I read. It goes slowly—but I love the ending.

I look down at the tablet—it has a color e-ink screen?—to find the Web browser is open to my Wikipedia entry. I stare at it blankly for a moment before my brain admits what my eyes are telling it. I have a Wikipedia page? Fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the insanity of this situation, my brain insists it must be some other John Doe. It’s not like it’s some wildly uncommon name. But no, all the biographical information is the same—it’s me. As bizarre as it is, this guy is me. Or I’m him. This is who I am. Or was. Or something . . .

I read on. I recognize the details of my education—Early Entrance Program, University of Washington; M.D., UW; M.S. in bioengineering from Cal; Ph.D. in medicine, Johns Hopkins; then the second Ph.D. from MIT in nano-robotics under that crazy genius Dr. Harbaugh. Crazy/genius: most of the world thought he was crazy, I thought he was a genius.

Everyone was right. He was a genius—almost no one recognized it, but he’d made a series of theoretical breakthroughs in quick succession to rival Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905. He was also crazy. He expected a follower, not an equal. When I made a breakthrough of my own in my dissertation, he tried to submarine me; fortunately, I’d made some allies in the department, because if your doctoral adviser wants to ruin you, it’s hard to stop them. I was awarded my doctorate, went to Stanford for my postdoctoral research, made another major breakthrough . . .

. . . and got sandbagged. Big time. I don’t like talking about it, I don’t like thinking about it—for me, it’s still 2017 and this all just happened, the wound is still fresh, even if it’s six years in the past for the rest of the world. I left Stanford under a cloud, my research unfinished—nothing unethical proved against me, but enough suspicion to make it impossible for me to continue my career . . . or so I thought as of “last night,” whenever that actually was in relation to now. I peek down at the Wiki page, afraid to see what it says.

My eyes go wide. All the details are there as I knew them, which means a lot of things I knew but couldn’t prove. I read on—after I started making money hand over fist, I was able to hire lawyers and fund an investigation, which nailed Harbaugh’s hide to the wall. He was actually shivved during his first week in prison by a female inmate . . . and died because the doctor and nurses who should have treated him were mysteriously unavailable. Rumors of an orgy . . . Women taking vengeance on a man who’d tried to ruin the inventor of the Enhancement . . .

What the fuck kind of world is this?

*******

I put the tablet down and stare unseeing into the distance for a while. Finally I pull myself together enough to pick it up and read on. Everything about my life after my disgrace is new information to me. Apparently, in the midst of my despair, I somehow had one more major insight—I have no idea what catalyzed that; it’s bizarre—and managed to find a researcher in sexual genetics to work with me. She was a brilliant woman who had a powerful motivation to assist my research, so she didn’t care whether I was guilty or not.

Apparently, this woman, Dr. Eva Richards—of whom I have no memory at all, which is extremely frustrating, because it says we were lovers most of the time we worked together—had gone into genetics because she had some strange problems with her DNA that meant she kept developing really rare cancers. Wiki tells me I went to her because I believed there was a site on the X chromosome that could be activated to make it possible to reprogram the body. At that time, I was thinking of this in terms of cancer research. We hit several problems, one of them being that the Y chromosome has no corresponding site, and the one on the X chromosome is effectively recessive. This opened up the possibility of reprogramming women’s bodies but not men’s.

It seems we split our research into two tracks at that point: one full steam ahead on what we knew we could do, the other trying to work out an approach to cancer that would work for men as well as women. We couldn’t have done that except that Dr. Richards—Eva, I suppose I should call her—had a couple key connections—once she demonstrated our research to the right people, money started pouring in. We established a corporation, hired the best researchers we could find to build the teams we needed, and hit the gas pedal.

It wasn’t enough for my partner—Eva; she died with the end in sight. I plowed on, determined (so Wiki says) to honor her memory. One of the money people—a woman who turned out to have a slight deformity, of which very few people knew—came to me and asked what I could use the research on besides cancer. I started telling her, and she asked if it could be used for general body modification. I told her it could, but only on women, and she set me down and told me the facts of life: a cure for cancer would make us all a great deal of money, but a procedure to allow women to turn themselves into avatars of Aphrodite would make us the richest people on the planet. She proceeded to prove it by offering me unlimited funding to develop the Enhancement—she gave it that name in that first conversation—with the sole stipulation that once it was tested and proven effective, she be the first recipient.

*******

This is all too much . . . I skim ahead—success—not only did the process work, we hit on a way to do it that was not only 100% effective, it was actually cheap. The only problems with the cheap way were a) the body took a while to adapt, meaning no one could be Enhanced more often than every six months, and b) for reasons it appears we have yet to figure out, it randomly reprogrammed hair color. It seems the genetics of hair color are really strange. Well, chemo changed women’s hair, too, I muse.

Working with insurance companies to make it generally affordable—Blue Cross refused to work with us; when their two next largest competitors worked out deals with us to cover our process at a rate that allowed ordinary women to afford it, Blue Cross went into a tailspin and ended up going bankrupt. (Women actually changed jobs just to change insurance plans so they could take the Enhancement!)

Personal life . . . What the fuck—is this for real? Apparently for the last couple years, I’ve been the world’s biggest playboy: any woman who has been Enhanced will willingly—no, gladly—no, in most cases enthusiastically—fuck me any time I want, any way I want, in any location, under any conditions, merely because I ask, and feel ecstatically honored to do so—and no one will think a single negative thing about it.

All the world’s Enhanced women are mine—and why would I want any woman who isn’t?

I don’t know what the fuck kind of world I created, but I’m going to enjoy it.

Maybe I should start with that call button . . . I don’t think I could move right now, but I don’t need to—my dick’s pointing up, and there’s room in the bed for a woman to ride me—even that Amazon of a doctor. Assuming the bed could take the weight . . .