Sivertsen woke up the next day feeling deeply conflicted. He'd spent hours musing about the possibilities of such a device for a sort of a spy like he was, well at least until he was fired.
And then there was the case of that old man and the note deftly inserted in his shirt pocket. He'd read stories about something called "sheep dipping", although it seemed to come up more on pretty out there conspiracy sites. It was when a guy was publicly let go or cast off by an agency sent out among the sheep of the general public. But, secretly, the guy was still working for whoever it was, NSA, CIA or maybe undercover as a cop with the DEA.
But, in those cases, the guy was in on it. Sivertsen sure as hell wasn't in on anything and Carruthers and those assholes sure seemed to be authentically firing him. Nobody had winked at him or given the slightest indication that his termination was anything other than what it seemed to be.
And getting into the mindset of parsing all his interactions at the NSA for the slightest hints of any grander plan just amplified his skepticism about the previous days genetic events.
He couldn't really be turned into an ape, could he? How much did he think he weighed once he'd been transformed, if he'd actually been transformed? 350 pounds? 400 pounds? Where did the mass come from that made up the difference between those weights and natural, slender 164 pound me?
He just couldn't quite accept it. Which was more likely, that this program somehow hypnotizes the user and makes him think that these incredible transformations have been worked on him or that they've actually happened?
He needed to have outside confirmation. Other people who haven't maybe been hypnotized have to see the same thing. But how? He immediately understood that this could be dangerous. He puzzled at how to set it up that other people. Maybe his neighbors in the apartment complex, see me but don't freak out and call animal rescue or something like that and get me shot with a tranquilizer dart and put in a cage.
He thought long and hard and finally came up with an idea.
He went out in the hallway, in the parking lot, in the entrance area to his building and two others in the complex, asking everyone he came across, "Have you seen my friend's brown spider monkey?"
He explained to a couple of women that a friend of his brother's was quadriplegic and has an assistance monkey. Well, the friend was going into the hospital for an operation and they were taking the opportunity to do some remodeling of his special apartment and they asked him to take the monkey for the next few days. But the window was open and he got out! Please, can you help me?! He answers to the name "Kong". He sits about 20 inches high with a three foot long tail, he weighs about 20 pounds and he's covered in brown fur. Can you help me?
Sivertsen ran some errands, filed for unemployment and ate an early dinner. He opened the slider to his third floor apartment's balcony.
Then he sat down at his laptop and laboriously went through all the menu options. This certainly seemed exacting and real. He programmed the "Destination Identity" to be an adult, male Brown Spider Monkey with athletic abilities at the top end of the scale for such a monkey but retaining 100% his own mind. He gave the destination identity one other special attribute, the ability to speak in his human voice in addition to making the pattern of chirps and screeches normal to the species, Ateles hybridus. He set the time of change to a minute and the duration of identity to 15 hours this time.
He sighed and tried to think of some test that would prove that whatever happened now was real and not just him hypnotized or in some other way tricked to think something had really happened to him when it hadn't. But he couldn't come up with anything. The best he had was his previous idea that if neighbors told him that they'd seen a monkey then it wasn't just him imagining it or being tricked into it.
He was about to hit start when he realized that, like the previous day, he still had his normal clothes on. He frantically stripped and even got his feet up on the bar stool seat with his knees up against his chest in what he imagined to be a standard monkey posture.
He hit the start button and then, after the "Are You Sure?" prompt, hit it again. The strong electromagnetic wave passed through him again.
Immediately, he felt a tail start to project from the top of the cleft of his buns. In just seconds it had stretched to his thighs and then was off the bar stool seat and down to the floor. At the same time, he started shrinking. Even sitting naked on his haunches he'd been more than a foot over the counter in front of him. In just seconds that was cut in half and in a few seconds more his eyes were barely above the counter. He looked down at his arms and legs to see that they'd gotten ridiculously thin.
He let out a high pitched protesting screech.
He got thinner and thinner, a perception only exacerbated by his arms and legs getting proportionately longer and longer. His fingers, too, got longer but his thumbs got much shorter and, looking between his legs, that part of him became much, much shorter to the point that he was glad when he started covering over with fur to hide his now tiny maleness. In just seconds more his tail, body and limbs covered over with golden brown fur, some black at his black skinned hands and face and his dark green eyes had also turned a golden brown in his little monkey face.
He could feel that it was done and looked around the confines of the now much larger room.
"I am a Brown Spider Monkey," he carefully said, confirming that he still had his human voice as the program had promised.
It took him just one leap to go from the chair to the entrance to the bathroom 20 feet away. He pulled out the scale that was under the sink. He seldom used it because he was a toned 164 pounds and probably never deviated more than a pound from that.
He sat his furry little ass on the scale, looking up at the edge of the sink. The dial in front of him swayed back and forth slightly then settled at 22 pounds.
"I now weigh 22 pounds. Where did the other 142 pounds of me go?"
He let out a little sigh and then a series of "Reee's". Hmm. If I don't consciously try to speak in a human voice I make just the sounds I normally would with this body.
He jumped up on the basin top and stared into the mirror at his furry little self.
Amazing. Look at my stretched out arms and legs! My . . . he turned his tiny little ass to one side to see every inch of it, my tail! He whipped his tail back and forth shocked at how completely natural it felt. This whole tiny body feels so perfectly natural.
He'd read that Brown Spider Monkeys like him mostly ate fruit. He jumped onto the counter and took a peach from the bowl there. Holding it in both hands he spun it round and round stripping it down to the pit in under a minute, a good meal for a 21 pound guy like him.
With just a couple joyful jumps he was across his apartment and at the slider door. He paused for one anxious moment, hesitant to let others see him in this reduced, simian state but he had to know if they saw him. He had to confirm that this was real.
He jumped up from the balcony floor to the railing and then leaped out 20 feet to a nearby tree, letting out a joyful screech as he did so. He leaped from the top of that tree to another and then atop a third and a forth exulting in his amazing agility and letting out a series of chirps and screeches as he went. Goddam but this was fun!
He spent another 10 minutes just leaping from tree to tree enjoying this new monkey body and everything he could do with it. But he realized that he wasn't here to play. He was here to confirm that what the machine did was real. It sure seemed real. In a series of leaps with his new 21 pound body he'd gone a thousand feet from his apartment. He hung from a high branch of an oak tree by only his tail surveying the people below. He could see a half dozen people getting out of their cars. His pink and black monkey lips curled into a smile. What would these people remember more than a mischievous monkey?
He swung down the oak tree in three moves and landed on the hood of a car driven by an old woman who'd been wearing a mask despite being along in her car . He jumped onto the hood just after he closed the door than yanked the mask off her. She was shocked and let out a small scream. He wiped his furry ass with the mask and then put it back on her whereupon she let out a truly ear splitting scream.
Sivertsen leaped from her car to another three cars away to another across a parking aisle to a tree and over a fence to then another tree and back into the apartment complex. There, a fat hipster was jogging, barely more than walking along the sidewalk beyond the parking spaces. In just a couple running leaps he was beside the hipster and yanked his shorts down. The hipster tripped and several onlookers burst out laughing as he frantically pulled up his shorts. The hipster immediately started shrieking "That monkey must be rabid! That monkey must be rabid!"
Sivertsen's little monkey face was cast in a smirk. He went on a mischief spree, bouncing from tree to sidewalk, pulling off a man's toupee, sneaking up and peeing in a man's alcoholic drink by the complex swimming pool, kissing a beautiful woman on the lips as she fumbled for her keys at a building entrance.
In short order, a police cruiser was called to the site and from high up in a tree, Sivertsen the little brown spider monkey could see a policeman pointing up at him and talking to a dozen onlookers. He could also hear someone banging on the door of his apartment. "Mr. Sivertsen! Mr. Sivertsen! We found your monkey!"
Okay, he told himself. Maybe it's time to go back in the apartment. He took one more look back at the policeman. Now, among the onlookers right behind him was a shockingly obese woman chanting "Defund the Police!" over and over from just a few feet from the cop.
Hmmm. Sivertsen felt that his digestion of that peach was done. He considered it and couldn't resist. Have to remember to wash this hand right away, he told himself then squatted and caught his own poo. He heard a couple of the onlookers' voice go from curious to frantic.
He flung it.
Perfect.
It broke into several pieces hitting both the cop and the obese woman chanting "Defund the Police". The cop only shook his head and wiped it away as best he could. The obese woman had a fit, shrieking over and over and then flopping on the ground, her shrieks only picking up, anew, each time she found more of Sivertsen's poo in her hair or on her clothes.
With a few leaps that were easy for him in his little monkey body, Sivertson made his way to his apartment's balcony and then hopped inside, out of view.
Once there, he stepped to a spot beside the open slider door and cleared his throat. He concentrated on speaking in his human voice and shouted, "Kong! You're back! Thanks everyone for finding him! Thank you!"
A few minutes later, the obese woman was banging on his door, demanding to be let in like it was a doughnut shop that wasn't opening late. In his tiny, simian form, Sivertsen wasn't about to let the disagreeable sow in. He just waited her out.
The important thing was that all this seemed to prove conclusively that the effects of the Chronivac 4.0 were real. He really had been a 400 pound ape. He really was a 21 pound monkey now. And with the Chronivac 4.0 he'd been able to direct these amazing changes.
He watched a few movies and went to bed, half paying attention to the movies and half pondering the implications of this. He jumped up on his bed and crawled in, the sheets seeming the size of the tarps they put over the infield at baseball game rain delays.
When he woke up, still a Brown Spider Monkey, he was momentarily shocked and perplexed at his size and the brown fur that covered him. But then he remembered the events of the previous day and calmed down. After that he thought some more of what he could do and got excited.