"Of course!" exclaimed Karyn. "You're going about this all wrong..."
"I am?" said Jon. "I wasn't doing anything. How could I be not doing something but doing it all wrong?"
"Don't you see, Jon? When you said 'make me a girl', the first way the machine interpreted it was to change you into a girl.
"So? I phrased it better the second time and it understood me. It didn't do it, but it understood fine."
"Jon," said Karyn, "if the machine thought you wanted to change into a girl, then the machine probably knows how to do that. Meaning you aren't the first person to ask for that. Maybe someone else asked it... and when they asked for it it wasn't a mistake--they meant it. Look at all these pictures."
"But I don't get it. These are all full of relatives I don't recognize...."
"You don't recognize them," explained Karyn, "because they're the same relatives you know, but they decided to use something like this Replomat to change sex. Your cousins aren't missing from the wedding. They're there; they changed sex and they're the two people you didn't recognize. That isn't a picture with your Dad missing but a 'new aunt'. The 'aunt' is your father as a woman. I bet one of those pictures is you as a girl. I don't think you have any new relatives here at all."
"Really? None at all?"
"Well, there always could be an extra sibling in there somewhere. Someone could have turned into a woman and gotten pregnant when in our world that didn't happen because they were a guy. Or maybe someone used the Replomat to make a person, or an android, and that person or android is in the pictures. But most of them are just the same people with sex changes."
