Alan Bixby and the Lab 7 Incident The New World of SwapTech chapter 7 by deleted_user

The 3rd-floor hallway door swung open—Lab 7 in disarray. The research team was scrambling, though “team” was a loose term now. What had once been six men and two women was now a room of eight women, all talking over each other in a cocktail of panic and technical jargon.

“Check the recompiler logs again,” someone snapped. “We need to isolate the trigger event!”

“I did—twice! It’s not a single event. It’s a cascade!”

Alan recognized the voices—once low and familiar, now pitched higher, frantic, but still theirs. Dr. Sanjay Raman—now a petite woman in oversized safety goggles—was gesturing wildly at a chart, while Dr. Landon Oakley was typing furiously, his lab coat pulled tight across a newly expanded bust.

“I thought the targeting boundary was locked,” another woman said, pacing. “Why the hell is it still spreading?”

“I told you the containment field was sketchy after the last QA run!”

Alan pressed himself against the wall, staying out of sight. He didn’t need to announce himself. He needed to listen.

“The pulse didn’t just hit us,” someone muttered. “We thought it would stay inside the lab network. But if it jumped via the linked neural mesh…”

“…then every male within the receiver radius…”

They trailed off.

Silence hung in the air. Then someone said it: “We’ve just triggered a live cascade on a populated urban grid.”

Someone else gasped. “Oh my God. How many people?”

That was when Jasmine, the nearest researcher, a tall woman with smudged eyeliner and trembling hands, looked up—and saw Alan.

She blinked. Stared. Then her mouth fell open. “Bixby?”

The entire lab turned.

Alan stood there, frozen in the doorway, looking like a lingerie model caught sneaking into a server room.

“You’re not one of us,” someone whispered.

“No,” said another, her voice suddenly low and frightened. “He wasn’t in the test chamber.”

A third murmured, “Oh no. Oh no no no…”

It was the moment of realization.

The lab hadn’t just turned themselves into women.

They’d turned everyone nearby into women.

And Alan Bixby was the first unexpected proof.