Unable to keep seeing her in the body of Amber Knights and more than a bit shocked at the sudden changes she is going through, you decide to keep yourself away from your mom for a while and head back to school, keeping some sort of normalcy in your life. One day, after the bell rung for end of class, you finally found the courage to approach Allison and asked her out. To your immense surprise, she actually said yes and playfully slapped you before she headed out of the room blushing at the same time.
After another Tabitha dinner (which was becoming surprisingly edible and tasty), you picked up the slack on tending to the kitchen while your brother took his turn at the laundry. No matter how much you tried to avoid thinking about it, the fact you all were doing things that just a few months ago, your mom would be doing had you wondering about her. It had been close to a week since you had last spoken to her, or tried to, and in that week, you noticed that she hadn’t called you to check up on you. Not that she cares, she’s too busy fucking that guy… you mused, finishing off the last of the plates and was about to wipe your hands dry when the phone rang.
“Tim, can you get that? I have to help dumbass with the laundry again,” Tabitha shouted from the back, over your brother’s stunned and somewhat stilted denial. You couldn’t understand how anyone could get the idea of putting in a laundry pod before the wash wrong but your brother managed to do that.
“Is this Timothy Connors?”
You recognized the voice even though you sorely wish you hadn’t. “Yes, yes it is.”
“This is Dr. Kerry from the hospital. I was wondering if your mother was around?”
You tightened the grip on the phone, fighting the desire to slam the phone back down. “No, she doesn’t live here anymore. She moved in to the old Stephanie Burke’s place.”
Dr. Kerry paused, seemingly taking notes as you spoke. “Is that so? Is there anyone in the house who could stop by the hospital? We need to discuss some things and do a follow up.”
You glanced up at the clock. “Um…if you don’t mind, I can come. Dad’s busy today.”
“Sure. When you get to the hospital, go straight to Dr. Saunders' office and we’ll be waiting for you there.” The sound of anxiety in his voice didn’t pass your notice and as you hung up, you took a deep breath and shrugged.
“Hi Timothy, welcome in.” You shook Saunders’ hand before nodding in Kerry’s direction. The older doctor motioned for you to take a seat as he closed the door behind him. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.” You sat down and looked between the two. “What’s going on?”
“How is your mother doing?”
You turned your head towards Kerry. “She seems okay…” He began to take notes, prompting you to continue. “I mean, she moved back into Stephanie Burke’s house, if that’s what you’re getting after.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A short while after the funeral, she and dad had a fight and she just moved out.”
Kerry looked up at you. “What was the cause of the argument?” Your glance at him should’ve made it clear to him to back off but the guy was too wrapped up in his work to really understand. Saunders tried, and failed, to get him to stop with a somewhat discreet cough. “Did anything happen?”
“How would you feel if your wife had suddenly been turned into a porn star with big fake tits?” You looked at him and the surprise on his face told you he didn’t have a clue why you were suddenly angry. “What’s up with all these questions anyway?”
Kerry tried to take a stab at explaining but the look of skepticism stopped him in his tracks and he turned to Saunders. “We’re sorry that this happened, Timothy. After the surgery, we have been trying the procedure on other subjects and we’ve been studying them for the past few months. To put this mildly, we’re encountering interesting results that we want to avoid with your mother.”
“What do you mean by ‘interesting results’?”
Saunders thought for a moment. “As we told you earlier, the surgery doesn’t involve the removal of her entire brain and putting it into another person’s body. We removed the portion of the brain that is believed to be the origin of her conscious self, the essence that made your mom who she was. We took that part and put it into Amber’s body, in effect placing your mom in charge of Amber’s life. Follow so far?” You nodded and he continued. “Doing the same procedures on the test subjects, initially they acted like their original self and that led us to believe that the transplanted portion would be the dominant portion of the brain and that the subject would adapt to the original host. But…”
“You turned up an interesting result…” you whispered, slowly dreading where the light dawning in your head about the procedure was leading to.
Saunders gave you a sympathetic nod. “Yes, as time passed, the subjects started to exhibit characteristics that belonged to the new host. It was simple at first, preferences changed, and then the effects began to snowball. They eventually developed characteristics of the new host until they completely adapted to the new lifestyle and developing all the sort of connections that went along. The old memories still existed, as far as we could tell, but the new body just assimilates it.”
“The theory we put forth about the consciousness portion of the brain being the dominant one was incorrect,” Kerry explained, trying his best to keep it as jargon-free as possible, the sheer immensity of the subject was overbearing. “There’s so much of the brain we don’t understand and the results we are getting show us this one simple truth: in order to survive, the original personality aspect becomes obsolete and discarded in favor of complete integration with the new body…”
“What my colleague is trying to say, Timothy, is that in order for your mother to survive in her new body, the portion of her brain had to discard fundamentally any attachment to her prior life as Jennifer Connors and assume the personality of Stephanie Burke.”
You sat back in the chair, dumbfounded, after hearing all of this. “Are you saying…because of your stupid surgery that my mother has decided to become a fucking porn star?” It’s only after you blurted out that you realized you just said what you said and the anger left your body almost as soon as it came.
“If it’s no trouble, we would like to know as much as you can tell us what happened to her after she left.”
“What’s there to tell…Stephanie has a website and mom’s been doing her job. The things she’s doing now would’ve absolutely disgusted her before.” You went into some detail but Saunders just stopped you after he could tell it was beginning to make you more than a bit uneasy.
“When you took her to Stephanie’s house, how did she react on her first visit?”
You paused for a moment. “Well, she was nervous at first, having never been there before, but it was after seeing all the nude graphic posters of Stephanie inside the house that she broke down crying and all.”
“A nervous breakdown?”
“Yeah…I think something like that. We ended up just getting some clothes that would fit her.”
Saunders nodded while Kerry took notes. “This must be when her conscious brain started to surrender to the impulses from her new body.”
“Anyway, after a few days, she and dad had that fight over her wanting to go back there and she just picked up and left.” You nodded at Saunders’ direction. “You’re right, we all began to notice small changes in her behavior at the time but we just thought it was a fight. We never really saw the two of them fight before but whatever he said, that was the final word…usually.”
After taking a moment to collect your thoughts, Saunders bade you to continue. “I don’t know really what happened in the days to follow but she started visiting and letting us know that she was staying at Stephanie’s place and we started visiting her there. She had actually rearranged the house to the way she usually liked things so no one really bothered to question any of the things we picked up. Tabby was the one that actually picked up on it first, that mom started to seem more and more comfortable not acting like mom…if that makes any sense. One day, in particular, I found out she was practicing out the roles that Stephanie did in her movies and she somewhat admitted that she was going to take up Stephanie’s profession again…that it wouldn’t be fair to her otherwise.”
Saunders and Kerry exchanged looks at each other before Kerry turned and looked at you. “I’m guessing at this point the vulgarity of adult films and the immorality no longer really had any impact on her….”
“She seemed to come up with reasons to defend her choices and now sex is something casual to her, she doesn’t care who she does it with or how many guys she does it with…” You felt the anger raging in you and you had to catch yourself from giving into the urge to hit something.
Saunders leaned back. “It seems like your mom’s having the same changes like the test subjects. Slowly but surely, she is turning into the old Stephanie Burke. She will have the same memories of her life with you and your family but other than that, everything else about her personality and behavior will become Stephanie.”
“It’s best you try to maintain the relationship because her new body is pumping so much information into her brain that absent an external stimulus, her mind will simply fail to resist and we may lose anything that still remains.” As you got up to leave, he placed a reassuring hand on your shoulder. “We will be here for you if you or your family needs any help.”
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