Samantha Duncan (Jay's mother) walked past her son's bedroom. She was about to leave to go to work. But she stopped when she got to Jay's partially open door.
His room was always fairly clean. She rarely had to pick up clothes off the floor. This was one of those times.
She saw one of his shirts on the floor next to his bed. And when she crouched down to pick it up, she saw that there was something under her son's bed. She grabbed for it.
It looked like a toy gun, except that it had a small view screen attached to it, that was still on. It had the word READY on the screen.
She turned it around in her hands, trying to determine what it was exactly. She was a supervisor at McMillan Tech Industries in the R&D; department. So, analysing technology was part of her job.
As she turned it around, she accidentally pulled the trigger and shot herself with it. She fell to the floor in a daze. When she got up, she caught a glimpse of herself in Jay's bedroom mirror. Slowly, she walked closer to the mirror, a look of unbelief on her face. That's not the only thing that was noticable about her face, though. She had no make-up on, even though she clearly remembered putting it on less than an hour before. Her hair looked like it hadn't been washed. Again, she had just taken a shower that morning. And her clothes were different. She had a white blouse and long black skirt on, instead of her usual top and capri pants, which she could have sworn she had just put on.
She ran to her bedroom. Maybe if she was quick, she could at least change clothes. She should have already been leaving for work.
She took off her skirt and stopped. She stared at her underwear. Granny panties? she thought. Why am I wearing those? And where did I get them from?
Maybe it was intuition, but she had this feeling that something was different. Not herself, but something in the room. Something was out of place.
She opened her underwear drawer to get a normal pair of panties, but was treated with a sight of nothing but more pairs of granny panties.
"Where did my underwear go?"
Now she was getting scared. What exactly had happened to her? Memory loss? No, she was only out for a few seconds. Perhaps she blacked out and changed clothes unconsciously? Like sleepwalking? That didn't make much sense either.
She opened her closet and saw that all of her clothing was gone, replaced by more of the same clothes that she currently wore.
She grabbed her head. "What's going on?"
She closed her closet doors and the underwear drawer. Then she looked in her mirror. She thought that her clothes were okay to wear to work. They fell within the dress guidelines. And she thought that she didn't look too bad in them. In fact, she didn't want to dress like she normally had. She liked these new clothes, that had mysteriously been given to her, more. She pulled her skirt back up and left her bedroom.
On the way to the foyer, she stopped at Jay's bedroom and picked up the toy gun. She decided to take it to work. Maybe she could figure out what it did, in the lab. They had special equipment for that sort of thing.
When she picked up the toy gun, she saw that the screen was different. Instead of saying READY, it had a list of words. They looked like different types of personalities. And the one that was highlighted was GEEK.
This toy gun turned me into a geek, she thought. The whole idea was ridiculous. But it was the only thing that made sense. She did pass out when she was examining the toy gun. And when she came to, she was dressed differently. And she did feel a lot different now. More geeky, she supposed. And the thing was, she liked it.
A minute later, she got into her car, put her purse and the toy gun on the passenger's seat, and drove to Pittsburgh.
