The Architecture of Soft Things

The Collapse of Structure

Julian Thorne lived his life by the grid. As a senior architect at Vane & Foster, he understood that stability was a matter of load-bearing walls, calculated stress points, and the rigid application of physics. His life was a series of clean lines: a minimalist apartment in the city, a pristine grey sedan, and a schedule that tolerated no deviations. He was thirty-two years old, successful, and aggressively solitary.
He viewed emotions much like he viewed water damage: a chaotic, corrosive force that needed to be sealed out to preserve the integrity of the structure.
Which was why visiting his mother, Eleanor, always felt like walking into a condemned building.

"You're checking your watch again, Julian," Eleanor said. Her voice was soft, but it carried that specific frequency of disappointment that had grated on his nerves since he was a teenager.
Julian sighed, adjusting the cuff of his crisp white dress shirt. "I have an early site visit tomorrow, Mother. The sprawling chaos of the ecstatic brutality project downtown. I can't be late."
"Ecstatic brutality," Eleanor murmured, pouring tea from a heavy ceramic pot. The steam curled into the dim light of her dining room. The house was exactly as it had been for twenty years—cluttered with knick-knacks, smelling of dried lavender and old paper, a stark contrast to Julian's sterile world. "That sounds like a terrible way to design a building. Or a life."
"It's a style, Mother. It's about honesty in materials." Julian accepted the cup. He didn't really want it, but declining Eleanor's herbal blends usually resulted in a twenty-minute lecture on antioxidants. "Something you might not appreciate."
Eleanor sat opposite him. She was a small woman, her hair a frizzy halo of grey, her eyes magnified by thick glasses. She had been a chemist for a pharmaceutical company for thirty years before forced retirement. Now, she spent her days in her basement "lab"—a glorified greenhouse where she distilled oils and brewed concoctions she claimed were for focus and vitality.
She looked at him now, not with her usual pestering anxiety, but with a strange, heavy sadness. It was a look of assessment.
"I appreciate honesty, Julian," she said quietly. "I appreciate it more than you know. I remember when you were honest. When you were small. You used to cry when you were sad. You used to laugh until you hiccuped. You were so... permeable. Now you're just concrete."
Julian took a long sip of the tea. It was thick, tasting of chamomile, heavy syrup, and something bitter underneath—like crushed roots. "I grew up, Mother. It happens. I'm independent. I'm efficient."
"You're lonely," she corrected.
"I'm busy." He finished the cup, setting it down with a definitive clink. "And I really must go. Thank you for the... whatever this was."
"It's a blend for regression," she said, her eyes locked on his.
Julian stood up, smoothing his blazer. "Regression? Like statistical analysis? I didn't know you followed my work."
"No," Eleanor whispered. "Not that kind."
He turned toward the hallway. "Right. Well. I'll call you next week."
"Julian."
He stopped at the archway but didn't turn around.
"I love you. You know that, right? Everything I do... it's because the world hardened you wrong. You set like bone that healed crooked. It needs to be re-broken to be set right."
"You're talking nonsense, Mother. Goodnight."
Julian walked to the front door. He reached for the brass handle, the metal cool under his palm. He twisted it.
Or, he tried to.
A wave of vertigo hit him so hard his vision swam. The foyer, with its checkered tiles, seemed to tilt forty-five degrees to the left. Julian stumbled, his shoulder slamming into the coat rack.
What the hell?
"Julian?" Eleanor's voice came from the dining room, calm and unmoving.
"I'm... fine," he rasped. But his voice sounded wrong. It was too high. Too thin. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, like it had swollen to twice its size.
He tried to grip the doorknob again, but his fingers felt slippery, clumsy. The strength in his grip evaporated. His knees buckled, not with a snap, but with a gelatinous wobble. He slid down the doorframe, hitting the floor with a heavy thud.
Stroke, his architect's brain diagnosed instantly. I am having a stroke. Left hemisphere impairment. Motor function collapse.
He tried to shout for help. "Call... nine... one..."
The words came out slurred. "Caw... ni... wun..."
The heat began then. It wasn't a fever; it was a roaring fire inside his marrow. It felt as though his bones were melting, condensing, snapping and reforming. A scream tore from his throat, but it pitched up, higher and higher, until it was a terrifying, piercing shriek.
His vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of grey and beige. The ceiling of the foyer, usually ten feet up, seemed to rocket upward, soaring away from him into a cavernous height. The door looming beside him grew immense, a towering monolith of oak.
He squeezed his eyes shut, the pain in his joints excruciating. His spine felt like it was compressing, his hips grinding as they shifted. His clothes—his tailored Italian suit, his silk tie—suddenly felt suffocatingly tight, then paradoxically loose, bunching around him like a collapsing tent.
The burning stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving him gasping, drenched in sweat, lying on the cold tiles.
Silence filled the house.
Julian blinked his eyes open. The world was blurry. He tried to push himself up.
His hands.
He stared at them. They were planted on the tile floor. But they weren't his hands. They were pudgy. The knuckles were dimpled. The skin was flawlessly smooth, pink, and soft. His wedding ring—no, he wasn't married, his class ring—was gone.
He tried to stand. He commanded his legs to lift him, a simple neural instruction he had given billions of times.
His legs disobeyed. They kicked out, uncoordinated, heavy. He managed to push his torso up, wobbling precariously. He looked down at himself.
His trousers were a tangled mess around his ankles. His legs were short, chubby stumps of pale flesh. He was wearing his white dress shirt, but it was now a massive, billowing nightgown that swallowed his tiny frame.
No.
The thought was clear, articulate, and sharp in his mind. This is a hallucination. The tea. She drugged me with a hallucinogen.

He tried to speak. "Mother! What did you do?"
What came out of his mouth was: "Mama! Wha... du...?"
The voice was a high-pitched, reedy squeak. The consonants were soft, the vowels round and clumsy. He clapped a hand over his mouth in horror. The tactile sensation was wrong—his palm was too soft, his chin too small.
He needed a mirror. There was a decorative mirror on the wall above the hallway table. He scrambled toward it. But he couldn't walk. He tried to take a step and immediately toppled forward, catching himself on his hands. He was crawling. He was crawling.
Panic, cold and primal, seized him. He dragged his heavy, uncooperative body toward the hallway table. It loomed above him like a skyscraper. He reached up, his tiny fingers scrabbling against the wood, trying to pull himself up to see.
He couldn't reach the mirror. He could barely reach the bottom edge of the table.
He looked down at his body again. The shirt had ridden up. Underneath, he wasn't wearing his boxer briefs. The fabric had dissolved or disappeared. Instead, wrapped thickly around his hips, creating a bulky, crinkling padding between his legs, was a diaper. A thick, white, disposable diaper.
He felt the plastic taping at his hips. He felt the humiliating, snug gather of elastic around his thighs.
"No!" he screamed inside his head. "NO!"
"No!" he shouted aloud. "No! No!"
It sounded like a tantrum. "No! No! No!"
Click-clack. Click-clack.
Footsteps. They sounded like thunder rolling across the floorboards. He turned his head, his neck muscles feeling weak, struggling to support the weight of his own head.
Eleanor stood at the end of the hallway.
To Julian, she was a giant. She blocked out the light. Her shoes were the size of cars. She looked down at him, her expression unreadable, magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses.
"Oh, Julian," she sighed. It wasn't a sigh of regret. It was the sigh of a craftsman looking at a finished project. "It worked faster than the simulation predicted. Metabolism is a tricky thing."
Julian backed away, scooting on his padded bottom. He pointed a shaking, dimpled finger at her.
You poisoned me. You did this. Fix it. Fix it right now!
He opened his mouth. "Yu... yu bad! Fix! Fix it!"
The lisp was undeniable. The R's were W's. The complexity of his sentence structure collapsed between his brain and his tongue.
Eleanor smiled, a sad, terrifyingly gentle smile. She walked toward him. He tried to scramble backward, but his coordination was nonexistent. He tangled in the oversized dress shirt and flopped onto his stomach.
She knelt down. Even kneeling, she towered over him.
"There's nothing to fix, sweetheart," she said, reaching out.
He flinched. He tried to slap her hand away, but his arm was short and his aim was terrible. He missed by inches.
"You're safe now," she cooed. She scooped him up.
The sensation of leaving the ground was nauseating. One moment he was on the floor, the next he was being hoisted six feet into the air. The vertigo returned. He instinctively grabbed at her blouse, his tiny fingers clutching the fabric in a death grip to keep from falling.
Put me down! I am a thirty-two-year-old man! I am an architect! Put me down!
"Down!" he shrieked. "Down! Me... man!"
"Shh, shh," Eleanor hushed him, rocking him against her chest. She smelled of lavender and old dust, overpowering at this range. "You're tired. The transition takes a lot of energy. Your body is brand new, Julian. It doesn't know how to work yet."
She walked him into the living room. The furniture was enormous. The sofa was a mountain range of beige velvet.
"You have your mind, don't you?" she whispered into his ear, her breath warm and ticklish. "I didn't touch that. I needed you to know. I needed you to be here for this, not just an empty shell. You need to understand what it means to need someone."
Julian's heart hammered against his ribs—tiny, rapid-fire beats like a hummingbird. He stared at her face, seeing the pores in her skin, the stray hairs on her chin.
She's insane, he thought, the clarity of the realization cutting through the panic. She has had a psychotic break, and she has used some chemical agent to... to shrink me? To regress my DNA?
The biology of it was impossible. Yet, the heavy, crinkling bulk between his legs was real. The way his head lolled against her shoulder because his neck was too tired to hold it up was real.
"This is a crime," he tried to say. "This is kidnapping."
"Cwime!" he spluttered, spit bubbling at his lips. "Kid-nap!"
"Oh, silly goose," Eleanor said, adjusting his weight on her hip. She patted his diapered bottom rhythmically. Pat. Pat. Pat. The sensation was muffled but undeniably intimate. A wave of hot shame flushed his cheeks. "It's not kidnapping. I'm your mother. I'm just taking care of you. We're going to start over. We're going to get it right this time. No rigid lines. No cold concrete. Just us."
She carried him toward the stairs.
"Now," she said, her voice hardening slightly, shifting from the scientist to the mother. "It's past your bedtime. And we have so much work to do tomorrow."
Julian looked down the stairs as they ascended. The front door—his escape, his freedom, his life—grew smaller and smaller. He tried to kick, to struggle, but his limbs felt like they were moving through molasses. He was weak. He was incredibly, terrifyingly weak.
He let out a wail. It wasn't a word. It was a cry of pure, impotent frustration.
"There, there," Eleanor hummed, tightening her grip. "Mama's got you."