TBT

Joey Swoll was just finishing up his responses to his online clients when he got another e-mail from a weird address. Like the last one, it was just a series of numbers at some weird Russian server with a forty character name. The address was slightly different but the file attached had the exact same name: TBT.MP4

No way was he trashing his laptop by opening that file. He deleted the message and blocked the address. Just for good measure he ran a quick virus scan: no malware detected.

A few more workout routines written and some diet plans tweaked and he was ready to smoke a nice joint, jerk one out and drift off to sleep. But just as he went to shut off his laptop, he noticed another weird e-mail, similar with the last two but this time with some text in the body of the message. Carefully he clicked on the message to read it in full:

“YOU WERE MUCH HOTTER BEFORE YOU GOT SO DISGUSTINGLY BIG,” it read in one line. A window popped open and Joey blinked, shocked; he hadn’t clicked the file attached but it was running automatically.

It was one of his old videos from Straightmuscleguys, back when he was going by the name Tristan. He had only just finished his college football career and was just getting into bodybuilding. In the video he’s in great shape, muscular and cut but reasonably sized. Those were back when he could still slide his wide shoulders into an XL shirt, back when he was able to buy pants at a store. “Man, I look good,” he said out loud as the video played, “but I was fucking tiny! I used to think I was huge, too.”

In the video Joey, wearing only a pair of white briefs, swayed his hips back and forth seductively as he traced his fingers across his washboard stomach. He pursed his lips at the camera, exuding sex in a smoldering stare, as he flexed each arms and made his chest bounce. “Jesus, look at those fucking things,” he said leaning in to examine what his torso looked like sixty pounds ago, before he had become the mass monster he was today. To compare, he grabbed a handful of his own ample pec meat and gave it a squeeze. “Bro,” he said to his outdated image, “you’re about as big as my pre-gym meals.” He chuckled at himself and closed the window, deleting the message.

Instantly it reappeared. He blinked, confused, and deleted it again. Again it came back. Once more he deleted it and suddenly 30 identical copies of the message, each with the same text and the same file attached, showed up in his inbox.

“What. The fuck,” he said, annoyed. His swollen lats were sore from the obliterating back workout he’d finished an hour before. He just wanted to get high and get sleepy. This virus bullshit was testing his patience. Worse was that it was no doubt from some psychotic fan--or worse, some obsessed weirdo who hated him for being a huge bodybuilder. It was probably some anemic micro-dick who barely came out of his basement and never stopped pointing fingers over why his life was so bleak.

One more run of his virus scan, however, ended with a, “No malware detected,” message. Time to run a deep scan, he thought, and to call Luis to help him out.

“Hey buddy,” he said when his client Luis was on the phone. Luis was master with computers and made house calls for problems exactly like this as his main profession. “Something’s messed up with my e-mail. I think it’s a weird virus or some shit. You think you could swing over and tackle it? I’ll smoke you up.” When Luis hesitated, he sweetened the deal: “I’ll throw you in a cycle of Dbols too. What do you think, man? I need my laptop to work.”

“Change your password,” Luis suggested with a yawn, “and don’t open the attachment. I’ll be over in bit.”

As soon as Luis hung up, Joey heard the cheesy background music from the “straightmuscleguys” video he’d just watched suddenly blasting through the speakers again. The file had opened itself somehow. There he was, half the size he was now, stuffed into a pair of tighty-whiteys and shaking his considerably smaller (but otherwise flawless) ass for a bunch of horny gay guys wiping away drool and jerking their little dicks.

“How the fuck,” Joey started, but as he reached toward the laptop to close the running movie, another window popped up. The same movie started up again. Three more windows popped open, now littering his screen with his much-younger self doing his best to rile dudes up while flexing his underdeveloped body. Each window had its own stock background music playing at a different spot. The effect of all of them at once made Joey cringe.

“God dammit!” he said, hitting control-alt-delete to no avail. He held down the power button but nothing happened. With his beefy hand he slapped the laptop shut and his apartment went silent again. “Thank the fucking lord,” he said. Luis would be there soon and he would get it all squared away. Maybe a little weed would be just the thing.

On his couch, he raised a joint to his lips and was about to flick his lighter when his phone vibrated loudly on his glass coffee table. Hoping it was Luis, he set the joint down and leaned forward.

“New Text, Unknown”

“No fucking way,” Joey thought. He reached out and clicked the home screen. Immediately that damned video started. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” He said aloud. Then something happened. An eerie silence fell over him, as if he’d lost his hearing for a moment. The air felt dry and electric. His skin tingled. All lights, except for the phone before him, dimmed into darkness. Joey’s heart pounded but for some reason he couldn’t look away from the looping video.

As he watched, his image in the video started to change. Joey’s smaller body started to swell up with muscle. First his pecs plumped, then, as he flexed each arm, his tris and biceps rose like bread dough. His shoulders blew up on either side of his younger self’s neck, which filled out to match the rest of him.

Suddenly, the guy in the video was as big as Joey was now. Otherwise the video continued the same. The Joey in the video went through the exact same movements, wiggling his ass, rubbing his abs, bouncing his pecs for the camera, only now he was twice the size, filled out with so much muscle he filled up every inch of the screen. The white briefs in the video hadn’t changed size at all. They had torn in parts, threatening to give way entirely in others, unable to contain the unbelievably massive ass stuffed into them.

Suddenly the lights and sounds in his apartment came back. The impossibly altered video continued, but Joey, shaken by a feeling he couldn’t identify, leapt to his feet.

His shorts fell down. His tank top hung on him like a dress, one strap slipping over his shoulder and hanging down by his elbow. He felt lighter, like he could jump ten feet in the air if he wanted to. His joints and tendons felt relieved of a burden he hadn’t been aware of before. But his arms hung straight down, no longer forced out by thick lats he’d been spot injecting Tren into for years. His stance felt off; his feet were closer together than he was used to. Horrified, he slowly grabbed his tank top and pulled it over his head, shocked at how big it seemed.

The body underneath was his but he hadn’t seen it in years. He was now exactly the size he had been at age 21, the same size he had been on the video. Now the video, still playing, featured a Joey the size he had grown into. This shit wasn’t possible, he thought as he patted every inch of himself to verify it was all real. Maybe something was in that joint--no, shit, he hadn’t smoked it yet!

The doorbell rang. Luis was there. No way was he going to let Luis see him like this! “One second!” he shouted and sprinted to his room, surprised at how easy it was to move around now that he was 60 pounds lighter and his quads weren’t forcing themselves apart. He dug desperately through his clothes, holding up old pairs of boxers against him and groaning at how narrow his waist had become. “Holy fuck, was I ever this scrawny?” he said aloud. None of his shirts had any hope of fitting either. Everything was XXXL, and fit him pretty snugly. The best he could find was a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring he could pull tight enough that they would stay up, as well as an old Bears jersey that billowed around him but would at least obscure his shrunken frame.

Luis rang the doorbell again and Joey walked slowly toward the door. “Okay now Luis, I’m just warning you,” he said through the door, “something weird happened. I don’t know how to explain it but… just don’t freak out when I open the door, okay?” He slowly opened the door, staring at the floor.

When he heard no reaction, he looked up. It wasn’t Luis. He had no idea who the guy was: some chubby bearded dude about 6 feet tall wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. “Who the fuck are you?” Joey asked.

“Just one of your biggest fans,” the guy said, stroking his beard. He looked like he weighed nearly 300 porky pounds, although his frame seemed to have a little thickness to it like he used to play football and still lifted heavy. He licked his lips. “C’mon, Joey. I didn’t go through all this trouble just to see you all covered up like that!”

Joey balled up his fists. “Fuck you!” he shouted at the taller man, but before he took a swing the big bear of a man shoved him with both hands. Joey hit the ground hard, knocking the wind out of him. The big bear strutted confidently into the room, slamming the door behind him.

Joey was on his feet again, tackling the guy, but the big man just grabbed Joey under his armpits and lifted him into the air. “Jeez, more like ‘Joey Deflated,’ am I right?” he said as Joey, a good six inches shorter than the man and missing most of the size and strength that would have normally given him the upper hand here, just kicked his legs helplessly. “Calm the fuck down,” the man commanded. “What I did to you is gonna stick, permanently. You can load up on roids and train your brains out but you’ll be stuck at this size forever. Which I guess is not so bad, but it’s gonna kill your career, don’t you think?”

As the realization hit Joey, he stopped struggling. The man set him back down on the ground. “I can’t believe how well this worked,” the burly guy said, rubbing his firm gut with both hands. “Did you see everything else that changed? All your old videos?”

Joey shook his head, confused, but the man walked to Joey’s laptop and opened it up. He struck a few keys and turned the screen so Joey could see. “Look at all these! From way back when. Look how they changed!”

Four videos from back in his Tristan days were playing, but the guy in the videos was swollen with the bulk Joey had just lost. Other than their star being bulked out beyond belief, the videos were exactly the same.

“How the fuck…” Joey said, his eyes narrowed.

“Have you checked your instagram yet?” the guy said, his eyes widening crazily. “Go ahead! Check your phone. You gotta see it.”

Joey opened his phone and scrolled through his instagram feed. Somehow all those pictures had changed as well. A video he had taken that day of him bench pressing was still there, but his gym clothes billowed loosely around him. Half the weight was missing from the bar. He scrolled back to a picture of him meeting Bautista, but his gut went cold when he saw it: he remembered completely outsizing the WWE wrestler in the pic, but now Bautista dwarfed him, like all Joey’s years of bodybuilding had been stripped not just from his own frame but from his past as well.

“Now, let’s get a look at you. Take that jersey off.”

“Fuck you!” Joey spat.

“You ever want to put on weight again?” the guy said. “You’re gonna do what I say. If I leave here you’ll never hear from me again. I guarantee you’ll never find anyone who can help you make sense of how I did this or what could be done to undo it.”

Unable to argue, Joey reached to pull off the jersey. Suddenly his phone vibrated. It was a text from Luis: “Sorry I’m late, almost there,” it said. Joey shook anxiously. Maybe with Luis there, the two of them could overpower this guy. Maybe not, though. The big bearded man strutted over to the table and picked up Joey’s discarded joint. He helped himself to it, neither asking nor offering some of it. As the guy toked away, Joey quickly texted back: “Some creepy stalker’s in my house! Big fat bearded redhead. Call the fucking cops!”

“So, Mr. Not-So-Swoll,” the big bear said as he exhaled a cloud of pot smoke, “are you going to show me that beautiful body or what?”

“...You can undo this? Make me big again? You fucking promise?”

The man nodded. “I’m not gonna get weird or anything. I just want to see that sweet torso of yours! You used to pay your bills this way you know.”

Joey pulled off the jersey and tossed it aside. He stared at the ground, unwilling to watch the man staring hungrily at his body. “You happy now?” Joey said. “You ready to fix me?”

“Good lord,” the man said breathlessly as he adjusted the weighty bulge in his crotch. “Joey, you used to be so fucking perfect, but you had to get all blown out like a fucking parade float and become some big bulging freak. What a waste of a beautiful man.” The man was closer to him than Joey was comfortable with, but if he protested, would the man change his mind about turning him back?

“I like being big,” Joey said quietly. “I worked hard for it. My body puts on size really easily. Fuck, it was my livelihood! I could barely pay my bills back when I was dancing for dudes on the internet.”

“Imagine the money you could make,” the redheaded bear said with a toothy grin, “if you dropped those sweatpants and moved that ass like I know you can do. Good god, what I wouldn’t give for a glimpse of that beautiful cock before steroids withered it away to nothing…”

“No way,” Joey said. “No way, I’m not gonna show you my dick. I never did that before. I never stripped totally. I’m not gonna do it now.”

“Okay, okay,” said the hefty man. “One last request and I’ll give you a way out of this. I want you to flex. Just let me touch your flexed biceps. I just want one squeeze.”

Joey exhaled deeply. He raised his fists into the air and brought them down, disappointed at how small--relative to the bulging limbs he was used to--his arms were. He closed his eyes as the man reached forward and ran his fingers along his arms, squeezing the hardened muscle and moaning gently.

“You had enough yet?” Joey whimpered. The man chuckled.

“Actually, I could do this all night,” he said, “but a deal’s a deal.”

Joey breathed a sigh of relief as the pudgy bastard took a step back and pulled a small USB drive from his pocket. “Just play the video on here, got it? It works just like the one that made you like this.”

Joey snatched it from the man’s hands. The big guy just chuckled.

“Does it piss you off that if you’d still been big you could have probably tossed me through the wall? I mean, I’m a strong guy but if you’d still been that big musclebloated freak, I wouldn’t have stood a chance, but now…” The man gave Joey a shove and laughed cruelly as the deflated bodybuilder just took it.

“Dude, do you need anything else? I did what you said!”

“Fine,” the guy said, walking to the door. “I’ll leave. Thanks, you beautiful, beautiful man. That body is… something I’ll treasure forever.” He leered at Joey hungrily before stepping out the door and slamming it behind him.

“Fucking finally,” Joey said as he ran to his laptop. All the movies had stopped, thankfully, so it looked like whatever terrifying tech the guy had used to pull this shit off had quit functioning. He fumbled as he plugged in the USB drive and sighed as he clicked on the MP4 file. He reached down and tugged at the drawstring on his sweatpants, letting them fall to the floor. He didn’t want to bust out of them when he got big again.

The video that opened confused Joey. It was that beefy bearded guy standing in a jockstrap, dancing to EDM. How was that supposed to change him back?

Now that he could see all of it, he had to admit the guy’s body, while thick with fat, was fairly dense with muscle as well. His keg-sized belly was too solid to wiggle as he gyrated around. Most shocking was the amount of meat stuffed into that jockstrap. It looked like he had a football jammed in there. What kind of a cock and balls did this freak have?

Joey felt the tingle again, the sound and lights fading away as the air felt electric once again. The guy in the video continued to dance but his beard faded away. All of his flesh seemed to shrink wrap to his body, his fat dissolving as a pleasingly symmetrical body materialized. The red hair grew lighter until it was blonde and the facial features shifted until… it was Joey. Exactly as he had looked back in his Tristan days, but dancing like a gay go-go dancer, sticking his tongue out at the camera lewdly shaking his ass.

Joey shook as he examined himself: his body was bloated, hairy, firm with muscle but fatter than he’d ever been in his life. He could barely see beyond the massive belly before him but when he felt below his hands grabbed saline-injected cock and balls, unnaturally huge and effectively useless as they wobbled between his soft hairy thighs.

“That motherfucker!” Joey said in a voice he didn’t recognize. Everything in his apartment looked smaller--no, he was six inches taller. He grabbed for his sweatpants and yanked them up--he could barely get them past his chubby thighs and they fit like capris. He ran for the door, ready to pound the guy into a smear on the pavement, but when he opened it he saw Luis flanked by two cops standing outside.

“That’s the guy!” Luis said. One of the cops grabbed his gun.

“Freeze!” he ordered.

“Luis! Man, it’s me!” Joey said as it dawned on him what this looked like. “I’m not… I’m Joey, I fucking swear! This guy did this to me… He looked… like this!” All of it sounded crazy. How could he explain?

“The videos!” Joey said. He pointed to his laptop. “Check out the videos!”

“You’re here unlawfully,” the other cop said. “You’re under arrest for trespassing…”

“Fuck no!” Joey said, shoving the cop back. He never saw the other cop pull out his tazer, but his teeth chattered as his body seized and he found himself writhing on the floor. He was in cuffs before he knew it, and while he tried to stammer out an explanation, he knew there was no way they would believe him. As they led him out to the cop car he looked back up at his apartment. As far as he knew, the guy who had come in looked like him now. Maybe Luis could trace the e-mails and somehow find the guy. Maybe he could reverse what happened! Or maybe he would be stuck like this forever.

With a glance at the absurd unit between Joey’s legs, one of the cops chuckled, “Something tells me you’re gonna be really popular in prison there, buddy…”

They both laughed and Joey gritted his teeth. “But I’m… I’m fucking Joey Swoll! I’m Joey Swoll…”

“‘Swole’ is right,” the other cop said. “What, did a bee sting your cock or something?”

They both laughed and Joey rested his head against the window, weighed down by a beefy body that wasn’t his.