Nu-You: Genesis

by Cris Kane

Nathaniel stared at his reflection in the mirror as his thumb hovered over the "TRANSFORM" button on his iPhone. He knew that only a fool experimented on himself, but he was desperate to see if his calculations were correct, and waiting until he got back to the lab on Monday felt interminable.

Nathaniel worked as a coder at the software company DigiWarp, working in the virtual-reality division. In an attempt to create a full sensory experience, DigiWarp had been experimenting with nanobots which would enter the user's body and create the appropriate corresponding sensations. If the virtual character sipped a cold lemonade, the nanobots would rush to the tongue, lower its temperature and stimulate the taste buds which register sweet and sour. If the character was lying on a tropical beach, nanobots would elevate the temperature of the user's skin and trigger signals in the brain that made the user think they were inhaling salt air. The breakthroughs were impressive, but Nathaniel was sure they could push the envelope further and actually cause physical changes to the user's body.

When his superiors raised various ethical and legal issues which would make it impossible for DigiWarp to implement Nathaniel's ideas, he began to work on them at home, tapping surreptitiously into the company's computer network overnight as he refined his concepts. Many times, he would come home from a twelve-hour day at the office and spend another twelve hours working on his secret project at home. He rarely slept and often forgot to eat. He had always been scrawny, but he was wasting away to skeletal proportions.

It was finally time to see if all his work would pay off. He stood in his bathroom, shirtless and wearing his lucky baseball cap. He had preset the parameters for the changes the nanobots would make and felt confident that he hadn't missed anything crucial. He could see his thumb trembling, and wondered if his thumb had more sense than his brain did. Maybe he should do just one more review of his calculations, to be sure he hadn't overlooked anything. That would be the prudent...

The screen of his phone flashed "TRANSFORMING". His jittery thumb had brushed against the screen and initiated the process. Oh, well. Nothing to do now but hold his breath and see what happens.

Nathaniel felt something between an itch and a tickle as millions of tiny robots escaped from his phone and entered through the pores of his palm, each dispatched on a specific series of missions being calculated by the servers back at DigiWarp HQ. He stared at the influx of nanobots in his forearm, creating a tsunami under his skin before dissipating throughout his body. As they attached themselves to his nerves, Nathaniel's hand spasmed and he dropped his phone onto the bathroom floor.

He began to overheat and rushed to the kitchen to grab a cold soda, which he pressed against his feverish forehead. He popped open the can and took a frantic drink, only to discover that he had mistakenly grabbed a beer. Nathaniel detested beer, and this can had been in the fridge since the last time he had guests over a year ago. He set the can down on the kitchen counter and stumbled to his living room sofa, where he thrashed violently as the nanobots set about their work.

He was initially wracked with pain, but once the bots reached his brain, they stimulated the release of serotonin, calming Nathaniel considerably. He stopped worrying and surrendered to the process. As the nanobots wormed their way into his muscles, he felt a soothing warmth, followed by a rapid pulse which subjected the tissues to the equivalent of a year in the gym in the space of a minute, causing his muscles to grow dramatically. He felt like he was hallucinating, envisioning his body as unpopped popcorn which was bursting into something plumper and more delicious every second. Eyes closed, head swimming deliriously, Nathaniel brushed his fingers across his torso and could feel his pecs inflating and a cleft forming through his abs. His shoulders and arms grew heavy and bulky, just as he had programmed.

Another battalion of nanobots infiltrated his penis, where he had requested a particularly generous remodeling. He could feel his cock straining against his tight black jeans and a surge of testosterone blasted its way through Nathaniel's system. He felt like his entire body was experiencing an orgasm. His limbs went rigid, and his lungs contracted, struggling for fresh air. He was having trouble thinking clearly, but some survival instinct deep in his brain kicked in, forcing his body to crawl toward his balcony. He slid open the glass door and gasped like a beached fish, lying practically lifeless as his body recuperated.

When he awoke, he had no idea how long he had been lying there, unaware that he had collapsed at eight p.m. on Saturday night and it was now practically noon on Sunday. The process had drained him thoroughly, but he was now feeling well rested and vigorous. He grabbed the railing of his balcony and hoisted himself to his feet with his bulging muscles. He rolled his shoulders and rubbed the kinks out of his neck as if such motions were second-nature to the former nerd.

His eyesight was bleary, which he attributed to the faint taste of beer in his mouth. His head ached slightly, but it didn't exactly feel like a hangover. As he reached toward his forehead, his fingers collided with his glasses, which he pulled off in order to rub the sleep from his eyes. Reopening his eyes, he found his vision was perfectly sharp without the glasses, so he tossed them aside. He noticed the open beer on the kitchen counter and thought it would quench his cotton mouth nicely. He chugged the contents in a single gulp, followed shortly by a satisfied belch.

His cock was stiff, trapped inside a pair of black pants which felt way too tight for him. He struggled to unbuckle them, then yanked down the zipper and waddled his way to the bathroom just in time to unleash a geyser of piss. Streams shot from his slit in four different directions at once, none of them landing in the toilet bowl. He noticed his iPhone lying at his feet, its cracked screen getting drenched in urine. He couldn't imagine that would be covered by his warranty.

Relieved, he stumbled into his bedroom where he extracted himself fully from his jeans. He looked around the room in a fog, as if he were a guest in an unfamiliar home and the true owner had left on vacation. He spotted a wallet on a bedside table and opened it, finding a driver's license for a Nathaniel Weiner. The name seemed vaguely familiar and, when he looked in the mirror, he could see some facial resemblance between himself and the skinny kid pictured on the license. Could they be related? Maybe they were brothers? Or cousins? No answers came to him. He searched his mind but could not dredge up his own name.

Perhaps if he still possessed Nathaniel's technical expertise, he would have figured out what had happened, what he might have caught if he had taken just one more look at his programming before hitting "TRANSFORM". Nathaniel had been operating under the assumption that, even after his body had undergone a complete renovation, his mind would remain intact, his technological acumen undiminished. For that reason, he hadn't bothered to waste time writing programming for his post-transformation intellect and personality, focusing entirely on the physical changes.

Unfortunately, the nanobots did not interpret this as a default command to leave those parts of Nathaniel's brain alone. Instead, while Nathaniel lay on the balcony passed out all night and all morning, the nanobots had been hard at work wiping his memory clean. He could still function and speak and had his basic coping skills, but all traces of what had made Nathaniel Weiner uniquely "Nathaniel Weiner" had been expunged. The muscular hunk standing naked in Nathaniel's bedroom was a blank slate whose personality would be shaped by every encounter he had from this moment forward. And the experiences of a stud with no technological know-how were destined to be entirely different from those which had formed skinny science-nerd Nathaniel Weiner.

One thing he did know was that he liked the way he looked. He raised both arms to check out his jacked biceps and the sight made his cock leap. He smiled, confident that other guys would like to look at and touch his body just as much as he did. Nathaniel had been gay, but was too timid and insecure to do anything about it. His replacement had no such reservations. As one hand explored his body and the other stroked his growing cock, the hot young man studied himself in the mirror and, with a stunning lack of imagination, settled on calling himself "Dick". Only later, after many people had fallen into fits of laughter when he said his name was Dick Weiner, would he rethink this decision and start calling himself Nate, in honor of his dimly-remembered predecessor.

But on this particular morning, the newly-named Dick needed to finish jacking off and get some food into his system. After a quick shower, he searched the apartment for clothes that fit him, but everything in the bedroom closet was sized for a much smaller man. About all he could squeeze into was a pair of running shorts and sneakers. He hoped the owner wouldn't mind him borrowing them. He took some bills from Nathaniel's wallet, snatched up his key ring, and headed outside to explore. Everything about the world felt new and exciting to him, and he never found his way back to the apartment. Not surprisingly, he found many men who were more than willing to help him get on his feet...and into their beds.

When Nathaniel's superiors returned to the office on Monday and discovered that Nathaniel had tapped into the system for a secret experiment over the weekend, they were furious, until they checked the data and realized that Nathaniel truly had found a way to transform the body physically using nanobots. With further refinements, this became the basis of a groundbreaking new company called Nu-You, currently valued at eighteen-billion dollars and growing.

Management immediately attempted to track down Nathaniel, but he seemed to have vanished after that weekend. When their investigators finally turned up someone named Nate Weiner working as a model and personal trainer in San Francisco and using Nathaniel's Social Security number, Nu-You made sure he received every dollar he was owed from the company's profits, billions of dollars that Nate mostly gave away to a variety of charities, never quite seeming to grasp why this company was giving him so much money.

The staff at Nu-You made repeated attempts to restore Nathaniel's brain back to its original state, but the erasure had been too thorough. They eventually concluded that Nathaniel Weiner would never return.

On the bright side, Nate seemed far happier than Nathaniel ever had.

The Nu-You story continues here.