Field Research - Chapter 7

My entire body seemed to hum. I could feel the oversized clothes sliding against my skin and was shocked by the intensity of the sensation, the simple cotton and denim feeling like a warm, plush blanket. My line of sight was slowly but surely lowering, and the laboratory seemed to stretch away from me in all directions. I’m not sure why, but I tried to stand; I had no control over my legs at all, and nearly slid right out of the chair and onto my ass. Jenny reached down and gently clasped a giant hand around my own and I felt my heart utterly melt at her touch. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, how good she made me feel, what an incredibly lucky man I was to be with her. Instead I just lazily opened and closed my mouth while I stared up at her with adoring puppy dog eyes, her already massive form seeming to loom a little larger with each passing second.

I had no idea how long I was stuck like that, immobile and mute, but eventually the effect started to fade. I blinked away the last of the fog in my head as Jenny turned toward her assistants with a massive grin.

“Team, we have successfully achieved body-mass expulsion.”

The assistants started applauding. Feeling more in control of my body, I tried once again to rise, crimson red shooting through my face as my jeans and boxers immediately fell around my ankles. My shirt hung so far down that I wasn’t really exposed, and besides, everyone was too busy celebrating and congratulating one another to pay me any mind as I rushed to pull the pants back up. I tried to cinch my belt tighter, but I didn’t have a hole to make it as tight as I needed it; I’d gotten these clothes in anticipation of getting taller and heavier-set, and instead I…

“What happened!? Did something go wrong?” The question immediately struck me as stupid; everyone was far too excited for this to have been a failure. Then…?

“Not at all,” Jenny answered. “This was a smash success. How are you feeling, Sean?” I looked up at her, and my eyes went wide as I really processed what I was seeing for the first time. A few moments ago I came up to Jenny’s shoulders. Now, if I stared straight ahead, I was looking at the lower curve of her chest, which looked larger than ever.

“I… I… You shrank me?”

“Well, yeah! That’s what this formulation of the drug is designed to do!”

“That’s… What the fuck. What the fuck?!” I was starting to hyperventilate as reality began to set in. The chairs and tables rose so much higher now. My plus-sized shirt was hanging off of me like a tent, and I was still having to hold up my pants at waist-level. 

“Can we have the room for a moment, folks?” Jenny asked, turning toward the other scientists. They nodded and made for the door, still buzzing with excitement.

“Jenny! What the fuck did you do—” I was cut off abruptly as she hoisted me up by the armpits, my pants, shoes and socks left behind on the floor as I was lifted to her eye level, her lips mashing into mine, her tongue effortlessly overpowering my own. My panic briefly gave way to lust. My deepest desire was coming true: a seven-foot tall amazon, lavishly soft and round, had shrunken me and was having her way with me. My rational mind was stamped out and I greedily returned her kiss, melting into the supple silkiness of her touch, before my eyes snapped open and I got ahold of myself. I pulled away, pushing myself against her shoulders.

“Jenny, what the fuck?”

“What?”

“This isn’t what you said would happen!”

“The effects of the formula you’ve been administered were described in detail in those waivers you signed. Not my fault that you didn’t read them.”

“I asked you if I was going to grow like you did!”

“And I told you that I was giving you a new iteration of the drug. This one is designed to have an inverse effect.”

“You…! You tricked me!”

“That’s right.” Jenny smiled at me predatorily as she set me on my feet, the tile cold against my exposed soles. She leaned over me and I instinctively backed away, starting as my back hit the wall only a few inches behind me.

“Come on now, Sean. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? I seem to recall a whole lot of nights when we were younger where I played the part of a witch or a mad scientist that shrank the strapping young man I’d kidnapped, and I also seem to recall having a very satisfied boyfriend. Don’t pretend like you’re not loving this.”

“Fucking…! Of course I am! But that doesn’t fucking matter, Jenny!” The smile faded off of her face. “I have to live my life! I can’t… We can fool around, and I’ll have a great time, but then I have to go run errands or do chores or go to work and I’ll still be… how fucking small did you make me, anyway?!”

“I’d have to measure you to be sure, but if I did the math right, you’re about five feet tall.” Her voice was flat, her tone hard to read.

“Jesus Christ. Jenny, I can’t live like this. I just can’t.”

“Oh, and I suppose it’s fine for me to live like this?” Jenny snapped back, standing up straighter. “You never had any concerns about me getting bigger Sean, or how that might negatively impact my life. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to find clothes that fit now?”

“You chose this!” I shouted. “I didn’t, fucking make you do this. I didn’t trick you. You decided to grow all on your own, and you told me you liked it.”

“Yeah, I do like it! And if you’d stop throwing a temper tantrum, you’d admit that you like being smaller! ‘Chores?’ ‘Work?’ What the fuck are you talking about? First off, you know full well just how much we’re—how much I’m paying you for this. But beyond that, we’re talking book deals, talk show appearances, international science awards with massive cash prizes. ‘Ruin your life?’ I haven’t ruined shit! I made your fucking dreams come true, and I’m gonna make the both of us rich in the process!”

“You should have told me.” My voice was quieter, my eyes cast downward as I tried to put a leash on my anger. “You should have been honest with me about this. We could have talked about it. Maybe… maybe I would have even agreed to it. But I deserved the right to decide. Instead you… you…” I felt a lump in my throat. “You betrayed my trust. You manipulated me. I thought we were… I thought…” I couldn’t find the words to finish the sentence, and Jenny seemed to have run out of comebacks.

“Give me the other pill. Put me back to normal.”

“I can’t.”

“Jenny—”

“No, seriously, I can’t do that. I mean, even setting aside the fact that you spent all morning signing agreements to commit to the full clinical trial, taking the other pill right now would kill you. You still have traces of the mass-expulsion formula in you, and it reacts with the mass-infusion formula in an extremely volatile way.”

“Fine. How long do I have to wait?”

“Well, Sean, it doesn’t matter, because you’re in the trial. You have to keep taking the—”

“I’m not doing that. Sue me if you have to, it’s not like I have any money to lose anyway. How long do I have to wait before it’s safe to take the growth pill?”

“At minimum… ten years. Maybe longer.”

“What!?”

“It’s a drug that rewrites your DNA and completely changes your body composition, not to mention what it has to do to get rid of the excess matter. Is it really that surprising it would linger in your system?”

The muscles in my neck clenched as I balled and unballed my fists. I was stuck at five feet tall for ten years?! How… How could she do this to me? I loved her, and she… she’d just used me.

“Was this your plan the whole time?” I asked, fighting a losing battle to maintain my composure. “Was… was it even a coincidence that we ran into each other?”

“What are you talking about? Of course it—”

“You needed test subjects for your experiment. ‘What kind of gullible rube can I get to sign up to get shrunk? Oh, I know, what about that asshole that dumped me in high school! I’ll just look him up on Facebook and oh hey what fucking luck, he lives nearby!’” A few tears were escaping out of the sides of my eyes.

“That’s not… No.” Jenny was getting upset, too.

“No, no, that’s what this whole thing was, wasn’t it? It’s all just one big revenge fantasy for you, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

“NO.”

Suddenly, the door to the lab flew open, the handle slamming into the wall. Dr. Walker, dressed in a sweater and slacks, came storming in. Jennifer whipped around and pointed at him aggressively.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I know exactly what you’ve done, Jennifer. I… my God.” His gaze fixated on me, jaw dropping. 

“You’re not supposed to be here!”

“Jennifer. This project is my life’s work, you understand me? My life’s. Work. And I am not going to stand idly by while some… some… kid tries to swipe it out from under my nose! You can’t seem to go two days without a new ethics violation! Do you really think the department’s going to keep covering for you?”

“They will, if I keep turning in successful results! Which I am!”

Jenny was getting angry now, angrier than she’d been before. I instinctively backed away from her, only to feel a large, powerful hand clamp down on my shoulder. Dr. Walker’s hand.

I still had a clear image of the doctor in my head from the previous week. Average height, average build, probably somewhere in his fifties. A regular, unremarkable adult man. The man who was now standing next to me was at once the same person and someone entirely different. From my reduced perspective he seemed unbelievably tall and powerful. I was used to Jenny being intimidating… but even this random old man had enough height on me to make me feel a little nervous.

“Come on,” he said. “Grab your things. I’m getting you out of here.” He’d seemed overbearing and annoying before, but now his relative stature seemed to vest him with an authority that I reflexively submitted to. I moved across the room, back to where my pants were still sitting pooled on the floor.

“Sean...” I turned to look back at Jenny, swallowing as I bit my lip. She looked… hurt.

“Haven’t you done enough damage to the poor guy already?!” Dr. Walker snapped. “Come on, hurry up. We can talk more in the car.”

I stared at Jenny for another long moment, then got my clothes. I left her there in her lab, sniffling, as I struggled not to trip over my pant-legs and tried to keep up with the doctor power-walking out to the parking lot.

“Jennifer Miller,” he said as we drove down the road, “is one of the most brilliant young minds I’ve ever encountered. She is a generational genius.”

I said nothing. I just stared out the window silently at the gray, rainy day outside, thinking about how my viewing angle was lower, how the seatbelt rested differently against my chest, how I couldn’t sit back in my seat and touch the floor with my feet at the same time.

“For all my bluster… the matter conversion project was purely theoretical until she transferred here. We’ve made more leaps and bounds in the last 6 months than we have in the last ten years. It was Jennifer’s idea to incorporate natural biological processes. I was certain that she was only adding more layers of unnecessary complication to an already completely uncharted field of physics, but she was confident it was the only way to make things function properly, and as of right now it certainly seems as though she was correct.”

A small spark of curiosity managed to punch through my depression. “How does this whole… thing, work, anyway? I’ve seen Jenny get bigger than the amount of food she eats, and, I mean… where did my extra foot of height, like… go?”

The doctor didn’t answer. 

“I’m part of the project technically, right? Come on. After the day I had, don’t you think I at least deserve some explanation?”

Dr. Walker sighed. “Dark matter.”

“What?”

“It’s a form of matter that’s all around us at all times, but we can’t touch or interface with it in any way. It outnumbers ‘light matter’ by more than five-to-one. We’re completely submerged in the stuff, but it’s impossible to do anything with it… until now.

“This entire project is confidential. The official story is that we’re working on a growth drug, something that can effectively induce a second, third or fourth puberty in an adult. That alone would push medicine forward decades, if not centuries. But what we’re actually doing is developing a means to convert dark matter to light. When the growth ‘drug’ activates, it uses the food in the subject’s stomach to kickstart a chain-reaction, allowing their body to absorb the ambient dark matter that’s already permeating their body, converting it into light matter and using that matter to increase their biomass. What you experienced today was the opposite: converting a portion of your biomass into dark matter.”

“You… you can do that with food?!”

“A single atom has enough energy to demolish multiple city blocks. And a sandwich—hell, a bite of a sandwich—has more atoms than there are stars in the universe. It also makes it easier to incorporate the drug with the body’s digestive processes. Don’t misunderstand, obviously the digestive tract is nowhere near the level of necessary energy efficiency. But working in tandem with the stomach makes it far easier for the body to absorb the newly-converted matter.

“Anyway. As I said, Jennifer is brilliant… so brilliant that she thinks the rules don’t apply to her. So brilliant that she doesn’t have to listen to anyone else. We are decades away from human testing getting approval through normal channels, and that’s just for the mass-infusion formula. The mass-expulsion formula, the one you took, we aren’t even ready to begin animal testing with that. She went behind my back, went over my head, and used herself to put on a dog-and-pony show for the board to convince them to overlook some niggling little details like ‘ethics’ and ‘peer review.’ No, no, to hell with it! Ms. Miller looks healthy enough, who cares that we have no data on long-term side effects! Oh, and she says she has another formula ready to go, and she’s gulled some poor sap—er, sorry—she’s fooled some poor young man into signing away his liability? Sounds great!” The doctor was steadily raising his voice. “Why hasn’t Dr. Walker turned in these kinds of results? Why is this young graduate student showing him up? She doesn’t fool me for a second. She’s trying to swipe all the credit for my research. Well, it’s not going to happen. I won’t let it. I’ll get the entire project shut down before I let that, that that whale steal it from me.”

“Hey!”

Dr. Walker looked at me as if he didn’t understand what I was upset about. It was astonishing to me how he could talk so confidently and casually about rewriting the rules of science in one breath, and then sound so… petty in the next. It was obvious that he wasn’t really worried about me, or about any of the “ethics violations” he kept hammering on about. He was worried about getting muscled out of the credit.

“Anyway, we’re here,” he said flatly as he pulled into an open spot on the curb.

“Uh. Where?” I hadn’t really been paying much attention to where we were going, but we were somewhere downtown.

“My lawyer’s office. He’s already drafting a suit against the university, we can get you added to it. I’m sure there’s some vulnerabilities in those waivers you signed. We’ll get what’s ours, and we’ll make sure Jennifer Miller is never allowed within a thousand feet of a laboratory ever again.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on. What? No, I. I don’t want to sue her.”

“Son. Look at what she’s done to you. Don’t be an idiot.”

I fought to suppress a growl in my throat. “I am… I have had a real shitty day, man. I’m dressed like a fucking clown, I’m the size of a middle schooler, the last thing I want to do is spend the rest of my afternoon in a fucking lawyer’s office.”

“But—”

“All I want to do right now is go home. Will you give me a ride or should I grab an Uber?”

He stared at me for a long, tense moment, and it occurred to me all over again that this man could effortlessly overpower me.

“Fine. We can come back tomorrow.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were outside my apartment.

“Let me give you my number, so we can—” I was out of the car and slamming the door before he could finish the sentence.

“You’re making a big mistake!” He shouted out his window. “Don’t be stupid! We can win this if we work together!” I didn’t pay him any attention. I was too fixated on… well, everything. On how the car door had been noticeably heavier, on how I had to pick my feet up a little higher to climb the steps to my front door, on how I instinctively poked my key into the door, a few inches below the keyhole. Not even getting inside made me feel more secure; my apartment felt alien and uncanny, familiar and yet completely different, everything just a little too big.

I sighed, suddenly feeling deeply, deeply exhausted. I took off my oversized clothes—or, more like I just let them slide off of me—and sat naked on my couch, staring at the ceiling.

After a few minutes, I bent down to the floor to fish my phone out of the pants pocket, frowning at how even it felt markedly heavier now, unwieldy in my diminished hands. I’d silenced it before heading into the lab earlier so it wouldn’t interrupt anything, and opening it now, I saw that I had a dozen missed calls from Jenny.