Saul and Catherine Rafferty were beside themselves with grief. Their son Frederick, Freddie to his friends, had been stricken with childhood leukemia. He wasn't dead yet, but his condition had deteriorated rapidly in just a few short months.
The bad news was he didn't have much time left. The good news was that he was being given top priority for a body transplant. What had once been the subject of science fiction was now, like many other technologies, a reality. But there was a caveat. Donors had to match the recipient. For any given human, only 1% of the population was going to be a respective match.
Donors had to come from somewhere, usually from one of the following categories:
* brain dead patients whose minds could not be recorded and saved
* prisoners on death row, and there were many more on death row now that people who were productive citizens needed body swaps
* illegal aliens who had committed crimes
* clones designed for body swaps
There were complications with each. For braindead patients, part of the brain had to be removed and replaced with cloned material, and the transfer process could be more difficult, often resulting with limited access to one's previous lifetime of memories. For prisons, rights activists were always protesting that innocent people were being processed through the system simply so that rich people who could afford body swaps could have their pick of poor, uneducated criminals. The body swap lobby was fairly strong, though, and Americans had simply gotten sick of crime epidemics. Nowadays, crime was tapering and on its way down thanks to the fact that dying citizens were being downloaded into criminal bodies. Those transfers usually worked out quite well, though the law limited whose bodies could be used. For instance, inmates with known narcotics problems were often not included on the lists, as well as inmates with already severe medical issues.
For illegal aliens, the cost of crossing the border had much higher stakes. The risk of being captured and forced to swap with an elderly person were higher now than ever before. Most of those elderly people simply either assumed the identity of the person whose body they stole and took their money south of the border where it would go further anyway, or claimed that they paid the immigrant in question. Usually and conveniently, the poor swapped souls found themselves in octogenarian bodies with little recourse after being offered money to give to their families back in Central America. Most of them took the money and lived out the rest of their brief lives as elderly gringos, signing documents that claimed they agreed to the swap to begin with. Illegal immigration had dropped severely since this started happening.
There were now body swap agencies around the world for citizens of industrialized first world nations to find "donors" willing to swap bodies with them, paying them to reduce their lifespan significantly so that their families and loved ones would have the money for a chance at true happiness. These were slowly replacing the kidnappings of illegals and besides which, bodies of non-refugees were usually in better shape.
Lastly, there were clones, but the technology was still atrociously expensive to build a body from scratch.
The state had been looking furiously for a match for the Snyder family. And they had finally found one.
Freddie was covered with plastic tubes invading every orifice of his body. His father - a short gentle man with soft features, seemed like a tall giant compared with his son. Saul wondered how his son would view him after he had been swapped. He wondered how much things would change. You read about body swaps in families ruining lives but at least his son would BE alive. Some perfectly healthy people wanted body swaps and looked forward to them, but the law was pretty clear that if you didn't have the money to pay for one yourself, priority had to go to dying children, victims of violent crime, and dying adult patients who had something to contribute to society.
His son more than qualified for the transition. They told Freddie that he was going to get a new body, but that it would be very different than the one he was used to. The man he would become was in his mid 50s, with a gray beard and bald head. It shocked Freddie but he didn't care. He was in too much pain to care. His father was trying not to be visibly stressed, and was putting a nice spin on it.
"Just think of it this way, slugger. You'll be really strong. You'll have really big muscles." He showed his son a few photos the prison had sent. The older Caucasian man looked tough and mean. His face wore a deep scowl. His hair, once blond, was now yellow-white. Mostly bald with just a bit of hair growing on the sides. He had a beard and a few tattoos on his massive 21 inch arms. He had been in prison for over five years. Counts of felony arson, attempted murder, and first degree manslaughter. The man was obviously dangerous and no one would miss him. Saul didn't share that particular part with his son.
"So I'm going to be older than you?"
"Well, your body will be but your mind will still be 12 years old. I'll still be your dad, and your mom will still be your mom. We love you. And even if you are 54, you'll still have a lot more time than you would have in this body. Any time you can extend your life will be a blessing."
"But I can't go back to school, huh?"
"No, sorry kiddo. You won't be able to go back to school with other kids. But you can go to a special school for Mind Transfers. You can play with other kids who have been given adult bodies. So that's pretty cool, right?"
They prepped his son for immediate surgery. Freddie remembered his mom crying tears of joy and kissing him gently on his little boy cheeks for the last time before he fell asleep...
Groggily, he started to see blurred lights. He smelled the cold, antiseptic air of the hospital. The thin sheet covering him. He groaned.
"Patient is waking. Hello, Mr. Snyder!" A beaming nurse came into view. "The procedure was a complete success, no complications. We'll tell your parents you're awake. Just stay here and relax. I'm going to go get the doctor."
"Okay," he mumbled. Or rather, rumbled. He heard the monotonous beeping of the monitors. He realized he didn't have any tubes going inside his nose anymore. He moved his arm. No IV dripped into his arms. Nothing was attached to him except a medical bracelet. He looked at his arm and his eyes bulged. He was groggy and almost fell asleep again when the doctor rushed in, all smiles.
"Hey there, sport! Can you go me a favor and sit up? Easy does it. Thattaboy. Good. I'm going to check you out now. I need to ask you a few questions..."
He answered the doctor about how he felt. His voice rumbled when he spoke now. He felt his chest and there was so much more of it, and it didn't feel real. He had so much muscle now everywhere that it felt like he was wearing a Halloween costume. It felt like he was talking through a synthesizer of some kind. He tried to sound like himself and he couldn't. He sounded like a 54 year old muscular, bald, gruff adult male. He wasn't entirely over the anaesthesia yet, so it felt like a dream where he had woken up in a big body and the dream was going to be over any minute...
Instead, his mind grew more clear. The doctor had him stand. He was now a few inches taller than the doctor! He had been so tall before, he thought in bewilderment. As he continued to wake, they gave him some clothing. The hospital was only able to provide him with one outfit, and all their clothing came from Goodwill donations. Freddie took off the hospital gown and felt all his new fur, spellbound by the mat of white chest hair he now possessed. He put on the T-shirt, which stretched over his muscular pecs, nipples and beer gut. He wrapped the jeans around his legs, and though this body had gained some fat in prison, it still retained quite a bit of muscle. His gut hung slightly over the belt when he cinched it, but his muscular legs filled out the jeans nicely. He only glanced at his new dick briefly. It was 7 inches long. His old penis had been 2 inches in length. He could wear a man's size boxers and jeans now! It made him feel large. He was large!
They brought him to a full length mirror so he could see himself. He gasped. He looked like some kind of construction worker! The man before him was intimidating looking! If Freddie had seen him walking around in real life before the swap, he would have felt respect for the man's size. He looked like no one should fuck with him. His arms were absolutely breathtaking. They had taken to fat only a little. They bulged with raw power. He tried flexing his arms briefly, slowly, gaping and flexing in slow motion, as if he was underwater. Nothing felt real, he thought.
But I like this...I like this so far... he thought.
His mother cried. His father was trying not to be emotional. He held his hands UP to his son's face and his father hugged him. His father was now only as tall as Freddie's chest, he thought in wonder.
It felt like his dad was now his little brother or something. This was so weird! he thought.
Squinting at the light, Freddie walked out of the hospital a free citizen, given a new life by the miracle of the Mind Transfer procedure. They told him he needed rest for several days and it would take him weeks to get used to his new muscular frame and height. It was surreal being so much taller and stronger than either of his parents. They told him he would be going to several scheduled therapy sessions with a professional child psychologist who specialized in children that were given adult bodies and lived adult lives.
His room was spotless. His mother had been cleaning it and making sure it was ready for his return home. Freddie realized going through his drawers that he didn't have any clothes that would fit him.
"Daddy?" the grown 54 year old burly, muscular, bearded man said to his 35 year old dad, "I don't have any clothes."
"We know, sweetheart. Just sit tight, okay? We're going to have lunch first and then if you feel up to it, we'll go clothes shopping in a few hours. We didn't know what your size would be until just last night. Why don't you sit and watch some TV, slugger? Okay, sweetie?"
"Okay, Daddy," the much bigger man told Saul.
As he flipped through the channels, he stomach grumbled. He was big now and it was still very odd, still very much felt like a dream. He gingerly felt his pecs, so hard, so manly, so covered with hair. He felt the fur underneath his T-shirt. Pulled at it slightly. It hurt! He was a man now. He had chest hair.
The rest of the day felt like a blur. He followed his Dad and Mom around a few clothing stores. People kept calling him "Sir" for the first time and that was a new experience for him. He wasn't used to people calling him "Sir." He was only 12 years old! People thought he was naturally a grown up. Mind transfers were still very much a minority in society, after all.
They spent several hundred dollars getting their son a new wardrobe.
"Sorry it cost to much," Freddie said, in his deep, burly voice. He was still getting used to sounding like some construction worker dude.
"It's okay, bud. Don't worry about it. The reason we always had to be so careful was you were still a growing boy. Something tells me you won't be getting any taller, so your clothes should fit you for a longer time, right slugger?"
"I should hope he doesn't get any taller. I have a hard enough time reaching him for a kiss as it is," Mom said. "Now come down here so I can give you a kiss," she told her son. He bent down and she kissed his cheek.
Catherine had read a lot about parents rejecting children with new adult bodies and it broke her heart. Inside that body was still her little boy and he deserved love and tenderness, just as much now as ever before, no matter what he looked like.
It had been a big day for Freddie. He didn't even fit in his bed anymore, so he slept in the guest room, where his uncles normally crashed when they visited. The queen sized bed fit him much better. He drifted off to sleep, wondering about what was going to happen to him now that he was an old man with huge muscles...