Ashleigh looks at herself in an old, dusty mirror in the corner of the shed, and then back to her body containing her daughter, sleeping sweetly in the pod. "Who am I kidding?" She laughs to herself. "I'm not switching back."
She leans over her body, and strokes her hair like she did with her daughter (in her own body) when she was little. It's not like she didn't care for her own daughter, of course she did. But she never planned on having kids. Never planned on settling down, getting trapped in this suburban hell of a lifestyle. She'd had bigger aspirations, and life took that away from her. Once you were born, the second child her husband wanted didn't really matter so she went along with it, but she was now thankful to have raised a brand new body for herself.
"Joanna will find this amusing for a short time, but she'll grow bored and want to switch back before too long. It would be cruel for me to string her along. So how should I deal with it?"
Ashleigh looks around the shed and thinks about her options, ranging from merciful to cruel.
If she swapped her sleeping daughter with some kind of animal or something else, she would be free to live out her life, but wouldn't be able to tell anyone what happened.
She could break the machine beyond repair, or get rid of it. Joanna would be able to live out the life Ashleigh was abandoning, only losing 25 years of her life.
Sure, Ashleigh hated her life, but there are people out there who would be thrilled to have it. It would be convenient to have a new mother while she grew up for the second time.
Spotting a can of gasoline, Ashleigh admitted the simplest solution would just be to lock the door and burn the shed down. No witnesses, no evidence of the swap. The trauma of losing a mother at a young age would give her endless wiggle room to explain away her change in personality. She grabbed the can and held it up... But could she really kill her own daughter?
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