Chapter 1: Feverish Fuck and the First Shrinking
The air in the apartment tasted like recycled oxygen and dread. Cole leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the balcony door, staring out at the geometric constellation of city lights that was Tanis. From the 42nd floor, it looked like a spilled jewelry box. It didn’t look like a place where people quietly vanished from the census.
He could still feel the phantom vibration of his bass guitar in his palms, the echo of the crowd's semi-polite applause ringing in his ears. The gig had been at The Hollow, a club that catered to people who wanted to say they’d seen live music, not actually hear it. He’d come home with more sweat than cash.
A shiver ran through him, deep and bone-aching, and he blamed the club’s shitty AC. But part of him knew. He’d seen the looks from other musicians on the bill, the subtle way they’d edged back from his mic stand. The Shrink9 panic was a silent current under everything now, a background hum you tried to tune out until it was your own frequency.
“You’re burning up.”
Keke’s voice was a firm statement, not a question. She stood in the doorway of their bedroom, now retrofitted into what the contractors called a “secure suite.” The sleek glass walls were crisscrossed with almost-invisible wire, the king-sized bed replaced by a narrow, padded platform with a locking gate. It looked like a very expensive kennel. She’d fought for the glass. “I won’t live in a fucking box,” she’d said.
He turned. She was already in her silk sleep shorts and tank, her long braids piled in a messy crown. Her brow was furrowed, her lawyer-face assessing the situation.
“Just tired,” he mumbled, pushing off the glass. Another wave of chills hit him, making his teeth click. “Long night.”
“Bullshit.” She crossed the room, her footsteps silent on the plush gray carpet. She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek, then his neck. Her skin was cool and smelled like coconut oil. “You’re furnace-level, Cole. Did you feel dizzy? Nauseous?”
“Just cold.” He tried a grin, the one that usually disarmed her. It felt stiff on his face. “Need my personal space heater.”
She didn’t smile back. Her warm brown eyes scanned his face, looking for cracks. “We should call the hotline. Get you tested.”
“And then what?” The words came out harsher than he intended. “If it’s positive, they just… watch? Wait to see if I go sub-one-foot? No thanks. Not tonight.”
He watched the debate play out behind her eyes. Fear versus control. She hated not having a plan. Finally, she let out a breath. “Bed. Now. I’ll get water and ibuprofen.”
He didn’t argue. The walk to the bed felt longer than usual, his legs like wood. He fumbled with the simple latch on the gate—a design choice so they wouldn’t feel trapped—and slid under the crisp sheets. The padding beneath was medical-grade, a subtle reminder.
He lay there, listening to the distant wail of sirens seven stories below, feeling his body alternately flush and freeze. The virus wasn’t supposed to hurt, they said. The shrinking was painless. The symptoms were just… your body recalibrating. Sure.
Keke returned with a tall glass of water and two pills. “Sit up.”
He obeyed, swallowing the pills with a tepid gulp. She took the glass, set it on the locked-down nightstand, and just looked at him. In the low, ambient light from the city, her face was all sharp angles and concern.
Then her expression shifted. The worry melted into something darker, more possessive. It was a look he knew. A look that usually started arguments or ended them.
“You know what you need,” she said, her voice dropping.
“Keke, I’m fucking freezing…”
“You’re feverish. Your blood is too hot.” She swung a leg over his hips, straddling him, her weight pinning him to the bed. The thin silk of her shorts was all that separated her heat from his. Through the fabric, he could feel her, already warm and ready. “I’ll sweat it out of you.”
His body responded instantly, traitorously. Despite the chills wracking his core, his cock stiffened, pressing against the confines of his jeans, against the soft pressure of her. “This is a terrible idea,” he breathed, but his hands were already on her thighs, sliding up to grip her ass.
“It’s the only idea,” she said, leaning down to kiss him. Her mouth was demanding, all tongue and teeth, and he kissed her back with a desperate hunger that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with clinging to the now, to the familiar. To being Cole, her Cole, not a potential statistic.
She wrestled his shirt off, then her own tank, her breasts swaying. He reached for them, but she caught his wrists, pinning them down by his head. “My show,” she whispered, a glint in her eye. She worked his jeans and boxers down, just enough to free his cock. It stood thick and eager, a stark contrast to his shivering torso.
She positioned herself, guiding him with one hand, and sank down onto him in one slow, deliberate motion. He gasped. She was so wet, so tight, a searing heaven that cut through the fog of his fever. She began to move, not with rhythm but with a deliberate, grinding violence, setting a pace designed to claim, not to please.
“Look at me,” she commanded, her voice husky.
He forced his eyes open. She was a silhouette against the city-lit glass, her braids coming undone, her lips parted. Her nails bit into the muscles of his chest, little crescent moons of pain that anchored him.
He thrust upward to meet her, driving deeper, wanting to lose himself in the physicality of it. The world narrowed to the slap of skin, her choked gasps, the coil of heat tightening in his gut.
And then, mid-thrust, something changed.
It wasn’t pain. It was a sudden, visceral wrongness. A squeezing tension that started in his core and radiated outwards. It felt like his entire skeleton was being gently, insistently compressed. Keke froze above him, her eyes widening.
“Cole…?”
His gasp caught in his throat. The sensation was intensifying, a cellular concertina. The world didn’t grow bigger; he was growing denser, tighter. His frame, which had always filled this space, felt like it was pulling in on itself.
The most grotesque part was what it did to her. As his body compacted, his cock, still buried deep inside her, suddenly seemed… different. Proportionally thicker, more filling, as the rest of him diminished around it. Keke’s gasp turned into a shocked moan. Her internal muscles clenched around him reflexively, the new, intense pressure triggering a wave of frantic pleasure.
“Don’t stop,” he gritted out, the words feeling strange in his tightening throat. It was a perverse anchor, this brutal connection. The fever broke, not in a sweat, but in this impossible contraction.
She started moving again, a frantic, piston-like rhythm now, her nails drawing beads of blood from his pecs. He could see the confusion and a dark, dawning understanding in her eyes, even as her body chased its finish. The conflicting sensations—the horror, the primal physical pleasure—pushed him to the edge.
He came with a silent, wrenching shout, his orgasm ripped from him by the tumult in his cells. She followed a second later, crying out, her body convulsing around him as she collapsed onto his now-smaller chest.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The sterile room smelled of sex and sweat. Keke pushed herself up, looking down at him. Her expression was unreadable.
He felt hollowed out, lighter. And cold again.
“Stay here,” she said, her voice flat. She slipped off him and out of the bed, grabbing her robe. “I have to… I have to file the brief for tomorrow. I’ll be in the study.”
She walked out without looking back, closing the gate behind her with a soft, definitive click.
Cole lay there, feeling the odd dissonance in his limbs. Like wearing a suit that was once tailored and now baggy. He waited until he heard the soft click of her study door, then he pushed himself up.
The world felt… off. The bed seemed wider. The nightstand appeared farther away. He swung his legs over the side of the padded platform. His feet dangled higher above the floor than they should have.
His heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic drum against the tightening cage of his chest.
He stood. The floor was definitely farther away. A vertigo not of height, but of loss, swept through him. He stumbled to the bathroom, his gait unsteady, new. He didn’t turn on the light, just stood before the broad mirror over the double sinks, illuminated by the city’s glow.
The man staring back was him, but diminished. His green eyes were wider, brighter with panic in a face that seemed more finely drawn. His shoulders, once broad enough to fill a doorway, now looked… compact. He was still tall, but not his tall.
He was shrinking.
A cold, rational terror settled over him. He needed to see. To measure. He stepped into the large, tiled shower stall and turned on the water, hot, hoping the steam would clear his head, make the mirror show the truth.
It didn’t. As the water sluiced over him, he could see the change. The shower head, once at eyebrow level, now arced water over the top of his head. The bottle of body wash on the ledge seemed bulkier, harder to grasp. He braced his hands against the cool tile, letting the water pound his neck, and he finally let the sob out, a ragged, broken sound lost in the spray.
The shower door opened.
Keke stood there, her robe open over her sleep clothes, the brief forgotten. Her eyes traveled down his wet, naked form. He saw the moment of clinical assessment—the comparison to the doorframe behind him, to the height markers they’d secretly etched on the tile months ago in a fit of paranoid preparation.
Her initial concern, the lawyerly need to diagnose and act, flickered across her face. Then it faded, replaced by something else. Something calmer. Terrifyingly sure.
He turned off the water, the sudden silence loud. He reached for a towel, but it was draped over the bar higher up now. He had to stretch for it.
Keke watched him. She didn’t help.
He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped out, dripping on the mat. He had to look up to meet her eyes. Not just a little. A significant tilt of his head.
“Cole…” she started, then stopped. Her gaze wasn’t on his face anymore. It was traveling over his body, this new, smaller version of him. There was a curiosity in it. An ownership.
“How bad is it?” he asked, his voice sounding thinner to his own ears.
She didn’t answer directly. Instead, a slow, speculative smile touched her lips. It wasn’t cruel. It was calculating. “You know,” she said softly, almost to herself, her eyes finally locking with his from her new, greater height. “The firm has been pushing for us to have a more… traditional home dynamic. To project stability.”
She took a step closer. He instinctively took a step back, his shoulder blades meeting the cool tile wall.
“A pet would help with that image,” she continued, her voice a soft murmur in the sterile bathroom air. “Everyone’s getting one now. It’s seen as… responsible. Compassionate, even.”
The word ‘pet’ hung between them, vile and heavy.
She reached out, not to comfort him, but to brush a wet strand of hair from his forehead. Her thumb traced the line of his brow. “And it would be so much easier,” she breathed, her eyes dark with a new, terrifying kind of love, “if the pet was someone who already knew the rules of the house.”
The tile was cold against his back. Her words were colder.
“Keke,” he started, his voice cracking. “Don’t. Don’t even fucking joke about that.”
“I’m not joking.” She said it simply, like she was stating the weather. Her hand moved from his brow to cup his cheek, and the gesture, once loving, now felt like a measurement. Her thumb spanned nearly his entire jawline. “It’s happening, Cole. You’re shrunken. What, about three-and-a-half feet now? It’s not stopping, is it?”
He wanted to argue, to scream, to shove her away. But his body was betraying him with a fresh, icy wave of that internal compression. A subtle creaking sensation echoed in his joints, a sickening popcorn pop in his spine. He felt himself settling, condensing. The top of his head now barely reached the middle of her chest.
She saw the fresh panic in his eyes and her smile widened, just a fraction. “See? Your body knows. It’s adapting.” She withdrew her hand, looking at it as if it were a new tool. “We need to adapt too.”
“Adapt?” he choked out. “Keke, I’m a person! We call the doctors, we—“
“Doctors report,” she interrupted, her tone shifting to the one she used in court, final and damning. “The mandate is clear. Sub-one-foot, you become property of the state for ‘humane management and redistribution.’ You think I’m going to let them take you? Put you in a kennel with strangers? Auction you off to some fuckin’ tech-bro billionaire who’ll stick you in a dollhouse?”
The image was so horrifyingly specific it stole his breath. That was her talent. She didn’t deal in abstract fears; she built concrete nightmares.
“So your solution is to… keep me?” he whispered.
“My solution is to save you,” she corrected, stepping back to lean against the bathroom counter. She looked down at him from what felt like a tremendous height. “Here, with me, you’re safe. You’re loved. You just… you’ll have a different role.”
Another lurch inside him. A sharp, cramping twist in his gut. He gasped, doubling over. The world tilted, the floor rushing up. The shower mat’s plush fibers suddenly looked like a deep-pile carpet. He reached out a hand to steady himself on the toilet, but his arm was shorter, his reach weaker. He missed, stumbling to his knees.
From his new vantage point, Keke’s legs looked like pillars. He stared up, dizzy, at the shadowed junction between her thighs, at the hem of her silk shorts. A place he’d kissed, worshipped, countless times. Now it loomed over him, a dark monument.
“Oh, Cole,” she murmured, not moving to help. Her voice was a mix of awe and hunger. “Look at you.”
He struggled to his feet—or tried to. His coordination was off. His center of gravity had shifted. He was maybe two-and-a-half feet tall now. The process was accelerating.
“It’s… it’s going faster,” he panted, terror dissolving his thoughts into pure instinct.
“I know.” Finally, she moved. She didn’t bend down. Instead, she slowly slid down the cabinet to sit on the bath mat, bringing herself to his level. But even seated, she was larger than him now. She opened her legs, creating a space between them. “Come here.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a command wrapped in a velvet whisper. The part of him that was still her boyfriend, her lover, recoiled. The part that was scared, shrinking, and utterly disoriented crawled forward on his knees. He moved into the V of her thighs, his head coming to rest just below her navel. He was shuddering, from cold, from fear.
She ran her fingers through his hair, now much thicker-seeming in her grasp. “Shhh. I’ve got you.” Her other hand traced the line of his shoulder, down his spine. Her palm covered his entire back. “My poor, big man. Getting so small for me.”
Her touch ignited a confusing, shameful spark in him. His body, in the midst of its silent collapse, responded to familiar territory. A low, unwilling heat stirred in his groin.
She felt the minute shift against her inner thigh. Her breath hitched. “Even now,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “Even like this, you want me. That’s good. That’s important.”
Her hand left his hair and dipped between her own legs, under the silk. He heard the slick sound as she touched herself, watched the muscle in her thigh tense. The scent of her, familiar and musky, filled the air around him, overpowering in his heightened state.
“You used to love going down on me,” she said, her voice husky. “When you were big. Could barely breathe, I’d grind on your face so hard.”
He remembered. He’d loved it. The powerlessness of it, the drowning in her.
“Do you still want to?” she asked, hooking her thumbs in the waistband of her shorts and panties. In one smooth motion, she peeled them down to her knees.
He was staring at her, exposed and glistening, from a distance of inches. It was monumental. A world of soft, dark curves and slick folds. His mouth watered, a Pavlovian response etched deep by love and habit.
“Show me you’re still mine,” she whispered, spreading herself open with two fingers. “Show me you still know how to belong to me.”
The degradation of it warred with a desperate, animal need for connection, for any anchor in this dissolving reality. With a sob trapped in his throat, he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to her.
It was different. Her taste was the same, but the scale was all wrong. Where before his tongue could explore, now it felt like he was trying to navigate a vast, wet landscape. He lapped at her, clumsy and small, his whole head moving where once just his tongue would have.
A low groan rumbled through her. “Yes… fuck, yes, just like that. Try to get your little tongue in there. As deep as you can.”
He obeyed, the coil of shame tightening with each weak flick. She began to move against his face, gently at first, then with more insistence. His neck strained. The world narrowed to the taste of her, the smell of her, the crushing pressure of her thighs beginning to close around his head.
“That’s it,” she panted, her hands now gripping the back of his head, not caressing, but guiding, pushing him deeper. “You’re just a little thing now, aren’t you? Just a little mouth for me to use.”
He couldn’t breathe. He was buried in her, the world gone dark and wet and overwhelming. He tapped her thigh, a weak patting.
She released him with a gasp, letting him pull back, dripping and desperate for air. He was panting, his own erection straining, painfully small and ridiculous.
“Look at you,” she breathed, her eyes glazed. She looked between his legs. “All eager. You think you can still fuck me? Like this?”
Before he could answer, another, more violent compression seized him. He cried out, falling forward against her stomach. It felt like his very bones were melting, reforming into a denser, tinier puzzle. The room seemed to explode in size. The grout lines in the tile became valleys. The droplets of water on the shower door looked like planets.
Keke watched, rapt, as he diminished before her eyes. His clothes, the towel around his waist, pooled around a form that was swiftly receding into them. When the sensation finally ebbed, he was struggling in a lake of terrycloth.
He was the size of a large action figure. Twelve inches tall, maybe less.
She laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated wonder. “Oh my god.”
With a casual flick, she brushed the heavy towel away. He lay naked on the bath mat, completely exposed. The air felt twenty degrees cooler on his skin.
She leaned over, a giantess blocking the light, and picked him up. Her hands encircled his entire torso, her fingers meeting around his back. She lifted him to her face, studying him. Her warm breath washed over him.
“You’re perfect,” she whispered. She brought him down between her legs again. “Now let’s see.”
She positioned him. His feet dangled in the air. His tiny, hard cock pressed against her vast, soaked entrance. There was no possible way. It was a cruel joke.
But Keke was relentless. She used her fingers to part herself, and with deliberate, firm pressure, she pushed the head of him inside.
It was a sensation beyond anything. A tight, impossible, engulfing heat. He was sheathed in her, his entire lower body surrounded by pulsing, living velvet. He screamed, a high, tiny sound.
“Shhh, baby, I’ve got you,” she cooed, holding him there, not moving. He was a part of her, a tiny plug. She looked down, fascinated by the sight. “Fuck, that’s obscene. I can barely feel you, but I can see you… in me.”
She began to move him. Not by thrusting, but by manipulating his entire body with her hand. She’d push him an inch deeper, then pull him almost all the way out, using him like a living toy. His world was a blur of motion and sensation, her grip firm and inescapable, her cries of pleasure thunderous above him.
He came quickly, a tiny, desperate convulsion that she probably didn’t even feel. She kept moving him, milking his oversensitive body until he was whimpering. Only then, when her own breathing hitched and she shuddered around him, did she stop.
She pulled him out, glistening and limp, and held him against her chest. He could hear the colossal, steady thump of her heart.
“See?” she whispered into the top of his head. “You still make me feel good. You’re still useful.”
He was crying, silent tears, too overwhelmed for anything else.
She carried him, cradled in one hand, to the bedroom. To their bed—the secure, padded platform. She set him down in the center. He stood unsteadily on the soft surface, which now felt like a vast, bare mattress. The gate on the side was a wall of polished bars stretching into the sky.
“Stay right there,” she said.
She left and returned a moment later with something that gleamed in the low light. It was a slender, silver chain, fine but strong. From it dangled a tiny, elegant tag. She knelt by the bed, her face level with his. With tender, precise movements, she fastened the chain around his neck. It was a perfect fit. The tag lay against his chest. He looked down. Etched on it was a single word: COLE.
“So you don’t get lost,” she said softly.
Then, from her pocket, she produced one more item. A black leather collar, padded, with a small, sturdy ring. It was sized for a very small animal.
He stared at it, comprehension dawning, a final, cold horror seeping into his soul.
“No,” he rasped, his voice a mouse’s squeak. “Keke, please. Don’t.”
“It’s for your safety,” she said, her voice utterly convincing, even to her. “The law is very clear, baby. Under one foot, you’re not a person anymore. But with this,” she said, reaching for him, her fingers gentle but inexorable as they closed around his waist, “you’re mine. My pet. My responsibility. My Cole.”
He struggled, a feeble twisting in her grasp. She brought the collar up to his neck, over the chain. The leather was cool and firm. He heard the click of the buckle, snug but not choking, just behind his ears.
He was collared.
As if the symbol itself triggered the final change, a last, silent contraction pulsed through him. It was swift and total. The world seemed to explode upward and outward in a final, nauseating lurch. Keke’s hand, which had been encircling his waist, now enclosed his entire body from chest to knees. Her thumb alone was as wide as his shoulders.
She gasped, her eyes wide with triumph. She lifted him, bringing him eye-to-eye. He dangled in her grip, his legs kicking uselessly in the open air.
The once-spacious room was now a cavern of impossible dimensions. The bed beneath was a distant white plain. Her face was a beautiful, familiar moon.
He had become her six-inch pet man.