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in Chronivac Version 4.0 by anyone tagged as none

Chronivac Version 4.0

Not Mary

added by PersonalAlchemy 2 years ago BM

The trouble all started when Merritt Sivertsen was 9 years old. He was a happy go lucky kid, very handsome, the fastest boy in his class and near the top of the class academically.

With the benefit of hindsight, 25 year old Merritt realized that that Mrs. Cranston probably wanted to get in his mother's pants. Mrs. Sivertsen was a slender beauty and she and her husband had seemed pretty happy to Merritt, even with the benefit of adult hindsight. Then Mrs. Sivertsen joined the local library book club and encountered Sheila Cranston. Mrs. Cranston had the local distributorship on extremist feminism.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed to Merritt that she had toned it down at first as she insinuated herself into Mrs. Sivertsen's life but over many months she constantly worked to drive a wedge between Merritt's mom and his dad. It was particularly bad timing for his father in that he had just been given new responsibilities at work and was under tremendous stress. Meanwhile, at home, Mrs. Cranston was constantly in his mom's ear about how his dad was no good.

Eventually the pot boiled over and Merritt's mother and father separated. The divorce filing came 6 months later. It had always seemed to Merritt that his mother had almost openly favored his younger sister over him in every way. Now, it was explicit. His younger sister wanted to take ballet classes and he wasn't young enough to be home alone, she said. So, Merritt was forced to go to the dance school, too. In short order, he'd been outfitted in a crazy dance belt thing and tights and slippers.
He thought he might die from embarrassment at first but the truth was that he liked it. He liked dancing and the teacher seemed to be amazed at how high and far he could jump. Hell, the spins and turns were fun and he was the kind of slender athletic boy with prominent rear who actually looked good in tights. For a year, everything went along great. Nobody at school was the wiser and he took ballet classes from age 10 to age 11. Sheila Cranston said it was wonderful that Merritt was so well suited to ballet. He didn't really care.
Then some girl in the class blabbed.
One day he came to school and it seamed like most every kid on the playground was calling him every epithet for gay that there was. He ended up in a fight and got sent to the principal's office. When he got out, all the kids were calling him "Mary" instead of Merritt in light of his being a ballet dancer.
The next year and change of his life, from age 11 to age 12 and a half was hell. He got in fights at school almost every day. He was constantly mocked as being gay and called "Mary" by every kid in school, even some he'd thought had been his friends.
But the unfairness of it so pissed him off that he was no determined to take ballet just to show every asshole kid that they couldn't bully Merritt Sivertsen.
Part of it, two was that, starting around his 12th birthday, Merritt had started to not just notice girls but be fascinated, entranced by the sight of them. And for a 12 year old boy, the only one in class, doing beginner's partnering exercises with all the ballerinas allowed him to put his hands on two dozen girls. Why should he give that up because some assholes were, paradoxically, call him a faggot?

Then, when he was 12 and a half, his mother got a new job in the next state. She said she'd look for a good ballet school for his sister and him but Merritt was adamant that he was done with ballet. His sister wasn't interested any more either.
So, in their new condo the next state over, Merritt was just a baseball player and a runner. He grew to be a slender six foot one, 160 pounds and a track star in high school, he was on the varsity baseball team, too. But running track was his thing. Merritt set a school record in the 400 meters and, filling in for other runners, got the track team points in every event from the 100 to the mile to the long jump. He finished second in his class and got the best SAT scores.

He went through two steady girlfriends his senior year. When it came time to apply to colleges he quietly noted that he had also danced ballet in order to broaden his application. He got a free ride to a top college just below Harvard and Yale. He wondered if it had helped to mention the ballet. Had they even noticed it?
When he met the roommate assigned to him freshman year he was pretty sure they did. That boy, Ryan, couldn't have been more out in a pride parade. Things were fine except when Ryan had a few beers, after which he became extremely tactile with Merritt, always pawing his buns. And there were the times when Ryan brought another boy home with him. Merritt would turn away and wrap the cheap dorm room pillow around his ears as tightly as possible. He thanked God that none of them could last long.

From sophomore year on he had his own apartment off campus and while he met some girls and went to their apartments in freshman and sophomore years he didn't have a steady girlfriend till junior year. He and Dagny did everything together. They had a few of the same classes and would try to match their schedules to see as much of each other as possible.

Merritt had a sort of a collage of a picture on his desk in his apartment of images of him growing up. His mother had put it together and he liked it. He felt sentimental looking at images of him on his first day of school, at his first school dance, playing baseball, running track, in a suit to go to prom etc. In one corner his mother had included an image of Merritt in ballet class. He usually arranged books in front of that. But one day, Dagny saw it. She guffawed.
"You! You were a ballet dancer?!"
He rolled his eyes and nodded. He gave her a brief account of it all.
And then, when they looked at their schedules for the next semester, the only way their schedules matched up was if they both took ballet as their phys. ed elective. He tried to figure a way out of it, but there really wasn't one.

But ballet this time was nothing but fun. He got to be with Dagny. He got to show off for her and the other girls in class. No one was calling him "Mary". No one seemed to care, Although his former roommate Ryan came by the window overlooking the dance studios one day and he definitely cared.

Merritt graduated with honors and some students with his major were being recruited by federal agencies. The guy there for the NSA was a terrific salesman. He explained to Merritt that he didn't even want kids from Harvard and Yale. Too often they were rich snobs who derived their sense of status from feeling that they were above all their fellow citizens. People like that wanted to tell other people what to do. They didn't want to serve them or protect them.

Three years later, after giving his all to the agency, Merritt had been cut loose. Only they had apparently matched the stupidity of letting him go by discarding the incredible Chronivac device that someone had presented to them.

Merritt was no certain that it actually worked and, combing through the manual again and again, he realized that it didn't have to be used only for short term changes to oneself. You could change your body for good. Merritt didn't see any harm in upgrading himself. Why not? He'd be better able to deal with whatever came his way.

Merritt spent hours pouring over the incredible information in the profile of him that the Chronivac had somehow discerned from that very first electric pulse. He saw that he had a bad appendix, one that was relatively susceptible to rupturing. All he had to do to remedy this was slide a bar in a menu box from the 10th percentile of appendix resilience to the 99th percentile. Now it would never rupture on him.

He had a few minor acne scars. He erased them. He'd slightly messed up the rotator cuff in his right shoulder pitching in high school. It would now be good as new.

But what Merritt really focused on was the limits of his athletic ability. It required going several menus deep but eventually, Merritt was staring at a line drawing of his own naked body and a box off to the side asked how fast he wanted to be able to run 400 meters. He typed in "30 seconds". The machine gave a harsh beep and the box displayed a message "NOT SUPPORTED BY PRESENT PHYSICAL STRUCTURE".
He typed in "45 seconds". The machine beeped and, as he watched, the drawing of him became leaner with fantastic calves and a rounder pair of buns.
He went through menu boxes about his ability to run 100 meters, 1 mile and a marathon. He found that the same, fantastic version of himself could run a 10.0 second 100 meters, a 45 second 400 meters, a 4:05 mile and a 2:40:00 marathon. He could now bench press 50% more than his weight and he had ligaments and tendons that were impossible supple and would never tear. He upped his proprioceptive sense, his body control to match that of any ballet dancer, any athlete on earth.

He had seen something in the menus about giving a subject what was it? Martial arts muscle memory? Was that the phrasing? It sounded like it amounted to programming in being a freaking Bruce Lee. When at last he found the relevant menus, he grinned. One of the options was to give the subject completed training in Jeet Kune Do. He couldn't check the box on that one fast enough.

Merritt returned to the base menu and pressed start. The machine prompted, "Are you sure? Permanent changes are proposed to base identity."
Merritt sighed and nodded. He pressed "YES" and felt the electromagnetic wave pass through him. The changes were more subtle than becoming an ape or a spider monkey. He got leaner. He got a little more muscular. He felt at his left cheek. It was perfectly smooth. The acne scars were gone!

More than anything else as a noticeable change, he suddenly felt a wonderful, ongoing low level sense of energy. He changed into running shorts and singlet and went outside. He ran five miles with amazing 100 yard sprints sprinkled in. He flew down the sidewalks on long, floating strides. Onlookers gawked.

When he returned to his apartment, he stepped in front of the mirror and gave an imitation Bruce Lee shout as he spun left then right presenting fists and hand strikes to any potential opponent. He grinned. Now he was ready for anything.


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