Alex trudged through the autumn-chilled streets of Eldridge, his worn sneakers kicking up leaves that had rotted into mulch. The college town was a depressing sprawl, aging brick buildings, chain link fences, the kind of place that made you feel smaller every day you spent there. At nineteen, he was a freshman adrift, invisible. Shaggy brown hair, faded black hoodie, a permanent slouch that said "don't look at me." Depression wasn't dramatic with him, it was a low hum, a constant static that made everything feel like wading through concrete.
Classes blurred together. Dining hall food went down without tasting. He had one friend: Jake, a sophomore he'd met in that godforsaken orientation seminar. Jake was tall, wiry, always smirking like he knew something you didn't. They'd bonded over mutual hatred for intro psych, where the professor droned on about Freud like it was gospel. That was the extent of it.
Tonight's text had been cryptic: "Shitty party on Frat Row. But this guy Trevor's got DMT. Life-changing shit. You coming?"
Alex had stared at his phone screen in the dark of his dorm room, cursor blinking mockingly. DMT, dimethyltryptamine. He'd spent a rabbit hole night reading about it: the spirit molecule, breakthrough doses, entities that rewired your entire concept of reality. Terrifying. Which was probably why he texted back: "Yeah."
What was the alternative? Another night staring at the cracked ceiling, tracing the spiderweb pattern he'd memorized weeks ago? Wondering why he bothered?
---
The house was a grungy relic at the end of Frat Row, its porch sagging under kegs and cigarette butts. Music thumped from inside, distorted alt rock, angry and loud. Alex pushed through the door into a wall of heat and body odor. Overwhelmingly male: guys in flannels and beanies, shouting over each other about video games and girls who weren't there. A few women hovered on the periphery, looking bored or uncomfortable. Mostly it was testosterone and cheap beer.
Jake spotted him from the kitchen, already flushed. "Alex, dude! Thought you'd bail." He clapped him on the back, spilling beer on his shoe. "This is Trevor. He's the one."
Trevor was scrawny, mid twenties, matted dreads and a fractal tattoo creeping up his neck. His eyes had the glassy permanence of someone who'd seen too many sunrises from the wrong direction. "Sup," he said. "Upstairs is for lightweights. Basement's where the real thing happens. You ever done DMT?"
Alex shook his head, mouth dry.
"First time's always the strongest," Trevor said. "Entities, machines, the whole deal. Changes your perspective, man."
They descended into the basement. Concrete floors stained with god knows what, peeling posters of 90s bands, a single bare lightbulb dangling from a cord like a noose. A circle of eight guys sat on milk crates and ratty rugs, passing a glass pipe. The air was hazy, smelling of burnt plastic and herbs. Everyone looked hollowed out, the kind of hollow that comes from too many bad decisions and not enough sleep.
Alex squeezed into the circle next to Jake. The bearded guy beside him didn't acknowledge him.
Trevor relit the pipe, flame dancing in the dim light. "Three hits, hold each for ten. Let it pull you. Don't fight it."
One by one, the guys inhaled. Faces contorted, eyes rolled. Exhaled vapor shimmered oddly, seemed to hang in the air longer than it should. One guy started giggling, then just... stopped, slumped against the wall.
Jake went next, taking his hits smoothly. He leaned back, eyes fluttering closed, a blissful smile spreading. "Colors, man. So many..."
Then it was Alex's turn.
His hands shook as he took the pipe. The glass was warm, slick with residue he didn't want to think about. He brought it to his lips and inhaled.
The first hit burned, chemicals, hot plastic, something charred. He held it, counting to ten, feeling a buzz creep into his skull like fog rolling in. The room began to shimmer slightly at the edges. Second hit: walls breathed. Colors intensified. Sounds stretched. He could hear Jake's voice like it was coming through water.
Third hit, he went all in. Sucked in as much as his lungs could hold. Held it until spots bloomed in his vision.
When he exhaled, the world didn't end. It transformed.
---
A low hum started in his ears, building, building, until it consumed everything. The basement dissolved like watercolor. The guys' faces stretched and warped, their voices deepening into distorted drones that seemed to come from underwater.
Then gravity inverted.
He was falling. Not tumbling, falling, a pure vertical plunge through something that wasn't air but felt heavier. No wind, no sensation except the awful certainty of descent. Colors streaked past him, colors that didn't have names: ultraviolet that screamed in his mind, infrared that whispered secrets he'd never asked to know, reds that burned like the inside of his own regrets made visible.
His body was gone. He was just consciousness now, a point of awareness spiraling downward through layers of reality, each one peeling away like skin, revealing something raw underneath. Panic surged: I'm dying. This is death. But it wasn't death. It was something else, a shedding. A stripping down.
He fell for what felt like hours. His mind fractured into its component parts: memories, fears, the weight of every disappointed hope. He saw himself in fragments: ten years old and friendless, fifteen and invisible, nineteen and still invisible. Would he always be invisible?
The fall became impossible to endure. Something had to give.
It gave.
Alex didn't land so much as arrive. His consciousness solidified in a space that existed outside ordinary logic. An infinite expanse of hallways that stretched into forever, walls made of shifting geometric patterns that pulsed with a life of their own. The air, or whatever medium existed here, vibrated at frequencies that resonated in his core, making his nonexistent body sing at pitches he couldn't consciously hear but could feel in the essence of whatever he was.
Entities moved at the edges of his perception.
Not hostile, but profound in a way that triggered pure terror. One was a vortex of light and fractals, each rotation revealing new dimensions, universes nested inside universes. Its center was lined with eyes, thousands of them, each pupil a galaxy. It saw him. All of him. Every shame, every moment of cowardice, every time he'd chosen silence instead of connection. The weight of its knowing was unbearable.
Another entity was a geometric impossibility, a shape that folded in on itself endlessly, existing in more dimensions than his brain could process. It hummed concepts directly into his consciousness, not words but truths: the self is an illusion, all things are one, consciousness is the fabric of reality. The information poured in like fire. Too much. Wrong frequency.
A third entity approached, a colossal orb of interlocking gears and crystalline structures, rotating with mechanical precision. Its presence carried an offer: Come. See the truth.
He was pulled forward. Or he walked. Movement was meaningless here. The orb opened, revealing a vast interior: a machine of divine architecture, all golden light and impossible mechanics, a cosmic engine churning realities like butter. Gears the size of planets rotated against each other, sparks of creation spiraling off in bursts of color that made the aurora look dull.
He passed through the first chamber.
Inside, time looped backward. He relived moments in reverse: a conversation with his mother that ended with him not being born, playing basketball as a kid before he forgot how, the moment he first felt lonely unwinding itself. Raw. Painful. He tried to move past it, but the machine held him there, grinding against that old wound, showing him how deep it went.
The second chamber branched into infinite pathways. Alternate versions of Alex stretched out in fractals: Alex who'd made the soccer team, confident and bright; Alex who'd killed himself junior year of high school; Alex who'd become a lawyer, a doctor, a nothing; infinite variations, each one equally real, equally him. The machine was showing him that every version of himself he could have been was here, was already happening, was always happening. The probability branches felt like infinite death.
The third chamber was worse.
His atoms began to vibrate apart. He could feel them separating, dispersing into the void. The machine was deconstructing him, breaking him down to components, and he screamed, a soundless scream that echoed through eternity. The pain was absolute, total. Or was it pleasure? He couldn't tell anymore. Both. Neither. His essence pulled in opposite directions until it felt like tearing.
Then something shifted.
A realization, crystalline and clear: This is all me. All of this. I'm doing this to myself. The machine wasn't external. It was his mind, deconstructing itself, trying to understand what it was made of. The panic began to fade, replaced by something like acceptance.
The machine hummed louder, vibrating at a new frequency.
In that frequency, everything changed.
---
Snap.
The basement swam into focus. The lightbulb swinging lazily. The guys' faces, watching him curiously. Alex blinked, disoriented, his chest heaving. Everything felt wrong, too small, wrong angles.
"How long?" His voice came out wrong. Higher. Softer. Almost melodic.
Trevor checked his phone. "Fifteen minutes, dude. You were gone. Really gone." He tilted his head, studying him. "You okay, Alexis?"
Alexis.
The name didn't register for a moment. Then it hit, settling into his mind like it had always been there. But it hadn't. His name was Alex. Wasn't it?
She sat up slowly, and her body didn't move right.
Her hands were smaller, fingers slender where they'd been blunt. Hair brushed her shoulders, long, wavy, silky. The weight of it felt foreign, wrong. She looked down. Jeans fit differently, hugging at hips that curved in ways hips shouldn't curve. Her chest—
She touched it. Soft. Rounded.
"No." The word came out small. "No, no, no."
Panic rose like floodwater. She scrambled to her feet, legs feeling strange, off balance. The room spun. In a cracked mirror on the wall, a face stared back. Not her face. Not his face. A face that was almost familiar, Alex's features but reshaped, softened, with wider eyes and full lips and skin that looked unbelievably delicate.
A woman's face.
"What the fuck?" she whispered, hands moving to her chest, her face, her hair, exploring this new geography like she was mapping a country she'd never wanted to visit. The guys exchanged glances.
"Yo, Alexis, you good?" one of them asked. "Bad trip?"
Alexis. Why did they keep calling her that? "I'm not, my name is Alex. I'm—" She looked down at her body again, at the undeniable reality of it. At the absence. "Oh god. Oh god, what happened?"
Jake stood, moving toward her carefully, like approaching a spooked animal. "Alexis, hey. You're okay. You're just tripping. Look, your name is Alexis, remember? We've been friends since orientation. We both hate psych class?"
"No." Memories crashed together like cars in a wreck. She was male. She was. The dorm, the depression, the concrete ceiling she'd traced a thousand times. That was real. But also: sleepovers, makeup routines, her mother saying "my daughter," years of being Alexis compressed into the architecture of her mind like they'd always been there.
Both versions were perfect. Both felt true.
"I need air," she gasped, pushing past them toward the stairs.
Jake followed her up, through the crowd of guys on the main floor who suddenly looked different now, some leering, some leering and looking away ashamed, all of them suddenly aware of her in a way they hadn't been before. Outside, the October night was sharp and cold, but it didn't help. The panic wasn't about temperature.
"We should go to urgent care," Jake said quietly, pulling out his phone. "Get you checked out."
She didn't argue.
---
The urgent care waiting room was fluorescent lit purgatory: coughing kids, exhausted parents, the beep of vitals machines. A nurse took them back quickly, eyeing Alexis's tear streaked face with the expression of someone who'd seen a thousand bad decisions walk through the door.
Dr. Ramirez was a woman in her fifties, salt and pepper hair pulled back tight, glasses on a chain, the kind of professional exhaustion that came from working nights. She listened to Jake's halting explanation: "She smoked something at a party. Had a reaction. Thinks she's... someone else. A guy."
Dr. Ramirez didn't blink. She checked Alexis's vitals, pulse racing, pupils dilated like dinner plates. Shone a light in her eyes. Asked her name.
"Alex," Alexis said. Then: "Alexis. I don't, both. Both are—"
"Depersonalization and derealization, common with hallucinogens," the doctor said to Jake, then turned to her. "How much did you take?"
"Just some DMT. At a party."
"Breakthroughs?" Dr. Ramirez's tone suggested she knew the answer.
Alexis nodded miserably.
The doctor set down her clipboard. "Here's what's going to happen. You're experiencing drug-induced psychosis. It will pass. However, if you continue insisting that you're experiencing reality distortion, if you can't accept your actual biological state, we'll need to put you on a 72-hour psychiatric hold. Involuntary admission. You'll spend three days in a hospital while we evaluate you, run tests, sedate you if necessary." She let that sink in. "So you can either accept that you're having a very intense hallucination from a powerful drug, or you can continue claiming you've switched bodies, and I'll have to follow protocol. Your choice."
The threat was clear. Crystalline.
Alexis swallowed hard. Her throat felt like sandpaper. "I'm... I'm okay. I'm just tripping. It's the drug."
"Smart," Dr. Ramirez said. She wrote a prescription. "Lorazepam, one every four hours if needed. Avoid substances. And next time? There might not be a next time if you cause permanent damage. Brain damage, psychotic break that doesn't heal. These things can linger."
Alexis nodded, took the prescription, the pamphlet about substance abuse, the discharge papers. Nothing said: Your body is different. Your life has changed. You are no longer who you were. But that was implied in every clinical sentence.
Outside, the October air was sharp but didn't help. Nothing helped.
Jake walked her back to the dorm, Hawthorne Hall, room 312. She knew the way now, memories aligning. The campus paths were the same but felt tilted, like she was seeing them through warped glass. At the door to her room, Jake hesitated.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have pushed you to do it. That was my bad."
She wanted to be angry at him, but she couldn't make it stick. "It's okay. Just... a bad reaction."
"Yeah. Bad reaction." He hugged her awkwardly, his arm around her in a way he'd probably never hugged Alex. Different now. Everything was different now. "Text me tomorrow?"
"Sure."
He left.
She stood at her door for a long moment, hand on the knob, before pushing it open.
The room was both familiar and alien. Same posters on the walls, the Velvet Underground, some indie bands she didn't remember hanging up, but now there was a makeup vanity that hadn't been there in Alex's memory. Lipsticks and eyeshadow palettes in colors she'd never wear. Or would wear. Had worn her whole life, apparently.
Clothes in the closet mixed: grungy band tees and hoodies, but also dresses, blouses, things Alex had never owned.
She stripped, standing naked in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door.
The body staring back was objectively beautiful in a way that felt obscene. Pale skin, delicate collarbones, small waist, the soft curve of breasts, everything proportioned like it had been designed by committee. Hair falling down past her shoulders in waves. Legs that seemed impossibly long. A face that was heart shaped and symmetrical and completely wrong.
She traced a hand down her stomach, across her hips. It was real. All of it. Skin warm, responsive. She could feel it.
On her nightstand, there were photos. Alexis with her mother, laughing. Alexis at summer camp in a bikini. Alexis at a party surrounded by friends, arm around another girl, both of them gorgeous and happy and connected in ways Alex had never been.
Alexis at graduation, in a dress.
She'd been Alexis for nineteen years. All of her. The entire architecture of her life.
So why did she remember being Alex?
She got into bed, the sheets were soft, had a floral scent, were a dusty pink color, and stared at the ceiling. The cracks in the plaster didn't make the same pattern as her dorm ceiling. Different room. Different building. Different world.
The trip replayed on a loop: the fall, the entities, the machine that had ground her down, deconstructed her, shown her the infinite variations of herself existing simultaneously. And then, what? A choice? A reality shift? A breakdown so complete that her mind had simply rewired her sense of self to match this new existence?
She lay awake through the night, watching shadows move across the wall, waiting for something to change back. Waiting for the punchline. The dream to end.
It didn't.
By dawn, Alexis understood: this wasn't temporary. The machine hadn't broken her. It had rebuilt her. And she had no idea how to live as what she'd become.
She got out of bed and looked in the mirror again. The same face stared back.