Chapter 2

It took less than a minute for Andrew to decide he was going to use the Object (he wasn’t going to call it The Transformatron every single time) for sex. He was a young man, after all, sex was on his mind often, and he was home alone. But since he was alone there wasn’t anyone around to test on. He looked down, briefly, and considered testing the device on himself. He shrugged and looked down, clicking the button.

No.

No? Andrew prickled with frustration. The voice had echoed in his head, just a whisper, with no course and no affect. Just that single word and nothing else. He tried again.

No.

He tried a third time.

No.

“Oh come on!” Andrew said.

Fine, Andrew huffed. Fine. He looked around and briefly thought about trying to transform an object in the room, but didn’t want the voice to return, so he decided against it. He knew, too, that this object can’t create life, and he didn’t want to make a sex toy. He sighed, he’d have to wait until school tomorrow. Still, he wondered why he couldn’t transform himself. He had not even wanted to change that much. As a test he had wanted to make his penis bigger, or just to be better looking. Why was that against the rules? Were there even rules?

He glanced out his window across to his neighbor Stephanie’s house. His bedroom had faced hers for years, and as kids they had been pretty close. But, like many of those neighborhood friendships, it slowly drifted away until they hardly talked at all. For a brief moment a few years ago Andrew thought they would date, and they started to casually go out and even fool around, but it didn’t work out. It was the last gasp of their friendship, but there wasn’t anything else there, and now they were practically strangers.

But, if she kept her window open Andrew could still see her, and that might be enough to try his new toy.

He had to wait a while. Stephanie didn’t come home until after Andrew’s mom, and Andrew had homework and dinner to take care of before he could hide out in his room. With all his obligations done, he sat in his chair with the lights off and waited to see if Stephanie would play along.