Curry Favor

It had been a few weeks since the Great Shift, and Sanjay had tried not to panic about the fact that he was now a woman with pale, pasty skin. There were a few adjustments -- sure -- but it hadn’t been that bad. He was looking forward to things getting back to mostly normal, and his favorite restaurant re-opening certainly qualified as normal.

He went in and ordered his favorite dish. He noted the aroma seemed slightly off, but it still smelled extremely delicious. He took a bite, and it was so...spicy! Obviously, he KNEW it was spicy; that’s why he liked it! But this new body was having trouble handling the heat. Things started to get messy; the curry only burned the sides of his mouth as much as it burned the inside. This was a nightmare! It no longer had the familiar, delicious taste he was once used to; now it only tasted like someone set fire to his mouth. Being stuck as a woman he could handle, but being stuck as someone who couldn’t eat his favorite dish? Well, that was terrible!

Makes Me Nervous

Jack hadn’t intended to create a machine that swapped people’s bodies; he certainly didn’t expect it to swap his body with his neighbor, Mrs. Brandis. Now he was trying to soldering the parts in hopes he could fix it and get back to normal.

“You know you don’t need to watch me while I do this. It just makes me nervous.” Jack tried to explain while looking up from the pieces of his machine.

“You’re a little weirdo who stole my body. Who knows what your plans were with it!” Mrs. Brandis shot back.

Jack didn’t want to say it aloud, but Mrs. Brandis was full of herself. If he could chose to swap with a woman, why would he pick her? She was 50 years old -- twice his age! Her body felt heavy, and he could feel that anytime he moved. Even her fat fingers may some of the finer work quite the challenge.

Get Swapped (Part 1)

“The Swapper” didn’t seem like much of a ride. With the tagline “Get Swapped,” it appeared to be little more than a small booth in the amusement park. But people came out looking so refreshed that Nathan assumed the ride must just be underground or something, and that prospect seemed a little bit better than another long wait in the hot sun for a roller coaster right now.

As it turned out, there really wasn’t much more than the booth itself. Nathan entered and was squirted with some sort of weird goo. That part actually was refreshing. The goo was in sharp contrast to the summer temperature, and he felt goose bumps on his skin. But that feeling began spreading; soon his whole body was tingling. It wasn’t just tingling, it was changing.

And, sure enough, Nathan had left The Swapper as a completely different person from the one who entered. He could feel the weight of long hair on his head and a new weight on his chest. He pulled out his phone to look at himself, seeing a woman looking back. He should probably be freaking out, but all he could think was how fun the ride had been.

Unique Node (Part 1)

Chloe nervously walked to the front of the lecture hall after class. Professor White thought he had gone over the heads of everyone with his parallel realities theories, but he was glad at least one student was brave enough to ask a question.

“Do you think it’s possible to travel back to a previous reality?” Chloe asked nervously.

Professor White laughed, “The amount of energy to travel to a random universe in the first place would be near incalculable, and returning to an exact point would be like landing a rocket ship on the head of a pin.”

“What if you could reduce the entropy? By matching a deterministic state with a resonant quantum signature?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we figured it out. In my reality. You and I did. But I was the only one who could. Because Chloe lived my life. I was never born here. My parents adopted her. It was as close to being identical without being identical. And she was the only one. But my real name is Steve. Steve Johnson.”

“And so Chloe is a unique node for you?”

“Yeah.”

“But that means there are an infinite number of Steve Johnsons. And no way to know which one is you.”

BFFs | The Halloween Episode

View the Body Swap Episode of BFFs