The assistants were on call so hanging around the machines was not required, but many did anyway. Chris approached the alley where the most commonly requested machine from his area stood. This machine had placed itself where the alley joined the street. The city had installed a lamp that kept the machine and half the alley lit even in shadow or night. He spotted his co-worker Andy standing there under the lamp.
"Hi," said Andy, folding up his blue and white Changes Anytime headband as Chris approached. "Happy shift change. We met the other day... you were Chris, right?"
"Yeah."
"The other guy already left. It says here that you signed up to do the whole shift yourself as two people?"
"Yeah, I finally decided to try it. I don't need a fancy change, just copy me as a guy and a girl." Each shift had to have two personnel because otherwise, the customer could turn the assistant inanimate, and put him in the closet for three years. That had happened once in the entire history of Changes Anytime, and it hadn't taken long to track the customer down using the camera footage and his credit card number. Nevertheless, the bad publicity forced them to put "safety measures" into effect.
Chris and Andy entered the machine. A few minutes later, Andy came out unchanged; Chris exited the machine as two people, male and female versions of each other. Andy said, "There you go!"
It was a little confusing for Chris but he had tried multiple bodies briefly before. He leaned against the side of the alley with four hands while he tried remembering how he was supposed to move. One body was Chris and one was what Chris would have looked like if he had grown up as a girl--a little shorter, a softer face, and with the obvious bodily differences as well as some cosmetic ones (her hair, the same shade of chestnut as her twin's, was much longer). If identical twins could have been opposite sex, that was what they would have looked like.
"Hi Andy," said Chris. After briefly opening his mouth on the wrong body and catching himself, he spoke out of the woman's mouth, "I'm Tina!"
"Not a very original name," said Andy. "I assume it's short for 'Christina' or something like that?"
"Of course," said Tina, "but I'm not trying to hide that we're the same person."
"Still, a girl?"
"Well, I know how it goes. One assistant uses the machine on the customer, and the other makes sure that the customer doesn't screw over the first one. I Venned into both assistants. Only the one with at least half the mass can use the machine, so I need to know who that is. If one is a girl, it has to be the other one. Unless I want to drag a scale out here and start weighing bodies."
"You could have become a child, or a dwarf, or a thin man instead. Or...." He proudly said, "you could let me give one body heavy wings or a big tail. I did this great Godzilla tail yesterday. They're really pretty hard to do while not messing up and keeping the rest of the body the same."
"No," said Chris. "I was planning on doing this change anyway whether or not I get to use it on the job."
"Ah, the 'I don't have a date' gambit."
"You laugh, but I'm trying it. If I'd like to have an opposite sex double, my opposite sex double would like to have one too, which is me, right?"
Andy shrugged.
Then Tina winked at Andy and said "Andy... you know what I need from you, you handsome fellow...."
Andy was having none of it and said "My headband."
Tina stopped the act, laughed, and said "Right," in unison with Chris. Chris took the headband from Andy and adjusted it onto Tina's head. Since it had the company's name printed on it, the Tina body could not have been Venned already wearing one.
The final step was for Andy and Chris to enter the machine again. First Chris hit the abort button, breaking the connection between the two bodies. Tina blinked and looked around again, as if she had been startled by something. Then Andy changed Chris into himself and they both exited the machine.
******************
Copying a girl version of yourself (the gender ratio among Venners of this type was 2:1 men to women) was, like many types of Venn, something that only a few people did. But even a tiny percentage of a big population meant that there were plenty of blogs, forums, how-to guides, and even a few articles about the subject in real paper magazines. It had briefly had its own media panic, which fortunately had already passed, and burned out, to the point where using the word "Narcissus" as an insult sounded as quaint as accusing D&D players of being in league with the Devil.
Of course, it still didn't hold a candle to the popularity of elves and mermaids.
After the shift ended, Chris and Tina looked at each other and Chris said, "Well, we were going to get dinner somewhere?"
Tina grinned; she was about to say the exact same thing, but had been beaten by a fraction of a second. Instead she said "Sure!" and they headed off to the 9th Street Diner. Neither one had named the restaurant.
They entered and the waitress led them to a table, where they sat down. She gave each one a menu and left. Eventually a different waitress came by again and asked "Are you ready for your order?"
Chris said "Yes" and added, "I'll take the quesadillas. And a Coke."
Tina said "I'll.... I was going to have the quesadillas, but I'll take the veggie burger and fries instead. Also a Coke."
The waitress wrote down the order and left.
Chris said, "I guess this is it."
"It's weird," said Tina. "I'm trying to follow the recommendations, and I know you are."
Chris nodded. "First recommendation: Don't expect your other self to do something you wouldn't."
Tina said, "Well, the first recommendation is to make sure our bodies' orientations match. If I'm a girl, my body likes guys and I can go with it, especially when it's a guy I know."
Chris said, "Right. Gay people do exist. What if your body is gay and you're a girl and your body doesn't like guys after all?"
Tina grinned and got up, then snuggled up to Chris for a second. "I think we're okay there."
Returning to her seat, she said, "So the not-first first recommendation. If you're both doing the same thing--eating, board games, or even sex after considering orientation--it'll be like you're made for each other. But if you want someone to serve you dinner naked...."
Chris continued, from the same memories of the same suggestions, "If you want to be served dinner naked, but you don't want to serve dinner naked, things will go badly."
Tina said, "How did they say it? 'You can be the same person, but on different sides.' You have to compromise, just like you would if you were two people who weren't Venned. People think that you can make an instant girlfriend without needing people skills and it's not true."
"Funny how we end up talking about stuff we know. It's like..."
"Like thinking things over in your head," said Tina. "What you're going to do, whether you really want to do something."
They abruptly stopped talking as the waitress returned and set a Coke in front of each of them.
When she left, Chris asked, "So does that mean I get naked dinner if I do something as nice for you?"
"Not with 16 hours on the timer, you don't. 9 hours now, I think, after all of tonight."
"Yeah, Tina, that was a bad night. I can't believe we got an inanimate request."
When Chris paused, Tina said, "Because if you're turning inanimate, someone else has to be there to take you away. That person can transform you, so you don't need to hire anyone."
Chris said, "Well, it was two teenagers. The machine didn't think the other one was over the age of consent."
"No, I could swear that she was just drunk. I smelled it, just barely."
"I didn't smell anything, Tina."
"Maybe you were distracted trying to get the transformation right. I was just chaperoning you, so I noticed it."
"Wait, does this mean we just had our first disagreement? We were continuing each other's ideas, until we weren't...."
Tina said, "... because it was something that didn't happen to us in the same way. Wait, we're doing it again."
"Yeah, it's easy to do. It's like twins finishing each other's sentences."
"Which happens mostly among teenagers trying to get a rise out of people."
"When twins are raised apart and they meet for the first time, they can have similar clothes, similar jobs, and they may have named their kids the same thing. Only we do it a lot more since we've only been different for a few hours. Do you think we should try to stop it or keep on with it?"
"I don't know," said Chris.
"Me neither. It's sort of fun, though."
The waitress set down two plates of food in front of them. Chris waved her down just before she left them again. "Hey, miss?" he said.
"What?"
"Here," he said, holding his phone out. "I'd like you to take a photo of us. Because we just disagreed on something."
"I don't understand, but sure."
"It's a private joke." Chris and Tina got up, stood right next to each other, and smiled for the camera, with Tina holding a french fry as if she was going to feed it to Chris. The waitress took the picture, handed the phone back, and left.
******************
After dinner, Chris and Tina went home to Chris's apartment.
They had planned to watch a run of the new online show "Revolution II". "Planned", of course, meaning that Chris had decided it before Venning. Tina seemed pretty happy with it anyway.
They settled down on the couch with some beers and marathoned four episodes. The series was a sci-fi show featuring a think tank that used the technology of the Venn machines to make, basically, superheroes.
After a heavy makeout session, but nothing more than that yet, they went to sleep in Chris's bed as two people. The next morning, Chris woke up as one.
******************
Chris dragged himself to the bathroom. Venn machines seemed to have been designed for safety. Someone who turned into a lion and ate a deer would not have their stomach explode when they changed back to a human. Nobody had ever killed themselves by having twice as much alcohol in their blood or twice as much waste in their intestines when a transformation ended. Still, as Chris sat on the toilet and nursed a hangover, he had to wonder.
The idea of becoming two people had come to him after a breakup with his girlfriend Carol, but only as a stray thought. At some point, he wasn't sure when, it had gone from "stray thought" to "considered seriously."
The transformation would produce separate people but they would understand each other and they would be together as friends and even as lovers. And since they would merge after at most three years, and probably a lot sooner depending on need, they would have to thoroughly understand both their separate identities and their single identity.
It sounded great, but it risked going wrong in terrible ways. Plenty of people tried it and had messy breakups with themselves because of personality clashes. Controlling personalities were especially bad for this since it was hard for them to compromise--only one of them could be in control. Merging two versions of the same person who can't get along was even worse. Some obsessed over the 'death' caused by an upcoming merge and even became suicidal. Some developed split personalities. Some just decided to turn into objects, which blunted the aspects of their mind that could feel hatred, or anything else.
Chris had spoken to Tina as though there was only one possible plan. He didn't want to look indecisive in front of his new girlfriend, after all. Tina had agreed; she didn't want to look indecisive in front of her new boyfriend. But there was not really one set of rules for how to do it; no plan was guaranteed.
His plan, as it was, was to gradually increase the length of his transformations. Get used to his partner as another person while they both had all the same experiences before creating years of separate experiences. Get used to having a few memories merge before he would routinely merge months or years of them.
So he tried thinking over his memories. Memories of Chris and Tina thinking in the same way tended to blur together. When were they thinking differently? Hmm... there was the TV show. She had immediately thought that the special effects had gotten better. She had said "Doesn't that flying scene look a lot better than it did last year?" and he readily agreed.
Not a big difference at all, but if they remembered different things, which one was him? It would be a mistake to think "I am Chris, that was Tina." Just because Tina is the one whose body vanished didn't mean that when their memories combine, Tina merged into Chris, as if she was an accessory. On the other hand, it made perfect sense to think "That was Chris back then, that was Tina back then." Chris now was a combination of Chris then and Tina then, not either one alone, even if he had the same name as one of them.
******************
Chris had finagled two days for which he was on call for only the "outside" position, so he didn't have to enter the machine. Changes Anytime didn't really have holidays since their employees had irregular hours and customers liked to use machines on their days off, but he had decided to take the upcoming Memorial Day weekend as a real holiday. This made five days total. Well, six days and five nights if they didn't change back until the morning; that was decently longer than 16 hours. He'd have to use a one month transformation and cut it off early.
This time, Chris decided to be one person with two bodies but without separating their minds. He had done it briefly, but never for almost a week. He wouldn't really be two people this way, but he could multitask the bodies and concentrate on two things at the same time. It was halfway to being separate and halfway to being merged--in a way it was more separation than a 16 hour complete split, and in a way it wasn't.
As Chris hung around the machine watching the other operator, he walked Tina around the block. Even though he had done this before, it still took a little getting used to. But soon Tina was walking around the block normally. When she returned he had the two bodies kiss and felt it from both sides. They parted again; it was easier to think in two different ways at once when they were in different environments.
After two days of practice before the weekend, the environment didn't matter.
Tina and Chris were walking separately and Tina passed by a shop window. She saw herself in the glass, dressed in the best fitting jeans and shirt that Chris could find, which were still a bit loose. "I need clothes," she thought.
Chris agreed. They'd have to do some shopping, especially since the whole idea was to be two people for an extended period of time. That implied clothes. "We should have enough money," he thought, "especially since we're usually doing two shifts."
Tina's split consciousness immediately knew that Chris had thought that, and thought in response, "It'll be a little late today but we could go tomorrow morning."
It felt a little funny. Chris remembered having thought that, knew that he did think that, but there was no continuity between that and his current thoughts since he was thinking two things at once. Trying to stop that, he felt a sense of surprise as his two trains of thought combined. He had known he was going to do that yet not known.
He maneuvered to the end of the street corner with one body to join up with the other body.
"Hi," said Tina.
"Hi yourself," said Chris. "How's being a girl?"
"As soon as I think the answer, you'll remember me thinking the answer. But all right. I just go with the flow. Whichever piece of our mind controls 'Tina' feels like it's right to wear women's clothes, to think guys are hot.... And, stop that."
"What?"
"Chris, you're undressing me in your mind."
"We're the same person with a gender flip. If I like girls and I'm attracted to us as a girl, you should like guys and be attracted to us as a guy."
"You mean, you think I'm mentally undressing you too?"
"Shouldn't you be?"
"Uh... Confession time. I am, Chris. But you know that it isn't completely the same when a girl looks at a guy and when a guy looks at a girl. It's hard to describe, but you're me, so you should know what I mean."
"That's fair. Wait, you were going to make a joke about girlfriends expecting you to read their mind, weren't you?"
"I wouldn't think of it, Chris! All right, I did think of it. But it is funny."
******************
Tina had been Venned in a clothed state. Clothes are usually labelled with their sizes. But Tina's "original" clothes had labels covered in strange marks that could have been some alien language.
"You don't know your sizes?" asked the salesclerk. "Are you Venned?"
"Well, yes," said Tina. "Do you get a lot of those?"
"Not a lot, but it's never meant anything else. Sometimes it's a sex change, sometimes just weight loss or someone's trying to turn into a celebrity. I won't ask which one you are." She narrowed her eyes and looked between Chris and Tina. "You do look awfully similar, though."
The clerk tried her best to measure or guess Tina's sizes, and then Tina started looking around. She would ask Chris if he thought some blouse or shoes or whatever looked good on her. Invariably, the answer was the same as Tina's. The truth was, they weren't really thinking very separately at this point. It was more like thinking something and then thinking back over what you just came up with. It was just as easy to edge into not multitasking as it was into multitasking, especially when both sides had the same thing on their mind.
Although Tina felt less embarrassed by the identical thoughts. Chris wouldn't want to wear women's clothes. Tina did. The meme was that well, your body likes something, and it affects your mind. That didn't seem right; your body couldn't want to wear high heels and carry a purse. It was more like "your body affects your self-image and the preexisting association between a self-image of that type in your mind...." That was too long to meme anyway.
"You're having a lot of sales here," said Tina.
Chris said, "I've been noticing that too."
"We have to have sales. Venn is competition--everyone can get Venned while carrying a stack of rags and turn into a person carrying a stack of clothes. At least it's hard to get a stack of clothes without doing them one at a time, and hard to make them fit. If they ever add something to make it easier like when they added the 'history' word, clothes departments will go out of business."
Chris and Tina ended up buying the shoes, a green purse which Tina immediately emptied her pockets into, and two days worth of clothes. They would have to get more later.
******************
Chris walked into the meeting hall. Chris and Tina knew a group of board gamers who had rented it out, and they wanted to play. "Hi everyone," said Chris. "This is Tina. We're... well..."
Tina added, "Venned. To tell the truth, there is no Tina. It's just that being Tina makes me feel like there is." Some of the group looked a little confused at that.
Chris said, "Just so nobody thinks we're trying to cheat. Two people trying to play the same game...."
Jason, a slightly older man sitting by the Words of Wisdom deck, said, "I never took you for a Venn person."
"Well," said Chris, "Venn people can never agree on who counts as Venn people anyway. Tina and I aren't Furvenns or Mods."
"Furvenns?"
"The group that does a lot of nonhuman transforms, related to furries. If you don't know what those are, it may take a while to explain. Mods means the kind of people who would also get piercings. Like "body mods." They have parts on their body that... Well, it doesn't just mean 'anyone with a change' even though it sounds like that."
"Hmm."
"We're not medical Venners either. There's probably a slang word for that, but I... we... don't know it. Also, our long-term plans are to have separate minds. Next time it'll really be me and Tina."
"Are you both playing now, if you're not separate people? You can sit at two tables, but I don't understand how you can play different games."
"It's funny thinking about two things at the same time, but we can manage. We can even disagree if we have different experiences."
Tina continued, "You know how people turned into animals feel like acting like those animals? If you're turned into two people, you want to act like two people."
Tina lost once and won once. Chris won twice. By now they had had enough practice that they never slipped and finished each other's sentences or mixed up which body was doing what.
When they had finished, Jason had suggested everyone go to a bar.
"Okay," said Chris. "But the Irish pub across the street isn't very Venn-friendly."
"Venn-friendly? But it's not obvious that you're Venned. You do look alike, but you're just humans. You don't look like elves or space people."
Chris said, "Identification. How can I prove that Tina is old enough to drink? We've been at it for less than a week. Tina never got a chance to get a driver's license."
"So a Venn-friendly bar is one that lets her go in without one?"
Tina answered, "No, every bar requires ID. But if you were plausibly Venned from the person on the license, and your signature matches, the bar legally can let you in without liability. It's just that some bars are a lot stricter on 'plausible' than other ones. Many will refuse to let two bodies in on one license no matter how similar they look."
Chris said, "Now, if we didn't look like the same person, we'd have to wait to get separate licenses...."
At the bar, the conversation soon turned to Chris and Tina's Venn. Everyone asked all sorts of questions, and Chris and Tina were a little surprised at how little the others knew about it. But they realized that a lot of Venn transformations were, after all, still a niche interest and many people never used the machines except for medical and safety purposes.
The only one who knew anything was Louise. Her teenage sister was proud that the machines treated her as able to consent, and she found the machines invaluable in her cosplay hobby. Which, as Louise pointed out, had rules of its own; most judges won't let Venn machines be used as a complete substitute for skill and effort. It mattered how important that demon tail was to your overall costume.
******************
"Well," said Chris after they had headed to their car, "it's getting late and this is about when I wanted to end this transformation. We can become two people again. Should we do it now or tomorrow when we start work?"
They were still saying things that were obvious to each other, which was natural with the same mind. Tina didn't need to answer the question.
"Hmm," said Chris. "Was that a machine by the McDonalds? I thought I saw one when we came here. Did you notice it? Oh, stupid question."
Tina chuckled a bit at having asked such a stupid question and answered, "Let's try it."
The next step in the plan was to stay separated for at least a week. They had several weeks left on the one month Venn, so they could go directly from one mind to a week of two minds, without anyone transforming them.
Chris hugged Tina and said "Bye."
"Bye," said Tina, but they smiled and both replied, "Neither of us is going anywhere."
Chris stepped into the machine and aborted the change. Suddenly he just had his one body, and Tina hers.
Tina hugged him again and said "Hi, Chris. It's been a while."
"Twenty seconds?" he said.
"Thirty I think. Hey, what's that?" she said, pointing to a flyer taped to the machine. "People with Improv playing at Vennfest? I never heard of that."
"Yeah, it's hard to hear something I haven't in those thirty seconds."
There was a worried look on Chris's face, but Tina said, "It's fine, Chris. I know, we're 'the same person, on different sides'. Joking is one side and being joked at is another, so being the same person won't keep me from getting offended. But not being Carol will. I like you; you can't make me angry that easily."
"When you put it that way you're right. Thanks for being so understanding."
"You're welcome."
******************
Vennfest was an event which took place at the local university. It covered the upper half of the campus and, aside from the food vendors that appeared at all such events, was well-attended by representatives from various Venn-related groups. Relatively few of them were Venned, at least in obvious ways. This wasn't ConVENNTion.
Chris and Tina passed by a transgender group's booth and then a larger booth set aside by the county hospital. Much of it was dedicated to the expansion of their pediatric wing, with a banner telling the world to "never forget the littlest ones who can't be Venned." Others called for an end to discrimination against the Venned, which they could certainly support.
Five people on a stage introduced themselves, but using four names. A man with a mustache and a slightly darker skinned woman, looking nothing alike, bowed to the audience under the name "Jessie". Then the leader spoke. "Hello, everyone. We of People With Improv have a regular show downtown at the old Theater Lobo. We were one of the first comedy groups to use Venning in our performances, years ago. Now, since this is Vennfest, I'll start with 'going to the festival'."
Audience members began to shout ideas until the leader pointed to a young man whose hand had been raised instead. The man said, "You're going to the festival and you lost your tickets."
The comedy troupe pretended to Venn one member into a bird to get in to an imaginary festival, then four members kept distracting one member who kept trying to catch the bird. At one point one of the women went offstage and came back having really Venned into a flying cat to catch it.
After the show, Chris and Tina went to the stage to try to talk to the crew. "Hi," said Chris. "Jessie, right? It may be an obvious question, but are you Venned?"
"Yes we are!" said the man.
"I mean, are you Venned as one person with two bodies?"
"Exactly," said the female Jessie. "We needed a second woman in the group. You see a lot of people do it in anything related to theater or acting. Except for the famous ones. The union demands that they get double salary and nobody will pay that."
"Because we're Venned and we haven't met a lot of other people in person who were Venned into two. What kind is it? I mean, one mind or not?"
The female Jessie said, "Oh, just one. Improv teams are supposed to be like a group mind. Having a real group mind in there helps. If you practice and practice it almost feels like you're two people anyway."
Tina said, "Chris and I are doing two, long term. We tried doing one for a little while because we wanted the experience."
"Really? I haven't heard of anyone who did that. You know, I should have guessed you were Venned. You could be twins. Have you ever considered acting or comedy?"
"We were in two plays in college. It isn't comedy experience, though. Thanks anyway."
"Ah, well. Have one of our business cards. We have shows on Thursdays for the rest of the holiday season."
"You know, we could take some comedy classes..." said Tina.
Chris replied, "You can't be serious."
"Of course not."
******************
The week was over in no time. Chris drove towards the Venn machine outside a 24 hour grocery store while Tina used the app to call two people from Changes Anytime. Once again they made their goodbyes, partly as a joke, partly because merging memories is a mental headache and it felt like it shouldn't be completely shrugged off.
One person stepped out of the machine, and Chris sat down on a city bench to wait for the Change Anywhere assistant.
The people who came were not anyone Chris knew. A Hispanic man and an older woman. "I'm Pablo," said the first man. He didn't seem to have an accent. "I'll be transforming you tonight. The app says that you want a two person complete split?"
"Yes, I just ended one and I need another one. I can still feel the last one. Like it was me who did one thing, and me who did another thing, but I either did one or the other. This time it needs to be set for a month."
Pablo quickly Venned Chris according to his history and in no time Chris and Tina were back.
"Hi, Tina," said Chris as he left the machine in the second pass.
"Hi yourself, Chris. I wonder if we should have stayed merged for a while before doing this. You'd think that the merge would stop when we split again but it doesn't."
"Yeah. It just means that each of us, right now, is trying to merge both of us, from before."
"Well, not completely," said Tina. "Some of the memories fit more because I'm a girl. It's easier to think 'it was me wearing makeup' if my body wears makeup. Even if it's something like eating, the memory is a little easier if this body was the one eating. On the other hand they're all still my memories. They may not be as relevant but they don't fade away. It's not an intrusion in my mind like that dinosaur skit at the improv, when the guy suddenly had to roar every other sentence."
"It's probably one of those things where everyone is different. How much are you affected by an old merge if you undergo a new split before it's over?"
"Or it's something people can learn by practice. Are you having problems?"
Chris grimaced.
Tina said, "Me too. Maybe we can talk each other through it."
They sat down on the bench, talking and leaning against each other for a while, until they felt like they were themselves again.
******************
A few months later:
Chris's parents, his younger sister, and several family friends were at the holiday dinner table. Most people had finished eating. "So," said Chris's mother, "we finally get to meet Tina."
Tina replied, "Yes, Mom."
"Excuse me?" said her mother.
Chris whispered, "Mom, I don't think you quite get it. Tina is me, remember?"
"Your dad and I didn't have Venn machines growing up. But we're not stupid. I just thought that you wanted to act like normal people. If she was a normal person, she wouldn't call me 'Mom', right?"
"Well," said Tina, "at least one of us has to."
"And that's Chris."
"Why is that?" asked Tina. "I hope you're not going to say 'because Chris is the original.' There isn't an original. Besides, people who think 'one of us is the original' aren't well suited for this kind of Venn anyway."
"But-- if you were to step inside a machine, you'd vanish, and Chris wouldn't."
Chris said, "No, I'd vanish. I have a medical card in my wallet. No Venning if I'm injured. One of us has to be un-Vennable but it doesn't have to be Tina every time. All we needed to do was to become two bodies with Tina as a heavy centaur that's more than half our total mass, then change her into normal Tina."
"I don't understand any of that, but it sounds like you're talking as if you're different people."
Chris said, "We're like... different people who have a lot of history with each other and know each other very well. We become more different as time passes until we merge and it starts again. I know that not everyone could do this but it works out for us."
"So are you able to have children?"
"Yes."
"How does that work?"
Tina said, "Mom, it works the same way everyone else does it. There aren't any risks, if that's what you're thinking of. Venn machines seem to be deliberately designed so that they keep pregnancies going."
"But if you're the same person, that's like, well..."
Tina interrupted. "Like incest? I know that's what you're thinking. That was disproven last year. Venn machines transform you the way they're told to. Nobody tells them 'I want someone with the same bad recessive genes.' It changes those just like it changes your fingerprints, and you can't see them so you probably couldn't get them even if you asked for them. There's even a theory that bad genes in your base body are considered damage, just like aging. If that's true, they might even go away for good."
"You might change your mind later."
"Mom," said Tina, "when you're Venned your base body gets older, but it doesn't really age. If we ever change our mind, we've lost no years from our life doing this."
******************
Chris and Tina had decided on a wedding ceremony, one year into their second three year cycle. Even groups who couldn't legally marry have always had ceremonies, and split-Venn couples were no exception.
The minister was ending his speech. "I have officiated many weddings, and the world has changed drastically since I started many years ago. Indeed, without these changes this wedding couldn't even be possible. Yet the couple in front of us, while owing their existence to these changes, still follows in a long tradition. I am proud to continue this tradition. The couple may now read their vows."
Chris and Tina read, "We promise to support each other, materially and spiritually. To share our lives and to become a family together. To become one in matrimony, in sickness and in health...."
"Do you, Chris, and you, Tina, take each other to be your wedded spouse?"
"I do!"
"I do!"
"By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride." They melted into a kiss and the audience clapped wildly.
******************
Their lives continued on. Changes Anywhere got bought out by a competitor and shut down, but by this time Chris and Tina had found better jobs. When their children were born, Tina Venned two bodies so she could take care of them. Through practice, willingness to compromise with each other, and the mental flexibility to combine and separate, they had managed to make it all work out.
And when people who didn't know them as Venned asked how they met, they would always say "we met seven years ago during a job running Venn machines. Isn't it wonderful how that can happen?"