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Chapter 3
Part 3

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Chapter Description: Trials.

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Contemplating the possibilities of this brave new world, Sarah’s head spun in a million directions. Every new discovery gave birth to a million new questions. Interested but unconcerned with the actual mechanism causing the changes, she immediately set about discovering just what the system was capable of. Better yet, what could this bizarre development do for her?

As she struggled to pinpoint the best use of this new tool, one of Sarah’s babydoll nightie straps had slithered halfway down her shoulder, leaving half of her left breast exposed. The sudden infusion of 13-year-old hormones still coursing through his veins, Michael discovered his focus unavoidably returning like a magnet to the jiggling flesh. Also, though he couldn’t place the changes with any accuracy, something about his sister seemed... well, prettier. Was it her cheekbones? The way her eyes sparkled from the glow of the laptop screen? Michael strove to exile the vaguely incestuous thoughts from his brain.

Inevitably, when Sarah finally took notice of the situation, retribution was swift.

“Oh, gross, Michael!” she groaned with a calculated pretend disgust. “Were you staring at my boobs?”

Knowing what was best for him, Michael took the fifth.

“I’ll bet there’s a little boner under that shirt, isn’t there? God, you guys are such predictable pervs. Maybe you’re not ready to be a teenager, Mikey,” she said, eager for a new excuse to toy with him.

“Sarah, whatever you’re thinking...” he protested. “Don’t.”

But the search was already underway. Giddy and totally unconstrained by any ethical hangups, Sarah went foraging for just the right photograph in their parents’ prolific collection. Sentimental and tech-savvy, Mr. and Mrs. Reardon had thoroughly archived every aspect of their children’s lives. Careful to bypass any photos that contained herself at a younger age (just in case), Sarah traveled back through their histories with an eye toward one photo in particular. She slipped past Michael’s ill-advised foray into dirt bikes, her various dental appliances, fully documented birthdays, lost teeth, Christmas in Colorado, skinned knees still fresh in her memory, until she finally landed on the prize: a painfully dorky Polaroid taken during Michael’s “dress up” phase. In it, her brother donned a comically large cocktail dress stolen from his mother’s closet and enough makeup to embarrass the Joker.

Giggling to herself, Sarah uploaded the shot to Michael’s account. “You’re gonna love this one!”

Squinting from his new restricted vantage point, he could barely make out the vibrant reds and blues. Vague data, but it was sufficient to set his heart racing. His parents’ photo albums were a treasure chest of potential humiliations.

As Michael correctly guessed, his viewpoint began gently sliding downward while the wormy sensation spiraled down his trunk, settling this time in his thighs and groin. It didn’t take a degree in biology to surmise the reason. With every tick of the second hand, the tokens of adolescence disappeared into the realm of the hypothetical. Pigmented hair turned to peach fuzz, facial features lost their proportion. This time aware of what was happening, Michael could swear the sensation felt more tactile. Everything from his shrinking toes to his contracting testicles flowed with the strange energy.

“Awesome,” Sarah chuckled at her handiwork. “God, you really were a shrimp in the fourth grade.”

That said, slight disappointment crept in when she realized the most damaging aspects of the photo - the oversized women’s clothing and poorly-applied mascara - didn’t transfer. This made sense, however, as her previous pigtailed profile picture failed to affect her hairstyle, only her age. “Well, it was worth a shot,” she mumbled. “You still look adorable, little bro. By my count, you’re... let’s see... nine and a half now.”

Hyperventilating, Michael dreaded hearing the vibrations of his shrunken vocal cords. “Stop it, Sarah. This isn’t funny!” Man, that sounded silly, he thought, his tongue exploring the fresh hole where one of his incisors had been moments before.

“No, I’m serious. How does it feel?” she asked curiously, holding her pen to her mouth like a therapist. Having only experienced it briefly herself, Sarah seemed genuinely interested in observing the effects of her experiment, both out on the outside and on the inside. If Facebook had the power to alter physical appearances and erect invisible walls, what else might it do? Though tempted to heighten her own reality a bit, she decided to stick to running some basic tests first. The correlation between profile picture and age thoroughly established, she dug through the more extraneous features.

Meanwhile, an utterly beaten Michael gradually worked up the courage to examine his predicament. Wilting onto the couch, now pantsless and relying on the canopy his night shirt provided, Michael wiped away the salty drops gathering in his eyes. 11 years. Gone in less time than it took to cook a batch of Ramen noodles.

The puny outline of his body pushing out from beneath the shirt belonged to a stranger, one he hadn’t known since the late 90s. The rapid weight loss also produced the odd but persistent notion that he’d somehow become ill and withered away, when in fact he was perfectly healthy - a perfectly healthy little boy. His brain couldn’t help but interpret the violent changes to his body image as a medical emergency. The spike of adrenaline was only beginning to wear off when his sister wondered aloud...

“Education,” she announced. “It still lists middle school, high school, and community college for you. So I guess that means whatever shreds of knowledge you managed to pick up are still knocking around in there.”

“Haven’t you tried enough?” Michael cheeped, raising his sleeve-covered hands in exasperation. “Look at me. Just leave me alone.”

“Let’s see here, if I just...” Sarah poked around at the keyboard, hunting and pecking. Seconds later, a dull headache developed, followed by what Michael could only call a sense of blankness. As if storehouses of memory had vanished, leaving behind tiny traces that quickly faded themselves. His face went pale and vacant for a moment, as he struggled to reconcile the blind spot in his mind’s eye.

“So...” Sarah said, now tapping the pen against her teeth. “Where did you spend your 20th birthday?”

“P.F. Chang’s,” Michael answered without missing a beat. “You should know. You were there.”

“OK,” she replied, searching her own memory for the right question. “Who wrote Moby Dick?” Sarah remembered her brother trudging through the famous Melville novel his freshmen year at Parkmont.

“It’s, um...” A look of pure determination melted into agitation. “Um... I... I don’t know.”

“Interesting.”

“What? What did you do?”

“I just zapped most of your school life. But it looks like you remember everything else.”

“You what?!”

“Sheesh, calm down, munchkin. It’s Facebook. We can always change it back. Not like you were an honor roll student anyway.”

But the implications were distressing, even to someone who had just been robbed of everything but his elementary school education. While his math and reading skills had taken an enormous hit, the social aspects of her discovery still set off alarm bells in his head. Changing someone’s physique was one thing; mind control was another.

A quick fit of typing and a few clicks later, the headache lifted and the details of his past once again came into sharp focus. Like a completed puzzle. The restoration occurred so rapidly, Michael could only compare it to those science fiction films where characters are able to download encyclopedias worth of knowledge in a short space of time. Only these were his memories, filling necessary gaps in his his brain’s autobiography, so none of it felt “learned” per se.

“There. Feel better?” she asked, having done her good deed for the day.

“I... I think so,” Michael replied, still shaken. “Look, this is kinda scary. We don’t know...”

“Oh, shush. It’s obvious how this works. Add and subtract stuff and it happens in real life. Don’t get your dick in a knot.” Sarah chuckled slightly at her own quip, imagining her brother’s heightened sensitivity to penis humor at the moment.

“So... you have the hots for this Mackenzi girl, huh?”

If Michael’s face could turn a deeper shade of red, it did.

“Yeah. So what?”

“Well, I only mention it so you won’t feel so bad about your little bod there. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s clocking in at first grade, maybe kindergarten,” Sarah informed, again as if out of the goodness of her heart. “But you’re right. She is cute. Still probably out of your league.”

Squirming, Michael labored to formulate a response. There was no blueprint for how to react in such a situation.

“If she doesn’t figure out the whole Facebook thing, maybe you two could go hang out at Chuck E. Cheese or something,” she suggested. “First dates are always awkward anyway. That might be kinda fun.”

As the taunts continued, Michael’s hand subconsciously wandered under his shirt. The mere mention of Mackenzi led to an impromptu self-exam of sorts. While expected, Michael nevertheless flinched as his tiny fingers encountered the remnants of his once average cock, now reduced to an inch-long stub of boring tissue. Everything barren, exposed, and smooth.

Meanwhile, Sarah could hardly avoid the temptation to use the system’s power to increase her own assets. Lacking any pictures of herself from the future, she toyed with another enticing option. Opening a separate browser window and logging back into her account, Sarah selected the “Info” tab and clicked “Edit.” Not particularly interested in changing her political or religious beliefs, she couldn’t help but wonder how Facebook might react to a change in birthday.

Holding her breath, Sarah replaced November 9, 1993 with November 9, 1988.

Her choice of year was completely intentional. If the experiment worked she would gain five years in the process, enough time to produce some major results, she reasoned. Also, she would keep tabs on her profile picture to monitor any changes. Though confident, a part of Sarah worried such an alteration might prompt some kind of horrible rift in the space-time continuum, sending the universe dangerously out of whack. Would Facebook actually rewrite her own biography, adding half a decade of memories and experiences? Sarah’s adolescent curiosity overwhelmed her critical faculties. Risks be damned. She had to witness what the remainder of puberty held in store for her.

In no time, the answers came.

As before, peculiar impulses shot down the longitude of her body. With every firing, a tide of stimulated growth - though none as outwardly dramatic as what took place during the first episode - engulfed her like a rush of water. Again, her torso elongated, thighs and waist widened, and her breasts fattened, advancing a cup size and filling out her gown. All traces of acne dissolved into a sharper, more adult complexion as the progression slowed. During the changes Sarah watched her profile picture evolve. Like magic the girl in the image shed her teenage smile and morphed into a not-unattractive twentysomething. No supermodel, for sure, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Especially, a satisfied Sarah noticed, in the chest department.

“Whoa.” She cupped her new, improved rack. [I]What was the old milk commercial? It does a body good?

More miraculously, it had actually worked. The new Facebook had granted her adulthood five years ahead of schedule. Everything about it felt so right. Sarah began rationalizing Michael’s slow torture as a kind of cosmic karma. After all, she reflected, didn’t she deserve the many benefits that accompanied maturity? Her life story read like a manual in second sibling syndrome - always craving the attention lavished on the first born, and never winning it, despite the row of school trophies lining her shelves. If anyone merited an increased in age and privilege, it was her.

“So, little bro,” Sarah said, dancing toward the couch. “What do you think?”

Rendered speechless, Michael only stared up at his sister with bewilderment. Minutes before, she had demoted him to the fourth grade for gawking at her; now she wanted an audience.

“Come on, don’t be a spoilsport.”

“How did you -“

“Easy. I changed my birthdate. Now I’m 21. How does it look on me?” she said, modeling her swimsuit-ready body before the acquiescent grade-schooler. “I mean, it’s no Samantha Fox, but not too bad, right?”

Michael had to agree. The new Sarah surpassed anything he would have predicted. More worrying, however, was the relish with which she wore it. Michael wondered how anyone would manage to talk her into relinquishing the endowments she’d granted herself and returning to her lowly teens. Who wouldn’t want to fast forward past adolescence, zits, and curfews?

“What... do you want me to say?” Michael replied ruefully.

“Geez, silly. I’m just asking your opinion,” Sarah said, again too flippantly, he decided.

With each new success, she was becoming more confident, more willing to push the envelope. Choosing not to dwell on the philosophical implications, Sarah ran through a checklist of strange options now before her. Could one upload a photo of a celebrity and take on his or her appearance? Swap genders? Or even species? What happened to users with photos of inanimate objects or scenery? Or their own children? The imagination reeled. Surely there were limits.

She pondered changing her profile photo to her favorite actress, Zooey Deschanel, just out of curiosity. God, it would be awesome to be that adorable. Just for a few minutes even... But her fantasy was interrupted by a thump coming from the hallway.

“Did you hear something?”

“Yeah,” Michael said, “I think it’s coming from...”

Pointing to the door, he witnessed a sight that dropped his jaw. Covering his diminished little body with a neck pillow was his otherwise naked three-year-old father, a look of consternation drawn on his cherub face. Following close behind, Maurine, also laboring to coat herself with articles from their bed, hobbled into the doorway.

“Mom? Dad?” Michael exclaimed, “We can explain.”

“Help us!” his mom pleaded.

“What’s... happening here?” William managed to ask, his voice pitched so high as to be indistinguishable from his wife’s.

The vision of her parents toddling toward her in their near infantile state shook Sarah momentarily from her daydreams. Unlike her brother, they continued to exercise some authority over her, despite their drop in status. These two children were her mom and dad. And she had the power to restore them to normal whenever she wished with a few clicks of a mouse. None of this was her fault - yet. Already devising a plan, Sarah thought through various scenarios: aging her parents back into their old selves and being forced to abdicate her new position, not to mention whatever punishment might follow for regressing her brother, or doing as she pleased, continuing to mess with the natural order of things as long as the system allowed. Handing over the laptop was the right thing to do, and yet, too obvious for Sarah.

Maybe there was a third way.

“Mom, Dad... it’s OK,” she reassured the pint-sized pair. “I’ve got it under control.”[/size][/quote][/quote][/quote]

 

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