Side Effect

Chapter 2
A Wide-Awake Nightmare

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Chapter Description: Who knew an experimental drug could have bad effects? Small warning for explicit biological descriptions but no overt sex (This is also the only chapter with actual AR.)

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After a minute I started feeling the effects of the Novicid. They were about what I expected, a feeling of heavy sedation. My usual cast of nighttime fantasies paraded through my head, but I felt too exhausted to take advantage of them. Surely I would be out cold in a minute or two anyway. My head started spinning... spinning...

Then my head really started spinning, in a way that was no longer relaxing. My pulse started racing and I was jolted to alertness, as if I’d OD’ed on caffeine, or possibly something harder and less legal. Then came a pulsing sensation, like I sometimes felt when an infection was screwing with my inner ear, only regular and very frequent, just about every second.

Uh oh.

After a minute or two the spinning sensation stopped and my heart rate settled down but the pulsing sensation in my head continued to tap out a steady beat that made falling asleep an impossibility, even as drowsy as I felt.

So, okay, this was annoying as all get out, and sleep deprivation wasn’t going to be any good for me in the long term, but nothing particularly life-threatening was happening. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be driving with this going on but either Dr. Welling was being really overcautious or there was more to come.

Little did I know!

About ten minutes later, I felt a sensation of pressure in my sphincter, and forgetting all else for the moment I hauled myself over to the toilet before I couldn’t hold it any longer. Not that it was going to be that bad a mess if I didn’t make it, if my guess was right.

After a small stream of liquid had poured out of my anus into the bowl, I wiped and checked the color of the deposit on the toilet tissue. Sure enough, not brown -- red.

Just great. What a time for THAT to be acting up again.

Hoping that would be the end of it for the moment, I staggered back to bed, almost falling over on the way as I was really dizzy from the medication by now.

It was a while before I noticed anything else, but eventually I realized the sensation of feeling a little... lighter. Scanning myself with my hands I noticed the spare tire around my belly was significantly reduced. Well, now, this was a side effect I could get behind! I felt bad now that this was only going to be temporary. It wasn’t something that was detectable as it happened, but if I checked back at intervals of a minute or so there was definitely a little more fat gone.

Joy slowly gave way to concern as my body shape approached something resembling normal with no sign of slowing. Would it keep going? I’d been through this before. About seven years ago I’d suddenly lost my appetite and started losing weight uncontrollably. It took three different doctors and ultimately a trip to the emergency room before they diagnosed me properly and stabilized me at a very scrawny 130 lbs. for my 6 foot male frame. From there I got into the habit of forcing myself to eat, a habit that I failed to break after my disease went into remission and I was able to gain weight again, with the net result being that I eventually ate myself into the borderline obese state I was currently in, at least until a few minutes ago.

It was about then that my vision suddenly went all blurry.

Forgetting my headache I flicked on the lamp just to make sure it wasn’t a trick of the darkness, but no, the whole room was just a big blur now. I held up my hand in front of my face and it only came into focus at about a foot away. All in all, it was an eerie re-creation of the eyesight I used to have until I had laser surgery done on it two years ago. I rather wished I hadn’t thrown out my old glasses now but who could have anticipated this happening?

Eight hours, I reminded myself. By morning this will all be over.

Next came a wave of nausea, another familiar feeling I’d hoped never to experience again. I felt about ready to vomit, and in fact my stomach tried to do so, but with next to nothing in it there wasn’t much that could come out, just some strands of bile that tasted as awful as ever.

Strangely, despite this new development, my body seemed to level off in terms of deflating, not that I really seemed to have much left to lose. It was just as well that I couldn’t see much of my emaciated body.

But just as I got to thinking the end might be near, things started to get even stranger. I still felt just as nauseous as ever, but now my body seemed to be re-inflating. Nausea, no appetite, and yet gaining weight? How backwards can you get?

A funny thought to have had, in hindsight, but in the moment I hadn’t yet put it together.

Thankfully, the nausea subsided, and with it my body seemed to have stabilized. I was maybe a few pounds overweight again, but all in all I felt a lot better than I had in a long time. If only I could see worth anything! That and the pulsing sensations that were keeping me awake were really the only things still wrong with me. Grabbing my alarm clock and holding it right up to my eyes I saw that it had only been about half an hour since I’d taken the pill. Sure felt a lot longer.

For lack of anything else to do, I laid back down, shut off the lights and tried to go to sleep, even as I was sure that would be futile. For a while nothing seemed to happen. After what I guessed was about fifteen minutes, possibly even twenty, I noticed my bed sheets were starting to... move? It was happening in ever-so-tiny increments and if I weren’t running so much by touch at this point I might not have even caught it, but there was definitely movement, and what was most disconcerting was that in seemed to be happening in time with the pulses in my head.

I grabbed my bedcover firmly with both hands to hold it in place, but somehow this wasn’t having any effect. Even more strangely, while I felt the movement at my feet, my hands felt no movement at all. What was going on here? How could the covers be moving at my feet but not at my hands? It made no sense at all. If the covers weren’t moving then the only thing left that could be moving was...

Oh no.

Fighting off terror, I decided to assess my situation. Was I merely shrinking or was there more to it than that? Could I possibly be... I didn’t want to think it. But, I still had to know. But how? My vision was still too bad for even a mirror to be of much help. But what else could I go by...?

HAIR! I checked the top of my head. One of the sorrows of my mid-20’s was the early onset of male pattern baldness. That along with the illness cheated me out of my prime years for meeting that special someone, which was no small part of why I was sleeping alone this night. But enough self-pity, back to the task at hand. Head hair, felt maybe a little thicker... but not conclusive. Chest hair? No, still in place, as much as I ever had of that. Pubic hair perhaps? No, still there. Uh, Facial hair? I felt my chin for the goatee I’d sported ever since grad school, and... nothing but bare chin.

Oh crap.

What was more, in its place were skin eruptions of an all-too-familiar variety. Acne. I had acne again.

Oh double crap.

Panic started to set in. I decided to mentally review Dr. Welling’s instructions, partially in case there was something I missed, partially to distract myself from what was happening. Take just one pill, and just before bed. Did that. Guess it made sense now, in bed was just about the safest place I could be under the circumstances. Certainly it could have been very bad if I had taken the pill while out and about. Alcohol. That was just sound general advice with painkillers, probably had nothing to do with this. Food and water. I guess that was good advice. The contents of a full stomach in my fully grown body would be starting to get very uncomfortable now and if this trend continued... eugh. Sleeping naked? Still not quite sure what good that was doing. So my bedclothes would be too big on me, so what? Finally, don’t panic. Well, ten out of ten for anticipating that one.

At this point I entered into a mental tug-of-war over my feelings about Dr. Welling. Why didn’t he tell me this could happen? He clearly knew it! But on the other hand, this result was very rare, if he was to be believed. But could I trust him? Technically he hadn’t steered me wrong, the advice he’d given had been very good. But doubt gnawed at me. What if he was wrong about the eight hours? What if I’m going to be stuck however I end up? Or what if just flat out don’t survive eight hours? But what could I do about it?

Scrambling out of bed, I located my jeans and pulled my smart phone out of the pocket. Holding the phone up to my face I entered "911" and was about to hit dial when I decided to figure out what I was going to say first. "Help! I’m turning into a kid!"? Yeah, that would get believed. What if I just made up something? Like, I’m suffering from an overdose maybe. That would get help on the way, but wait... what would they find when they got here? Some freaked out teenager, maybe even pre-teen, with nothing obviously wrong with him? That might land me in Child Protective Services rather than the hospital. Heck, I might even end up in trouble for child endangerment, of myself!

No, 911 wasn’t going to do me any good. I had to face it: I was going to have to deal with this by myself. But now with the phone in my hand I had another idea. After some squinting I managed to locate and open a voice memo app I’d downloaded for it. I’d never used it before, but it was definitely going to come in useful now.

After starting the recorder, I began my slowly saying my name and the date and time. I noted with dismay that my voice was starting to crack. "I may not quite sound like myself," I continued. "That would be because I’m not quite myself right now." I went on to describe my current situation, what I had taken that caused this, and the name of my doctor. "If I am dead, disappeared, or otherwise incapacitated when you find this message, you now know why. If this proves to be my last message to the world, all I ask is that justice be done." I closed with some short messages of love to my family, and stopped the recording.

I then searched around and soon found a scrap of paper and a pencil and wrote a simple note. "RUN VOICE MEMOS". After placing my smart phone on my bedside table and placing the note on top, I climbed back into bed, satisfied that whatever cruel fate awaited me in the minutes and hours to follow, would at least not be the end of the story.

Really, I felt a lot better about it all now. A lot calmer. I wondered if it was all satisfaction of having preemptively struck back at those who had wronged me, or if it was something else. I decided to do another hair check. Head, definitely full now. This time I thought to run my fingers through it and there was clearly a lot more than I had started with. Face, still bare. The pimples seemed to have subsided for now. Chest. Umm... inconclusive? Down to the short-curlies...

Gone. Oh triple crap with whipped cream on top.

I checked back to my chest and confirmed, yeah, not much there at all. At least that gave me my first solid indicator of my current age. If I was just on the very fringes of puberty that would put me around 12 or 13. I couldn’t remember which it was offhand. Probably didn’t matter much anyway, since I was pretty sure I was still sliding.

So. I’m a kid again. A Novi-kid, if you would. Oof. At least I still had my talent for bad puns. But now what?

Well, certainly one option for passing the time was now gone by the boards. Another idea was certainly to just continue to lie there and await developments, or whatever the opposite of that was. I noticed the pulsing sensation was less pronounced than before. Or maybe I was just getting used to it. Maybe I’d finally fall asleep despite it all, and then I could deal with whatever I needed to when I woke up in the morning. If I woke up the morning. But no, I decided, if I was going to die, that would be such a lame way to go out, and if I was going to live, it would be an awful waste to not take advantage of this revisit of my childhood... somehow.

But how? It’s not like I kept a bunch of toys lying around the house, or had anything out in the backyard to play with. Hmm, there was that one playground down the street a little ways, no more than a quarter-mile. It had a little fence but I could climb over that. I’d driven by that all the time and marveled at how much those things had changed since I’d grown up and had often wondered how much different they felt to play on. And if I found something warm to wear, like maybe a sweatshirt, I might be able to manage that distance... if I could see worth anything, that is. And what if the doctor was right and I’d be back to normal in the morning? Then in all likelihood I’d be waking up, as an adult, half-naked -- and not the more acceptable half either -- in a children’s playground. Ooh, bad idea. REALLY bad idea.

No, whatever amusement I dreamed up for myself was going to have to come from within the confines of my own home. I thought about turning on some cartoons -- the Boomerang channel seemed apt for the occasion -- but then I remembered my vision problems again. Darn it! I thought back to my memories of wearing glasses. It was second grade, wasn’t it, when I first started wearing them. Was that because that was when my vision started deteriorating or just the first time it had been properly diagnosed? No, I thought back to first grade and how I was one of the best readers in class. That would be unlikely if my vision had been that bad all along. So maybe later my vision would get better and I would have the chance to have some fun. But for now there was little to do but wait things out and see how young I got.

That brought up another chilling thought. Was my body all that was changing or was my mind going to go with it as well? I tried mentally reviewing some high school trigonometry. Sine, cosine, tangent, and what was that other thing again...? Secant! Yeah, that all seemed intact. Good. Heh, and all this time I thought trigonometry would never come in handy again.

Changing tracks, I ran my tongue along my teeth and noticed I didn’t have very many of those left. Yeah, baby teeth, those weren’t coming back. By the time I hit five years old, if I got that far, I’d be basically toothless. That wasn’t going to be very much fun. Thank goodness I wasn’t hungry. I supposed that nausea I went through earlier cancelled out the hunger from having fasted all day.

Finally, I’d had enough lying around. If I couldn’t sleep I was going to do something! I looked about me and something seemed different now. I looked at my hands. Yes, they’d gotten significantly smaller but the thing I was interested in was that I could almost hold them at arm’s length and still focus on them. Of course arm’s length wasn’t what it used to be, but it still seemed an improvement.

I sat up on the edge of my bed and was amused to note that my feet were a long way from the floor now. I couldn’t remember offhand how my adult legs fared (it turns out they barely touch), but it seemed worth it to kick in the air a few times in celebration of shortness.

Scampering out to the living room the first item I encountered was my overstuffed sofa. Counterintuitively, this piece of furniture was actually quite bad for my back and so I had not made much use of it, but I sure was going to now! Vaulting myself over the solid back of the sofa, I landed in the cushioned portion with a soft thud...

Or so I’d planned. Instead what I got was rather solid thud accompanied by one or two cracks. I had forgotten about all the stuff I had piled on the disused couch over the months. Some of it I had just broken, and some of it had just done its best to break me. "Ow! Ow! Ow!" I yelled, but I noticed that I didn’t feel any urge burst into tears. At least I was holding on in that respect.

Hastily pushing everything off the sofa and onto the floor (I’d worry about cleaning it up later), I lined up for another vault and this time achieved the desired result. Well, just about; my right foot clipped the top of the sofa back on the way over. I got up for a third try (stepping on and breaking something I’d pushed onto the floor earlier -- oh well!) and this time even my left foot didn’t quite clear, causing me to flip over in midair and land on the sofa face first. "I meant to do that," I said to nobody.

No, I had to face it, I was losing strength, which meant I was still not done getting younger. On the upside, my vision was almost back to normal; I guessed that pegged my age at about eight. Well now, if I could see well enough to watch TV, what was I waiting for! Grabbing the remote, I tuned into Boomerang... and was disappointed to see not a cartoon from my time but one from well before. Something called the... Cattanooga Cats? Whatever it was, it wasn’t very good. Couldn’t they at least have some Scooby-Doo, if they were going to go that far back?

I tried Nicktoons and found a Spongebob Squarepants rerun in progress. (Thank goodness for channels that run on-format 24 hours a day!) Spongebob had come out just a little too late for me back in the day, so I couldn’t claim to be a true fan, but I was still familiar with the premise. I figured now was as good a time as any to see why this show was such a hit.

One thing I quickly concluded was that the title character irritated the heck out of me. If you knew me as a kid, though, that would not surprise you. When it came the Winnie the Pooh stories I think I was the old kid who liked Rabbit better than Tigger. I think that might have been because I was always quite athletically inept, so I developed a natural resentment for kids that could literally bounce rings around me. But that started me down the road: I took a shine to Oscar from Sesame Street, Grumpy was easily my favorite of the Care Bears, and I probably would have even found Grouchy Smurf cool, if only he weren’t such a one-note character. So given that, you’d probably be right if you pegged me as a natural to be a Squidward fan. Except, he didn’t appear in this episode, so instead my sympathies fell to Sandy Cheeks, tonight’s target of Spongebob’s silliness. I actually found myself cheering out loud when she came out on top in the end!

About this time I noticed two things. First, I was sticking a bit to the leather of the sofa, partially because all this time I’d been running around naked, still following doctor’s orders to the letter. And, I was getting cold, for pretty much the same reason. But that was easily fixed. Romping back to my bedroom, I picked up my bathrobe and put it on as best I could. It was actually very nearly full length on my adult body, so now it was comically oversized on me. So much so that there was no way I could take more than two steps without tripping over it. But oh was it SOFT! It was really one of the best purchases I’d ever made; it felt great even on my relatively tough adult skin, but against younger, thinner skin, it felt absolutely incredible. You could have your Snuggies -- THIS was where comfort was at. I really just wanted to cuddle up inside it and I resolved to do just that... but there were a couple things I wanted to do first. Bracing myself mentally, I dropped the robe and ran into the bathroom to have a look in the mirror.

But really, bracing, no bracing, it didn’t matter, nothing was really going to prepare me for the sight of a little kid looking back at me. Or rather, the top of a little kid’s head, what with the mirror bottoming out at about three and a half feet above the floor. I went up on tiptoes and just managed to get my whole face in sight. "Hi there," I said, and had to laugh a little at the sight of my mouth, now completely toothless apart from two artificial teeth up front I’d had to have put in as the result of a playground mishap. Now they just dominated my little mouth and looked absolutely ridiculous. Come to think of it, didn’t they kind of make me look a little like Spongebob? Talk about turning into what you hate.

Just then the next show started on Nickelodeon, and I knew by the theme song that it could only be Rugrats. Which got me to thinking: was I about to become a Rugrat myself? Was I going to get as young as Angelica? As Chucky? Tommy?? Dil??? I certainly didn’t have any diapers lying around the house so that might get to be a bit of a problem. Maybe this was why the doctor suggested I might want to get naked?

Anyway, my eyes fell upon the toilet and I decided I’d better use it now, while I still could. An ounce of prevention was better than an ounce of wetness, or something like that. Mission eventually accomplished after some effort, I ran back into my bedroom, completely forgetting to flush.

Moments later, having decided the robe was too bulky to carry, I was dragging it behind me into the living room. It vaguely occurred to me that I probably looked like Linus with his blanket, but running around naked in the body of a five-year-old (if that) was no time for self-consciousness.

Instead, I stopped as one more idea entered my head. Something I hadn’t been able to do in a long time... but did I even remember how? Dropping the robe, I bent over as far as I could, which was a lot further than I could have before. Now what? Hmm, maybe if I bent my knees. No, maybe I should just get on my knees. That seemed a little better. Now to tuck my head inward as far as I could. There, now I’m resting on my head, now if I can stand back up with my legs… and… push off! Actually, It took three tries, but finally my center of gravity shifted enough that my legs carried themselves forward and over my head, causing me to land splat on my back.

It was probably the worst somersault in the history of preschool tumbling, but I was still proud of it.

Okay, back on track. I made my way to the overstuffed chair I owned that matched the sofa. If the sofa was bad for my adult back the chair was absolute murder, but at this point there was no other place I wanted to be. Having much smaller arms than I was used to, it took a little effort to clear all the junk I’d piled onto the disused chair, but the floor was a big place so the issue of where the stuff should go was easy to resolve. But even getting in the chair took a tiny bit of climbing by now. Still, I got there, and as expected it was plenty big enough for my whole body to curl up on the seat. Now all I had to do was arrange myself so that the robe (didn’t forget that!) covered every part of me, and it would all be perfect.

It took a fair amount of wriggling and at one point I almost fell out of the chair, but in the end I got where I wanted to be, completely encased in the bathrobe, apart from my head, the better to breathe and to watch Rugrats, which seemed to be nearly halfway done by now.

The best part was that now I didn’t have to care how young I ultimately got. Whether I stabilized at four years old, or ultimately became a totally helpless and immobile four-month-old, didn’t matter a bit now. I was happy right here and nothing was going to break that mood. And if things were about to take a fatal turn... well, there were certainly worse ways to go.

After Rugrats I was disappointed by the next show to come on, and said as much. "Wide Fornbewwies, boo!" I said, and upon hearing that come out of my mouth resolved not to try to speak again until this was all over. Besides, there was no way I was moving to change the channel. If I even could still do that. I’d really done quite the number getting myself all tangled in the robe, so much so that even my hands could not break free to reach my mouth. Which they might have been trying to do, I wasn’t sure.

Finally, the pulsing sensation, which I’d mostly come to ignore but had been gradually slowing all this time, finally subsided completely, and the Sandman was quick to do his duty...

 

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