With a casual swipe, Mark cleared the irritating bug out of his path. He hadn’t actually slapped it. The damn bug had been too quick for that, but now he could proceed undisturbed, utterly unaware how he’d left his spouse traumatized and slowly coming to terms with a new reality.
After the close call and a moment of blinding panic, Brad managed to regain a slim hold on sanity and control of his new form.
His tiny fly heart beat at an incredible rate of almost 300 beats per minute, but that wasn’t too far out of normal range for such an insect. He felt excited and aroused, but that was also normal for him when in the presence of his husband, especially when Mark now loomed over Brad and everything else as such an enormous titan.
What did make his blood chill was the memory of his decision to make restoration a manual, not automatic, process.
In short, Mark or someone else would have to manually work the device to restore him.
He gave Mark the benefit of the doubt.
“He’s smart. He will figure it out,” Brad told himself. “As soon as he reads the profiles…”
His thoughts screeched to a halt. The profile! The one he had hidden with a password.
“Fuck!” Brad began to realize the immensity of his dilemma.
He twitched his wings and buzzed off in search of Mark. He found him in the living room on the sofa. Brad buzzed closer. When about half a room length away from the immense man, he saw that Mark had put aside the device, replacing it with the TV remote.
For a change, he felt thankful for Mark’s incessant channel surfing. He could never land on any programming for more than a few seconds before he was zapping the remote for other options.
Brad, unnoticed, spiraled down on tiny wings and landed on the device’s view screen. He scraped with a spiky clawed foreleg at the glass, trying to swipe open the screen.
“Damn, it’s not working…” Brad edged back over into near-panic mode.
He hopped over onto the “enter” button adjacent to the view screen. His puny form didn’t offer anything of relevance to activate the button. He tried hovering and dropping onto the button. All he got was a bruised abdomen.
His antics, erratic and wild as they were, had the undesired effect of drawing attention. To Mark, the return of the housefly still barely rose to nuisance level, but he couldn’t ignore the bug as it kept hopping onto the device and crawling all over it.
Brad had paused and was staring at the blank screen with his new faceted insect eyes, thinking there must be something he could do to reverse his transformation. The software of his intellect was hampered by the primitive hardware of the insect.
His thoughts kept getting interrupted by insect instincts. He might now have a puny brain, but he was determined to solve his problem with the one thing he still had going for him: human intelligence.
His fly brain, no bigger than a pinhead, contained over 100,000 neurons with around 100 million synapses. It sounded impressive until compared with a human brain and its 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections.
Typically. a fly only needed brain power to trigger a few hundred different behaviors, mostly connected to feeding, grooming, flying, mating and learning.
The stress of his situation made his little fly brain hurt. Brad’s taxing of his cognitive abilities finally prompted his insect brain into self-preservation mode, shunting aside Brad’s disturbing contesting of the right to be in control.
It happened so quickly that the transformed man required a second or so to absorb what had happened. Recognition sank in just as Mark put down the remote and reached for a copy of yesterday’s newspaper.
“Fly!” Brad demanded. “Now!”
Nothing happened.
He discovered that, with the worst possible timing, he had been locked out from the controls. The fly brain might have to share space with him, but it didn’t have to cede its authority and autonomy to him.
A shadow passed overhead, the fly sensing it and taking appropriate action as Mark slapped a cylinder of rolled up newsprint onto the table.
Mark reacted to the miss with a few more ineffective swipes, but by that time the fly had made a quick exit from the vicinity.
It was a perfect time, in Brad’s estimation, to make a wary approach and attempt to communicate with Mark, but the fly thought otherwise.
In a classic fight or flight scenario, the fly chose flight and, a couple of moments later, the insect dove into the kitchen trash, seeking food. A slimy banana peel soaked with other liquid wastes provided something the fly could savor as Brad could only rage as the insect instincts kept him on a tight leash. A chaos of flavors and tastes seeped through the receptors on his tiny feet and reached the primitive fly brain.
Brad’s shreds of remaining willpower were overwhelmed by a tide of new sensations. The fly feasted while Brad rested uneasily for another opportunity to exert his will.