When the Chronivac asked Robert to choose a species, he paused to think. A buzzing sound caught his attention, so he glanced over to his bedroom window and saw a wasp landing on the sill. At first, he was nervous about the possibility that it might fly over and sting him, but it twitched only its legs and antennae for a moment and flew back outside. The encounter caused Robert to consider how simple and free the life of a wasp would seem to be. As far as he could tell, all they had to do was buzz around, eat whatever a wasp eats, maybe build a nest somewhere, and eventually make wasp babies somehow. Surely it couldn't be as difficult as putting up with the high school drama he was discovering as a freshman. People would think carefully before bothering a wasp, too, because they could sting. The best part would have to be that wasps could fly: Robert would love to be able to fly; humans can only fly in superhero movies (boring five-hour plane rides to visit family don't count).
Robert set his new species to a some kind of wasp and clicked the change button. Immediately, everything split, twisted, and rearranged both within and around him. He was so overwhelmed and confused that he couldn't move or talk or do anything for a while (he couldn't even begin to guess how long or short a time it was). At first, he thought the Chronivac or something else had simply killed him, but he soon decided that he was still alive and still in his bedroom. His arms and legs felt weird, as though he could move his hands or feet normally but could still flex a number of joints up and down the length of his limbs. He could flex and move other things on his body, too: somewhere between his arms and legs he could feel two other things sticking out of his body that worked about the same way his arms and legs did, from what he could feel from inside them. There were also things on his back that sent a strong vibration through his body when he tried to move them, and they seemed to generate an upward pull on his midsection if he kept them moving for too long. He didn't think he could smell or hear at first, but an on-going flow of intense sensation into his face from beyond it made Robert realize that he could actually hear and especially smell quite well, only he wasn't doing so through a nose or ears. Instead, he had a pair of long, thick, arm-like extensions of his face that he could twitch and redirect at will, and they were constantly sending back scents and vibrations that they had gathered from the world around him. He vibrated the things on his back again and heard a loud roar through the things on his face.
The hardest part for Robert to get used to was the jumbled mess of images that he was seeing, but he quickly started piecing them together once the sounds and smells from his face-parts told him he must still be in his house, even in his very bedroom, so he must be seeing things he should already recognize. His entire sense of vision was incredibly complicated, and it really felt like more than one sense, if he thought about it. The raw brightness of sunlight was filtering in through three pits on his head, almost like the sunroof of a car. The real show-stopper, though, was the kaleidoscope of familiar and unfamiliar colors from two large panels of eyesight on either side of Robert's head: he couldn't move his eyes or blink, it seemed, but he could see thousands of jigsaw-like pieces of a panoramic picture of his bedroom. He could see things behind him, things beside him, things before or beneath him, and things above him. The computer screen was flickering vibrant colors into countless little segments of his field of view. The chair cushion beneath him was like a vast hillside of interwoven nets, and the plant-life outside the window was more vivid and colorful than Robert had ever seen it before. There was a very noticeable movement above and in front Robert, which even seemed to cast some moving shadows on his triple sunroof, so he spent a moment focusing on that and trying to identify it. He could make out the pixelated form two giant stalks bending and twisting, standing tall from somewhere just beneath his eyes. Those must be the things on his face that let him smell things!
"This is confusing!" thought Robert after his mind calmed down. "What did the Chronivac do to me? I just wanted to see what it's like to be a wasp. Wait a second--that's it!"
Robert flexed his facial stalks around some more in front of his view. It made sense to him what those were now: his new antennae! He'd learned something in an science class a long time ago about insects having compound vision--that must be what he's seeing through his puzzle-eyes! He sure wasn't expecting to have three completely different eyes upon his head, though, if that's what the light-and-shadow sensors were. He started moving the things on his back again and didn't stop this time. He felt his body lifting off the chair. "There wings!" he thought, "I'm flying! I can fly whenever I want now!"
His six legs dangled beneath him, and his long, sharp abdominal area hung behind them as he hovered in place like a helicopter. He felt the flow of air against innumerable tiny hairs across his insect body. He adjusted his wings and moved himself forward; he would have shouted if he could still do so. It was strange to think that he had really become a wasp in his bedroom! And the window was still open, so he could go out and enjoy nature in his new form. He still didn't really feel like he was breathing, but he didn't feel like he was suffocating either. There was lots of fresh air coursing through his body--from his sides, maybe? He wished he'd paid more attention about insects in science class. Whatever. "This is gonna be great!" he thought.