Alan Turing

Alan Turing sat quiet in his studio, looking at an apple. His boobs felt heavy. He had boobs. He had never been a big fan of boobs to begin with, and it felt particularly insidious that he had been saddled with a set of his own. He was a marathon runner for Christ’s sake, a fit and healthy man. Beyond that, he was a genius, a computer scientist before computers even existed, hell, he practically invented it, and even beyond that he was a national bloody hero, and even if it was classified, some of them knew, those fucks who gave him boobs precisely because he didn’t like them. They gave him estrogen shots to cure him of his sexual disorientation, of his attraction to other gay men, shots which worked only to give him these alien boobs. They certainly didn’t feel like his, though neither did they feel like someone else’s. More like leeches or foreign growths. Humiliating homunculi. He and his boobs sighed and shifted in their seat.

The apple on the table in front of him was red and shiny. He had been working with some vacuum tubes and circuits earlier and had accidentally picked up the apple while his hands were still covered in cyanide. He had started to go wash it off, but instead just dipped the whole thing in cyanide and left it to dry. Hence the shine, which really did bring out the spectacular red of the skin, making it look cartoonishly platonic, like Snow White’s apple. He smiled for a second. Here he was, just like Snow White, with an apple and boobs.

He sighed again, closing his eyes and leaning his head back. He did not think to himself: Someday everyone will know that I helped decode the German Enigma, helped to win the second world war. Nor: someday I will be celebrated as the gay grandfather of computer science.

Nor: someday millions of people will have computers on their desks and in their pockets, computers that i helped create, computers with logos that pay homage to me and this shiny red apple. He thought instead of things immediate and painful, the sorts of things felt as much as thought, things that have no somedays ahead, things that weighed with a very real and acute sensation throughout his body. He felt molybdenum in his legs, and plutonium in his arms, mercury in his neck and copper in his belly, but mostly in his breasts he felt a tonnage of lead, a weight he couldn’t lift.

With a third and last sigh, he found the strength to lift his head, and let it fall forward again to look at the apple. Looking at the apple helped. It made his breasts feel lighter, like Snow White’s.