What I was holding in my hand was impossible, but it was all there in the numbers and percentages. Across from me, May’s face was going through every expression I could name and some I couldn’t. I knew how she felt.

  “I think it was when she sneezed in your face that last Friday,” she said. “DNA transfer. I think maybe your changeling transformation had already begun, but instead of just rejuvenating you—which has happened before—it took your DNA and her DNA and did the unzip and splice thing that only ever happens with chromosomes when sex cells combine in reproduction. And that new unique DNA configuration became the blueprint for your rejuvenation. A new, unique, you.”

  My thoughts churned uselessly. “So . . . genetically . . . half of my chromosomes are from me, David, and half of my chromosomes are from Steph. From you and Carl.”

  “That would be yes. It’s obvious to see—you have so many of the Chandler family traits, not just the red hair. You’ve got my body type, your nose is definitely mine, and you’ve got Mom’s gray-green eyes. It’s harder to see because you’re a girl, but I think you have your own chin and forehead—at least what they’d be with different hormones shaping them anyway.”

  “Does Carl know?”

  “Not the results, not yet. I did tell him my theory, I had to talk it through. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the test, I just wasn’t thinking and then I thought—well it seemed best to just wait and tell you about my theory if the test confirmed it. After all, I could have been wrong. Sweetie? Hun?”

  My mind was stuck. Whatever this meant for me, I couldn’t get over how bizarre it all was. Even as strange as my changeling transformation was compared to any others I’d read about, this was just beyond. Why would a transformation do this? It was next-level. The pages crinkled in my hands. “Why?”

  May somehow knew what I meant. “I have a theory about that, too. It’s just a theory but I’m pretty sure now. Do you want to hear it?”

  I nodded. What else was I going to do? Anything that explained the craziness, no matter how out there, would be better than the whirling confusion in my head.

  “Okay.” She took a breath. “So, it’s not true that we don’t know anything about the aliens. We know they’re at least sort of human proportioned, and we know they built the ship. A ship so advanced that we understand so little about it that it might as well be magic. Clark’s Law.”

  “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” I quoted. “Right, we hear that a lot.”

  “Okay. And that ‘magic’ extends to genetics. Nobody has any idea how changeling transformations are rewriting human genes and remaking bodies. There’s no visible process, it’s like it’s being done psychically or something—which just means invisibly, really. Changeling bodies and minds show no evidence of the physical process that changes them. One theory I read was that the ship’s interior environment had been ‘contaminated,’ if that’s the right word, with ‘psychic nanites,’ an artificial bio-psychic field that the aliens kept around them to maintain and regulate their physical bodies and to communicate with. When we opened up the ship, we released the self-replicating Psychic Nanite Field into the environment and now it’s spread across the whole world.”

  “So why isn’t everyone a changeling, now?”

  “Maybe only certain people trigger an interaction with the field, or only under certain conditions. Human brains just don’t have the structures for conscious control of it? That’s not important. What is important is asking why it did something so different to you.”

  “Why?”

  “There is one thing we can be absolutely certain about, with the aliens. They’re immortal.”

  I blinked. “Huh?”

  “Think about it—if their psychic-nanite field can take a person and completely rejuvenate them, de-age them, physically enhance them, even grant perfect regeneration all the way to completely regrowing complex organ and bone structures, then they have total command of their biology all the way down to the cellular and chromosomal levels. So why would they ever let themselves age? They wouldn’t. And that’s a problem.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “. . . Okay?” I’d become a one-word response generator, but I really couldn’t see where she was going.

  “Think,” she urged, leaning in and putting a hand on mine. “If you lived for centuries, even thousands of years, wouldn’t you get bored with yourself eventually? You’d know every thought you were ever going to have in your head, every reaction you’re going to have. And after a while no experiences are going to be novel. Nothing is going to be new, at least nothing good. You’ll have done everything, over and over again, or at least everything you feel is worth doing, everything you have an interest in. And you’ll know everyone around you just as well as you know yourself.”

  And that sounded . . . pretty awful. Terminal boredom. Remembering what the world had felt like in depression-painted shades of gray, I turned it over in my head and shuddered. “It sounds like suicide would be the only ticket out. Or a memory-wipe? Or you voluntarily go somewhere without the psychic-nanite field and wait for nature to take its course.”

  “I think so, too. Call it the Forever Trap. But there’s another way.” She took a deep breath. “Even today there’s a huge debate over how much of our personalities, our selves, is from our genetic makeup and its expression and how much is from the environment of our upbringing and our consequent memories and thought patterns. The general consensus is it’s a mix of both. So what if, what if, when you’re tired of yourself, you can just be someone else. A new you. Change your genes, change how they express in your brain structure and endocrine system, and you’re dealing with whole new variations of your emotional spectrum, whole new flavors of thinking, a whole new you.”

  “That’s— But—” I had nothing.

  “Think about it! Combine rejuvenation with a genetic rewrite and regeneration and you have a new you to experience and learn about. Swap sexes, if they have them like we do, and the differences are even bigger. Maybe they go through literal second childhoods every century or so? And they’re probably much more organized about it—choose for genes that bring out different talents and tastes, maybe? Maybe you could seek out a famous musician and ask to share their gift. Or swap ‘scientist’ genes for ‘thrill-seeker’ genes. Who knows?”

  “And with me . . .” I groped for an answer.

  “I think with you,” she said in a rush, hands in motion, “When the psychic-nanite field triggered for you it would have just rejuvenated and maybe de-aged you like what happened with some of the other changelings we know about, but when Steph sneezed on you it got confused by the sudden presence of a bunch of foreign DNA and decided that that was a request to activate the rewrite protocol!” She threw her hands up with a laugh. “This is purest speculation, really, but at least it’s an answer?”

  “. . . Huh.”

  I stared at the printouts in my hand again. Even if it was really a fairy tale, a Just So story as true as How the Elephant Got His Trunk, it did make a horrific sort of sense. I felt like May was right about the implications of alien immortality, at least. It did seem a stretch that a system so advanced that we couldn’t even comprehend it could make such a huge mistake, but the aliens' tech wasn’t infallible—the ship had crashed, after all.

  And to be yourself forever and ever, unchanging, life with no end and no purpose and no novelty anymore? My past undiagnosed depression had given me years of gray days when nothing mattered enough to more than barely care about. That had likely been a brain-chemistry thing, but maybe also a consequence of my own disconnected pointlessness. Until the Seevers had moved in I’d been living just to live and to entertain myself, disconnected and alone. What if the sheer weight of endless life experience crushed everyone like that eventually?

  May was right; the only exit from the Forever Trap really would be death or change. Big change. Maybe even, going beyond this, memory-erasing change. Just forget, blank slate. Start over.

  Just thinking I could have wound up with amnesia on top of my transformation sent chills down my spine. I could have woken up in my tub with no idea who I was and how I’d gotten there. Complete personality death, forgetting everyone you cared about and even yourself? Nobody could want that. Well, almost nobody. But maybe they’d be open to shaving off centuries of repetitive memories? Rewind to a previous save-point? Who knew how the aliens might think about it.

  I stared at the pages. The big takeaway was—all speculation aside—I was genetically related to May and Carl now. The thought made me dizzy. “So what—what does this mean?”

  May took the test results from my hands and pulled me from my chair to sit beside her on my bed. Putting an arm around my shoulders, she encouraged me to lean into her. “For us? You’re family by blood now, hun, but you were family already. It means you might be compatible for a blood donation or a kidney or bone marrow transplant if it ever comes up?”

  That pulled a laugh out of me, which was good since I couldn’t identify any of the emotions shaking me as I held myself together. I wasn’t me, anymore, not on a genetic level, but I was theirs in a fundamental way now, as related to them genetically as I was to my own parents.

  Rubbing my back, she kissed my head. “Tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “Everything. Nothing. I don’t know?”

  She gave me a moment to say something more, eyes searching mine, and nodded. “Okay. That’s fine. I’ll leave you alone, and don’t you think you need to do anything else tonight. I’ll call you down for dinner, okay?”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” Laying a kiss on my cheek and giving me a final squeeze, she was gone.

  I didn’t get any more studying done.