That Dratted Affair with the Dream Engine by Christine Danse Page B

and released me.
    I watched her
back away, then turned my wary gaze to the gaunt Mr. Foster, who
sorted out a tangle of wires at a small table in front of the
engine. I had just begun to relax into the chair when he dipped two
fingers into a jar and scooped out a quivering glob of
gel.
    As the man
approached me with that greenish mound of jelly, I opened my mouth
to protest, but at that moment, Annette sweetly said, "I love you."
I deflated. I grimaced, and then the repulsive slime was being
smeared across my forehead. This was followed by the placement of
three small, flat pads. When I opened my eyes, wires trailed from
my forehead from those pads, and Annette had seated herself in the
chair on the other side of the machine. As I watched, she underwent
an identical treatment. Gel, pads, wires. Catching my gaze, she
grinned at me and winked.
    "Mr. Foster.
The one I prepared, if you would please," she said to our skeletal
host.
    "But of
course," he said, and removed a rather ordinary-looking punchcard
from a small box. He fed this into the engine, and—with a pull of a
lever—the machine steamed to life.
    Immediately,
my forehead began to tingle under the coat of gel, and my stomach
lurched as sudden vertigo caused the room to spin around me. I had
time only to cry out in dismay before the parlor disappeared and I
was swallowed into another reality.
    The world
around me was blue, and formless, and weightless. I had the feeling
of floating in a cloudless sky. For some moments, I simply hung
motionless, blinking myself into full awareness. There was a
nagging haze over my mind, like the drowsy veil that blurred my
dreams at night.
    Yes. That was
it, of course. I was—
    "What do you
think?" asked a voice from behind me. It was male, and it was at
once wholly familiar and altogether strange. With a lazy twist of
my body, I found myself turning about to face its owner.
    A man floated
as if in water several feet away, limbs casually buoyant. He was
naked, with lean arms and an abdomen that was flat but undefined.
His manhood dangled shamelessly in full view.
    I was struck
with an overwhelming sense of familiarity. After all, the face I
gawked at now was the face that looked back at me in the bathroom
mirror every morning.
    I was looking
at...me.
    "Hello,
Jeremy," said the other me, in my own voice. "I'm so very glad you
joined me. I had always wanted to know what it felt like to be a
man, and when I learned of Mr. Foster’s machine, the very first
dream I watched was a man's. I thought it was a fantastic and
intimate experience, and I thought you ought to try it. As a
woman." The lips that I knew so well but seemed so alien quirked up
at the ends. "Surprise."
    At that, I
looked down at my body. There: A pair of voluptuous breasts that I
would have recognized anywhere, no matter the vantage point. Lily
white, with smart brown nipples that always perked at the lightest
touch or chill of the air. No, there was no mistaking these
breasts, nor the fact that they swelled from my own smooth,
perfectly white chest.
    The "me" was
Annette. And I...was her.
    "I
promise to make your first experience so very memorable," Annette
continued. She—he?—smiled at me with my mustached mouth. "Go on," she said. "Touch them. They're real,
and they're yours."
    I wanted to
call off Annette's nonsense, but curiosity or some other compulsion
drove me to raise one of her—my—delicate hands and cup it under the
curve of one breast. The flesh felt soft and smooth, just as I
remembered it. However, this time, I experienced the dual sensation
of touching and being touched. I could feel the warmth of my hand
sliding over my own flesh. I squeezed.
    Oh...
    Annette
chuckled softly in a way that had no right coming from my mouth.
She floated toward me and closed the hand that should have been
mine around the breast that should have been hers. Slowly,
tenderly, she began to knead the flesh. She murmured, "Do you like
it?"
    I
had no choice but to agree. I had