-- Chameleon --

"Inception"

I hit the ground hard and let out a moan of pain. Where am I?

I rise slowly to my feet and look around. Behind me is a tall metal wall engraved with a row of small figures. People, but without distinction. There's no way of telling who's a man and who's a woman.

Just like in real life.

I look ahead. The Emperor's palace towers in the distance, surrounded by another tall wall. On the other side of that wall are the illustrious mansions that make up the Inner City, where the members of the House of Diplomats reside. I look behind me again. On the other side of the wall I just fell from is the Outer City, where the citizens live.

I'm not supposed to be on this side of the wall. At least, I don't think I am. Not unless I'm a imperial emissary. Am I? I don't remember. Of myself, I know nothing.

There are footsteps, quick and heavy.

"Don't move!"

I turn to my right. Great. A guard. I should have figured there'd be some of those in the Inner City.

The guard -- not just a guard, but a Pale Creeper -- walks towards me, quietly circles around me, keeping me in check. Hidden behind that chrome mask, the man (or maybe a woman?) is unrecognizable, a faceless assassin phantom. This is one of the many troopers of Gaius Gideon II, our epicene emperor.

"State your gender, citizen," the Pale Creeper says through its mask with its mechanically neutered voice.

I look down at myself. I can't tell.

"I'm kind of in the dark about that at the moment," I say.

The Pale Creeper scoffs. Perhaps it takes my comment as snide.

"Too wiry to be a male...but you've got no outstanding feminine features. A synth-transsexual?"

The wan metal-suited androgyne unlatches a small scanner from its belt. It scans my eyes, and for a moment I am blind.

The Pale Creeper reads the scanner's tiny screen.

"Hmm...all-natural," it says inquisitively. It pauses in what I assume to be thought. "So...a Switcher, eh? Not many of you around anymore."

"So now that you know I'm neither man nor woman, do you feel better about wanting to fuck me?" I ask flatly. Damn, I must be quite a smartass.

The Pale Creeper hits me in the face with the butt of its gun. I fall to the ground, nose bleeding.

"You're trespassing. What're you doing in the Inner City?"

I wipe the blood from under my nose with my sleeve. "I don't know."

The Pale Creeper gives me a hard kick in the side.

"Enough of your shit! I'll just take you in."

It changes the setting on the gun and kneels over me. Close range, it fires into my neck. A tranquilizer.

"Shit..." I slur.

As the soldier in the sexless armor plucks me off of the ground, I black out.

--

I wake up in a white cell.

"The prisoner's awakened," someone says.

I look up through blurred eyes at three people looming over me. I rise from the bed I've been laid down on in shock. I mumble something incoherent that sounds like a question.

"You've got a lot to explain for, citizen," the same someone says. A man. It's a man's voice. The middle of the three people is a man. On either side of him are Pale Creepers. I'm really getting sick of them.

"Nice to see someone that I know has a dick," I say groggily.

The man, some ass in a grey business suit, frowns. "I am Mr. Hendricks, head of the Office of Gender Affairs. I understand that you're a Switcher?"

"What makes you say that, monsieur?" I ask. I like to poke fun at one-sexers, make them as aware of themselves as I can.

"My men have informed me."

"You sure that's what they are? That one that picked me up had a pretty feminine temper, if you ask me. Short and brazen."

"Perhaps you're right, but we always use the masculine term in such a case."

"Yeah, yeah," I say, waving my hand, growing bored. "That's how it's always been. Men are the masters, yeah? All throughout history. Even our languages are based around a male dominance."

The Hendricks guy smirks. "You sound pretty spiteful. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps you're a woman?"

I glare at him. "You wanna check between my legs and see, pal? Nah, I'm not a woman. Women are crazy. And men are dogs. Personally, I'm thankful to be outside of all of it."

"Nonetheless, I'm going to have to ask you to come with us."

"Oh? Well, thanks, buddy, but no thanks." I lie back down. Maybe I can get some more sleep.

"Allow me to rephrase my statement," I hear Mr. Hendricks say from behind my closed eyes. "You must come with us. I'm not really asking."

Before I can shoot back another sarcastic remark, I feel hands clutch onto my arms and pull me up. I open my eyes again and the Pale Creepers on either side of me drag me out of the white room. Hendricks walks ahead of us, in the lead.

--

They sit me down in some smooth, silver chair that kind of molds around me. The arm-rests move like liquid metal and hold me down. Then they stick a helmet on my head made of identical material. It melts into the chair so I can't move my head or neck. The helmet covers my eyes so I can't see.

"What the fuck is this thing?"

"A truth chair. Surely you've heard rumors of it," Hendricks answers.

"I don't really recall whether I have or not, chief. But now that you mention it, it does sound familiar."

"What do you mean?" Hendricks asks.

"That's the problem with all of this, ya see. I wasn't in the Inner City on purpose...I think. I don't remember anything before falling over that wall."

"He's telling the truth, sir," some new voice says from behind me. Some kind of interpreter, I guess.

"You...you mean you don't remember anything? Anything at all?"

"No," I say, "I do. I remember everything about society. The whole Age of Androgyny thing. The rise of the Intersexual Empire, the Switcher Conflict, the whole synth-transsexual trend that's been going on. I know all of that. But I don't know anything about me. Ya know, about myself personally."

"Not even your name?"

"Nope."

"Well, that's a shame," Hendricks says, "because we don't know either. There seems to be no record of you in the city archives."

"Do they even still have records for Switchers?" I ask.

"For the ones that are still alive and within the city, yes. And with so few, we would have thought you'd be an easy find."

"Maybe I'm an imposter," I reply with passive self-curiousity. "A fake alias, fake gender, that sort of thing."

Hendricks is quiet for a moment. "That could be a possibility. But that would be a difficult thing to accomplish. Switchers have to --"

"-- Return to their natural state every 48 hours, yeah. Well, maybe I'm a pro. Maybe I'm not posing as just one person. I could be some kind of spy or something. For one of the Outer City radicalist groups."

"A Chameleon?"

"Yeah. Going from one identity to the next, just being one person long enough to get whatever I need done."

"Hmm...why are you even telling me this? I mean, you could be right, and then you'd be endangering yourself quite a bit."

"Well, sir," I chuckle, "I'm just as curious to find out about myself as you are."

"Damn it. If one of those underground terrorist groups is behind this, then there's almost no way to find out who you are. They're thorough. They don't leave any leaks."

"Maybe that's why I don't remember anything," I say.

Hendricks' must be thinking again. I guess he's not used to it.

"Of course. A mind-wipe. You must have been amnesiated before you were sent into the Inner City."

I take a moment to consider this. "Well, if that's the case...how would I be able to fulfill my mission if I can't remember what it is?"

No reply. Just stark silence.

Then, there's an uproar of noise. Clashing metal. The sound of firearms going off. Human bodies struggling, fighting, sporadically crying out in pain.

Silence resumes.

I feel the helmet morph and change shape. It detaches from the chair and I raise my head as the helmet melts away from over my eyes.

The helmet is removed by someone in front of me. Someone I do not know. Someone without distinction. A true androgyne, a Switcher. Just like me.

And it's wearing Hendricks' clothes.

"Because you didn't need to know. You were the decoy," the mystery person says.

"What?"

The sexless person takes out a scanner from its pocket. I must be crazy, because it looks like the same one the Pale Creeper that caught me used. It brings the scanner to my eyes, a light flashes. I'm momentarily blind again. I blink in reaction to the light.

As I open my eyes, my memory begins coming back to me. By the time the blindness is gone, I remember who and what I am. I stare up at the person before me and smile.

"Hey there, Dale," I say. "So, it worked?"

"Like a charm, Lee," Dale says.

"How was I?"

Dale grins. "Great. Cocky, as usual. Only you would be able to completely give yourself away without knowing it. For a minute there, you had me going. I was beginning to doubt whether or not I'd really lifted your memory."

"Oh, you did. I'm just good like that."

"Yeah, yeah..."

"So...did you have hit me?" I say, remembering my bleeding nose.

"Just getting you back for last time," Dale replies.

"You're such a woman."

"Not right now I'm not."

"That's a shame, 'cause I was really hoping we could have a quickie."

"Shut up already, you," Dale laughs.

Dale does something behind me to the chair and the arm-rests let go of me. I stand up and look at the two Pale Creepers on the floor. I turn around and see some young man, shot in the chest, sprawled in the corner behind the truth chair. I guess he was the interpreter. They're all dead. At least, I think they are.

"They dead?" I ask. I just like to know.

"Yeah. I snapped that one's neck," Dale says and points to a Pale Creeper lying on the floor nearest us, "and I injected that one with poison," Dale says and shows me a needle.

"And him?" I point to the interpreter.

"Didn't touch him. The Creepers blew him to hell trying to shoot at me."

"Nice job," I say. "Now what?"

"Quit playing dumb, you've got your memory back," Dale says.

"Oh, come on, just humor me."

Dale rolls its eyes.

"Hendricks is a member of the Inner City, By Grace. He's also dead. We use his position to infiltrate Councilman Bowers' office, then we kill him. By doing that, we can fill his place and change the vote on the Houses' proposal to reinstate the City Confinement Act."

I smirk. "Can you believe it, Dale? We're finally gonna get out of the city. Somewhere where they won't judge us because of what we are. Where we won't be classified and exterminated and called freaks."

Dale tousles my hair. "Now's not the time to be an idealist, Lee. We've still got a lot of work to do."

"Right. Let's get one of these Creeper suits off so I can change. Then we have to get rid of the bodies."

I move to the Pale Creeper with the broken neck and begin taking off his armor. He won't be needing it. When I look back at Dale again, I'm not looking at Dale's ambigious man-woman face, but at Hendricks'.

"Hurry up," he says. "We've got a schedule to keep."