Little Things
“Hey, one small step for man, right?”
“Very funny” said Dr. Anita as she air-locked his suit, making Lohank’s only passage of air the giant tubes that led out of his helmet.
“Do I need this? Feels very clunky.”
“The haemoglobin in your body will become smaller than the oxygen molecules it needs to carry to keep you conscious. Those tubes leading out of your helmet will constantly-”
“I’m going to stop you right there, doc. You told me this was going to be painful, but I don’t know if I can take it anymore.”
“Ha, ha. You’ll become too small to breathe regular air. Yes, you’ll need it.”
Lohank took a deep breath and blinked a few times. He looked around him through the transparent material that surrounded his head, and took in his surroundings one last time. If this experiment worked, he would shrink along with his suit to a few inches small. And if everything went according to the plan, he was guaranteed a world of unspeakable pain as his body would be torn to shreds and reattached on a molecular level.
“Are you sure about this?” said Anita as she worked the machines on the other end of the room. For some reason, she couldn’t look him in the eye as she asked, “Do you have family, Lohank?”
“Not that I know of.” Anita turned to see Lohank sitting on a chair and staring at the floor, wiping his face with his hands inside his suit. She started, but was interrupted by the man getting ready to blow himself up for a scientific experiment. “You can relax, doctor. I volunteered for this. I know what I got myself into.” Lohank couldn’t see her face, but he knew she had heaved a sigh of relief.
The countdown started, and Lohank could feel his mind racing. He doubled down in the glass cylinder he was in, and started reconsidering every decision in his life that had led to him being in this situation. The voices in his head screamed for him to stop the experiment, to get out of the lab right this instant, and the loudest of them all was a little boy’s, asking him to leave everything and get home. He felt his throat tighten up, and his eyes started to water, but the countdown hadn’t even finished yet. As the numbers on the screen approached one, he wondered if he deserved the life he had got.
The people in the lab coats followed through on their promise. Every second of the process was agonizing, and Lohank could feel himself being ripped apart. They had sedated him, but not enough to put him to sleep, in fear of him losing conscious or worse. As he drifted away, all he heard was the beeping of the machine, ringing just loud enough that he couldn’t hear the little boy’s voice anymore.
He woke up to the loudest blaring noise he had ever heard. It hurt just to stand up, even though the suit he was wearing was combating the external pressure of the air around him. He stood up and looked around him, though he couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark, and whatever light was entering his eyes felt — sharp. He immediately reached into his suit and dialed the combination of buttons he was instructed to press, and immediately, the noise was cancelled out, and the screen inside his helmet glowed bright. It took his irises another whole minute to adjust to the light, and soon he was looking at the world from a perspective never before seen by man.
It was beautiful.
The vibrations kept knocking him off his feet, and he felt extremely cold, but the world had never looked more aesthetic. Everything looked sharper, but felt easier on the eyes. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. The doctors had given him drugs so that he wouldn’t need constant replenishment, because his body was burning energy at a much faster rate than before. He felt like he could do anything, he felt power emanating off him the likes of which he’d never experienced before. The colors seemed to pop in his eyes, and he focused on the giant lab coat that Dr. Anita was wearing, and saw it move towards him. She was moving slowly, or so it seemed. As she bent down to look at him, she stared at him, it looked like, for a while before her eyes lit up. He recognized that look of excitement, and he tried to let her know that he could see her too, by jumping up and down and waving his arms. She went over to the computer screen and pulled up an image of him, and he realized that he didn’t look like a smaller version of himself. In fact, he barely looked human. He still had his limbs and motor functions, but he couldn’t recognize the man on the screen.
He scrambled in his suit and found the pager that Anita had instructed him about. Given his size, his lungs couldn’t produce a sound of enough amplitude for her to hear, moreover, he’d sound like an incredibly tiny, very aggravated chipmunk because of his now narrow vocal chords. This modified pager, if it worked, would transmit signals of receivable wavelength to the pager in Anita’s hand. Careful not to open his suit, he pulled the pager up into his helmet with his hands and typed into it, squinting at the dark screen and fumbling with his dry fingers.
“does thus wirk”
She responded to his question with another question.
“Describe your surroundings.”
“its besutiful, doc”
“Im getting unusual pressure readings.”
Lohank could feel the blood coursing through his veins, and the head rush was almost nauseating. But he was going to keep it together, he wasn’t going to vomit in the suit that he couldn’t remove.
“can u open glass”
“No.”
“can i open suit”
“Definitely not.”
“C’mon doc”
He watched as she sighed and pressed a few buttons. The world suddenly started shaking, and the glass cylinder around him rotated open.
