Something's different before I'm fully awake. The weight of the blanket, or the mattress, the way my hips sit against it, two contact points spread wider than they should be. There's a warmth at my chest that isn't how my chest feels when I sleep. I lie there tracking it with my eyes closed. The body keeps giving me things I don't want.

The alarm says 5:21. I got there first, which is normal.

I keep still another minute. The warmth at my chest has an ache to it, low and just under the skin. On both sides, centered at each nipple. A bruise-type ache, if you'd rolled onto it in the night.

I sit up and the blanket falls away. The air in the room is cold against my chest.

I look down.

The tissue isn't much. But it's there. A small ridge on each side, sitting up and out just enough that the skin is slightly taut across it, the nipple pushed forward from behind like there's a thumb pressed underneath. Gynecomastia is the clinical word, though gynecomastia doesn't explain this. My hands are in my lap. For a second I don't move them.

Then I do what I always do: I check. I press two fingers against the right side, the way you'd palpate a patient. The tissue gives softly, unmistakably glandular, and the thing that fires up through me when I press it is something the body reads as close to pain, hypersensitive, the nerve endings too close to the surface, a density I've never felt on myself. I pull my hand away. I make myself do the left. Same. The same give, the same wrong nerve input. I put my hands in my lap again, and I'm aware that my hips are resting against the mattress wrong, wider and lower than they were yesterday, and below that a heaviness to my thighs that hadn't been there before.

I get up. The first step is the same adjustment problem as the paddle miss last night, my center of gravity slightly south of where it lives, my hip tilting through a small orbit I didn't initiate. I catch the dresser edge and wait.

Kate's on her side facing the wall, still asleep. I watch her for a second, the rise of her shoulder. Then I go to the bathroom and lock the door.

The light over the mirror flickers once and holds. I look at my face. My face is still mine, crow's feet, the salted stubble I haven't touched in three days, my eyes that my mother says came from her father, dark enough that you have to stand close to see the iris. My shoulders are still mine. My arms. The brown of them in this bathroom light, familiar as handwriting.

Below the navel is a different accounting.

I pull my boxers down and stand with them at my knees and look. The hair is softer and sits higher than it should, a changed distribution from yesterday, the density different. And below it, an absence where there shouldn't be one. I know female genitalia the way a plumber knows pipe fittings. Years of anatomical study and five thousand patient-hours, and right now that knowledge is sitting in my hands while my body demonstrates itself to me from the inside. The nerve density. How close everything is to the surface. The warmth of it. The way the labia rest against each other. A soft pressure, continuous, a contact I don't know how to ignore because I've never had to.

I press my palm flat against it the way you'd test a wound. The tissue yields and every nerve ending comes to attention at once and I pull my hand back. I stand for a second. Then I breathe out and check again, briefly, clinically, trying to inventory what I'm working with. The external anatomy is complete: labia majora and minora, the clitoris at the superior junction, a vaginal opening. All proportional, unremarkable, exactly what a standard exam would find. There's warmth and a slight moisture already, just the body's ambient state, the normal lubrication of tissue that has its own continuous business to conduct. The clinical inventory does nothing to make it mine. But it occupies the hands.

I stand over the toilet. I stand there and reach out of habit and find nothing and stand there a moment longer with my hand in the air, and then I give it up and sit. The toilet seat is cold. The position is foreign, wrong, a body placed on furniture it has no stored procedure for, the weight distributed differently across a wider seat of bone. The pressure on the inner thighs from sitting is different.

What comes is quiet and wrong and I look at the wall while it happens. The sound is wrong, the direction is wrong, the warmth spreads somewhere it shouldn't. Then I deal with the aftermath. The muscle memory tries to take over and the geometry is different from the start, unfamiliar folds, a cleft I don't know, and when I wipe the paper drags across tissue and the jolt of it goes up through me. I yank my hand back. I try again, with no confidence about the direction, about what needs to be covered, about any of it. Then I drop the tissue and sit there for a second.

I turn the shower on. The water takes forty-five seconds to warm up in this apartment; I've stood here so many times the count is meaningless. I think about whether I can do today. The eleven o'clock is a new consult, a varicocele referral, and I've got a bilateral orchiectomy scheduled for the afternoon, a testicular cancer case I've been tracking four months, and the patient is twenty-three years old and scared and I need to be exactly what I am in that room.

The water warms. I step in.

Standing under the spray is almost ordinary, almost enough. I soap my arms, my chest, my hair, and for maybe ninety seconds I'm just a person in a shower. Then I get to the lower half and the nerve geography is different enough that twice my hand catches on sensation that isn't supposed to be there and I have to stop and wait for it to settle. I do what I need to do and move on. The water runs down the inside of my thighs differently, tracking channels I didn't know were there.

I get out. I dry off from the top down, like always. I skip the lower half the first pass and then go back to it. That part I pat.

The breast tissue is visible in the mirror now that I'm looking for it. It'd show under a thin shirt. I go through my work shirts in my head: the thin ones are out, the Oxford cloth should hold, one of the heavier dress shirts. The boxers are another problem. The fabric bunches between my legs where there's nothing to hold it in place, the elastic riding up into territory it was never designed to navigate. I pull them straight and they drift back. I stand in front of the dresser for a moment before deciding this is a solvable problem only in the sense that any situation you have to live through is solvable. I have patients to see.

My hips are a different issue. I step back from the mirror to look at the full picture and it's the lower half that registers hardest in clothing, the broader spread of bone from hip to hip, the ass fuller and rounder than it has any right to be, the thighs tapering differently. The slacks don't lie about this. The waistband sits right but the fabric pulls across the seat and the thighs and the hips in a way that announces a geometry the slacks weren't cut for. And at the front, where the fabric should drape the way it always has, there's nothing to drape over. Flat. The crotch of the slacks just hanging, the absence of what used to fill it visible in a way I feel before I'm conscious of it. I hitch the waistband up and that helps nothing. I find a belt and thread it, which helps with the waist and does nothing for the rest.

I eat toast standing at the counter, Kate still asleep. The coffee takes six minutes in the French press and I stand watching it brew, watching the grounds settle at the bottom of the glass, and I think about what I'm going to do today, which is go to the hospital, see my patients, and not say anything to anyone. It's a plan. It's what I have.

I check my reflection once more before I leave. The face is still mine. The shirt hangs wrong at the chest if I look, but if I look away it reads as a doctor in a dress shirt heading into work. I practice not looking. The slacks pull at the hips just enough to feel it walking.

Outside it's the beginning of a bad day weather-wise, overcast and cold for November, a morning where the sky can't commit. I keep the radio off. The freeway is backed up at the usual spot and I sit in it for twelve minutes watching the brake lights and I don't think about anything except the orchiectomy pre-op, the patient, twenty-three, the imaging I've run three times, the approach. The seat seam presses into the wrong place on every pothole. I shift forward and keep my hands on the wheel.

The hospital lobby smells like coffee and cleaning solution and every morning of the last eight years. I wave to the security desk, Tomas, who nods and goes back to his phone, and take the stairs because the elevator at this hour always has an administrator in it and I'm not ready to make conversation.

The physician locker room is empty this early, which is what I'd been counting on. I work fast. I face the locker while I strip the dress shirt and slacks, the same way you'd change in front of strangers on a bad vacation, economical, eyes forward. I take my scrubs off the hook and step into the bottoms and pull them up and they're a medium and loose through the hips, which is fine, better than the slacks, but when I close the drawstring the fabric still gathers wrong at the front, nothing there for it to drape over, and I have to look at that for a second before I pull the top on. I lace the clogs. I put on the white coat and go to work without looking down again.

Helen catches me at the coffee station. She's finishing up a thirty-six-hour trauma shift, a look on her face that means she's running on caffeine and professional obligation, and she glances up when I come in and says, "Julian. You look like you slept in your car."

"You look worse than I do."

She laughs, the short version. Turns back to her coffee. "Six-car on the 95 at two a.m. I love my career choices." She takes a sip and then says, with her back still to me, "You have something…" and she gestures toward her chest.

My pulse does something. "What."

"Your coat pocket. There's a pen cap sticking out at a weird angle."

I look down. A pen cap. I fix it. "Thanks."

"Go see your patients." She takes her coffee and leaves.

I let two seconds pass before I move.

The morning board has me in Three and Four for the first block. I pull the first chart and walk into Three and the patient is already there, a man in his forties who hasn't been in this office in seven years, according to his chart. Heavyset, a guy who gets out of his truck slowly, left testicular heaviness for three months, a dragging sensation that got bad enough he finally came in.

"Morning," I say. "Julian Reyes." I wash my hands at the sink.

"Tom Abernethy." He's on the paper-covered table with his hands flat on his thighs, braced. "My wife made the appointment."

"OK, fair enough."

"It's not… I mean it doesn't hurt. It's more like…" He makes a vague downward gesture.

"Heaviness. The chart says three months."

"About that. Maybe a little longer. I kept thinking it'd go away."

I snap the gloves on. "Stand up for me. Drop the shorts."

He does it, like he's decided not to make this weird. "I know what I probably have," he says. "I looked it up."

"What did you find?"

"Varicocele. I think."

"Tell me what you read."

He does, while I work, left first, then right. Left side: the cord is slightly fuller than it should be, the characteristic give of dilated veins when he's standing. I cup and compress. The vein collapses on pressure and refills. Classic.

"You're not wrong," I say. "Left side, grade two. You were right to look it up."

"So it's… is that bad?"

"It's not cancer, if that's what you're asking."

The breath he lets out. "Yeah. That's what I was asking."

"A varicocele is a dilation of the veins that drain the testicle. It happens in about fifteen percent of men. It feels heavy because the blood pools when you're upright." I roll the vein once more under my fingers, confirming. "The question is whether it's causing you any problems beyond the discomfort. Are you and your wife trying for children?"

"We have two."

"Then the fertility question's off the table. For most men with a grade two and no fertility concerns, we watch it. It doesn't get worse on any predictable schedule."

He pulls his shorts back up. "So I didn't need to come in."

"You didn't know that until you came in." I peel the gloves. "If it starts affecting your daily life, if the discomfort picks up, we revisit. Otherwise, you know what it is, and that's worth something."

He seems satisfied with that. He shakes my hand on the way out and I close the chart and move to the next one.

The morning runs like this. I'm inside the clinic, examining what my body no longer has, patient after patient, and the knowledge is intact, I know what I'm looking for, I know what I find, I know what to say, and the only thing that's different is the awareness, constant and low, of the anatomy under my coat rearranging itself on its own schedule. I do a semen analysis consult, a prostate follow-up on a man I've been seeing two years, a second opinion on a testicular torsion repair from six months ago. I'm good with them. I've always been good with them.

The eleven o'clock is the varicocele referral, nineteen years old, came with his mother. She sits in the corner of Three radiating anxiety she's trying very hard to make invisible. The kid's name is Mateo. He keeps looking at his mother and then at me and then at his hands, and I take the history directly from him, not from her, which costs me about four redirected questions before she stops jumping in. His grandfather died of testicular cancer. That's why they're here. I know before I examine him what I'll find, because the grandfather's death has no bearing on what's in front of me today, and I'm right: nothing. A normal exam. He came in because a man he loved died of this, and there's nothing in him to find, and I get to be the one who tells him so.

"Will it affect," Mateo starts.

"Fertility," his mother says, in a tone that makes it clear they discussed this in the car.

"Potentially," I say. "If you're planning a family down the line, we'd want to revisit. For now, watchful waiting is reasonable."

"He's nineteen," his mother says.

"Yes."

She's working up to another question. I let her.

"So there's nothing… it's not…"

"It's not cancer. Nothing about this presentation suggests malignancy. A varicocele is a venous dilation, a structural issue, not a tumor." I look at Mateo. "You did the right thing coming in. Now you know what you're dealing with."

He nods. His hands go loose in his lap. At the door, after his mother has gone ahead, he says, "She's been freaked out since my grandfather. I didn't want to not come and have it turn out to be…"

"You did the right thing," I say again. "That's it."

He goes.

By half past eleven I have a problem I've been managing badly since I got here, which is that the moisture between my legs has been building all morning. It's what the body does, the low lubrication of tissue with its own constant business, tissue that's been there about sixteen hours and has already adopted its own housekeeping. I know this clinically. I've read about it, explained it to patients. Experiencing it from the inside, in scrubs, in a hospital where I have to interact with colleagues and patients without any indication that anything is different, is something the literature doesn't cover.

I find a single-occupancy restroom between the urology wing and radiology and lock the door. The overhead light buzzes. There's a framed print of a Klimt on the wall, generic hospital art that nobody chose on purpose, and I look at it while I sort out what I'm dealing with. I check. The dampness is normal by every clinical metric, clear, minimal, the body doing what bodies do, but it's mine, on the inside of my own underwear, the boxers absorbing it poorly because boxers aren't designed for this.

I deal with it as best I can with what the restroom provides. Then I wash my hands and look at myself in the small mirror above the sink. The face is still mine. The white coat is still mine. I have four patients left in the afternoon block, an orchiectomy scheduled for two, and a pre-op to run before it. None of these things have changed.

At noon I eat a granola bar at my desk and look at the afternoon board and don't think about my body at all, which is an accomplishment. I eat it in four bites and throw the wrapper away and I'm pulling up the pre-op notes when I notice I've been sitting in the chair wrong, perched forward on my thighs rather than back against the seat, and I've been doing it all morning, shifting to put the weight where there's less of it, the same adjustment at the desk as in the car. I sit back. It isn't the chair. The chair is fine.

The afternoon pre-op is the twenty-three-year-old, and I give him most of a half-hour. He makes a lot of eye contact with the floor. We go through the procedure, what to expect after, what the pathology will tell us that we don't already know. By the end he's still scared but less so, which is what I can actually do for him.

The orchiectomy goes routine. Two-fifteen to three-thirty, the scrub nurse on one side and the anesthesiologist behind the drape, the room at the temperature they keep surgical suites, cold enough that you don't notice the heat the lights put out. I'm good in a room like this. The procedure is one I've run dozens of times, and the body's wrongness recedes because there isn't room for it here, there's the patient, there's the tissue, there's the thing I need to do and the order in which I need to do it. The resident's closing when I step back and peel my gloves off. The patient is fine.

One follow-up left. I change out of surgical scrubs in the locker room, thankfully empty again, though later than I'd like, and pull the dress clothes back on. The slacks announce the same problem they announced this morning. The waistband is fine, the hips are not. I pull my coat on over it and go to find the last chart.

The cystoscopy patient is in Four, already changed into a gown, reading something on his phone. Sixty-two, a reduced stream I've been monitoring since November, came up on the system for a six-month check. Gerald Moffitt. He's a retired something, the chart has a previous employer listed in an old insurance field, something to do with municipal water, which I read once and have half-forgotten.

"Dr. Reyes." He puts the phone away. He has the easy manner of a man who's been through enough medical appointments to be unbothered by them. "How's my prostate?"

"Same as November. No change."

"That's supposed to be good news."

"It is good news."

He shifts on the table. "Then why's the stream still slow?"

"How much water are you drinking?"

A pause. "Reasonable amounts."

"Gerald."

"Coffee. Some coffee."

"Coffee is a diuretic. It works against you." I sit on the stool and pull up his imaging on the screen. "The prostate is unremarkable for your age. What you're describing is normal physiology for a sixty-two-year-old man who's dehydrated most of the time."

"My wife says I need to drink more water."

"Your wife is right."

He looks at me. "I was hoping it was something you could fix."

"I can't fix dehydration with a procedure. Drink sixty-four ounces of water a day for two weeks and come back if the stream doesn't improve." I print the after-visit summary. "If it doesn't improve after two weeks of actually doing it, then we talk about next steps."

"You're very confident about this."

"I've seen your imaging three times. The prostate isn't the problem."

He takes the printout with the air of a man receiving instructions he already knows he'll follow imperfectly. "My wife's going to be smug about this."

"Probably."

He gets off the table with the careful economy of someone whose knees are not what they were. At the door he says, "You know, I looked you up before I made the appointment. Sixty-eight reviews. Four-point-six."

"I remember."

"There's a two-star review from a man who says you're cold."

"I'm efficient."

He seems to consider this. "I'd give you four and a half," he says, and goes.

The parking garage is on the third level, the same spot I've taken for six years. I sit in the car with the engine off. The garage echoes with someone two rows over trying to start a reluctant engine. I watch them pull out and go. I check the clock. Then I call Rafa.

Four rings. Five. Then: "Hey."

"I need you to look at something for me."

A second of quiet on his end. "Okay."

"The exposure protocol on the feeder tank. The one I went into last night. What's the actual absorption rate for dermis, intact skin, the parameters it uses."

"Julian."

"I need to look at the numbers."

Another beat. I hear him move, the scrape of a chair. "The protocol's conservative," he says. "It's written for full immersion, eyes, mucous membranes. Intact skin at that level of contact, forearm, one pass, clean wash within ten minutes, is supposed to be negligible. That's what I told you last night."

"I know what you told me last night." I look at the concrete pillar in front of me. Somebody's put a concert flyer on it, peeling at one corner. "Rafa. What's the actual number."

More quiet. Long enough that I know what the quiet is.

"I pulled the log this morning," he says. "Batch concentration was higher than it should've been. Kirk's decimal thing. The batch you went into was…" He stops. "I need to recalculate."

"Rafa."

"…an order of magnitude off the dilution we've been running." I can hear him breathing. "Which changes the absorption model."

The flyer keeps peeling and flattening and peeling again in the draft from someone on the level below.

"I know I should have called you earlier," he says. "I was trying to figure out what I was looking at first."

"Change the model how."

"A lot." A pause. "Like, substantially. Like a completely different exposure class." He goes quiet again. "Are you okay? Are you… what are you experiencing?"

"File the incident report," I say. "Standard exposure form. Don't put my name on it."

"Julian…"

"If you use my name it goes to my department, it goes to Credentialing, it goes everywhere before I know what I'm dealing with. File it as an anonymous unintended exposure. You can add the specifics later."

A long pause. "What are you dealing with?"

I start the car. "I'll call you."

"Hey, wait…"

"I'll call you."

Kate's home when I get there. I see her car in the lot and I sit in the parking space for a moment. I wasn't expecting her until after seven, there was something Monday nights, a thing with a colleague, I can't reconstruct it right now. I collect myself and go upstairs.

She's at the kitchen table with her laptop and a glass of wine and a take-out container from the Thai place we both like, the pad kee mao she always gets. She looks up when I come in. The look is just hello. Then she looks again.

She has always been good at this, at reading off a body whatever it's giving away against a person's intentions, and I've never fully sorted out whether it's a skill or just two years of practice with me. I watch her watch me cross the kitchen to set my bag down.

"How are you walking," she says.

"What?"

She sets her fork down. "You came in from the door to the counter and your hip is doing…" She makes a gesture. "Something."

"I pulled something. At the gym."

"Again?"

"Different thing." I turn to open the refrigerator. I'm not hungry. I stand with it open and look at the middle shelf, which has a half-eaten rotisserie chicken and a container of yogurt and a lime. "What are you doing home?"

"Michael cancelled," she says. The colleague. I still can't place which Michael. "I picked up food. There's a second one in the bag."

"I'm not hungry."

She doesn't say anything. I close the refrigerator and get a glass of water and stand with it, facing the counter.

"Julian."

"It's fine."

"I didn't say anything yet."

"I know." I turn the glass around in my hands. "I'm tired. I had a hard day."

The sound she makes is the one that means she's deciding whether to push, doing the math on how much push this mood can take. Two years of practice. I've heard it go both ways.

"Sit down," she says. "Please."

I don't. I stay at the counter with the glass, and I can feel her watching how I'm standing, the weight distributed wrong, and I'm trying to hold myself the way I always hold myself and I'm not sure it's working. The ache at my chest is constant now, a thing I've been suppressing all day by incremental degrees.

"Something happened," she says. It's not a question.

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've been in here two minutes and you haven't looked at me once and you're gripping that glass like it owes you something." She pushes back from the table. "Did something happen at work?"

"No. Can you…" I set the glass down. "I just need a minute."

"You've had the whole drive home to have a minute." She comes around the table and stands on the other side of the kitchen island, which is about six feet away, which in our kitchen is close. I look at the window above the sink. There's a little grease splatter on it from Monday I keep meaning to wipe off. "Talk to me."

"Kate."

"Talk to me."

"There's nothing to…"

"Stop." Not loud. She crosses her arms, one elbow in her palm. "You're doing the thing where you decide unilaterally that I don't need to know something. And then three weeks later I find out and we have a whole thing about it. I'd rather just skip to the thing."

"There was an incident at the lab," I say.

"Rafa's lab."

"Yes." I look at the window. "When I went in to collect him last night. I came into contact with… there's a fluid they work with, a nanobot suspension. I fell and put my arm in the tank." I pause. "We thought the exposure was minor. We found out today it wasn't."

She comes around the island and stands in front of me, too close now for me to not look at her. I look at her. Her face is doing the thing it does when she's holding something back, jaw set, the lines around her eyes pulling tight.

"What do you mean, found out today," she says.

"The concentration was off. Kirk, Rafa's lab tech, it doesn't matter. The dilution was off by an order of magnitude. The actual exposure was in a different class than what we thought."

"An order of magnitude." She looks at me steadily. "Julian, what does the fluid do?"

"It rewrites tissue. It's designed to reverse tumor processes. To pattern-match cellular structure and rebuild it according to…" I stop. The clinical vocabulary is not getting me anywhere useful. "It makes changes to the body. Significant changes. Rapidly."

She doesn't move. "What kind of changes?"

"The kind I'm going to show you," I say. "And I need you to wait until I finish."

"Okay."

I look at her face once more. Then I reach down and pull my shirt up and hold it there.

The breast tissue is visible, the two small swells pressing the skin forward, the nipples displaced, small but unmistakable, especially now, at the end of a day of awareness. She stares. She doesn't make a sound.

Then I take a breath and lower the waistband of my slacks.

The boxers are in the way and I pull the waistband of those down too, just enough, the hair and the flat mound of the mons beneath it, and she looks, and there's a long silence in the kitchen.

I pull my clothes back up. I look at the grease splatter on the window.

"Julian," she says. Very quiet.

"I know."

"That's…" She stops. She puts her hand over her mouth and then takes it away. She takes a slow breath in and releases it. "How is that possible?"

"The compound rewrites tissue. It was developed to reverse tumor processes, to disassemble cellular structure and rebuild it according to a pattern. The pattern…" My voice is level and I keep it that way. "The pattern, when it's exposed to a human, appears to be a female configuration. A default." I'm looking at the window. "The process started last night. It's ongoing."

She's not saying anything. I hear her breathing.

"Rafa confirmed this afternoon that the concentration was high enough for significant dermal absorption. He doesn't have human data. Animal data suggests it moves fast." I stop. I look at her then. Her face is white. "Kate."

"Give me a second."

"Okay."

She puts both hands on the counter. She looks down at them. The take-out is going cold on the table and the laptop's closed and the kitchen is very quiet, just us in it and the dark coming on outside, and I wait for her to have her second.

She looks up. Her eyes are wet, which I was not fully prepared for, though I should have been.

"Can they undo it," she says.

"I don't know yet."

"Rafa, does Rafa know how to…"

"I don't know yet." I look at her. "I only called him an hour ago. And the data for something like this doesn't exist." I watch her take that in. "I'm working on it."

"Working on it," she says. Testing the phrase.

"Yes."

She looks at me for a long time. "What does this mean for tomorrow? For work."

"I managed today."

"You managed today." Something shifts in her face. "Julian. You went to work."

"I had a scheduled orchiectomy."

"You…" She makes a sound. Half a laugh, not a laugh. "You had a… you went to the hospital, you did surgery…"

"The patient needed me there. Postponing would have…"

"That's not the point." She puts her palms flat on the counter. "You woke up this morning with… with that… and you went to work."

"Yes."

She looks at me. I look back. We've had some version of this conversation before, the one where she tells me I've weaponized my competence into something that hurts the people around me, and I listen and she's not wrong and nothing changes because I don't know how to want anything different. She knows the shape of it as well as I do. She doesn't finish the sentence.

"Okay," she says. She stands up straight. "Okay."

"I'm going to figure this out."

"I know you are." She says it and I can't tell if she means it or if she's giving it to me because I need it, and I've never been good at telling the difference with her. She comes around the counter and puts her arms around me, tentative, and I stand in it. The top of her head at my chin, where it's always been.

I put my arms around her back.

She goes still when she feels the tissue at my chest, pressed between us. She doesn't pull away. She stays, and I hold her in the kitchen while the food goes cold and the window goes dark and the neighborhood outside gets on with its evening, and I let myself have the ninety seconds of it before I start thinking about tomorrow.

---
Read the illustrated version of this chapter, with images of Julian examining his new anatomy, taking a shower, looking at himself clothed in the mirror, with Helen at the hospital, showing his nude body to Kate and holding her after. Subscribers get access to chapters weeks ahead and to exclusive stories and other content, as well as the ability to vote on future stories.