Anachron

Chapter 1
Anachron

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Chapter Description: Complete story. A college student is spirited away from his campus to an underground lab where scientists gather data in excruciating detail. An idea by KidAgain.

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1. It’s Only Over When...

( ONE MINUTE BEFORE TIME ZERO )

Students at Gwynett University, a celebrated, 19,000-strong institution nestled between two swaths of nowhere in the American Midwest and one of the nation’s foremost bastions of scientific innovation, were no strangers to waking up disoriented, often partially naked and seldom with any fabric separating their dehydrated bodies from a relentlessly frigid floor. That’s college. No matter how gifted they were, no matter how much they excelled in academics, athletics, or both, the only students who didn’t awaken in such an agonized state rose with the sunshine, reaping the benefits of piety, a distaste for partying, or a desire to add another 20 years to their lives.

Subject Alpha was one such teetotaler. So, when he awoke, stripped completely naked and braced to a Lucite table in an unfamiliar room that resembled a hospital’s OR, his sense of disorientation blended into one of terror fairly quickly.

The room was spartan, reeked of disinfectant, and looked so white and sterile that the incidental glow of the light-reflecting walls was headache-inducing. Alpha efficiently took note of his surroundings. He identified an IV drip which had already been inserted into a vein but had not yet been started. Large pipes pointed downward from directly above him, outfitted with apertures and eerie blue lights, looked to be sinister amalgams of cameras and laser guns. And, when Alpha raised his head and looked downward past his feet, the massive observation window wasn’t a window at all, but a mirror. The student was adroit enough to assume that it was one-way.

Alpha’s wrists and ankles were bound to the examination table via cuffs whose cords led all the way beneath, their mounts unseen. He’d screened enough movies and read enough stories to know that his only option was to wait, and to fill that time with fervent hopes that whatever he was doomed to suffer wouldn’t leave him disfigured, insane, or worse.

He didn’t even stop to think whether he was dreaming. It never turns out that way, after all.

2. Meeting of the Minds

( TWO WEEKS BEFORE TIME ZERO )

“I don’t think we’re ready yet.”

“Stop sitting on your thumbs, Doc. Science isn’t gonna wait, and neither are your competitors.”

The office belonged to Dr. Ennis Cave, chair of the science department at Gwynett, and his company was his 30-year-old research assistant, Roger Devlin. The topic of discussion was Project Anachron, so named for its world-upending research into the science of slowing, stopping, and ultimately reversing the aging process-- “The one disease with which we’re all born,” Dr. Cave would frequently wax.

The research -- conducted in secret amongst the most subterranean levels of the campus’s science building and funded privately by anonymous investors -- had been fantastically successful. Cave and Devlin had successfully frozen rodents at the youthful peak of their sexual drives, bestowed immortality upon things as whimsical as roses and cacti, and taken a 15-year-old dog, blind with age and crippled by arthritis, and regressed him to a puppy with the cleanest bill of health to which the local veterinarian had ever bore witness.

“But a human being?” Cave asked, the tone of his ostensibly shocked and dismissive voice betrayed by a noticeable undercurrent of intellectual curiosity. “Where are we going to find a human being willing to be the fourth in a line that started with plants and arced upwards through rats and dying dogs? For whatever price?”

“No price,” Devlin grinned. “Look around you. Nineteen thousand test subjects milling about campus, using their ID cards to enter buildings-- so their locations are tracked at all times. You don’t have to pay someone you... ‘borrow’ for the good of science. For the good of humanity.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“We need to get this done in two weeks, Doc,” said a stern Devlin, “or your investors are gonna bail and haul your ass into court. Your career will be ruined and all your hard work will have been for nothing. And every minute detail of your research will become permanently emblazoned in the public record. You won’t be the scientist who saved humanity, Dr. Cave. You’ll be the imprisoned kidnapper and your college roommate from decades ago will read your notes and become a trillionaire.”

“You understand that I can’t tell you to do this,” Cave replied, “or even ask you. But I can’t control you.”

Devlin grinned. “No one’s ever tried.”

3. Anesthesia

( THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE TIME ZERO )

Roger Devlin found his mark. Keeping his binoculars couched in the palm of his left hand, the research assistant used his right to scribble notes onto the steel clipboard next to him. It was the school’s administrative intranet that clued Devlin in to the ideal mark; Subject Alpha, to which Devlin had come to refer the boy, was a business major, a Dean’s List sophomore, born 1992, and assigned to the very secluded dormitory near which the research assistant was lying in wait.

And Alpha was, indeed, a specimen. At nearly six feet tall and weighing in the neighborhood of 185 pounds, his stint as a high school varsity soccer player had forged the moderately-muscular, clean-cut lad into the very picture of health. Health was a crucial component to the legitimacy of Dr. Cave’s science; it had to be as close to the concept of “control” as possible. Subject Alpha fit every conceivable metric.

When Alpha began climbing the stairs to his dorm, Devlin made his move, launching up from his hiding place to the side of the stairway and plunging a needle into the shocked student’s leg. The anesthetic went in cleanly. The research assistant was there to catch the quickly-fading test subject before it tumbled back down the stairs.

It had been just that easy.

Almost half an hour later, as Alpha squirmed and yelled from his bondage atop the uncomfortable medical table, the memories of his drugging had come back to him. His thoughts of what was to come saturated the nightmarish internal monologue in which the despairing 20-year-old had engaged.

He was naked, he was helpless, and he knew that no amount of clever problem-solving was going to get him out of this one-- whatever “this one” turned out to be.

4. In So Many Ways

( ONE MINUTE BEFORE TIME ZERO )

On the opposite side of the one-way mirror was a veritable paean to visual technology. What Dr. Cave regarded as a practical and efficient way to gather and record data, Devlin saw as a digital onslaught of information so complete in its comprehensiveness and marvelous in its refresh rate that his mind often wandered to a long-ago viewing of Minority Report.

Dozens of LCD screens covered one entire wall of the observation room, and every relevant component of Project Anachron was being monitored and recorded for posterity. One screen was dedicated solely to Subject Alpha’s heart rate and blood pressure. Another monitored brain activity, lighting up with cloudy reds and yellows splotched over a realtime CAT scan of the boy’s cranium. Yet another tracked Alpha’s lung capacity. The largest of them was a to-scale x-ray of the student’s skeleton. But those weren’t even the most impressive of the monitors.

The larger digital readouts -- characterized by digits so brilliantly red that one could read by their glow -- tracked the particularly relevant variables of Alpha’s impending regression. Height: 71 inches. Weight: 183 pounds. A testosterone level befitting a boy his age. And, of course, the largest and most important readout of all, the one at which Dr. Ennis Cave and Roger Devlin would spend the majority of their time observing... a dozen digits, each pair bifurcated by a blinking colon, that represented 20 years, two months, 16 days, nine hours, zero minutes, and 37 seconds. Thirty-eight seconds. Thirty-nine. The silent climb of the second ticker reassured the duo that they had set everything up to their exacting standards.

“Shall we begin?” asked a noticeably excited Devlin.

Ennis Cave nodded in silence.

At the moment which later came to be known as Time Zero, Roger Devlin pulled the lever, and liquids began to drip from the IV and into the tube connected to a vein in Subject Alpha’s left arm. The seconds continued to tick upwards as expected. Neither Cave nor Devlin knew when -- or if -- time was going to reverse for poor Alpha.

“Still the target age we agreed on?” Devlin asked.

Cave nodded again, morose, anxious. “Still the target age we agreed on.”

5. Wrong Way Kids

( FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER TIME ZERO )

The moment of twenty years, two months, 16 days, nine hours, 45 minutes, and 39 seconds -- displayed on the readout as 22:02:16:09:45:39 -- was when Devlin realized that the ticking of the seconds was beginning to rapidly decrease in speed. It took almost a full minute for the “39” to climb to “44.”

And then it stopped.

“Subject’s aging has ceased, Doc,” Devlin called over to Cave-- but the dumbstruck scientist was too busy observing Alpha through the one-way window to fully register the massive implications of what the team had just managed to accomplish. “All vital signs normal.”

Dr. Cave watched speechlessly as the IV drip and the directed radiation from the pipes had taken a dramatic effect on Subject Alpha’s appearance. The boy’s skin had become pale, elastic, and thin-- it looked as though the slightest pinprick would have caused Alpha’s translucent flesh to hemorrhage. Monitors on the wall indicated that the intravenous drip had softened the boy’s internal organs in much the same manner, allowing them to shrink along with skin and bone such that the student would come to retain a perfectly-proportioned body when he reached the targeted age. Then, it would simply be a matter of switching to an alternate drip, one which would return Alpha’s body parts to their original, healthful integrity.

About a minute after Subject Alpha’s aging process had come to a halt, the “44” on the digital readout changed to “43.” It was at that precise moment that mankind had at last managed to accomplish what thousands of years of civilization had never even come close to realizing -- reversing the aging process. Literally. Granting immortality-- guaranteeing health. The very paradigm of mortality, of human existence, had been turned on its head. Forever.

Dr. Ennis Cave and Roger Devlin celebrated appropriately, cheering and high-fiving while still attempting to maintain a modicum of professionalism. It took exactly one second for the “43” to become a “42,” and only one more second for “45 minutes” to become “44 minutes.” Then the hours started dropping, one by one, with every tick of the clock. The regression was accelerating. The days began peeling away from a confused and horrified Subject Alpha, who tugged at his restraints as the therapeutic tingle of his regenerating cells tickled him inside and out.

At last, the months started coming off.

Devlin quickly tapped on a few computer keys. “I’ve locked in the target age at nine months.”

“Nine months it is,” smiled Dr. Cave. “He’s going to be a beautiful baby.”

6. Submission Complete

( FORTY-SIX MINUTES AFTER TIME ZERO )

When Ennis Cave was a small child, he would press Crayolas to the radiator in his Brooklyn apartment and watch in awe as the wax melted, dripped down the heated iron, and proceeded to bubble. The crayon’s sudden transformation from artistic tool to useless viscous slop awed the youngster and taught him a valuable lesson about how fleeting the state of things can be.

For whatever reason, it was that image, and that lesson, that popped into Cave’s head as he watched Subject Alpha’s upper-body muscle mass begin to regress into nonexistence, as he observed the strong, sinewy product of daily trips to the campus athletic facility melt, bubble, and vanish. A glance at the digital readout revealed that the student had become a teenager again and, as the months bled away in matters of seconds, so did the fruits of Alpha’s hard work.

None of this was lost on the fiercely-struggling boy. As his upper body grew slender and doughy and not-at-all defined, only the hardy leg muscles Alpha had built up during years of soccer practice remained. He noticed that he appeared similar to how he had looked as a high school graduate.

All Cave and Devlin had to do was to check the readout. Seventeen years, nine months. And a full 16 pounds of muscle mass had become but sand in an hourglass whence the tiny rocks rose; every last ounce of it would have to be earned back.

“Subject has reentered adolescence,” Devlin announced, his eyes trained on the realtime x-ray image of the boy’s skeleton. “I’m noting a reemergence of growth plates. Prepare for a reduction in height, as well as a proportionate reduction in the size of the body as a whole.”

Cave had done well to prepare for his test subject’s inevitable shrinking. The cuffs he had affixed to the Lucite examination table were wired beneath the table itself and linked to a remotely-controlled slackening system; as the subject’s body decreased in size, Cave would merely push a button and more length would be offered to the cord connecting the cuffs to the table. While the restraints themselves made escape patently impossible, the slackening system rendered the entire process mercifully painless.

Sixteen years and one month. Dr. Cave had to smile. Even as he watched his test subject start to shrink -- even as the boy’s height sunk towards five feet and change and the weight readout drained with a speed so precipitous it would put any commercial weight loss scam to shame -- the other effects Alpha’s regression were having on his body were fascinating in their own rights.

The musculature the student had spent years on the pitch chiseling into his legs melted and disappeared in much the same manner as his pectorals and abs. The weight readout announced a scrawny 129 pounds, and the number tumbled still further as the solidification of the edges of Alpha’s bones gave way to growth plates that quickly and comfortably permitted the test subject’s body to retract into itself.

Subject Alpha was just over five feet tall when the acne he had briefly suffered as a 15-year-old streaked his face and forehead and, just as quickly as the boils had breached, they receded again. The student’s whines and squeals of protest, barely audible through the one-way mirror, were rising in pitch. His shoulders slumped. His Adam’s apple receded. No observer would deny that the harried test subject was, at best, in a time of awkward transition.

“This is where the fun begins,” Devlin remarked in a tone of voice that bordered on the psychotic. Dr. Cave often wondered what proportion of Devlin’s verve for their project was rooted in the noble pursuit of lifesaving science... and what proportion comprised the perverse exhilaration of converting a fellow adult into a pathetic little child.

Naturally, as the digital readout indicating Subject Alpha’s age crested 14 years and a handful of months, three pairs of eyes -- the student himself, having astutely figured out the precise nature of the test he was undergoing, couldn’t help but join the scientists in watching -- were concentrated on the harried boy’s penis. Though Alpha’s chest hair had already grown sparse and downy before disappearing altogether, nobody involved in this deep-underground scientific breakthrough could take their eyes off the 13-year-old’s shriveling genitals.

Mere minutes prior, it had been a proud, commanding cock, ready at a moment’s notice to perform with all the exuberance expected of a 20-year-old man. But the regression process was not kind to it. As Alpha’s body shrunk, as he became four-foot-something and the cords connecting his cuffs to the table grew longer to compensate for his dwindling size, the student’s penis shrank, and shrank, and shrank. The pubic hairs surrounding it went from black and wiry to blond and wispy, then rapidly began to recede altogether into Alpha’s softening crotch. The egg-sized testicles he had taken for granted that very morning had become grapes; any ejaculation that could have been coaxed out of them would carry naught but clear fluid and air. Finally, the test subject crested twelve years old, and all vestiges of his sexual maturation had been swiftly stripped from his person.

“The subject has breached puberty,” announced Devlin, a wry grin crossing his face-- the very same grin Dr. Cave shared. The testosterone readout on the wall had become practically blank with so little hormone to measure. The sperm the student had accrued since his last orgasm up until that moment leaked unceremoniously out of his urethra and pooled between his hairless thighs. “Test Subject Alpha is very much a little boy.”

Fifty-four inches. Eighty-two pounds. The Dean’s List soccer wunderkind was 10 years old, and he saw no end in sight. Unadulterated terror was quickly overriding his sense of sexual humiliation.

But, oh, what a spectacle. Dr. Cave continuously pushed the button that increased the length of the table’s restraint cords, permitting the now-wailing second-grader to thrash and fight and shake the tears from his eyes in spitting projections. As the cords lengthened, the restraints tightened, compensating for the dramatic reduction in the circumference of the boy’s wrists. The screen that monitored the test subject’s brain activity lit up like Christmas, dual images of Alpha’s organ indicating two distinct realities-- that the child was wracked with horror and panic, and that his level of knowledge was decreasing in concert with his age, facts and mechanics of reason alike popping and crackling, like sparking metal, into oblivion, as the nerves of the corpus callosum shrank and retracted, pulling together two hemispheres of a brain caught in the throes of a swift devolution.

Subject Alpha, from his position of bondage, was not a witness to the data; he could only suffer a personal and wickedly lonely realization of what was becoming of his mind. Even through his haze of fear could the young boy acknowledge the things he had lost. The certainty that he had once known multiplication and division, but no longer did, was a psychological trauma unto itself. Any adult would have considered it an existential tragedy. But Alpha, now a kindergartner whose newfound scrawniness was being subverted by the reemergence of baby fat, responded to the notion of the evaporation of his knowledge in a far more age-appropriate idiom... he cried harder, screamed louder, and wet himself.

Devlin smiled, his wiry lips upturning the corners of his mouth to point to eyes that flashed with self-satisfied sociopathy. He derived an inexplicable thrill from observing this highly-accomplished college student voiding his bladder in inelegant arcs all over the table and the bottom half of his 37-pound body.

The digital readout indicated an age of three years and 11 months. Seconds later, Dr. Cave’s test subject was three years and two months old. Old enough to have made the transition from training pants to little boys’ briefs-- not that this was evident for the sight of the child helplessly thrashing about in his own urine.

Alpha’s cream-colored, hairless form continued to blossom and balloon with ample pockets of baby fat. His thighs became spheroid and weak. What once were spindly fingers and toes had transformed into grubby little paws, twitching and wriggling apparently of their own volition. The dome of a wobbly baby belly emerged from the toddler’s midsection like a rising soufflé, its gentle adiposity serving to further dwarf the comically diminutive penis bobbing away beneath it.

Eighteen months old. Twelve. Subject Alpha knew, within the constraints of his cripplingly limited cognition, that -- even if he had managed to retain the balance and motor skills associated with walking -- his chubby, useless legs would never allow for locomotion, let alone support the xenomorphically-proportioned body above them. The sensation of his tongue filling a tiny mouth that was becoming increasingly devoid of teeth drove home the message that any form of comprehensible speech was out of the question, as well. All he could do was cry and get younger. His voice having peaked at an intolerably high timbre, the infantilized college student appeared a simple baby in desperate need of some diaper rash cream.

Cave looked at the digital display. It read 00:09:00:00:00:00-- for nine months of age, precisely.

And then it read 00:08:29:23:59:59.

“Uh, Devlin?” asked Dr. Cave, an uncharacteristic note of trepidation creeping into his voice. “It’s not stopping.”

Devlin glanced at the readout, which told the tale of an eight-month-old infant, then seven and change.

“I said it’s not stopping! Shut off the goddamned drip!”

“I did!” Devlin hollered back, truthfully. “I don’t know what’s wrong!”

Panicked, Cave looked at the involuntarily-twitching form strapped to the table in the OR. The still-regressing infant continued to cry, but these were wails of discomfort, not fear; the test subject could no longer understand the implications of what was occurring, but he could certainly feel the chill of the Lucite table.

Lines of drool spilled from the student’s gaping, toothless mouth. His foreskin returned and enshrouded the pink head of his tiny penis. His testicles ascended from his scrotum and into his abdomen. Subject Alpha, weighing little more than 10 pounds, was practically a newborn again.

“I’ve got it!” Devlin shrieked after several tense seconds of flipping through a ream of notes. “A miscalculation. I made a simple miscalculation.”

“A what!?” Dr. Cave was livid, his face burning with anger. “A ‘simple’ miscalculation? You’ve ruined the experiment-- you’ve ruined us!”

“Not to mention that poor bastard on the table,” shrugged Devlin, calmly assessing the absurd, distorted appearance of the shrinking one-day-old.

The boy, brittle and frail and with eyes bulging, continuously ejected the unmistakable shriek of an infant who had just been liberated from its mother’s womb. The cuffs Dr. Cave had used to restrain Subject Alpha could not be adjusted tightly enough to remain affixed to the college student’s thumb-thin wrists; the newborn was at last unchained from his bindings, free to squirm and squeal and wonder why everything had suddenly become so very, very cold.

He crammed his fist into his mouth and gummed it pitiably. The test subject clocked in at one minute of age, then 30 seconds. From his navel emerged the stub of a cut umbilical cord. His crying quieted, then ceased.

When the lab’s digital readout struck 00:00:00:00:00:00, a blood-red minus sign appeared to the left of the figure, and the numbers themselves began to climb, signaling the widening gap between Subject Alpha’s developmental stage and the time at which he would, ultimately, be born.

“I can’t believe this,” said Dr. Cave. Tears were welling in his eyes. “It’s still going. It’s still going, you insufferable fool.”

Devlin said nothing.

Data continued to present itself as some of the more gruesome aspects of prenatal development proceeded to cycle backwards in full view of the scientists. Cave tried, and failed, to look away as the fetus’s eyes sealed shut. The body itself registered a weight of less than one pound. When Subject Alpha reflexively curled up, his skin became fully transparent, and the IV gently slipped out of his spongy limb without fanfare or protest. The fetus was silent, its mouth having blended into what was left of its face. According to the display, it was just over seven months prior to the student’s birth when he lapsed into the embryonic stage, now little more than a lab specimen, something to be stored when not being studied.

The seconds felt as hours. At last, mercifully, the thing which had so recently been a promising, intelligent athlete collapsed into itself entirely, leaving as its legacy a small puddle of semen and fluids that glimmered in the low light of the lab.

7. Marked

( FORTY-NINE MINUTES AFTER TIME ZERO )

Roger Devlin dispassionately scrawled notes onto a clipboard as he observed the cumshot splattered upon the table.

“Yep,” he muttered, circumscribing the perimeter of the surface. “Definitely gonna have to redo this calculation.”

It was all Dr. Ennis Cave could do to hold himself together. In seeking to grant limitless life to the people of the world, he had become nothing more than a common murderer. He had stolen away what hadn’t been his to take. It didn’t matter to him that it was an accident, or that it was Devlin’s -- not Cave’s -- malpractice that had actualized the tragedy, or even that nobody would ever know what had transpired within those underground walls. He knew. And he’d have to live with it for the rest of his life.

Cave chose to do what he normally did when confronted with an emotionally-taxing situation: He worked. He followed all the proper protocols in gathering the seminal fluids from an environment he ensured remained sterile; he placed Subject Alpha’s remains into the appropriate airtight container; he labeled and indexed the specimen as he would any other. It was a far cry from reconciliation, but Cave vowed to himself that he would devise a way to grant the student’s nonexistence some beneficial and lasting meaning.

“We’ll have to try again,” Devlin remarked. “I’ll start searching for Subject Beta immediately.”

Cave looked up at him, aghast. “You’re not serious.”

“Why aren’t I serious?”

“We just killed this kid!” Cave howled. “We fucked up! You fucked up!”

“What we did here was science.”

“What we did here was murder.” Cave’s eyes narrowed. “You should be more upset about this.”

“Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap,” spat Devlin. “The earth’s crust is speckled with the corpses of men who died for science. Maybe if you’re having such an existential dilemma about our research, I should be the one to make a difference. To make history. For science.”

The detached lab assistant, only marginally distracted by Dr. Cave’s characteristically principled stand, finished working on his notes and handed the steel clipboard to the scientist.

“Here,” Devlin said. “This calculation should work. Nine months old, and not a day younger. You can thank me after we find Subject Beta.”

Cave examined the notes, still too distraught to make heads or tails of them-- and fuming at the inhumanity and incompetence his once-trusted assistant had demonstrated.

When Devlin turned to leave the OR, the last thing he heard before being plunged into blackness by the impact of hard steel against the back of his skull was Cave saying “Eureka.”

“I have found it,” murmured the scientist, towering over Devlin’s unconscious form as he dabbed a small spot of blood off the back of the clipboard.

“For science.”

8. ...You Give Up

( ONE MINUTE BEFORE TIME ZERO BETA )

Devlin awoke, then focused. He immediately wished he hadn’t.

Roger Devlin had been stripped naked and strapped to the very table upon which Subject Alpha had met his horrifying end. The piercing glow of the snow-white walls penetrated the research assistant’s eyes and chipped away at his throbbing skull as if it were an icepick. An IV was connected to his left arm and switched to the closed position. Familiar luminescent pipes pointed downward at Devlin’s nude form, appearing as though they were microscopes placed there by God to judge him.

None of that was the worst of it. The worst of it, to Devlin, was what Cave had done to the digital readout that displayed the test subject’s age; he had moved it from the observation room and into the lab itself, affixing it to the wall just above the one-way mirror. Its bloody glow dominated Devlin’s attention.

30:07:04:10:24:42. Roger Devlin’s age. All 30 years and seven months of it.

“Rise and shine, Mr. Devlin.”

Dr. Ennis Cave towered over his restrained and helpless assistant, an unidentifiable look of menace plastering the older man’s face. Even in his panic, Devlin attempted to identify why Cave’s expression instilled within him such a feeling of unlimited dread. His instinct was to ascribe the scientist’s actions to a psychotic break. Cave had seen horrors. He had committed them. Time Zero had cost more than one life that day.

“You’ll let me out of here,” Devlin said, calmly, measured. “You’ll let me out of here and we’ll talk this through and we’ll never discuss Anachron again.”

Cave nodded. “You’re right. Mostly. I am going to let you out, and we’re never going to discuss Anachron again. But I don’t think you’ll be doing all that much talking.” With a decisive motion, Dr. Cave opened the valve on the IV, causing the modified solution to drip into Devlin’s veins.

“Dammit, Ennis! Think this through!” Devlin’s sense of self-control was already in entropy, spiraling asymptotically towards total lethal panic. “You want to kill two men today?”

“You said you fixed the calculations. ‘Nine months old, and not a day younger.’ And, now that I’ve found my Subject Beta, I do thank you.”

Devlin’s heart plunged into his stomach. He had modified the calculations, indeed, but there was no way to tell whether they were fixed until...

“So consider this a thank-you gift,” said Cave. “Enjoy it. I know I will.” And, with that, the scientist retreated to the observation room, patiently waiting out the 45 minutes it took for the process to initiate.

When that moment arrived, Roger Devlin looked very much as Alpha had when his regression had begun: translucent, elastic, and terrified. The numbers on the digital readout began to tick backwards. First the seconds, then the minutes-- in no time at all, the months were bleeding out of Devlin at a relentlessly rapid pace.

The man’s pleas for mercy went unanswered. They decayed into pathetic screams when Devlin returned to puberty, and those screams became teary, childish sobs when he left it again. He no longer knew anything of science, or of sex, or of his own mortality, his own altogether tenuous link to this plane of existence.

As three-year-old Roger Devlin’s numbers ticked away -- as they began to lose their meaning to him entirely -- all the toddler could think about was what he was doomed to become.

Hope I did numbers gooder this time, he thought. Me no wanna go bye-bye.

the end

#35

 

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