“Okay,” Carmen conceded, “if multiple bodies is a core part of your identity, it’s probably fine to take them all to the protest. But venning into multiple bodies for the protest just to inflate the numbers —”

The first Saturday in March, Carmen and I went to High Point early in the morning, where they venned me into a girl body, looking about eighteen or nineteen and distinct enough from any of my earlier ones to be safe. We ate breakfast and met up with the other venners at the machine in Burlington forty minutes later.

We’d been working on my cover story off and on for two weeks now, and had it pretty well worked out. I’d wanted to use “Lauren,” since the police or CPS wouldn’t connect a girl of that name with the boy they were looking for, but Carmen pointed out that later on, after I turned eighteen, claimed my identity, and filed name change and long-term transformation paperwork, we wouldn’t want the Venn club people to associate Carmen’s friend Lauren with Meredith’s friend Lauren with the mysterious past, especially if Meredith and I wound up going to UNC Greensboro and hanging out with many of the same people.

So I was Kayla Anne Saunders, a trans girl from Catesville who was working full-time while she saved up money to start at Mynatt Community College. I’d met Carmen online and found out they lived near me, and they’d invited me to hang out with the venners from UNC Greensboro. I’d usually used the Venn machine in Catesville in the past, which would explain why the university students hadn’t seen me hanging out around the machine in Burlington before, and hadn’t used it at all since my best friend from high school, the only person I trusted enough to go in the machine with, had gone off to SCAD down in Savannah, Georgia.

The Venn machine in Burlington was on a street corner, with a bank on one corner and various small businesses on the other corners and the intersecting streets. Finding nobody Carmen knew there was yet when we arrived, we hung out at a small bookstore for a little while. I bought a couple of books to help me study for my GED, as well as a novel from the discount table. After stashing the books in Carmen’s car, we returned to the machine.

Serena, Montana, and a couple of other people I’d seen at the Queer Student Union were there, along with one guy I thought I remembered seeing in Carmen’s biology lab and five other college-age people I didn’t recognize. They weren’t exactly lined up in a queue, more standing around in clusters chatting. Carmen and I joined them.

“Hey, Carmen,” said the guy from their biology lab, and when he noticed us, so did everyone else. Most of the people said hi or waved.

Serena came over and hugged Carmen, and said, “Is this your friend you told me about?” Of course she knew perfectly well who I was.

“Yeah,” Carmen said.

My anxiety at social situations hadn’t gone away completely now that I had a girl body, but it was a lot more manageable. I could push through it. “Hi, I’m Kayla,” I said. “Carmen told me about this. It sounds so cool.”

“Have you ever venned before?” the guy from biology lab asked.

“Yeah, back in high school. Not since my best friend went off to college in Georgia. There wasn’t anybody else local I trust enough to go in the machine with. But Carmen explained how y’all talk about what you want your partners to change you into and keep each other honest?”

I let Serena and her friend Drew, a lanky white guy with shaggy blonde hair and big floppy ears like a basset hound, explain and convince me. Drew gave me a one-page handout that briefly described how the system worked and listed (in three columns of small print) some of the neat things you could turn into with a Venn machine. As we talked, more people arrived, other groups hashed out what they were going to change into and how they’d pair off, and an orderly line gradually formed.

I’d originally been planning to ask someone to turn me into a dragon-girl — not too similar in appearance to the dragon-girls I’d been before, but a dragon-girl. It had been too long. But Carmen had convinced me to avoid that, as it might connect me to the “boy” the police were looking for. That was probably too paranoid; there must have been hundreds of people in the U.S. alone who had venned into dragon-girls by that point, but I wanted to avoid any possible risk of getting Meredith, Sophia, or Carmen in trouble, not to mention having to go back to my parents. After I looked over the list of nifty venns that Drew handed me, I said, “This. I’d like to be a carbon sequestration cyborg, like your friend Guadalupe you told me about. But not humanoid? Could I be kind of a centaur, but with an alligator back half? Or maybe some kind of four-legged dinosaur, like a scaled-down triceratops or a stegosaurus?”

Drew looked thoughtful. “Carbon offset cyborgs are tricky,” he said. “Cyborgs in general, really. If you don’t know exactly what to say and how to interpret the pictures it pops up, you’re likely to just get a basic human body with some light-up piercings. I mean the electronics are embedded in your flesh, but not really integrated into your nervous system or all that functional. I’m not good at that, but I know who is.” He turned and called out, “Hey, Adam!”

Adam was a hefty black guy with four arms; the lower pair were smaller, with girl-sized hands that were presumably better for delicate tasks, while the hands on his main arms were bigger than my dad’s. He also had an electronic left eye, which he explained later gave him infrared and ultraviolet vision. There was a kind of vent or pipe with a fine grille over the end sticking out of a hole in his shirt, similar to the ones Guadalupe had in her neck, and a bit later I realized he had another one in back. I explained what I wanted and he nodded and said he thought he could do it.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “Cyborging’s always tricky. Might need to go through the line two or three times while we refine it. But let’s give it a try. Are you new or someone I know in a new body?”

So I told him my cover story, and he told me what he wanted me to change him into: a puppy.

“Preferably a Corgi, but it can be hard to get a specific dog breed. Just something small and fluffy like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That sounds easy.” And cute, I thought but didn’t say.

Carmen paired off with Serena, and Drew with a blue-skinned guy. The line moved fairly quickly; a lot of people were venning into forms from their history, and most of the people here were well-practiced at venning, so it only occasionally took more than a couple of minutes for someone to figure out how to find the form their partner wanted. Adam and I were at the end of the line, behind Carmen and Serena.

People went into the Venn machine and came out in weird and wonderful shapes. Per capita, it was the weirdest group of venners I’d ever had the privilege to watch; so different from the typical Saturday at the library or the mall watching old people rejuvenate and middle-aged people lose weight. We had giant insectoids, exotic animals and anthropomorphic animals of various kinds, centauroids, people with extra arms or heads, cyborgs, one 100% robot (vaguely like a maintenance droid from Star Wars, an ovoid on tractor treads), an animate crystal statue, people with two or three bodies (one pair of identical ones, another more diverse trio), and several articles of clothing or jewelry that were donned by their partner, either immediately or after visiting a nearby business’s restroom.

Then Serena and Carmen went in and came out as little kids. Serena had an electronic left eye like Adam and wore a pink ballerina dress. Carmen had cat-like ears and whiskers and wore overalls over a red T-shirt with an abstract design; their hair was pretty similar to what it usually was, black with a blue streak on the side, but a lot longer than normal.

“Cyborg ballerina for the win!” Serena exclaimed, high-fiving Carmen, who more phlegmatically added “Hmm. Cat... farmer, I guess?”

I gave Carmen back their messenger bag I’d been holding for them, along with the purse we’d picked up at a thrift store for my Kayla identity. The bag looked comically huge dangling from their little-kid shoulder. Serena had worn a smaller purse today, so it wouldn’t look so big once she venned into a little girl. Adam set the machine for a day, as we’d agreed. Neither of us planned to stay changed that long; we’d both return to the machine and change back after just a couple of hours.

“Corgi puppy,” I said once we were inside, and was presented with a bewildering array of dogs, wolves, dingoes and coyotes, most of them puppies but few or none of them recognizable as Corgis. I studied them for a few moments and picked the most Corgi-like. Then the image of Adam was replaced by a Corgi-ish puppy, incongruously reaching out with a paw to touch one of the bubbles and still talking in a low voice, while the bubbles were replaced with variations on the puppy I’d selected. I picked a fluffier one with a slightly longer snout and refined it a little more before saying, “Okay, I’m ready whenever you are.”

“Let me go first. This is going to take a little longer.”

Those words seemed silly coming out of a puppy’s mouth, and I couldn’t help giggling. “Sure.”

A few moments later he said, “Okay, here’s something interesting. Would you like to have a kind of triceratops head as well as your lower body? The upper torso looks like a human girl with a lacy blouse, but the head is... kind of a weird mix of human and triceratops.”

“Oh, that’s cool! Where are the air valves?” The bubbles surrounding Adam’s puppy-image changed, some of them into cyborg puppies with air valves in various places, some into machines with air valves, some into stand-alone valves without a machine or body to blow air through. Fortunately, I’d already selected a good puppy for Adam to become; as long as I didn’t press another bubble, he’d be fine.

“On the flanks of your lower body. Looks like six valves, three on each side, and they’re kind of flared like trumpets.”

“Awesome! Let’s go for it.”

A moment later, I was a cybertriceratopcentaur, and after taking a moment to get my bearings, I pressed my green button and heard a happy yip from the other side as the doors opened.

“Yay!” Serena cheered as we came out, and bent over to pet Adam for a few moments. “Can I have a ride?”

“Sure,” I giggled. “You want a ride too, Carmen?”

“Thanks,” they said, and climbed on between my air valves. The noise of the air sucking and blowing through them was louder than with Guadalupe or Adam, and I wondered if I might not be welcome in places of business that were otherwise Venn-friendly due to the noise.

“Giddy-up!” Serena exclaimed. Adam ran in circles around me, yipping, until the crystal statue came up and put a large collar around his neck whose dangling tag had a large “V” on it, with smaller print saying “Venned human, not animal.” I later learned that Alamance County had an ordinance saying people venned into animals could go around without a leash if they wore such a tag.

“Where are we going, cowgirl cyborg ballerina?” I asked.

“Follow the crowd,” Serena said. “We usually go to this cafe around the block that’s cool with venned customers.”

So we did, and as the group of people ahead of us were filing through the doors of the cafe, I took a look at my reflection in the window. I had a bony frill a little behind where my hairline would be, and no hair. There were two upper horns halfway between the frill and my eyes (which were pretty much human), and below that, my nose and mouth (or rather nostrils and mouth) stuck out a bit in a sort of a snout, though nowhere near as long as a real triceratops’, or a dog’s for that matter. Just above my nostrils, I had another horn, shorter than the upper horns but still a good bit longer than my nose in any of my human bodies. I wondered why I couldn’t see it except in my reflection, but later I realized my subconscious was editing it out; I could see it if I concentrated, just like you can see your own nose if you concentrate when you’re in a basic human form.

My hindquarters looked pretty much like a scaled-down triceratops, around five feet long. I’d found myself standing diagonally in the booth after the transformation, and had to bend a little in the middle to get out through the door. The air exchange valves weren’t as big or prominent as Adam had made them sound, but they were bigger than those Guadalupe or Adam had in their usual cyborg bodies. Serena and Carmen were gripping them like a saddle horn to help stay on my back.

The crowd up ahead cleared up and I made my way through the door of the cafe. I found I’d worried needlessly about the noise of my air valves; the noise of conversation was louder. Adam’s friend Ty, who’d changed into a trio of guy, girl, and intersex bodies, ordered and paid for Adam’s food, which the waiter set on the floor for Adam. He wasn’t the only member of our group who’d venned into an animal shape that couldn’t talk; there was also a capybara, whose name I didn’t catch. Drew, who’d venned into something like the pushmi-pullyu from the Doctor Dolittle books, a quadrupedal body with heads at both ends, stood next to me, Serena, and Carmen (who had booster seats) and not far from one of Ty’s three bodies, the girl one. Somehow we ended up talking about the ethics of venning to enhance protest marches and campaign rallies.

“It’s dishonest to venn into multiple bodies and attend a protest with all of them,” Carmen said. “Go to work or school with one and to the protest with the other, sure. I’m gonna do that for the pocosin protest. But taking multiple bodies to the protest is lying about how much support your cause has. It’s like paying homeless people a pittance to show up and yell support for your candidate at a rally.”

“Exploiting homeless people is a completely different issue and you know it,” Ty argued. “If someone feels more comfortable in two or three bodies than one, why shouldn’t they all attend the same protest? Would you want everyone attending the protest to de-venn and show up in the body they were born with?”

Ty handled their three separate bodies pretty well, but I noticed that if one of them got up to go to the restroom, only one of the two remaining at the table would continue carrying on a conversation and eating; the other one would sit still and quiet until the third got back.

“That’s a low blow,” Carmen began, and Serena put a hand on their arm.

“Carmen’s not saying anything like that,” she said.

“So how is having multiple bodies different from being trans?” Ty asked.

“Okay,” Carmen conceded, “if multiple bodies is a core part of your identity, it’s probably fine to take them all to the protest. But venning into multiple bodies for the protest just to inflate the numbers —”

“What about de-venning to make a protest look more respectable?” I asked. “Would the protest organizers want people like Adam to change back to their baseline form or at least something more quote ‘normal’-looking to keep the protest movement from looking too fringey?”

“I’ve heard of that happening,” Carmen said. “I don’t think it’s going to happen this time, since our local organizer is a cyborg herself. If she was getting that kind of pressure from the state headquarters, she’d have told me.”

“You want to know about something really sketchy?” one of Drew’s heads said. “I heard about a rally for this right-wing candidate for the state legislature out in Texas. Nearly all of his supporters are white for reasons that don’t take three tries to guess. So to make him look less racist, his campaign manager arranges for a bunch of the people who showed up early to venn each other into black and Hispanic people. Most of them were reluctant, but he pointed out they’d change back in eight hours and the rally would look a lot better on TV.”

Ty shook her head. “Yeah, that’s pretty disgusting.”

The conversation drifted to other aspects of politics for a while before coming back to the upcoming protest in Raleigh about the wetlands bill. Some of the protesters were going to venn into photogenic animals and plants native to the pocosin, the unique acidic wetland found in several places near the North Carolina coast. “Actual animals, or anthropomorphic versions that can wave a protest sign?” I asked.

“Some of both,” Carmen said. “Guadalupe’s got several volunteers lined up. She’s got permission to borrow samples of fur and feathers from the Biology department to take into the booth while she’s transforming people.”

After I finished eating, I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. I was less than a fifth the size of a real triceratops, but I was still wider than I was used to being; it had been months since I’d been a dragon-girl with a wingspan wide enough to make fitting through doors a problem. I don’t want to go into detail, but getting in and out of the stall and doing my business was kind of an ordeal. When one of the other girls from our group came into the restroom, a kitsune with a range of bright reds, yellows and oranges in her hair and fur, I had to ask her to help me out.

“You’re Carmen’s friend Kayla, right?” she asked me through the stall door after she closed it behind her.

“Yeah,” I said, starting to wash my hands. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked Adam for such a big body. I’m not used to being centauroid, I should have started with something smaller for my lower half.”

“It’s cool,” she said. “We’ve all tried it at some point. Taur forms are best when you can go to a park or wilderness area straight from the Venn machine. Are those carbon offset implants?”

“Yeah, I heard about them from Carmen.”

“That’s awesome. I tried that once, but my roommate said she’d strangle me if I didn’t change back; the air flow was loud enough to keep her awake all night. Guadalupe’s got that dial on her chest that she can change the air flow rate with, but not many other people have managed to get that feature without some weird drawback. Like the second time I tried it, I had huge, flat air vents covering my whole chest and upper back... I guess you can process a lot of CO2 that way, but I couldn’t wear anything above the waist. Not to mention not having any boobs. So I went right back in the machine and went back to my usual form.”

“I kind of wish the vents stuck straight up from my back,” I said, “instead of out to the side and then curving up. I like the aesthetics of the curved shape, at least for a body I’m only going to wear for a few hours, but this restroom ordeal would have been at least five times easier with vertical vents.”

The toilet flushed and she came out of the stall to wash her hands.

“Better luck next time. Are you going to be joining us regularly?”

“Maybe? I’d like to.”

“I’m Bailey, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you.” I’d met someone named Bailey when they came by to see Carmen in their dorm room; they’d been a guy at the time, and I wasn’t sure if this was the same Bailey. Later on, I learned they were gender-fluid and switched bodies at least once a week. They actually had permission from the university to attend classes and take exams in either of their two main forms.

We went back to the table, where I found Carmen and the others talking about what might have happened if the Venn machines had come along earlier in history.

“If they came along that early, you’d get a lot of slaves using them to escape by venning into white people,” Ty said. “The white authorities would try to stop slaves, and probably free blacks too, from using them, but the makers of the Venn machines would make new ones pop up nearby, same as they do now when a property owner or local government tries to block one off, and sooner or later there’d be so many that they can’t guard them all.”

“Maybe they’d pop up in the slave quarters on some plantations?” Carmen suggested.

“Yeah, probably.”

Serena put in, “I’m not sure, though? I mean, when the owners of the antique mall here in Burlington blocked off the Venn machine that popped up in an empty shop space, this one at Davis and Main popped up, but that machine in Granddaddy’s Antiques wasn’t being used at all. Would the Venn machines or their makers detect that only certain people are being allowed to use them?”

“Yes,” Drew said. “I read about how in this town in Turkey, the local police weren’t letting the Kurds use the Venn machine, and then a new one popped up in the Kurdish neighborhood.”

“Would the slaves that escaped that way have trouble passing as white because of their dialect, though?” I asked. “I mean, I get the impression from some old books like Huckleberry Finn that slaves and white people spoke completely different dialects back then, but I don’t know how much of that was white writers exaggerating things.”

“That could be a problem, yeah,” Ty said, and the conversation drifted to linguistics, which only Ty and Montana were qualified to talk about, for a few minutes before Carmen wrenched it back to the alternate history.

“So what kind of impact would it have on society’s views of gender if they showed up that early? The women’s rights movement barely existed yet, you just had a few scattered activists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Abigail Adams.”

“I think you’d get a lot of frustrated women venning into male forms to escape arranged marriages or other oppressive situations,” Serena said. “Most would suffer enough dysphoria that they’d change back as soon as they got away to a safer place, but some might stay that way. Either because the dysphoria wasn’t as bad as the oppression, or they figured out they were trans men or agender.”

“You think there’d be enough women doing that to affect the sex ratio?” I asked. I could barely imagine changing back into a guy, but I supposed it would probably be less bad than facing a lifetime of marital rape.

“Quite possibly. There’d probably be laws in some places against changing your sex or race... maybe against venning for anything except healing or minor cosmetic improvement.”

“They didn’t have surveillance cameras in those days,” Drew pointed out. “Those laws would be impossible to enforce. Maybe at first they could station a police officer at every machine 24/7, but eventually there’d be too many Venn machines to do that.”

“Man, if they freaked out at people changing sex or race, what do you think they’d do about inanimate venning?” Montana wondered.

“Ban it, of course,” Carmen said. “While secretly indulging in it at certain machines in white neighborhoods where the police know not to arrest the right people.”

That was a fun conversation. After talking about Venn machines in antebellum North Carolina for a while, we started talking about what might be different if they’d showed up in ancient Greece, but didn’t get very far before some people started saying they needed to get back to Greensboro for work or whatever. A bunch of us went back to the Venn machine, including me, Carmen, and Adam, while some returned to campus in their modified bodies. A few who were keeping their venned forms for the weekend or longer hung out with us at the machine while we changed back, as they needed their driver to venn back into something that could drive. I noticed that Ty went from three bodies to two.

Carmen and I went in together so nobody else would see my history, and maybe recognize my not-quite-a-boy forms from the missing child posters Dad had plastered all over Greensboro. I changed them back to their usual neuter body with a blue streak in their hair, and they changed me to the Kayla form I’d worn earlier in the day. Then we drove to High Point, where they venned me back into the dragon statuette, and went straight to work afterward — they didn’t have time to drop me off at the dorm first. I stayed in the back seat of their car while they were at work, and read until it got too dark.

My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset, etc. in a few months; I'm not sure when yet.

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