When I got home, Pauline was waiting for me. She asked me to explain, in detail, what had happened to Gina and how I was going to fix it. I told her what we had discovered and what we planned to do. I promised that I would keep her updated on the results from the lab. I asked her where Gina was and she told me that Gina was in her crib. The week passed rapidly and I found myself watching Pauline care for Gina with increasing jealousy. I resented her intrusion into our life together. I knew it was silly to be jealous of an infant, but I wanted Pauline to cuddle and take care of me, not a baby version of one of my lab assistants.

We made some progress at the lab in understanding what had happened, but none at all in finding a way to help Gina. We were able to construct and incorporate a local remapper into the machine that allowed us to control the amount of regression to some degree. The subjects still regressed into infancy, but it was late infancy rather than the early infancy that Gina had suffered. Our attempts to restore the test subjects failed utterly

We decided that our attempts to restore their entropic states to normal amounted to an attempt to create a state in the future. It seemed that there was an infinite sheaf of historic states folded into the present state, but once a subject was regressed, the information about the states occupying the interval between the present state and the remapped state was lost. Essentially there was no information on which to map the present state onto the future state. We theorized that there was a quantum restriction on our ability to remap to a state that was the same as the present state and therefore only historical states could be mapped. The energy requirements to remap went up as the selected historical state became closer in time to the present. Our power consumption figures indicated that there was an exponential relationship between this interval and the power required to map, i.e., as the interval between the present state and the desired state approached zero, the required energy to remap became infinite. We had hopes that in the future we could reduce power consumption by the machine so we could reduce the difference between the subject’s present state and the minimum historical state that could be achieved to a few micro or milliseconds, but for the present we were limited to years. As for Gina, as far as we could tell, there would never be a way to restore our infant colleague. Gina was stuck.

When I went home Thursday night I told Pauline what we had discovered. I explained to her that I would call Gina’s family the next day to see if they couldn’t take custody of her. Pauline was upset with me for insisting that we had to send Gina back to her family but for once I was adamant, Gina had to go. Keeping her without her family’s sanction was tantamount to kidnapping.

Friday night Pauline barely spoke to me. She sat on the couch with Gina cuddling her and making mothering noises. I was green with envy. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be a baby again. The thought gave me a strange, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach like there was something I was missing, but I couldn’t imagine what my childish id was trying to tell me. I looked at Gina sitting in Pauline’s lap nursing her bottle happily. At least she had a good home to return to. I had contacted her sister and told her what had happened. After an initial period of disbelief her sister understood I wasn’t joking and told me she’d be here tomorrow to pick Gina up and take her home. She said Gina had been her older sister and there was no one else to take care of her. She told me that their parents had died in an auto accident a few years ago and that she was married and had a little boy in kindergarten.

I explained that we weren’t sure whether Gina would grow up again, but the X-rays we took immediately after the accident weren’t promising. We had submitted them to a discrete radiologist last week for evaluation. The epiphysis’s on the ends of Gin’s long bones were missing and without growth plates not even growth hormone would help. We had a veterinarian evaluate the X-rays of the test animals and produced similar results. Apparently the remapping function was defective and had corrupted the template. I offered her sister a large sum of money for Gina’s care in return for her signature on a release of liability. I pointed out that Gina had signed a release before participating as a test subject and that a court would almost certainly hold that she had given informed consent to the experiment. In short, the Board felt that although they were immune from liability they wanted to take care of an injured employee. All they asked for their munificence was that her sister remain silent about the accident. She told me she understood and she be wanted to take care of her sister no matter what age she had become. She said that she had always wanted a little girl of her own and that she and her husband had been trying without success to have another baby. She thanked me for the offer of money and told me not to worry, she would remain silent and take care of Gina as if she were her own baby.