Best Served Cold

"Wake up, Juan Schultz," said a woman's voice.

Juan opened his eyes to a white ceiling and beige walls. Am I still at the ReVisage clinic? he wondered. The senator sat up and the bed he was on squeaked, like a cot instead of a hospital bed. He looked down. The blanket on him was grey and was scratchy against his bare feet. His body felt strange, but Juan was expecting that, since he had gone to the clinic to gain a more fit body than he had had before. But, to his surprise, he wasn't wearing a hospital gown, he was wearing shapeless grey scrubs that had numbers on the sleeves. Confused, Juan looked around the room. There was a chair with a large black woman sitting it in, a toilet, and a sink. The door had a barred window about head height, with what looked like a dog-door at the bottom. "Where the fuck am I?" he demanded of the woman.

She grinned. "You, Juan, are in prison."

"What? That's can't be!" he said, then turned and swung his feet out from under the blanket over the edge of the cot. A flash of pink caught his eye. He looked down at his feet touching the linoleum tiled floor. They were smooth and clean, but seemed thinner and more delicate than they had been. There was also pink sparkly nail polish on the perfectly trimmed toenails. "What the hell?" he said again.

The woman leaned back in her chair, folding her arms. "Maybe I should actually call you Juanita?"

"Excuse me?"

She pulled out a small tablet, held it up, and took Juan's picture, then turned it to show him. Wide eyed, he put his hands to his head. Where his bald patch had been was now thick dark-blonde hair that went to his shoulders. He touched his face, and where there should have been perfect, thick masculine eyebrows were thin, neatly trimmed ones. His goatee was gone, the skin on his chin was smooth and soft. Juan ran his hands down his body and felt breasts. He looked down his shirt and sure enough, there they were. "No!" Juan whispered, realizing his voice was higher pitched. "No!" he yelled, then stood and immediately face planted at the woman's feet, his balance off. Juan didn't want to think about other areas of his body. "What did you do to me? This isn't what I asked for!"

The woman looked down at him, her face a mask. "Oh, we know that."

He looked up at her. "What the fuck is going on? What do you mean that you know?"

She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "ReVisage happened to you, Juan. As you know, our company developed the nanobot tech that could do cosmetic surgery without having to cut open the body at all." Raising her arms, she chanted, "Change your entire body and face in one day! You go to sleep looking one way, and wake up a whole new you! Miraculous. Expensive." She leaned forward towards the senator with a sneer. "So easy for you fascists to latch on to and make an exclusive toy of the billionaire club. And as soon as we tried to market it to transgender people for transition, boy, oh boy! You and your theocratic buddies couldn't regulate it fast enough! You, Senator Schultz, drafted a bill in record time to ensure that it could never be used for gender affirming care. So, we played your little game, did as we were ordered, and bided our time until we were able to get our nanobots into as many of you and your buddies as we could. Brilliant plan, no?"

Juan moved to sit up against the cot, shocked and terrified. "What do you mean by that?"

The woman stood and squatted next to him. "That means, my friend, that we lured you in and changed your gender. Which, according to your own laws, is illegal. As you know, ReVisage's nanobots once programmed, can't be changed for ten years. You signed the consent form when you came in, so I know you were told about that."

"But I didn't come in to be changed into a woman!" he sputtered.

She laughed. "Oh, we know that. But you, Juan, were the worst of the senators when it came to the trans genocide. Being who you are, you should have known better to throw your lot in with fascists. I mean you're from Florida and Cuban after all, but, well here we are. So, when you decided to finally take advantage of our ReVisage clinic, well..."

"Why did you do this to me?"

"Do I really have to spell it out for you?" she said. "You're in solitary confinement for breaking your own laws." Feigning innocence, she added, "Oh no! One of our staff must have leaked a picture of you to ICE after the procedure! What a horrible breach of privacy!"

"Oh God, help me!"

"She's not going to help you with this one, Juan."

"Fuck you!" he yelled, then crawled over to the door, banging his fist against it. "Help! Get me out of here! I'm Senator Juan Schultz! I've been changed against my will!"

The woman in the chair laughed, and then there was a answering thud from the other side of the door. "Shut up you freak!" shouted a deep voice. "Bad enough you're one of them, you gotta be crazy, too! Keep quiet in there or we'll come give you something to cry about."

Juan backed away from the door in terror, then looked to the woman standing over him. "Solitary-- wait-- you're not real? What the fuck is going on?"

"Oh, I'm real. Very real. Just not physically here. You see, while you were waging your little genocide on trans people, a lot of us got out. The thing is, a good deal of our people are some of the best scientists and computer programmers in the world. I'm sure you noticed the brain drain from Silicon Valley once you began your genocide in earnest, right?" She sat back down on the chair that wasn't really there. "I built ReVisage as a way to make transition easier, but primarily, I, and my colleagues, built it as means for revenge."

Juan stared at her. "Revenge on me?"

She laughed again. "Not just you, moron, but on all of you. Nearly all of you who killed my trans siblings and brought about this damned theocracy bought into our fantastic marketing scheme. All of you now have our amazing nanobots in your hateful, bigoted bodies." She leaned forward to look him straight in the eyes. "No, you're the warning. But, they're not going to see it as one. Our PR department is way too good. What they don't know is that the ten year wait isn't strictly true. And one day, many of your fascist buddies are going to wake up very different people." Her smile was feral, and Juan shuddered. "By the way, our security team planted an interesting folder on your home server and tablet, which ICE was tipped off about yesterday, just after they arrested you." She looked at the smartwatch on her wrist. "And right about now, your wife and son will be getting the news that you drove yourself off the Dumbarton Bridge because you couldn't live your life as a lie anymore. You gave ICE a very good chase. It was rather exciting. Lots on hits on social media. Your superiors made a very good show of it. Much more flashy than your arrest at the clinic. And before you asked, it was one of your most vitriolic staffers that we changed into you who was in the car. Our bots are incredible, don't you think?"

"You monster!" Juan shook his head, feeling the hair that shouldn't have been there brush against his shoulders. Memories surfaced of being dragged out of another white room by agents. "You're no better than us!"

"Oh, I know that. But at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that your life was completely ruined by your very own legislation. Because, one thing I know for sure, is that the President and his enforcers can't let you live because he also has our nanobots in his body." She stood and the chair disappeared. "The best thing for me, though, is that through your nanobots I get the satisfaction of watching you suffer and die at the hands of the very people who killed my trans siblings. That you, Senator Juan Schultz, will know exactly how it felt to die as one of us." She smiled coldly again. "Isn't technology wonderful? Most of what we use, technology wise, was invented by transgender people. Fitting that our work will be used to take out the trash." She looked at her smartwatch again.

"Why are you looking at your watch?" Juan asked, too shocked and terrified to ask anything else.

"It's almost dinnertime, Juan. I wonder if they'll bring you a nice meal? I always wondered if the meal they brought Epstein before he died was a nice one all those years ago."

The lock on the dog sized door clicked and slid open. Juan stared as a tray with covered dishes and a cup filled with water was shoved through. "Compliments of the President," said the voice on the other side of the door as it slid closed. He turned back to where the woman had been sitting, but the woman was gone.

"Oh my God," Juan whispered again, staring at the tray. "Oh Jesus Christ!"

"They won't help you, no matter how hard you pray!" The woman's laughter echoed loudly in his head. "Bon Appetite, asshole!"