Chapter 6: 3:00. The Girl In The Mirror (pt. 1)

The trip back through the tunnels could be described as "uneventful," if you ignored everything leading up to it. Once we'd escaped the science building unnoticed, our immediate stress levels dropped substantially, and the quiet rhythm of walking - plus our individual challenges - managed to distract us until we arrived back at the access elevator for the women's dorm.

"Alright," Emma said, finally breaking the silence, "c'mon. We need to get out of sight for a bit."

Tammy nodded. "We can use my room. The Little Divas are supposed to be at some workshop tonight, so we'll have the bathroom to ourselves; they won't be back until at least two or three." She grimaced, recalling some precedent. "Hell, with the weather they'll probably just stay out all night and barge back in at five once the buses start running."

Emma opened the door, and Tammy wheeled into the stairwell and hit the call button; then they glanced back at me expectantly. I frowned. "Um, guys, that's the women's..." I trailed off, realizing what I was saying - but I wasn't really a woman, was I?

...Was I?

Tammy read me like a book. "Look, it's fine," she said, trying to smooth it over. "We're allowed to have guests. Plus, it's still crazy weather out there, and the tunnels don't run over to the men's dorm - they built that later, when the school went co-ed and they needed a new building."

"And nobody's gonna give you a second look, now," Emma said. "Well, not for that, anyw-ow!" She winced as Tammy gave her a tail-slap to the shins; I winced at her coming out and saying it. But then the elevator arrived, and we got in. There'd be time to sort that out after we were safely out of sight.

Thankfully, it was quiet enough that we got to Tammy's room without meeting anyone; the rain was still pounding outside, and people had apparently decided to call it a night. She ushered us in, and I took a look around. As a handicapped student, she'd gotten a room to herself (aside from the shared bathroom,) so it was more spacious than I was used to; the bed on one side was gone, and she had a little couch and some bits of exercise equipment there instead. The rest of the decor was sparse, but neatly-kept.

I gravitated to an empty corner of the room once we were inside, as usual. Emma followed behind us; she shut and locked the door, and we breathed a heavy, collective sigh of relief. Which was a little surprising, since I still wasn't breathing as such. But I put that aside for now, as Tammy went into the bathroom and cautiously opened the door to the other room. "Yep," she said, "they're gone."

That was it, then. We were, for the moment, safe from discovery and left to wonder: what were we supposed to do now!? I looked to my classmates, wondering if they had any idea how we were supposed to react to this.

Emma had settled in on the little mini-sofa and was busily examining herself: holding her head out at arm's length, looking back at her own body, tilting it this way and that. "This is so weird," she said. "What even is this...shimmer-thing? I can't even see where my neck was." She frowned. "Can I just...?"

She carefully tried to set her head back on her body. "Yaugh! Ugh, no." She yanked herself away, grimacing. "Gah. It's like chewing on tin foil." A thoughtful expression crossed her face. "Wait, do I have something like that under my head?"

"Uh, no," I said, feeling another twinge of strangeness at the sound of my new voice, then cringed when she tipped her head backwards to show me the underside of her jaw.

"Hey, tell me what's under there," she said. "I definitely can't see that without, like a double-mirror setup."

"J-just skin." It was a bit of a relief; I was still half-expecting a ghoulish cross-section of a human neck, especially with no mysterious haze to obscure it. But it was still freaky to look at; humans weren't supposed to have a blank expanse of skin there... Of course, humans weren't supposed to look like disembodied heads at all, in a normal, sane universe.

Emma laughed. "Freakin' bizarre."

"I'm glad this is so entertaining to you," Tammy interrupted, "but we really need to talk about what we do now."

"Aww."

"I'm serious!" the new mermaid snapped, teeth clenched; her pelvic fins thrashed under her skirt, even as her hands clenched the armrests of her chair. "They're definitely going to figure out that somebody was using the machine - did you even clear any activity logs or whatever?"

Emma shook her head - meaning, again, that she twisted it from side to side using her hands. It was fascinating to watch...did she even know she was doing it? Was it just a brain-tweak that came with her change, like mermaids instinctively switching from lung-breathing to gill-breathing underwater? It seemed a bit high-level for that - the concept of gesture might be instinctual in humans, but the exact gestures are often cultural. But who knew?

"We were in too much of a hurry to get out when we saw Dr. Curtis coming," she said. "But it was under his login."

"Yeah, and that's another problem," Tammy said. "That's not something you're supposed to do. If you just went in and pulled a lever, that'd be one thing, but hijacking someone's account? That's definitely against the rules, if not actually illegal."

Our classmate the disembodied head grimaced, and her decapitated body shrugged. "You watched me do it, y'know. But look, I'll take the rap on that, if you're seriously worried about it. You guys shouldn't get in trouble over my idea."

"It's a little friggin' late for that," Tammy hissed. "We're already in trouble. And even if they don't have a billion security cameras set up around their expensive new toy, there's no way we can just show up for class like this without everyone in the school realizing what happened."

Emma raised an eyebrow. "Shit, I hadn't even thought of that."

"And at least you and I are still recognizable," she continued. "If we weren't witnesses to it, Stuart would probably have a hell of a time just proving that sh-that he was Stuart."

I caught the slip and winced, but I was more worried about what she was implying. Was I that different? I must be, from what I did know happened to me, but...

"Oh, right, you haven't actually seen yourself yet, have you?" Emma said casually. "Here; the closets here have a mirror on the inside." Her body went to the closet and cracked the door, waving me over. I was hesitant to confirm this to myself any further - but another part of me was desperate to end the uncertainty, and my not knowing wouldn't make it any less real. Slowly, I stepped over to the door; she opened it, and I gazed into the mirror.

Reflected in the glass was a young woman, no more than five feet tall, with silver-white hair - not like an old person who'd gone grey, but vibrant, as if it was her natural color. It hung straight to a little past her jawline - but it was oddly wiry and springy for hair that long and full. Her irises were deep purple and her skin was pale cream; she was delicately built and wore a crisp black dress with white underclothes and stockings and black leather flats. Her face wasn't beautiful so much as pleasantly cute; but she was visibly troubled.

Part of what was troubling her was that the figure in the mirror was clearly a woman, but just as clearly not human. The hair, for starters - the color was unusual enough, but looking closer at the unusual texture...it was artificial, filaments of some other material rooted in the skin of her head. But the "skin" was also different, coarser in texture, less glossy; it too was artificial, a layer of felt in a human skin tone, stretched over an internal frame that shaped the head.

The "skin" didn't fit right around the joints, either - there were creases on the inside of the elbows and knees, and it was split around the outside. The gap revealed enameled metal, pearly-white against the skin-tone of the felt. The fit on the face was better, smoothing the moving parts that articulated eyebrows, cheeks, and lips into a convincing facsimile of human features, but the eyes were obviously artificial - pearlescent orbs with a glass coating, the irises shutters made from tiny, delicate blades of purple onyx.

But the most obvious clue that she wasn't a human was the polished brass shaft protruding from the middle of her back. This had a two-lobed, roughly heart-shaped blade on it, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, with holes in either end; an enormous winding key, slowly turning counter-clockwise to the ticking of some unseen escapement within her body as it metered out the energy from a comparably enormous mainspring, countless mechanisms chattering with activity.

The other thing that troubled this strange clockwork automaton was the part where she was me.

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I stared into the mirror for what felt like an eternity, watching her, watching me: the key on my back - my key - slowly turning with the unwinding of my mainspring, driving my mechanisms, operating my new body. Hearing the chatter of things I didn't even know the names for turning, clicking, catching, releasing, extending, retracting; marking time, reacting to stimuli, processing information, making decisions, triggering responses. Feeling the perpetual motion; not a sense in itself, but a subtle interference, vibrations carried through my frame and fed back into the sensors for other stimuli - touch, hearing, balance - to form a phantom sense of the parts that I couldn't feel directly.

I watched my own expressions as my mechanical brain gradually, inexorably processed what had happened to me. I was...I was a machine; I was a girl. I was an automaton; I was a clockwork mechanism; I was a doll. I was a God-damned wind-up toy.

"This...this can't be real," I said, in a daze. "This is a dream, this has to be..."

"Stu," Tammy said, "this is real. I know it's crazy, but it's real, and if we want to do anything about it we're gonna have to accept that, for now. Believe me, I don't like it either, but there's no other way to get through this." She rolled up next to me and put a hand on my shoulder; I noted absently that she no longer had to stretch to reach that high.

I looked back at her and realized what I'd noticed earlier: her sculpted features had softened in the change. In fact, all of her was a little softer than she had been; she wasn't chubby or anything, but it was like the fine lines and sharper features of her face had smoothed out, and she'd gone from "classical beauty" to simply "pretty girl." I wondered if this was what she'd been angry about, but I was too caught up in my own shock to think much about it. This couldn't be real...but it felt real. All these alien sensations were too consistent to be a dream. This was real, this was really happening...

"We have to go back," I said, my voice a faint metallic rustle. I felt things inside me accelerate again. I couldn't stay like this; I wasn't supposed to be a girl, I didn't know the first thing about being one, I definitely wasn't supposed to be some bizarre clockwork automaton, nobody would believe it was me, I wouldn't be able to attend classes, my grades would drop, I'd drop out, my family wouldn't know me, I'd end up-

"That's not gonna happen anytime soon," Tammy said; she squeezed my shoulder gently, but her voice was firm. "As soon as they realize what happened, they're gonna lock that thing down tight. Emma wasn't wrong about this being the best chance we had to do anything with it." She sighed heavily. "As for what happens now...I dunno. We're gonna have to do a lot of convincing for the faculty to let us anywhere near it, which means we're stuck like this for...hell, I dunno. Probably months."

"Months!?" I said, hardly able to process the idea. My whole life, completely upended, for months on end, before I might even have a chance of getting back to some semblance of normalcy...

"I dunno," Emma said, as she experimented with keeping her head tucked underneath her arm. "I'm kinda hopeful that we broke the proverbial ice. With us as prominent test cases, I think we can maybe talk them into having another go at it in a few weeks, once the fuss's died down. But Tammy's right that it's not gonna be tonight, or anytime in the immediate future. We're all gonna have some adjusting to do."

I felt myself start to get hot under the collar; something inside my head was revving up as I grew more and more frustrated with the whole situation and the blasé attitude of my classmates towards all this madness. How could they be so calm!? "B-but...but listen," I stammered, "you-you haven't...!"

Tammy nodded and gave my shoulder another squeeze, in a maddeningly sympathetic gesture. "I know," she said. "We're still girls here, and you're the only one that got switched around. There's a whole level of craziness that you have to deal with that we don't, sure." There was a curiously bitter edge to her comforting words. Then she took a more authoritative, almost parental tone. "But that doesn't change anything about the situation. We are where we are right now, and there's no quick or easy fix. So all we can do is move forward as best we can, and figure out from there."

"But what can I even do!?" I moaned, my voice warbling like a shaken spring. "I can't go back to the men's dorm like this! Hell, I don't even know what happens when...when my..." I gestured to my back, still hesitant to acknowledge it - my mainspring. What happens when I wind down. If this was really me, if my new body worked the way it seemed to, it was inevitable - but I had no idea what it would mean. Would I sleep? Dream? Die? Or just stop? There was no way to know...

Emma chuckled dryly. "Funny you should mention," she said. "Guess who texted while we were busy with the craziest night of our lives?"

Tammy growled in irritation. "Em, is this really the time? It can wai-hey, that's my phone!" She grabbed for it, but Emma was too far away for her to reach. "Okay, give me that now," she said firmly.

Emma shrugged and handed it back, shifting her head up securely into her armpit. "Ugh, my right forehead keeps squishing against my left boob," she said. "This is gonna take some practice. And you should really pick a better lock pattern."

But Tammy had stopped listening once she got her phone back; she was staring at the screen with a mixture of confusion, irritation, and relief. "They...hahahaomigod, of course they did." She looked up at us. "My roommates, in their infinite wisdom, are renting a loft downtown, I guess because the Muse told them it would make their lives more like Rent, but with less AIDS."

"We barely have a downtown as such," I said, confused. "Unless they're...what, gonna live in one of the old business spaces across from the casino?"

She shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine, but that's officially Not My Problem. So screw it, you guys can make yourselves at home. We'll call it a night, and we can figure the rest out in the morning."

"Makes sense," Emma said. "The admin offices aren't even open on the weekend, so it's not like we can talk to the faculty until Monday anyway."

I thought for a moment, then frowned. "Wait, stay here?" And...were we just moving past my whole crisis? I was barely even-

"Yes, Stu, stay here," Tammy said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. "I know this is all weird and awkward for you, but, news flash, it's weird and awkward for all three of us - and you both have roommates who, I assume, would freak the hell out if they saw what happened to you. And then nobody'd get any sleep." She put her hand back on my shoulder. "You have my full permission to crash here for the night - and believe me, nothing you could possibly do to the place would hold a candle to what my roommates get up to on Friday nights."

Emma nodded, performing the gesture manually. "Right. This way, we're all right here if one of us needs help with something, and we can worry about tomorrow tomorrow." She turned to Tammy. "On that note, if you're cool, I'm gonna steal the bathroom for a bit. I haven't had a shower since this morning, and with all the running around I've been doing and then hauling ass back here, I feel like a pig."

Tammy didn't object, and Emma went into the bathroom to figure out headless showering; I hoped there was a shelf or something she could set herself on safely. The water started running and we didn't hear any alarming thuds, so she was probably managing. After a minute or so, Tammy turned back to me.

"Okay, listen, Stuart," she said. "I don't know everything you're going through, but a blind man could see how bad you're freaking out about...everything. I can't say I blame you; your situation is even weirder than ours, on a couple of levels. But you're doing that thing where you start brooding and get lost in your own head again, and that's not gonna help anyone right now, least of all you, so stop it already."

I opened my mouth to protest, but she shushed me. "Look, I'm not mad at you or anything. Maybe you can't help being this way; it's just...look, Emma's crazy. Right now, this is all just a big game to her, or something. I...I like her fine, but she just doesn't think stuff through, and she doesn't do consequences, I don't think. Probably. Maybe. I dunno."

She sighed. "Point is, you and I are the sensible ones here. Meaning that A. we're gonna have to take point on whatever trouble we're in, no matter what Em says about falling on her sword, but also B. we're the most liable to completely lose our shit, because we're taking this insanity seriously." She buried her forehead in her palm, slowly shaking her head, then looked back up at me. "Stu, we need to keep it together until we get this sorted out with the faculty - both of us. We don't need you freaking out because you're a girl now any more than we need me having an aneurysm over what I hate about this. So I need you to keep your cool, please?"

I just stared for a moment. I wanted to get mad at her for acting like I was irresponsible for supposedly putting my own distress ahead of the needs of our group, but...I could tell myself that she was being unfair, I could focus in on that thought, but I couldn't feel mad, not the way I knew it. Like my distress, the raw emotional edge was gone, with the flesh and blood and chemicals that produced it, replaced by something more abstract. It wasn't that I didn't feel things, but they were much less able to take control of my mind. And without the ability to fall back on blind, unreasoning emotion, I had to admit that...she was right.

I sighed and nodded. "I-I'll try. I'm just...look, I know this is probably overwhelming for you, too, but...that doesn't change the fact that it's overwhelming for me. I don't even know how to process this in the immediate sense, let alone think about the long term. I'm already at a loss, and when I think about anything past that, it's just a big blank wall of not even knowing."

Tammy nodded. "Yeah, I guess. I suppose I'm a bit more used to it." It was an offhand remark, half to herself, and she didn't elaborate, but I felt like a jerk again. This wasn't her first life-altering incident, after all.

"Y-yeah," I said apologetically. "Um...wanna talk about it?" I wasn't sure whether to feel like a tool for prying, but it seemed only fair; if she was suggesting that we both support each other in this, and she'd been doing her best to talk me down, then...

"No," she snapped. I cringed, really feeling like a cretin now, but she waved it off. "No, look, um...thanks," she said. "But...this isn't the time. The last thing I need right now is to start off down that road. Not while we still have all of this to get through. But thanks."

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