Nano Read Free Page A

lying on my back on a gurney in a pool of sweat and mucous.  The overhead flourescents drilled holes in my brain, and I covered my face with my arm.
    A small arm, drenched in sweat.  With little tiny hairs.  I remembered.
    I sat up groggily and swung my legs over the side of the gurney, feeling hung over and clumsy.  My little bare legs dangled, my feet a good foot further from the floor than when I'd lain down before.
    Breasts.  I cupped them with my tiny hands; they were soft and heavy and felt bizarre.
    I sat for a moment, fighting the temporary sense of vertigo all radical transformees felt.  I let it pass, then slid off the gurney and planted my feet on the floor.
    Okay.  Time to get this shit off of me.  I walked gingerly to the shower.
    I turned on the water and let its hot steam wash off the considerable residue the nano had pushed through my sweat glands to the surface of my skin.  Most of it was lying in a pool on the gurney, material discarded by the nano as being superfluous to its mission of reshaping me into something 80 pounds lighter.  Tissue rendered into a fat-like substance, mixed with chemicals and hormones, enzymes created by the nano and discarded, the job done.  I knew if I ran the stuff through an analyzer I'd find a lot of testosterone, broken down and rendered inviable, muscle proteins broken into small enough pieces to sweat out, and other biological detritus.  The radical reshaping was done by the nano; my pituitary gland, now fed instructions from XX chromosomes, would regulate my body's hormones as if I were any other teenaged girl.  Which, in fact, I was.  Biologically I was indistinguishable from a born female, even upon the closest examination.  The distinction was purely semantic.
    That's why what I just did to myself was very illegal.   I was an unregistered nano-mod; a tax-evader's wet dream and Government's bane.
    My DNA now was so different from what it had been that there was no way to connect me with Sam Smith.  You could tell that nano was present and active, under a microscope, but since it was now in maintenance mode, it would appear to be therapeutic nano - to manage my weight, or mood, or something else quite legal and unobjectionable.
    My hair had grown about eight inches in the two days I was comatose, and had turned from a grey-blond to nut brown.  It would keep growing another ten inches over the next few days, then slow to normal growth rate.  The nano was programmed to keep hair length down below the shoulder blades, so even if it cut it short the nano would kick back in, and my hair would return to the programmed length.
    Similarly, my physical strength was monitored my the nano.  If I joined a gym and worked out every day for a year, I would end up without an ounce of extra muscle tone or strength.  The nano would disassemble the new tissues as soon as my body developed them.
    Soon the floor of the shower was covered with sticky goo.  I let it wash down the drain, turned the spigots off, and grabbed a towel.  I dried myself as I stepped out in front of the sink and mirror.
    The sink was a foot higher than it had been before.  I reached over it and used the towel to wipe off the steam, noting the way my breasts swayed forward as I did so.
    The girl staring back at me was Anne-Marie, all right.  No way around it.  I'd chosen a composite of several natural girls I'd nano-improved to make Anne-Marie.  They had all been beautiful, but, of course, wanted perfection. I preferred using their pre-nano DNA as source material.  The result of mixing the DNA from these sources was a healthy prettiness with a few flaws.  I noted the freckling around my chest and on my cheeks, and my lopsided smile, with the practiced eye of a nano-surgeon.  I liked what I saw, which was good, since I wasn't in a position to change it now.
    I dried off clumsily, my hands overreaching in the wrong places finding curves blocking the places they were accustomed to moving to.  I