Jeff Rose stared discontentedly at the reflection in the mirror. Moving his eyes down from the pretty face framed with neat, chin-length blonde hair, past the swollen breasts that peeked out proudly beneath the ample cleavage of his burgundy dress, Jeff focused on the real cause for his concern: his full, round, heavily pregnant belly. The woman in the mirror--Shelly--she must have been, what, eight months pregnant? Eight and a half? He hadn't had a chance to track her down and find out, but judging from her size she must have been nearly due.
The burgeoning round belly that pressed against Shelly's maternity dress wasn't the only sign her pregnancy had left on her twenty-something body. Her feet were swollen, her face heavy, her breasts large, her eyes ringed with dark circles. Nevertheless, the woman Jeff saw in the mirror was pretty, beneath all the marks of pregnancy. It was a sweet, honest kind of prettiness, and Jeff's chest fluttered with something he suspected might have been the beginnings of love. Jeff had never been into pregnant women... but he was a sucker for a pretty face.
Jumping into a pregnant woman had left Jeff with some nagging questions, however. As one of Mayor Dickinson's most trusted aides, Jeff was as knowledgeable about the swaps that had occurred in town as anyone. No one knew yet, however, how something like pregnancy would behave under the influence of the swaps. He wasn't actually pregnant; he knew that much. It had been determined hours ago that the swaps were merely illusions, that people maintained their actual physical bodies. And while reality tended to warp around people such that their bodies interacted with the world as though they were really the people they appeared to be--the most obvious example being people's clothing, which stretched or shrank to fit them comfortably--ultimately people's bodies remained their own. And that meant that Shelly's baby was still in her own womb, that it was still Shelly who was pregnant, not Jeff. After all, Jeff had nowhere in his body for Shelly's baby to go. That raised some difficult questions, though. Would Jeff's illusion "give birth" at some point? Would it stop appearing pregnant somehow? Or would Jeff look like a pregnant woman for the rest of his... well, for as long as he remained Shelly? And what would happen when Shelly gave birth? What would that look like? And how would she get the medical attention she would need?
Washing his hands, Jeff took one last look at his reflection and left the restroom. He had delayed long enough; it was time to get back to work. Jeff wanted nothing more than to be at home right now. In bed, perhaps, asleep, dreaming all of this. But this was real, and that meant he still had a lot of work to do. Mayor Dickinson was still missing, which meant it was left to his staff--including Jeff--to run the city.
As he left the ladies room and entered the hallway of city hall, Jeff heard a commotion down the hallway. He walked cautiously down the hall in the direction of the noise. Entering the lobby, Jeff saw a strange sight: a toddler in a pink dress, held in a young woman's arms, arguing heatedly with Myra Kress, the mayor's receptionist, who was currently in the body of a man in his thirties. "Sir," said the little girl, with surprising authority in her voice, "I'm the mayor. I demand to be given access to my own access. If you don't follow my orders immediately, I will have you fired."
"Excuse me," said Jeff, "what's going on here?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Rose," said Myra softly, turning toward him. "This little girl claims--"
"Rose?" the little girl said, turning to Jeff. "Jeff Rose, is that you?"
"Mr. Mayor?" Jeff asked uncertainly.
"Thank God someone in this office still has some sense left," the little girl who was claiming to be the mayor said. "Yes, it's me, Richard Dickinson. This man refuses to let me in."
"Did... did you give her the password?" Jeff said.
"Of course I didn't give him the password," the mayor said. "I'm not going to give out the password to just anyone... we can't have strangers infiltrating the city gov--"
"Sir," Jeff said, "this isn't just anyone. This is Myra Kress."
"Myra?" the mayor said, his eyebrows lfiting in surprise. "Good Lord, I'm sorry, Myra. I didn't know that... I mean... I didn't know."
"Look," Jeff said, approaching the mayor and the woman who held him in her arms, "whisper the password in my ear. I'll let Myra know if you're who you say you are."
The mayor leaned in and whispered a pair of quiet words, and Jeff nodded silently to Myra. Myra's tense muscles relaxed.
"Come on," Jeff said with a wave of his hand. "Let's get you back to your office." The woman holding the mayor hesitated for a moment, then began to follow Jeff down the hall. Jeff looked the woman over. She was a young mother, younger than Shelly, and not exactly professional-looking. She appeared to be utterly dazed by everything that was going on around her. Indeed, she looked uneasy, like she wanted to be anywhere other than here carrying Mayor Dickinson in her arms. The mayor, for his part, appeared to be almost oblivious to her.
"Sir," Jeff said, "who is this woman?"
"Hmm?" the mayor said, distractedly, as though interrupted from reading a particularly engaging book. Jeff knew the mayor well enough to know what was going on; the mayor's mind was racing, trying to come up with a solution to the town's troubles. "Oh," he said, looking back at the woman who was carrying him, "this is my... err... my body's mother. Oh, speaking of, we need to alert the police to be on the lookout for her real daughter."
"Sir," Jeff said, "I'm not sure we can allow--"
"I'm tied to her, somehow," the mayor said. "I'm not sure how, or why, but I can't seem to be more than a few feet away from her at any given time. I'm afraid she'll have to stay with me, for the moment at least." He shook his head. "Oh, Rose, do I have a story to tell..." He looked at Jeff, looked his pregnant body up and down. "It appears you might have a story, too. Looks like you might be learning a few things about motherhood yourself soon?"
Jeff frowned. "Perhaps," he said, rubbing a hand over his belly.
They walked along in silence for a moment, the beat of Jeff's ballet flats and the other woman's tennis shoes against the floor the only sound. At last the mayor said, "Let's see... we need to compile a report about everything we know about the swaps so far. We need to get in touch with the feds and see what progress they've made. We need to send someone out to the prison to check on the situation there. We need to write a press release letting people know that I've been found and I'm back on the job. We need to put together a task force to find this young lady's daughter." He indicated the woman who was still carrying him. "We should get in touch with the police, the hospitals, the fire department. I'll want to write a report on the emergencies I've encountered firsthand.. there's a lot going on out there, more than I could have realized realized if I'd been cloistered here in city hall."
The mayor was ticking off these tasks on his stubby childlike fingers. Jeff had to fight to keep a grin off his face... he knew that it was the mayor inside this child's form, but it was still funny to see such a little girl behaving in such a serious manner. For just a moment he felt something he might have described as an almost maternal affection for this little girl... but he pushed those feelings aside andn tried to remain businesslike.
"I want all the aides together in the conference room within twenty minutes if at all possible," the mayor went on. "We're going to need to have a meeting to get all of this straight. But first things first," he said, looking at Jeff and blushing a little. "I'm going to need a booster seat."
