Chapter 1: The Accidental Activation
The hum of Mark’s lab was a sound I’d gotten used to over the years—a cold, electric purr that lived in your teeth. I leaned against a workbench, arms crossed, watching him gesture at what looked like a chrome salad spinner hooked up to a supercomputer.
“So it’s a fancy blender,” I said, grinning behind my beard. “Finally gonna make that perfect smoothie?”
Mark didn’t look up from the holographic schematic floating above the console. At six-four, he made the equipment look like toys. “It’s a molecular alteration unit, you philistine. It doesn’t blend. It reassembles. Carefully. At a subatomic level.”
“Right, right.” I pushed off the bench and wandered closer, my size-twelve boots clunking on the polished floor. The air smelled like ozone and hot metal. “And what are we reassembling today? Gonna turn your Tesla into a toaster?”
“The potential applications are infinite,” he said, his voice taking on that lecturing tone I knew so well. “Medical fields alone—targeted tissue regeneration, corrective genetic restructuring. This,” he pointed a stylus at the core chamber, a hollow sphere of what looked like smoked glass, “is the most precise matter compiler ever built by a private citizen.”
I whistled, low and impressed. He’d been holed up in this wing of his mansion for eighteen months. I’d missed our game nights. “Looks like a very expensive disco ball.”
That got a smirk. “Only you, Justin, would look at a billion dollars of quantum engineering and see a party accessory.” He turned to a secondary monitor, his broad back to me. “The safety protocols are a work of art. Sequential key codes, biometric locks, a failsafe capacitor that dumps the energy into a shielded ground pod if there’s even a picosecond of waveform instability.”
He reached for a physical folder on a shelf above the terminal. His fingers just grazed it.
The console in front of me was a galaxy of soft, glowing buttons. One in the center, under a clear guard, pulsed a gentle, inviting blue. It was the same blue as the ‘on’ button on my old game console. A stupid, simple thought cut through the technical awe: I wonder what that one feels like.
My hand moved before my brain engaged. It was an impulse, the same one that made me touch hot stoves as a kid or poke strange insects with a stick. I flipped the guard up. It made a tiny, satisfying click.
I pressed the button.
It wasn’t a click. It was a silent, inward gasp from the machine itself.
The blue light wasn’t gentle anymore. It wasn’t a light at all. It was a hole ripped in reality, sitting in that glass sphere. It yawned open, soundless and hungrily bright, and then it pulled.
Not my body. Everything in my body.
A scream jammed in my throat, frozen. It was like being turned inside out by a gentle, curious giant. I felt a pop in my joints, a liquid rush in my bones as they ran like hot wax, shortening, reshaping. My beard… the prickling sensation on my jaw just vanished, as if it had never been. My skull compressed with a soft, crunching pressure, my vision swimming as my perspective plummeted downwards.
The world got taller. Fast.
My clothes—my trusty flannel shirt and jeans—became a suddenly heavy, smothering tent of fabric. The collar sagged past my shoulders. The waistband of my jeans, once snug, pooled in heavy denim folds around my hips and then slid, dragging the boxers with them, down my legs in a rough heap. I was falling inside them.
I threw my arms out to balance, and that’s when the new weight hit me. On my chest. A profound, unfamiliar heaviness that shifted, that jiggled with the aborted motion. My mind stuttered, trying to process the sensation of two soft, full anchors pulling against my new, fragile ribcage.
I looked down.
A ocean of blue plaid flannel drowned everything below my neck. But there, pushing out against the fabric, were two obvious, perfect mounds. I watched, hypnotized and horrified, as they settled with a final, soft bounce.
“What the everlasting fuck did you do?!”
Mark’s voice was a detonation. I jerked my head up. He was staring at me, the folder crumpled in his fist, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated shock. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at… what was in front of him.
I tried to speak. “Mark, I—” The voice that came out was wrong. It was higher, smoother, lighter. It was a stranger’s voice. It wobbled with panic. “The button… I just…”
The words died. A new sensation screamed for attention between my legs. A profound absence. The familiar, comfortable weight of my cock and balls was gone. In its place was… a smooth, flat plain, and then a strange, soft fold of sensitive flesh beneath. A cool draft from the lab’s venting system brushed across it, and I flinched violently, my new hips snapping together with an awkward, instinctive motion.
I tried to step forward, to get to Mark, to make him fix this. My foot, a size five now, swam in the cavern of my boot. I tripped. I didn’t fall hard—my new body was terrifyingly light—but the process of catching myself was a disaster. My arms, slim and weak, trembled. The drag of the shirt, the weight on my chest pulling me forward, it was all wrong. I ended up on my knees in the puddle of my old jeans, the rough lab floor biting into my skin.
“Change me back!” The new voice rose, sharp and frightened. “Right now, Mark! This isn’t funny!”
Mark was already moving, a controlled panic in his movements. He lunged for the console, his fingers flying over the interface. “The log… it initiated a full-body aesthetic and structural scan and reassembly. Default template. My god, it used the last stored template…” He muttered technical curses, his eyes scanning data. “Okay. Okay. Reverse sequence. I just need to re-engage the field and run the inversion—”
He punched a command.
A spark, fat and yellow, shot from the side of the unit. Then another. The holographic schematics flickered, died, and reignited in frantic, error-red pulses. A sharp smell of burning insulation filled the air.
“No,” Mark breathed. He slammed his palm on an emergency cutoff.
With a dying, agonized whine, the core of the machine—the beautiful, smoked-glass sphere—glowed cherry red. There was a wet, popping sound from inside, like eggs frying. Then, a plume of acrid black smoke poured out. Tiny, bright molten droplets of silver solder dripped from its base onto the workbench, sizzling and burning little black holes into the surface.
The hum of the lab dropped into a deafening silence, broken only by the crackle of dying electronics.
The blue light was gone. The machine sat there, dark and dead, a twisted, smoking paperweight.
I stared at the wreckage from the floor, the reality of the cool air on my naked skin under the giant shirt finally registering. The delicate, alien feel of my own hair—long, blonde, and silky—where it brushed over my shoulders and against my new, sharply defined collarbones. The constant, undeniable ache in my lower back from the new sway in my spine. The sheer, overwhelming smallness of myself.
My best friend turned slowly from the dead machine to look at me, his expression shifting from technological despair to a dawning, human horror.
The tool to change me back was currently melting into a single, useless lump of plastic and metal.
I was stuck.
The word echoed in my strange, new head, in the unfamiliar vault of my skull.
Stuck.