great deal of fuel), and finally stopped at a motel for the night. The ugly girl behind the desk was most gracious, and so we decided to give her a little present: a lovely new body complete with driver's license, well-stocked bank account (Emma fiddled a few computers), birth certificate, college diploma with knowledge to match it, a talent for being seductive, the lot. Just as she was about to leave for the day, she disappeared, Emma assumed the form that we planned to give her, checked into the motel...the rest was easy. Of course we left her the same sort of explanatory letter we had given to Jane, the wife of the president of the University, when we made her into a delectable coed. I hope that the girl enjoys herself. We rose late. The police were around; somebody had already reported the desk clerk as missing. We saw her leave her room, resplendent in her fashion-model flesh; the police asked her if she had seen her former self, and she had the sense to say that she hadn't. Gratifying. But in general it's so much more difficult and less amusing to do things that people find pleasant: making a cat of someone takes minutes, but making a beauty of an ugly but gracious girl took most of the night. In the afternoon we drove to the desolate end of a nearby lake, changed the Ferrari into a 4x4 and ourselves into sturdy outdoor folk not allergic to mosquito bites. We rigged up a device that sucks up minnows and turns them into grayling, a rare and exquisitely beautiful fish extinct over much of its formerly wide range. These grayling are extraordinary: far more tolerant of dirty water and low oxygen levels than natural grayling, and capable of spawning several times a season. I predict an ecological disaster wherever they are introduced, and thousands of ecologists and other idiots writing foolish papers about super-grayling. We camped overnight by the lake, the grayling-maker churning out many thousands of the lovely fish overnight. Emma remained the tomboyish redhead she had become the afternoon before, and we had great fun in the double sleeping bag. Emma wants to increase the number of Elvis sightings in the world. I agree that this is an admirable goal. We changed our vehicle into a van and went into a nearby town; as luck would have it, we happened upon the town drunkard, who begged us for "a buck or two for a sandwich." We offered him a bottle of whiskey instead, and thereby lured him into the back of the van...apart from his stench, he gave no trouble, and we en-Elvised him, using a body and persona that Emma had expressly (exPresley?) designed to be as realistic as possible, down to the fingerprints. We dropped the new Elvis off a few miles out of town, changed the van into a 4x4 again out of prudence, and drove on. As luck would have it, we soon spotted a hitchhiker, a ragged young lady...it was a temptation we could not resist. Even before our truck was moving, we had her unconscious, in the space behind the seats. After scanning her (not a bad body, and a cute little face), we changed her into another Elvis. Fifty miles further on we left this second Elvis, still unconscious, in a ditch by the road. Emma and I had taken a fancy to the hitchhiker's body, so we changed Emma into the girl and checked in early at a motel. I created some pretty clothes as she showered. The rest of this evening promises to be delightful.

31 May:

Emma has a way of bringing out the best in any body she wears, and she outdid herself last night. Up late again, we had breakfast, made an Elvis of a man who was trimming the hedges, and drove off without paying the motel bill. Good luck to the police, I thought. We found a sheltered spot amongst trees, and became an attractive young black couple in a Mercedes. Not a moment too soon, either: the local sheriff drove past in a great hurry just as we regained the main road. Hitherto we have kept clear of the police by careful planning, careful execution of plans, and avoidance of needless risks: it was quite foolish not to pay the bill, considering that I am remarkably wealthy. Yet the thrill of it all! Presently a deputy's car stopped us, and two deputies, one a muscular but attractive woman, got out and asked us if we had seen our previous selves. Emma and I, thinking as one, had them unconscious in a moment, scanned them, turned them into gophers and ourselves into them, superficial personae and all. Emma, now Billie Sue, asked me in her lush new voice about our car: what should we do? I showed her a remarkable feature of it: it can transform itself into a nondescript little box that fits into a shirt pocket. Deputy Jim Nurke pocketed the little box, and he and Deputy Billie Sue Billings got into their patrol car and drove off. We spent the day as the deputies, living their lives rather as they would have done. The people we have become are married but not to each other, and they were not having an affair -- until today. A spot of lovemaking in the back seat early in the afternoon was very pleasant, but we had to part and go home to our families. Perhaps we can stay this way for a while. As Jim, I am married to a pretty but shrewish woman named Crystal; we have four nasty little brats who would make excellent piglets, I think. Crystal, it appears, periodically and baselessly (until today) accuses Jim of infidelity; she herself appears to be a nymphomaniac. Tonight should be most interesting.

1 June:

Crystal would not let me go to sleep until we had had sex, sex accompanied by a few rough blows she demanded from me, sex criticized in detail after the fact. A horrid, perverse woman: I am trying to think of an appropriate revenge. After a heavy breakfast of badly-prepared biscuits and gravy, I joined Billie Sue at the patrol car and we started to drive about. Emma's expression appeared on her face and Emma's tones crept into her voice as she told me of her husband Joe: a wimp whom she had no difficulty in denying sex. She laughed over my troubles with Crystal, and told me that she didn't mind that I had to have sex with her to stay in character. Apart from my problems with Crystal, it is great fun being who we are. One of the Elvises we had made turned up, and, suppressing our laughter, we questioned him and held him until the state mental hospital sent somebody to take charge of him. Won't they be amazed when they find that he has Elvis' fingerprints? More backseat sex with Billie Sue: very nice indeed. We also indulged in a little police brutality: if we get into too much trouble, we can always change selves again.

4 June:

Too busy being Jim for any entries. My brats are being quite nasty: I have beaten them a few times for misbehavior, which was satisfying but resulted in Crystal demanding the same treatment before sex. Billie Sue and I have been called on the carpet by the sheriff, who at length decided to suspend us beginning tomorrow. I think that he doesn't approve of our physical approach to law enforcement. Time to move on. We have a little surprise planned for our families this evening.

5 June:

I will miss Billie Sue, but of course we have her pattern on tape and Emma can always put her on. Yesterday evening I took Crystal and the brats for a ride. We stopped at a lonely spot in the country, and I anesthetized them all with my little dart gun. Billie Sue and an unconscious Joe showed up a few moments later. I took out that little box, put it out the ground, and changed it back into our car. What to do with these people? More disappearances would cause too much of a stir. Eventually we decided to swap their bodies around a little: Crystal's body with Joe's, and my two girl brats with my two boy brats. We had our last sex as Jim and Billie Sue, then changed ourselves into the black couple with the Mercedes, and drove fifty miles and slept in a motel. We relaxed today. It is a great strain wearing someone else's persona over your own, unlike wearing an unfamiliar body. We did manage to make an Elvis of a passing jogger.

6 June:

5 Another relaxing day. I thought I heard the motel maid mutter "niggers" at us under her breath. A potential Elvis, I think, or perhaps she deserves worse: animalhood or planthood, yes? We strolled about the town trying to decide what to do next. Being sheriff's deputies was fun, but we hadn't had very much power, and got into trouble merely for handling a few suspects roughly. Emma suggests that we find some prominent couple, rich and powerful, and replace them with ourselves. With care we can cause a vast amount of amusing trouble for which they will be blamed; we can keep the originals in suspended animation and revive them so that they, not us, will have to account for our mischief.

7 June:

Very early in the morning we got up, checked out of the motel, and altered the car and ourselves. We had grown rather fond of our black bodies, but decided that a change of race was in order: we became white again, an ordinary thirtyish couple. A bit risky, perhaps, to change in a parking lot, but our infrared detectors showed nobody nearby. I wanted to wait for the maid, to wreak some nasty metamorphosis on her, but Emma wanted to put a plan of hers into action. I was about to argue when I remembered the hyperspatial portal I had made, the one that provides a gateway from its location back to our lab. She was quite pleased with it, and gratified to learn that it was the fruit of her alteration of my mind. With it she could use our lab while I used the car. This city is the state capital. I had a pretty good idea of what Emma had in mind when she had me drop her off at the Capitol building after an early breakfast. Meanwhile I drove back to the motel and waited for the maid to show up for work. It was quite easy to render her unconscious and put her into a little hyperspatial bag that, folded up, fitted neatly into my pocket. Back in the van, I changed her into a fully functional hermaphrodite dressed in unisex clothing. Won't she be surprised when she wakes up! A phone call on the mobile phone. An old lady, the Governor's secretary, said that she has made an appointment with the Governor in the afternoon for her niece, "a lovely young blonde." I thanked her for letting me know. Of course the secretary was Emma wearing the old bitch's form, and the appointment a way of letting me replace the Governor. I cursed inwardly at having to be a woman, but I showed up at the Governor's office a few minutes early, in a striking young female body with long golden hair, playing the part to the hilt. Emma fought back her laughter until tears came to her old-crone eyes: her amusement made my degradation almost worthwhile. When she recovered, we went into the Governor's office together, and she introduced me as her niece Laura. The man, though a politician, was stunned speechless by my beauty, giving us plenty of time to anesthetize him. Emma opened the portal back to the lab, where I scanned the Governor, assumed his form, and left him in suspended animation next to his real secretary. Boring government business, appointments, and so on for a few hours: I did nothing unusual. Emma and I stayed late, Emma changing into a female janitor and leaving the real secretary asleep on the office couch. Then I went to the governor's mansion by chaffeured car and had dinner with my wife: very pretty for a fortyish lady, but prone to nag and rather a fool. Imagine my relief when I saw Emma's unique and unmistakable expression on the face of our cook. Of course I promptly steered my wife upstairs to our bedroom, rendered her unconscious, went down and brought back the cook...within half an hour Emma was my wife. A fine body, really, and I look forward to the rest of this evening.

8 June:

Well, the fun began today. Emma really made the most of her body last night and early this morning. Then we demanded a lavish breakfast of our cook, though she was still stunned after missing a few hours of her life yesterday. I went to the office, vetoed a few bills that the real Governor would have signed without a thought (the looks of horror on the faces of my aides!), insulted a few legislators, and accepted a bribe. Then a speaking engagement, accompanied by my wife, at lunch. Emma had taken her prim political-wife body to the sleazier sex shops in town, in a chaffeured car, no less, and bought quite a collection of kinky goods, taking one of the Governor's credit cards to the limit. So much for his anti-porn campaign. We showed up at the luncheon: a meeting of an environmental organization. I had helped myself to the contents of the whiskey decanter in my office, and was a bit drunk. I could not resist the chance of a bit of fun, and threw away the fruit of the speechwriter's toil and spoke impromptu. I went into rhapsodies about strip-mining and unrestricted hunting seasons and tax breaks to promote the chemical industry within the state and atomic waste dumps. After the initial shock I was roundly booed; Emma came up to the platform, bless her, and announced that she proposed to start and take charge of a voluntary effort to educate children about the joys of littering and water pollution. Soon the audience began to throw food at us, which we deftly dodged as we ran from the platform, laughing. After that Emma and I went to my office and ordered pizza, which we ate while I conducted state business. A group of Japanese businessmen arrived; the Governor had been trying to cajole them into building a large factory in the state. I was rude, flippant, did my best to make them lose face, took breaks from our conversation in order to feel up Emma's cute if aging body (the memories of my body record an affair in progress: why? Probably the persona of the Governor's real wife), and ruined months of flattery and diplomacy in an hour. After that one of my senior aides came into the office to complain about my recent actions. Emma inobtrusively altered his persona so that he would accept my orders blindly; we repeated this for my secretary and several other aides and assistants. My mistress, Tiffany, called. Emma and I will visit her tonight. I think her form will look exquisite on Emma. These entries grow too verbose. Having a politician's brain doesn't help.

10 June:

A lovely evening. Emma and I went to see Tiffany: a fine young wench, rather stupid-looking. What with the hyperspatial link back to the lab, it wasn't long before Emma was she. We had a night out on the town, kissing passionately in public, bringing the affair into the open. Around two this morning we went to her apartment and slept together in both senses of the term. Later in the morning Emma reluctantly became my wife again. We decided to keep the real Tiffany in suspended animation for a while; Emma can become her again when necessary. Off to the office again. All the important members of my staff now do exactly as I tell them, so that I dictate insulting letters, veto bills, make absurd proclamations (next week is Zoophily Week in this state, by the way), and so forth, and nobody near me complains, although the reporters are about to put my office under siege. Emma spoke at a luncheon meeting of professional women. She made a tape-recording of her speech: hilarious. She told them that they had no business having careers, that they should all stay home and keep house and produce babies, that they were undermining civilization and adding to human misery for the sake of useless ambition -- all beautifully sarcastic and vicious. A few of the weaker sisters wept, but most of the women present were justifiably enraged and literally chased her out. Then, at an afternoon meeting of an upper-crust group of matrons, she gave a panegyric on the joys of perverted sex. The lieutenant-governor is becoming a nuisance. We must do something about him, preferably something nasty. Emma is starting to work on viruses again, changing into a fresh body at night and taking the hyperspatial link into our lab. I think I'll join her.

12 June:

Busy. The press is getting very hostile. I held a press conference yesterday, at which I began by calling the reporters crazed hyenas and went on to somewhat more picturesque terms involving the habits of their parents. Not well received. I pardoned several recently-convicted state officials, as well as several dangerous criminals. There is talk of impeachment. This afternoon I opened a juvenile detention center. I noted in my speech that it could become an excellent source of high-grade meat for the poorer citizens of the state, and suggested wider use of the death penalty, with the remains being earmarked for human consumption. Emma assumed the blonde-bimbo shape I had worn on my first visit to what is now my office. The lieutenant governor has an eye for the trim ankle, so that it was easy for her to ensnare him and take him to our lab, where Emma changed him into Tiffany and Tiffany into him. That should keep them both busy for a while. Also she gave the attorney general an overriding, obsessive penchant for young boys. At night we go to our lab and become our real selves, work hard on the metamorphic viruses, and at dawn become the Governor and his wife again. There are reports of a strange sexually-transmitted disease that causes its sufferers to change into young women: one of our prototype viruses! Most gratifying.

15 June:

At last I am safe and sound and can write about the last few days. I went to the office as usual on the 13th, to be met by a group of doctors and orderlies from the state mental hospital. Really I had thought that they would give me another week or so of fun before they tried this, and I must admit that I was unprepared. Emma had the car and the link back to the lab, so that I had no means of escape: the few miniature anesthetic darts I carried would not have been enough to stop all of my captors. I went quietly and behaved rationally and as much like the Governor as possible, hoping that they would let me go. No such luck. I gently but repeatedly protested that I was quite sane; nevertheless I found myself under moderate sedation, not yet at the state hospital, but in the mental ward of the most luxurious hospital in town. The next day I bided my time, talking affably with psychiatrists. Apparently the Governor's political party wished to be spared the shame of a demented Governor, and had acted quickly to avoid something worse than what had happened in a certain Southwestern state not long ago. Finally, late in the afternoon, another psychiatrist showed up and spoke with me alone. She was a pleasant young woman. After about ten minutes her posture and manner and expression suddenly changed into Emma's! She took the hyperspatial portal from her lab-coat pocket, activated it, went into our lab, and took out the real Governor, dressed in clothes just like mine and heavily sedated. I went through the portal into the lab, where I was not surprised to see the original of the lady psychiatrist. I became myself but was too perturbed to get much work done. After a few hours Emma, still in the psychiatrist's body, led me out into a hotel room. We made love, had a room-service dinner, watched stupid programs on TV, made love again (a darling body which I will have her wear again), and went to sleep. Early this morning we assumed nondescript new forms, left the psychiatrist and the Governor's wife together in the double bed, and drove our car out of the hotel's garage. We plan to stay around for a few days and enjoy the fun. According to the nastiest of the local tabloids, the Governor is deranged, as is the lieutenant governor (he insists he is really the governor's mistress trapped in the wrong body), the governor's wife is having a lesbian affair with a rising young psychiatrist -- all very juicy and gratifying. But already we were too far from the action. Emma dashed off, promising to meet me in a few hours; sure enough, she returned as a vivacious woman reporter from a local paper. Using the equipment in the car I became one of her (male, fortunately) colleagues; they are having an affair already, which makes things easier for us.

17 June:

Being a reporter is hard work but great fun when you're covering a story like this one. I had an exclusive interview with a person who is supposedly the Governor's mistress Tiffany, but really the Lieutenant Governor wearing her body. He has already integrated himself with the residual Tiffany-persona of the body, and is fast becoming an intelligent, well-adjusted young woman: this is gratifying and very funny. She gave a lurid, largely invented account of their affair, and has tentatively hired me as ghostwriter for her memoirs, which should sell like hotcakes. She professed amazement that the Lieutenant Governor could be so insane as to claim to be her. Emma interviewed the Governor's wife, savoring every bit of the irony. The woman is remarkably quick on the uptake: she claims that her strange behavior was in accordance with her husband's wishes, so that she did it out of love! Such disloyalty masquerading as loyalty revolts us both: Emma wanted to change her into something quite hideous, but I pointed out that we have done enough mischief already, much as the woman deserves such punishment. Emma and I are living together at her apartment: the woman she is wearing has admirable taste in decor, food, and drink. My wife calls me at the office, but my secretary has shielded me quite well so far.

18 June:

I interviewed the attorney-general, who was quite confused with the turn of events and no doubt distracted by the obsessive desire we had planted in him. I concluded the interview by asking him if there was any truth to the rumors of his pederasty. To my amazement he broke down and confessed it all to me, giving me permission to publish everything. Like a weakling I was moved to pity, and had Emma impersonate his secretary and expunge the desire from his self. I really must avoid such sentimentality in the future. My wife came to my office, having learned of my affair with Emma. Fortunately Emma left me the link to the lab, and I somehow got my wife into a closet, into the lab, and under a persona-alterer. She now does my will without question. A stopgap measure, and inelegant, but the amalgam of Emma with Julia (the reporter whose form she wears) is delightful and we want at least another few days together as we are. Out of sheer spite I am having my wife dress as a housemaid and wait on Emma and me in Julia's apartment; as I write, I am in bed, Emma murmuring endearments in her Julia-voice and caressing me with her slender Julia-hands, while my wife cleans the rest of the apartment. Good vicious fun.

20 June:

Everything is settling down. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor (the Governor's mistress still hasn't the sense to realize that if she's trapped in the Lieutenant Governor's body, she should try to behave like the man) are simply considered insane, the Governor's wife says that she was just humoring her husband, the aides still act a bit like zombies but nobody notices, and Emma and I are beginning to get bored. The scandal generates little new news, so that we are back to reporting the routine. Commendations from our employers are gratifying, sex is great in the bodies we have assumed, and my now-docile wife waits on us hand and foot: pleasant but dull. Time to move on.

21 June:

Emma became the Governor's cook again, and with a little clever use of the hyperspatial link back to our lab, we swapped the forms of my wife and the Governor's. Not a really satisfying solution; so much time wearing other people's personae as well as their bodies has dulled our minds. We left our originals together in bed, and for a change Emma became a pretty but matronly woman of about thirty and I became a boy of eight. We unfolded our vehicle from its little hyperspatial box and made it into a station wagon. Being an innocent-looking little child is really quite pleasant, although sex will of course be out of the question. The motel is letting me stay for free: another little advantage. I have an idea...

22 June:

We started another impersonation today. Emma and I, with only a vague plan, bought supplies for a picnic, changed the station wagon into a van, and went to a local park. We had quite a large amount of junk food, and Emma invited some of the children in the park to join us. With great skill she culled them down after some minutes to a brother and sister, thirteen and twelve respectively. They helped us clean up the mess afterwards, and I felt just a slight pang of regret when we lured them into the van...Finding a place to compress the van was our only difficulty; with their originals in suspended animation in the lab, Jennifer and Jason, ourselves in their forms and the van and the hyperspatial link in their pockets, walked home, said hello to their mother, and proceeded to their well-furnished treehouse. They are both rather well-developed for their ages, and I suppose that it doesn't really count as incest because the selves in their bodies are really husband and wife. It seems that we are well-behaved children though our parents give us very little supervision. Many of our peers and even playmates cordially dislike us. Our originals deserve to have their enemies put down a little, and of course if we are living their lives their enemies are ours. Our parents are amazed that we didn't want to watch TV tonight. We spent some time together in my bedroom, talking and feeling each other up.

24 June:

As brother and sister we can spend a lot of time together, but of course we can show no intimacy in public. Emma's persona, even though largely masked with Jennifer's, makes her unformed body most delectable. Nocturnal traffic between our bedrooms is out of the question, and we make do with brief but passionate encounters in the treehouse. It is also hard to get work done when we aren't in the mood to be children. We need a place to hide the hyperspatial portal, which must remain open as we work. At night our parents, light sleepers both, come into our bedrooms and check on us, perhaps out of guilt for supervising us so little during the day; being absent would require some explanation. I fear that we will have to tamper with their minds: no doubt wearing the body of their son makes me sentimental and therefore reluctant to change them.

25 June:

We took our first action against an enemy today. A fat but strong lad known as the Pig, the neighborhood bully, now has the persona of an excessively feminine little girl, but not the wits to dissemble. We waited until his mother drove off in the morning; then Emma assumed her shape and made our vehicle into her car. She drove to the house, claimed to have lost her house key, and altered the Pig's persona utterly. She left a concealed microphone, and when his real mother returned we listened to the goings on from our treehouse. Delightful: the boy behaved as if everything was normal; his mother was first amused, then annoyed, then horrified.

27 June:

Our mother suspects that we are a bit more intimate than a brother and a sister should be. She gave Jennifer/Emma a good talking-to. Last night we drugged them into a sound sleep and took them to our lab. In future they will always sleep soundly at night, and no longer question our activities. This does take some of the thrill out of our lives, but we have a need for intimacy and a number of projects to complete. Today we went over to the house of Crystal, a spoilt girl of twelve who considers Jason and Jennifer not so much friends as associates before whom she can flaunt the tribute that her doting parents render to her. We sat through a video tape of a stupid film, played on her own VCR onto her own large television, in which a mother and daughter exchange bodies for one day. This is evidently her favorite film, and she wishes that such an exchange would happen to her. We intend to oblige, although one day seems much too brief a time. Indefinitely, on the other hand...

28 June:

Crystal's idiotic wish has come true. It was quite easy to break into her house, anesthetize family and dog, and take her and her mother back to the lab for a bit of re-embodiment. Crystal called Jennifer up to tell her of the change, but Jennifer simply humored her and refused to come over and see. We have a large number of metamorphic viruses to test on the brats of this lovely neighborhood. Today we began to distribute a fine new product of our lab: a fashionable candy bar infected with a virus, spread only by ingestion, that quickly and irrevocably alters the eater's metabolism so that he will become and remain grossly obese except on the most stringent diet. Off we went to the park, the same place we became our present selves, with two big boxes of these goodies. We announced to the greedy children that a kindly uncle who works for the manufacturer had let us have four boxes, and that since we couldn't possibly eat that much in a reasonable amount of time, we were giving away half of what we had. Any suspicions they had were allayed when we ate a few random bars. Of course we had immunized our bodies beforehand. Soon the little swine were swarming and fighting for the tainted treats: delightful. They should start gaining weight very soon.

29 June:

Crystal called on us, still, of course, in her mother's body. We refused to believe that she was not her mother. She was screaming at us, clawing at me...it was not just spite that led Emma to call the mental health authorities. Crystal's mother, on the other hand, whom we visited at her house to break the sad news of Crystal's insanity, is impersonating Crystal effectively, though inaccurately: she is calm and gracious. I think that secretly she is very pleased to be young and potentially beautiful, and rid of her demanding, spoilt daughter. Our parents pay no attention to our sharing a bed: usually Jennifer's, which is for some reason a double bed. As I write this, Emma has just come back from the lab in Crystal's body, which should make for an interesting night.

30 June:

Crystal's body wasn't quite as nice as Jennifer's, and Emma assumed her Jennifer-flesh shortly after waking up, seeming relieved. Spend enough time in a body and it begins to really become yours, the one you consider your proper one. Both Jennifer -- I mean Emma -- and I are starting to think of ourselves as the children we see in the mirror. Emma admits to being tempted to spend the rest of her life as Jennifer, and I have an analogous temptation. Of course that would never do: if we were really who we seem, we would be practicing incest. Strange how quickly we have grown accustomed to these bodies. Time to move on.

1 July:

Adults again. A little after midnight we restored our parents' proper personae, and then moved the real Jason and Jennifer from suspended animation to drugged sleep and from the lab to Jennifer's bed. Let them wonder about it all. We walked to the park, which was conveniently dark and quiet, got out the car, and began to change. I became a man closely resembling my real self, and Emma the red-haired, green-eyed version of herself that I find so attractive. We checked into a hotel like an ordinary couple and slept late. In the morning we missed our brother-and-sister bodies; I was tempted to go to the lab and assume them, but Emma wisely dissuaded me. "It's like an addiction," she said, "you have to break it off quickly." Her own lovely form helped bolster the argument. Over a room-service breakfast we read the newspaper. The Governor may be turned loose soon, but his political career is over. The false Lieutenant Governor still insists that he is the Governor's mistress in the wrong body. The real Lieutenant Governor is doing nicely in the body of the Governor's mistress: he has combined his intelligence with the intense femininity of the body's residual persona to create a charming woman in a stunning body; she has her own TV talk show already, which will soon be syndicated. No news about the woman in the body of the Governor's wife: dissembling adequately, I suppose. A leisurely day...just letting ourselves be ourselves again, I suppose. Still ourselves, and trying to think up some mischief for July 4th. Today a large number of high school bands and cheerleading squads are arriving here in the state capital for parades on the day itself. The thought of all those fine young bodies makes us both desire to do something to them. We have had quite enough of impersonation for now, although spending a few weeks as high school sweethearts might be most enjoyable. Emma is looking longingly at some delectable wenches; I am certain that I will find one or another of these pretty creatures in my bed now and again, Emma gazing at me out of her eyes. We checked out of the hotel, changed into a fiftyish couple, and checked back in -- no point in looking too much like ourselves if we plan to do any mischief. Swapping the bodies of two marching bands or groups of cheerleaders seems much too tedious, though the confusion resulting from it might be worthwhile. What else might we do?

5 July:

A good deal of activity in the past few days. Emma impersonated the cuddly little desk clerk for long enough to find out who was in what room. Two nights ago we were very busy: Emma and I went, disguised in suitable forms, to a few little parties given by members of several marching bands, and spiked the drinks with a little virus, again one spread by ingestion but otherwise not really infectious, that causes rapid aging. The little wenches, especially, will be quite pleased to find themselves blossoming into mature women, but horrified as they soon become older than their own mothers and grandmothers. After several rapid changes of body we were quite exhausted. After a few hours rest, we broke into a few rooms, anesthetized a few coaches and bandleaders, and swapped their bodies about a little, exchanging when possible persons of differing talents and sexes. Then Emma became the cuddly clerk again and we had a very pleasant time until morning, when we cheated fatigue by re-assuming our fiftyish bodies. We had planned merely to watch the parade, but soon we began to fear boredom. We went to the huge parking lot where the floats were being made ready. One float caught Emma's eye: it had several seats on which winners of beauty pageants were to sit and throw candy to the screaming brats along the parade route. Emma saw two of the beauty queens head for a trailer that contained the women's bathroom; she followed them and was back soon. "I've got both of them in the lab: one body for you, one for me," she said. "You know I hate being female," I muttered, but of course there would be trouble if one of the girls were missing, so I sneaked into the women's trailer with her, we set up the hyperspatial link in a stall...a few minutes later the two girls left the trailer, carrying a big box of candy which they inobtrusively mixed with that which they were supposed to throw. The extra candy had a nice assortment of ingestible viruses with various effects: obesity, aging, change of race, change of sex, increase of intelligence (the country needs more scientists like me, after all). Oh, the agony of that parade! Only the knowledge that I was, from behind the mask of an innocent girl's flesh, spreading strange infections -- only that made it bearable. (Also the sight and sounds of an uncoordinated band in front of us, which a cheerleading coach, trapped in the bandleader's body, was trying to conduct.) There I was, molded into a pretty wench, big breasts nearly popping out of a strapless gown, vapid grin fixed on my heavily painted face, waving with one hand and tossing candy with the other, mile after slow mile. If the usual wearer of my form had not been an aerobics buff, my frail-looking arms could never had endured. I stole glances at Emma: she was plainly enjoying herself, if only because of my discomfiture. She wore her body with real panache, and I was nearly overcome with lust. At last it was all over; we went back to the trailer and got out our two originals, injected with enough alcohol to put them in a drunken stupor. Still raging with lust, I had Emma retain her borrowed form and remain there in the lab; I became the middle-aged woman that Emma had been that morning, went back to our hotel room, went into the lab, and became myself. I tore the gown off her beauty-queen body and took Emma right there on the floor; the floor was cold and hard, and her body tired and sweaty, but it served her right for having tortured me all afternoon. Middle-aged and respectable again for the fireworks, and again today. This sort of adventure can be very tiring; again we relaxed, apart from making another Elvis. Emma is wonderful even at fifty.

6 July:

We checked out of the hotel. The cuddly little desk clerk (Denise, according to her name tag) was rude: patronizing to us and overly familiar. We waited until her coffee break, then hustled her into an empty room and made her unconscious. Two quick metamorphoses, and Emma was Denise and Denise had a very ugly face. Half a dozen plastic-surgery operations might give her some semblance of her former beauty. We left her to her fate, and drove off, Emma snuggling Denise's body and pretty face against me. Any woman as nasty as Denise shouldn't be allowed to be beautiful. On a deserted side road we changed the car into a nondescript Japanese model and me into a young man again. Emma insisted on retaining Denise's flesh, changing only her hotel uniform for a frilly dress. Her persona seems natually sympathetic to the girl's body, though not to the residue of Denise-persona it retains. We stopped for lunch in a town of about twenty thousand. The food at the local restaurant was awful, and the townspeople either surly or artificially friendly; we decided to give them something to remember us by. Off we went to find the local water supply: a group of wells at the edge of town, managed by an intelligent young woman of a quiet country-girl beauty. Emma scanned her, but no impersonation was necessary; we used a charming little device to make her become dizzy and faint; I rigged another little device to the water mains, and when I was done we revived her, with fussing and many expressions of concern. Over the next few days one of our viruses will be released into the water supply; it can survive only in clean water, a careful laboratory culture, or a human body. If present in the latter, it transforms its host into an exact copy of a particular person: in this case, the young Audrey Hepburn. Everyone who ingests the town water, or even gets a bit in the eye or up an orfice whilst showering, will be mildly ill for a few weeks to a few months, during which his or her body will change, aging or becoming younger, shrinking or growing, becoming female if necessary. An entire town of Audreys...and we have viruses of several dozen actors and actresses already. At the motel in the next town, Emma became Audrey just for fun, but is becoming Denise again as I write. I find Denise delectable, but if Emma insists on being her in public we may soon be tracked down.

7 July:

Today we wandered through town, stopping periodically to kiss passionately. Unfortunately Denise's uncle and aunt live in this town; they recognized her body immediately. One of the disadvantages of suppressing the residual persona of borrowed flesh is that you also suppress knowledge useful in case your body is recognized: had Emma let herself be Denise, persona as well as body, unpleasant to both of us as that would have been, she would not have had us come here. Denise is married, and her family has old-fashioned ideas about marriage, and I did not resemble her husband, and Emma did not recall at first that Denise even has such relatives. The old fools insisted that Emma was Denise (the real Denise had not told them of being, ahem, defaced), and assumed she had abandoned her husband and run off with me. They were furious; her uncle was almost furious enough to kill. Somehow Emma charmed him into letting us come to their house. Once inside, we were alone with them: their children are grown and live elsewhere. What to do? We could have become them, or simply anesthetized them and ran. Instead we changed them into Denises. Emma still refused to become someone else. We left -- and Denise was recognized again, by a spinster friend of her aunt's. The woman gave us a good lunch in her cottage; we rewarded her hospitality by giving her the body of one of the cheerleaders we had scanned at the hotel (much cheaper than paying for a bad lunch in a local beanery). By this time I was ready to force Emma to change form, but she smiled her lovely smile -- very pretty on Denise's face -- and said, "Let's see how long we can get away with it." I let Emma have her way. She was promptly recognized yet again: she had stayed with her aunt and uncle for several summers, and many people recognized her and spread the word that she was there. Several more acquaintances showed up. Emma had let her Denise-persona express itself more and more in order to play the part, to the degree that she found herself liking these people and wanting to spend the night. Just then the transformed spinster, her lovely cheerleader-face the proverbial mask of horror, ran out screaming that we had stolen her body -- what ingratitude for a second chance at life! She tore at us and made a scene; I knocked her out, bundled Emma into the car, and drove off. A few miles out of town I changed the car into a van, and gave myself a new form, but Emma refused to be anyone other than Denise. Another motel in the next town.

8 July:

When I awakened this morning, Denise was sitting next to me in bed, smiling unpleasantly. Denise: not a hint of Emma's expression was on her face; she was entirely the hotel clerk we had come to dislike. I was somewhat rough in knocking her unconscious, hauling her back into the lab, and putting her into Emma's body again. Presently Emma came to -- or was it Denise in Emma's body? Fortunately it was the former. She had panicked and let the Denise persona take control of her. Back we went to the motel room. There was a knock on the door, and I let in two policemen, or, more accurately, a policeman and a policewoman. They were looking for Denise: someone had the idea that I had kidnapped her, or something equally absurd. I might have been able to bluff things out, but they had seen Emma in her real body, and we were under suspicion, after all, and the policewoman was pretty even if she had dyed her hair an unlikely shade of yellow. We anesthetized them, the policewoman drawing her pistol just too late to fire it; I am getting sloppy. We made the policewoman Denise and the policeman the current me, then assumed their forms. I convinced the motel manager to let me drive our van into a closed garage, where, safe from public view, I compressed it. Off we minions of the law drove in our patrol car. We played police for a few hours, then drove to an abandoned garage where we left the car, uncompressed our vehicle into a plush Cadillac, turned ourselves into a pair of well-to-do senior citizens, and drove off.

9 July:

We spent last night in our sixty-ish bodies: not bad, surprisingly. A long drive today; we stopped only for lunch and enElvisment of a hitchhiker. Late in the afternoon we passed a billboard advertising a "faith community and theme park" run by a TV evangelist. About ten seconds later Emma and I looked at each other: there was no need for words. Finally Emma said, "His wife looks grotesque." "She wouldn't if she were you," I replied, and we laughed. We checked into a motel near the park.

11 July:

Emma and I are getting quite good at stepping into other people's shoes -- or bodies, rather. It was slightly tedious but not at all difficult. A huge contribution from a bogus bank account gained us a tour of the place: just the two of us led by Rev. Sam's personal assistant, the lovely Sue Anne. Need I add that Sue Anne was not herself when I returned to the office with her, or that the woods had gained a lovely new squirrel? And of course she obligingly gave me an immediate personal meeting with Rev. Sam, which left him a changed man and gave the woods a possum as well. Emma was delighted at becoming Sue Anne, and once in her luscious form refused even to consider becoming my wife Loretta, who is indeed grotesque. Fortunately Rev. Sam and Loretta are estranged, and keep up the pretense of a marriage only for the sake of business. Sue Anne is Sam's mistress, whilst Loretta consoles herself with our construction supervisor, a burly fellow named Cliff. I will have to show a plausible degree of affection for Loretta in public, but no more than that. Cliff has even gone to the farcical measure of building our houses on adjacent Faith Community lots and connecting their basements with a tunnel! This still leaves a bit of difficulty for Sue Anne and me, but my back office has a very nice bedroom (with a huge waterbed) and a bathroom complete with Jacuzzi, and it seems that I like to work nights, my loyal assistant at my side. Tch, tch, tch. Well, all this should be most amusing to reveal to the general public once Emma and I are finished with things here. Getting settled today. Tomorrow is Rev. Sam's first TV taping with me inside him. Sue Anne and I are working late tonight.

12 July:

I did nothing outrageous today for the folks on TV. I found myself wishing that Emma was inside Loretta rather than Sue Anne, if only to keep some of the makeup off that face and some of the howl out of that singing voice. My requests for money were a bit more extreme than usual, implying that giving to Rev. Sam is exactly like giving to God Himself...and of course Loretta cried mascara-stained tears. The show is a mixture of talk show with revival meeting with fund-raising telethon. I was polite to the guests: a creation-scientist (I could have shown him a thing or two) and a woman who had had one of those near-death experiences (Emma knows how to fake real beauties). Sue Anne remained off camera, snickering when I kissed Loretta's over-painted face: making love to latex paint. Sue Anne and I are about to have another late-night conference; among other things, we will discuss how to have fun without alarming my, ahem, flock too quickly. Satan-worship is right out, I think...what can we get away with? One of my colleagues presented a death threat from the Almighty, after all; by that standard, we should have a lot of latitude. Perhaps I can sell indulgences. The Bible (I seem to have a lot of it in my Rev. Sam brain) does warn against those claiming to be Christ, but that hasn't stopped people trying it...

13 July:

I see problems ahead. According to articles in prominent national news-magazines, the strange plague resulting from our experimental virus is changing several thousand men into attractive young women. Foolishly we introduced it only a few hundred miles from our home. Once people see that a complete metamorphosis is possible, they will start to come forward with their claims of having been changed -- and others will believe them. A bit of investigation, certainly not beyond the abilities even of dimwitted F. B. I. men, will show a trail of alterations and disappearances beginning a few months ago, within a stone's throw of my laboratory. We have been careless. One altered person even knows that we are responsible: Jane, formerly the wife of the University's president. If she, until now happy and lovely in the form of a coed, realizes that we made her husband into a homosexual... and I am loath to harm her. Any fun that Emma and I have here we must have soon. Eventually someone will connect that Governor's strange behavior with impersonation by metamorphosis, and will suspect any public figure who appears to have gone mad. Today Sue Anne visited our Golden Years Home and infected the aged inmates with two viruses: one for youth and the other for increased sexual drive. In a few months all the old geezers and crones will be young and attractive and banging away at each other: a pleasant thought. But we must be gone from here before the alterations become obvious.

14 July:

Taped another broadcast today, in which I guaranteed forgiveness of sins to anyone who contributes "a reasonable quantity of his worldly substance to the work of God that we are carrying on here." Of course the Catholic Church does it for free, but they ask for real repentance, which Rev. Sam does not. Going a bit far, but not really scandalous. My creativity is blunted because I am too worried about what will happen to Emma and me: will we have to destroy our lab? No more ill-considered metamorphoses or spreading of disease? Entirely new identities, indefinitely? Prospects are bleak. Emma says (in Sue Anne's lush voice, with its soft Alabama accent) that with me she could enjoy even a prosaic life, with no need for metamorphosis or impersonation. "Perhaps we can just become a wealthy couple somewhere, with a lab hidden beneath our house, and not do anything to anyone for a few years," she tells me. Yes, but doing things to people, making them who I want them to be, has become almost an obsession. This is real power, and I am reluctant to let go of it.

16 July:

A few hours of hard work in the lab, and the result was a splendid gimmick for the TV show: faith healing by partial metamorphosis. Of course it irks me to do good, but the reaction of the studio audience (what else can one call it? the congregation? hrmph!) was remarkable. We rigged a sort of altar with the equipment inside and Emma manning the controls, and altered damaged or ailing parts of several dozen people. To be sure, most of the cured had insidious new ailments afterwards, such as the paraplegic girl whose ovaries now secrete testosterone, the man who had a brain tumor but now has a leaky heart valve instead -- just a few little drolleries so that we might have a measure of fun. The phoned-in contributions are rolling in already, and I am calling myself the Modern Apostle. Loretta, disgusting creature, is attracted by my new powers and wants to be a proper wife again. A bit of persona-change for her?

19 July:

My, what a lot of work! The hospitals around here are being emptied, we are taping two shows a day, and the cash is pouring in. I am discreetly transferring it to Rev. Sam's Swiss bank accounts, from which I will later transfer it to mine. Of course I could just as well create gold or uncut diamonds and sell those, but I like money better when people give it to me. The adulation is most amusing, especially now that we are creating a few cancer cells as well in most of the people we cure...little time bombs which may never go off, or then again may explode years from now. Emma altered Loretta's persona a bit so that she should go back to Cliff now and leave me alone.

21 July:

Even with sundry tricks for cheating fatigue by changing form, Emma and I are getting tired. In retrospect, it seems that this faith-healing racket was not such a good idea: I think we chose it because it was unlikely to suggest a connection with our earlier activities. Metamorphosed people are starting to turn up, selling their stories to tabloids; soon reputable journalists will start to believe them, and I fear that our days of fun are numbered. We have started to spread a few more of our favorite engineered viruses amongst the crowds who cram the place. These are mostly of the type that make their hosts into copies of some famous individual in the prime of youth. Actors and actresses, opera singers (let's see what average Americans can do with truly superior vocal equipment, eh?), a smattering of politicians and the like: a good assortment. Still no word on the town we are changing into Audrey Hepburns, but we haven't had time to investigate. By now some of the young women should be almost Audrey, and even the men should be fairly effeminate.

23 July:

Enough is enough. Emma and I are preparing for our getaway. We are forging some truly disgusting photographs involving the Rev. Sam and Sue Anne, showing them engaged in...well, it involves animals and strange rituals that might be some sort of devil-worship. We are preparing a scene for the bedroom, complete with notes in Sue Anne's handwriting, that points to some sort of diabolical abduction of the happy couple: lots of scorch marks, a partly-obscured pentagram, and a powerful smell of brimstone for starters. Yet more hopeful sick folk and yet more money rolling in. We are quite exhausted. Emma feels, and I must concur, that we have not exploited this impersonation at all effectively.

24 July:

Early this morning we changed form and prepared the weird tableau in the bedroom next to my office. Our vehicle again a van, we drove off, stopping at a mailbox to drop in some anonymous packets of our dirty photos, addressed neatly to the editors of several major newspapers. I had gotten rather used to Emma as Sue Anne, but the Nordic blue-eyed blonde in the passenger seat was a more-than-adequate replacement; she also seemed to like my golden hair and beard. Finally a good look at some national newspapers and news magazines. I was wrong about the infected town: an Audrey Hepburn, natural-blonde hair and eyebrows both showing dark roots, eyelashes still pale, gazed at us with a haggard expression from the cover of one magazine; a deliciously pretty girl, the expression of an angry man on her face, her hair cut mannishly short, a bit of razor stubble on her chin, glared from another -- above a caption with a man's name! Delightful. The pictures inside of the half- changed, particularly one hulking giant of a man with an Audrey face and two little breasts sprouting atop a powerful chest, sent us into gales of laughter. A sidebar to one article mentioned people who claim to have been transformed suddenly; that of another attempted to show a pattern for the strange happenings: fairly accurate, as far as they went.

26 July:

Today is my creator's birthday: July 26th. The rest of this entry is a letter to him: anybody else may read it, but nobody else need bother.

Dear Mark.,

Many happy returns of the day. It isn't July 26th in your

world, but it is in mine. It was Chesterton (why must you

have such saccharine tastes in reading?) who told of his

youthful spell of nihilism. he and his brother were

discussing the general miserableness of existence, and his

great-uncle overheard and said, "I would give thanks to God

for my existence even if I knew I was a damned soul." Well,

you will probably bring me to some moralizing Catholic end,

like poor Don Giovanni getting dragged off to hell just

because he wouldn't repent, but I thank you anyway. Thank

you for a happy life and amusing adventures and the perfect

woman to share them with, and I hope that you don't cut them

off too soon. you nearly did, and it took a chorus of

readers to bring me back. I wish I could do something for

you in your present woes. we both know that your situation

is not especially painful as these things go, but my help

would be most useful. If I could only send you duplicates of

some of the equipment Emma and I have created! You could

give yourself a bit more nerve and a healthier body with a

better physique, attract a fine young woman and sculpt her

into the girl of your dreams. I would even send you Emma --

not mine, of course, but a form-altering, persona-altering

costume (haven't told the readers about those, have you?)

that you can slip onto some woman you pick off the street.

it would change her irreversibly into your very own Emma.

But then again, you'd never do such a thing to anyone, prude

that you are...and of course there are heavy duties involved

for shipping things from fiction into fact, and not even my

huge Swiss bank accounts could pay for them.

Really you should have more faith in your God. (No, I am not

being hypocritical. I have complete faith in you. You have

given my universe a set of moral laws -- very well, moral

anarchy -- which I follow exactly, no need for you to get all

self-righteous just because your God has higher standards for

you than you for me.) If you know how to give a creature

like me such good things, will He not do better for you?

(Yes, the Devil may quote Scripture for his own purposes, no

matter what the Muslims say.) Maybe not instant physical and

mental health, nor yet the love of an intelligent woman with

a kind heart and a perfect body, but things more important in

the long run.

Yes, I can hear the net.atheists snickering. Let them. Were

they within my power, they would be net.squirrels promptly.

Hang in there.

Your loyal creature,

The "mad" scientist.

P.S.. Really I'm not mad. You are, slightly. Shouldn't you

let your readers know my name?

27 July:

We are staying at a comfortable motel about a hundred miles from Rev. Sam's place. From our room we used the hyperspatial link to get back to the lab. For the first time in months we went upstairs...no sign that the place has been searched yet. To me, anyway, we seem to be obvious suspects should anyone trace the metamorphoses back to this area: Emma and I rigged some gadgets to detect intruders, and made ready a hundred-kiloton thermo-nuclear device in case we need to destroy the place. The only entrances to the lab and the caves are secret and well-concealed, but we cannot rely on that indefinitely. We changed into yet another attractive young couple, and left the lab by a secret exit in order to see whether we are suspected here in our own town. Why, oh why did we not show up here every few days so that nobody would think that we might be behind all that lovely mayhem? We visited the University, picked up on the gossip...the President has a professor of English as his homosexual lover, the lady Dean has found a Toy Boy to slake her sexual thirsts, and nobody seems to suspect us of being behind the changes of body and persona. We scanned a few personae and confirmed this. A trip to the porn district shows that Catherine is a minor star in dirty videos: a much better career for her than science, the slut. Why am I so worried? Back we went to the lab, then back through the link to our motel room. The tabloids this week are full of articles on our fake Elvises and other metamorphosed folk. One reputable magazine has an article about what happened to that Governor and his associates... people are starting to believe that the Governor's mistress really is trapped in the body of the Lieutenant Governor, though the real Lieutenant Governor, happy and successful in the woman's body as a TV talk show hostess, is brushing off such absurd speculations. Emma and I fear that within a few weeks, whenever we change anyone we will have to change ourselves and move on immediately: people will grow wary, re-embodied folk will grow bold and tell everyone of what we have done to them, and the authorities will take an interest...

28 July:

Still at the motel. It's in a lovely area...we take walks in the state parks and try to decide what to do next. Should we go back home but prepare an escape route in case we are found out? Why not wander around having as much fun as we can, then, when capture is imminent, slip into the forms and lives of some wealthy couple? Emma says that any prolonged stay in both borrowed shape and borrowed persona could result in our becoming who we impersonate, as she became that cute hotel clerk she insisted on remaining for such a long time. Once people start to believe in the things we have been doing, the sudden, radical change of self necessary to prevent such a fate might be taken as evidence of our activity. The best we can hope for might be an amalgamation of selves, which is what happened to the Lieutenant Governor. Not a pleasant prospect in my view. For amusement we sprayed some fruit at a grocery store with an ingestible virus that changes people into Marilyn Monroe -- only with real blonde hair, features not needing plastic surgery, and so on. Very slow-acting, this one: changes shouldn't be obvious for another month or two.

30 July:

The desire to transform people has gotten the better of us yet again. What made matters worse is that one of the doctors in this town is married to his nurse-receptionist, and they are a charming pair: a strapping young fellow and a cuddlesome little redhead. Emma feigned a medical complaint yesterday after office hours; the doctor, kind-hearted idealistic fellow that he was, agreed to see her while his wife chatted with me in the waiting room. Becoming them should have gone off without a hitch, except that Emma swapped the tapes so that she became the doctor and I his lovely wife. Emma thought this terribly funny, as she usually does when she tricks me into being female, but we promptly put things right and went back to the office. Fortunately our new selves have no children. Today we started treating patients, giving them that little something extra that their hometown doctor never provided before. I have long regretted that there are no such things as vampires and werewolves, but thanks to our assiduous research, there will soon be quite a few in this town and its environs. We have a lovely little blood-borne virus that makes its host into a vampire, causing photophobia, a need for blood (and hollow fangs for getting it), pallor, unnatural strength, aversion to garlic...unfortunately it is impossible for the virus to provide the ability to change to and from a bat at will. The lycanthropy virus causes cyclic changes (unfortunately not tied to the phases of the moon, though in women to the menstrual period) of the host to a somewhat lupine form: temporary elongation of the jaw, alterations to the hands and feet, hirusitism with exceedingly fast growth of hair, behavior better suited to a carnivorous animal than a human. Every injection we give a patient will include one or the other of these viruses.

1 August:

House calls aplenty. One old lady dying of cancer is now infected with a Sophia Loren virus that should make a healthy new woman of her in a few months. An ill-behaved hypochondriacal boy is on his way to girlhood, and several new werewolves will eventually show their shaggy muzzles. Emma, or rather Linda, as her new incarnation is called, supervised the local blood drive today. People are generous in these smallish towns, and she infected several hundred donors, as well as their blood, with the vampire virus...and the blood drive lasts two more days, with excess blood going to nearby cities.

3 August:

We are experimenting with voluntarily melding our personae with those of the people we impersonate: I am letting my self merge with Jim, the doctor; Emma is letting hers merge with Linda, his wife. We are acquiring their tastes in food and entertainment and other things that do not matter, while retaining our own wills in things that do. We watch television, go to the local movie house, associate happily with people our original selves would scorn -- just as if we were really Jim and Linda. This evening we had dinner with Linda's parents: dull, unimaginative people, I would have thought just a few days ago, but being Jim and Linda made them pleasant company. Of course this didn't stop us from infecting Linda's parents with an Ursula Andress virus, or scanning her kid sister Tammy and then making her a vampire. Now I see how that Lieutenant Governor, caught in an impossible situation, made himself into such a well-adjusted young woman. Linda is Tammy for now, just blossomed into womanhood at sixteen. It promises to be a pleasant evening.

5 August:

Tammy reluctantly became Linda again, and we looked over the results for the blood drive: nearly five hundred pints, or over one person in twenty! Very little of the blood can be used locally, so that nearly all is now at the nearby regional hospital, spreading vampirism. My Jim self masks my original persona completely, just as Linda's masks Emma's. I love Linda for being Linda; she loves me for being Jim. Yet we retain the beliefs and knowledge and desires of our real selves. We used the hyperspatial link and spent a few hours in the lab just now (no one has searched the house above it, fortunately), in our Linda and Jim bodies and selves. I lovingly caressed the hair of the original Linda, and Linda kissed the original Jim: they lay there in suspended animation. As we had expected, we had no trouble working or planning new diversions. This may be the disguise we have been seeking: the innocent couple, with family and friends and unassailable identities, the same selves that everyone has known as far back as they can remember, the malevolent core hidden entirely. The only drawback is that when the viruses start to manifest themselves, we will probably have to move on...will we be able to? Linda -- or rather Emma -- is afraid that although our original personae are safe, we may find that changing back may be exceedingly difficult: like an unwilling suicide.

7 August:

Still infecting people in the course of our duties. Also, Linda went over to the next town and helped do an inventory of supplies at the hospital, contaminating quite a lot of them with a generous assortment of our viruses. A national newspaper reports that federal authorities now suspect a single source for all the strange metamorphoses of the past few months. The F. B. I. has traced their origin back to the area of our home, and suspect a man and a woman, description varying greatly, as the culprits. Apparently many of our victims have recovered their memories quite well; Emma and I should have tested her persona-and-memory-alterer more thoroughly before putting it to general use. Further, we should have given all of our subjects animal bodies: a spate of missing persons would have raised far fewer suspicions than a whole chorus whining about their bodies being changed. Our house (the one above the secret lab, not Jim and Linda's) has yet to be searched.

8 August:

We are potentially in grave trouble, which would be worse if not for the press. At least we have fair warning. The F. B. I. is reportedly furious that yesterday's article gave the game away by showing us how much they know. We will have to move on soon. Today a girl of sixteen came to me with an unusual complaint: her thick brown hair, which grows very quickly, has blonde roots! Not two weeks have passed since we infected that fruit with the Marilyn Monroe virus, supposedly so slow-acting, and already it is showing itself. Somebody searched our house today. We are suspected. Hindsight is wonderful...we should have shown ourselves around home every few days, we should have tested things better, we should have left more squirrels and fewer girls, we should have worked more modest metamorphoses. Should have, should have, should have. Too late. Time to go.

10 August:

It was hard. Still Jim and Linda, we went to the lab and assumed our true bodies. Our Jim and Linda selves were intact. We used Emma's device to, so to speak, pry them off and replace them with the missing parts of our real ones. I screamed in agony...my very self was being torn in two. Linda seemed to fare somewhat better in becoming Emma again. After a few hours of rest we altered ourselves superficially -- new faces, voices, fingerprints, and complexions. We drugged the real Jim and Linda and dragged them back into their house. In their garage I opened up our vehicle into a nondescript car; we got in and drove off, well before dawn. We drove all that day. We bought a tarpaulin, drove to an abandoned quarry, and under the tarpaulin changed car and bodies. Refreshed, we drove all night, decided on a middle-sized city, and checked into a motel there.

12 August:

We have been relaxing, and studying (in a leisurely manner) the local population. There is a wealthy, cultured, and somewhat idle young couple here who appear to be good candidates for the new us. We can only hope that they are as compatible with each other as were Jim and Linda: again, we are going to merge their personae with ours. Already I am itching to release some viruses, make passersby into Elvises or hermaphrodites, impersonate local bigwigs -- but of course we must not. We must lie low for at least a few months. Emma seems to have less difficulty resisting these temptations. She admits that exercising such power really doesn't matter to her: all she wants, she claims (as she snuggles her delicate body against me and gazes on me with her huge green eyes), is to be with me and see me happy.

14 August:

Really it was too easy for words. The couple we have become lives in a large new house with a long drive that connects to a country road. In the nearby woods we collapsed the car, pocketed it, and walked up the drive; a quick scan of their house showed that they, and only they, were at home. We knocked at the door and claimed that our car had broken down on the main road. They let us in...well, the rest is obvious. I am now Fred, and Emma is now Catherine. An odd coincidence: Emma was once my assistant Fred, assembled from corpses, until she changed herself into the exquisite woman I love. I was infatuated with a slut of a woman named Catherine...we changed her into a mindless wench...was it really only a few months ago? Names aside, we seem to be just the sort of people we were hoping for: intelligent, independently wealthy, deeply in love. I hope that I can control my desire to transform people: we will not be safe in this guise for long, though we have all but assumed Fred's and Catherine's personae, if we keep working mischief.

15 August:

Our lab is at risk. It is only a matter of time before the police find one of the secret entrances. Catherine and I used the hyperspatial link and fetched some disintegrator-ray machines: ingenious little gadgets that I thought up a few months ago as curiosities. They break bonds in matter and dispose of the fragments through a hyperspatial portal. With these, by the light of banks of sodium-vapor lamps fed by a miniature power plant, we cut a sloping tunnel down from our basement into the solid granite underneath our property (no, we did not choose this area at random). From the living rock we cut a series of huge chambers. Tiring work.

17 August:

We spent yesterday and most of today moving equipment from our lab to the huge granite rooms. Forklifts, carts equipped with winches, and so on were very helpful, but there is some old apparatus down in the caves that was not practical to move. By assuming monstrous forms we probably would have been able to bring it along, but we want to remain our new selves.

18 August:

There have been no further searches of the house. We decided to change that. We set up our equipment in its new location, and without much difficulty created mindless copies of our former bodies, unconscious and in fact nearly dead from poison. We arranged these artistically in our former house, with a somewhat vague suicide note that might be interpreted as an admission of responsibility for our doings. Then we made an anonymous phone call to the local police, went back into the lab, and armed our thermonuclear device. Should anyone try to enter the lab...

19 August:

The lab, the house, the caves, and a good deal of the surrounding landscape have been destroyed. I think that they found the bodies before that...of course, considering that they know of our expertise in altering bodies, I doubt that anyone was fooled. It was worth a try, anyway.

22 August:

Catherine is a darling woman. Not my dream-girl, not even now that I am essentially Fred, but beautiful and witty and charming and very nice in bed. And we are wealthy, even without the Swiss bank accounts of my former self. And we can enjoy either work or leisure, and we have rescued all of our important equipment from what is now a pile of rather radioactive rubble. Our new selves are all that we could have hoped for. Even if the lawmen don't believe in our faked suicides, we are safe. Yet I am unhappy. Catherine and I went to visit friends in town. Pleasant people, good food and conversation. We were the Catherine and Fred they had known for years, and we enjoyed being them. I accompanied Catherine on the piano as she sang in her incredible soprano voice: thrilling, exquisite, good enough for opera. Everyone applauded. Still I was not satisfied. We bought the major news magazines and newspapers. The infamous mad scientist and his wife appear to be dead, they say. Yet new outrages are being discovered. They finally have noticed the super-grayling. The strange case of Rev. Sam and his mistress: someone has noticed that the old folks in the retirement home are growing younger. New plagues, new cases of changed forms, swapped bodies. Some of these they may never suspect, I miss it all. It has been only two weeks since we last did anything, but I miss it: that feeling of power over others, the knowledge that I can make them who I want them to be. I must do something to someone.

23 August:

Catherine stopped me from doing a foolish thing. I was in the lab, preparing a little spray bottle with a suspension of one of our ingestible viruses: I was driven by a mad desire to rush to the nearest grocery and spray it over the lettuce. "Darling, you can't," she said, starting to weep. "It would ruin everything we've done here. They'd start to hunt for us again." Of course I knew she was right, and I capitulated immediately. But the desire is already welling up in me again.

24 August:

I asked Catherine what I should do. I cannot continue like this, desiring such power over others, technically capable of exercising it, but held back... Her suggestion seems drastic: we should forget ourselves for a time. "Let's seal up that tunnel in the basement," she said, "and I'll make a little device that will wipe out the memories of our old selves for a while. We'll be just Fred and Catherine for a few years. Then, one day, another little device will restore everything. By then, the hue and the cry will have died down, and we can have a bit of fun again." Like suicide. But Catherine thinks that even if we aren't restored, we would still be happy as our new selves. Perhaps I would be happy if I had no great frustrated desire...

26 August:

We sealed up and disguised the entrance of the tunnel leading to the granite rooms. Catherine has made her "little devices," and I am prepared for oblivion. Perhaps we will really be restored, perhaps not. I am mailing this diary to an acquaintance who will be surprised to find that he is my executor and principal heir. Our thermonuclear bomb was rather "clean," as such things go; the land he will inherit won't really be that dangerous. There are also some of my older notebooks, containing things still unknown to conventional science, in safe-deposit boxes. As for the Swiss bank accounts...yes he'll have to see for himself.