“What’s a mutual-risk paternity?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t apply to you,” I said. “It’s for boys.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Later,” I said. I felt like I had done enough fathering for the morning. “Just trash it so you’re not late for soccer.”

  A final chime.

  “Good work,” I said.

  She squinted at the screen. “I can do this now,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”

  “You have to check it every day,” I said. “Time, tide, and law wait for no man.”

  She looked at me and rolled her eyes (like her mother, her eyes are brown), dismissed the arbitration client and swiped the tablet to sleep.

  She asked: “Can I sue people?”

  This surprised me. “Yes,” I said. “Most people don’t but if you have a good reason you can sue anyone.”

  “Cool,” she said. Off she went to find her shin guards.

  I was of a generation where one group sued and a much larger group was named. But perhaps her generation sees this as part of the traffic of daily life, a territory to explore. Every one a little lawyer.

  My wife was on patrol, repeating the time, pointing out when asked where to find a water bottle, where to find a jacket, where to find a hair scrunchy. Finally my daughter had her act together. I watched them leave.

  Here is how it would go, I imagined. Daughter and Mother would walk together to the park. They would talk about this morning’s conversation. Mother would confirm that handling your own suits is a serious responsibility, that you can’t let them pile up or that will send the signal that you were susceptible to liens.

  Mother would explain what liens are. Daughter, well-intentioned, would half-listen and send messages to a dozen friends as they walked, each message another flash on the map. Mother would ask Daughter to please keep her wits about her crossing the street, and threaten to take away her phone. (I make the same empty threat many times a day.) Mother and Daughter would arrive at the field in the park, late but not very.

  Then would come the game. Cameras in the phone of every parent. Sensors on the goals; sensors in the ref’s whistle; in the ball; in the lamps that light the field. Yellow cards, goals, offsides, all recorded from many angles and tagged with time, location, temperature, whether for the memories or to limit liability—the motion of 22 bobbing ponytails transformed into lines of light.

  One team would win; another team would lose; or they’d tie; or it would rain. All would go home. And days or decades from now, someone will find a way to cull, to merge, to bend the bobbing ponytails to their own ends and use them in some scheme. They will steal that light as if were nothing, as if it were not life itself.

  * * *

  Paul Ford is a writer, programmer, and co-founder of Postlight, a New York City agency that creates Internet platforms and designs and builds web and mobile products. He has been an editor, essayist, novelist, and radio commentator, and is often found building content management systems for fun. He writes regularly for Medium’s The Message and has a column in The New Republic about databases, called Big Data. In addition to managing Postlight, he is writing a book about Web pages for the publisher FSG, to be published in 2016.

  “Nanolaw with Daughter” was previously published on Ftrain.com.

  Changes

  by Neil Gaiman

  1.

  Later, they would point to his sister’s death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year old life, tumours the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say “that was the start of it all,” and perhaps it was.

  In Reboot (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jump-cut to his teens, and he’s watching his science teacher die of AIDS, following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.

  “Why should we take it apart?” says the young Rajit, as the music swells, “Instead, should we not give it life?” His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed, and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy’s bony shoulder. “Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can,” he says in a deep bass rumble.

  The boy nods, and stares at us with a dedication in his eyes that borders upon fanaticism.

  This never happened.

  2.

  It is a grey November day, and Rajit is now a tall man in his forties, with dark-rimmed spectacles, which he is not currently wearing. The lack of spectacles emphasises his nudity. He is sitting in the bath, as the water gets cold, practising the conclusion to his speech. He stoops, a little, in everyday life, although he is not stooping now, and he considers his words before he speaks. He is not a good public speaker.

  The apartment in Brooklyn, which he shares with another research scientist and a librarian, is empty today. His penis is shrunken and nut-like in the tepid water. “What this means,” he says, loudly and slowly, “is that the war against cancer has been won.”

  Then he pauses, takes a question from an imaginary reporter, standing on the other side of the bathroom.

  “Side effects?” he replies to himself in an echoing bathroom voice. “Yes, there are some side effects. But, as far as we have been able to ascertain, nothing that will create any permanent changes.”

  He climbs out of the battered porcelain bathtub, and walks, naked, to the toilet bowl, into which he throws up, violently, the stage fright ripping through him like a gutting-knife. When there is nothing more to throw up and the dry heaves have subsided, Rajit washes his mouth with Listerine, gets dressed, and takes the subway into central Manhattan.

  3.

  It is, as Time Magazine will point out, a discovery that would ‘change the nature of medicine every bit as fundamentally and as importantly as the discovery of penicillin’.

  “What if,” says Jeff Goldblum, playing the adult Rajit in the biopic, “just—what if—you could reset the body’s genetic code? So many ills come because the body has forgotten what it should be doing. The code has become scrambled. The program has become corrupted. What if... what if you could fix it?”

  “You’re crazy,” retorts his lovely blonde girlfriend, in the movie. In real life, he has no girlfriend; in real life Rajit’s sex-life is a fitful series of commercial transactions between Rajit and the young men of the AAA-Ajax Escort Agency.

  “Hey,” says Jeff Goldblum, putting it better than Rajit ever did, “it’s like a computer. Instead of trying to fix the glitches caused by a corrupted program one by one, symptom by symptom, you can just reinstall the program. All the information’s there all along. We just have to tell our bodies to go and recheck the RNA and the DNA—reread the program if you will. And then reboot.”

  The blonde actress smiles, and stops his words with a kiss, amused and impressed and passionate.

  4.

  The woman has cancer of the spleen and of the lymph nodes and abdomen: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She also has pneumonia. She has agreed to Rajit’s request to use an experimental treatment on her. She also knows that claiming to cure cancer is illegal in America. She was a fat woman until recently: the weight has fallen from her, and she reminds Rajit of a snowman in the sun: each day she melts, each day she is, he feels, less defined.

  “It is not a drug as you understand it,” he tells her. “It is a set of chemical instructions.” She looks blank. He injects two ampules of a clear liquid into her veins.

  Soon, she sleeps.

  When she awakes she is free of cancer. The pneumonia kills her, soon after that.

  Rajit has spent the two days before her death wondering how he will explain the fact that, as the autopsy demonstrates beyond a doubt, the patient now has a penis and is, in every respect, functionally and chromosonally male.

  5.

  It is twenty years later, in a tiny apartment in New Orleans (although it might as well be in Moscow, or Manchester, or Paris, or Berlin). Tonight is going to be a big night, and Jo/e is going to stun.

  The choice is between a Polonaise crinoline style eighteenth century French court dress (fibre-glass bustle, underwired decolletage setting off lace-embroidered crimson bodice) and a reproduction of Sir Phillip Sydney’s court dress, in black velvet and silver thread, complete with ruff and codpiece. Eventually, and after weighing all the options, Jo/e plumps for cleavage over cock. Twelve hours to go: Jo/e opens the bottle with the red pills, each little red pill marked with an X, and pops two of them. It’s ten a.m., and Jo/e goes to bed, begins to masturbate, penis semi-hard, but falls asleep before coming.

  The room is very small. Clothes hang from every surface. An empty pizza box sits on the floor. Jo/e snores loudly, normally, but when freebooting Jo/e makes no sound at all, and might as well be in some kind of coma.

  Jo/e wakes at ten p.m. feeling tender and new. Back when Jo/e first started on the party scene, each change would prompt a severe self-examination, peering at moles and nipples, foreskin or clit, finding out which scars had vanished and which ones had remained. But now Jo/e’s an old hand at this, and puts on the bustle, the petticoat, the bodice and the gown, new breasts (high and conical) pushed together, petticoat trailing the floor, which means Jo/e can wear the forty-year-old pair of Doctor Marten’s boots underneath (you never know when you’ll need to run, or to walk or to kick, and silk slippers do no-one any favours).

  High, powder-look wig completes the look. And a spray of cologne. Then Jo/e’s hand fumbles at the petticoat, a finger pushes between the legs (Jo/e wears no knickers, claiming a desire for authenticity to which the Doc. Marten’s give the lie) and then dabs it behind the ears, for luck, perhaps, or to help pull. The taxi rings the door at 11:05, and Jo/e goes downstairs. Jo/e goes to the ball.

  Tomorrow night Jo/e will take another dose; Jo/e’s job identity during the week is strictly male-identified.

  6.

  Rajit never viewed the gender rewriting action of Reboot as anything more than a side effect. The Nobel Prize was for anti-cancer work (rebooting worked for most cancers, it was discovered, but not all of them).

  For a clever man Rajit was remarkably short-sighted. There were a few things he failed to foresee. For example:

  That there would be people who, dying of cancer, would rather die than experience a change in gender. And they did.

  That the Catholic Church would come out against Rajit’s chemical trigger, marketed by this point under the brand name Reboot, chiefly because the gender change caused a female body to reabsorb into itself the flesh of a foetus as it rebooted itself: males cannot be pregnant. A number of other religious sects would come out against Reboot, most of them citing Genesis I. 27, 'male and female created He them', as their reason.

  (Sects who came out against Reboot included: Islam; Christian Science; the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church (with a number of dissenting voices); the Unification Church; Orthodox Trek Fandom; Orthodox Judaism; the Fundamentalist Alliance of the USA.

  Sects who came out in favour of Reboot use where deemed the appropriate treatment by a qualified medical doctor included: most Buddhists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the Greek Orthodox Church; the Church of Scientology; the Anglican Church (with a number of dissenting voices); New Trek Fandom; Liberal and Reform Judaism; The New Age Coalition of America.

  Sects who initially came out in favour of using Reboot recreationally: none.)

  While Rajit realised that Reboot would make Gender reassignment surgery obsolete, it never occurred to him that anyone might wish to take it for reasons of desire or curiosity or escape. Thus, he never foresaw the black market in Reboot and similar chemical triggers; nor that, within fifteen years of Reboot’s commercial release and FDA approval, illegal sales of the designer Reboot knock-offs (bootlegs, as they were soon known) would outsell heroin and cocaine, gram for gram, more than ten times over.

  7.

  In several of the New Communist States of Eastern Europe, possession of bootlegs carried a mandatory death sentence.

  In Thailand and Mongolia it was reported that boys were being forcibly rebooted into girls, to increase their worth as prostitutes.

  In China, newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for a single dose. The old people died of cancer as before. The subsequent birthrate crisis was not perceived as a problem until it was too late, the proposed drastic solutions proved difficult to implement and led, in their own way, to the final revolution.

  Amnesty International reported that in several of the Pan-Arabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male, and were not in fact women escaping the veil, were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed. Most Arab leaders denied that either phenomenon was occurring or had ever occurred.

  8.

  Rajit is in his sixties when he reads in the New Yorker that the word ‘Change’ is gathering to itself connotations of deep indecency and taboo.

  Schoolchildren giggle embarrassedly when they encounter phrases like ‘I needed a change' or 'Time for change' or 'The Winds of Change' in their studies of pre-Twenty-First Century Literature. In an English class in Norwich horrified smutty sniggers greet a fourteen-year old’s discovery of “a change is as good as a rest“.

  A representative of the King’s English Society writes a letter to the Times, deploring the loss of another perfectly good word to the English language.

  Several years later a youth in Streatham is successfully prosecuted for publically wearing a tee shirt with the slogan “I’m a Changed Man!” printed clearly upon it.

  9.

  Jackie works in Blossoms, a nightclub in West Hollywood. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Jackies in Los Angeles, thousands of them across the country, hundreds of thousands across the world.

  Some of them work for the government, some for religious organisations, or for businesses. In New York, London and Los Angeles, people like Jackie are on the door at the places that the In-Crowds go.

  This is what Jackie does. Jackie watches the crowd coming in, and thinks, “Born M now F, Born F now M, Born M now M, Born M now F, Born F now F...”

  On “Natural Nights” (crudely, unchanged) Jackie says “I’m sorry. You can’t come in tonight,” a lot. People like Jackie have a 97% accuracy rate. An article in Scientific American suggests that birth gender recognition skills might be genetically inherited: an ability that always existed but had no strict survival values until now.

  Jackie is ambushed in the small hours of the morning, walking out from Blossoms, in the parking lot out the back, and as each new boot crashes or thuds into Jackie’s face and chest and head and groin, Jackie thinks “Born M now F, born F now F, Born F now M, born M now M...”.

  When Jackie gets out of hospital, vision in one eye only, face and chest one huge purple-green bruise, there is a message, sent with an enormous bunch of exotic flowers, to say that Jackie’s job is still open.

  However Jackie takes the bullet train to Chicago, and from there takes a slow train to Kansas City, and stays there, working as a housepainter and electrician, professions for which Jackie had trained a long time before, and does not go back.

  10.

  Rajit is now in his seventies. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. He is rich enough to satisfy any whim; he will, however, will no longer have sex with anyone. He eyes them all distrustfully, from his apartment’s window, staring down at the bronzed bodies on the Copacabana, wondering.

  The people on the beach think no more of him than a teenager with chlamydia gives thanks to Alexander Fleming. Most of them imagine that Rajit must be dead by now. None of them care either way.

  It is suggested that certain cancers have evolved or mutated to survive rebooting. Many bacterial and viral diseases can survive rebooting. A handful even thrive upon rebooting, and one—a strain of gonorrhoea—is hypothesised to use rebooting in its vectoring, initially remaining dormant in the host body and becoming infectious only when the genitalia have reorganised into that of the opposite gender.

  Still, the average western human lifespan is increasing.

  Why some freebooters—recreational Reboot users—appear to age normally, while others give no indication of aging at all is something that puzzles scientists. Some claim that the latter group are actually aging, on a cellular level. Others maintain that it is too soon to tell, and that no-one knows anything for certain.

  Rebooting does not reverse the aging process, however. There is evidence that, for some, it may arrest it. Many of the older generation, who have until now been resistant to rebooting for pleasure, begin to take it regularly—freebooting—whether they have a medical condition that warrants it or no.

  11.

  Loose coins become known as coinage or, occasionally, specie.

  The process of making different or altering is now usually known as shifting.

  12.

  Rajit is dying of prostate cancer in his Rio apartment. He is now in his early nineties. He has never taken Reboot; the idea now terrifies him. The cancer has spread to the bones of his pelvis, and to his testes.

  He rings the bell. There is a short wait, for the nurse’s daily soap opera to be turned off, the cup of coffee put down. Eventually his nurse comes in.

  “Take me out into the air,” he says to the nurse, his voice hoarse. At first the nurse affects not to understand him. He repeats it, in his rough Portuguese. A shake of the head from his nurse.

  He pulls himself out of the bed—a shrunken figure, stooped so badly as to be almost hunchbacked, and so frail that it seems that a storm would blow him over—and begins to walk toward the door of the apartment.