Simon went into the bathroom, looking around and trying to wake up. He had a raging case of morning wood and it was taking it a while to go down, and damn, it looked bigger than it ever had before. Which wasn't a bad thing, because Simon was particularly average in the hung department.
But something else was odd, and he finally noticed when he pissed and hit the back of the toilet--the toilet was lower than before. Or actually, he was taller.
Of course, he had been away at college for almost a year. He finished pissing, then looked over at the doorframe where he'd put a mark last year when he was in high school showing how tall he was. He stood against it, measuring with his hand, then seeing where he came to now. His fingers were about an inch and a little bit above the mark.
Simon grinned. Cool! He'd been 6'1" when he'd gone off to college but must have sprouted up to 6'2" while he was there. He posed in the mirror and flexed. Yep, he was the man. He then noticed that he had a bit more muscle definition too, and the beginning of a treasure trail. Even a little hair between his pecs.
He started to get hard again at the thought of it and locked himself in the bathroom to masturbate.
Jeff, meanwhile, woke up slowly, running his hand over the luxuriant hair covering his chest and his shoulders, his upper arms and just about everything else. He got up, stretching and fluffing the hair, then ran his hand across the raspy stubble on his face and neck. This would take some getting used to, but it was really growing on him.
He went over to his dresser mirror and looked at himself and was shocked to see that more, not less, hairy than he'd been when he'd gone to bed. His unibrow was now a solid bar connecting to the hair at his temple and trailing hair down the bridge of his nose, and the hair on the tip of his nose and ears was longer and thicker. In fact, all the hair on his body was longer and thicker, and there was more of it.
He went and got out the Chronivac. What in the hell was happening? He'd instructed it to put his body hair index to 25.
He scanned himself. His current hair index was 29.8. He was a freak!
What happened to the commands from last night?
He then saw a flashing icon in the corner of the screen. He clicked on it.
WARNING! SYTEM RESOURCES CRUCIALLY LOW. PLEASE ALLOW CURRENT CHANGES TO EXECUTE BEFORE INITIATING ADDITIONAL PARAMETERS. DO NOT ABORT--UNEXPECTED DATA LOSS, SCANNER ERRORS AND OVERWRITE VIOLATIONS MAY OCCUR!
Another window popped up then, showing Jeff's stats, except that it said that his body hair index was currently 10 with a projected index of 25. What the hell?
Jeff clicked around, trying to find a help file, and at last did, discovering that some of his worst fears were confirmed: The original hairiness program had stalled when he'd used the Chronivac for a more extensive program on Simon, then the subsequent hairiness program had mixed it's variables with those of the initial program, not of the current scan. He was going from 0 to 30 and to 25 simultaneously. The hairiness was off the scale!
The scanning feature of the Chronivac seemed all right, however. It showed him currently at 30.91 Then the program timer froze as a new window came up:
WARNING! UPDATING! CHRONIVAC HAS ACQUIRED NEW DATA! RECALIBRATING HAIRINESS SCALE!
There was a whirr and a hum and then a window popped up declaring NEW PARAMETERS IMPLEMENTED. SUBJECT "JEFF" CURRENT BENCHMARK FOR BODY HAIR SCALE MARK 30. This was followed by WARNING: PROGRAMS VIOLATION OF TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT. OVERWRITING BENCHMARK'S DISALLOWED. PROGRAMS CLOSING.
The two windows that had shown his hairness and increasing hairness winked closed. The only program up and running was the one on Simon.
Jeff popped open a scan of himself. Everything was the same as before, except that his Hairiness Scale Index was now 30 and was followed by a notation reading (CHRONIVAC REFERENCE SUBJECT) and the whole bar was greyed out.
Jeff knew what that meant. He was, by definition, the hairiest man on the planet.
"Dude!" said Simon behind him. "This is crazy, but I think I've got the same problem as you. I was just jacking off and when I opened my eyes, I was hella hairier."
Jeff looked over at Simon. He wasn't a yeti in any sense, but he did now have a fair amount of chest hair, and Jeff realized that when he'd been placed at the new 30, the whole scale of relative hairness had been recalibrated.
Simon stared at Jeff. "Dude, I think you're even hairier than last night! You think I'm going to get as hairy as you?"
Jeff looked at the Chronivac. "It's a distinct possiblity...."