By the time Heather got to the bar two hours later, I'm ashamed to admit Lori and I were pretty wasted. She was babbling on like an idiot, and while I don't really remember all of what she was saying, I was pretty sure she was mixing up her real life with her fabricated past pretty badly. If I hadn't been so depressed, deep down, from what had happened with Mark earlier, I wouldn't have let myself get so tipsy.
I don't drink often, mostly because, as you know, I like to be in control of myself, and alcohol tends to remove one's inhibitions. With me, though, it also has another strange effect--it makes me extremely sleepy. When Heather showed up, I was nodding off right there at the table.
Heather thought it was hilarious that we were drunk, so she ordered something for herself and sat back to watch the fun. I at least had the presence of mind not to blow my cover, and besides which, I was so tired I didn't say much, anyway. Instead, Lori did most of the talking. I vaguely recall Heather being really excited about something that had happened that evening, but I don't remember what it was.
After a while, I fell mostly asleep. Heather was kind enough to drive us both home, which must have meant I told her sometime where I lived, though I don't remember doing it. She left me asleep on my bed, still in my clothes, which I woke up in sometime around ten o'clock the next morning.
Naturally, I had a huge hangover. Through the haze and pain, I recalled dreaming about Mark looking down at me while I steadily shrunk. He was laughing and growing bigger and bigger, and reached down to pick me up, not nearly so gently this time. It seemed like I was paralyzed, because I didn't try to run. He lifted me up and held me in front of his face, and I realized I was probably only a couple of inches tall--and still getting smaller! Fortunately, the dream cut out at this point, before I got lost in the folds of his palm.
For some reason, I didn't feel afraid at all, or at least I didn't in the dream. Instead, I felt strangely calm and content, as though I were accepting my fate willingly. Now that I was awake, of course, the memory was terrifying, but it did seem strange that I hadn't felt upset about it while I was asleep. That's how dreams are, though. Your subconscious just plays all kinds of weird games with your mind.
In the shower, which of course was VERY long and luxurious, I thought back to what Lori had said the night before. I tried closing my eyes, relaxing under the flow of hot water, and imagining myself being small, but my mind kept returning to that dream. At least at work I knew how tiny I was going to be. Shrinking uncontrollably was a much worse nightmare than I'd yet experienced.
Still, I did have that other idea I could try, so I resolved to get started at once. It was Saturday, so I didn't have to work, but the computer store was open. I headed over there as soon as I'd had a bite to eat, first taking an autobus back to the casino to get my car. The bus ride wasn't too bad, but it was boring and much too slow, taking about three times to get me to my destination than I would have liked.
Anyway, from there I drove to the shop to get my computer. As they'd promised, it was waiting for me, so I put the bill on my credit card and took my purchase home.
Now, back when I was in school, computers were big, bulky, and difficult to install. Not any more. The newest ones were little ceramic disk-shaped affairs, about a foot across, and fit easily just about anywhere on your desk. Most of the interior was a tiny, enclosed refrigerator, the extreme cold being necessary to keep the Pentium XVI chips from overheating. After all, if the freon ever leaked out, the motherboard would be slag in about ten seconds.
To install the machine, I simply plugged it into the wall (it had its own surge protector), unfolded the flatscreen monitor, shoved in a LDC laser datacube, and hit the power switch. The whole process took about thirty seconds, and I was up and running just like that. I didn't even need a modem or cable to hook up to the Internet, because about five years ago, just about every town of any size at all had installed wireless internet hubs in various locations, ensuring that anyone who wanted to could get online pretty much at will. Of course, you paid for this with your monthly net access tax, but unless you were below the poverty level, that was chump change for most citizens of our fine country.
Anyway, once I was online, I called up the Internet and started looking around. Fortunately, Virtual Windows made this as easy as pointing and clicking, just like I'd tried to explain to Lori. Back at the turn of the century, there were all kinds of browsers and whatnot, making it very difficult for a layman to use the 'net. Back in '12, though, the government got tired of trying to break Microsoft's operating system monopoly and just bought them out, after President Quayle agreed to make Bill Gates the Secretary of the Treasury. A lot of people really hated that, decrying it as another Quayleism that would ruin the country, but as it turned out, it was the best thing that anyone could do for the computer industry. By standardizing the USA on a single OS, we were finally able to get back ahead of the EU and the Chinese, where we deserved to be. Sure, some diehards still use Macs, but you see them around about as much as hard drives and VHS tapes anymore.
Anyhow, my objective on the 'net was to see if I could use the virtual worlds to simulate what I was going through. Maybe if I could experience it online, in the safety of my home, it wouldn't be so scary back at work. Sort of like the snake phobia analogy I used earlier--I needed to work up to it, instead of trying to dive right in, like I had with Mark. Best of all, though, using the Internet, I could practice anonymously, so if I embarrassed myself, I wouldn't have to worry about what people thought of me.
The only concern I had was whether or not any resources existed for this kind of thing. For all I knew, no one else on the planet had the same problem I did. How many people had to face going to work and being shrunk every day? So far as I knew, the SW Casino was the only place of its kind anywhere in the world, at least for now. Like I said at the beginning, it was an experiment, one that was still ongoing.
The first thing I did was visit the online psychology search engine, www.psych.src, hoping to find anything about shrinking phobias. There was microphobia, of course, which was a fear of small things, but that was totally off base. The closest I came to what I was looking for was phagophobia, a fear of being eaten. In some extreme cases of this particular psychological problem, the fear developed into a dementia in which giants existed who would grab normal-sized folks and carry them off to be cooked.
I shuddered. That hit fairly close to home, but it wasn't quite the same. I wasn't afraid of people getting big, I was afraid of myself being small in an otherwise normal world. And of course, the last thing I was thinking about was being eaten.
While I was on the psych search site, I tried entering "shrinking fantasy" instead of "shrinking fear," and a new topic came back: "Microphilia." Now what the hell was that? I read the description: "Fantasies involving people shrinking to tiny size." Hmm. Now this could be helpful, I thought.
I checked it out. The technical jargon was too dry to repeat here, but basically, it was talking about fantasies related to shrinking other people, usually those of the opposite sex. The basic focus of the article was the loss of control and helplessness of the shrinkee, which was a big turn-on to the shrinker. The fantasy, apparently, was frequently shared by those who had inferiority or persecution complexes, liked the idea of dominating others, or were megalomaniacs. Better than 90% of such people were male, and their targets were almost always female, a fact I found rather curious, but not entirely unexpected.
Unfortunately, not much was said about people who were frightened by the idea of being shrunk, or, like Heather, who enjoyed the thought. The description of this weird fetish didn't really apply to Heather, who didn't want to shrink others--she wanted to be shrunk herself!
Well, since I didn't have this fantasy, it didn't apply to me, but I had another thought--these "microphiliacs" would certainly know a lot about what it was like to be shrunk. If I asked some of them, maybe I could get one of them to help me out. Hell, they probably had a virtual world already set up somewhere, where they could shrink people any time they wanted!
If that couldn't help me out, nothing will, I thought, and keyed in the search criteria.