"This is crazy," he muttered to himself and got up from his chair and looked out the window for a few minutes.
"This is crazy," he repeated softly. "A-a little prong or antenna plugged into the USB port of a laptop can't do magic." He tried to make himself for the solidity, the certainty of this notion. Of course those claims are impossible.
But . . then how did it read everything about my body from one little electric pulse? That should be impossible, too.
He took a deep breath with his eyes closed. Okay, okay, okay. I'll just try one test of this thing. But . . . what if it actually works? I can't turn myself into a fish or something where I'd be helpless or-or something too big for the apartment like a T-Rex.
He pondered what he should do from among nearly infinite options before finally settling on a monkey, an ape. Five fingers, mostly human dexterity. I'll-I'll ape myself.
But first, he set up a camera with the idea that, if the device actually did a tiny bit of something for a few fleeting seconds, he'd have it on camera. That done, with the camera on the counter and recording video he set about creating what the program called a "Destination identity". He set the origin identity at himself from the assessment a few minutes back. The machine let out a deep toned hum.
He typed away, through option screen after option screen. "Allright, if I'm gonna be a monkey, I'm gonna be a big one. Eastern lowlands gorilla. He clicked on that choice. He went through menu after menu after that, able to pick every sort of choice about what said gorilla would look like and its abilities. The last two menu boxes were labeled "Duration of Transformation" and "Duration of New Identity". He sighed, unsure what was the right choice. Finally, almost arbitrarily he settled on a 1 minute time of transformation. Instantaneous didn't seem like it would let him appreciate it but he didn't want it to take a long time. What if it hurt?
For duration of identity, he sighed again, unsure, and picked 4 hours.
To actually start the process, you had to click the big red START button twice. After the first time, a message displayed on the screen asking , "ARE YOU SURE?". Sivertsen clicked it again. The machine let out another deep him and instantly a much more powerful electric wave passed through him.
"Whoa!"
Right away he felt . . . odd.
He looked down and saw that the palms of his hands were blackening.
"Holy . . shit!" he whispered. "I'm changing!"
All over his body, his skin first felt warm and then like ten thousand pins were pricking his skin. The backs of his hands covered with thick black hair. He reached up and felt his neck just as it, too, covered completely with a mat of thick black hair.
Next he felt his mouth widen, his nose flatten and his nostrils get hugely larger and his head expanding upward.
"It's -it's really happening!" he gasped with a last bit of human voice.
And then, humiliatingly, he felt his penis, proudly 98th percentile for both length and thickness, get smaller and smaller till it was like his little finger at best.
He tried to complain in human voice but only produced a series of grunts and "ooo"'s.
Finally, his slender hips started widening. Oh no! He realized, too late, that he should have taken off his clothes. But he hadn't taken it seriously. His ass end got wider and wider and with a crrrrack and then a rrrrrrrip, the seams of his pants were overcome by his new width. His legs shortened and his feet got bigger, bursting out of his shoes as he grew a pot belly and massively powerful shoulders and arms.
At the elapse of a minute's time, he felt everything finish. His transformation was done. Where a minute ago had sat a young man weighing 164 pounds, now he was an Eastern Lowlands Gorilla weighing 402 pounds.
He angrily pulled off the tattered remnants of his clothes. Damn. Should have thought of that. He reached for the camera to turn it off and realized that, with his much thicker new fingers manipulating buttons and a keyboard was going to be very difficult. It took him several tries to just hit the damn button on top of the camera.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some dumbells that he'd left on the living room floor. He scooted over there, walking gorilla style now, not upright but on all fours. He picked up the largest of the dumbells, 50 pounds and did a curl then an overhead press with the greatest of ease. 50 pounds now felt like 5 or 10 pounds used to feel. God damn but I'm strong.
He scooted into the bathroom and stared, fixated at his new body. "I'm actually a gorilla," he tried to say but only produced "Ooo oooooooooo ooo ooooooo!" He was fascinated, poking and prodding his new self, making faces, opening and closing his mouth, confirm, finally, that this new ape body was actually him.
Brrrrrrrrrrrring!
His phone rang in the kitchen. In just two powerful jumps from the bathroom door, he was there in the kitchen looking over it. He recognized the number. Etta! The girl he had talked with at the club the other night. He so much wanted to talk to her that he actually reached for the phone before recoiling and then just listening as she left a message. Oh, yeah, she'll still want to go out with me now that I have a triple width hairy ass.
He'd forgotten how long he was going to be stuck like this and looked at the mini-laptop screen, careful not to touch it. In the upper right corner of the screen was a small countdown box it still listed over 3 hours and 30 minutes to go. He sighed then made his was to the living room . After several pushes at the remote control he got the TV to turn on.
Planet of the Apes.
"Oooooo ooooooo oooooo!!" he declared angrily though it took him ten tries to change the channel to Jeopardy. He was relieved that he could still get almost all the answers even if he couldn't phrase them in the form of a question, if you didn't count, "Ooooo ooooo ooooo ooooo ooooooooooo?"
So, even in this completely gorillafied body I have now, I still retain my mind. Hmm. That's interesting. It could come in very handy for someone in the NSA to be able to be in the room without anyone realizing that it's me that's in the room.
He watched some more tv and then anxiously awaited the elapse of four hours. With great difficulty, he turned the camera on again and sat his giant gorilla but in the same chair. The transformation went in the opposite order in this direction, first size then other characteristics then hair and skin. When it was done, he breathed a huge sigh of relief.
"Damn," he muttered. "The thing actually worked. It actually transformed me."
And now his thoughts turned to what an NSA agent could do with such a device.