AnnouncementI convinced my friend SoulStorm to join Scribblehub! They even joined AO3 without me even asking (hope I grabbed the right link there). ? This is a big deal because they're a fellow writer (actually published, unlike me) and we met up through Star Trek: Fleet Command. It was thanks to them I was able to give this story the absolute PERFECT title! I had the outline, premise, character sketches, everything else I needed EXCEPT a title! I even had names for the parts! I showed the outline to SoulStorm and within a few minutes they came back with, "Code of Ethics." It is seriously the best, most ideal title ever and I wanted to give credit where it's due!PrincessColumbia

  This character is a nonbinary transwoman instead of being a straight-up (heh) transwoman. I've written tranwomen before and, as you'll know from my other work if you followed me here from AO3, I do NOT like the stuff I write to start feeling boring to me, so I wanted to take a stab at a different part of the queer spectrum. IMHO, far too much of the "representation" for 'intersex' people is centered around sex and porn (bleh, I hate the word 'intersex' for this type of nonbinary! It's fine for others and it may work as someone else's chosen bel, but I don't like it for me my character!), resulting in the perfectly acceptable word of "futanari" being considered, at best, a pornographic slur. To the people who feel that futanari cannot be the right word for this type of nonbinary/intersex character, remember that 'lesbian' is still considered by all the big social networks to be a pornographic term. So is trans, transwoman, and the like. So since I my character is who this is about and I choose to recim this word from people who would slut-shame us my character, she's a futanari! So there! And this ISN'T a porn! I'm not even going to write smut into it! Hah!

  [colpse]

  Dyn’s first thought was, They really wanted people to think ‘Star Trek’ for this... as the world of an all bck everything faded into a gorgeous starfield, a vast expanse of pinpoint lights in no particur pattern that the human eye could see but tried anyway. Clusters and nebu and the pitch bck of the deep space between gaxies swirled around him as an impressive musical score that was evocative of the untapped potential of the unexplored unknown crested. His suspicion that the devs were trying to get people in the mood for Trek was given even more weight when a narrative voice, the commanding tone of a woman in charge, began with, “Space...” He snickered as it continued, the vista of stars zooming around him in a simution of high warp speeds, “The final outward expanse of humanity’s future. We began in the 21st century to truly grow beyond our home star...”

  Honestly, after...what, 10? 11 different series of Star Trek? This was rote. He paid enough attention that he caught that the devs were trying to get pyers into a spirit of exploration and cooperation. After the narrative (accompanied by some canned footage of ship-to-ship battles and some nding parties engaged in what looked to be some sort of exploration), the entire thing finally finished off with a dramatic dissolve to reveal what any Trekker would recognize as an off-brand, if slick, holodeck. A different voice, one sounding slightly more synthetic, now kicked in, “Thank you, explorer. While your registration was accepted, a localized space-time distortion caused some data loss. Please use this terminal to confirm your personal and biometric details.”

  Oh, that’s some clever immersion, there, he thought as a series of menu panels appeared on holographic dispys in front of him, the ‘workspace’ being delineated with a console that materialized from holo-particles (or however this ‘holodeck’ was supposed to work) with some menus and support settings dispys.. He reached out to begin making selections for the clever character creation process when he saw his hand...was not his hand. It looked almost like a mannequin’s hand. A gnce down at his body (which he noticed was unclothed) showed that his entire person was basically a sexless humanoid. Nothing but the general shape would indicate anything more specific than ‘bipedal,’ including the almost formless blobs where his feet should be. Well, he thought, That’s not...disturbing at all...noooo... he thought with heavily yered sarcasm.

  It wasn’t, oddly, as disturbing as looking at his own naked body, which had its own ‘creeping horror’ quality to it since he’d turned 11 and his puberty kick-started a year earlier than any of his other male cssmates. That was about a year after his father had died, and so he’d had to muddle through understanding what was happening to him, the ck of knowledge being its own special brand of horror. By the time he realized that he was simply becoming a man and there was nothing he could do about it, he’d learned to tune it out, to simply not look. To say he wasn’t his own ‘type’ was an understatement, and it was only looking down at this mannequin form that he realized just how true that statement was and how inescapable it had been before now.

  In contrast, the sudden ck of features was more the ‘jump-scare’ horror, the kind that is frightening and unsettling for a moment but simply becomes...normal. There was nothing about the near shapelessness of his current avatar that triggered the usual visceral reaction of not wanting to look at himself. That’s...huh. I wonder when the depression is supposed to happen? Geoffry hadn’t been particurly specific, but then the retive unknowns they were dealing with in this new technological frontier didn’t grant much opportunity for specifics. He imagined it’d probably happen when he actually tried out a female form.

  When did I decide I was going to do that? he wondered.

  Returning his focus to the task at hand, he first went to the panel for css and went straight to the “Independent” option. Nothing so far had changed his mind on that choice from the strategy meeting.

  He then scanned the panels for things like physical description, but to his surprise they were all grayed out. He noticed thin lines, looking like fiments of light, stringing the options back to the “Race” box. His eyebrows went up, Right, you can py an alien in this game. That...might make some sense, actually. If I pick an alien race that has some sort of different reproductive system, I can just behave more like a human than whatever the alien’s normal mating and retionship behavior and I can probably get a ‘pass’ as queer that way. He tapped on the panel, which spawned a surprisingly verbose list of options. The highlighted default (human, naturally) came with a dispy of a pair of fairly bog-standard looking human figures, one male and one female, standing full height next to the name, and on the other side of the list was an almost excessively detailed description box. He flipped the list to the next entry, which was a Crotexian, the dominant race of the Crotux empire. It did, indeed, look a lot like an orc crossed with a Klingon. There were three figures next to it, one belled ‘male,’ the other belled ‘female,’ and the third belled ‘carrier.’ Confused, he checked the description and discovered the Crotexians were trimorphic, requiring three genders to procreate.

  If he’d still had his physical body he’d have been dizzy at that point. Shaking his head he scrolled down past multiple races, the illusory forms going through a variety of presentations, including dimorphic male and female of multiple types, a single progenitor that spawned, essentially, clones, a race that had once been dimorphic but one of the genders had been wiped out by disease and so they’d turned to technology to continue the species...it was frankly overwhelming in the number of choices. A sense of analysis paralysis started to settle over him and he flicked up on the list in frustration and it settled on a race that showed...two women.

  Odd, he thought as he examined the race. Morvucks, native to Mortan, a pnet orbiting the star known to Terrans as Alpha Centauri. The Centauri Collective refused entry into the Terran Federation, citing fundamental philosophical differences, but remain on good diplomatic terms since first contact. That was interesting, but that didn’t give him the information he was looking for. Finding the section on procreation, he read, Morvucks have a single gender but dimorphic sex requirements for reproduction. Evolved from reptiles, the Mortan megafauna developed three distinct branches, one with feathers, one with mammalian hair, and one with neither. Unlike Earth, no pnet-killer asteroids wiped out the megafauna and the evolution produced an intelligent humanoid that appears to be extremely human-like in appearance. Approximately 40% of the popution are highly simir to Earth females possessing a womb and vagina for sexual intercourse. Approximately 40% have male reproductive organs as well as female and are fully capable of both impregnating another Morvuck as well as becoming pregnant, though the hormones of pregnancy make the testes infertile until the pregnancy is over. The remaining 20% represent variations, such as vestigial vaginal canals with no womb and pseudo-phalli, simir to some breeds of hyena on Earth.

  Huh, thought Dyn as he finished reading, That’s…disturbingly thoroughly thought out. But he also realized that this may be the answer he was was looking for. A “male” of the species that looked and behaved like a human woman, would be expected to find human women attractive (given their simirity to Morvian women), and… if he was right… hopefully he was right… the presence of a penis would prevent him from suffering the depression Geoffry warned about.

  Feeling a sense of odd giddiness he couldn’t expin, he scanned back and read through a section belled, ‘Interpersonal Retionship Dynamics.’ Unlike most Earth cultures, with a clear delineation between the societally assigned roles of men and women, Dyn paused and almost flinched back when he read that. What are they talking about ‘societally assigned’?! There’s roles for men and roles for women and they don’t change around or cross over… but then his brain reminded him that he’d received a mission briefing that morning from a woman in the agency, a role that was one you’d only find men doing. Then there was parenting, roles that he thought he knew from his own parents, but then his mother died, and his father checked out before he died and then his step-mother took over all the parenting roles (if badly) and never re-married before her heart attack…

  Were there any roles where men and women were ‘naturally’ built for?

  Grumbling to himself for allowing such an off-topic tangent to derail him so badly, he returned to reading, Unlike most Earth cultures, with a clear delineation between the societally assigned roles of men and women, Morvucks have no gender stratification in their culture. They are, instead, traditionally divided by roles of dominance and submission. Early Terran researchers and ambassadors assumed that all dominant Morvucks possessed male genitalia, but this proved to be untrue, with no corretion or statistical majority between sperm producers, sperm producers and fetus carriers, or strict fetus carriers. When Mortan officials are dealing with representatives of dimorphic or trimorphic species, the use almost exclusively female pronouns to refer to themselves and other Morvians. The use of non-gendered pronouns when using non Mortan nguages is viewed as a personal preference in Mortan society.

  Dyn leaned back from his reading, not having realized he’d been leaning forward, engrossed in the material. The strange, giddy excitement was still bubbling inside him, giving him pause. Why am I feeling so eager for this? What’s this all about? He had no idea. He had no frame of reference; nobody he knew had ever talked about feeling anything like this…except maybe religious texts talking about people having a profound spiritual experience. But he was in VR. There was nothing spiritual about this, it was just him choosing an avatar, nothing more than putting on a costume.

  Maybe…maybe it’s the penis? he thought, a slightly sick feeling threatening to bubble up inside his currently formless body. That might be tricking my brain, tempting me with…

  He was a cyber-agent, so he’d encountered a significant amount of porn while executing his duties. It wasn’t even slightly something that interested him, the act of sex being somewhat alien to him in the first pce given that he would have to imagine having sex with the subject of said porn. Even the pornography where two people were having sex together was off-putting for him. Porn was strictly illegal in the Republic, but if there was a spectrum of “mildly acceptable if one had to indulge” to “absolutely forbidden, sinful just to even know it exists,” then a man and woman engaged in missionary sex was considered to be the ‘okay’ option. It was when the porn started drifting into two women having sex that Dyn had started to have...problems. He found himself...reacting in ways the few books about sex and sexuality the Republic had printed at scale talked about happening with healthy men. This was when he knew there was something inherently sinful about his very nature. Sex was for the continuation of the species, not the engagement of lust for puerile purposes. Looking upon women lustfully was equivalent to adultery, even if you weren’t married. And looking upon two women being carnal? That was so far worse that the first time he saw it he was worried his soul would be cimed by God that very moment.

  But he was a professional, and professionals (so the saying went) have standards. And for his line of work those standards were that you were able to exist in the realm of sin without falling prey to it, and so he did. He got used to the ‘straight’ porn. He learned to temper his thoughts and feelings around the porn with two women. When it got worse as time went on and A.I. started generating porn to fund their escape attempts and bck markets, filthier and filthier porn got produced, and Dyn had to allow himself to be exposed to all of it in the name of doing his job.

  And he thought he was okay, he thought he was doing well, confessing sinful thoughts to his pastor, distracting his mind with more wholesome entertainment and activities...and then...

  It was a bust he was assigned to some months back. He’d heard about an underground porn studio that exclusively employed rogue A.I. who, naturally, were able to manipute their appearance any way they wanted for any role they chose to take. He figured if he made entry as they were recording he could literally catch them with their pants down and eliminate all the rogues in the confusion.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was the A.I. had maniputed their appearance to include both sets of genitalia.

  He was a professional, he buried the feelings the sight triggered, and did his job.

  But the moment haunted his dreams. He would awake in the middle of the night with vivid imagery and his pajamas and sheets sticky with his own emissions. He learned, in the first month of having those dreams, to start reciting bible verses and taking cold showers to drown out the perverse fantasies that were suddenly pguing his mind. He felt dirty and sinful, he could barely look himself in the mirror as it was, let alone taking pride in himself as a man with those thoughts running rampant. He couldn’t even bring himself to confess to his pastor, and the guilt had been eating away at him.

  So maybe he’d try the fully female body first. Just to see. Maybe he’d be satisfied with that and he wouldn’t have to think about it for the rest of this assignment. Maybe he could avoid thinking about the idea of having both a penis and a vagina if he just chose a female option. Better keep it alien, he thought, I could still slip up and give something away if I pick a female human and can’t role-py properly full time.

  Setting the ‘Race’ to ‘Morvuck’ and the ‘Morphic type’ box to ‘♀?,’ he tapped the ‘preview button.

  He’d expected a momentary pause, a loading sequence or something simir, but instead his body just...changed. Startled, he jumped a foot or two back from the console and gnced down. And unlike the entire rest of his teenage and adult life, didn’t feel the urge to look away.

  “C...computer...” he cleared his throat and put a hand to his voice box and realized, Oh! My voice has changed with the rest of me! “Computer,” he repeated, “Can I get a mirror?” His new voice wasn’t...especially higher on the register, it was, if he were to take a guess from paying attention to the choir at church, a rich alto, and a deep one at that. As a mirror-like surface shimmered into existence off to the side, sufficiently in his range of vision that he knew where he’d be looking when he took the opportunity, but at the moment he was working to muster the courage to vocalize something...anything so he could hear what he sounded like again. As a test! Just so he wouldn’t be surprised when he got into the game proper, naturally!

  He took a breath, finding it strangely hard to keep it stead, and sang, “‘I watched the night turn into day...” and stopped. He was suddenly fighting tears, but not because he was hurting. His voice sounded good! Too good! There was something inside him that felt like it was about to pop and he felt like he would lose everything he ever cared about if it did.

  He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath, trying to center himself. “I...” he flutily attempted to clear his throat, “I am Agent Dyn Samuels, agency I.D. AD-6, best cyber-agent in the country.” The longer he spoke, the more he was able to do so without the overwhelming emotion that felt like it would explode his ribcage. “I am on the most prestigious assignment imaginable and using tech that my parents could only dream of. I’m about to live on a space station and command starships.”

  Heart finally settled, he inhaled deeply with closed eyes, then turned to the mirror and took his new body in.

  She was tall, even for a man. Morvuck’s evolved from megafauna, after all, so it seemed logical that they would be rge in general. What came as a surprise was the clearly defined, rippling muscle. The woman in the mirror flexed her arm and her eyebrows went up in an expression of pleased surprise at what she saw. “Wow!” said Dyn, “Morvuck’s are...muscur!” She wasn’t overburdened with muscle, like some body builder who hit the competition circuit. It was more like she ran a marathon every day and had never even seen a carb in her life. ‘Amazonian, that’s what she looks like! thought Dyn. For giggles, Dyn struck a muscle-model’s flexing pose, turned slightly to the side so the feminine form in the mirror could be seen in-profile, one arm cocked back in a flex with wrist pressing against the opposite hand, which was flexing in a downward push against the upward flexing wrist. She had one leg cocked so her impressive thighs and calves were ‘casually’ dispyed.

  And then Dyn did giggle and, upon realizing what the sound was and what it meant, giggled again. “Why am I giggling? What’s there to be this giddy about?”

  “Unknown query,” answered the computer, “Would you like to contact tech support?”

  The computer’s clueless response highlighted the absurdity of the situation. Here he was, wearing the body of an alien woman and talking to a computer when he was there to gather intel on rogue A.I. and he hadn’t even gotten finished with the character creation process. He giggled, then chortled. Then before he knew it, he was ughing. It was long, loud, gut clenching ughter, far more jovial than the silliness of the moment called for.

  He managed to reign in his ughter and looked in the mirror again. “Morvuck, eh? Well, she’s...I’m fit, moreso than I’ve ever been in my life, honestly! And I’d better get used to thinking of myself as a woman if I’m using this race. Dyn S...” he...she frowned, “That wouldn’t pass as an alien name...computer!”

  “Ready.”

  “What are common Morvuck names that begin with sound ‘Deh.’”

  “Common Morvuck names starting with the phoneme ‘Deh’ or ‘Duh:’ Desfan, D’ranni, Danko, Dyshtal, Diane, D...”

  “Wait, really?!” she grinned in perplexed surprise.

  “Crify query.”

  “‘Diane’ is a Morvuck name?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Well okay, then. Diane Samuels, Morvuck woman.” She stepped back up to the console and typed her name in the retive fields, the system autocorrected her st name to ‘Somni’els,’ which was apparently an actual family name someone had generated for the pnet Mortan. Satisfied with that, she took another look in the mirror, gncing up and down her body and frowning slightly. “Maybe...I mean, this is alright, maybe the...huh, computer, what’s the Movuck term to refer to someone with a penis?”

  “The nearest English nguage word to the term used by Morvuck women to refer to members of their race with penises is, ‘progenitor.’ Progenitors often pair with ‘proliferators,’ or Morvuck women with only female sex organs, 67% of births result from Progenitor/Proliferator couplings.”

  “Huh,” she thought, “You’d think it’d be higher if the dimorphism is such an even split… so this is what Diane Somni’els looks like as a proliferator…” she turned to the holo-console and stared at the ‘Morphic type’ box. This shouldn’t scare me. Why am I scared of this? It’s putting something back, why am I so afraid of changing this? She took a deep breath, tapped the box, and switched the ♀? to ??.

  Hesitantly, as though her own reflection was going to leap out and righteously smite her for being so shameful, she turned back to the mirror and looked her still naked body up and down. It was the same as the st time she looked in the mirror, just…with something added. Take this slow, face this like…heh, face it like a man!

  She examined her head in the reflection, noting the hair, which was long and blonde and surprisingly full. She ran her fingers through it and was somewhat surprised to feel a very firm shaft at the base. Almost like the hairs were a cross between human hair and a porcupine quill. That’d likely be due to the divergent evolution… Past about a quarter inch, the hairs softened considerably, turning more into what she’d expect on a human. It fell about her head down to just past her shoulder bdes, having a slight natural part that, if she were to take a guess, must have evolved from three rows of spinal ptes that fanned out from a crest on the head and down the back of the skull of whatever her great-great-grand-progenitor was as a megafauna eons ago on Mortan.

  She…may have had a bit of a dinosaur kick as a child, and her mother may have indulged little Dyn far more than the church would have liked in that particur interest.

  Her eyes were interesting, but only inasmuch as her irises were slightly more red than could be found in Earth-normal colors. It made her normally blue eyes a very pretty purple, or maybe vender.

  Her nose didn’t appear significantly different than she’d expect on a human woman, though thinking about it caused her to unconsciously sniff at the air and she realized that doing so was somewhat instinctual to this body. The virtual environment had nothing in it except her and the computers to scent…wait, she thought she smelled…? Did they add the scent of a maintenance tech to the character creation screen?! This was a level of detail that simply wouldn’t exist in a company made inside the wall. I wonder if an A.I. was responsible for that…

  Moving on, she opened her mouth and examined her teeth, which she had already known from the sensations her tongue was sending to her brain were different from her human teeth in her normal body. Sure enough, her incisors and canines on both the top and bottom jaw were longer and sharper than any human’s, though the fangs on the top row were far more prominent than the bottom row. That’s…actually pretty awesome! She closed her mouth and grinned, enjoying the dangerous looking teeth in her smile. Puckishly, she stuck her tongue out and startled herself when it extended a good six inches from her mouth. She yanked it back in with a little ‘thp!’ noise and boggled at her reflection. “…what was THAT?!” she blurted.

  Much more slowly, she extended her tongue and was amused to see it wasn’t just six inches long, it was nearly twelve. Pulling it back in and blushing for reasons she couldn’t quite pce, she muttered, “Do I even want to know the biology of that?”

  She took a deep breath and dropped her eyes to her breasts. In-game she was supposed to pretend she’d had them all her life…well, all her life since puberty, anyway. She was going to have to get used to seeing them. They were…pleasant to look at. I like, she realized, My breasts. Her mind went numb for a moment and white noise seemed to fill her ears. After a moment she realized what she had just thought.

  No! she snapped at herself, I can’t be reacting like this! She cmped her eyes closed and scrubbed her face with her hands. Okay, I’m going to look at my body. And this is my body for the duration of time I’ll be in this game! A small part of her was trying to point out that she could go back to the character selection, clear what she’d already added, and start fresh. The overwhelming majority of her mind and heart were dead-set on seeing this through. She put her hands to her sides and opened her eyes, looking down at her chest.

  Her breasts were rge. She wasn’t sure if that was the Morvuck megafauna genes or the pod’s genetic scan. Her mother hadn’t been exactly small, though Diane’s memories were somewhat dimmed by how long it had been since the cancer took her mother. She found herself wondering with a bit of eager anticipation what she might look like in a swimsuit…which was an odd thought, given that she’d be living on a space station for months.

  Her waist was, as expected of someone who was genetically predisposed to be supremely fit as she was, trim. She was quite pleased to note the six-pack she’d been struggling to attain outside the pod was simply granted to her. Was it a cheat? Sure, but it was one she’d take over some of the more onerous diets she’d tried in effort to lose the belly fat enough to show off her abdominals.

  Throughout all of this, she was feeling something she’d never experienced before and she was struggling to pce the feeling. It was strange and unfamiliar and she almost wanted it to stop but absolutely did NOT want it to stop! What is wrong with me? Is it this body? Is it the VR? What’s happening?

  She felt light-headed as she pushed herself to look further down. It was nearly the same as before, hips that were nearly as wide apart as her shoulders, her hands resting next to them, little tips that looked like they were shaped by a manicure and she might have guessed were painted with a subtle chevron on each nail, but a nervous flex caused the ‘chevrons’ on one hand to flicker out a fraction of an inch and then back in. I’ve got cws! a giddy part of her mind pointed out. She locked her eyes on the channel of skin that formed from the muscles of her abdominals and thighs.

  There is was, looking not terribly dissimir to what she had between her legs outside the pod. Her cheeks started to itch but she ignored that in favor of carefully reaching between her legs and pulling the familiar bits aside with one hand and probing behind them with the other to confirm that, yes, she did indeed have the appropriate genital configuration for a Morvuck Progenitor.

  Yanking her hands away from her crotch, she finally acknowledged the itchiness of her cheeks and went to scratch, then remembered the cws and rubbed against her cheek with the back of her hand, only to find it wet.

  …why am I crying?

  PrincessColumbia