Sitting on a small stool I glance around at the shelves surrounding me, the towering frames reaching up to the metal roof and the hanging lights that poorly lit the space. It wasn't like they were intended to properly light the place at night, with the workers having cleared out hours ago.
The shelves are lined with various boxes of parts and pieces of machinery. Without any knowledge of the location one could easily just think of the place as some dispatching hub for some home improvements or tech store. However, I had not only seen the sign out front but also one of the bare devices in the back with each pointing to the same business.
The Swap Clinic
The various storefronts around the world all were supplied with spare parts and new hardware from hubs like this one, a rather plain warehouse sitting in the middle of a simple industrial district. Security at these places was normally tight, the company not wanting to find any parts missing or items stolen during their regular inventories.
However, no security was perfect.
So long as nothing went missing and the right pockets were lined getting access to a warehouse for an evening wasn't all too hard. With the help of some threatened technicians, or even the help of a local manager and their team, a machine that would otherwise sit in storage could be set up and even wired into the system to log swaps legally if needed.
With this, the Underground Swap Clinic was born.
Despite the name and reputation, the Underground Swap Clinic tried to avoid breaking any major laws. The sheer number of potential whistleblowers required meant any kidnapping or identity theft was simply too risky for the most part.
However, they quickly found a niche in providing services that the real Swap Clinic was unwilling or simply refused to offer.
Age had always been an issue with the Swap Clinic, with the elderly desperately wanting to regain their youth and the young struggling to give it up. After a long internal debate, the Swap Clinic had largely shut down the trading and sale of age, restricting it to within a decade either way of one's 'Natural Born Age'.
This put the Underground Swap Clinic with an opportunity, a niche in the market to fill. However, they quickly ran into the problem of how to navigate the legalities of the issue. How would they so drastically reduce the age of someone without people asking questions?
They could simply make new lives for these people, the forging of documents not being too far outside of their wheelhouse. With a few wheels being greased they could easily get some new ID issued, though the problem of the previous life remained.
The previous life and their property.
Once the Swap Clinic started its surrogacy and IV program, allowing people to either carry the offspring of others to term or merely the early stages, the Underground Swap Clinic came to an odd yet profitable conclusion.
Why not make a new life the old-fashioned way?
Those with the money to not only pay for the service of the dubious secretive group but also enough to have a substantial sum left over were soon able to have their youth and lives upturned with one simple swap.
With one simple mind swap they would soon find themselves trapped inside the belly of a soon-to-be wealthy volunteer, their former body passing away soon after as the practically empty brain struggles to keep itself alive.
After months of rest and relaxation they would soon be brought back into the world, set up with the largest age reset possible and a brand new body to boot.
While originally used as a way for the wealthy to escape the ravages of age it soon became an out for those few to escape all manner of issues. Injuries and illnesses, things that were often times difficult to buy their way out of, were soon a thing they could simply grow out of.
Of course, in order to keep their wealth no small amount of trust was required. The whole wealth and estate of the former millionaires and billionaires would need to be signed over to their mother-to-be, the volunteer finding themselves the beneficiary of a wondrous estate. Some stipulations could be made, mandated elements in trusts or simply imposing some sort of contract, but when all was said and done it was hard for the former wealthy elite to really enforce those terms in their new lives.
Due to the amount of wealth involved it was never hard to convince new volunteers to take part, each agreement being a golden ticket to early retirement. However, between the discerning clients and the conditions they could impose it was more difficult to keep people around until the end of the process.
Of course, with the amount of money being thrown around the wealthy clientele would request at least some changes to their future parents. A change in height here, a perfect metabolism there, anything and everything they craved to hopefully be inherited in their future body knowing they wouldn't be able to use the Swap Clinic again for nearly two decades (assuming they were still open then).
Sometimes further swaps were performed as well, once the illegal mind swap had taken place, accelerating the pregnancy to a later stage in order to get the wealthy clientele either to a stage where they could experience their confinement, or even to get them close to re-emerging into the world.
Once all was said and done, between the signing of agreements, the crafting of a new mother-to-be, and the final swap sealing the deal, the now pregnant volunteer would be free to go and enjoy their new fortune if sometimes bound by the terms of her contract.
Of course, the Swap Clinic itself had heard of this practice in name only. Failing to understand fully what it was they made a different service to try and fill that gap in the market, building wives and future stay-at-home wives for wealthy clients. However, due to their own fundamental misunderstanding, the Underground Swap Clinic continued these rare and profitable swaps without any form of competition.
"Mr. H?" Calls a voice from deeper within the warehouse, their soft yet crisp songbird-like voice reverberating between the sheet metal walls.
Looking up I watch as a woman in her early thirties approaches me, the leggy dark-haired woman mincing her way around one of the disassembled Swap Booths. Her hair is tied back into a high and tight bun, the shiny black locks matching the stylish black frames perched on her delicate pale nose.
Her stride is alluring, her long sheer fabric-covered legs crossing over each other as her hips sway enticingly with each step. She appears practically poured into her tight crisp white blouse and black pencil skirt, my jaw practically hitting the floor as I drink in her curves.
With a slight smirk she looks me over, her ice-blue eyes darting to her clipboard.
"Three degrees, high capacity for education" she muses, looking up at me expectantly. I pause for a moment, taking a second to realize she was waiting for a response. With a little nod from me, she ticks a box on her little plastic clipboard, her gaze returning to it as she moves on.
"Good metabolism... Well-endowed (Male)... Well-above average height..." she continues, her eyes roaming over me as she assesses my base body prior to the changes that were to come. After a brief moment she wraps her arms around the clipboard, pinning it to her perky bust and squishing the mounds beneath the flimsy board.
"Welcome" she chirps, holding out a hand for me to shake. "Please, just this way. Can I get you a drink? Water? Scotch? Wine? Most want something stiff, it'll be the last you have for a while" she says with a delightful giggle, spinning around to mince her way down between the shelves from the way she came.
After a brief pause I quickly hop to my feet, racing down to catch up to her as we both round the corner. My eyes fall to the large series of Swap Booths set up in sequence, dozens of cables thicker than my arm running around the warehouse as empty boxes sit piled up in the corner.
"Hey!" shouts a gruff yet nervous voice, my gaze snapping to a short bearded man with graying brown hair. "Don't touch anything, we still need to put this all back once we're..."
"Calm down Mr. A" the dark-haired woman coos, waving at the man dismissively. "If anything can't be made to look as new then we'll pay for it." she explains, stepping over one of the huge wires with a loud clicking of her heels.
"Mr... A?" I mutter, eliciting a soft chuckle from the woman.
"Pseudonyms Mr. H" she coos, walking us closer to the line of machines. "We all use them, well most of us do. Looking like this, I prefer Pam" she explains, gesturing at her hot secretary-styled body with the clipboard.
"What do you mean by looking like..." I begin to ask, a loud cough from the older man cutting me off.
"Can we get this show on the road?" Mr. A grumbles, beads of sweat building on his weathered tan face. "I still need to disassemble all this and get it boxed up before my wife starts to worry about where the hell I..."
"Of course, of course" Pam states soothingly, pulling some papers from the clipboard and passing them to me. "We'll get right onto the procedure, we just need Mr. H to give these the once over. Please, take a seat in the booth and I'll fetch you that drink."
As I drop myself into the booth, resting on the as-of-yet unused leather seat, I begin to glance over the documents. The purpose of the dense legalese is not lost on me, my nervous and frazzled mind struggling to keep up with the many pages of confusing verbiage under the immense time pressure.
However, one thing quickly snaps me back into focus. My eyes fixate on the last page, my gaze locking to the number of signatures at the bottom of the agreements. Swallowing hard I read it over, finally internalizing the...
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