Brent Halvorson, LB, San Francisco 49ers The New World of SwapTech chapter 4 by deleted_user

The alarm screamed at 4:30 a.m., a sound as brutal and unyielding as a blitzing safety. Brent Halvorson’s hand shot out from under the duvet and slammed it silent. The room, a minimalist box in a high-rise with a view of the San Francisco skyline, was pitch black. He didn’t need light. His body knew the routine.

He swung his legs out of bed, his bare feet hitting the cool hardwood floor. Two hundred and sixty pounds of lean muscle, honed for a single purpose: to hit other large men as hard as humanly possible. He padded to the bathroom, didn’t flick on the light, and pissed in the dark. The toilet groaned under his weight when he sat. He scrolled through his phone, checking sports news, ignoring the faint glow that illuminated the powerful slabs of his quadriceps.

Gym clothes were laid out from the night before. Compression shorts, a grey sweatshirt with the 49ers logo faded from countless washes. He dressed quickly, his movements efficient, economical. A protein shake was already mixed in the blender bottle in the fridge. He gulped it down in three long swallows, the chalky vanilla flavor a familiar penance.

The streets were empty at 5 a.m. His truck, a hulking black F-250, felt like an extension of himself. The engine roared to life, a sound of pure power. He drove to the private athletes’ gym he owned a membership to, the one with the reinforced racks and plates heavy enough to challenge him. His mind was already there, running through the day’s regimen. Squats. Deadlifts. Box jumps. His body was a tool, and today was for sharpening the edge.

He pulled into the lot, the only car there. The sky was beginning to lighten from black to a deep, bruised purple. He killed the engine, enjoying the silence for a moment before the grind began.

And then the world turned white.

It wasn't a light. It was the absence of everything else. A silent, blinding flash that consumed the interior of his truck, the parking lot, the world. There was no sound, no heat, no shockwave. Just a sudden, total sensory overload followed by an immediate and violent wrongness.

His first thought was that he’d been in an accident. His body was screaming. It felt like every muscle fiber was being unraveled at once. A searing, deep ache radiated from his core outward. He looked down at his hands on the steering wheel, and they were… shrinking. The thick, calloused fingers, the knuckles scarred from years on the field, were pulling back, smoothing out, the veins retreating under suddenly softer skin.

A sharp, cracking pain shot through his shoulders as they narrowed, the deltoids seeming to melt away. The massive expanse of his chest tightened, the pectorals receding, the hard plane softening into something else. He felt a bizarre, pulling sensation there, a tingling ache that culminated in two points of acute pressure. He looked down, horrified, as two small, firm bumps pushed against the inside of his sweatshirt.

“What the fuck,” he tried to say, but the voice that came out was not his. It was higher. Softer. It was a stranger’s voice.

A wave of nausea rolled through him as his gut clenched. The powerful V-taper of his torso, the defined obliques he’d carved for years, were dissolving. His waist cinched in, his hips flared out with a series of sickening pops. The compression shorts he wore were suddenly loose around his thighs, then painfully tight across his new, wider hips. The dense muscle of his legs softened, the definition blurring into longer, smoother curves.

The most profound horror was centered lower. A dizzying, empty feeling, a vacuum where there had always been solid, familiar weight. He frantically grabbed at the sweatshirt, yanking the fabric taut over his groin. The prominent bulge he’d woken up with, taken a piss with mere minutes ago, was gone. Completely. Utterly. There was nothing there but a flat, smooth expanse.

He was panting, the high, panicked breaths of a cornered animal. He fumbled for the rearview mirror, his new, slender fingers struggling with the adjustment. He tilted it down.

A woman’s face stared back at him.

It was framed by his same dirty-blond hair, but now it was longer, spilling over narrower shoulders. His jawline, once a hard, squared thing, was softer, more rounded. His brows were less heavy, his eyes—his same blue eyes—seemed larger, wider with terror. The face was pretty, in a shocked, athletic way. It was not his face.

He scrambled for the door handle, his strength gone, his movements uncoordinated. He fell out of the truck, his body landing with a jolt on the asphalt. He pushed himself up, stumbling toward the gym’s glass front door, using it as a mirror.

The reflection showed a woman. A tall woman, maybe five-foot-ten instead of his six-three, but still tall. She—he—was wearing his clothes, which now hung comically large in some places and were stretched taut in others. The sweatshirt draped over a slender frame, but hinted at the new curves beneath. The woman in the reflection moved when he moved. She mimicked the absolute panic on his face.

Brent brought a hand—a soft, smooth hand—up to touch his—her—face. The cheekbone was higher. The skin was smooth where a five-o’clock shadow should be rasping.

He looked down at himself again, at the foreign body he was trapped in. He ran his hands over his flat chest, then down over the narrow waist and the shocking swell of his hips. He cupped himself between the legs, a frantic, searching gesture.

Nothing. Just a soft, confusing fold of fabric and flesh.

A raw, guttural sound of disbelief tore from his throat. It came out as a choked sob.

“No,” the woman’s voice whispered into the cool morning air. “No, no, no.”

He was Brent Halvorson. Linebacker. Number fifty-eight. And he was standing in a parking lot at dawn in a body that belonged to someone else.