Nano Read Free

forcibly.  The tools I used to have women at my beck and call now render me utterly helpless.  Natalie married me for my money, you know.  She wanted wealth and power, however she could get it.  Now, as my husband, he has what he wanted in the purest way possible.  I have also given him a rather extreme means of revenge upon me for what I put him through.  
    "He's a better man than I ever was.  Being a woman - a slave - isn't easy, but it's what I deserve.  Now I feel like my physical form - weak, dependent, fragile - finally matches my true character.
    "And John now has what he wanted.  He's much more truly John Maynard than I ever was.  Where I subjugated women as a form of overcompensation, he does so because he has the right to do so.  He is superior to me, and his control over me is a reflection of his superiority, rather than a feeble act of bravado."
    I left Natalie bewildered and a little bemused.  I went back to work, giving her little thought; I had a backlog of clients to tend to.
    But her words came back to haunt me.  And I began to realize that my attraction to her and her story, her motives, was more than just idle curiousity.
    Several months passed.

Chapter 4
    I wasn't really sure why I was doing this.  It felt like a strange obsession.
    The encryption key on the nano I'd worked up for the job would unlock automatically after one year.  Until then it couldn't be broken, not even by me, and would prevent further physical modification.
    The nano would transform the subject into a eighteen year old girl.  Five foot even, 95 pounds, 34-17-33.  Doing the waist so narrow required pushing the internal organs around a little, but women in the 19th century had gotten by with even smaller waistlines, and this one, encoded into the DNA, wouldn't require a corset.
    I'd never had transgendered inclinations before in my life.  Strange now that I'd become so captivated by the idea.  I told myself it was an experiment - I wouldn't really understand Natalie unless I spent some time in her shoes.  But some part of me knew that to be a lie.  The motivation was much harder to pin down.  I felt like I wasn't really in control of what I was doing.
    All I knew was that for the past three months, every time I tried to put this project aside, it consumed me, and I thought about it compulsively.  I justified going through with it, telling myself it was either that or go crazy resisting the urge.
    I never once considered, however, that perhaps my wanting desperately to go through with this was fuelled by anything other than personal motive.
    Long brown hair, olive skin, brown eyes.  Small feet and hands.  Full lips on a tiny face.  The simulation looked pretty good.
    The nano included behavior modification as well.  Highly submissive tendencies, shyness, an ingrained deferentiality to men, a highly keyed sex drive.  Punching it up that high gave her the libido of a thirty year old woman or an 18 year old boy.
    I did a complete set of paperwork on her.  She was a matriculating freshman at NYU, and I'd rented a tiny apartment for her in the East Village.  She had a monthly stipend from her scholarship that would keep her in beans and rice, and not much else.  Everything looked legal - sort of.  Forging an identity from scratch always leaves holes.  Anne-Marie La Fontaine died shortly after her birth, and it was concievable that this fact could be dug up.
    I'd fitted my nano-lab and apartment with DNA locks designed to deny access to Anne-Marie La Fontaine's particular DNA signature.  Anne-Marie wouldn't be able to access either location until the locks deactivated a year from now. The lab would be rented out to Johnny Dentz, a friend in the business I sometimes did jobs with. My bank accounts were frozen for the same period.  Sam Smith was taking a sabbatical in Asia and wouldn't be returning for some time.

Chapter 5
    I awoke feeling like I had just run a marathon.  Every muscle in my body ached.
    I was