Jon woke up in the morning. Jonnie was stirring beside him. His alarm clock hadn't gone off yet, but from the look of it it would in a few minutes.
Jonnie yawned.
"Looking for your dress?" asked Jon.
"No! I mean, we had fun but it was weird. Like you having some kind of fetish to see me crossdressing. Even though it isn't exactly a fetish, since we all think girls look good in girls' clothes."
"And you weren't crossdressing," said Jon.
"It feels like crossdressing," replied Jonnie. "Remember, you're me."
"You mean that you're me," said Jon.
Jonnie was ready to reply to that when suddenly the alarm rang. She was on the side closest to the clock and got up to turn it off.
"I hate it when that happens," said Jon. "You get used to the alarm clock, so you wake up before it really goes off... which means you just get a few minutes less sleep and the alarm clock doesn't do you much good. I wish that..."
"Hey, watch it!" yelled Jonnie.
"What did I--? Oh. I wasn't touching the stone."
"I can't believe one of us really said it!" replied the tomboyish girl.
"It's like in one of those stories we looked at on the Internet," said Jon. "If you ever get a way to make wishes, watch out for making wishes by accident. I mean think of it, how many times a day do you really say the words 'I wish'? It isn't a very likely accident."
"It won't be. I made a wish yesterday that we'd never make wishes by accident, only on purpose. You know, everyone's heard of wishes. Even people who don't have wishing stones!"
"Right!" said Jon. "And everyone's heard of wishes that go wrong. It's in every story you hear about wishes except maybe Aladdin. Once you've heard of stories where some guy gets a sausage attached to his nose because of his bad wish, you're going to start wishing yourself up some safety measures."
"So anyway, what are you going to use the stone for? It's your day."
"I don't know," said Jon. "We both have the stuff we wanted already, except for the really evil things. Like mind control... well, every wish is sort of mind control, since we're making people remember a new reality, but I'm not going to go around changing personalities. There's just one thing."
"The range."
Jon nodded. "The range. There are all sorts of things we have to change outside the wish range. Most of them are computers, some of them are relatives. You'll have trouble if you ever get stopped by the police and asked to show your license, and don't even get me started with college applications. Or the Men in Black taking the cloning machine."
"You told me you tried making the stone teleport...."
"Sort of. Do you know how big the Earth is? We'd have to make the stone teleport everywhere on the Earth. Even if there's nothing there to change, the stone doesn't know that until it goes there, so it has to teleport anyway. Then it probably has to repeat if anyone moves."
"How long does it take?"
"A week. We lived our lives without a magic stone, we can do without it for a week... But we've gotten so used to it."
"We couldn't do what we did last night without the magic stone," said Jonnie.
"Sure we could! We're still here, Jonnie. You can always change your mind and do the shopping trip. And we can have sex without using the stone as a sex toy. That's what we did, you know, when you think of it."
"I think I'm going to do it," said Jon. He got up, dressed only in shorts and scribbled on a piece of paper. "My wish is that the magic stone teleport all over the world so that nobody anywhere finds it strange that I have a cloning device or what I do with it. And my clone becomes magically listed in any computers and papers she needs to be in order to live like me. Nobody finds that strange either. Once this wish is over, the stone teleports back to Jonnie and when it does this, we'll know she has it." He held it out to Jonnie. "See anything wrong with this?" he said.
Jonnie took the paper and read it. Then she said "No, but we think too much alike. Even if not, it's just a week, though."
"Fair enough," replied Jon. "I wish the wish on this paper would happen."
The stone disappeared.
