That there would be people who, dying of cancer, would rather die than experience a change in gender.
That the Catholic Church would come out against Rajit's chemical trigger, marketed by this point under the brand name Reboot, chiefly because the gender change caused a female body to reabsorb into itself the flesh of a fetus as it rebooted itself: males cannot be pregnant. A number of other religious sects would come out against Reboot, most of them citing Genesis I: 27, "Male and female created He them," as their reason.
Sects that came out against Reboot included: Islam; Christian Science; the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church (with a number of dissenting voices); the Unification Church; Orthodox Trek Fandom; Orthodox Judaism; the Fundamentalist Alliance of the U.S.A.
Sects that came out in favour of Reboot use where deemed the appropriate treatment by a qualified medical doctor included: most Buddhists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; the Greek Orthodox Church; the Church of Scientology; the Anglican Church (with a number of dissenting voices); New Trek Fandom; Liberal and Reform Judaism; the New Age Coalition of America.
Sects that initially came out in favour of using Reboot recreationally: None.
While Rajit realised that Reboot would make gender-reassignment surgery obsolete, it never occurred to him that anyone might wish to take it for reasons of desire or curiosity or escape. Thus, he never foresaw the black market in Reboot and similar chemical triggers; nor that, within fifteen years of Reboot's commercial release and FDA approval, illegal sales of the designer Reboot knock-offs (bootlegs, as they were soon known) would outsell heroine and cocaine, gram for gram, more than ten times over.
VII.
In several of the New Communist States of Eastern Europe possession of bootlegs carried a mandatory death sentence.
In Thailand and Mongolia it was reported that boys were being forcibly rebooted into girls to increase their worth as prostitutes.
In China newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for a single dose. The old people died of cancer as before. The subsequent birthrate crisis was not perceived as a problem until it was too late, the proposed drastic solutions proved difficult to implement and led, in their own way, to the final revolution.
Amnesty International reported that in several of the Pan-Arabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male and were not, in fact, women escaping the veil were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed. Most Arab leaders denied that either phenomenon was occurring or had ever occurred.
Rajit is in his sixties when he reads in The New Yorker that the word change is gathering to itself connotations of deep indecency and taboo.
Schoolchildren giggle embarrassedly when they encounter phrases like "I needed a change" or "Time for change" or The Winds of Change" in their studies of pre-twenty-first-century literature. In an English class in Norwich horrified smutty sniggers greet a fourteen-year-old's discovery of "A change is as good as a rest."
A representative of the King's English Society writes a letter to The Times, deploring the loss of another perfectly good word to the English language.
Several years later a youth in Streatham is successfully prosecuted for publicly wearing a T-shirt with the slogan I'M A CHANGED MAN! printed clearly upon it.
IX.
Jackie works in Blossoms, a nightclub in West Hollywood. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Jackies in Los Angeles, thousands of them across the country hundreds of thousands across the world.
Some of them work for the government, some for religious organizations, or for businesses. In New York, London and Los Angeles, people like Jackie are on the door at the places that the in-crowds go.
This is what Jackie does. Jackie watches the crowd coming in and thinks, Born M now F, born F now M, born M now M, born M now F, born F now F…
On "Natural Nights" (crudely, unchanged) Jackie says, "I'm sorry you can't come in tonight" a lot. People like Jackie have a 97 per cent accuracy rate. An article in Scientific American suggests that birth gender recognition skills might be genetically inherited: an ability that always existed but had no strict survival values until now.
Jackie is ambushed in the small hours of the morning, after work, in the back of the Blossoms parking lot. And as each new boot crashes or thuds into Jackie's face and chest and head and groin, Jackie thinks, Born M now F, born F now F, born F now M, born M now M…
When Jackie gets out of the hospital, vision in one eye only, face and chest a single huge purple-green bruise, there is a message, sent with an enormous bunch of exotic flowers, to say that Jackie's job is still open.
However, Jackie takes the bullet train to Chicago, and from there takes a slow train to Kansas City, and stays there, working as a housepainter and electrician, professions for which Jackie had trained a long time before, and does not go back.
X.
Raj it is now in his seventies. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. He is rich enough to satisfy any whim; he will, however, no longer have sex with anyone. He eyes them all distrustfully from his apartment's window, staring down at the bronzed bodies on the Copacabana, wondering.
The people on the beach think no more of him than a teenager with chlamydia gives thanks to Alexander Fleming. Most of them imagine that Rajit must be dead by now. None of them care either way.
It is suggested that certain cancers have evolved or mutated to survive rebooting. Many bacterial and viral diseases can survive rebooting. A handful even thrive upon rebooting, and one-a strain of gonorrhoea-is hypothesised to use the process in its vectoring, initially remaining dormant in the host body and becoming infectious only when the genitalia have reorganised into that of the opposite gender.
Still, the average Western human life span is increasing.
Why some freebooters-recreational Reboot users-appear to age normally, while others give no indication of ageing at all, is something that puzzles scientists. Some claim that the latter group is actually ageing on a cellular level. Others maintain that it is too soon to tell and that no one knows anything for certain.
Rebooting does not reverse the ageing process; however, there is evidence that, for some, it may arrest it. Many of the older generation, who have until now been resistant to rebooting for pleasure, begin to take it regularly-freebooting-whether they have a medical condition that warrants it or no.
XI.
Loose coins become known as coinage or, occasionally, specie.
The process of making different or altering is now usually known as shifting.
XII.
Rajit is dying of prostate cancer in his Rio apartment. He is in his early nineties. He has never taken Reboot; the idea now terrifies him. The cancer has spread to the bones of his pelvis and to his testes.
He rings the bell. There is a short wait for the nurse's daily soap opera to be turned off, the cup of coffee put down. Eventually his nurse comes in.
"Take me out into the air," he says to the nurse, his voice hoarse. At first the nurse affects not to understand him. He repeats it, in his rough Portuguese. A shake of the head from his nurse.
He pulls himself out of the bed-a shrunken figure, stooped so badly as to be almost hunchbacked, and so frail that it seems that a storm would blow him over-and begins to walk toward the door of the apartment.
His nurse tries, and fails, to dissuade him. And then the nurse walks with him to the apartment hall and holds his arm as they wait for the elevator. He has not left the apartment in two years; even before the cancer, Rajit did not leave the apartment. He is almost blind.