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A little sometime for spring.

On that first Sunday in April 2007, the weather in northern Vermont was not quite perfect, but close enough. By mid-day the temps were in the mid fifties, the sun filtered through high clouds, not too windy. Shortly after one o’clock the alien ship appeared above the Queen City and almost every person who had already gone through puberty found themselves swapped.

It was determined later that everyone swapped with the person of the opposite gender that she or he was physically nearest. There were exceptions: It seems that anyone with violent tendencies, those who were near death and those enduring extreme mental duress did not swap. But pretty much everyone else did.

There were a few car accidents, particularly on the nearby interstate. A study found that there were no major injuries or death: most accidents were minor fender benders.  Some people reported that they found themselves hurtling at high speed towards some object like a tree or bridge abutment and time slowed down as they decelerated and finally made contact at a very low speed. The traffic tie-up lasted for hours.  The city cops were all swapped – that took some sorting out. The state troopers called in couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.

Over the next few years the experiences for those involved were documented by many different means.

The first blog post was found to have been posted on a transgender fiction site within ten minutes of the change by a 45 year old male cross-dresser who found himself as his twenty-something neighbor seated at her computer. Now he was a Windows user and she had a Mac. But the browser was open and he did a quick post of what had happened. Most of the regulars on the site thought it was yet another of his “OMG! I’m a girl” stories.  When the community there found out the truth the next day, the comment count was soon in the hundreds.

Blogs, Tweets, Facebook pages and YouTube videos recounted what happened from many different perspectives.

The “Burlington Body Switch” Wikipedia page was up by 8:00 that evening.

A project was started that week to document the experiences of those who swapped.

It being Sunday, couples were reading the Sunday paper on the couch, or enjoying brunch at some downtown eatery or just walking or biking along the waterfront together. Lots of these individuals found themselves looking at themselves.  In many, many cases, this led to having sex. Lots of sex. The local medical center reported a 20 percent spike in births during the following late December, early January time period. Another study, twenty years later, found that couples who swapped were forty percent more likely to still be together.

And up the hill at UVM, the University of Vermont, good old Groovy UV? Well suffice it to say that, on that particular Sunday afternoon, the students upheld the longstanding reputation of UVM as one of the premier party schools in the country. The couplings that day are noted, even now, twenty-five years later, as legendary in the history of campus sex. If the Guinness Book recorded such things and anyone on campus had cared to record the same, UVM that day would have gone down in history for the quantity and quality of scholarly intercourse.

Other swap stories were more unusual.

Members of the local Boy and Girl Scouts troops were each matched with residents of retirement and nursing homes in the city for outings to movies, or the Fleming Art Museum, or a concert at the Flynn Center. The elderly, many now in teenaged bodies, albeit of the opposite sex, mostly got up and moved; savoring the lack of pain or stiff joints. Some just walked around downtown – happy to be unfettered and mobile again.  Others, maybe realizing this could be fleeting, found another “Switcher” (as they came to be called) and did what couples throughout the city were doing; they made out, they had sex. Many of those winter births were to teenagers.

Almost to a person, the teens who changed into older bodies just sat, trying to understand why it hurt to move. Many, in adulthood, it is said went into the human services, or physical therapy or medical fields, but the evidence is all anecdotal.

The oddest swap stories came from a meeting being held at City Hall. Members of the many area conservative churches and leaders of the local LGBT community had been brought together by pastors of some of the more liberal congregations for a summit to try to engender some understanding between them. The organizers were the only ones who believed any real change could come from such a meeting. Most participants who were on the extremes of the left or right thought it was a waste of time. But they agreed to participate so no one could accuse them of being obstructions to understanding.

Seating was arranged such that members of opposite camps were intermingled. When the change came all kinds of chaos broke loose. 

A matron of one evangelical church changed to the body of a gay software entrepreneur with nipple rings and other piercings she’d never thought possible.

A lesbian artist found herself in the body of a particularly vehement and virulent pastor: wearing a bra and panties and a garter-belt and stockings underneath his three-piece suit. Now there was a “Revelation”.

Many on both sides felt revulsion at the body with which they swapped, others: puzzlement. And some started talking with the people around them. No great epiphanies resulted for most. But for some…

Meanwhile…

As soon as the object arrived, the Vermont Air Guard scrambled their F-16s which took up an orbit, at some distance, around the alien. But lacking any guidance from the higher chain-of-command, they only observed. The ship itself just hung there, about a mile above the city. Regular Air Force units soon joined the monitoring but they also had not received instructions regarding how to proceed.

In Washington the Administration and Pentagon were at odds as to the best course of action. The Vice-President wanted to “nuke the damned thing” while the Secretary of Defense cautioned against any “rash, preemptive, action.”  The president demanded to know if al-Qaeda or Iran were involved.

So the planes watched but did not threaten the ship while the national command structure dithered.

Finally at 4:02:23 PM. EDT the ship faded away and those who’d swapped returned to their own bodies. Most recovered without problems, some not so well. The hardest hit were those transgendered individuals who had a glimpse of their true bodies for a short period, only to be slammed back into their real ones. Later the city set up a fund, supported by many grants, to help them with counseling and, for many, surgery.

All the time the ship hovered, it broadcast a message on all radio frequencies. A message that repeated constantly. Military and civilian agencies all tried to decrypt the message with no luck. They knew it was short but could not understand it.

Many years later the world had a second contact. After the Burlington incident we, obviously, knew we were not alone in the universe. But the second contact showed how not alone we are: There are millions of populated systems out there.

It wasn’t until several weeks after the second contact that someone thought to give recordings of the Burlington message to the alien delegation. What came back was a complete surprise and the delegation seemed both embarrassed and apologetic about what had happened.

Apparently there is a ship that explores the galaxy, looking for worlds not yet contacted by the galactic trade councils and pulling stunts like it did in Burlington. The terms used by the delegation to describe them were translated as “hackers” or “pranksters”.

And the message broadcast?

It said “April Fools!”

Chapter End Notes:

The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended. This story is copyright (c) 2007 J. L. Wewndelin. All rights reserved.

The End. (Complete)
Jamie Wendelin is the author of 1 other stories.

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