"Yours?" said Jon's mother. "Are you sure that's okay?"
"It's fine," said Karyn. "You don't want Jon to miss any more school, do you? Maybe you can find some old hairs or something to use later, but anything has to be better than being a tree."
"He's going to be a girl, right? Because of the DNA?"
Karyn was slightly annoyed, but didn't show it. Transporters were like VCRs or computers--the older you were the less likely you were to know how to use it properly, even though VCRs had been around since before she was born. Of course he was going to be a girl. That was because the transporter fixed errors. It was some kind of mumbo-jumbo Karyn didn't completely understand having to do with the worldline of the person providing the fix. But it wasn't just DNA--if it only changed DNA it would just leave Jon a sick member of the same species, it wouldn't change his body shape.
Karyn ran her fingers through her hair and pulled out one blonde strand, trying to break it without pulling out the root but wincing when that didn't happen. She opened the panel in the transporter and inserted the hair, then moved a small switch to "repair mode".
She and Jon's mother looked to the tree that was Jon. Only the biggest roots were there and the dirt had been washed away, but it shouldn't make any difference now that the transporter had been fixed--soil bacteria were just too small to count.
They put the heavy Jon-tree inside the machine as a loose acorn fell off, and Jon's mother pushed the door closed. "Here we go," said Karyn, and turned the machine on.
A panel lit up. "Repair mode initiated." The machine hummed and buzzed and a few seconds later Jon opened the door and stepped out. "Hey, what happened? I'm..." Looking over herself and feeling her breasts as blonde hair dangled in front of his face, she said "A girl. Karyn? I think I've turned into you." She was also naked, but Karyn had brought some of Jon's clothes. Not that they fit well, but they would do.
"There was a mistake," said Karyn. "You tried to use a broken transporter and turned into a tree... we used my hair to fix you. You do have the stone, right?"
"Sure I do," replied Jon--in Karyn's voice. "It's right here." She showed Karyn the stone, but also tried to turn away from Karyn and his mother.
"You don't have to keep us from seeing you naked," said Karyn. "You're a girl now until you change back. We know what girls look like!"
"Let me put this stuff on first," said Jon, closing the door and picking up the ill-fitting jeans and shirt. "Look, Karyn, I'm sorry about this. There's no such thing as a transporter. I invented it with the stone. You just remember it, but if you go outside the city you'll find nobody's heard of them. I didn't know it was broken because I didn't know about it at all."
"Really?" said Karyn while Jon's mother looked confused. "No wonder nobody was able to transport to any other cities in the past few days. The booths there don't exist!"
Suddenly the transporter hummed again. The panel lit up again. "Repair mode initiated."
Jon, about to wish herself back to a guy, stopped and said "What?"
"Is there anyone inside?" asked Jon's mother. "There couldn't be."
"I didn't see anything," said Jon. "Well, I nearly stepped on an acorn... what, you think the transporter is trying to 'fix' the acorn like it did me?"
"Well, it is alive," said Karyn. "And it's separate from you. So..." She opened the door again.
