The Goblin Princess (Episode 3)

The Data

The social networking company had been stealing data from people for years, but they were finally ordered to give it back to any user that requested it after years of court battles. Few people understood exactly what the court order meant and fewer still took the company up on their offer of returned data. But still some people did and the company needed a method for doing so.

Jennifer Kim was among the first to request her data back. The company was ill-prepared. They had countless Jennifer Kims in their database; they just needed her to go away -- so they hooked her up to the machine that would return her data to her, and told her to sit still.

Instead of returning her data to her, they picked a carefully selected alternate user instead. Jennifer would obtain the memories, personality, full data file, and (most importantly) the lax attitude of data security of user “Steve Johnson.” Sure, it would be like creating a second Steve Johnson inside Jennifer Kim’s body, and that might be a problem. But, according to the data, the company suspected the new Steve probably wouldn’t care. The company was rarely wrong with the way they interpreted the data.

Only One

Nate had read a bunch of these stories online about a massive number of people swapping bodies all at once. However, when he found him swapped into the body of a woman -- he seemed to be the only one!

No one around him seemed to be in a panic. He checked his phone for news articles, but there was nothing. His own body was clear across town, and so far it hadn’t given him a call. If there was at least one other person involved in this body swap, it had to be the woman he swapped with, right? She had to be in his original body and at least somewhat concerned about it -- shouldn’t she?

Retro Hell

Rob had found the retro game console in the trash. These things often sold on eBay for a hundred bucks -- not bad for something pulled out of the trash -- and a few hundred more if they actually worked.

He was lucky there was a game inside and that he had the right cords to hook it up to his television. The thing actually turned on, though the loading screen seemed to take forever.

He didn’t expect the console to glow and suck him inside. Being trapped in the cheap looking world of polygons wasn’t even the worst part of this, it was the fact that he didn’t even get sucked into the body of the main character! Instead, he was inside the body of a female NPC. He wanted out of this retro hell ASAP.

Ruined Her Outfit

“Ugh! That stain will never come out! My outfit is ruined! What did you do?” The voice speaking above me sounded familiar -- my own, to be precise -- but the tone and intonation sounded so weird.

Looking up, I saw my own face, but looking down it was obvious that I had swapped into someone else’s body. And despite the clearly life-changing consequences of being stuck in the wrong body and dealing with being a different unfamiliar gender, this woman’s biggest concern was -- her outfit?

She complained how she had just bought it and went on about how cute she thought it was. I tried to bring the topic back to the fact that we were now in each other’s bodies, and yet she still kept going on about how the stained outfit was somehow my fault -- even though I had woke up in this body with it already like this!

Maybe this was her way of coping, but it was still so strange.