Chapter 1: The Delivery and the Prank
The box was smaller than I’d expected, a matte black cube left on my doorstep with no postage marks. Just my initials burned into the lid. The living room was a mess of half-unpacked moving boxes and the ghost of last night’s boredom: a whiskey bottle, a laptop, the flickering lamp that buzzed like a dying insect. I ripped the tape off.
Inside, nestled in black foam, was the suit.
It looked like liquid shadow, sleek and impossibly thin. The product page had been a joke, a deep-web curiosities forum where I’d found it. Experimental substrate: full sensation transcoding, the description read. User experiences total morphological and sensory verisimilitude. The price was insane. I’d bought it as a prank, a stupid, expensive bit for Marcus. He’d lose his mind.
The material felt cool and weightless as I lifted it. There was no zipper, no seams I could see. Just a neck opening. I shed my clothes, kicked a pizza box out of the way, and stepped in.
The first foot went in, then the other. I pulled it up my legs. It was like sinking into cool oil.
Then it activated.
A hum, deep in the material, and it began to contract. It wasn’t painful. It was… precise. A million invisible hands squeezing, molding. My bones didn’t break, they compacted. I stumbled, watching the floor rise toward me as my height vanished, my perspective shrinking violently. A dizzying vertigo washed over me. My skin prickled, then burned with a cold fire as the pigment drained away, leaving behind a stark, porcelain white.
I gasped, and the sound that came out was high, delicate.
My hands flew to my chest, where a tremendous, aching weight was burgeoning. The suit swelled, forming two heavy, soft orbs that strained against the black material. The sensation was immense, a deep, full tugging on my whole frame. I stumbled toward a tall mirror leaning against a wall, my new center of gravity all wrong.
The person in the mirror was a stranger. Tiny, barely five feet tall. A doll with a grotesquely exaggerated figure, poured into a skin-tight black sheath. Pale white skin like something that lived underground. My face was my own, but not—sharper, with huge eyes ringed in smudged, jet-black shadow, and lips stained a unforgiving matte black. My hair was a messy black shag, covering one eye.
“Holy shit,” the tiny goth girl in the mirror breathed with my voice, higher, breathier.
I touched my face. The sensation wasn’t just touch. It was hyper-touch. The brush of my own fingertip against my cheek was a lightning bolt of texture, the slight coolness of my skin, the softness. It was overwhelming. I pinched the skin of my arm, and a wave of pleasure-pain cascaded through me, making my knees buckle. I caught myself on a box.
Every movement was a symphony of sensation. The brush of the suit’s inner lining against my nipples was an electric current straight to my core. The way my new breasts swayed with each shaky step was a heavy, constant awareness. It was all tuned to a deafening volume. I wasn’t wearing a suit. I was inside a new nervous system, one designed for a single purpose: to feel everything.
My original consciousness floated in this hyper-real vessel, screaming quietly. This wasn’t a prank anymore. This was a catastrophe.
The doorbell rang.
Marcus. Right on time.
Panic, clean and sharp, cut through the sensory fog. I couldn’t let him see this. I had to get it off. I clawed at the neckline, but there was no purchase. The material was seamless, fused to me. I pulled harder, a frantic, rising sob catching in my throat. The act of pulling sent waves of intense sensation rolling across my skin, confusing my efforts, softening my panic into a bewildered shudder.
The doorbell rang again, followed by his familiar, impatient knock.
Think. The remote. The instructions said a neural remote, for calibration and emergency release. Where was it? I looked frantically around the sea of boxes. The packaging. I tipped the black foam over. Nothing. It wasn’t there.
“Hey, you in there? I’m coming in, I borrowed your spare key last week!” Marcus’s voice, muffled through the door.
The lock turned.
I froze, standing in the middle of the living room disaster, fully exposed. The door swung open.
Marcus stopped dead. He was all angles and scruffy beard, holding a six-pack of beer. His eyes widened, traveled from my face down the dramatic curve of my body and back up. His expression cycled through confusion, surprise, and a slow-dawning, utterly wrong appreciation.
“Whoa,” he said, softly. He stepped in, closing the door behind him. “Uh. Hey. Is… is Alex here?”
He didn’t recognize me. Of course he didn’t.
My plan. The stupid, idiotic plan. I had to commit. My voice, when I found it, was a unfamiliar, sugary thing. “He… stepped out. I’m Chloe.” The name tumbled out, nonsense. “A friend.”
“Right.” Marcus set the beer down, still staring. His gaze felt like a physical pressure on my skin, another layer of sensation. “Alex didn’t mention… Sorry, it’s just a mess. He’s a slob.”
“I see that,” I said, trying to sound casual, but every syllable in this new voice felt like a performance. I crossed my arms under my chest, an instinctive move, and the enhanced feeling of the weight settling there, the compression, made me bite my black-stained lip. A small, traitorous thrill went through me. I saw his eyes track the movement.
This was all wrong. I needed to end this, get him out, find the remote. “He should be back soon. Maybe you should…”
“Nah, I’ll wait,” Marcus said, flopping onto my couch, right onto the cushion where I’d been sitting last night. He grinned, easy, confident. My best friend. Seeing a stranger. “Don’t let me scare you off. You here visiting?”
I was trapped. I gave a stiff, tiny nod, perched on the edge of a packing crate. Every shift sent silent fireworks through my body. The silence stretched, thick and awkward.
“Cool dress,” he said finally, his tone shifting into his flirtatious mode, the one he used in bars. It made my skin crawl. Or it should have. Instead, the attention fed into the suit’s feedback loop, a warm, prickling validation.
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“Kind of a wild look. The whole… thing.” He gestured vaguely at me. “I like it.”
His phone buzzed. He looked at it, swore. “My Uber’s here early. I was supposed to grab that board game from Alex.” He stood up, looking around. “You think he’d mind if I just snatched it? It’s on his shelf.”
“Go ahead,” I said, desperate for him to leave.
He walked over to the shelves, his back to me. This was my chance. My eyes scanned the floor again for the remote. Nothing. As he bent to look at the lower shelf, I saw it. A slim, black metallic wedge, barely visible, poking out from between the couch cushions where he’d been sitting. The remote. It must have fallen out last night when I opened the package.
He found the game, a big box under his arm. “Got it. Nice to meet you, Chloe. Tell Alex I’ll call him.” His smile was wide, genuine. “Tell him he’s a dirtbag for not telling me he had a… friend over.”
But just as Marcus is about to leave he sees the strange looking remote for the suit which snags his curiosity immediately. Fear shoots through your brain as you finally notice where the lost remote had been. You start to slowly try to get near it as Marcus inspects the device.
“This is new, what does it do?” Marcus muses