Brad completed his core profile, following the instructions in the booklet. He felt a familiar sensation of peculiar excitement as he followed the steps to execute his plan. He looked down at the finished profile on the screen.
Name: Brad Rivera
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 175lbs
Build: Lean
Status: Married
Sexual Preference: Gay
Penis size: 6.5"
Occupation: Physicist
He next implemented a quick self-scan by simply waving the device’s screen up and down in front of himself while standing. The scan attached itself to his saved profile, ensuring access to his original form.
Although the device offered him a smorgasbord of possibilities, Brad fixated on housefly, one of the first choices on the insect menu.
In his estimation, the only drawback to shrinking was that it took so fucking long to travel from Point A to Point B. With wings, he could solve that problem and still enjoy the experience of being small in a gigantic world.
He clicked housefly, programming that option. But he performed another survey of his freshly-entered selection. Some parameters in the menu, such as age, had apparently been randomly supplied by the device.
Name: Musca Domestica
Age: 20 days
Gender: Male
Height: .25 inches
Weight 10 micrograms
Aware/unaware: aware
Duration: 60 minutes
“Looks good,” he spoke aloud, but he wondered about the age and reached for his phone. A quick Google search later, he learned that on average, a housefly lives less than a month. Twenty days old seemed to be cutting it close.
He scaled back a sliding bar to make his expected age six days old. “That seems safer,” he decided. “I don’t want a body that will keel over from old age.”
Now for the conversation with Mark. He picked up his phone and called his man.
“A Chrono-what?” Mark asked with thinly masked concern after listening to Brad’s rather breathless condensed version of his intent to use his mysterious device.
“It’s just when you get home, I’ll fly up and greet you,” Brad said. “I’ll be the bug you’ve always imagined me being…”
“I don’t think of you as a bug!” Mark sputtered a protest.
“Liar.”
“This sounds dangerous,” Mark said. “Wait until I am home and we can…”
“Too late.” Brad clicked the device and Mark thought he actually heard a zapping noise.
Brad?” Mark questioned. He waited briefly and spoke again. “Brad! Dammit, what have you done?”
He got no answer.
Half an hour later, Mark walked into the house. He expected to hear a buzz from a fly, but he got nothing.
“Brad?”
He closed the door and made his way into the kitchen. It took him only a moment to recognize an unfamiliar device at rest on the kitchen table.
•••
Something felt wrong.
He realized it almost immediately.
Brad had been anticipating the exhilaration of flight with a tiny pair of wings on a tiny housefly body as soon as he opened his eyes.
Instead, he could barely move. And he tried valiantly. The best he could achieve was a feeble rocking motion.
As for opening his eyes, no matter what he tried, vision appeared denied, too. He didn’t even have eyes!
His body instinctively “felt” bright sunlight as a steady beam passed through the kitchen window and shone on his position in the center of a gleaming kitchen tile.
“What’s the matter?” The transformed physicist wondered. “Hey! Help!”
No words escaped what might conveniently be termed a mouth, which was simply an opening on one end of his gray-white tubular body. It was a simple opening encircled by jagged grasping hooks.
“What the fuck? I’m supposed to be a fly!”
Had the device malfunctioned?
Although his thoughts raced and explored that possibility, Brad had only himself to blame.
He was exactly what he had programmed into the settings prior to authorizing the transformation — he was a six-day old housefly, a creature that spent the first couple of weeks of life in larval form.
Instead of a winged insect, he was a stubby, ugly maggot stranded on a smooth expanse of ceramic tile inset into his kitchen floor.
He didn’t realize his mistake, of course, being ignorant of the stages in a housefly’s life cycle.
His mouth gaped and the hooks protruded, hungrily seeking something he could bore through and consume, but the presence of a rotting carcass or even a pile of putrid rubbish was sadly missing in the immaculate kitchen.
“Help! Someone help!” Brad tried to scream, but his maggot’s maw merely pulsed wordlessly.
He was on the cusp of panic when he remembered that he had fortunately programmed the Chronivac to restore him to human form after sixty minutes. He would just have to be patient. He would have to…
Tremors rocked the tiles under the helpless grub. He’d had enough experience as a shrunken man to recognize the peril associated with such powerful tremors.
“I’m here!” Mark bellowed upon entering the house. “Fly out, fly out, wherever you are.”
Hearing the “words” at first gave Brad misguided hope. He felt his husband’s voice more than he heard it, but he still got the gist of Mark’s speech.
“Mark. Something got fucked up… Please, find me! Help me!”
The tremors came closer, grew more powerful with every step.
His wingless, completely alien form, continued to baffle him. He simply hadn’t done enough homework to know that flies begin life as larval maggots, and by reducing his age, he had landed himself in such a body.
“Fuck,” he though as he tried to wiggle his form into something approaching actual movement. “This is bad.”
On the floor, the tiny gray-white maggot attempted to crawl. Lacking limbs, that didn’t work. Brad’s new body had no legs, but the “front” end of his tubular form had a simple mouth lined with grasping hooks. He had no eyes, but he could “sense” that he was lost on a gleaming vast landscape.
His tiny body rocked on the floor tile as Mark’s footsteps approached the kitchen counter.
“Mark!” Brad wanted to scream. The stomps came closer. His tiny body felt the powerful tremors from each step.