I woke up slowly, lying in bed, on my right side with an arm over myselves, on my left side with an arm over myselves, stretched out and lying on myself, and snuggled under myselves. There were a few blissful moments of four-fold warm fuzziness, before awareness hit. Because there were only three of me last night.
The receptionist was having a bad Tuesday, following a dull Monday, and was not prepared for the tired-looking man who staggered in and thrust a complex ID card at her.
“Dominic Kull, NUIA, this is my colleague James Hobson. We’re expected.”
“Who? What? By whom? And why should I care?”
“Nanotech Usage Investigatory Authority,” replied Kull wearily, the explanation tripping off his tongue with the ease of long practise, “and your boss called us in, and you probably aren’t about to dissolve into sludge, but would you like to risk it?”
“Uuh, right, right”, muttered the receptionist, and waved them round towards a waiting area. Kull, looking unshaven, with brown hair slicked back and clad in a dark official suit, slumped into a chair facing the desk. His younger colleague, looking considerably smarter and so non-descript as for this to be a distinctive feature, sat down opposite him. On a small desk between them were a couple of glossy magazines and a glossier catalogue. The title of the catalogue matched that of the office frontage, except for the rain skidding down the side of the building: Forms of Desire.
The Private Uses of Nanotechnology Act, 2036, had established the NUIA to keep a watchful eye on all uses, as much as possible, of Nanotechnology in the private sector of English industry. Usually this was simple, with physicists and chemists using the tiny machines to produce or manipulate things in carefully controlled environments. Sometimes it was tricky, where private artists used swarms of nanos to build things to order, barely possible, and quasi-legal. And sometimes, it was downright insanely complicated, especially after 2048.
At this point a few bright sparks had worked out how to program or control the nanos to operate on living biological systems, without killing or causing much pain to the owner. At this point, the Gilburton amendment had been added to the law, and to the PUN Act, listing all the restrictions of the application of this tech. Anyone having major bodily changes had to volunteer, or be guilty of a short list of rather heinous crimes. It was felt that killing a murderer was a waste of material, but wiping his mind and turning him into something more useful, and selling him, provided valuable assets for victim compensation, public funds, labour pools, etc. Human rights groups had screamed blue murder, but the public were sick of lenient sentences, serial re-offenders, and a prison service long since inadequate.
So a few companies started up, taking criminals and turning them into anything sellable. Taking rich volunteers and changing them to their specifications. Humans went in, Changed came out. Some were sold, with tattooed barcodes on their backs. Some did not come out, becoming effectively part of the plant and operation of the business. For evolution had established that the best place to build a human, was inside another human…
Which was where the mega-wombs came from. An ordinary woman, fed and bloated to the point of immovability, “dumbed down” to imbecility, and altered into little more than an eating machine wrapped around a vast reproductive system. Floating in water, a vast blob of flesh with a face at one end and a vagina at the other, growing the lost, the rebuilt, and the self-designed within themselves. One such “transmutation” company was “Forms of Desire.”
A short dapper man, in a blue suit, hurried into the waiting area. “Mr Hobson, Mr Kull? I’m Julian Salter, glad you could come…”
“No you aren’t” bounced back Kull, “because you only actually call in the NUIA if it’s all gone wrong.”
“Uh, yes, quite… erm…”
“Why don’t you show us?” asked Hobson, pointedly standing up and walking towards the office door. As Salter hurried up between the two officers, they passed several offices of people arguing with computers, past a large window on a physiotherapists studio. Kull stopped and looked in. “Ah yes, said Salter, “some of our recent clients. I think that’s a Mr Heinkel on the treadmill, and, erm a Jane Doe on the chair.”
Mr Heinkel looked like the sort for a full nano-sculpt, appearing to be young, fit, powerfully built without being bulky, with a handsome face and sparkling blue eyes. Jane Doe, on the other hand, was nude, with the body of a six-breasted porn star and an expression on the verge of giggling. She kept leaning out to stroke and fondle the physiotherapist who was trying to check her reflexes.
“Mr Heinkel came in for a new body, he’s 87, good job there…”
“And Jane six-pack?”
“Erm, well, interesting case there…”
“Oh?” (the syllable carried implications of trouble, depending on the definition of interesting. Kull practised it on his colleagues, to their irritation)
“If I remember right, she’s technically a suicide. Came in a few months back and donated her body to us, asking for her mind to be wiped. Caused a hell of a lot of paperwork. But eventually we wiped her mind, randomly picked one of our more popular lines, and remade her into…” Salter gestured vaguely through the window.
“Into a mindless sex toy.” Hobsons declaration slammed down accusingly.
“All perfectly legal, all sorted, paperwork’s upstairs, not the problem…” Salter hurried on (followed by the agents) through a door covered in warning signs, and down a set of metal stairs to a huge room, dominated by machinery and tanks. Six tanks, in two rows of three, stood inside the warehouse-like space. In each floated a massive blob of once- human flesh, 5 in caucasian skin tones and 1 in asian bronze. Each was connected to pipes, monitors, banks of computers, bustling technicians and emergency power generators. Each also stood, with all it’s attendant machinery, inside a fence of blue light shining up from the floor and down from the ceiling. The blue light was marking a considerable outpouring of energy, a wash of electromagnetic static calibrated to burn out any nanobot passing through, along with just about any form of electronic storage media as well. This was to ensure that no transmutational nanotech escaped from where it was meant to be working. It had also, in Kulls experience, been a bone of contention, due to the massive power bills for these “disruption fields”. Some companies had been known to switch them off whenever not strictly necessary, leading to ...incidents. Salter walked past all the tanks, and through another door to another part of the complex, a holding area for finished projects and products. He stopped by a bank of monitors and hit a few points on a touchscreen. “It all, erm, started this morning. Here’s the first problem…” A view appeared of a being, apparently a bald woman of tanned skin, naked and abundantly female to her hips, from which proceeded a massive snakes tail, in iridescent green and gold scales. She was obviously female below the waist as well. There was no sound on the recording, but she was speaking and twisting and calling at the walls, occasionally looking face-on to the camera.
“Danni Morrison, Thrown Away for dangerous driving and three counts of manslaughter. We eventually rooted through a few legends and called her a naga.”
“You mean you didn’t know in advance?” asked Hobson.
“No. That is not the design we were aiming for. But that’s not the problem. She’s fully sentient, a shade smarter than she was, and keeps trying to have sex with any male attendants who enter without full body protection. We found out she’s leaking pheromones like nobodies business. That’s not the problem…” Kull and Hobson glanced at each other and waited for Slater to come to the point.
“She still contains active nano. We’ve no power feeding to them, disruption fields are doing nothing while it’s in her, and we aren’t entirely sure what they do…”
Hobson inhaled sharply, “Shit. Rogue nano. Keeping a field on the door?”
“And the walls. From what we’ve been able to dig up out of the designers files and our own scans, we’ll take a guess that she could probably breed, as soon as she manages to have sex, and have loads of little nagas, all equally, ah, fertile.”
Kull groaned and leaned his head against the wall. “And she’s fully awake and bouncing off the walls and still qualifies as human, with rights, including freedom and probably intimate company. This is one for the lawyers I think...” His head jerked up, eyes narrowing and focussed on Salter, “but if that’s the first problem, what’s the second?”
The first thing I remembered was being born. First one, then another, then a third of me, an easy birth from a place of warm comfort, onto sterile plasticated floor, lit by harsh blue light, dazzling all my eyes. I saw three different views, including of myself, a young woman, fairly slim and athletic, lightly tanned skin, short brown hair, and green eyes. I took a breath, then another, with three sets of lungs in three identical bodies. I looked into my eyes, and saw myself looking back at me looking back at me. I stood, one self helping another to my feet, as men in protective white suits stepped towards me, looking shocked through their facemasks as they reached out to me, to all of me, to one mind in three bodies.
I recognised this situation as strange, but not why. I knew my bodies, any one of them, was strange and unfamiliar to me, but I couldn’t remember what I looked like before. I looked around, turning three heads for a full panoramic view, at a cavernous space of things I identified without knowing from where, at mega-wombs and nano-insertion machinery. And at the baffled technicians, who gently took my hands and led through a curtain of blue light, and into a bare white room.
I sat thinking, leaning back upon myself for comfort, in the centre of the room. Technicians pointed pieces of technology at me, and argued, and waved small display screens, and eventually left, the door clicking shut behind them. I had to get out of there. I knew it in the same way I knew which way was down. But first, I wanted to see more of myself, with the warm bodies (me) pressed up against my naked back (also me), and I twisted in triplicate and fell into my arms. Kissing and stroking myself, six breasts stroked by six hands as I leaned each of me hugged two others of me into a complex three way kiss, an act halfway between incest and masturbation, as I lost balance and fell to the floor, sprawling atop/beneath/between my writhing selves.
“Okay,” said Kull “so you had the triplets pop up when you were expecting a six-armed typist, dragged them off to where they had their little orgy, and then what?”
“Uh, erm, then the naga was born, and we diverted the staff to deal with her, I mean, they weren’t doing anything threatening… They were still under observation via the cameras…”
“And then?” prompted Hobson.
“Uh, you’d better watch it yourself…”
Salter hesitantly poked a few more keys, and another clip appeared, with a time of 10:37 flashing in the corner. The three women appeared to be dozing on the floor of the cell. Suddenly they sprang up and launched themselves at the door. In amazing co-ordination, all three of them hit the same point on the door (just behind the lock) with their heels at the same time. Lined up in front of the door, with less than a centimetre between them, they lashed out again and again in perfectly timed triple strikes, until the door and the lock separated, and they dashed through, off-camera. Hobson spoke first. “That was… impressive. What happened then.”
“Uh, they ran into the guard on the cells, who tired shooting them with a taser. He missed, they beat him up and took most of his uniform, triggered the fire alarm and escaped out a fire escape, 1 in uniform and 2, we assume, in lab coats which have turned up missing.”
“Bit of a security failure, eh?”
“Erm, well, we had to have the fire safety stuff for the regulations. They didn’t seem to dangerous and so we just stuck them in a low-security cell. And we certainly didn’t expect the level of co-ordination between each other that they showed…”
“And then they left site. No bar-code, I noticed. I think we’d better speak to the designer of those girls…”
“Erm, he left last week. Resigned.”
“His records?”
“I think he pretty much, erm, scragged them before he left. We’ve got some info retrieval techs in putting it back together, but it’s a bit slow…”
“I knew I should have stayed in bed. Okay, what’ve you got?”
When I left my birthplace, I moved first to acquire clothing, food, resources, somewhere to rest for a while. A plan formed quickly, and a little drama was acted out. Two naked women were seen fighting in an alley, and a local security guard would direct the attention of a passer by to the sight, and request help in breaking them up. Not too many men will argue with separating a naked catfight, but fewer still are capable surviving being hit from three directions at once. My first victim I stripped, clothing another of me rather badly, and checked his wallet. Annoyingly, he had no address details on him. I hit him on the back of the head with a brick and threw him into a rubbish holder, easy with three bodies. The second victim was a smaller man, who tried to mediate between my fighting selves, and was easily knocked out. He had keys and address, and grocery shopping to boot. I stole his clothes as well, and pushed his body down a manhole.
What money they’d been carrying bought a few more clothes at second-hand shops, better fitting and less distinctive. Trying clothes on my female bodies felt strange and new, but then I had been born only hours earlier. Or rather re-born. Thinking on that sparked another memory. A face, thin but energetic with a shock of brown hair, a face important to me. My creator? My… father?
The flat of Matthew Lee, my second unwilling donator, was some way away, and when I eventually arrived there, I collapsed on his small bed (barely big enough for three), and slept away the day.
I woke suddenly, with a jerk, and one of me fell off the bed. “And they all rolled over and one fell out…” I said from the floor, as I got up and helped me up. Looking at myself, I seemed a little flushed, and I needed something. There was a hunger in my stomach, an ache, a desire for… for sex.
I licked my lips in realised arousal, and it looked rather strange to see three views of two other women doing the same. It was approaching evening, and old memories stirred, of nightclubs, bars, and similar places where a willing woman would find someone to oblige fairly soon. Apparent twins in search of a man between them would be successful, but triplets might just freak people out. Two of me adjusted what clothes we had to look a bit more alluring, while the third was stuck with what was leftover. I wanted to make love with all of me, but I could always bring a third in later.
Some hours later, two of me leant against a bus-stop, while the other me dodged into a nightclub called the Hot Spot, and had a quick glance round. This me was wearing rather shabby clothes and a baseball cap, and spotted a few likely prospects at the bar before leaving. No point in attracting too much attention. I then wandered back to the bus shelter, passing my other selves as they sauntered by, mirroring each others movements, and walked into the Hot Spot. Finding a suitable place in the bus shelter, I stretched out and closed my eyes, wanting to concentrate on the actions of the other two of me.
I walked in, beside myself, striking a pose in the door of the club and then gliding to the bar. A short but wide man, in a leather jacket and jeans, was the target of my attentions, leaning back against the bar as he searched for a chat-up victim. His eyes widened as I walked in and leant on the bar on either side of him.
“Hello girls, what brings you in here?” he asked in a deep voice, a line he probably practised in front of the mirror. I replied a little out of sync with myself, to the amusement of those watching.
“Looking for some fun/Looking? for some trouble…” I glanced at myself, across his chest, and then looked back at him. My hands moved, and grabbed his from the bar, and I twirled up his arm, in stereo like a pair of chorus girls, asking “Waiting for anyone/Got? plans for the evening?”
He looked suspicously from one me to another, and asked “Is this some kind of a trick?”
“Yes,” I answered, through one mouth, “but it’s not on you…” In the bus shelter, someone stroked my shoulder and I opened my eyes with a start, to see a young blond man, maybe mid-twenties, in a sheepskin jacket and a haze of alchohol, looking down at me. In the club: I leaned in on the short man, whispering in his ear, “I’m Sandy/I’m Candy”.
“Heh, well girls, I’m Clive, and…”
“Will you take us home?” whispered “Candy” in one ear as “Sandy” whispered “Will you have sex with us?” in the other.
In the shelter, he leant down on me, burbling “Ya donna wanna be sleepin alone there baby…” as his hand slid round my cheek.
In the club, two of my hands stole under Clives jacket, as Candy continued to whisper “With both of us? We do everything together…” Sandy started to kiss Clive up his neck, and nibbled his ear. Clives resistance collapsed, and he leant forwards, asking “Now?”
“Now!” said both of us together, as the bar snickered around us, watching our antics. In the shelter, I thought “Fuck it, why not?” and leaned up to kiss the young blond man. He practically fell onto me, landing on the concrete floor, where I leaned over and pulled him out of his sheepskin jacket. In the bar, a couple of jealous exclamations followed Clive as he walked out, me on each arm. I pulled off my ill-fitting pants as the blond fumbled for his belt, a drunken grin spreading across his face. I signalled for a taxi while I snuggled up Clives arm, kissing him deeply. He staggered, seemingly intoxicated as the blond finally got his boxers out the way, and I grabbed his penis, guiding it into myself and arching back in the bus shelter with the sensation, swaying onto the thankfully sturdy Clive as three sets of legs went weak, and the taxi pulled up. The blond man reached up under my shirt, fondling my breasts as I eased up and down on him, collapsing in the taxi seat and draping myself, sweaty and flushed across Clive, who distractedly inputted his destination into the cabs computer, as the blond, youth and alchohol overpowering restraint, came into me. I continued using him as a giant sex toy for a few moments, until my climax swept over me, a warm wave of ecstacy spreading out from my vagina, and a few sharp gasps filling the bus shelter, as I writhed against Clive in the back of the cab. As the blond man slipped into drunken post-coital stupor, I tidied myself up, stole his wallet, and hurried out. As I sighed back against Clive, I realised that I had no idea where we were going, and I still felt I should all be in on things at his house.
“Clive, how long till we get back to your place?”
“A few minutes, Sandy, hold on, girl…”
“What’s the street?”
“Uh, Woodmead drive…” he replied as he buried his face into Candys neck. Behind them, I caught a cab, paying for it with the blonds cashcard, and followed Clive, myself and I back to his place. As I shut the door to Clive's house (a dull grey terrace with no lights on), I left it just on the catch as I leaned in on Clive and licked up his jaw and nibbled his ear. To buy time for the third part of me to get there, I put on an impromptu strip act for Clive, slowly being dragged up the stairs by him, as one body twisted free and shed some clothes, to be replaced by the other body, to repeat things. In this fashion, I was slowly escorted into his bedroom, a rather ostentatious double bed, in red silk sheets, dominating the room. As the cab carrying me pulled up into Woodmead drive, I collapsed onto the bed with Clive, myself following afterwards. I was sweating quite a lot, and his sheets were soon drenched as I stroked and fondled and evaded actually doing anything. He was panting and desperate, and very ready when I leaned in and asked
"You don't mind if my sister joins us, do you?"
"Yes! I mean no! Just stop wriggling..." At which point I'd reached the house, dodged in through the barely shut door, shutting it behind me, and bounced up the stairs. As I'd shed clothes and cap en-route, Clive saw a naked woman enter his bedroom, identical to the ones on each arm, but by this point he was beyond thinking straight. And I slid up the sweaty bed, between myselves, and all of me leaned in on him...
It was early morning, a misty Wednesday, and Hobson and Kull were back at the NUIA offices, trying not to bite through their styrofoam cups of coffee substitute, as they read through the huge wadges of data forcibly extracted from Forms of Desire the day before. Kull was reading the design notes for the naga and the triplets, and...
"Getting nowhere fast here."
"You were going on that you were the big expert on the technical side of it. Too fragged to understand?"
"No, too bloody complicated."
"How so?" asked Hobson, grimacing as he read a bit of text on his own screen.
"Well, we're dealing with self-replicating nano, which is difficult, powered by ambient body heat, which is practically theoretical...
"Oh God..."
"Shut it, I'm ranting. The designer babbles on about a fluid based system for transformation, but doesn't say what."
"At least it's not airborne."
"Thank God for small mercies!" sighed Kull, and the two looked over at a small statue, visible through their office window, dedicated to those NUIA agents killed the last time airborne self-replicating transmutational nanotech had got loose. It had cost the government a several squads of soldiers, a large town, and a small tactical nuclear bomb. It had cost Kull and Hobson several friends.
"Anyway," resumed Kull "the complicated bit is the brain, which is stuffed full of this shit..."
"Well-designed shit."
"...and which copies across the entire brain structure, including electrical impulses, several squillion times a second, and transmits to all other brains that can recieve."
"So the reason those triplets were moving in perfect unison and co-ordination was because..."
"They're sharing the same mind, updated constantly. If we seperated them round the globe, they might lose contact, but otherwise, it's one person in three bodies."
"Nice body though. Who was it originally?"
"Oh you'll love this," frowned Kull, "a nasty piece of work called Tony Rodd. Professional mugger, in and out of jail for years, Thrown Away and to transmutation for hitting some little old dear a bit too hard and killing her."
"Great. One male mugger into three female mugglets. Hopefully the mind was wiped."
"Hopefully. But apart from reams and reams of technical data, that's about it. What about the naga?"
"An easier one. Fully sentient, but we can't smash the nano in her without killing her. It's what keeps her alive."
"Urgh."
"And what would let her breed true. Lots of baby clones, all full of their own nano. Luckily, that's all it does, from this."
"Harmless, do not allow to breed. Can't chuck her back in the womb, because Naga is innocent even if Danni deserved it."
"That's about it. One for the legal team. I've been scanning their file on the designer though..."
"And?"
"Put that pillow on your desk in front of you, save yourself an injury. Right. Daniel Forms (lovely bit of nominative determinism there)..."
"Stuff your nominative determinism, get on with it."
"Yeah, Daniel, creative type, founds Forms of Desire 2049, after being involved in the bio-nano research project. 2052, company is on the rocks and bought up by some investors, he becomes chief designer. 2053 is down to plain designer due to 'personality conflicts'. March this year, is downsized from the company he founded due to being, wait for it, overqualified..."
(there was a muffled thumping sound as Kull started to headbutt his pillowed desk, in frustration at the ways of companies)
"Yes, I thought you'd appreciate that. Note on here that he seems to have cheered up a bit, designed a couple of regular pieces of work, and left last week. The company already tried his forwarding address, which hasn't heard of him."
"So they fired him, he screwed them over with these little beauties, and we have to tidy up. I'm just going to lie here for a bit and weep softly into my pillow at the pettiness of man."
"Well, it's a dirty job, but someone's..." Hobsons cliche was interrupted by a pillow in the face.
As I sat up along the edge of the bed, all four of me trying to snuggle under one duvet, I ran through a logical extrapolation. 1)Transmutational nano-tech existed. 2)It was therefore possible, if illegal (and how did I know that?) to turn one person into another. 3)Thinking about it, I recognised the place where the three of me remembered awakening for the first time as a transmutation laboratory. 4)So it was possible, even probable, that I’d turned Clive into… another of me. Three of me turned and looked at the me-once-Clive.
“What?” I answered from that body.
“I don’t look like a Clive anymore…” pointed out another me.
“We are Facet.” Said all of me in unison.
“Where did that come from?” I addressed myself.
“I don’t know, and I’m talking to myself again.”
“Point.”
Thinking back on the events of last night, I received another surprise (I mean, Facet? It makes me sound like a character in a bad sci-fi novel). I remembered from “Candy and Sandys” point of view, and from “bus shelter girls” eyes, and from Clives as well. I paused in the middle of cooking breakfast for four (he had had a well stocked fridge), as the view of me through someone else’s eyes and perceptions clouded my own for a moment. Where was Clive now? His body remade into mine, his mind… what, snuffed out like a candle and replaced by mine? Oh, who cares? A hairy lump like that, hanging around bars, with (I shared a predatory grin with myselves) no one to miss him. I checked this in my new memories. Clive had lived mainly alone, wasn’t expected back at work for a couple of days, and had some savings. And knowing his thoughts, his mind, his memories, they were mine.
“You know,” I said, thinking aloud to myself as I all sat down on Clive’s overstuffed sofa, “feeding four is going to be problematic…”
“What’s the alternative, getting a job?”
“As what, mind-reading quadruplets?”
“Could carry on doing this.”
“Same amount of cash/food each time, more of me each time.”
“Could keep mugging people for their cash…”
“And then not throw them away…”
“Mmm,” I said as I munched fried bacon “Long Pig…”
A faint memory intruded, not mine but it felt like mine. Of a section of metal pipe, held in a wide hairy male hand, descending at speed towards a woman’s head. Who had I been, before being changed?
Not too far away, in a cramped two-room flat, many, many stairs up a tower block, young blond student Robert Cogson was having problems of his own. His day had started not snuggled in a bed, but waking up to a pounding hangover on the floor of a filthy bus shelter. Lying on his sheepskin jacket, his trousers round his ankles, and his wallet missing. A stumbling, hungry, nauseous walk had followed, 6 long miles in the glaring morning sunshine, with smug busses passing at insanely frequent intervals. Luckily, Rob still had his keys, and was able to collapse into his rented accomadation with relief. Despite a long walk, he still had a headache, was sweating heavily, and was starting to get the jitters.
After pulling himself together just enough to ring his bank and get a new cashcard, he propped himself into the tiny cubicle shower, and tried to feel better, or even awake. He had a nasty rash all round his dick, and hunger aside, his guts were making some very strange noises. Had he caught something? A vague memory of a girl in the bus shelter popped up, and then vanished into post-alcoholic haze. Typical, he actually got lucky on a night out, but only when too drunk to remember it, and catching something horrible in the process.
Feeling slightly better after a belated brunch of beans on toast, Rob called up a few friends from college. Explaining how apallingly ill he was, he managed to get them, in exchange for future favours, to copy across a few lectures and similar that he felt totally incapable of attending. The rest of his truncated Wednesday was spent eating what felt like huge amounts of food, nipping to the loo far too many times, and lying on his bed, trying to watch television, as his muscles ached, and his joints throbbed, and his skin crawled and twitched. And on his sweat-sodden sheets, he eventually passed out.
I spent that morning preparing for a life in quadruplicate. One of me went shopping for a few cosmetics, hair dye and the like. One of me went to max out Clive’s bank balance (I think I who went was once Clive, but I’d lost track), while the other two of me went shopping for a selection of clothes. Clothes to mug the dozy fools who thronged around all four of me in this sprawling city. Clothes to pick up men in, for I could already feel a four-fold itch in the back of my mind, a teasing nag of a voice subvocalising “sex sex lets all have sex, lets find a man and have sex, all have sex with him and make him us…”
I felt, as I looked out through four sets of eyes, very detached from the people on the pavements, in their cars, in the shops, each crippled by a single viewpoint, by a single pair of hands, by having to do things one at a time. They were less than I was, and so much less than what I would be.
Later that afternoon, in a variety of outfits, I was in place on the edge of an urban park. A middle-aged woman, walking a small dog, drab and in her fifties, walked briskly along on of the paths, towards an intersection with a small back street. As she approached the gate, two of me on a bench, making small talk to each other (and it’s so easy to make pleasant conversation while talking to yourself) dressed in business woman clothes, got up and started walking down the path towards her, hands empty and looking at each other. As they got closer, a third me ran past Mrs Dog-walker, dressed as a jogger, carrying a short length of sturdy metal pipe in each hand. I ran straight between my other two selves, eliciting shouts of “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” as I turned angrily to watch myself jogging out, empty-handed. The two of me turned back towards my victim, now in easy reach and distracted by the running me. She had time to say “What an inconsiderate…” before I smashed her head in with the pipes. And her little dog too.
Quickly rejoined by my running self, I picked her up and bundled her out of the park, where the fourth me was waiting by the gate, in a hired car. I was hungry, no, one of me was desperately hungry, and as I drove the car hurriedly back to an old industrial estate, I just couldn’t wait, and sank my teeth into her raw and flabby body.
Later, around an oil-drum fire, I cleaned some blood of myself with my tongue, and threw the remains of the woman into the fire, where she burnt soggily and with an appetising smell. I felt… quite strange, and I identified the strange feeling as coming from the me that had been so hungry, and indeed had eaten most of the muscle of the woman. Standing up, and prompted by a strange apprehension, I dropped my trousers and turned slightly, so I could get a side look at myself. A low bulge, too low to be a swollen stomach, confirmed my suspicion. I was pregnant, and apparently by several months.
“When? How?”
“Am I the me who shagged that guy in the bus shelter?”
“Hang on… yeah, I remember this graze I picked up.”
“And if he did this” patting my bump with a hand or three, “then what did I do to him?”
Thinking about that blond drunk, I had a flash of another view, from another set of eyes, of a wall and ceiling in a cramped room. And then it passed, and I headed off to clean up and prepare for the evening.
While the pregnant me stayed home to check through Clive’s house, and two of me (looking a little different from each other through judicous use of cosmetics) headed into town to repeat the Sandy/Candy? routine, another of me headed for a bar I’d spotted Tuesday.
Looking for dinner, I swayed into a gay bar and found out that the aphrodisical effect of my touch, or possibly of my sweat, worked just as well on other females. The poor woman, named Tricia, was lured back to my lair, and met another of me with a carving knife coming the other way. It was so easy to kill the one-bodied foolish girl, with one me holding her down, and another stabbing. Tricia was tomorrows breakfast, and stashed out the way by the time Sandy/Candy?/me came home, dragging a young man named Paul, who looked barely old enough to shave, but carried himself with an assurance in his own desirability that had made snaring him so easy. As I looked at him and wondered how old he was, my breasts tingled and swelled, all eight of them.
As my pregnant body happily jointed Tricia in Clives kitchen, the other three of me, just starting to lactate a sweet (and, as it turned out, highly addictive) breast milk, crawled into bed with Paul…
Rob woke tangled in his sheets, looking at the wall, body still aching and ravenously hungry. Shuddering and moaning, he looked at his watch, loose on his shrunken wrist, and groaned at the blinking display reading 22:35. He still felt terrible, and his body felt strange, numb in places, tingling and burning on others.
“Uuurgh, eat something, get to a doctor, what do I look like?” He managed to close his door and get a good look in the mirror affixed to the back. A wave of dizziness washed over him, as he looked at a face he didn’t recognise. His face seemed rounder, his hair darker, and he wouldn’t swear to it, but his eyes were looking green. Looking down, he seemed slightly shorter, and that rash around his crotch had spread between his legs. His dick was maybe half the size it had been, and his scrotum likewise. And then he blacked out.
Awaking some hours later from strange dreams of a trio of identical women (or was that a trio of dreams?) Robs hunger forced him to gorge himself on all the food he had in the flat, before he pulled himself over to his computer, and frantically tried looking something up.
“This isn’t a dis’iss, ah look all diff’ent. Erp, too much food… Som’un musta done somin’… with whassa called… nanos…Ahm so screwed…where’s that fuckin number!”
It was well past midnight that Rob managed to call the emergency victims hotline for the NUIA, but he was barely able to croak out his details before passing out.
Hobson and Kull were called to the NUIA internment wing when they arrived on Thursday morning. “What’s this about, George?” asked Kull of his old friend George Mills.
“Victim came in early hours, connected to your case…” responded the short and slightly tubby agent, transferred years ago to the NUIA after years of hospital work with nanotech victims.
“How?”
“Nano emission and behavioral patterns. Looks better than most though. Here’s the file…” George passed across a sheet of paper, and bustled off, pointing Kull and Hobson in the direction of a bank of viewing screens.
“Ooo, nano-match of 98.5%, called in one in the morning…”
“A victim how? Mugged, infected? What state is he in?” inquired Hobson.
“Fucked.” Spat Kull, looking grimly up at Hobson. “We can’t stop the transformation, it’s too far along. We can’t reverse it ‘cos the nanos are locked to their designer. All we can do is let it run its course.”
“Oh hell. And how did he get it?”
“Like I said, fucked. It seems that Miss Triplicate is an STD…”
The two sat down in front of a couple of computers, and flicked throughthe transcipt of what Robert had been able to gasp out between blackouts and screaming.
“Hang on, he barely remembers shagging one of them. Where were the others?”
“Doing the same thing elsewhere?”
“God, I hope not.”
“Okay, but if it’s a couple of days for the effect, based on, what, fluid exposure during sex? I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”
“Bump all that tech data up to our experts, they’ll have to see if they can get a better clue about the function and operation than you can.”
“How does he look now?”
Kull leaned in and brought up a live feed from the isolation tank Rob, or what had been Rob, was languishing in.
“Oh boy…”
“Remember those pics of Triplicate? Not far off.”
“A little breast tissue, a touch longer hair. Looks like her sister already.”
“Reckon she’ll share the group mind?”
“We can’t shield these rooms and keep them clean of nanos. So yeah. Oh no…”
“Oh yes. Feel like an interrogation?”
“Not without another cup of coffee.”
“She’s still sleeping. We’ve got a minute.”
I woke with a start, opening six pairs of eyes and convulsively kicking out. Four of me in a bed, one on a sofa, weight thrown off by heavy pregnancy, and one in a white cell…All of me sat up hurriedly, as I concentrated on the one me far away, in a white cell I recognised, similar to the one the three of me had broken out of. No Threat. Featureless white walls. Metal door, smooth on this side. Experimentley, I kicked out at it, but it was much harder than the last door and this time I had but one set of legs to kick with. So I sat down in the cell, and made breakfast in the house, and had to take turns on the toilet, and thought about this. By process of elimination, the me in the cell had to have been the man I shagged in the bus shelter. My selves in the house had stopped lactating and were tucking into roast Tricia, especially the pregnant me, when the cell door opened.
In came two men, the first looking thin and tired, with brown hair slicked back, he second the poster boy for average, although he also looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. Both men were wearing suits of white cloth, and headbands of the same, with sparks flying between their legs, arms, chin and chest, and anywhere where the cloth became close to itself.
“Good morning Miss.” Stated Mr Average in official tones “I am Mr Hobson, this is my colleague Mr Kull. You are in custody at a facility of the Nanotech Usage Investigatory Aurthority. Do you know who you are?”
I grinned in hexaplate, although they saw only one.
"Hello Mr and Mr. No, I don't. Who do you think I am?"
The pair glanced at each other, and then Mr Hobson leant back against the wall, saying "We believe that you've been the victim of circumstances beyond your control, and now you've got more trouble than you can handle."
"Oh, you'd be surprised what I can handle..." I laughed, standing up and moving towards him, only to crash to the floor as Mr Kull swept a leg round and tripped me up. The shick and loss of balance was nothing to the pain in my legs where he'd lightly tapped me. Tapped! Felt like I'd been beaten with stinging nettles, and the five of me not even in the cell winced as the pain hit me.
"Ah, ah, don't come too close. We know what your touch is like," nodded Hobson from the wall, "and you couldn't touch us anyway through these suits."
I grimaced and rolled over in the cell, while the rest of me lost my appetite and went still.
"Now," said Hobson, "how many of you felt that little sting?"
I gulped nervously, and he noticed it with a grin.
"There are at least four of you, and you may be making more, but we can't really allow that. What's happened to you isn't your fault, and we'd prefer to help you. Turn yourself in, we'll see about shutting down your little problem, and set you up with a life a way away from here."
"Although," said Kull, speaking for the first time in a quiet voice, "we'd have to restrict you down to a few less bodies. See if we can bring back the boy you were, in this case."
"On the other hand," Hobson interjected, "we can track you through this one of you, and bring you in anyway. It'll be messy, painful, and no help to anyone."
"What?" I gasped "What makes you think I'd want to go back to being only one?" The two agents glanced at each other again, and then lunged forwards, grabbing my hands and holding me to the floor, as pain washed up my arms like acid, causing the me in the house to shudder and jerk, as Kull said
"Like it or not, you're coming back here and we're going to straighten you out!"
I concentrated on a short reply, and on what I was about to do next.
Hobson held the victim (if that was still the right word) down, encased in his protective suit, and signalled for a tranquilizer patch. As he did so, she twisted her head round and spat the words
"I'll! Just! Do! This!" She convulsed under his grip, and then went completely limp.
"Shit!" Kull breathed as he checked for lifesigns.
"Any signal off her?" called out Hobson to the room in general. The response came back from hidden speakers near the ceiling, "Nothing, sir. Definate nano activity, and then nothing." Kull looked up.
"Do we know she could do that?"
"I certainly didn't. But even so, shutting off a body so as to give us nothing to trace?"
"More than a little ruthless. Like something biting its leg off to get out of a trap."
"No like to it. That's what she did."
"And tracking the rest of her down is going to be that much harder."
"We're so screwed."
"By her? I hope not. I like me the way I am. But come on. We've got other leads to follow."
I shuddered as the after effects of what I had done swept over me. For a while, I had been five, but now I was only five, and already regretted killing my other body. I spoke, to articulate my thoughts:
“Well, I had to do it.”
“Could they have tracked me down through that one of me?”
“Not something to risk.”
“No.”
“How am I feeling?”
Four of me looked at the pregnant one of me, who posed beneath my eyes, appearing nearly to full term.
“Not ready to pop yet, but I want to be six again.”
“I want to be more than six.”
“Enough food for the moment?”
“Yes, but we should move to somewhere else.” With a five fold nod, and a predatory grin, I pondered how to assimilate some more of the pathetic one-viewed cripples roaming around the city. Suburbia offered many opportunities, and I wanted to test out another theory. My sweat drove men (and women) crazy, and I certainly sweated a lot in bed. The saliva from my kisses had a similiar effect, and actual sex with me turned the poor little one-views into more of glorious me. But what did my milk do? Paul had certainly enjoyed it last night, but then he’d enjoyed all of me, several times over. I flicked through his memories, and had an amusing time seeing sex with me from the male perspective. For a moment, it seemed vaguely familiar, but then I did have Clives memories as well. I looked at the pregnant me, who was hungry again already, and nodded. What, after all, were breasts designed for?
Right, I thought, shuffling my feet outside a selection of local schools. Wanted: affluent family with a couple of brats, living fairly close. Outside four schools, among four clusters of waiting mothers, four identical women grinned. Really pregnant me was lying back in Clives house, munching on leftover Tricia. I looked around the various crowds, relishing the security in being everywhere at once. Even if something happened to one of me, the others would go on. I would go on. These pitiful little one-views, so limited, so beneath me, were only really useful as support for me, as food, as (I licked my lips as the right term came to mind) prey…
Ah, here came the swarming little brats now. First from one school, then from another, until there was the daily confusion of mums and school kids outside each building. All primary schools, not enough mums outside the secondaries. Four pairs of eyes scanned the crowd; one mind collated information. I discounted some of the mothers as perhaps two poor, others who’d come with their husbands, and most who climbed into cars and onto bicycles. There! Anchor School, a young woman, late twenties, with two small children, heading off into the maze of semi-detached suburbia around the school and shops. I tailed her, and I left the other schools, and I felt the first pangs of birth.
While one of me followed young mum back to her house, walking briskly past but noting the street and number, I brought the rest of me back to Clives. From my body straining and grunting to give birth, it seemed that the rest of me didn’t arrive quickly enough. Happily, I was not in as much pain as I’d suspected. Another legacy of my designer? With the rest of me standing around and helping, supporting, and giving me an excellent view, I shared the pain around myselves, and it seemed to help. However, it still took long and painful hours, and I cursed my designer, the limitations of the human body, and that fool who got me pregnant, and who definitely deserved to have his personality subsumed and his body reshaped and then killed.
And then I was born, again, in a different fashion, as I saw myself lying on the blankets below my exhausted self. I was the baby as well as the mother, and after having survived the first birth where the mother can hold her own hands, I was perhaps the first newborn girl who could communicate discomfort and confusion effectively. So I lifted my tiny new body, and cleaned me up, and tidied up after the birth. And then, as it turned out, I had five bodies to breast feed with. And so I was six again, and I smiled at the thought (and gurgled happily, amending that figure to maybe 5 and a half).
I spent the rest of that day recovering, and feeding the baby me vast quantities of breast milk. Despite no experience in this sort of thing, my new body seemed to be growing practically as I watched. But it still lacked the co-ordination to look after itself, even with my mind in her. So, with Mummie me looking after baby me, it was the other four bodies who went out hunting that evening.
As a group, I wandered happily down the streets towards the address I’d noted (36 Falchion Street), and then three of me hid in the evening gloom, while I stepped decisively forwards and knocked on the door. There was a car in the drive: the man of the house was probably home. Good, I thought, licking my many lips, it’s been too long without a man. The door was opened, though, by the young mother. Her name was Prey, and I smiled a glassy smile and started in on a sales pitch, while sticking a foot in the door. As her eyes glazed over and I rambled on, she tried to shut the door at the sight of the other three of me, all recognisably identical, coming up her path. Her eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late for her. My hands shot forwards and grabbed her by the throat, while the others of me dashed up and past her into the house. As I breastfed a baby me, not far away, I strangled my latest prey and moved through her house. One of me jumped sideways into a comfy sitting room, and two children, a six year old girl and a four year boy, looked up in surprise.
“Hello!” I said as winningly as I could, “I’m your Auntie Facet. Your parents have just had to go out for a bit, so they’ve asked me to babysit you for the evening.”
The boy gave me the vacant expression so beloved by small children, while the girl crossed her arms with a truculent expression and declared
“We don’t need a babysitter! Who are you? Where’s Mummy?” Meanwhile, the other two of me had headed upstairs, surprising a short dark man in shirt and tie. He was heading downstairs, and I jumped up in stereo, knocking him backwards and kissing him before he had time to swear. And after the first kiss came the second, and he broke out in sweat beneath us on the stairs, and I saw rising lust in his eyes overtake any other considerations.
I dropped his startled, strangled wife to the floor of the hallway, and checked that the other of me had closed the door behind me. I switched the baby me to the other breast (my milk tasted really good), and checked through Clive’s house for anything I’d missed in an earlier packing spree. In the new house, I nipped into the kitchen, opened a large plastic bottle I’d brought, and poured out two glasses of milk. My milk, expressed earlier and brought along. And some cookies. While another of me led Husband upstairs, the other two of me quickly jammed Wife into a small cupboard. Time to deal with her, later.
Small Annoying Girl had wandered into the kitchen, where luckily there was only the one of me.
“Where’s my mummy?”
“Taking a quick nap. Milk and cookies?” I pushed a glass and plate into her hands, but she looked at me suspiciously.
“I don’t think I’ve got an Auntie Facet…”
“Yes you do. Drink your milk.”
“Where’s my daddy?”
“Upstairs. Look, if you drink your milk, you won’t need to go to school tomorrow…”
She watched me very carefully, and took a small sip. Then a bigger sip. Then started gulping it down.
“Good, isn’t it?”
“Erm, yes, erm could I have some more?”
I poured her another glass, and a smaller one for her brother. Meanwhile, my other three bodies were quietly fucking the man of the house on his own bed. In the old house, I called a taxi while carrying my baby self on one hip, and travelled to 36 Falchion Street, with a bag or two of everything useful from Clives. I smiled at and paid the taxi driver. No need to attract too much attention.
By the time all of me were gathered at Falchion Street, my baby self had grown to an apparent two years old, and the children in the house had drunk all the milk I had brought, asking for more. By the time my three upstairs had finished shagging Husband into a transformative coma, the children were begging to be allowed to suckle. At that point, they didn’t blink at the five identical women, and the baby who highly resembled them, and soon I had five of me collapsed on their overstuffed sofa, with three children crawling all over us, breast feeding as much as they could. It was very warm, and all of me cuddled together, and eventually slept.
“Ah, another day of bashing our heads against beurocratic brick walls,” muttered Hobson as he clocked in on Friday.
“Bluuurgh”
“Stop it Kull, I know you’re still alive.”
“I wish I wasn’t. I’ve been here for an hour, going over the maths of the Triplicity case.”
“And? I hope you’ve thought of something, because otherwise it’ll be a quarantine job.”
“Assuming it took her a day or so to go to ground, and her shagging and transforming one man a night, we could look at her numbers being up to, perhaps five or six at the end of today.”
“Counting our unfortunate friend Robert Cogson?”
“Yes. The transformation process takes time. But eventually they’ll be too many of her to hide effectively.”
“Reckon she’ll try to leave the city?” asked Hobson, scratching his nose in a speculative manner.
“I would.”
“Plugged her face and mannerisms into the IR software at the city/rural interface?”
“I was just filling out the forms for it.”
I woke up, one at a time, and felt powerful and many. Five of me on the sofa, jammed into a snuggly mass. One new-come to femininity, waking up in what was once his bed. And three more, small but still part of me, waking on top of those of me on the sofa. I stood, in one of my child-size selves, atop the pile on the sofa, and got a good look at what had been a four-year old boy. I now appeared to be a young, pre-pubescent girl, maybe ten years of age. In an evening and a night, I had taken a family of four little one-views, and subsumed three of them. And the fourth?
In a well co-ordinated display of untangling limbs, I all stood up, and was joined by myself from upstairs. I gave myself a hug, relishing the feeling of nine-fold hugging and the rush of sensation from so many sexy bodies. Nine in the house was somewhat crowded, and I took the opportunity to send a couple of me out, heavily disguised, to empty the bank accounts of my newest bodies. When I came back, I was greeted by the rich smell of roast meat, and all of me cheerfully tucked into my well cooked hostess.
I grinned, and wondered which of the smaller mes were eating their mother, and which of my older selves was eating his wife. It didn’t matter. They were part of me now, liberated to a wider world and elevated to far beyond their previous petty selves. After eating, my smaller selves continued to breast-feed. They were growing fast, stuffed full of protien and transmutational nanotech, but it was with some surprise that I felt a sexual urge within myself, and starting suckling less as babies, and more as lovers.
I pulled in all my bodies, my nine now identical bodies, and fell into a sprawling orgy across half the floor. With three of me, newly born, it had been comfortably pleasant. With nine of me, it was mind-blowing…
It was hours later that I woke up, and panicked. I felt so cut off, so restricted, so limited! I tallied my selves, and found to my horror that I had only three bodies again. I was lying among a large pile of naked women, still on the living room floor of 36 Falchion Street, and apart from my other two bodies, clearly visible to each other, I could see two other women. No, I could see two groups of three identical women. They all seemed to be still asleep. With a deep breath, six hands, and a certain mischevous thrill, I slapped all of them on the bum, calling “Facet! Wake up!” “Ow! What? Who? Where?” asked a trio of young women with long dark hair, bronzed skin and an asian slant to their black eyes, currently widened in shock (and looking rather cute).
The other trio, of shorter, voluptous women, blond and blue-eyed, responded by swinging a fist at me, and there was a rather complicated scuffle for a few moments until she/they woke up properly.
Checking myself out, I was still the same shape as I had been, athleticly trim, short brown hair and green eyes.
“Facet!”
“That name really sucks” said the blonde trio.
“There’s only three of me!” wailed the asian babes.
“Hold on a minute.” I comforted the six of them. Or possibly the two of them. “Lets all sit back down and talk this through. First stop, new names. What’s our name?”
“We are Facet” We all recited in three voices from nine throats.
“Crap. I’d hoped we’d ditched that.”
“Obviously not” said an asian girl. “By hair colour?”
One of the blondes responded “That makes me Facet Yellow, you Facet Black, and her Facet Brown.”
“Yuck. How about by eye colour. Blue, Black and Green?”
“It’ll do.” I, Facet Green, admitted.
“Logically, you’d be the original three, as you still look the same,” stated Blue.
“Which would mean that it’s part of how we’re designed…”
“You two still remember breaking out of the cell don’t you?”
“Yes Green/Don?’t you Green?”
“Stop that. So when we get to a certain size, nine bodies, we…?”
“Metastasis. Paul studied biology. It’s the term for when a cancer splits…”
“And spread to infect other places.”
“We’re not a cancer.”
“Best analogy.”
I interrupted this cheerful banter with a disturbing recollection. “Remember the me who was captured.”
“The NUIA will be hunting us. But now?”
“In different bodies, Black and Blue can leave the city.”
“And Green can stay here. What time is it?”
“Late afternoon. Evening train.”
“Oh yes.”
Daniel Forms noted with annoyance the increased security on the train station. The cameras sweeping the crowd were moving faster, and occasionally stopping to lock onto someone. There were a couple more groups of security guards standing around, here and there accompanied by the… was that the NUIA uniform? Must be. Ah well, it would seem that Facet was making her presence felt. There had been a fair few missing persons reports on the local news that morning. He wondered vaguely how Naga would do, especially if she ever ran into any of Facet.
“Ah well,” he muttered, “I guess I’ll hear about it later.” Still, if the NUIA were looking for her (them?) they wouldn’t be too concerned about him. Passing a large gaggle of young women, he ignored the security completely (although he was very glad when it did the same), and boarded the upper floor of the massive but crowded train. Having planned a long trip at least a country or two away, he’d shelled out for a private cabin. He felt he deserved some rest. So he was quite surprised when there came a knocking on his door, late in the evening. He opened it cautiously, only to get a glimpse of a blonde curvy form that smashed in the door and kissed him.
“Uh, who? What?”
“Hello Daddy dearest? Remember me?”
He felt a rising attraction to this voluptuous young woman, and leaned in to contradict her when two other women, identical to the one who had wriggled into his arms, walked in through his open door, shutting it firmly behind them. He wanted them, all of them, right now, with a strength of arousal that wasn’t natural… wanted these three identical women….
“Oh no…. Facet?”
“Oh yes…” said one.
“In the many flesh” said another.
“And while I’m grateful to you for making us…” (piped up the one in his arms)
“The name sucks!” they spat in unison.
“But I forgive you”, they smiled in eerie synchrony “let me show you…” And, as his resistance crumbled, they closed in around him.