But what should he start with first?
He thought through the possibilities. Wait... His power worked on the DNA of a person, so he couldn't just look at a picture and turn into them. But it also worked on the visual appearance, so he couldn't just touch them either--he had to see them. So there was no choice but to turn into an exact copy of them... right?
Not really. When he got back to his apartment, he went for an old photo book hidden at the top of a closet and paged through the images. His parents had taken some of them and they were photographic prints made from actual film.
One was a picture of himself at age 10. He concentrated and transformed... in moments he was a duplicate of himself at age 10, oversized clothes covering his body or falling down. After all, his DNA was the same as it was at age 10, and the picture showed him at age 10, so he should have been able to do it.
He transformed back and picked up his pants and shoes, and put them on again. The first test was successful. He could transform, and not only that, he could transform in ways beyond the obvious.
He left his apartment again and looked around for suitable targets. He saw a stray cat in an alley, but he didn't want to try turning into a cat--he didn't know how his power worked on animals, and the contents of a human brain might not be able to fit into the brain of a cat. It would have to be a human being.
The next person to come along was an older woman, almost at retirement. She worked at a nearby drugstore as a cashier, and was wearing a uniform and pin. "Alice Brady", it read. He pretended to trip when he was next to her and fell, just barely brushing his hand against her arm. "Oh, excuse me," he said. "Are you okay? I didn't hurt you, did I?"
"No, you didn't, son."
The touch was enough, but he didn't want to become an old woman any more than a cat. He returned to his apartment, but an Internet search for the woman proved fruitless. He eventually had to go to a library, and found a 40 year old newspaper on microfilm with a picture of her in a cheerleader uniform at a college. She certainly wasn't an old woman then, and was quite attractive at the age of 21. He printed it out, went home, and tried once again. Soon he had used the DNA from touching her and the picture of her, and had become a 21 year old woman, who nobody had seen in this form in decades. If he restyled his hair and changed his clothes, he would look like any college age woman.
Continuing to explore the limits of his power, it occurred to him: If he were a woman, his DNA would be the same except that instead of a Y chromosome was another X. Could he use this power to just change into a female version of himself? After all, he has all the right DNA already, as long as the existing X was repeated and the Y ignored. Except that he didn't have a picture of himself as a woman, and he needed both the DNA and the picture.
Of course, this could be solved too. He took out the picture of himself at age 10 and reasoned that a picture of himself as a boy and a picture of himself as a girl would look pretty much the same before puberty. So he should be able to use the boy picture as a girl picture. Oh, the picture didn't show him wearing a dress, or with long hair, but those weren't essential parts of being a girl. And his power didn't require seeing the genitals. He wasn't sure how to do the transformation. But then, it was a power. It was like throwing a ball. it would take a complicated computer program to figure out exactly how to throw a ball to make it land somewhere, but the human brain does it without thinking. If he could transform as automatically as throwing a ball....
Five minutes later he did it. He'd never be able to describe how he did it, any more than he could describe what sequence of actions he needs to do to throw a ball at basket, but he managed to do it anyway. He was now himself as a 10 year old girl. The idea of exploring this body disgusted him, though, and he quickly changed back. He had shown it would work, but to really do it right he'd need a picture of himself as a girl at an older age. And where was he going to get that?
