Cure for the Morning After @page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; } ----------------------------------- Cure for the Morning After by Darrell Bain ----------------------------------- Science Fiction/Humor Double Dragon Publishing double-dragon-ebooks.com Copyright ©2005 by Darrell Bain First published in DDP, 2005 NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc., Markham, Ontario Canada. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. A Double Dragon eBook Published by Double Dragon Publishing, Inc. PO Box 54016 1-5762 Highway 7 East Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 Canada www.double-dragon-ebooks.com www.double-dragon-publishing.com A DDP First Edition October 18, 2005 Book Layout and Cover Art by Deron Douglas CURE FOR THE MORNING AFTER By Darrell Bain The only two things Timothy Meeker had going for him were a good job and a brilliant mind. Other than those, he was a pretty pitiful specimen. Timothy had unfortunately inherited both alleles of the shyness gene. Coupled with that was an appearance that left little to cheer about. His hair was a mousy brown; his nose was so upturned that from a front view it almost presented the appearance of a pig's snout. His chin was badly undershot, leaving him bucktoothed. His beard grew in scraggly patches but was unaccountably very dark and thick where it did grow. By noon, his face always looked as if he had forgotten to wash it that morning. His ears stuck out from the side of his head like crumpled oak leaves bereft of chlorophyll to give them color. And this was just his head. Timothy's odd countenance was set atop a scrawny neck, and sported a prominent Adam's apple that looked like an unattended tumor. His shoulders were narrow, his chest sunken and he had a round little potbelly that no amount of exercise seemed to help reduce. Besides all that, he was shorter than average and splay footed. He walked like a duck, and this made the wildly incongruous colors of his shirt, trousers and jacket appear even more ludicrous. Some unfortunate men like Timothy quickly give up competing for women and devote their time to other pursuits, such as pornography, stamp collecting and science, to name a few. Being brilliant, Timothy chose science. However, being persistent and possessed of a very high libido, Timothy spent what time he could spare away from the genetics laboratory where he worked making the rounds of the singles bars in the affluent part of Dallas, north of the central city. He wanted to find a companion, a pretty female companion, who would overlook his obvious shortcomings. His quest for a pretty girl friend always failed, but he kept trying. Sometimes (usually right before the bar closed) he did find a companion for the night, though in the sober light of the next morning he always wished he hadn't. On this Friday night, Timothy didn't score until the very last moment, which was usually the case when he scored at all. The last call had been called and the few unattached men and women were settling for what was left if they intended to get laid. By this time, the woman who had moved onto the barstool near him looked very attractive indeed, the result of Timothy having imbibed a substantial load of ethanol. He had to drink substantially in order to overcome that awful, painful shyness which had plagued him all his life like a worthless, messy relative who wouldn't move out and couldn't be controlled. Even so, it was the woman who began the conversation. �śWhere d’ y’ work?” She asked, surreptitiously checking her watch as she brushed back a tangled mass of horrid red hair that had a half inch of black roots showing. She grinned lasciviously, displaying cavities in her teeth and cracked makeup that was disguising her true age, somewhere well north of fifty. �śUh, I'm a schientist, uh scientist at Bors ... I mean Border Labs,” Timothy slurred, peering myopically at the woman. He tried a grin and spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth. To his alcohol sluiced brain, the woman he was talking to appeared attractive, with nice red hair, a pretty smile and pert little nose. His befuddled mind traveled no further than her face. In his condition, he almost certainly wouldn't have noticed her dumpy body anyway. It bulged from her clothes in unsightly mounds, in unsightly places. Where mounds should have been was an almost flat plateau. �śYou maksh rockets? Vroom!". The woman made a flying gesture with her hand. Unfortunately, it was the hand holding her drink. It sloshed over the brim, wetting them both. Timothy didn't even notice. He was enthralled with the beautiful woman sitting next to him and taking such an avid interest in him. �śNo, I'm a genetishist,” he corrected. �śWhash y're name?" �śAlicsh. Whatsh yers?" �śTim. You wanta drink?" �śI think they're closhed." Timothy's conversational gambits were exhausted for the moment, but Alice didn't suffer from shyness. �śI gots shomethin’ t’ drink at my plascsh." �śYou do?” Even with a load on, Timothy was too shy to follow up on the obvious gambit. The woman was simply too beautiful. No woman that good looking would ask him home. �śYesh. Wanna go?" Timothy nodded gratefully, unable to speak. He wobbled to his feet and followed Alice outside. Neither of them should have been driving, of course, but they did. Fortunately, Alice lived only a few blocks away and they both managed to navigate that far with only minor damage to curbs, lampposts and fenders. * * * * Timothy opened his bloodshot eyes and sat up in bed. The room spun dizzily for a moment then settled down. He vaguely remembered leaving the last watering hole with an attractive woman. They had gone to her place and ... he looked down at the woman in bed with him and his eyes widened in horror. Peeling makeup clearly showed that she was easily old enough to be his grandmother. Alice was sleeping with her mouth open, revealing rotten teeth and a tongue coated with a fuzz that made him sick just looking at it. The rest of her made him sick too when he glanced hastily away from her face. How could he not have noticed last night? He must have been drunk out of his mind! Very quietly, and praying very sincerely that he didn't wake up the apparition beside him; Timothy eased out of the bed and stood up. He found his trousers and a chair. He sat down and pulled them on, then gathered the rest of his clothing and retreated from the bedroom, out the front door and, he earnestly hoped, out of Alice's life forever. * * * * For the rest of the weekend, Timothy mulled over the Friday night escapade. Being very honest with himself, he felt sure that had Alice awakened first, she would have had much the same reaction to him as he had to her. His shyness could be somewhat overcome with enough drink but there was simply no help for his appearance. He was doomed to either celibacy or a long line of future Alices. As he was brooding, he began to think what the world would be like if appearances didn't count. Wouldn't it be wonderful, he thought, if he had at least an equal chance at the attractive women and didn't have to get drunk and fool himself into thinking he had found one, then wake up with Alice or her equivalent? And vice versa, he admitted to himself as he remembered one painful episode of a woman gazing at him in unabated horror when she woke up beside him, notwithstanding her own less than enviable appearance. Timothy wasn't vain enough to think he was such a super geneticist that he could devise a method to change appearances such as his, but he was certainly no dummy. Far from it. He began contemplating another way to go about it, to get essentially the same results. Suppose there was a way so that even when sober, every single woman looked as attractive as Alice had last night�"and every woman thought every man was equally good looking? Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that even out the odds! He thought and thought and by Monday morning, he was ready to try putting his thoughts into action. * * * * It didn't happen immediately, of course. Timothy Meeker was brilliant, but even brilliance has its limits. For six months he worked practically day and night in his one man department at Border Labs. He made no more excursions to the singles bars. In fact, Timothy did very little but work and experiment. He was inspired by the thought of what he intended to accomplish. You might even say he became a monomaniac on the subject. His thought processes went no further nor considered much else except leveling the playing field. Timothy's original mental processes ran thus: Alcohol lowers inhibitions and judgment to the point where just about any member of the opposite sex appears not only suitable, but desirable. What would it take to produce the same result without alcohol? Genes, that's what. Or chemicals. Or perhaps both. In the end, it turned out to be both. Timothy altered a common virus that generally produced no harm to humans, but was attracted to the coliform bacteria, E. coli, which everyone acquires an hour or two after birth and carries in their gut the rest of their lives. He twitched a gene here and a base pair there and eventually the virus was capable of coupling with the bacterial DNA, causing it to produce a brain altering chemical that worked the same way alcohol did; that is, it lowered inhibitions and impaired judgment. He was pretty sure it did anyway, lacking a human to experiment on. If it worked, Timothy knew the results would be permanent, since the gene structure of the E.coli bacteria was permanently changed by the virus. Even if the body began producing antibodies, there would always be resistant bacteria that would multiply and carry on the change. The only question remaining was where to test it and whom to test it on. He chose himself as the first subject and imbibed a test dose one Sunday night before going to bed. * * * * The virus worked incredibly fast. At work the next day, Timothy could already sense a change in his perceptions. All the females at work, both young and old, seemed more attractive than they had been, though not unduly so. Even as rapidly as they multiply, viruses and bacteria need a little time to get up to speed. He was satisfied, though. With single minded determination, he returned to the site of his last disastrous conquest, the big singles bar where young men and women (and a great many who were not so young) gathered after work. He spread the bug he had created around by use of a mist inhaler that he consciously let leak from around his mouth and into the air. He intended to explain that he had developed a touch of asthma and was still getting used to the inhaler had anyone asked, but no one did. He even sprayed some of the virus suspension indiscriminately on surfaces in the men's room when he happened to be there alone on a couple of occasions. For the women, he managed to infect the door to the ladies room and the ambient air in the area of the expansive club where they tended to congregate. Satisfied for the nonce, he returned home. The next night he did the same thing at another bar, and the next night another. Timothy skipped a couple of nights after that. He felt a little strange and decided to stay home after work and rest up. He was confident he had accomplished his purpose anyway, and was just marking time until the weekend. * * * * Timothy waited until Saturday night in order to give the E.coli bacteria infected by his virus time to multiply and produce the chemical that would give him an equal chance in the dance of the sexes. In the meantime, on Thursday he almost got fired for talking back to his boss, something he had never done in his life. On Friday a laboratory technician bringing in some new samples for him to analyze came on to him, and he was so surprised he offered no resistance. They got caught smooching while his gene splicer alarm went unattended. He heard it, but it didn't seem important at the moment. By then, most of the females at Border Labs seemed to be getting prettier and prettier and he was noticing that the women he came in contact with for the most part no longer avoided looking at him. It made him wonder, because he hadn't infected the lab. Then he realized what was happening. Everyone carries E.coli around on their hands and body and it is everywhere in the environment. He must have inadvertently spread the new germ around Border Laboratories himself. He shrugged. So what? The women at the lab could wait. He wanted to see what happened over the weekend at the night spots where he had spread his virus. * * * * When Timothy returned to the first singles bar he had infected that Saturday night, he was inordinately pleased at how his experiment was working out. He still carried his shyness gene, of course, but now a good percentage of the females who came there regularly showed no inhibitions about approaching him. They thought he was as attractive as any other man in the place. And to his eyes, all of them were pretty, even though he knew what was happening, and even before he had his first drink. Timothy was so happy he didn't even notice the increased volume of shouting, the arguments and contention, and merely moved out of the way when a couple of fights broke out. He scored early and left with a pert little brunette whom he thought was cute as a bug. And in fact, she was. More importantly, she thought Timothy was a fairly good looking specimen and was impressed that he was a scientist. On the way to her place, Timothy was so absorbed that he failed to note the higher percentage than normal of aggressive drivers they encountered. Timothy spent a pleasant night with his companion, had coffee and breakfast with her the next morning and even got up the gumption to ask if he could see her again. When she agreed, he knew his plans had worked out exactly as he had hoped and anticipated. Or so he thought. Timothy Meeker was ecstatic! * * * * Two months later Timothy flinched as bullets whizzed by the barricade he and his beautiful red headed companion were hiding behind. She huddled against him for protection, but he had none to offer. Ugly black smoke rose from numerous areas of the city. Worse yet, firemen and policemen seemed to have quit giving a damn. Few sirens were heard, yet the bullets, the careening cars driven by men and women who gave no heed to traffic lights or speed limits and the roving mobs told Timothy that the situation in the city was getting completely out of hand. It was at that point that Timothy finally and fully realized how stupid he had been not to anticipate what awful effects a general lack of judgment and lowering of inhibitions would cause�"but somehow it didn't seem to matter to him that nobody gave a damn anymore. * * * * Timothy hadn't intended to cause the fall of civilization. He simply wanted an equal chance to get laid, but like many brilliant people, he couldn't see past the solution to a problem and consider the possible consequences. The E. coli bacteria altered by the virus spread and spread, infecting more and more people. Eventually everyone in the world had lowered inhibitions and had lost their ability to judge the consequences of their actions. The cities imploded, farmers quit farming and billions starved or were killed by others. Poor Timothy. He didn't give a damn either. He died when his car was hijacked and the well built blond he was traveling with was taken from him. His last thoughts were of how much fun he had been having with attractive women since he leveled the playing field and changed the world. THE END Visit double-dragon-ebooks.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.