text: October 2143 720 Ion Ave. Uranium City, Mare Imbrium, Moon of Earth Dear Alex, I know my previous e-mail to you left many things unfinished and that was for a good reason - at that time I was still frightened out of my wits, and had a hard time composing myself. I apologize for scaring you with my hastily writings about “the most horrible thing I have ever seen” and many other such vague and uninterpretable things. Now that I am more thoroughly constituted please allow me to explain how I have come to fear being near the endangered female. But don’t you dare accuse me of being some raging bigot towards the disfigured - surely you’ll understand where I come from. Even a week or so after this incident, I still find it most unpleasant and grating to be near one of them. Something so horrible has been burned into my mind, into my very core. I become deeply disturbed when I see one milling about on the street, and I often have to turn away or simply stare at the ground. The sight of one reminds me all too much about the things I witnessed about a week ago. It all began when I remembered my old friend Dallas from my teenage days. We got into contact, and we planned to have a meeting. It had been a while - oh, perhaps 30 or 35 years - since we had last seen each other. We planned to convene at the nearest coffeehouse to his residence, and then from there we would go to his house and listen to old jazz music or just another dusty record from the collection he inherited from his grandparents. We planned to discuss how our lives had progressed and changed. If you were not aware, something that made Dallas stand out was that he had acquired some unknown and undiagnosed genetic disease from the gestationary. For whatever reason, it prohibited him from receiving sufficient gender therapy from a young age until the malformations already took their tolls. I believe it’s one out of every 10,000. Thus, he lacked any of the defining traits that us “normal” people have, such as not bearing a penis (not even a vestigial one), having strange, enlarged breasts, being shorter than average, a disproportionate shoulder-to-hip ratio, lack of any facial hair, and all other kinds of disfigurations that confound the common eye. One could go as far to say that he was much like an archaic Woman before the corrective therapies became available to cure people from being forced into those strange bodies. I’ve seen pictures of these so-called women before the early 2060’s that frankly look a lot like him. But it wouldn’t be accurate to make the comparison. After all, he has since received some hormonal therapy to counteract the influence of this disease, but the damage has been done. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, on top of the disfiguring gender-related illness, he had been diagnosed with another affliction, which was some flavor of cardio-vascular disease. But otherwise he was very normal and kind. He didn’t deserve any of the bullying that came his way. In his childhood, these malformations made him an outsider, and a target for the cruel and apathetic classmates to use him as the social punching bag. Truly, some of the worst bullying that I remember seeing in highschool was directed towards Dallas. Instead of the neutral and proper pronouns of “he” or “him”, they would all refer to him by the slurs, “Woman!”,“Birther!”, “Menstraloid!” and some of the most awful names you could imagine. I remember that they would oftentimes stand behind him and point at his wide hips and rounded shoulders, or pull off his shirt and snicker at his swollen chest, yell him death threats down the hall, and other indescribably horrible things that I simply cannot find it in me to put down onto this message. But the worst part--not even the teachers or administrators would do anything about the bullying other than an indifferent “we are doing all we can to take care of the problem.” It was only I and a few of the more openhearted and understanding folks who looked beyond the biological costume he was forced to wear by birth and simply accepted him as just a man with a disease. &#x200B; &#x200B; Anyhow, I remember sitting there in the coffeehouse in rapt anticipation of meeting Dallas after the decades, to hear his stories, his life, and the old warm personality I used to love. I recall the moment when the door opened and he appeared out from behind, and I felt as if my stomach no longer had weight. I believe I jumped up from my seat with my mouth permanently set into smiling, and we greeted each other with the usual greetings. It’s always nice to meet with an old best friend. My memory already seems to be faded at the edges, but all I can remember is that I was the only one who drank coffee. And we talked for a while about menialities and small stories. Then we walked a short distance to his house. I noticed that he carried an umbrella, which was weird because it wasn’t even raining at the time. I didn’t ask about it, though. When we arrived at his house, nothing had really stood out as strange until we began to talk about more complex and personal things. He seemed as if he was an actor trying to play an unfamiliar role. When I asked him about Charlie, another close friend of his, he looked nervous and claimed he didn’t know who that was. Then all attempts to refresh his memory with pictures and stories were shot down rapidly with the same “no, I don’t know who that is.” And I noticed that the way he talked had the strangest and most uncanny textures to it. It nearly sounded like he was blankly reading poetry. But I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, so I ignored it, until I realized what it was that had made me so on edge. When it came to me, I started up from the cushions of the couch and began to hyperventilate. He asked me what the problem was, but I found everything to be so unspeakably morbid that I couldn’t even imagine a response. In the flurry of terror I needed to prove to myself if it was true or just my imagination about what had really happened to Dallas. Perhaps my inner psychology wanted to justify my newfound fear of Dallas with evidence; I don’t know. I wasn’t very rational in those moments. In that moment of true horror and surprise I poured the remaining amount of my scalding coffee onto the pale skin that stretched across his face, and ran to the other room to hide from his rage and confusion. Immediately, I heard him scream. When I peeked my eyes from around the corner, I saw it-- the horrible thing I mentioned. He had begun to silently twitch there on the couch, with his glassy eyes staring blankly at nothing. His eyes looked like lifeless marbles. And I still vividly remember his face curling into bizarre shapes of emotions, as if something inside had begun to pull and stretch the multiple muscles in his face. And the twitching! --it would have nearly been cartoonish, funny even, if it were not so morbid. And when the terrible twitching mass stopped moving and fell lifeless on the floor, his head made a lifeless, metallic *clunk*. My best friend, the only actual ‘woman’ I have ever known, dead! I tried to feel for his heartbeat in his neck, wrist, and chest but nothing. The main flaw with his behavior wasn’t just the indescribable tranquility in his voice. I heard no breathing when he spoke, I never saw that swollen chest rise or fall, and the way he would move his body when he walked was unnatural, even for a person with the phenotypic wider hips. I knew what this all meant when I remembered the other detail I mentioned from his teenage years. The condition with his heart. If memory serves me correct, there was a large underground problem of sick persons receiving unapproved and illegal thermoelectric organ implants from unlicensed doctors around when we graduated from highschool. There were rumors that some of the most ill, destitute, and damned would go over the top and become entirely electric, but I never believed it. Dallas was a good guy, and I thought he would naturally know that he should avoid those sorts of things, but somehow, just somehow, I know that he must have received this surgery, and bought himself more years. I am furious to admit that this now has completely changed my perception of him, but I cannot help how I feel. It’s permanently burned into my mind. **But don’t you dare say that I murdered him**. It’s not me who’s at fault. You must understand, if my deductions are correct, then Dallas actually died several decades ago on an unlicensed surgery table.