[new edit and expansion of _Sex of the Chaste_]
Chapter 1
My name is Gail Faggs. Yes, that's my real name. Thousands of times I have spoken those exact two sentences, in that exact order. I don't want to count the number of times I've been asked to show my ID, asked if I'm lesbian (I'm not and never was), or had to register online accounts as "Gail F" and then contact the webmaster about my name so that I didn't have my account deleted out of hand for "trolling." But that kind of thing ceased to bother me by the time I was six years old, because by then it was habitual and trivial.
The truth is that I have a gigantic family with various last names. My father's people were Huguenots who were hounded out of France 300 years ago and moved to Acadia in Canada. Then they barely avoided being massacred by the English and fled to Louisiana, where they remained. My father is from Louisiana and taught me some heavily accented French while I was growing up. On my mother's side, a young man in England was abducted 400 years ago to serve as forced labor on a fishing vessel that sailed for waters off the east coast of New England. You probably don't know this, but there was European commercial fishing off the coast of North America a long time before anyone from Europe "explored" the New world, and the crews of those ships were often young abductees. My ancestor the abductee escaped and lived for a time in a Massachusetts town populated entirely by exiles from Holland, who had founded the town before the French had even seen the area. Then the French burned and massacred most of the town and his family fled to Colorado, where they were among the first white people the Natives had ever seen. Some of my ninth cousins are Native, and some others are from everywhere else. I've met only about ninety or a hundred of my cousins, exclusively in childhood during Christmas holidays in Louisiana and Colorado.
I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, which is a stone's throw away from Niagara Falls. Those are my real roots. Yes, I watched every second of those four Superbowls, living and dying as they unfolded. But by then I was living north of the lake in a small city that, despite its size, continued to style itself a town. I travelled widely for work and saw each of those Superbowls from a different place across some ocean, on satellite.
That was the boring part. Now, here's the interesting part.
My first memory was of gliding in a bobbing kind of way, facing what I later learned were fluorescent ceiling lights somewhere above me. I was so bitterly cold that I wanted to scream, but I didn't know about screaming, or even about breathing. I tried to move my arms and legs but they refused to do anything useful. My first brush with life was the experience of overpowering bewilderment and intense frustration. But, although I knew nothing and was physically helpless, I had the same raw mind and feelings as I have now. Those have never changed since a few minutes after my birth. I plateaued at average adult intelligence, but you could say I was precocious in some ways.
My first experience with breathing was through negative vacuum pressure when a machine sucked obstruction out of my airways. That made me aware that I'd been hypoxic but no longer was, even if it would be another ten years before I knew the word "hypoxic." Masked faces were above me. I heard soft conversation. I tried to imitate the conversation but just kind of squawled for a few seconds before I gave up. Like my arms and legs, my voicebox would not obey.
It was in the first few hours that I discovered how odd my memory is. Everything in my working memory automatically goes to short-term memory, and then all of that tries to go into long-term memory, but it backlogs, so that at some point I stop remembering anything briefly while the backlog clears. So I have stretches of time where I remember every single detail interspersed with brief gaps where I remember nothing. When I was two months old and started puzzling out what some words meant, the oldest coherent words I remembered were from that first soft conversation. They were "twelve pounds." Yep, you guessed it, I'm six-foot-three and 170 pounds now, and have been since age fourteen. That has changed in quantity but not in principle.
During childhood my main affect was a vernacular version of pity. I cried for the breast only once. Then I saw my sleepy mother's face in the dark and subsequently cried out briefly and intermittently just to let her know I had appetite. My mother told me much later of her first experience with this. She had a dream in which a goat appeared from nowhere, bleated once, then vanished. She was startled awake and saw that my father had also been woken by a similar dream. They were still drowsy, so they drifted back to sleep, and my mother dreamt of the goat again. This time my parents stayed awake to discuss it. A short time later, they heard me cry out briefly, and realized that the goat had been me.
About my diaper I don't believe I complained even once until my mother clued in that I could understand English and instructed me to let her know if I needed changing. That happened mostly by happenstance. My mother never sang to me until she randomly singsonged some phrase to my father, who was in another room, and I cried out and smiled. I didn't feel like smiling, but there was no other way to let my mother know I wanted her to sing. So she began to sing to me, and I began to hum along, which I learned to do fairly well. Pitch was not difficult to figure out, so my mother and I devised a private language consisting entirely of notes within our vocal ranges before my throat was developed enough to form words. So it was that my mother happened to check my diaper a few times and finally said: "Gail, please let me know when your diaper needs changing, okay?" I responded with either B flat or low G, but probably both.
But I was going to tell you about the pity. Because of my keen awareness of my limitations, I struggled to feel like I belonged to my species, and that gave me keen awareness of the limitations of others. I felt sorry for others so I wouldn't feel sorry for myself. But I noticed that my abilities were increasing over time, so I also developed excessive patience. My parents had me evaluated for autism and various other conditions because I never acted upset. Some frustrated peers unjustly called me a psycho or a robot. I was neither. It was just that few things upset me until the onset of hormones, which nuked the pity and forced me to rebuild everything except the raw way my mind and feelings worked. My parents had been terrified of that happening, but it turned out to be less of a disaster than one might have expected.
And something else that normally causes disaster in the teen years turned out to be trivial for me. I was twelve and telling my mother about a classmate's embarrassingly unexpected first period when my mother gently woke me up to my Mullerian agenesis. You don't know what that is? It means I was born with normal ovaries but no fallopian tubes or uterus, and my vagina is half an inch deep and shaped like a squiggle. I had known about my vagina but thought it was normal. It would be nice to be able to say that I was devastated to find out that I could never bear a child or menstruate, and could have intercourse only following surgery. Instead, it never bothered me, and I've barely ever thought about it. My vagina became an issue when it made my job more difficult, but that's a long story. And it's part of the longer story of that worthless slob who had to lose his virginity so he could commit suicide without dying, or the world would end. Which is the story I wanted to tell you in the first place.
Chapter 2
It started when I was in the lab at Smith & Smith, the hygiene product company, trying and failing to invent body wash. Since Kindergarten I had planned to get a Master's in Chemical Engineering and then get a job at S&S coming up with formulas for new soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, mouthwashes, and whatnot. By studying ahead in high school, I had obtained the Master's at age 22 and used my contacts at S&S to land a relatively flexible position. The "S&S Diary" I'd kept while growing up was filled with various bright ideas, most of which I'd crossed out once I'd learned enough chemistry to realize that they were nonsense. There were still enough ideas left to keep me busy for more than one lifetime, and I planned to start farming them off to coworkers who showed interest.
Except that my dream job was really a cover. Precocity as extreme as mine draws the attention of the wrong people, people who see others only for our usefulness, and who will not be denied what they want. Despite my best efforts to remain independent, they had recruited me, and I had no real choice but to make their demands my priority. The consequences of refusing could have been much worse than just my personal death. It was less bad to be obedient than to step off the cliff of uncertainty and plummet into the unknown.
To the public, body wash wasn't even a concept back then. It was a vague notion in my subspecialty, but few colleagues thought it feasible, and upper management wasn't convinced it could be sufficiently profitable. But it was the one thing I was determined never to give up on, so I moved past countless failures and kept trying when I had time.
I was glad to receive the email at 9:37 pm because I was just about ready to take a break and regroup. The email appeared to have been sent by a real professor of chemistry who sent me emails all the time, but hadn't sent this one and would never find out about it. The body of the email was a stream of innocuous jargon, but it was also a cipher in memory code, with the key existing only in my mind and that of the sender. I deciphered it purely in my mind by reading it the right way, making sure I didn't write anything down. An hour later I would try to recall the deciphered message just to make sure that I hadn't done it during one of my dead memory zones. In this case I hadn't.
The message contained a description and identifying information of a man living in a large city about a three-hour drive away, and then the following instructions: "Subject to succeed at committing suicide but remain alive."
I had a rare moment of pique, although I showed nothing. Committing suicide meant killing yourself by definition. Killing yourself meant dying by definition. Remaining alive was not dying by definition. Dying and remaining alive was not logically possible. But questioning a directive or even asking for clarification was just not done in that line of work. When told to do something you just did it. Nothing else was acceptable.
Especially not failure. Failure was treated the same way as refusal.
But I hadn't been given a deadline, which meant there was none. That meant the job was not time-sensitive. As long as it eventually got done, I didn't have to hurry.
Unless the deadline had been withheld because the entire purpose of the assignment was to ensure that I failed and faced the consequences. I wouldn't have put that past them. They were capable of anything. Literally anything.
This was going to take some thought.
