Next morning found your pillow covered in hair. You looked down at your body and saw your left arm with flawless skin while your right arm had patches of your old skin with coarse dark hair amongst a majority of “soft skin”.
You moved to the bathroom to check on your face. As you had half expected it was almost completely “Soft skin” there was just a small patch of coarser looking skin on your forehead. Interestingly your eyes seemed totally unchanged and you still had your long dark eyelashes.
Your hair was a different matter. Your scalp looked like that of Gollum from Lord of the rings. You were not a pretty site.
You mother looked at you in shock when you entered the kitchen. “Oh my god! Daniel! Your hair!”
You tried to make a joke of your appearance “I don’t think your going to be able to sell your formula as a beauty cream”
“I’m so sorry. We should never have tested it on you. It was quite unethical, but we had seen no ill effects when we had tried the cream on ourselves”
“Mum I forgive you”
“No I take responsibility. Last week I was thinking about how many millions we could make. I got ahead of myself. I should have tested the cream on a cell culture first” She came across and hugged you.
“I’m thinking I might call in sick today. I don’t want to go to work looking like this. They would treat me like a pariah”
“That might be the best” your mother agreed.
….
After ringing in sick you went down to the lab. Once more Stephanie examined you thoroughly and documented your changes. She took yet another blood sample.
When she was finished you went back upstairs. You didn’t need to shave your face. Instead you shaved your scalp. It was obvious you were going to lose all your hair anyway. Better to be an egghead than a Gollum.
You checked whether the same thing was happening to your pubic hairs. It was, although perhaps not quite as drastically yet. For the moment you left them intact.
You didn’t feel sick but you didn’t have a lot of energy. You spent the morning between tidying your room, reading the newspapers and being on the computer.