The small but cozy kitchen of the Harper family, which, as always thanks to Martha Harper’s efforts, looked as if it had just been prepared for a commercial shoot: not a single crumb, not a single stain, every cup placed exactly where it belonged, while the sunlight filtering through the neat curtains fell across the table in soft, almost theatrical bands of light.
And it was probably easy to imagine her here, smiling, slowly and lovingly inspecting her domain, of course with a serious expression, yet with a certain pride in her eyes at how perfect everything was. Was...
“This... this... what the...” Martha whispered instead of giving any admiring remarks, sitting at the table and staring at her hands with their long, perfectly painted red nails. Her fingers trembled slightly as she slowly turned her palms over, feeling how even that tiny movement made her massive tits sway faintly, pulling at her skin, forcing her posture to stiffen.
She slowly clenched her fingers, watching the thin, well-groomed hands obey her, then felt the long red nails softly dig into her palms, leaving faint marks on the delicate skin. The sensation was so... feminine. So helplessly elegant.
“No... no, this isn’t...” she whispered a little louder, suddenly releasing her fingers and jerking her hands away as if they could burn her.
The chair creaked softly beneath her as she shifted, trying to straighten herself, only to once again feel her heavy, full breasts sway, and that very expression appeared on her face, the kind considered completely unacceptable for women here.
“Fuck...” escaped her lips in a high, melodic voice that sounded so soft and feminine that, obeying nothing but old instincts, she only shouted even louder, as if somehow that could fix her own voice. “FUCK! WHAT THE HELL! AAAH!”
“Martha, sweetheart?” Tom’s low, caring voice came from the hallway. The kitchen door swung open, and there he stood, tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with suspenders. His face immediately lit up with a warm smile, though a flicker of concern crossed his eyes. “I heard screaming... Are you alright, darling?”
Tom froze in the doorway for only a fraction of a second, as though something inside him rapidly recalculated the situation, and only then did he step into the kitchen.
“Can you imagine how crazy that sounds? For a second I thought I heard you swearing...” he chuckled softly, almost condescendingly, as he approached closer. “You?”
Martha jerked back sharply, nearly falling because she had forgotten she was wearing heels now, and that her center of gravity was completely different from the one she’d had all her life as Arthur Romber, a man used to giving orders, though only in male workplaces, since he had always considered women something... secondary.
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted in her high, melodic, almost tender voice, wanting nothing more in that moment than to disappear. “Tom, or whatever your name is... this isn’t... I’m not Martha! Damn it! Why do I even know these names?!”
She abruptly turned away, almost with an animal-like panic, and braced her palms against the edge of the table, breathing heavily as she felt her tits grow heavy again, dragging her attention toward them, rising and falling, making the fabric of the dress tighten and shift with every breath.
“No... no... no...” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. “This can’t be... I... I died... did I really die?”
She sucked in a sharp breath, and at that moment Tom’s hand rested gently yet firmly on her shoulder.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she shrieked, jerking away so suddenly and emotionally that even she hadn’t expected it.
Her heel immediately slipped across the smooth floor, and she lost her balance, painfully slamming her hip into the edge of the table hard enough to knock the breath out of her for a second.
“Aah!! Fuck!..” slipped from her lips, which genuinely surprised Tom. This time his smile disappeared, replaced by a far more worried expression, though he still removed his hand.
“Martha, darling, you’re scaring me...” he said softly in his low velvet voice. “Maybe you should lie down? I’ll call Doctor Miller, he always helps when you have... those womanly days.”
Womanly days?! Martha shot him a furious glare. Her eyes, framed by long curled lashes and blue eyeliner matching her dress, instantly glistened with anger and tears she desperately tried to hold back. Her lips, coated in bright red lipstick, parted to reveal neat white teeth, and she almost growled, though what came out instead was only a pitiful, trembling:
“What the hell do you mean, womanly days, Tom?! I’m Arthur Romber! I’m fifty years old, I own a company, I hate all these...” she faltered, feeling her tongue naturally shape words she had never spoken in the feminine form before, “all these... women! I can’t be one of them!”
Tom looked at her with such warm, almost fatherly concern that Martha felt even worse. He slowly raised his hands, palms open, showing he wasn’t going to touch her, yet still stepped closer.
“Of course, darling,” he said quietly, not forgetting to bring back his smile. “I understand, you’re upset.”
“I AM NOT UPSET!”
She made a sharp step toward the door, knowing it was the exit from this polished, overly perfect kitchen and out into the street, as if hoping everything there would somehow be completely different, even though deep inside she already knew it wouldn’t be.
“Martha, wait!” Tom’s voice rang out over the clumsy clicking of heels against the floor and the heavy feminine breaths from her quick, panicked breathing.
She walked as fast as she could, feeling and cursing the way her heavy, full tits bounced and swayed with every step, stretching the thin fabric of that overly “housewife-like” dress she was wearing.
“Martha, darling, wait!” Tom’s voice sounded closer now, caring, yet carrying that same masculine confidence Arthur himself had once used to “calm down” women. “You know you shouldn’t get up so suddenly, especially during these days...”
“GO FUCK YOURSELF!” she barked, throwing the door open and practically stumbling outside like some drunk staggering out of a bar.
Immediately the air hit her nostrils, sterile-fresh, impossibly clean, overflowing with the scent of grass and flowers. But what she saw made her shut her eyes for a moment because it was too much. Far too idealized and perfect.
“No... no-no-no! This isn’t my order! I ordered a yacht, a villa, tons of money, and dumb sluts all around me, not...” she whispered while stepping forward, only now noticing how the tight bun painfully pulled at her scalp as if someone were constantly tugging her hair, how the fabric of the dress softly rubbed against her skin with every step, and how beneath it lace-trimmed boyshort panties tightly hugged her rounded hips, which now drew attention with their chaotic swaying even more than her breasts did.
She couldn’t hear him, but she knew, damn it, she absolutely knew Tom was standing in the doorway right now, watching her with that warm, caring smile of his, as though she had simply gotten a little too emotional before baking an apple pie. She didn’t want to know that, but she did, because everything screamed that they had been a loving married couple for a very long time.
“NO!” she shouted like one final dart thrown into water instead of at a target, and opened her eyes.
At once, bright, almost sugary sunlight struck her face. Martha realized she hadn’t imagined it. She stood in the middle of a perfect intersection, on warm asphalt that looked as though it had just been scrubbed clean with soap. Around her stood pastel-colored one-story houses with white fences, bright flowerbeds where every flower stood perfectly straight as if on parade, vintage cars with gleaming chrome parked along the street. And in the sky, exactly as she, or rather Arthur, had been warned about as a temporary introductory effect so people would recognize where they were, huge pixelated letters floated like a projection from an old video game:
WELCOME HOME! YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR PERFECT LIFE. ENJOY YOUR NEW FOREVER.
Martha froze. Her hands instinctively pressed against her unfamiliar, full and firm breasts, which immediately responded through her sensitive nipples with some strange sensation, making her jerk her hands away again.
She, or rather Arthur, had died. That much was painfully obvious. At fifty years old, apparently in his sleep and for some unknown reason, he had died. And now his brain, according to the contract he had signed while alive, one that had earned him a substantial amount of money, was floating in a special neuro-reservoir somewhere beneath the underground laboratories of the corporation “Eternal Bliss,” the largest energy corporation in the world, one that had literally monopolized the market of electrical power generated by the human brain during so-called neuro-sleep, turning human consciousnesses into nearly endless batteries submerged inside the illusion of a “perfect life,” a fantasy carefully customized in detail with every single person who signed the contract.
But nobody is protected from mistakes, especially the kind no one will ever find out about. Like if some lab worker accidentally mixed up the reservoirs because he’d been celebrating his birthday the night before.
“Marthaaa!” a bright, almost sing-song voice called out from somewhere nearby, instantly sounding far too fitting for this sugary, sickeningly perfect world.
She jolted as if shocked by electricity and turned toward the sound.
There she stood by the fence, a woman around thirty-five, maybe a little older, wearing a light dress with a tiny floral pattern, with perfectly styled hair and an excessively perfect smile.
“Why are you so pale, dear?” she asked cheerfully, narrowing her eyes. “Did Tom upset you last night?”
Martha swallowed hard, rapidly blinking her large eyes framed by enormous lashes.
“What?..” she exhaled, and once again the voice that came out wasn’t Arthur Romber’s voice, but the voice of a woman this world had known, accepted, and worst of all, expected proper reactions from for a very long time. “No... no, he didn’t... I mean... shut up!”
The neighbor gasped, though far too theatrically, as if the correct scene had already been prepared in her head.
“Martha Harper!” she pressed a hand to her chest, and the pearl bracelet on her wrist softly jingled. “What kind of language is that first thing in the morning? What if Mrs. Wilkins heard you? She’s hosting the pie club today!”
“I don’t give a damn about the pie club!” Martha snapped, stepping backward.
Her heel twisted slightly on the perfectly smooth asphalt, and she flailed her arms awkwardly trying to keep her balance. Her tits swayed heavily, stretching the fabric of her dress tight enough to make her grit her teeth.
The neighbor immediately tilted her head, and for a split second it looked as though lines of code flashed through her eyes, as if the system were adjusting itself, calculating, cycling through possible reactions like an actress who had briefly forgotten her lines before instantly slipping back into character.
“Oh, sweetheart...” she said gently. “You’re having one of those episodes again?”
“What episodes?”
“Well...” the woman lowered her voice even though there was nobody around except perfectly trimmed bushes, “when you start saying strange things about how you’re... some Arthur person.”
She said the last sentence while glancing around almost in a whisper, then giggled before quickly adding, as though unwilling to spend even a second dwelling on it:
“Oh! Did you hear the news about Mrs. Wilkins?” She leaned closer, lowering her voice into a conspiratorial whisper, her eyes widening with fake excitement. “They say her younger daughter, you know, Linda... finally got proposed to!”
Martha... no, Arthur, already opened his mouth to brush her off, to bark at her, to tell her to go to hell, because what the fuck did pies or proposals matter when he had literally died and ended up trapped inside the body of a housewife... but—
“...by Mister Carl from the grocery store, can you imagine?” the neighbor continued, her eyes shining while her lips stretched into a perfectly calculated smile. “He owns his own business, small though it may be, but still... stability! And Linda... well, it was long overdue for her to—”
“He’s going bald,” suddenly slipped out of Martha’s mouth, and she couldn’t stop herself anymore. She had to add her own two cents.
“...what?” the neighbor blinked.
“He has a bald spot on the back of his head,” Martha added more quietly, frowning. “And he... he chews too loudly. Especially when he’s nervous.”
Only after a second of silence did Martha realize she shouldn’t know that, yet she did, and now she no longer wanted to show any panic. Not now. Not in front of the neighbor. Not during this tense moment.
“Oh, Martha, you’re impossible!” the woman finally laughed and waved her hand dismissively. “You always notice the tiniest little details. But that’s not what matters, right? What matters is that she finally has a chance at a normal life.”
A normal life... Martha bit her lip, realizing she had just voluntarily and with genuine interest participated in this conversation.
She looked around. Then raised her eyes to the sky.
The message was gone, but she herself was still here. And the neighbor. And this perfect place. And her... tits, whose unnaturalness apparently couldn’t be corrected by algorithms convinced they were dealing with a “female” brain, not even trying to resolve that contradiction.