Midnight Change

‚Midnight Change‘ is an English Science Fiction story about a strange Challenge, a transformation pill and a evil conspirancy.

Carl is twenty-one, studies biology and celebrates his birthday in his friends‘ chaotic shared flat. Between pizza boxes and loud music, his best friend Zavis hands him a tiny box. Inside lies a bitter little pill that supposedly turns him into a girl for one day. Carl takes it for a joke, but that night curiosity wins. He swallows the pill, and the next morning a young woman with long blonde hair looks back at him from the mirror. She wears black leggings, a sleeveless top and a smile that does not belong to him and yet fits him perfectly. He calls himself Caroline and notices that many things about this body feel surprisingly familiar.

Caroline decides not to hide the day but to live it. At the open-air pool she meets the mysterious Reegan, who studies her very closely, and has to fend off a group of pushy boys. At university she clashes with a lecturer who takes her for a stranger who sneaked into his lecture. In the campus café she meets Knox, a quiet medical student who listens and is amazed by her guitar melodies. The conversation turns into a date on the roof terrace of an old water tower. Her friend Soniya, a reporter for the student newspaper, advises her to use the night and sleep with Knox, just to gain the experience. Caroline decides otherwise. She does not want to lie or run before she knows who she is. When Carl wakes up changed back the next day, he has no idea how much that one day has altered.

Then the story tips. Zavis, the supposed ally, has betrayed Carl to a secret research project because its backers paid off his student debts. Soniya finds out that the active ingredient of the pill is meant for something far more dangerous at the Nordwerk Institute: people are to be transformed against their will. Together with Knox, Soniya and Reegan, Caroline breaks into the institute, finds heavy evidence and has to escape in a wild bicycle chase through the city. In the hideout in the old boathouse, Reegan tells her truth: four years ago she was a young man herself, the first test subject of institute director Horrison. Her transformation stayed permanent, and she had the pill sent to Carl because his genes are the key to a stable antidote. Only now does Caroline understand that the coincidence of the birthday party was none.

With the evidence in her bag and the courage she has discovered in herself, Caroline uses the campus festival to spread the truth live at a concert while Soniya broadcasts the files. Horrison and his backers are held to account, and Zavis confesses. But in the end Caroline faces the biggest question: there is a way to make the transformation permanent. After weeks in her new body she knows that Caroline never felt like a disguise but like the home she had long searched for. She decides, consciously and freely, to stay Caroline. At a beach party at the quarry lake, in a cute one-piece swimsuit, surrounded by friends, she feels for the first time that she has arrived.