Strange encounters: An Interview with Q?

Ever since the conference I had made my top priority to score an interview with this enigmatic Q character. She left me a pager number, which I have called numerous times with no response. I was growing frustrated, until early this week when I received an e-mail.

SENDER: Q

SUBJECT: From Q

BODY: In town this week, meet me Tuesday, noon, this address - Q

Following that was the address to a diner. I arrived early, because she would know me but I may not necessarily recognize her. Part of me was expecting to see an African American woman, but based on what she told me at our last meeting, there was no real reason to expect that.

I ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee and sat in wait, examining every person who entered for those hunched shoulders and twisted lips that Q seemed to carry, man or woman. A bald man, a teenage boy, a thirtysomething mother with a stroller... no, no, of course not. An old man, a teenage girl, a pair of businessmen... again, three no's. Most of them glanced at me and shrugged it off, seeing that I was obviously waiting for someone.

I was done my second cup of coffee and most of my sandwich when the someone finally entered. A thin little girl of no more than 12. She wore shorts and sandals and her hair was in pigtails. She sat next to me and tried to flag down a waitress.

"Soup and salad," she ordered, "Diet Pepsi." The waitress siad they had Coke and she said "Whatever" and turned her attention to me, shocked as I was. I don't know why; I shouldn't have been because swaps have a random way about them. Black woman, white preeteen, whatever.

"Q," I assured myself.

She smirked and said, "In the flesh. well, somebody's flesh! Oh, man, you would not believe the week I've been having! I was shacking up with the Richardsons in Colorado... this is Meg Richardson's body, by the way... and they just wouldn't let me go until they were sure their poor daughter was safe! And I told her she was probably fine and I called her on my cell and told her to go to the BISA and make sure everything was kosher. They managed to get her back to Denver and finally, finally I hit the road."

"I'm sure the Richardsons weren't to hpapy to see you take off in their daughter's body," I noted.

"What are they gonna do? I'm not their daughter."

Which is when I asked, "Then who are you?"

She coughed a little and mused, "I need a cigarette. You wanna do this thing quick? I'm not sure how much time I've got here."

I told her she should probably not smoke in that body and she told me bluntly it was not my business. I got out my notebook.

SN: So let's get down to it... who is "Q"?

Q: (Laughs) Well obviously, I am. Aren't I? I don't know anymore.

But where did you come from? Where were you before the swaps?

I'm not really sure, I'm sorry to say. I think I was in a coma or something, or maybe I just didn't exist and came into being just to swap people around.

So you think you are responsible for the swaps?

Maybe! I don't know. I mean, I don't know what's really going on, I'm sad to say. I wish I did, I'm as confused as everyone else, I'm just handling it better.

Could you at least try to explain yourself?

I'll give it a go. It was New Year's Eve, I guess, and I woke up on a beach. nobody knew what a swap was at the time, there was a half-a-handful of swapees. I was in Florida wearing this naughty string bikini and this man comes up and puts his arms around me, fondling me, kissing me.

Your husband?

Somebody's husband. Noreen Daugherty's husband. They were vacationing in Florida, she was catching some rays and he'd turned his back for a moment and pop, we were swapped.

You can't remember anything before that?

Not specifically. I have this personality, so it must've come from somewhere, but I knew I wasn't Noreen. I had just popped into her.

How did you react?

I wanted to sock the guy for touching me. I didn't know what was going on and it felt disgusting, but enticing in a way because he was, you know, stimulating the erogenous zones. So after it felt wrong, it started to feel right. And it was after fooling around a bit that I asked him who he was. At first he thought I had amnesia - that Noreen did anyway, because I didn't know who I was and I was worried that maybe I was Noreen. We were going to go to the doctor and get an MRI. Maybe they did, but I was gone after a few weeks of staying at home.

Where to?

Andrew Holloway, the poor kid from Nebraska was doing a little ice fishing on soem lake. That was January 10.

How did you react to THAT?

With quite a bit of surprise, because it wasn't like the first one. I knew where I'd just come from, and they were on the verge of convincing me I was Noreen.

And what happened to Andrew?

Well, he became Noreen I suppose. And by that, I mean he came back to Nebraska and lived as Andrew in Noreen's body, which has become the tendancy for swapees I suppose.

Did Noreen ever turn up?

No, I believe she just vanished into thin air.

What did you do after becoming Andrew?

I freaked out, because I was suddenly male again.

"Again?"

Well, when I was Noreen, I thought it was wrong to be a woman, so I thuoght I must've been a man. Then I become a man, and that felt wrong too, after being a woman for 10 days. Andrew was a high school football player with an athletic body, compared to Noreen, 5-something-feet, 100-something-pounds. I tried to explain to the Holloways their son was in Florida with Mr. Daugherty and they didn't believe me until he got home. I quietly snuck off.

Where to?

I just had to hit the road, so I went to Kansas City and did a little roadwork. I met a girl and we messed around some. Then one morning, a few days into February... it was after Groundhod Day, so maybe the third or fourth... I'm in Sacramento working a convenience store. That's when I got hooked on the Camels.

You were swapped into a convenience store clerk?

Rajiv Singh, to be precise. That lasted about eighteen days. He never came back, and by the end of February I'm in a first-grade classroom.

You were swapped with a first-grader?

No, just the teacher, Mrs. Pulaski. Diane. By this time I wasn't surprised at all, and I was a woman again, but whatever.

How did Mr. Pulaski react?

I never told him.

What, you just went on being this woman?

Yeah, it was easy enough to fake. So I was now, let's see, a 40-year-old woman with a husband who's almost fifty, teaching 6-year-olds shapes and basic math. Not too hard, basically babysitting. That lasted nearly a month, most of March. I liked it. It was a nice quiet life.

And the real Mrs. Pulaski never called?

Sure she did, but that's what caller-ID is for. I told Singh not to call again and convinced the husband he was just a crazy person. Eventually he gave up I guess.

What about Singh, did he ever try to get his life back?

Not really. He actually thanked me, because I left him a good job and a girlfriend, as Holloway. I told him it was no sweat and went on living. All the while, I horded some cash away for my next swap.

You knew it was going to happen?

You'd have to be stupid, after four of the damn things, not to know. It was around that time they were becoming more public. I laid low, I wanted to see what was going on. By Easter I wsa a waitress/student in Philly. Louise Chau.

You just take these people's lives?

Not by choice, but I don't have one of my own to go back to.

And you leave behind you a trail of unrelated swapees?

Sure. Not by choice, I told you, I'm just some kind of pawn in this I swear. After that, I was 8-year-old Billy MacKay for about a week, and then I was Lou Albini, the man you met in Canton.

And who were you in Bethesda?

Carrie Jackson.

How long do you spend in each body?

A couple weeks or so, but I'm getting better at estimating it, so I know I might not be here at the end of the day. I'm trying to learn to oconcentrate and control where I swap to.

Do you think you can do that?

When I was swapping out of Carrie, I thought abuot the mountains, and suddenly I was in Denver. You tell me.

Who are you going to be next?

Not sure. I wanted you to interview me because I'm going to go undergorund. Going to hide in plain sight.

Why?

The scientists want to dissect me, but it's not my body, they'd be hurting an innocent person. The Church of Redeemer wants to deify me, and that ain't cool. And everyone will want to ask me what the swaps are, but I don't know. All I know is that there is more to them than they know, and they know more than they are saying.

Do you think it's alien technology?

No, I think alien technology wouldn't fuck up as badly as this. Believe me, this is man-made, probably in America; you can tell because it doesn't work properly.

And you've only ever been swapped into Americans.

I know, that's so weird, isn't it? People get swapped to France or England or Japan all the time. I'm stuck in the Land of the (uses finger-quotes) "Free." Connect the dots, bro.

(She finished her meal.)

I think I'm going soon.

Going where?

Going to be swapped. I can tell. I'll stay in touch. But listen, as soon as I do, just play along, okay?

With that, she stared off in space for a moment...

"Bill?" The little girl looked around frantically. I didn't know what to say. "Bill, am-- oh, damn, I've been swapped?"

I almost answered when in barged a young lady, maybe in her late 20's. She wore sunglasses, a light top, a black skirt and had straight dark hair. I had never seen her before but she zoomed over to our table.

"Thanks for watching Meg, Alex," she told me as she grabbed Meg's shoulder, "Come on, honey."

The little girl pled, "Lady, I'm sorry I'm not your--- daughter? Aw, man. Listen, I'm a grown man, I--" she tried to explain as the woman cut her off.

"Oh, we're not playing this game." She smirked, "You let the girl watch one 20/20 special and suddenly she's swapped twice a day."

"Lady, I'm telling you, I'm not--"

"Shh," again she interrupted. The girl - probably some kind of businessman it seemed - was probably intimidated by how much larger the woman looked, even though she stood between 5'4-and-7. I couold only watch as the young lady scolded, "Your mommy is getting tired of this game."

Whatever Q had set up, it was a pretty flimsy cover and would probably only get him so far, wherever he now was. The little girl will likely get to a BISA soon and alert the authorities. I don't think Q can run for ever... just that there won't be a prison to hold him.

Bethesda Swap Conference Spring 2007 Report

I arrived early last tuesday morning at the Bethesda BISA complex, which has grown over the past month to include numerous surrounding buildings as well as new construction. Trolling the grounds were people of all demographics, many of whom swapees, but all seeking answers. The directorial staff of BISA, including Drs. Arthur Gulf and Howard Bergman, would hopefully provide.

When Dr. Arthur Gulf took the podium alongside a small latin girl, I could virtually immediately sense what the first item of discussion would be. The girl stepped up to the podium and spoke.

Earlier this month, she explained, the bodies of Dr. Howard Bergman and 12-year-old Manuella Perez of Mexico City, Mexico, were swapped. At this time, the mind of Dr. Bergman, in the body of Miss Perez, would be fulfilling Bergman's duties at BISA.

The wording seemed odd to me, and they were pressed to explain. "We have reason to believe that the swaps are, in fact, a temporary inversion of psyches. That through some yet-unknown catalyst, one person's identity is temporarily washed onto another's and vice versa, but will very likely become supressed and negated."

This got a generally positive reaction from the crowd, except for a few Church of the Holy Redeemer supporters, who booed audibly.

Questioned as to when this would occur, Bergman explained they had no idea. Their most conservative estimate was that within a year of the first swap, early swapees might be restored. However, a more likely scenario is that it could take many years for all or most of the swaps to be reversed, and that's assuming they reach a "breaking point" after which they slow or stop altogether.

"Much is still not known," Gulf explained, "but we are expanding our knowledge by leaps and bounds each and every day."

Now that the BISA infrastructure is in place on five continents, about 20 major cities with offices established or in development, swaps should be accepted as a very normal part of life, albeit one that brings numerous surprises and inconveniences.

Bergman said she did not know at this time what would become of swapees whose original bodies had died. They may stay as they are, or it is quite possible they will revert, depending on the still-unknown nature of the "de-swap" process. If it involves a maintained connection between the two, then severing that conncetion may prevent de-swapping. If it involves the swapee merely "remembering" his or her original identity, there is not much to worry about.

Beyond that, there were a number of roundtable discussions, panels, workshops for people who had been swapped. Most notably, a group for those who had inherited addictions from their swap-partner, whether to cigarettes or heroin. Many of those people were in bad shape.

The Church was attempting to recruit. There was a preview trailer, met with thunderous applause, for an upcoming film about the swaps featuring numerous actors who have been swapped, including America Ferrera and Matt Damon (who will take on Ferrera's role on ABC's "Ugly Betty" this fall.)

I saw my friend Nick at the conference, and we got a cup of coffee. She has been absent from the blog recently, and told me it was because she was "dealing with stuff, and some of what I'm hearing here is only making me feel worse." She also asked I keep our conversation private and off-the-record, which I am only slightly ignoring.

On the last day, a Volkswagen pulled up to me on the street, driven by a young African-American woman. She got out of the car, leaned against it and told me, "You're a tough guy to track down."

I looked at her and asked her if I knew her (because at these events you never know,) and she said we had met once before, at a support group on Ohio. I thought back and told her I didn't remember her (and my entry seems to confirm this, since I described everyone there and no African-American woman was among them.) She pulled out a pack of Camel cigarettes, which I remembered seeing a man there smoke.

"I've been in this body for almost a week and I still can't smoke these sumbitches without coughing," she said as she lit the cigarette in her lips.

She could not be the man I had met there; he'd told me he had already swapped, and I see no reason why he would have lied. There has not been a documented case of a person swapping twice, but this woman carried herself, with the same hunched shoulders, titled head and curled lips of the man I had met in Canton who refused to tell his name.

"Just who are you?" I asked her.

"You want to interview me, right?" she smiled. I told her I was actually on my way to the airport, so she took out a business card (which read "Mary Patton Designs") and scribbled something on the back; a pager number and the letter Q.

"Let me know when you wanna talk, 'kay sugar?"

With that, she flicked her cigarette down and coughed, extinguishing it with her open-toed shoe and got back in to drive away.

On the plane-ride home, I furiously scribbled my notes and about a dozen question I thought this Q person might be able to answer. I have yet to hear back.

Briefs: 2007 to be "Summer of the Swap"

June 21st, the first day of summer, will has been named by the BISA to be "Swap Awareness Day 2007," as preliminary estimates suggest to officials that 2007 will be the "Summer of the Swap."

"Our working theory," explains BISA's Dr. Howard Bergman, "Is that climate and temperature has an effect on the number of swaps that occur. As the summer heats up in North America, we may be seeing more swaps than ever before."

Bergman explains that during the winter months, swaps were far more common in areas in the southern United States, Australia, and Brazil. As spring wore on, temperate areas such as the coastal United States (particularly the Pacific Northwest,) Canada, England, mainland Europe and Japan were affected more and more.

BISA is still far from learning what factors induce a swap, or determine who is swapped with whom. They hope to refine their current theories by "Swap Awareness Day" in order to further spread awareness.

BISA reminds people that, to their knowledge, it is impossible to be swapped twice, although a swap could strike any two people, regardless of physical type of georgraphy, at any waking moment. Nobody has yet been swapped while sleeping, however.

Bergman also warns to avoid supposed "swap protection," a scam presented as a method of avoiding being swapped. "Protection" may come in the form of machinery (most often a cannibalized TiVo or Wireless Router,) medication (usually sugar pills, prozac, or vitamins) or even hypnosis. There is no remedy for a swap, only acceptance and conditioning once it has occurred.

Swaps currently affect one in every 2000 people in North America, one in 10 000 worldwide. The North American number may drop as low as one in 500 by August.

'Nightmarish' swap may have led to sexual assault

Warning: This article contains mature subject matter.

In what is being called a "nightmare swap come real," a known sexual predator may have been loosed on the City of New York, under the guise of an 11-year-old girl into whose body he has been swapped.

On March 24, 11-year-old Colleen Golightly of Queens went missing and was presumed kidnapped. Only a week later, parents Ryan and Helen were presented with a ghoulish alternative.

"They told us they thought she had been sighted in the city," said a tearful Helen, "A man had been attacked by a young girl at a party. They thought it was our Colleen."

Gerard Toombs, 28, was attending a casual cocktail party in the SoHo loft apartment of a friend's acquaintence.

"I was drinking and feeling drowsy," recalls Toombs, "And I should have known something was wrong then, but someone told me I could go lie down in the bedroom. I must've passed out in the bed."

As Toombs thinks back, he should have realized he'd been drugged; "I hadn't had enough to put a man of my size down." A toxicology report later revealed he had in his system a combination of ketamine (an anaesthetic often used as a date-rape drug) and viagra.

Toombs awoke some time after, restrained to the bed by expertly-tied knots, stripped, gagged with a washcloth, and blindfolded.

"Someone was on top of me," Toombs says, "She was small, I could tell, and from the way she sounded, far too young to have been at the party. Someone must have snuck her in. I could also hear another voice by the door. It was the most disgusting violation I have ever felt, made worse by the treatment that girl's body is getting. It makes me sick."

Toombs' descriptions match the modus operandi of two other recent sexual assaults in the New York area, one in Clinton and the other in Central Park.

Party-goers later admitted to seeing a small girl matching Golightly's description, with a larger bald man, leave the party. no-one questioned could identify either.

Mr. Golightly is outraged, saying "it is unbelievable that a pervert could take my daughter's body and commit those horrible things."

Meanwhile the identity of the assailant remains a mystery as detectives interrogate numerous known offenders.

"Given that the girl has been unable to contact her parents, we are under the impression that the swapee was incarcerated," says NYPD Det. Simoné Gupta, "And given that the perp had an accomplice on the outside and knew the area, we will be checking New York state facilities first. The thought that this poor girl is rotting in a cell with no idea where she is or why she's there is the most disgusting part of this, to me."

As the search continues, swap authorities at the BISA are calling the matter "the worst conceivable nightmare" of the swaps, and have cited it in their request for greater funding for researchers examining potential causes.

"We have to make sure this does not have the opportunity to ever happen again."

International Bureau begins taking appointments this week

March 21st, the first day of Spring, will bring relief to the many confused, mortified individuals who have been made victims of the swap phenomenon in the past 3 months, with the opening of the very first Bureau of International Swap Affairs.

BISA is an initiative launched by the United Nationd when they were first made aware of the issue last month, following the swap of Finnish ambassador Kirsten Linonen with an Australian-born tour guide at the Louvre in Paris, Michael Kent. BISA's duty will be to keep records of all swaps, both within a nation's orders and between.

"The idea is that once someone is swapped, they will report to the nearest bureau to get all their affairs in order," says Aaron Beaulieu, Director of the American branch. "That includes a registration card to correspond to their original birth certificate, a new driver's license, passport, and any other form of identification."

The Bureau will also employ counsellors trained to help swapees adapt to their new roles.

"Something we stress is that when you swap into a new body, you are not that person," says Dr. Howard Bergman, head of psychology for BISA, "You remain yourself, only in a new context."

Beaulieu notes that there are certain exceptions. "While we will be attempting to keep people in circumstances as similar as possible to their original selves, a grown man in a three-year-old's body, for instance, will not be permitted to drive or buy alcohol. This situations will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis."

BISA will be taking appointments, but unfortunately, are taksed with a three-month backlog of appointments, totally some 1500 swapees.

Laughs Beaulieu, "The paperwork is going to be insane."

BISA's other function will be to study and observe the swaps, and attempt to crack the mystery of their origins. Joining Beaulieu and Bergman in this capacity will be two neurologists, American Arthur Gulf and Russian Pavel Alexiev, Scottish sociologist Katherine Duncan-Stuart, and Japanese engineer Osamu Fujiwara, who is "fascinated by the technology that must be involved."

"As a man of science, I can't literally believe the force behind this is, for example, supernatural or extraterrestrial," said Fujiwara, "But it seems beyond any technology we currently have to dig in to a person's brain and remove the data in there."

"After observing only three months of cases," says Gulf, "It would be difficult for anyone to believe these things are absolutely random. The patterns are there, but not clearly defined. If they were random there would be a smaller concentration of swaps in a single nation and an even distribution between genders. What we're seeing is a lot of Americans for only a few Europeans and Asians. There is a direct force selecting who is swapped, where and when."

Adds Alexiev, "We also cannot rule this out as a form of global terrorism, although it is not our leading theory."

Alexiev and Gulf say that they are still far from determining a cause or cure, but that every reported swap they study gives them a better understanding.

The first BISA office is based in Bethesda, MD, and will open on Mar 21. April will see the opening of offices in Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth and San Francisco. The Bureau also hopes to have offices in Toronto, London, Paris, and Kyoto by the end of May. By the end of 2007, 28 of the 50 American states, five Canadian provinces, three counties in the U.K. and seven European nations will have BISAs. New York City will be home to the privately-owned SwapCentre, a $3.5 million complex that will serve a similar function to BISA.

"I don't see it as a competition," says Robert Kleinberg, who is the primary backer behind the venture, "We are very interested in this matter and want to contribute."

Until more BISA offices are established, the senior staff offers a few tips to anyone who is swapped:

Get in contact with your previous body as soon as possible. Discuss the situation, get all the information you need.

Arrange to exchange clothes and any necessary personal items. This also includes medicine and personal grooming.

Come clean. As embarrassing as it might be for you to call up friends and family and utter the phrase, "I've been swapped," the sooner you get through with it, the sooner you can get on with your life.

Make an appointment. Even if there isn't a BISA opening in your area soon, many therapists, doctors and counsellors are prepared to help.

Adapt. The most important thing is to continue living your life as best you can.

"Every swap occurs with a different degree of magnitude," says Gulf, "Sometimes it's as if the swaps are designed to leave vital information, food preferences, sense memory, and so forth. People find their own behavioral patterns altered, and that often bothers them more than their new physiology."

Page A1: NC trucker becomes emblem of new phenomenon

It was the wee hours of the morning on December 26th, and Christopher Barton was driving his 18-Wheeler home to spend a late Christmas with his family. He was only a twenty-minute drive from his Charlotte, North Carolina home when he stopped in at a convenience store for a cup of coffee and a scratch-and-win ticket. He was about to become part of a very different sort of lottery.

"It was about a quarter after four in the morning and I was really lookin' forward to gettin' home and wakin' the kids up," said Barton who, at 6' and almost 230 lbs was a picture-perfect trucker in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. "[Barton's wife] Marjie'd been up all night and I'd just called her on the cell phone sayin' to expect me home soon, and that I had presents."

Barton stood at the counter scratching the ticket. When he found out he hadn't won anything, he was about to leave.

"Then all'a sudden," he goes on to say, "I get this funny feelin', like I'm fallin' or drownin' or somethin', but really it was like when you stand up too fast. I was a bit concerned, but as a trucker I figured it was just tiredness, and it passed, so I made my way back to the truck."

But when Barton got to the truk, he found something was missing.

"I'd laid my keys on the counter and I thought I'd left 'em in there, so I went back in, grabbed 'em, and drove off."

Barton arrived home at nearly 5 AM, and called for his wife. She came from the kitchen to embrace her husband, but instead shreiked with horror when she saw him.

"It wasn't my Christopher at all," Marjie recalls, "I thought I heard him call my name but when I went to see him, some other man was there. I nearly called the police!"

Christopher watched on, mystified, as his very own wife ran screaming through the house in search of a baseball bat she uses to ward off intruders. Little did he know, the intruder was him; he'd become the first victim of what has since been called, "swapping."

As Barton puts it, "I went to the mirror, and what do you know? I see a brown guy staring back!"

Swapping is a recent phenomenon that causes otherwise regular people to be, all at once, transported into the body of another person. Barton had swapped into the body of Rajiv Patel, the clerk at the 7-11 where Barton had stopped. Since this incident they've occurred a number of times and make no regard to age, creed, sex or geographical location.

"Hypothetically," said Dr. Arthur Gulf, who has been studying the swaps, "You could find yourself as a NASCAR driver in the middle of a race, or as a sailor at sea. The unpredictable nature of the swaps makes them very dangeorus. Since the Barton incident, the distance between swaps has, on average, been growing."

The first difficulty the Bartons found was in convincing anybody. "They all thought I's crazy!" laughs Barton, whose voice twangs between Hindi and 'North Cackalackie.' "Then a few weeks go by and more and more these stories start goin' on the news. Suddenly I realize what's happened to me."

As the cause of the swaps is yet unknown, there is know known way to reverse them. As of yet, however, Dr. Gulf has made a few observations.

"Of the few dozen that have occurred," Gulf says, "None have happened during sleep, so nobody seems to be in danger of waking up someplace strange. None of the swaps have occurred between the human and animal kingdom, either."

While researchers scratch their heads in search of the cause, the government is making steps to accommodate the situation. The United Nations is working with world governments to establish a series of International Bureaus to apply a bureaucratic process for swapping.

Said a government official, "Swapping represents a potentially dangeorus x-factor to international diplomacy, not to mention a disruption of their own day-to-day lives. We're looking to have every swapee register and carry a card to indicate who they are and what they can and cannot do." Extreme swaps will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, as precendent builds up.

"There will be many more to come," cautions the Dr. Gulf, "There are more and more reported swaps every day, and that number certainly doesn't look to be slowing down." The Doctor re-iterates the likelihood of a "life-changing" swap by saying, "7 out of 10 swaps thus far have occurred across gender lines."

As the Bartons try to get on with their lives amidst testing and near-obsessive media coverage, Marjie laments, "Sometimes, I don't feel like he's my husband any more. He looks at me with those eyes of his and I don't see him. But then he'll do or say something and I'll think, 'That's my Christopher.'"

Barton has retained his old job, but noted an unexpected change. "I've been findin' I can't eat the same types of foods no more, I don't take cream in my coffee and I can't keep a burger down, which is hard since I love a good steak," observing the fact that Patel was on a strict Hindu diet. "But at the end of the day, I'm the same guy I always was. I still love my kids, and they still love me. I just hope other people who get dealt this hand get it as good as I do."