Read Online Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD by Jack Chalker - Free Book Online

times. I am a native, unlike you. The switching phenomenon conies with puberty—a rite of passage here, you might say. Adolescents here undergo many switches, particularly since that age is more highly emotional and so control is more difficult. Besides, what adolescent could resist the experimentation? Boys curious about what it's like to be a-girl, vice versa—that sort of thing. I often wonder what it would be like to be trapped at birth in a particular gender and body. I, for example, was born male, but by the age of sixteen, having been in three male and two female bodies, I found myself more comfortable, somehow, as a female. I found a female who felt more comfortable as a male and we slept together and settled it. However, don't think we run around swapping bodies as often as we change clothes. We don't. Oh, some of us change often, and there are occasional marriages where the partners switch around constantly, but those cases are rare."
      A thought had occurred to me early in her talk and I wanted to get the question out before it slipped away. "You said it takes several minutes to exchange minds during this sleep," I noted. "What happens if you're awakened in the middle of it?"
      "Normally, once the exchange begins it can't be stopped—you remain comatose, as it were, even if the building's burning down," she replied. "However, there are cases—very rare—when this happens. You're right to bring it up, since it occurs only among people from Outside like yourselves. The odds, I should emphasize, are one in a million, even to you. The transfer is all at once, so to speak, so all of the molecules in your brain start their rearrangement together. If you are jolted awake early in the process, youll have a dim remembrance of that other life which will usually fade. If this happens late in the transfer, youll have a period of psychological problems, a sort of schizophrenia, but that loo will pass and the dominant information will control. But if the process is just about exactly half over, then both of you will be in both bodies. There is a lot of extra space in the cerebrum and the new information will slowly shift to the unused parts, creating either a total split personality— two minds in one body, alternating—or a merger into a new personality that is a combination of both. And, understand, this will be the case for both bodies. But I wouldn't worry; there have been less than twenty such cases in the history of Cerberus. You almost have to do it deliberately, and nobody wants that."
      I nodded. Those seemed like favorable odds. She returned to her basic briefing once more, with a new question from a woman on the end.
      "What happens," she was asked, "when a switch occurs to someone in a critically skilled field? I mean, suppose your doctor now has the mind of your janitor? How can you tell?"
      "That was an early problem," we were told. "In a non-technological age or setting, like Lilith's, it probably Wouldn't have been solvable. Fortunately, tiny electrical patterns in the brain set up to handle our specific memories are unique to each individual. The new brain adjusts to the new pattern. We have sensitive devices able to read and record that distinctive electrical 'signature,' and you'll find them all over the place. Before you leave here today we'll take your imprint and this will open your account in the master planetary computer. Early imprint reading devices were quite bulky, but now it's a simple device quickly and easily used, and it is used for everything. There is no money here, for example. You are paid according to job and status directly into your computer account. Any time you wish to make a purchase, your imprint is read and compared to your identity card. As you can see, it is virtually impossible for anyone to masquerade as someone else, since it is a crime not to report a body change within eight hours of its occurrence." She paused for a moment, then added, "For a society founded by