We settled into a routine of having sex with Cathy more or less once per week, which wasn't too far from the frequency Nancy and I had, before we decided to get pregnant. We sympathized with Cathy as she started experiencing the early symptoms of pregnancy, since she related that Teclewtans did not experience anything similar to morning sickness.
An appointment with Dr. Carla Perkins, Nancy's regular gynecologist, confirmed the pregnancy officially. Carla recommended an associate, Astrid deLong, to be our obstetrician.
We scheduled a first appointment and sonogram with Dr. deLong for October 5th, when we knew that the fetus would not yet have started to differentiate sexually. Everything checked out as normal. It would be the 20-week sonogram after the new year where we would not be able to avoid detection.
Each week, we grew a little closer to Cathy and the distinct aspects of her personality began to separate from Nancy's. I was falling in love with her, bit by bit, but telling Nancy that was out of the question and I had nobody else I could tell.
~~~~~
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Nancy and I were sitting on the couch, reading blogs on my tablet, when a headline caught our attention, "Obstetrics Mystery - Ambiguous Gender Outbreak?" Clicking the link, we read the blog entry, by someone named Rudolph deSantos:
Sources tell me that obstetricians across the U.S. and in a number of foreign cities are reporting a statistically abnormal number of embryos displaying ambiguous genitalia, as checked by sonograms normally scheduled at 20 weeks of gestation, the normal checkpoint for determining gender. The number of observed abnormalities has spiked in the past week, far exceeding the number usually reported in an entire year.
After two women regrettably elected to abort after receiving the news, investigative autopsies were performed on their embryos and the results indicate development of mostly female anatomy but with the urethra running through a penis in place of the clitoris, with the penile base parted around the vaginal opening behind the labia, along with development of other male organs like the prostate and seminal vesicles, with the equivalent of testicular tissue being distributed to the sides of the penile base. Immature eggs in the ovaries and immature sperm cells were both identified.
Several sources asserted that this configuration of genitals does not align with any of the known causes of ambiguous genitalia.
Experts from the Centers for Disease Control are investigating to determine if the cause is genetic or disease. They are avoiding the word "outbreak", but that is what this appears to be to this writer. I promise my loyal readers more as I learn it, but I expect the mainstream media to latch onto this story at any moment.
'Gawd, that sounds an awful lot like Chromosome Z,' I thought.
"Cathy, come out here, when you can?" Nancy asked, boosting her voice with a mental call. As Cathy came through the door from the bedroom, wiping her mouth after another bout of morning sickness, Nancy said, "Scan our most recent memories, please."
Cathy concentrated, then frowned. "Give me a moment to check on something. I need to hold your hands to query your nanites."
She sat beside us and took our hands. She closed her eyes and focused for 30 seconds, before they opened and she sighed. "You were correct to link this report to Chromosome Z. To hasten the replication of the genetic changes I ordered them to make to your gametes, the nanites took the initiative to alter the remnants of a flu virus in Dan's body to produce a retrovirus, removing the components which cause illness and perhaps increasing its infectiousness to compensate. However, this retrovirus did not limit itself to changing only your sperm cells and changed the other cells of your body as well. As the nanites did not consider this to be dangerous, they did not alert me, even when the retrovirus infected me."
'Fuck,' I thought, forming a mental approximation of a sigh. Almost three months stuck in my own body and I still lamented the inability to do something so simple. 'I'm Patient Zero?'
Ignoring that, Nancy asked, "But the doctors are reporting this in embryos at 20 weeks, when you've only been here on Earth for a little more than 11 weeks? They had to have been conceived before you landed." Nancy said. "How could they be affected?"
Cathy said, "If the retrovirus changed an embryo's DNA before the sexual organs began to differentiate at seven weeks of fetal age, then it would be the Chromosome Z which would drive the development of the genitals. The timing of this reporting actually gives extra credence to this being the result of the retrovirus spreading. It is indeed an outbreak."
'That doesn't add up,' I said. 'You've been here just over 11 weeks and you're saying that only embryos less than seven weeks old at the time their genes are changed would develop as hermaphrodites, yet these are 20 week sonograms? Seven plus 11 is 18, right?'
Nancy said, "One of the weird things about pregnancy is that obstetricians use a 40-week gestational calendar which starts at the beginning of the last menstrual period, which is a date the woman usually knows, even though ovulation is about two weeks later. This goes back to the days before sonograms and ovulation predictors. Now, they can use a sonogram to estimate fetal age and will sometimes use that to adjust the gestational calendar's start date, but they haven't abandoned that calendar. So, the 20 week sonogram refers to gestational age, while the fetal age would be about 18 weeks."
I said, 'Okay. So, the dividing line for the virus is seven weeks fetal age or nine weeks gestational age? In either case, Paige said she was six weeks along, the week Cathy arrived,' making Nancy gasp. 'If the retrovirus spread from us to her that night, her child will be born a hermaphrodite at least a month before ours.'
"Oh, my. So, just how infectious is this virus?" Nancy asked. "They're already reporting the changes overseas."
Cathy replied, "Airplanes and airports are considered the primary way for any disease to spread internationally, so we can assume that is what happened, rather quickly. I was infected during our very first conversation in the hospital. Neither of us developed a cough that would help spread it, yet it must still be airborne. If all of that supposition is correct, it probably infected your doctors and nurses and spread unnoticed from them to other patients, then would have spread to your coworkers and anyone else you interacted with. It could have gone overseas even before you came out of your coma. Almost certainly, Zack and Paige would have been exposed."
'This is just getting started, isn't it?' I asked. 'If obstetricians are already detecting high enough numbers of altered embryos in a single week that they started discussing it with each other, those would be among the earliest exposures to the virus. How many more embryos that are younger than that have already been altered but haven't undergone the sonogram that will say so? If this virus keeps spreading world-wide, we could be looking at male and female babies being outnumbered by the hermaphrodites, if they aren't eliminated altogether.'
Cathy said, "Keep in mind that the retrovirus will not only change genitalia in embryos under a certain age. It will alter genetics in everyone infected, so that their gametes contain Chromosome Z and they can only conceive Z children in the future."
"How are people going to react, if they realize that most, if not all, of humanity is affected?" Nancy asked.
I said, 'Badly, I expect. This is going to be an existential crisis. Gender roles are so ingrained in most societies, I don't think people will know how to live without them. They're going to throw every medical researcher they can at the problem. Then it will be a race to see whether they identify the DNA changes before or after finding the retrovirus that caused them. If they establish the Bay Area as its origin point and combine that with an understanding that the alterations actually started in early September, rather than in July when these babies were first conceived, our involvement won't be hard to figure out. If they can't easily find a cure, they're going to look for scapegoats, even if we didn't cause this.'
Nancy groaned, saying, "Here I was, thinking that those seven weeks would cause our baby to be hidden amongst all the others. But you're right, this is going to be too big for the authorities to ignore a local news story about a pair of hikers surviving a meteor strike. That's assuming Paige doesn't point them straight to us, if her baby is among the affected as we expect. She and Zack know enough about the hermaphrodite transformation to connect it to this."
'We need to be the ones to tell her,' I said.
"Agreed," Cathy said. She took a deep breath before saying, "The virus is out in the world now, so there is not anything we can do to stop it spreading, assuming it has not already infected every human possible. We do need to prepare for these authorities to locate us. It raises another question, however. Keeping Chromosome Z a secret was your primary reason for declining the transformation when I offered it in September. Now that it is going to be global news, fairly soon, does that maybe change your mind? You might gain an advantage if you are seen as the first to be victimized by the retrovirus, with a reduced reason to stay quiet now that others are infected. But it would likely be best to complete the transformation before you are confronted about it. I doubt your science could determine when the transformation began, once it completes. It will take about a week for this body, about three weeks for Dan's, since the changes are more extensive. Unless the nanites put him back into a coma for about a week. The more sleep you get, the faster the process will be."
'Two problems with that premise,' I said. 'First, there are logic holes in blaming the retrovirus for our transformation, since it isn't transforming other adults who have been affected. We can't protect your presence if we force scientists to look deeper and they discover the nanites are the true source of both our transformation and the retrovirus as separate phenomena. Second, if our story is that our transformation started as soon as we were hit by the meteor, without making a conscious choice, not having anyone notice those changes starting back in September is a problem. My not having developed breasts, in particular.'
Cathy responded, "You are right about the retrovirus not causing the transformation. The reasonable conclusion would be that the meteor caused both your transformation and the retrovirus, separately. If doctors or scientists do detect the nanites, they still will not detect me as a foreign presence. I am not physically dependent upon the nanites, although they will be needed for transferring my consciousness to the baby. On the second point of breasts, you are assuming that people will expect you to develop them. With Chromosome Z, puberty will not be the driver of breast development, pregnancy hormones will. Breasts are not truly needed until there is a baby to feed from them. So, your breast transformation would likewise be delayed until you become pregnant, yourself. Even if I were not pregnant, there would be no reason to remove these breasts as part of transforming, however. As for the genital changes, those are covered by clothing, so would have gone undetected, even if you still urinate standing up. The only people who have seen us nude in the last three months are each other."
I asked, 'What do you think, Nancy? Should we do it?'
Nancy replied, "We would need to do it now. Otherwise, it will be abundantly clear that it was our choice, if we change our minds later. If we are going to be scapegoats, anyway, I think I would rather stand with the new children. Although, we should probably think up a name for them, if we're going to wind up the first adult members and their spokespeople. If Generation Z is taken, how about Generation H for hermaphrodite?"
I answered, 'I expect someone else is going to coin a catchy phrase for them before we can. I agree though, if we are going to be blamed anyway, we should do this.'
Cathy said, "Take my hands, then."
As before, our palms tingled as Cathy issued instructions to the nanites. Thirty seconds later, she let go. "It is started."
I said, 'We should call Zack and Paige. Let them hear this from us, if they haven't had their sonogram appointment yet.'
Nancy picked up my phone and called Zack. "Hi, Zack, it's Dan... and Nancy."
