A Wish the Heart Makes : Fornever in Blue Genes

by: Tigger

 

Chapter 10: Training Camp

A week later, a tired, but pleased Cat settled into the second bed she had ordered installed in her friend’s room. Things had gone well once they had both gotten over the initial embarrassment of seeing each other, with Matt, now Mandy as a woman. And what a woman, Cat sighed inwardly.

Fortunately for both of them, the combination of Mandy’s lack of stamina and Cat’s lovingly ruthless training program had left her charge with little energy for exploring her sexuality. On the downside, however, was the simple fact that, at the rate Mandy’s new body was getting into shape, that ploy would not work long. As good as her own fitness level was, Cat could not afford to drive herself as hard as was rapidly becoming necessary if she was going to continue to exhaust Mandy. She had to maintain her own alertness, after all, and Mandy was becoming one very fit female very quickly.

A thought hit her. Maybe it was time to involve someone else in the process. MacPherson was fit and had a good, cool head on her shoulders. Good in a fight, too, as Cat had learned the hard way. She did not have to know who they were protecting or why, so Mandy’s secret could remain protected. Adam and Robert wouldn’t like it much, but Cat knew she was going need help, maybe even backup, and her gut told her she could trust the carrot-topped MacPherson.

Just as she decided that she had everything under control, Mandy shifted in her sleep and the coverlet fell. A shapely, rose tipped globe peaked at Cat in the dim light of the sleeping chamber. Cat Donovan groaned. Another good reason to get Morag MacPherson in on this. She could be the practice dummy once they started the self defense lessons. Cat figured she could handle being in a clinch with Mandy for all of about 30 seconds before she took the girl to the mat and had her wicked way with the little virgin. A soft purring sound issued from Mandy and a sensual smile slowly lit her sleeping features. Cat pounded on her pillow. Sleep did not come easily that night.

~--------------~

For herself, Mandy was not sure what to make of the young woman in the uniform of her company’s Security Force. The sleek, elasto-polymer jumpsuit had been designed for ease of movement and for the wearer’s protection. In fact, it was woven of a special fiber that absorbed the kinetic energy from impact weapons and then dissipated it as light. The suit was also highly resistant to edged weapons cutting through it. However, it also fit the wearer like a second skin, showing every bump and bone. Mandy’s still thoroughly male mentality could not help but notice and approve because Morag MacPherson had very nice bumps and bones, indeed.

She was probably being paranoid, she told herself, but finding someone she did not know in her inner sanctum had shaken her badly this morning. The young security officer had taken up a position just inside her bed chamber so that Cat could answer nature’s call. The terrified scream Mandy’d cut loose the moment her befuddled wits had registered that the person was not Cat had brought that worthy person charging out of her shower at a hard run with death in her eyes.

In hindsight, the entire scene had been comical - something out of an early Twentieth Century slapstick movie. A stupefied MacPherson trying to get close enough to Mandy to calm her. A badly frightened, screeching Mandy scooting around in her night shift, trying to keep the bed between herself and the unknown intruder. Poor, confused, then furious Cat, standing on the bed, naked and dripping, trying to bellow over the general hysteria and restore some order. And then, the ultimate indignity when the duty nurse activated the restraints because her board readings indicated that Mandy was on the verge of hysteria.

*Have to do something about that as soon as Bob says those things can come off,* Cat thought. *That makes it too easy for the bad guys if we ever do get penetrated.*

After introductions, and Cat’s embarrassed admission that she probably should have waited to bring MacPherson until after Mandy was awake, things settled. Except for a bad scare and a bump on her head from the fall Mandy had taken when the restraints activated, the only real casualty had been Catherine’s dignity from her nude dash across the apartment.

Actually, Mandy mused, most of the results of that little comedy were quite positive - at least from her perspective. The leg restraints were gone, and the hand restraints replaced by gentler ones that locked her hands together in front of her, so she could catch herself if she fell with them activated. The apartment was being rapidly reconfigured with a bathroom directly accessible from the bed chamber. No more trekking across the lab/apartment to go potty or to bathe.

But, best of all, she’d finally gotten to see Catherine Donovan in all her feminine glory. *God, but that was a whole lot of beautiful woman,* Mandy thought. A curl of desire twisted in her belly and she fought that thought back into her hidden mind. "You have no time for that," she told herself sternly. Then her mind whispered back, *Still . . .*

"Miss Mandy?" The soft, oddly accented voice of the young woman broke in on her reveries. Mandy looked up from her bowl of hot cereal. "Is something wrong with your breakfast?"

"No . . . no," Mandy stammered back. "It’s fine. I was just thinking. That’s all. Ummmm, Officer MacPherson?" Her name being spoken so softly brought her quickly to full attention. "Could you please just call me "Mandy"?" No, the last thing she needed was anything else new added to her name to confuse her more than she already was.

Morag was not so certain. "I dunno, ma’am," she said deferentially. "I dinna think the Chief would cotton ta me usin’ yer proper name, ma’am."

Delighted with the young woman’s softly rolling brogue, Mandy nonetheless took charge. "Let me worry about Cat, Officer MacPherson. She will do as I ask."

"Oh, and will I?" came a sardonic voice from behind. "And just what am I going to do, Mandy?"

The young security officer looked like she wanted to hide under the table, but Mandy just turned and smiled at her old friend. Cat recognized that smile, too - it was the one that Matthew wore when he was about to throw a fox among the chickens. "Why, I was just telling Morrie, here, how I wanted all the people close to me to call me by my given name, Mandy. She was worried you would not like it."

"Don’t you think that might be just a little too familiar for a body guard, Mandy?"

Mandy tried a little lip quiver and voice quaver, just to see if it worked on Cat as well as those ploys used to work on good old Matthew. "Aren’t you my body guard, too? You call me Mandy."

The answering grin told Mandy that she did not have meek feminine wiles quite down, yet. "Oh, I suppose. Particularly since it is very hard to be all that respectful when you are kicking someone’s butt and cleaning their clock for them. "Morrie," and Cat gave that familiarized version of MacPherson’s name heavy irony, "is going to be your sparing partner when we start mat work in self defense." Cat let her grin become devilish. "Did I tell you, Mandy, how she took me down the other day when I tried to penetrate her security position?"

Mandy swallowed hard and looked between the grinning Chief and her increasingly uncomfortable subordinate. Why, the girl was in absolute awe of Donovan. Well, Matt Sorenson had been in too many verbal skirmishes in his, now her life to give in that easily. "Good," she answered equitably. "Then she can teach me how she did it so I can do it to you, too."

A single dark brow lifted on Cat’s face. She crossed her arms and looked at the now cold bowl of mush. "Well, if that is your goal, I suggest you finish eating. You are going to need a *lot* of teaching and time is a-wasting."

~------------~

That evening, Cat and a very tired, very sore Mandy sat in the small living room after a light dinner. Morrie, as she was slowly becoming comfortable being called, was going to have the graveyard shift and had been sent to bed. Mandy was "doodling" on the computer pad and Cat was savoring a very excellent de-alcoholized brandy. She would have preferred the real thing, but she was on duty.

"MacPherson is very good," Cat observed to break the silence. "She gave you just the resistance you needed to improve your form on the techniques without making it too easy on you." Mandy made an inarticulate noise that might have been agreement and continued to stare at the screen in front of her. "What are you looking at?" Cat asked. Matt Sorenson had often been like this when something caught his attention, so Mandy’s lack of a clear response did not surprise Cat very much. She moved over behind her friend to see better.

Rolling 3-D graphs, numbers and equations were seemingly haphazardly strewn about the screen. A newly polished bright red fingernail (a gift from the head nurse, Teri something, Cat remembered) traced from the numbers to the graph below and then back again. Curious now, Cat cleared her throat and asked her question again, louder this time.

Sea green eyes looked from the screen to her. "Just looking at Bob’s raw data on the successes and failures during the cultured cell tests. There is something there we really don’t understand," she mumbled to herself.

"Why?" Cat asked sharply enough to keep Mandy from drifting away again. "What is it that you don’t understand? Maybe if you can simplify the problem enough for me to understand, it might help you."

Mandy sighed and pushed herself back from the desk. She reached up and took Cat’s snifter and took a taste. It was much too strong for her newly virgin palette and she broke into a paroxysm of coughing. "Smooth," she choked out as Cat chuckled at her friend.

Regaining her composure, Mandy pointed again to the screen, this time to the complex equations at the top of the screen. "These are the basic models Bob developed to predict the male to female transition genetic interactions, and these," her fingers moved to a similar set of equally incomprehensible equations, "are the same thing, only for the female to male transition. Using these equations and a human subject’s starting genome signature, we can develop a simulation of what should happen to that person if we were to attempt the change. If we run that simulation using a Monte Carlo routine, using the GPD as the base input, while constraining it only by what we know are fatal, non-viable gene sets, we can predict how often the transitions should be successful. We can also figure out what made the unsuccessful ones fail. Okay so far?" she asked Cat.

Cat nodded slowly, and Mandy continued. "Well, without intervention, that is, without first changing certain specific genes to avoid known non-viable gene sets, Bob’s model predicts about a 70% viability rate and no male/female gender based variation in the success rate. When he intervenes to change non-viable combinations before transition, or when he uses gene sets that do not have some critically lethal genetic codings, his predicted success rate is effectively one hundred percent and still no gender related variation."

Then she sighed and pointed to the tabulated numbers. "Only when he ran the tests on cultures containing live human cells, the numbers were far short of that and also showed a sharp variation in survivability based on gender. 25% of the guys made it to being living girl cells, and about 60% of girl cells made it safely going back the other way. But that wasn’t the only nasty surprise. It seems that a transformed person who was orginally male is some how intrinsically different, at least from a "retransformation" point of view, than someone who was born female. That was totally unexpected and the reason I am going to be Mandy for the rest of my life. Simply stated, we found out you can’t go home again. Surviving male to female transitions always failed reversing the transition."

"What about female to male transitions?"

"Oddly enough, they seem to survive at about the same rate, if a little lower, than the born males undergoing initial transition to female."

"And you have no idea why?" Cat asked. "Sure sounds sex linked to me, at least the way I understand sex linked characteristics from my school days. Something missing on a guy’s puny little Y chromosome?"

"Yes, to us, too, but the numbers are wrong for it to be a gene site on the X chromosome. If it was a guy, with one X chromosome, a gene would be either good or bad - so it should be 50% success rate. Women with two X chromosomes would have a better chance, 50/50 on each X, so the net success rate should be about 75%. In both cases, the predicted numbers are too high to allow for the possibility of experimental error being at fault. Besides, we have already accounted for effects like that in the equations."

Cat puzzled over that. "Even for something as outside the ordinary as a sex change? Do you really know the genetic code that well?"

A gamine grin lit her friend’s face. "Got me there, Big Cat. No one tested for sex changing during the development of the GPD because no one thought it would be possible to control so many variables. Even if they could have thought of a way to test them for that."

"Okay. So assume you don’t know how the genes would react to that. What else could it be?"

A frown clouded Mandy’s face. "I don’t know, Cat. My understanding is that, for the most part, genes work singly. Or at least in some understandable combination. Eye and hair color for example aren’t quite that simple, but most genetically defined characteristics are. In fact, that is how we define them - a genetic effect is tied to a gene site on some chromosome. But then again, my specialty is computers, not biology."

"We define things that we understand, Mandy. I don’t think anyone really understands what happened to you. Not fully, anyway." Mandy started to speak and then reeled drunkenly. "Oops," Cat said. "Enough for one day. You need to get some rest so you can get beat up some more tomorrow."

And she reached over and flicked off the computer. When Mandy started to protest, Cat held up one hand. "Give me a hard time on this, little girl, and I will get Bob to lock you out of the computers *and then* I will give you a spanking."

"Oh, all right," she pouted before standing. She started off for the bedroom and then stopped abruptly. "Ummmmm, Cat?"

"Yes, Mandy?"

"Can I have a rain check on the spanking?" and she turned merry, sexy eyes on Cat. "It sounds quite . . . interesting," and then she turned and sauntered into the bedroom before a goggle-eyed Cat could muster the wit to reply.

 

 

 

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© 1996 by Tigger. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.