The Sandwich – Chapter 3

Coming around, I slowly inch my way off the floor. A sudden white-hot flash of pain erupts in my knee and I buckle under the agony of standing. Reduced to gasping breathes I roll over on my hip and look up, and up, and up, and, WHAT THE FUCK! Stretched out before me is a plane of infinite dimension. The floor was a kind of grayish material, varying in different leveled plateaus. At the moment I was sprawled across two plateaus, with my upper body sloped downward on a lighter gray plateau and my legs inclined about a foot up on a darker colored plateau. I say plateaus as that’s what they looked like, like something you see in the badlands in South Dakota; a vari-colored strata of pancake shaped levels with none higher than three- or four-feet tall but sometimes stretching twenty feet long by thirty feet wide. In front and behind me were the tallest sheer cliffs I had ever seen! They were weird though, not organic looking at all…it seemed…MAN MADE! What The Fuck? I SHRUNK!

To say this was freaking the shit out of me is the understatement of the century! How could this possibly happen? People just don’t shrink, right? Even the clothes on my back shrunk with me. How the… Wait a minute, wait a minute, ADAM! That shit he squirted on me! It was all coming back now. Adam squirted something out of his little gun and then I fell and blacked out. Once I get back to normal size I am going to fucking kill him!

GAH! CHRIST! That smell[JP1]  again; what the hell was that smell? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait one fucking minute! That smell, it was the same smell of that shit Adam sprayed on me! A sudden noise from behind jolted me out of my reverie. With a grunt of pain, I pivoted over to my other side I looked across a particularly long, darker gray colored plateau; what I saw defied belief. I rubbed my eyes and blinked rapidly about five times. Moving toward me at a rapid pace was an ant, a fucking Carpenter Ant!

I nearly shit myself! He was about the size of my Harley I had parked in the garage and just as black! His hairy legs (all six of them) were about six feet tall and moving rapidly in perfect synchronization. His head was at least the circumference of a trash can lid, and he had two eight-foot-long antennae sticking out from the top of his head. The most horrific sight were these huge fucking pinchers that sprouted from each side of his mouth; they must have been a foot long each and were snapping open and closed.

So, it’s amazing the things you think of before your going to die. In my case I was calculating my size to his. I knew the size of the standard worker-class carpenter ant was about 3mm tall and 8mm long (yeah, right, how the hell do you know that? I’ll get to that in a minute). So, based on some quick figuring that put me at about 2mm tall, Un-fucking-believable! I was the size of a Queen’s brood ant!

OK, so you must be wondering by now “how the hell does this guy know the sizes of ants, and fricken carpenter ants in particular. Well, last month Adam needed to do a science project and he picked the “Life of Carpenter Ants”. We had a recent infestation in our house as we had a leak under the sink that went undetected for about a year. As you may know, Carpenter Ants love moist wood and the male scouts will fly miles and miles to find a suitable spot to nest. Well, BINGO, our kitchen proved to be the ideal environment for their colony.

Adam being a boy, and interested in bugs, was fascinated with our little uninvited guests. This was much to the chagrin of his mother, Suzanne. As previously mentioned, Suzanne HATES ANTS with a passion greater than the most dramatic Shakespearian actor. This was an interesting situation to say the least, and, as you may have gathered, provided me with some passion of my own.

It was a common occurrence to come into the kitchen and see Suzanne toying with one of her many victims before crushing the life out of him. There were days where she would have five or six ants writhing in different levels of pain on the tile floor while she played out a cruel game with the lucky little guy she had at her feet. Knowing my fetish, and that, when stimulated, I performed with an at least 5x level of intensity in bed. So, being the lucky guy I am, she would regularly call me in to the kitchen to watch a particularly cruel game of “Crunch” as she called it. After the “show” she would drag me into the bedroom and force (it was so hard, ha ha) me to pleasure her. Humm, I wonder why I didn’t fix the floor till I absolutely had to. Ha Ha! Would you?

Well, I digress; back to Adam’s project. The kid actually did a great job and was quite through for an eight-year-old. He had size charts, life cycle graphs, pictures of each caste of ant, and a detailed illustration of how they were fucking up the studs in my walls. Like I said, a great job, and I really had fun working on it with him. I learned more about those stupid ants than I could ever have imagined.

Knowing how much smaller I was than the worker didn’t do much to improve my chances of survival. I also knew for a fact that he was probably 50x stronger than me so I just watched hopelessly as he advanced to my position. When he got to within a few feet of me the strangest thing happened; he actually bowed to me in a bizarre form of supplication. Thinking that this just might be a way of setting himself up to pounce on top of me I held my arms out in a futile gesture of defiance. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and prepared to become a Carpenter ants’ version of “Breakfast of Champions”. Oddly, after a few pregnant seconds I realized I was still amongst the land of the living. Squeezing my eyes open a fraction of an inch I could see that he was in the same spot and was making a strange mewling sound, almost like a whimpery purring of sorts.

Completely befuddled I lowered my arms and studied him. He was obviously not being aggressive, the complete opposite in fact. I tried to think back to Adam’s research and suddenly remembered the caste hierarchy within the collective of the nest.

It goes like this: The Queen is the top dog of the nest and (of course) all the other ants work for her. After her, there’s the Queen’s brood, and beneath them are the workers. So, being that I was the size of one of the brood ants it made sense of the worker’s reluctance to attack. I was also (funny as it seems) wearing my Armani suit which is made of black silk so, I had the right coloring and sheen of a brood ant. The part that perplexed me the most is that ants depend on scent for instructions (attack, defend, gather, etc.) and even though I might resemble a brood ant, I certainly didn’t smell like one…or did i? All of a sudden, I had an epiphany, and not one of a religious nature! PHEROMONES! Fucking pheromones!

Alright, so throughout my story I told you a lot about Suzanne, Adam, and of course my sexual proclivities (or deviances if you want to be more technical). Of course, it’s not “normal” to be turned on by hotties crushing bugs, but what the hell, I am what I am, and didn’t I marry a real live Goddess to fulfill my (ahem) non-conforming fantasies? So, what I am about to tell you about me, or more concisely, my job, and where I work, might just pull the puzzle together for you.

You see, I work in a division at 3M Pharmaceuticals (yeah, that 3M) called Beauty and Cosmetic products. My department is called “Frontier Sciences”. So, Frontier Sciences is an off the radar, super-secret R&D lab dedicated to finding Next-Gen products that have the ability to fundamentally alter human biology as we know it. Pretty fucking deep, huh?

All right, so the current project team is focused on a pheromone product that produces an honest to God, irresistible attractant to the opposite sex in humans. Our lead Scientist states it like this: “The term pheromone, is defined as a substance released by an organism to the outside that causes a specific behavioral or physiological reaction in a receiving organism of the same species. We have been able to isolate the DNA sequence of the common ant and extract the generic building blocks that produce the pheromone excretion exhibited in the Queen. From there, we were able to splice the generic building blocks of the Queen’s pheromone in to the Human DNA sequence and, Voilà! Love Potion Number Nine!

For those to young to remember, “Love Potion Number Nine” was the title of a song by the Clovers in 1959, the lyrics go like this:

“I took my troubles down to Madame Rue

You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth

She's got a pad down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine

Sellin' little bottles of Love Potion Number Nine

I told her that I was a flop with chicks

I've been this way since 1956

She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign

She said "What you need is Love Potion Number Nine"

She bent down and turned around and gave me a wink

She said "I'm gonna make it up right here in the sink"

It smelled like turpentine, it looked like India ink

I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink

I didn't know if it was day or night

I started kissin' everything in sight

But when I kissed a cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine

He broke my little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine”

I’m sure you have heard the claims about products like this before, and they were mainly sold as a “As Seen On TV” rip offs. Well, we did crack the code, and this product is 100% the real deal that works every time, on either a man, or woman. Of course (and a good thing) it does not have a permanent effect but if you put two drops on your wrist it will cause the nearest person to see you as a real-life sex God or Goddess and spark an irresistible attraction to the wearer that lasts for up to 24 hours. So, “just shut up and give me your money Bich. And as the CEO put it; Holy Shit! We will be laughing all the way to the bank. As the senior marketing executive for this product, I fully concur with that statement. 

Once the tumblers all fell into place and I recognized the smell of the shit Adam sprayed on me and I realized the smell was, Androstadienone. Androstadienone is one of the most well researched and pure pheromones in our product line (I know, the name sucks). As the lead marketing guy for this product, I was given four sample vials to try out on anyone I wanted to see how well it worked. Last I checked the vials were still in my briefcase. The first three vials were marked as Androstadienone 1, 2, and 3. The fourth vial was marked: Warning! This formula untested! May cause unexpected results!

I conjectured that that little fuck Adam poured all four vials into his squirt gun. Judging by the amount he sprayed in my face, I calculated he dosed me with at least 400 drops of pure pheromones, pretty much enough to start a fricken Rave sized orgy! Being that I am not a scientist I have no idea how our pheromones could cause shrinking however, judging from my current situation it’s the only explanation I have.

My only hope now is to try to get Suzanne’s attention to get me the hell out of this nightmare or wait it out and see if the effects wear off over time. Knowing what was on the line and the possibility of missing my meeting I decided the best course of action was to get Susanne’s attention. The thought also crossed my mind that this could be a discovery of epic proportions (pardon the pun) and I couldn’t wait to get back to the lab and get the team working on the commercial applications of a “shrinking potion”! Holy shit, the world could be my oyster; if I played my cards right.