Getting the Job Done Read online

  GETTING THE JOB DONE

  BY STACEY ZACKERLY

  Copyright (c) 2018 By Stacey Zackerly

  All Rights Reserved

  CHAPTER 1:

  "Well, I think that's the last of it," said Brent, the rather handsome young man who had gallantly offered to help me move my stuff into my new apartment. "If you need any help later bringing in some larger stuff like a couch, or a refrigerator, or a bed, I'm sure I can round up a couple of my buddies to help."

  I noticed how he emphasized the word "bed" or at least I thought I did. It might have been my imagination. Brent had been nothing but polite and helpful, and always insisted that I go first whenever we were bringing another load of crap up from my truck. Of course I sort of suspected that he was doing that to look at my ass, which I couldn't really do much about. If someone wanted to check out my butt they were probably going to do it without going to all of the trouble of helping me move.

  "Thank you, you've been so sweet already, I don't want to put you to any more trouble," I said, probably laying it on a little thick.

  "No trouble at all," said Brent, flashing me a smile. "What are neighbors for?"

  Brent had seen me juggling boxes in the hallway while I fished for my keys and figured out at once that I was the new tenant. Naturally he rushed to help and ultimately insisted on carrying anything remotely heavy, which left me bringing in mostly things like pillows and bedding. It made me feel kind of weak and helpless, but if someone volunteers to carry your suitcases and heavy boxes for you I figured there was no need to refuse the generosity of the offer.

  Of course the fact that I was a rather attractive young woman moving into a single apartment just down the hall from him probably had a lot to do with his enthusiastic offer to assist me in any way possible. That wasn't a surprising concept to me at all, just one that took a little getting used to having it applied to me personally. For some girls it was probably old hat, but not for me. You see, up until recently I had been a man.

  CHAPTER 2:

  I suppose that last sentence needs some explaining. I was born Eugene Arthur Maddox, and grew up and lived my life as a pretty typical male, as far as I can tell. I did the usual "guy stuff" and even had a very stereotypically male job working in the construction industry. I was currently a woman named Jean Angela Maddox and a volunteer in a very unique research project.

  Why I had volunteered was still somewhat of a mystery to me, but there was some money involved, although a lot of that would end up going to the cost of relocating and acquiring a whole new wardrobe and living until I could find employment. At the end of the program, which was to last for four years, I would receive a lump sum for my efforts, and I suppose it was enough enticement to give the thing a try. It came along at a good point in my life when things seemed kind of stalled or at a dead end and I guess I was just curious enough to be willing to subject myself to something so crazy.

  Apparently there were different demographic groups being tested but I was in the single with nothing major tying me down class. I hadn't been in a serious relationship for quite a while, and work had been kind of intermittent lately, and I had no close living relatives, my parents having died in an accident a few years ago. As part of the program I was expected to move to a new residence, somewhat close to the college campus that was the center of the research study, try to find a job as quickly as possible, and basically present myself to the world as if I had always been a woman named Jean who was just getting a fresh start in a new town. That didn't sound too hard.

  I was expected to make note of things like the moving incident and report on it at regularly scheduled intervals, but it wasn't the event that was of interest, in and of itself. That men and women are treated differently wasn't exactly a newsflash. What was of interest was how I felt about that treatment and reacted to it. There was a very definite method to all this madness.

  The process that had transformed me rather quickly from a guy to a girl was revolutionary and not available to the general public yet, although it was just a matter of time. Let me see if I can explain how it all works as simply as possible.

  Apparently the human genome is made up of 46 chromosomes that each contain hundreds or thousands of genes. The genes for the physical characteristics of each sex are spread throughout the entire genome, but male genes are turned off in females, and female genes are turned off in males. Once you know how to flip the switches, and which switches need to be flipped, which apparently the mad scientists working on this project did, you could "reprogram" the cellular structure of a human to be the opposite gender of their birth gender. Believe me, I didn't know any of this science crap before entering the program and I'm referring to the literature they gave me now so that I don't totally screw up the explanation.

  There was also a radical form of automated surgery that involved taking living tissue from my own body, using 3D printers to fabricate new organs, and in essence subjecting me to the ultimate physical makeover. It was all done by computer and all of that data was safely stored, I hoped, so that in four years they would be able to put me back together just the way I was when I first walked in the door.

  There were some potential risks, not surprisingly. My body could reject the new organs, or my cells that had been tampered with might be more susceptible to developing cancer, but if you can believe all the ads for pharmaceuticals on television these days there's a chance you can die from taking medicine to cure your dry eyes so I figured I'd roll the dice and hope that I wasn't one of the relatively few people who got totally screwed up by this whole thing.

  We actually had some say in what our female bodies and faces would look like, but it was more like choosing from a menu than designing from scratch. I don't think they wanted any of us to be extraordinarily attractive, like a super model or something. That might skew the data somewhat. I was very pleased with how I turned out, and thought I was quite the looker, but I don't know that I'd be appearing on the cover of any glamour magazines anytime soon. I was certainly attractive enough that a guy like Brent would be immediately interested in becoming my knight in shining armor.

  Basically the idea of this research was to see how difficult it was for someone to undergo this process and live a happy and relatively normal life in their new gender. I had been selected, in part, because I had displayed no outward symptoms of gender dysphoria or ever felt or expressed any feelings of being "trapped in the wrong body" as it were. That made me a "hard sell" test case. They certainly didn't erase my brain so I had all of my old memories and experiences as a man still floating around in my head, which would be true of any man who went through the process and became a woman, even if that was their fondest wish and desire from the start.

  The internal debate that they were trying to settle was how completely did this process "re-invent" someone as the opposite gender. Physically there wasn't any question that I was 100% female, but what science wanted to know was whether psychologically I could ever be 100% female. The fact that I had no previous desire to be any percentage of female at all made me an ideal test subject. If I found myself behaving against my supposed natural inclinations then it would be proof that both mind and body could be altered completely by this process.

  That was the part that scared me even more than cancer. I was instructed that sexual preference and gender identity were two very different things. Obviously you had every possible combination of gay, straight, bi-sexual, or asexual leanings potentially in anyone. On the other hand there was a school of thought that leaned rather heavily on the idea that genetics played a big role in that, and since my DNA had been flipped to the girly channel I was told to not be surprised if I started to have sexual or romantic feelings that I had never experienced before.
In other words I might end up boy crazy.

  I hoped that wasn't true and I believed in my heart that it would never be true, but I had already seen little signs of that creeping in. You may recall that I described my new neighbor Brent as a "rather handsome young man." I don't know exactly how I would have described him before but it probably would have been more like "some dude who lived down the hall" or something equally nondescript. That I could look at a man and immediately choose a word like "handsome" to describe him was probably scientific gold dust. Now it was a long stretch to get from acknowledging a man's physical attractiveness to actually being attracted to a man, let alone acting upon that attraction, but I had taken the first step along that road and it made me quite uneasy to say the least. Even so, I knew the job was dangerous when I signed up for it, so I figured I'd better be prepared for just about anything until the job was done.

  CHAPTER 3:

  I had been taking orientation classes, both before and after the change. Sort of Womanhood 101, you might say. It was a cross between charm school and sex ed. I had learned more about feminine hygiene than I had ever hoped to know in my lifetime and I could apply lipstick in a moving car on a bumpy road if I had to. These were the basics of being female that most females just learned along the way. Some things were quite obvious, like the fact that women wore a bra and weren't supposed to go around in public with no shirt on, but other things were far more subtle. Little girls usually grew up looking to older girls or women to be role models. Mothers, sisters, friends, teachers, all contributed their two cents worth to a young woman's development. Hell, in this day and age celebrities and social media probably influenced them as much as anything. I was kind of a blank slate. There was no telling what sort of a woman I would turn out to be.

  My helpful neighbor Brent seemed very interested in knowing what sort of a woman I was at the moment as he kept trying to find excuses to pop by, or bump into me. Most of my heavier furnishings had been delivered and installed professionally so I hadn't needed to avail myself of Brent's moving services, but that didn't stop him from trying to see if there was anything I needed.

  One night he appeared at my door holding what looked like a rather nice bottle of wine and two glasses.

  "Not too late or too early for a housewarming party I hope?" he said with a grin. "I didn't know if you had unpacked any glasses yet so I brought these along just in case."

  "That was thoughtful of you. I take it this is a party of two?" I said as indicated the glasses in his hand.

  "I've only got two clean wine glasses so I hoped this would do, but we can always go get some paper cups if you've got other company coming over."

  "I should warn you that I hold my liquor really well, in case you're the kind of a man who might try to ply a woman with drink in order to have your way with her," I teased.

  "Do I look like the sort of a man who would do that?" he replied.

  "From my experience just about every man is that sort of a man under the right circumstances," I said with a chuckle.

  "Well, you can keep the bottle as my gift, and the glasses too for that matter, and enjoy it with whoever you like," said Brent, actually sounding a little offended.

  "Don't be so sensitive. I'd be happy to have a drink with you. Come on in," I said as I opened the door fully.

  "I would say I like what you've done with the place, but you haven't really done too much yet have you?" he joked.

  "No I guess I've been kind of lazy about that," I said as I rummaged around for a corkscrew with no success.

  "Looking for one of these?" Brent said as he produced a corkscrew from his coat pocket.

  "You're a regular Boy Scout, aren't you?"

  "Always be prepared. You never know what else I might have in my pockets."

  I had no idea what he might be implying by that comment. He might have meant that he had drugs of some kind, in case wine wasn't enough to give us the proper buzz, or he might have meant that he had condoms, in case things went really well for him, or he might have not meant anything at all and was just making a joke. On a snap judgment basis I decided that I kind of liked this guy. He had been a bit pushy, but always in the most polite way possible, and I suppose I sort of admired his persistence. I know that's not really in style these days, but I found it kind of flattering.

  We opened the wine, and I let him pour, and we drank a toast to something or other and then settled down on my brand new sofa, close to each other, but not too close. I just prayed that we wouldn't spill wine on it only a couple of days after it had been delivered.

  I learned a lot about Brent, and he learned very little about me, which was kind of the way things had to be for now. Much of my past was applicable regardless of my current gender, but I also had to be careful not to say anything that would give away my secret. That was very important to the project. People needed to see me as any other woman they might meet, otherwise it might greatly color the way they interacted with me. I don't think I gave Brent any reason to suspect that I had a cock and balls hanging between my legs before I moved into this apartment, either that or he didn't care because he seemed to be creeping slightly closer to me on the sofa all the time.

  "So are you always this generous and helpful with every new tenant who moves into this building?" I asked.

  "No, just the beautiful ones with gorgeous green eyes," he replied as he let his hand rest on top of mine as he fixed his gaze on me.

  I learned a few things at that moment. One, I wasn't able to hold my liquor quite as well as I thought because the wine was definitely going to my head a little. Two, Brent really was a good-looking guy and pleasant company to be around. I didn't really have any friends at the moment, and I didn't know anyone else in the building very well yet, so I think I was kind of lonely. Three, when a man calls you beautiful and tells you that you have gorgeous green eyes while he's staring right into them it can make your heart flutter a little, especially if you're a little buzzed on wine, as referenced in Section One.

  Without really breaking our gaze Brent set his glass down and took the glass from my hand as well. It appeared as if my upholstery was going to be safe, even if nothing else was. Then he sort of took my face in his hands and kissed me. It was mostly on the lips but I could feel his tongue making an exploratory probe towards my mouth. It didn't last too long and I sat back when it was done and kind of looked at him appraisingly.

  "That was nice," I said as I reached for my glass and took another sip of wine.

  "I thought so too," he said with a pleasant smile. "Maybe we should do it again sometime."

  "New Year's Eve perhaps?"

  "I was thinking maybe a bit sooner."

  "I'll have to check my calendar."

  "If you can manage to squeeze me in I'd be happy to show you around. I know you're new in town and I'd love to show you the sights."

  "Are there any?"

  "Some," he said with a chuckle. "I'd love to at least be able to take you to dinner. Do you like Sushi?"

  "Nope."

  "Me neither, but I always ask. I'm pretty fond of Italian food."

  "So am I, what a coincidence," I said as I took another sip and looked at him over the rim of my glass.

  "I know a great place not too far from here," he volunteered.

  "Then I suppose it would be foolish of me not to let you take me there."

  "When?" he asked hopefully.

  "Friday," I replied after looking thoughtful for a moment or two.

  "Great! It's a date!"

  CHAPTER 4:

  I hadn't even finished unpacking yet and I already had a date with a guy named Brent who lived on my floor and thought I had gorgeous green eyes. I wanted to blame it on being drunk and call the whole thing off, which was partly why I chose the end of the week for our date, but I had also said Friday because I wanted time to buy a new dress and get my hair done in case I actually decided to go through with the thing.

  This was definitely going to float somebody's boat back
at the old campus whenever I made my next report. I found that I really had no good reason to call it off, so instead I went shopping and to the hair salon. Of course I had the reason that I had always been a heterosexual male but that didn't seem to be weighing me down unduly. As I said I was kind of lonely, and I hadn't been laid in quite a while, as either a man or a woman, which made me feel a little pent up sexually. Kissing Brent had been nice. It had been pretty much like kissing anyone else I had ever kissed, aside from the fact that he was a man, but my eyes had been closed at the time so I hadn't really been forced to think about that too much.

  I must also say, for the record, that I was incredibly curious about my new body. I had masturbated several times already, and that had even been discussed in my orientation. There was a whole section on using your hand versus using toys, and even what the different types of toys were supposed to do for you. We didn't actually whack off in the classroom or anything, but there was a pretty spicy video that definitely got my attention.

  In all honesty I think I had already resigned myself to the idea that at some point over the next four years I would probably end up having sex with a man, out of curiosity if nothing else. I just hadn't expected that possibility to rear its ugly head quite so fast. Of course I was just going out on a first date. I had been on plenty of those as a man where my lady friend and I never hit the sheets, but I had absolutely no idea what the prevailing social attitude might be about what a woman was expected to do, or not do, on a first date.

  This was one of those areas where it felt like my lack of previous experience as a female might be problematic. I had known plenty of women who seemed to have it all mapped out in advance. One of them, Candice Flannigan was her name, had it all planned from the day she met a guy to their wedding night, and beyond for all I know. I don't know how religiously she stuck to that blueprint, because I never got past the second date, and never got close to putting my dick inside her.