We stood there with Karyn listening to whatever the principal had to say. Whatever it was supposed to be, he looked extremely excited..
"I present to you" he said "the Combiner! This revolutionary cuting-edge technology essentialy allows two people to occupy single body which appied to our students would effectively cut treir number in half."
I was shocked. How could they even think about something like that?!
"The way it works is: after I press this button you'll be randomly assigned in pairs. Then one person's body is going to be saved in the device's memory and temporarily destroyed while its consciousness and memories will get implantedinto the other student's brain. Now, of course your memories and thoughts are your private thing and so the other person would not be able to access them. The only thing you'll be sharing is the body. Also, there's the issue of how to coordinate two people controling one body. This was solved by simply alternating the control rights between one person and the other changing weekly. When one of you will be in controll of the body's actions, the other will be like a passanger, able to see, hear, feel, touch and smell everything the body does, but unable to influence what it's doing. The 'passanger' will be able to mentally talk to the host though."
That was absolutely terrible. There was no way I was letting this happen! I reached to my pocket for the stone and... It wasn't there! I forgot it at home...
"Because the technology is so new there's still a couple of side effects involved. Firstly the body that remains to be inhabited by two people might change into a bit exaggerated form of itself. That means that for instance if you are known for long hair and your body is chosen to be double-occupied then you might find your hair even longer, if you are quite short then you might end up even shorter and so on... This side effect doesn't affect any personality traits but may change some of your traits based on body chemistry like temper or... well... libido. That's it."
When the principal was speaking everyone was silent. They were probably as shocked as I was. As soon as he finished everyone started talking.
"Did you... Did you wish for this?" asked Karyn
"No. I just wished for..."
But I didn't finish as the principal shouted.
"Well, I don't care whether you like the idea or not. We're doing it anyway!"
And then I saw him press the button.
