The Switchboard

Chapter 1
Seeking Something New

Chapter Description: Maya searches for the perfect gift for her 10th anniversary with her husband.

Ten year anniversaries are a time for celebration, of love, of passion…

But for a certain shopper at the mall, the prospect of the big 10 years of being married to the man of her dreams seemed to loom over her head as a cloud raining guilt and thundering regret. Dressed in a knee-length skirt and sleeveless turtleneck with semi-fashionable open-toe heels, the Japanese woman’s long black hair shone a sleek shine from the mall’s fluorescent lights as she approached her destination with a guilty and anxious pitting in her flat stomach.

It wasn’t that Mrs. Maya Tanaka Jefferson hated her husband, or being married to him. Far from it, her anxiety and uneasiness stemmed from her destination. Every step towards the adult-novelties and miscellaneous paraphernalia shop in the dark corner of the building seemed like another step towards the electric chair.

“This is stupid…” Maya groaned to herself under her breath, her slight remains of ‘Engrish’ barely noticeable in her nearly repressed Japanese accent. She’d become fluent in English by high school back in her home-country, and the past ten years of marital bliss with her husband Eric had caused his American accent and pronunciations to rub off on her. Living in America had also changed her behavior as well. Her parents’ conservative upbringing had been chipped at by her teenage desires to be independent as a woman, and her knack for software programming allowed her to become an upstart entrepreneur in the foreign country she now called ‘home’. As icing on the cake, America’s concept of women’s rights overthrew the more old-fashioned plan of being a good Japanese housewife her parents had envisioned for her.

This did not mean Maya didn’t want romance and security, and at the age of 23 she found that in a client’s relative she’d been introduced to at a formal shindig. It was as if Eric Jefferson had been born JUST to meet Maya Tanaka. After the wedding came the honeymoon, and upon returning home, both lovebirds remained steadfast in their goals; Maya’s for expanding her own (successful) business creating security software, and Eric’s to take over the family’s industrial diamond-mining business. Despite busy schedules and long hours overseas or on the computer, Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson never failed to make time for one another several times a month, coordinating vacations and downtimes to spend nights and weeks together to enjoy.

So why, why was Maya heading to an adult novelties shop? She’d wondered this from the moment she even thought of doing so. Nonchalantly glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one she knew would see her, she hurried her walking pace into the shop of things well-to-do people like her wouldn’t even think about.

The musty scent of hooka pipes, cigars, and sex-related items forced Maya to shudder a bit.

“Good morning, ma’am,” chirped a heavily tattooed and pierced man clad in a black T-shirt and khaki slacks from a sales counter. It was obvious he was trying not to grin too much at seeing Maya jump a little.

“Um, hi…” the apprehensive wife gulped. ‘There’s still time,’ Maya thought to herself. ‘I can turn back now…’

“Looking for anything in particular today, miss?” the punk-ish lithe man asked warmly.

“Uh, well…ah...” Maya tried to think of something to say. The urge to excuse herself and flake out was overpowering her now...

…Until the thought of her husband panting and moaning like never before in sex gave her an electric strike to her spine that she managed to reply,

“I’m …looking for something to…liven up things tonight,” she mentally gawked at herself. “It’s…our tenth-year anniversary, and…well…I want our night in bed to be…”

“Ah, the big one-oh,” the ink and gold-encrusted employee smiled happily as he left the counter to meet the woman closer. “Tell me, have you two done anything…special before?” Maya blushed and was about to smack the girlish man before he added. “No details, just a simple yes or no.”

“Oh,” she sighed in relief. “No. No…uh…toys or costumes…or wh-whips. We’re not really into that kind of…stuff…” Maya coughed.

“But you still want to make tonight something exciting, yes?” the deviously-adorned cashier asked with an honest smile.

“Y-Yeah…This sounds pretty ridiculous, right?” Maya laughed weakly as she scratched the back of her head, ruffling her long ebony mane.

“Not really.”

“Wait, really?” the programmer/wife blinked in mild shock.

“You’re not the first to say all that, nor will you be the last,” the overly-jeweled and inked employee smirked. “Something of your requirements isn’t in the open like all you see,” he pointed to the shop’s erotica-inventory. “What you desire lies somewhere in our more exclusive merchandise. Care to see?” he extended his hand in an oddly gentlemanly way.

“Um, alright,” Mrs. Jefferson nodded uneasily as she hesitantly took his hand and was lead to a door labeled ‘Preferred Customers Only’ complete with a card-scan lock the store-employee accessed with a badge hanging from his pocket.

As the two entered, Maya was honestly surprised at the sights and smells of the specialties room. The pungent odor of the main shop dissipated, giving way to a more sterile and clean smell of this locked-away part of the shop. Even more, gone were the ghastly shelves adorned with phallic objects and packages written in electric neon colorations.

The room looked more like a store stocked with seemingly mundane items that one would not even mention in the same sentence as ‘sex’. Board games, refrigerated sodas of unknown but welcoming-looking brands, a row of spare tires, and even a long bookshelf with what Maya automatically recognized as Japanese animation goods that any family-friendly anime-shop would have.

“Um…Sorry, but,” the confused Maya stared at the inventory. “How are any of these regular things going to help me? I mean seriously, car-tires?” she snorked a bit.

The bejeweled and tattooed shop keeper smiled with pure friendliness as he walked over to one row of products that seemed to resemble a switchboard from an audio-mixing system.

“You seem like a woman that is pretty realistic,” he mused while taking out the switchboard. “Or rather, you’re a realist, I guess I should say. You don’t believe in magic or hocus-pocus. Right.”

“I make my living programming anti-virus and malware security software,” Maya smirked back with her arms crossed.

“So you’re the ‘I’ll believe when I see it’ type.” A nod by the Japanese woman answered his question. “Then if you’ll please, place you hand on this little flat panel,” the goth presented a flat-black screen on the far right of the board. Rolling her eyes, Maya placed her flattened palm onto the black panel, only to squeak suddenly from an electric jolt that went through her hand and seemed to hit her spinal cord up to her neck.

“Wh-What was that for!?” she scowled, her cheeks reddening a bit.

“Easy now. You’re synched with this device now. Now, look in the mirror to your left,” he pointed to a full-body mirror a few feet from where Maya had been standing.

“Fine…” she eyed the salesman as she gazed at herself. To her right she heard a series of clicks from the switchboard being adjusted, wondering what was the shop-keeper trying to fool her with.

Nothing seemed to happen until Maya noticed something she’d been dreading recently: a grey hair on her bangs. Glancing to the side to check on her companion in this odd shop, she tried to see why something so glaringly obvious missed her attention when she got ready a few hours ago. Then she felt her heart race as she noticed another unwelcomed sight. Her face was still young at 33, but for the first time she noticed her laugh-lines forming. Before she could worry about them, something even more horrifying caught her attention.

The grey hairs had now multiplied…and were slowly cascading their coloration throughout her hair. All the while, her skin grew more aged with wrinkles slowly conquering her once beautiful face. She tried to feel her face to confirm that it wasn’t just a mirror-trick, but instead found that her own hands were rapidly losing their slender and perfectly manicured shapes as the skin became sagging, veins rising from her hands’s back and her knuckles folding into more wrinkled skin. Gazing up at her face, her mouth dropped open in terror as she was confronted with her now aged complexion and stallion-grey head of hair. Feeling the sagging of her own face, Maya’s breathing grew ragged and hoarse.

“WH-What are you-!?” she gasped as she realized her own voice had lost its silver pitch and tone and was now ragged and befitting a woman in her sixties. She then noticed her body at long last had started to hunch over, her arms losing the toned strength she’d worked so hard to maintain as her flat belly grew fatty and hung over her belt-line just as her once proud C-cups steadily drooped and hung like fleshy yams. And then, as she gazed at the strange man before her, she finally realized that as she grew frailer and uglier, there was a corresponding series of clicks on a dial synchronized with the changes. Age finally overcame her shock as she hunched to the side, breathing heavily and losing energy rapidly.

And then the clicking stopped. Exhausted, shaking, and weak, Maya pursed her wrinkled lips and licked them uneasily, noting that half her teeth seemed to have disappeared somehow.

“What…What have you…?” she wheezed in her airy, old voice.

“Given you a taste of what just this one product can do, miss,” the deviously-decorated man smiled warmly. “Fret not, this is all perfectly reversible…and then some,” he grinned as he steadily turned the dial again. But this time, Maya’s body felt the reverse of before. Looking back at the mirror, Maya gazed in awe as the decrepit old woman who looked no younger than 80 went backwards in time. The split ends of wispy white hair smoothed and became a healthier grey, then blackening to her luscious ebony waterfall of long hair. Her wrinkles receded slowly, eroding back as the last of the laugh lines and bags became the gorgeous smooth and vibrant skin of before. As her energy replenished, she gasped in joy as her breasts retracted and reshaped back to their once proud and perky shape while her flabby body contracted back to its curved and toned shape she knew so well.

“There we go, back to when you first started,” the shop-keeper smiled as he flicked a switch, and like voodoo, Maya felt a hollow click within her body at the exact moment too. “And now you’re no longer synched to this board. What did you think, ma’am?”

“C-Can that thing…make people younger than they are?” was the first thing Maya asked in giddy apprehension.

“This one can,” the goth salesman nodded as he placed the switchboard back on its shelf. “However,” he added, sweet nectar to Maya’s ears as he now had her FULL attention. “The top-of-the-line model can do MUCH more than alter users’ ages.”

“Such as…?”

“Size of body parts and people,” he grinned. “Body-types of users, relationship positions, genders, and even species.” He remained silent for a moment to let his customer digest the information, before adding the cherry to the top. “But the best part about the high-end model,” he purred. “Is that no matter how much you change yourself and or your lover, the world will act as if you’ve always been that way.”

“Bullshit!” Maya exclaimed with a toothy grin.

“I shit you not, ma’am,” the owner of the strange store replied smugly. “How’s this? I’ll rent you our only top-of-the-line model for just tonight…for just $25.”

“What’s the catch?” Maya remembered to control her excitement just in case, her shrewd business skills finally coming back in action.

“After 12 o’clock tomorrow afternoon, all of your changes will reset back to your true forms and the device will automatically lock out any changes without my tinkering. And before you think about altering it yourself, I don’t think you want to try opening up something that will result in a Chernobyl-esque reactor meltdown.

Sweat accumulated upon Maya’s brow as she gulped.

“Easy now, miss,” the salesman chuckled. “You’d need a pickup truck hitting it head-on at 120mph just to crack it open, and a junkyard compactor to risk the nuclear meltdown, so fret not.”

Thinking it over, her excitement of such power and opportunities overtook her judgment in the end. Maya finally asked, “How much for the unit if I want to keep it after tomorrow?”

“Ah,” the shopkeeper smiled. “That will cost you $80,000. Small price to pay when you think about it.”

The price was barely within affordability for Maya and her husband. They’d have to sell Eric’s custom Harley and most if not all of her jewelry just to name a few things. But…that thought of she and her husband enjoying themselves like never before, as well as the countless possibilities for them to use the switchboard for…It would be worth selling even their summer home along with all their prized possessions too. Looking back at the shop-keeper, whose appearance no longer irked her in the least, Maya finally asked,

“Does it come with a manual?”

“I’ll include it with a complementary gift-wrap,” the shop-keeper smiled with a nod.

To be continued…