"Okay, fine, I'll help you with your stupid experiments," Tommy reluctantly agreed, but only because you promised to stop bothering me!"
The instance those words came out of Tommy's mouth, he knew he would immediately regret it. It took him only a quick second to analyze the wide gushing smile on Brianna's face and her intentions, but was too late to run as he was swept up into her iron embrace and compressed against her body.
"Oh, thank you, little brother!" Brianna excitingly said, swinging the boy's body in her arms, ignoring his squirming and screaming. "I totally promise that you won't regret this!"
The genius teen unfurled her embrace and escorted him down the basement stairs, the location for her private laboratory.
The laboratory was like any typical science lab, with white, sterilized floors and walls, chemistry sets with the stereotypical chemistry kit and distilleries, and scientific inventions that were years ahead of anyone else at Brianna's current teen years. Up ahead in a particular area was a special cylindrical chamber, outfitted on the inside with radiation-emitting lights, and a metallic bed with the leather straps on the railings. This was a testing chamber where Brianna would conduct live experiments, and that would be the place where she would test her little brother on it.
The eager genius sister punched in a keycode, and the doors opened. Then she lead Tommy into the chamber and firmly strapped him into the metallic bed. Tommy mentally slapped himself for letting Brianna talk him into this crazy experiment. He hated everything about being a test subject locked inside the chamber. He didn't like the bright lights, the whirring humming, and the chill of the bed and in the air.
"Okay, we're all set," Brianna said, finishing the last strap fastening around Tommy's ankle. She exited the chamber, closed the door, and stood behind the computer monitor, analyzing the data. "Now, Tommy, do me a favor and don't try to wiggle around too much. Even if it seems a little scary to you at first, just try to take a deep breath and calm yourself down."
"Why? What's going to happen?" Tommy asked.
"It's gonna be loud, it's gonna get bright, and you might feel a bit of... a sensation."
"What?" Tommy began to wriggle in his straps, but couldn't loosen them free. "What kind of sensation?"
"I personally don't know," Brianna answered honestly, her eyes minding the keyboard and the monitor. "You might feel some heat, maybe a bit of electricity, but my analysis shows that the procedure on organic life won't have any long-term side effects."
Brianna pressed the red button, and the chamber whirred to life. Tommy felt his adrenaline rush as the chamber's whirring grew louder and the radiation-emitting lights in the walls and under the floor flickered on. The lights gradually grew brighter, the whirring steadily increased its volume, and he began to feel a combination of heat and electricity course through his body.
At the climax of it all, Tommy began to scream , and then came a sudden blinding, flickering flash from within the glass. Then the chamber's mechanisms calmed down as the lights within flickered off, their function complete. Thick clouds of steam and smoke built up from within the chamber, obscuring Brianna's view of her test results. She immediately recalled, Schrödinger's cat, a famous thought experiment and paradox where a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive sources and a flask of poison. The experiment dictated that the cat would be simultaneously dead and alive, but after opening the lid of the box, the cat would either be dead or alive.
Brianna didn't know if Tommy was dead, alive, or already felt the effects of her chamber inside. The most critical moment of this experiment came down to the push of the button. Brianna pushed the button and opened the chamber and released all the pent-up steam inside, either quickly dissipating or being ventilated to the outside via the ventilation system. Brianna stuck her head in, carefully observed the interior of the chamber, and found...
1.) Tommy had shrunken to the size of a grain of rice.
2.) Tommy hasn't felt the effects of the scientific chamber, but will eventually shrink sometime later.
3.) A fly flew into the test chamber and merges with Tommy to become a tiny human/fly hybrid.
4.) The shrinking chamber malfunctioned and teleported Tommy to another area an inch tall!
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