I crawled over to the carton and sat down in front, curious about what he had to show me. Paul reached in a pulled out a large cloth diaper. An adult diaper! He looked at me as if he expected me to say something and then reached in and pulled out a pair of adult-sized, blue-pastel plastic pants. I blushed in embarrassment as I recognized my property. He had discovered my secret! He reached in again an pulled out my favorite pair of “onesies”. I was mortified! How could I explain my secret desires to them? I wanted to run away and hide. Gina looked at me with an odd smile on her face as if she was secretly enjoying my discomfiture.

I tried to explain and found myself breaking into sobs. Gina knelt beside me and put her arms around my shoulders and told me it was alright. She didn’t mind if I wanted to be a baby. I tried to tell her that I wasn’t a pedophile, I just like to dress up and pretend that someone loved me and cared for me. I told her about how different I had felt growing up and how lonely I’d been. I told her about how all I had wanted in life was a place I could feel warm and secure and where everyone loved me. My sobs became loud cries and she gathered me up in her arms and held me to her breasts to comfort me. She patted my back and made mothering noises to calm me in front of her astonished husband. Paul shook his head silently and took the box out to his car. I never saw it again.

A month later, Paul called home and said he had some great news for us. He rushed home and told Gina to get me dressed, he had discovered the solution. Gina looked oddly sad at the news and took her time getting me ready. When I was dressed, Paul drove the two of us to the lab and asked Gina to strip me and put me within the machine’s field. He made some final adjustments to the control panel and turned it on.

The whine of the charging capacitors filled my ears as the machine began it’s startup sequence. I heard the main relay kick in and the hum of the coils as the current passing through them caused them to oscillate. Then the automatic timer kicked off and I asked how I looked.

…Or thought I asked how I looked!? “What’s the matter?”, I demanded.

Paul and Gina stood frozen with surprised looks on their faces. Something was wrong! I looked down at my hands and saw that the fingers were still short and pudgy like a small child’s. I tried to ask Paul what had gone wrong and all that came out was a baby’s babbling! I drummed my feet against the floor in frustration crying to know what had gone wrong. Paul recovered slightly, then rushed to his desktop computer, shouting, “His psyche! My God, I forgot to include his psychic field in the equations!” He worked furiously, forgetting all about the presence of his wife and infant associate.

Gina knelt at my side and picked me up in her arms. She turned to Paul and said softly, “Paul can you explain what’s happened to him? I thought you said you could cure him! He’s even younger than he was before! Instead of a two year old toddler, he’s been turned into an eleven or twelve-month-old baby! What happened?” Paul turned to her and said, “Gina, it’s him! His need to be a baby again is what happened! His psyche interacts with the probability field! The machine works by altering the order within this manifold of Hilbert space. His psyche is also an ordering function. It’s interacting with the machine’s changes and introduced chaos into the equation. His intense desires have formed a mathematical strange attractor and are causing the field to produce uncontrollable changes! Don’t you understand? He subconsciously wants to stay a baby! There’s nothing I can do about it! I’m scared to put him back under the field’s influence, I don’t know how young he’ll become!”

He turned off his computer in disgust and went over to the control panel to shut down the machine as well. He turned to Gina and said, “Let’s go home Gina. It been a long day.”