Just read about the button. I am a 35 year old Caucasian Male. I would love to be a Latino hunk with big pecs maybe. Is there a way the button slows it down so I remember that I know English but cannot speak it and everytime I try it comes out Spanish?
You push the button as soon as you get home.
How could you not? The chance to become someone new was too enticing, too exciting.
You push your glasses up your nose. Your eyes start tearing up, either from allergies or from all of the adrenaline pumping through your veins. You feel excited, or scared. Or both.
It dawns on you that you would like to see the changes, so you quickly skid across the floor to the bathroom so you can watch in the mirror. It had only been five seconds, but you think that there should have been some kind of change.
You flick on the bathroom light. The overhead fan whirrs into existence alongside a flickering fluorescent bulb. In the mirror you see… Your same old self. You lean closer into the mirror, thinking that maybe there are a few hairs sprouting under your nose, but no… It’s the same spotty moustache you’ve always had.
“No ha cambiado nada. ¿Será que se dañó?” you say, your voice sounding slightly deeper. “Espera... ¿qué acabo de decir?”
You freeze, staring into the mirror. Your eyes wide as the panic hits instantly.
That's not what you meant to say.
You try again. "Yo no hablo español.”
The sentence leaves your mouth effortlessly. And this time there has been a noticeable drop in the octaves of your voice. It’s definitely deeper. And more importantly, it’s definitely in Spanish.
In a panic, you leave the bathroom and stumble into the main room. The words for different objects in the room spill through your head. You trace your hand over top of them, reciting the words out loud.
“Sofá. Televisor. Refrigerador. Fregadero.”
Each word becomes more and more panicked. Each word comes out in Spanish.
You pause at a wall of books. The titles look unfamiliar to you. You recognize the letters but the words mean nothing. Your eyes scan the spines desperately, searching for something readable, but you find nothing. You open a book and thumb through the pages. Part of you recognizes it as English, but you don’t understand any of the words.
The realization hits you like a punch to the stomach. You can't read this because you don’t know English.
Your breathing quickens. You know English exists. You remember speaking it your entire life. You remember conversations, movies, songs, text messages, and grammar lessons in school. You remember understanding these words. But when you reach for a single English word, your mind comes back empty.
The memories are still there, but the language isn’t. It's like remembering that you once knew how to ride a bicycle while having no idea what a bicycle even is.
You continue to stare at the open book, willing the words to make sense but they don’t. Your breathing becomes shallow and tears start welling in your eyes. You shouldn’t have pressed the button.
"¡Hablo inglés!” you yell, hoping to force English out of you. But it’s in Spanish again.
You slam the book shut, the slam echoes through the apartment.
You grab your phone from the coffee table and unlock it. The home screen looks wrong. Not because anything has changed, but because you can't read it.
Your text messages are rows of meaningless words, your email inbox is incomprehensible and social media posts blur together into unreadable nonsense.
Panic grips your chest. You know exactly what these apps are. You remember using them! You remember reading thousands upon thousands of messages but now every sentence might as well be written in code.
“¿Qué le está pasando a mi celular?” you panic out. Now you don't even notice that you’re speaking in Spanish.
A notification appears at the top of the screen and for a brief moment you hope that it's written in Spanish because maybe that'll prove what's happening.
You tap it open, opening up your texts. The message is… perfectly readable. Instantly and effortlessly. The profile picture shows a grinning man with dark skin and short, curly hair. You recognize him immediately. It’s Santiago, your gym buddy. The name arrives naturally in your brain, and with a flood of half-formed memories follows. Late-night workouts, shared spotting sessions, protein shakes after training, long conversations about life and work and girls that feel vaguely familiar.
You read the message:
¿Entrenas esta noche o qué?
And unlike the books, unlike the emails, unlike everything else in your apartment, you understand every word.
Without thinking, you begin typing.
Sí. Llegaré pronto. Llego en 15.
You freeze. You didn’t translate the sentence, you didn’t even think about the sentence: you simply wrote it.
You turn your phone off and put it down on the table. The apartment suddenly feels quiet. You steady yourself, standing in the middle of a home that is beginning to feel strange and unfamiliar. Your eyes drift across the room to the furniture, books and DVDs, everything feels wrong.
A knot forms in your stomach. You start to feel like you don’t belong, like you’re supposed to be somewhere else. Because you don’t belong here.
You swallow hard. You know what’s going to happen next.
“Bueno...” you whisper, the word coming out naturally. “Aquí viene.”
The first change strikes like a sledgehammer. Pain explodes through your chest. You cry out and double over as your sternum creaks violently. The sound is wet and mechanical, like metal being bent under enormous pressure. Your ribs spread apart beneath your skin. Every breath becomes deeper, heavier, as your ribcage expands.
You stagger towards the bathroom, feeling like you are about to throw up. You grab the edge of the sink and hold on for dear life.
“No…” The protest comes out in Spanish.
Heat floods through your torso and your chest surges outward. Muscle swells beneath your skin in thick, dense waves. The growth is relentless. Your shirt tightens instantly, the fabric stretching across rapidly expanding pecs.
You hear stitching begin to tear, then a seam bursts. Your entire upper body jerks as more mass piles onto your frame.
The muscles aren't forming neatly but growing aggressively and violently. Years of heavy presses, incline benches, weighted dips, and brutal workouts seem to compress themselves into seconds. Your pecs continue expanding until they dominate your upper torso.
Another pulse tears through you and your shoulders explode outward.
You scream, deep and guttural. The joints in your shoulder and chest pop one after another as your frame widens. Thick muscle ripples across your deltoids, transforming them into dense rounded masses.
The bathroom suddenly feels smaller.
Your sleeves strain desperately around rapidly thickening arms and split. The tears echo around the room as fabric rips apart from shoulder to wrist.
Fresh muscle swells through the openings, your biceps knot and expand then keep growing.
Veins rise beneath your skin. Your triceps thicken and your forearms widen.
The muscles become heavy enough that your arms no longer hang the way they used to. They naturally drift away from your sides, crowded out by the sheer size of your chest and lats.
A deep groan escapes your throat. Even your voice sounds different now: deeper, richer, more powerful.
The pressure moves downward tightening your stomach violently. The softness around your waist burns away. Hard muscle forms beneath your skin. Your abdomen hardens. Obliques sharpen. Thick slabs of muscle spread across your core.
Then your back erupts. You nearly collapse from the shock and overwhelming pressure. Your lats flare outward so quickly that your remaining shirt tears up the sides. The fabric falls away, to the ground, but you barely notice.
Your entire torso feels impossibly broad now. Heavy, dense and built.
A fresh wave crashes into your neck. You clutch your throat as thick cords of muscle form beneath the skin. Your neck expands until it nearly blends into your traps.
Pressure spreads through your cheeks and brow as the bones beneath your skin shift. Dark stubble bursts across your jawline. The hairs rapidly lengthen and thicken into a dense goatee. The recession in your hairline disappears as thick, wavy black hair pushes forward across your scalp.
Suddenly your vision goes blurry and panic shoots across your face. You blink repeatedly but the bathroom smears around you.
"¿Qué está pasando?"
You rub furiously at your eyes with a massive hand and then you realize the problem isn't your eyes, it’s your glasses. The frames sit crooked on your face now. Your widening head has bent them slightly out of shape. You pull them off and stare at them. For the first time in your life, the room remains perfectly clear with very detail of the bathroom snapping into sharp focus. You slowly fold the glasses and place them on the sink. Somehow, you already know you're never going to need them again.
You stumble closer to the mirror. The man staring back is already becoming unrecognizable.
With his enormous chest, massive shoulders, and powerful arms. And somehow the transformation still isn't finished as the biggest changes haven't even reached your lower body yet.
A strange sensation suddenly blooms deep in your hips, a tingling deep in your bones and muscles. Your breath catches and pain arrives a split second later.
“¡Mierda!" you exclaim.
Your knees buckle and catch yourself on the edge of the sink as pressure floods through your pelvis. It feels like your entire lower body is being pulled apart. Your hips pop a deep and unsettling sound as muscle fibres tighten and seize across your thighs. You cry out as your quadriceps knot beneath your skin.
The muscles aren't simply growing but being rebuilt. Years of squats, leg presses, sprint training, stair climbs and lunges. Thousands upon thousands of repetitions seem to compress themselves into a few agonizing seconds. Your thighs thicken.
The fabric of your shorts stretches, but then it also begins to change and alter. The thick grey lounge shorts you bought from Costco are restitching themselves into black thin and airy gym shorts. The hem line rises higher up your thigh, exposing your muscles and darkening skin to the light of the bathroom light. The muscles beneath your shorts become heavier, denser and stronger.
The transformation drives deeper.
Your femurs ache and pressure builds inside the bones themselves. The realization that you are getting taller sends a fresh wave of panic through your chest. The bathroom countertop slowly sinks away, the mirror lowers and the towel hanging beside the shower drops inch by inch. Or at least that's what it looks like, but you know better than that because you're rising.
The crotch of your shorts grows tighter and more constrictive as the seam rides higher. In a moment of curiosity, you stretch the elastic of your shorts open to see your cock growing thicker, longer and darker in skin tone. The tip grows wider, and new foreskin knits itself across. Dark hair spreads from your belly button down to your dick. You reach your massive hand and hold dick in your equally massive hand, sending a jolt through your entire body. You stare and hold it longer than you mean to, partly because it's shocking but mostly because it's impossible to look away.
A strange mix of excitement, pride and disbelief settles in your chest. You feel your dick start to become harder, a flood of fresh blood surging into your groin. It feels good and normal. This has always been your dick. The gentle rhythmic stroking feels good, but it does not drown out the discomfort you feel in the rest of your still changing body.
A fresh surge of pressure floods through your hips and glutes. Your backside grows heavier, rounder, and noticeably firmer, forcing your stance wider to accommodate the new mass. The fabric of your shorts stretches taut across it, pulled tight against muscle built from years of squats, lunges, stair climbs, and endless hours in the gym. Every movement feels different now: more powerful and more grounded. You shift your balance and posture immediately as even standing still feels different. Your lower body now carries the dense strength of a man who has spent years building it.
Another crack echoes through your legs and knees straighten involuntarily. Your entire body jerks upward causing you to gasp in air. The movement feels impossible, yet it keeps happening.
Your calves swell next, and more dense muscle forms beneath the skin, hard and athletic. Fresh hair spreads across them while veins rise beneath the surface. You shift your weight and immediately notice the difference that balance has changed and your centre of gravity feels different.
Everything feels different: the bathroom feels smaller, the ceiling feels lower, the doorway feels narrower. A final pulse tears through your lower body causing you to cry out once again.
Then suddenly it's over. A silence fills the room, broken only by your own heavy breathing.
You slowly stand upright, noticing how strange the movement feels, not because you're injured but because you're much taller.
You catch sight of yourself in the mirror again and see a broad-shouldered Colombian man staring back, one who now stands over six feet tall. And for the first time since pressing the button, the reflection doesn't look like someone you're becoming but rather like someone you've always been.
You shake your head in disbelief. “Soy yo... Camilo Vargas.”
The name is yours. It’s always been yours.
A sudden jolt shoots through your stomach, reminding you of an airplane lifting off the runway.
The bathroom vanishes and for a brief moment there is only a weightlessness void. Then your feet hit rubber flooring causing you to stumble forward. Music pounds through hidden speakers and the sharp scent of sweat, disinfectant, and warm metal fills your lungs.
Spanish voices echo around you .You look up to see rows of machines stretch across a brightly lit gym. Men and women move between benches and squat racks and televisions hang from the walls playing soccer highlights. Ceiling fans push warm air through the building.
Nobody seems surprised by your presence. Nobody is staring and nobody is questioning why you're there because as far as they're concerned, you have always been there.
Memories begin settling into place of early morning workouts, protein shakes, missed reps, personal records and all the hours spent chasing a better version of yourself. The gym doesn't feel unfamiliar but rather it feels like home.
A voice suddenly calls out from across the room. “¡Camilo!”
You turn instinctively to see grinning muscular man waves from beside a bench press. You recognize Santiago immediately, he’s been your friend for years.
“Pensé que no ibas a venir,” he says.
A smile spreads across your face before you can stop it. “No me lo perdería.”
Santiago punches you playfully on the shoulder and leads you toward the bench press. You're already comfortably warmed up from the stretches you did when you arrived at the gym. As you follow him through the weight room, your eyes drift toward a Colombian flag hanging high on the far wall. A strange warmth spreads through your chest.
Pride washes through your mind as memories begin settling into place.
Watching Colombia play soccer with your family gathered around the television. Your tío shouting at the referee from the couch while your primos squeezed together on the floor. Your tía carrying plates of food through the living room while everyone yelled over one another. Then the entire house erupting when Colombia scored, drinks spilling and people jumping to their feet as car horns sounded somewhere outside. You remember kicking a soccer ball around afterward, trying to recreate the moves of James Rodríguez. For weeks afterward, you were convinced you were going to play for the national team someday.
You remember long afternoons spent sweating under the tropical sun. Your mamá handing you a warm arepa before school while the smell of fresh coffee drifted through the house. Your papá leaving for work before sunrise and returning home exhausted but always making time to ask about your day. You drift through memories of kicking a soccer ball through the street with your hermanos until your mamá called all of you inside for dinner. Riding in the back seat with the windows down as motorcycles buzzed through crowded streets, music spilling from open windows as you walked home. Entire neighbourhoods glowing with Christmas lights in December. The memories settle comfortably into place, carrying with them a warmth and familiarity that makes it difficult to remember ever calling anywhere else home.
The memories don't arrive as strangers. They feel familiar. Comforting.
Because they're yours.
You glance at the flag again and smile. For a moment, you can't believe there was ever a time when you weren't Colombian.
A distant memory of another life flickers briefly through your mind. A different face. A different language. A different country.
The memory fades almost as quickly as it came.
You have a workout to finish. Friends waiting for you. A life waiting for you.
Santiago calls your name from across the gym. You grin and head over. Camilo Vargas has always belonged here.
