#When you phase out the grey and toss out all the nuance along with it it becomes impossible to have a rational discussion that isn't just

[tfem-confessions]

I am so sorry to see you get pulled into discourse when this blog is clearly just trying to provide a space for transfems to exist freely, and people won't even give you that. Like seeing people come after you for assumed opinions on the discourse based off assumptions is like, are we against dogpiling transfems and exaggerating supposed wrongdoing by transfems or not? I hope you both are doing well and I appreciate you

Thank you, I really appreciate it. I've been doing my best to respond but it does put me in a bit of an awkward position with our commitment to neutrality. Still, we have a responsibility to respond to as many asks as we can, so long as they follow the rule of not being bigoted or too explicit to post here. -🐺

[hirohamadugh]

THE ENHANCED

 Part 1 | Part 2! | Part 3 | Visual of Issac

Suddenly, everything was happening at once. The capsule doors slid open to reveal Issac to the world, and to reveal the world to Issac. His eyes flew open as he urgently gasped his first breaths, ripped out of his peaceful stasis and thrust into being. Chris and Liv caught Issac’s body as he stumbled out of the chamber in a gangly and uncoordinated way, well-versed in the symptoms of sudden life before.

“Breathe,” Liv coerced, as the boy was still sucking in air frantically and posed himself the risk of hyperventilation. He’d only been alive for less than a minute, and it had already been so overwhelming that he passed out. She tore her gaze away from her newest creature, making eye contact with Chris to obtain his attention. “Lower him to the ground. Let the overstimulation pass before we try to teach him anything.”

The two gently dropped Issac’s body until he laid flat on his back, breaths finally starting to teeter into the heavy-but-unthreatening phase. He may have been a newborn, but Issac was no infant: all subjects of the Living Immunity Vectors program were born as fully formed young adults.

“Help me dress him,” the blonde woman ordered, tossing a pair of gray joggers to her assistant as she wrestled the boy into a perfectly color-matched crewneck with the Sycorax double-stranded helix logo embossed on the chest. Kneeling beside him on the ground now, Liv began checking over his physical attributes to see if anything had gone obviously wrong in the altered genetic coding, but was pleased to find no anomalies. Chris was silent once he’d finished his part as well, staring at the boy whose eyes dazedly opened and began to search every little aspect of the room. Looking between the two men, it was clear they were related somehow, but not to any great length. They had the same physical build, hair texture, and facial structure, but that seemed to be where the similarities stopped. Chris’s complexion was much fairer than Issac’s, Issac’s eye color was brown vs. Chris’s hazel, the older boy’s hair was blonder and shorter… The list went on and on, and the more Chris stared, the more differences he noticed.

“Issac,” Liv spoke, very eager to see if her latest trials proved a success or not.  “Can you understand me?”

The tanned boy just stared blankly back at her as she spoke, a lack of concentration obvious as his attention easily sidetracked to the control panels quietly beeping and flashing as always. “Issac!”

When he failed once again to respond, Liv rolled her eyes, annoyed that her hope had been squashed. “Whatever,” she huffed, very rapidly losing interest now that he was just another in vitro case study, no better than her last improvement. “Chris, carry him to his room with Hailey and prep the first coordinated movement lesson for in an hour. I want Elliot keeping an eye on him to ensure he doesn’t enter a state of panic, and to let me know if there’s any sort of worry whatsoever.”

“Wait, what do you mean my room with me?”

Both Liv and Chris froze, as the boy who was born less than five minutes ago just asked a fully functional and correct syntax sentence in a language he was never taught. Their gazes bore deep into Issac’s soul, as he propped himself up into a sitting position. “What??” He asked, knitting his eyebrows down in confusion on why they were looking at him as if he were a ghost.

“Hailey,” Chris said, making the connection.

“Yes??”

“Of course he would respond to Hailey!! It worked!” The blonde woman hugged her assistant out of glee, while Issac pushed himself off the ground and up into a standing position.

“Is there something I’m missing here, Ms. Amara?”

Liv was near tears, and turned to place her hands on Issac’s shoulders in an almost loving way. “You’re not Hailey,” she breathed out quietly, which was met with a face of extreme confusion from the newborn. “You’re Issac. You’ll understand soon enough.” The tender moment over, she turned to her assistant: “Make sure his acclimatization finds him well, will you? Get him caught up on everything she’s learned since upload so they can be taught together. I want his baseline vitals recorded tonight as well. I’m going to go record this in his file.”

Chris took the other male’s forearm and began to redirect him towards the living quarters. Somewhere deep inside himself, Issac knew where he was going, but he couldn’t quite visualize it completely. “What does she mean, I’m Issac?”

The blonde man smiled sympathetically, stealing a glance over as he continued to walk. “You probably don’t have complete access to all your memories yet. Hailey,” Issac’s head instinctively popped up at the girl’s name, still failing to dissociate her from himself, “She’s the one who was born before you. She’s a couple months old now. She’s learned how to walk, how to talk, how to behave in general, some basic biology concepts…” Chris trailed off, before stopping and putting his hand on Issac’s shoulder. “It’s taken her all this time just to learn that, you know? Despite the fact we all learn incredibly fast for humans, it still takes a long while.” He touched his own temple, a small gesture for any normal-grown adult, but incredibly advanced of a social nuance for someone who’s less than 2 years old like himself.  “She allowed us to extract, replicate, and upload her consciousness into you so we didn’t have to waste all that time and energy teaching you the basics.” Chris turned and began his brisk pace once more, leading the other boy around a bend as he continued to explain. “Maybe you’ll get them all, maybe you won’t, but the fact you’re talking and walking and understanding… That’s all really promising.”

           Issac stared at his hands as he listened to the older boy, fixated on the minor details. While what Chris was explaining sounded ridiculous, he did have a sense of Déjà vu while the assistant had been describing it. In addition, his fingers were thicker than he remembered them being, plus his body was more boxy in general; this would add up if Chris was telling the truth, and he really was a new person in a new body. “So my memories… aren’t mine?”

           “Not exactly. But from here on out they are!” Chris smiled oh-so-cheerily as he dexterously input his biometrics on the reader that disabled the semi-transparent gate into what would become Issac’s new home. Inside he saw a girl sitting on her bed, she was wearing the exact same outfit as he and reading from a tablet. Issac instantly recognized her. That’s me. I mean Hailey. I guess not me.

           As soon as the cell was disabled, the girl’s attention immediately fixated on the two men, and she smiled slightly. Jumping down from her bed, Hailey tossed the tech haphazardly onto it and walked right up to her new roommate, as everyone but Chris lived in pairs. “So, you’re Issac,” she stated matter-of-factly, tilting her head slightly in examination of the new boy’s facial features.

           “So I’ve been told,” he replied, having a minor out-of-body experience due to seeing what he thought was himself standing and talking right in front of him. “Thought I was you, but I’m not.”

           Hailey cracked a small laugh, and her smile instinctively made him show one in return. “So I see the uploading-thing worked! Very exciting…” She pursed her lips, kicking one foot lightly before refocusing on Chris. “And… Very sorry for all those involved that there will now be two of me!”

           The blonde boy chuckled, and Issac didn’t fully understand why, but nevertheless he felt the need to do the same as if he got the joke. “Should make it easy to get along,” Chris mentioned, before crossing the room to the other, neatly made bed that lay opposite of Hailey’s. “Issac, this is your bed, your wardrobe is,”

           “Over there,” Issac interrupted, pointing to the sliding door that conjoined he and Hailey’s closets, which were both unsurprisingly filled with more grey outfits like the ones they wore. “I’m remembering,” he stated bluntly, walking to the back of the room where the restricted-access CPU and medical recording instruments were set up. “Ms. Amara said she needed my vitals, right? Are you taking them, or is…” Issac pinched the bridge of his nose, tongue peeking out from the corner of his mouth as he desperately tried to grasp at a taunting memory of Hailey’s morning check-ins for the name of the man who performed them.

           “Elliot?” Hailey offered, pleased to see he was already remembering details from her life.

           “Yes!” Issac exclaimed, to which Chris nodded.

           “I’ll go get him to take your baseline stats. Be right back.” The blonde man walked out of the room, and thanks to the floor sensors detecting his biosignature leaving, the honeycomb-esque field was secured once more, keeping the two subjects where they were supposed to be.

           “How are you feeling?” Hailey broke the silence between them, walking over to where Issac was inspecting the sphygmomanometer cuff. “I can remember it was… Scary, when I was born. Not knowing where or what anything is. Just seeing Ms. Amara and Chris staring down at me, like I was a circus monkey and they wanted me to do a trick or something.”

           “It was very strange to see things you’ve never seen before… Yet remember them.” Issac turned to look at her, noticing she must’ve been pretty buff to look so strong despite all their loose clothing.

           “I know,” she confessed, shoving her hands in her pockets due to not knowing what to do with them. “I was one of the failed attempts to do this to. They tried with Gabriel, the guy born before me, tried uploading him to me, but I only ever got small bits and pieces, so it was hard with a sense of both familiarity and newness to get adjusted.” She averted her gaze for a moment, feigning to check if the older boys had returned. “Chris was the first one of us ever, although sorry if I’m just repeating what you already recall. I wonder what it was like for him.” She refocused on the new boy, pressing her lips together slightly in thought. “He was never really like the rest of us, though. He’s always been allowed upstairs.”

           “And what’s upstairs?” Issac asked, genetic predisposition to curiosity and answering questions making themselves prominent.

           “The world,” Hailey replied, a small and almost sad smile across her face. “If we work hard enough and prove ourselves like he has, we can start actually working for Sycorax up there too.” She fiddled with her umber colored braid to avoid overthinking the possibilities, knowing very well she was way ahead of herself in thinking about those kinds of things. “It’s a biology place, though, so we need to get really good at that first before anything happens. Do you remember anything I’ve learned about biology?”

           “I know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”

           Hailey let out a breathy laugh, shaking her head just a bit at his first jumped-to fact. “You’ll do fine, I’m sure of it. I’m glad you were at least able to be the protégé that I was not!”

           “Not to sound rude, since I’ve had probably a whole 35 minutes of socialization practice-so bear with me, but why do you care?” Issac mirrored the pose she had taken earlier, with his hands in his own pockets now. “Why do you want me to succeed? Why me?”

           The girl looked away, afraid to open up Pandora’s box of voids she was trying to fill. “You… After they asked me about possibly doing the upload, I peeked into your ongoing file and cross-compared it to my own. You and I share 72.18% of our DNA.” Hailey looked at him now, and he could see the sense of hope and longing in her eyes. “Look,” she said, bending over to the restricted database beside them and shutting off the monitor, leaving just a reflective black screen staring back at them. “Do you see how much we look alike?”

           Leaning over to peer into the haphazard mirror as well, Issac saw it. He and Hailey had the same exact eyes, the same hair color, the same complexion, it was almost uncanny. He had a slightly more robust stature, she had a teensy bit thinner eyebrows, but besides minor details the two looked like they were copied and pasted onto each other. “The closest relatedness of anyone else of the enhanced is Elliot and Faye, and even that is only about 54%. The rest of us range from mid 20s to early 40s.” She placed her hand atop his on the back of the chair, her dark eyes piercing him with a sense of utter care and a bit sense of self as well. “Issac, I care because… well, you’re the closest thing to a brother I will ever have. And there’s nothing more important to me than my family.”