Human by Choice Read online

  “Well,” I ventured, “if you can do what you're saying, and trust me to help pick out your form, the best thing to do is to let me show you shapes and colors and descriptions, then you mold yourself to the woman you want to look like.”

  “If that is what you wish,” she said.

  Jeri was amenable, but then I had to peruse some pictures of nude females to give her an idea of what I considered a nice face and figure. Inevitably, that meant seeing some pornography. I tried to keep it to a minimum, but it was no use. Looking for nude women on the internet meant you were going to see some porn, regardless. For that matter, looking for dishwashing detergent on the internet meant that you'd probably come across a come-on to a site where men and women were doing wild things to each other that had nothing to do with dirty dishes. Once, back before pop-up blockers came along, I got a into window of MILFs that wouldn't go away no matter how many times I “clicked X” on it. I didn't even know what the crap a MILF was until the site came up. Each time I'd click X, it would close and another would take its place, announcing that they had the hottest nude teens or the best library of nude celebrities or the nastiest women on the web or, you name it, it was there. And once there was even a site for very, very, large women. I quickly noted that Jeri was captivated by some of the acts pictured, even though I hurriedly scanned past them or closed them out. Finally, I just stopped fighting the flood of internet porn and tried to explain one of the most oddly fascinating, strange, and weird aspects of human nature—sex, and as a consequence, internet porn.

  “Jeri, some of the things you're seeing here aren't what most of us would call normal or mainstream. Humans are subject to innumerable neuroses, almost all of them at least partly sexual in nature. And a lot of them will do almost anything for the right amount of money or fame. If you get confused about any of this stuff, please ask, or better still, try to ignore it until later, when you're better acculturated. Okay?”

  “Yes. Shall we continue looking at nude females, then?” she said. Jeri was truly an alien after my own heart.

  “Yes, but I've got a better way of doing it. If you're determined to do this, you may as well do it right. Just wait here a minute.”

  I had a stack of old Playboy magazines inherited from my father, some of them collector's items now. And, yes, of course I had added to the pile myself over the years, but before I was married. I had gone through them once or twice and separated out the ones I thought I might like to look at again sometime in the future, either for the particularly pulchritudinous young women or for an article I might use sometime in my writing. And for the pictures of the young women, or did I mention that already?

  I brought the ones with the best photo displays (in my opinion). I like boobs as well as any normal man, but I like them proportional to the rest of the body, not oversized (although if a pair of extra large naked boobs just happened to be in front of me, I certainly wouldn't shy away from them). I showed Jeri some examples of what I considered to be ideal figures and coloring, then gave her a height limitation of no more than five feet six inches and preferably an inch or two shorter, which was probably a subconscious hangover of mine from Gwen. By the time we were finished, she had a good idea of what I liked, but none of them really resembled Gwen (who had been very pretty, verging on beautiful) other than their height. And I was not only as embarrassed as a kid caught with pornography by his parents but had a pretty fair erection besides. Call me old-fashioned, but looking at naked women for that prolonged a period of time did get my blood pumping.

  Those pictures at least gave Jeri something to shoot for. I still had my doubts about whether she could accomplish it or not, but I figured if she was going to do it, she may as well try for something I liked, since she was living with me. If the process came out anywhere near what I envisioned, she would turn heads by the score, which brought up another subject we had touched on here and there over the last three days but hadn't tried to explore yet in any depth.

  Once we were seated (and it turned out that my couch suited her about as well as any earthly furniture, so long as she sat upright), she began the conversation. I wasn't quite ready for it. Hell, I was even trying to avoid it. I mean, come on, sex with an alien, a very alien-looking alien at that, was not something even the free love hippies from the last century would've been up for.

  “Kyle, human sexual practices appear to be something I shall have to experience in order to even begin to comprehend. They bear little relation to what our species thinks of as sexual bonding. I've gotten the impression that much of your sexuality is exceedingly pleasurable, yet somehow associated with deep subconscious feelings of guilt. These in turn are very closely related to your religious beliefs, of which there are many. Am I correct so far?”

  “Well, yeah, religious and moral beliefs. All morals aren't necessarily derived from religion, though. I mean, even atheists have morals based on what they think is right and wrong.” I had to admit she was mostly right, though, much as I hated to. We're a weird species, no doubt about it.

  “Therein lies the confusion for me. We have nothing at all like religion in our culture, since our mathematicians have proven beyond doubt the non-existence of a Supreme Entity which orders how the universes work, much less one that takes a personal interest in our everyday affairs. I'm sorry if that offends you, but I have no other way of looking at it.”

  “You're not offending me, Jeri.” In fact, I felt a huge sense of relief. Religion has caused enough grief on our old earth already, without bringing in new ones from other parts of the galaxy! I wondered about her species’ history, though, but didn't have a chance to ask right away, because she continued almost immediately. And had I truly understood more about the underlying math of quantum physics and the connectedness phenomenon, I would have argued that any good mathematical proof can eventually be overturned with a new understanding or axiom. But I didn't, so I didn't.

  “Oh. Then I assume you belong to the ten percent or so of humanity which has lost the genes governing a belief system in the supernatural?”

  “Uh, well,” I started to say but then hesitated. Up until the loss of my brother and my wife I thought I was pretty sure about things, religion-wise. But these days I wasn't sure I knew anything about anything. But Jeri perhaps knew more than I did about humanity as she had really been researching our species. I was already pretty much aware of how much she'd learned. “That's one way of putting it, I suppose, although I'd sure like to see that proof you say you have. But yes, that's about right. Maybe as much as one in ten of us, or thereabout, apparently are born without a need to believe in a higher power. Of course, our scientists are beginning to think there are a number of interrelated genes associated with the belief genes, or any genes for that matter, and environment governs a good deal of the way most genes are expressed. It's extremely complicated. For us, anyway.”

  “I'll be able to shed some light on it for you once I've become human. Perhaps by publishing my findings?”

  The statement was in the form of a question. I wasn't certain if it was rhetorical or not. And I thought about it briefly. There were two problems with that. One was just a hunch that being human might change her mind. Seeing and “feeling” the universe from a human's perspective would be a new observation that might throw a monkey wrench in that proof of hers. The second was pure logistics of the Spanish inquisition of scientific publishing.

  “It's not that easy, at least if you can't show the research to back you up. If you don't have that, and credentials to match, a reputable genetics journal, or any other science journal for that matter, won't publish you.” I grinned. “Of course, there's always the internet. That's made a considerable change in the ways we make information available to the common man.” I thought for a moment. “In fact, I could probably do it for you. It's right up my line and I have a good reputation for not going off the deep end. Well, not too often, anyway.”

  “If I understand your similes correctly, you're involved with the publica
tion of scientific data?”

  “That's right. And I think I have a pretty open mind. You know, Jeri, you were very lucky you came down in my bailiwick rather than some hillbilly preacher's or someone that's ignorant of anything outside movies or the pabulum you find on television and so-called internet entertainment. You might have been shot or tied up and beaten to drive the devils out of you.” I shook my head, thinking of all the different prejudiced, opinionated, dogmatic and downright mean-minded people she might have come in contact with first, rather than me. Not that I'm free of some neurotic quirks and beliefs with no foundation in fact; all of us have them, and some cultures are more subject to them than others, but I did think I was relatively free of the most objectionable kinds. I said so and Jeri tried to nod with the very beginning of a neck separating her head from her trunk. So far it was just a little indentation at the base of the pyramid shape her trunk ascended into, where her brain resided, the same as in humans. The thought of human xenophobia didn't even cross my mind.

  “I understand,” she replied.

  “Well,” I started, remembering that I wanted to know a little of their history. “Did your species ever have religious beliefs or was there some other method your primitive ancestors evolved to reconcile their fear of the unknown and of death with their regular lives?” I asked.

  “Kyle, I can't say. We have such lengthy lives now and have had for such an immeasurably long time that our cultural sense of history is different from yours. We pay much less attention to our past. Ordinarily, we go for long periods while considering subjects before ever acting, other than in an emergency, which of course I classify my present predicament as. To put it more simply, we have no reckoning of whether our species ever had religions or wars. We don't even know how far in the past we deciphered our genetic code and began altering it to our present protean nature, where we can modify our bodies in many different ways simply by using our perceptive sense to initiate and control the process.”

  No wars, no religions, and I suspected their civilization and culture weren't driven by their sexual nature as ours is, and that sex wasn't nearly as important a part of their lives as with us. They had evidently lost most of their genetic disposition for territorial control in the past as well, if they ever had one. They were truly alien in every sense of the word. Jeri was blank on the subject of history and sex, but very interested in my take on it.

  “You think your territorial nature, the impulse to control domains, is the result of your sexual drive, then?”

  “Probably,” I nodded. “Or more likely the other way around, although very few of us will admit it since the territorial genes haven't been very well identified yet, nor the interrelated genes or environmental influences on them. The religious teachings ignore the obvious fact of our territorial nature when they preach peace and turning the other cheek and so forth.” I had to explain that metaphor, and that led to more talk of religion.

  “It's all very strange to me, Kyle. You do know that even when my human shape is complete, I'll still retain all my knowledge and beliefs and they'll be applied to the expression of my genes a human, even though my body may contain some contradictory genes, such as the religious ones, if I find it impossible to weed them out. Also, I may find that my actions and beliefs become at least partially subject to hormonal influence and other behavior dictated by the type of proteins some genes code for, just as I believe yours are. That might be the most difficult”

  “How will that be possible to believe the opposite of what your genes dictate if—oh, I get it. You'll be like a blank slate in some ways. You may have the genes for lots of undesirable characteristics but they'll never have been subject to environmental modification in their expression. And vice versa. Whew! You're going to be like no other human in history. And that's probably going to cause both you and me problems when we go out in public.” My mind was working as though I were outlining an article. It made me go into my lecture mode. “You'll have the look, but you're going to have to learn not only how to act like a human but how to act like a female human. In case you haven't figured it out yet, we're almost like separate species in many ways. Our brains don't function exactly alike; they even use the two hemispheres in dissimilar fashion, and that leads to different ways of viewing the world and interacting with others, particularly the opposite sex. Just as an example you've already run across, men are much more visually oriented than women, who are driven more by emotion and closeness. So far as sex goes anyway. That's why pornography is designed and produced much more for males than females and why sexual aberrations take such bizarre forms. Religion and sex and our separate sexual natures are all tangled together in relationships so complex we're probably still centuries away from even beginning to understand them.”

  “Yes,” she said and again tried to nod, already attempting to mimic human mannerisms. “I'm beginning to see the enormous challenge this process will involve. You mentioned that you were married but your wife died in an accident. Since you've lived with a woman, I'm hoping that you'll be able to help me learn the human mannerisms associated with being female, the ones I can't discover from reading.”

  I stood up and walked around the room, suddenly realizing how little I actually knew about women. I tried to imagine myself as a woman and simply couldn't do it, not with any assurance of how I would feel. It was the age-old conundrum, Mars and Venus; we act one way, they act another, and both of us all too frequently misinterpret the other's intentions. Just as small examples of what I began imagining then, I wondered how I would feel, existing in a culture where almost a hundred percent of the other sex was twice as strong as me, where I would be the undersized one, where even such little things as how tightly jar caps were screwed on and how furniture was almost always made to fit men rather than women would be (or so I thought) constant irritants. How would I like it if my body and face were constantly being scrutinized while I was out in public, and an immediate judgment of my worth was being made on that basis? How would I feel if I had to sometimes act contrary to my nature in order to get along? Hell, I didn't even have a clue about what women talked about among themselves when they let their hair down.

  I quit pacing amid all those thoughts and decided to have a drink and, for a change, a stiff one rather than coffee. It made me wonder whether Jeri's species used stimulants of any kind, but I put that aside for a moment while I poured some rum over ice and opened a Coke to dilute it. I brought it back over and sat down.

  “Jeri, you're going to be surprised at how little I know about women. Christ, they even button their shirts opposite from men. I'll help you all I can, but you're simply going to have to get out in public, among women, and observe. Perhaps you should watch some television and chick flicks, too.” It took her a moment to gather what I meant by “chick flicks.”

  “You speak as if your species have little interaction with the opposite sex, other than sex itself, yet from my perusal of text and literature, that appears not to be the case. Can you explain?”

  “Uh, sure, it's, uh,” I couldn't, not in a million years but I didn't tell her that. “I guess it's just that we're so different. Sure, we talk and work together and live together and love each other, but that still doesn't mean we understand our opposites. Shucks, we can't really get inside another male person's head, much less a woman's.”

  “I'm sure I'll learn but I'm certain to make mistakes along the way. Hopefully, they won't be too serious.”

  “As I said, I'll help you all I can but don't expect miracles.”

  “Good. We'll manage, I think.”

  I had no idea then, nor had I even considered, how much help Jeri would expect from me. For one thing, there were several periods during the transition where she had to concentrate so intensely that she went into an almost death-like comatose state. One lasted a full day as she prepared the human genome within her, and the other almost as long when she switched from her original to the human. She left instructions for me on how to care for her during
those occasions, which she told me helped by not having to worry about her safety. She could have done it alone, but would have had to divert a portion of her attention to avoid becoming prey to interruptions which she said would hinder the process. I didn't quite understand that but let it go, thinking she must know what she was doing. If not, we were both in trouble!

  I sipped at my drink and remembered the bottle was almost empty. There were other items I was getting low on, too. “Are you about ready to take that trip into town with me?”

  “Yes. Actually, the sooner the better.”

  That suited me, too. I needed to get out and see some other humans just to assure myself I wasn't dreaming!

  “Is there anything you need to take with you from your survival kit?”

  “Anything I need, I'll carry.”

  “Good. It wouldn't do to have a suitcase trailing along behind you, propped up by air so far as I can tell. How did they know to follow you into the house, and for that matter, how do they work?”

  “They're attuned to my perceptive sense and ‘knew', so to speak, that I was in trouble and couldn't use my perceptiveness just then. As for how they work—let's just say some ... magnetic repulsion is involved. We haven't built up enough of a technical vocabulary yet for me to really explain it.”

  “That's good enough for now,” I said.

  * * * *

  It turned out that I didn't need to conceal her under a blanket. The military was already working hard on that long-sought “invisibility cape” of legend and magic and was actually coming nearer to success all the time. Jeri's survival kit included one for just such purposes as intermingling with alien species should they have the need, or to observe alien life on the planets they explored. It wasn't a cape as such, though, but a little gadget about the size of my thumb she attached to one of the bands around her upper arm. She simply stuck it there and it clung as if by magnetic attraction. It was amazing to watch her seemingly blink into and out of existence as she turned it on and off to test it.