My training as a scientist hadn’t prepared me for this. On a Saturday I was in my lab recalibrating the device I had been working on for the last ten years and two weeks later I was sitting in a playpen, idly playing with my toes. I gazed at the room around me stupidly as I tried to understand how my device had malfunctioned. I had been trying to understand what had gone wrong since the accident. The device itself was simple in concept and incredibly complex in design. In a nutshell, the concept entailed the creation of a temporary “pocket universe” whose temporal coordinate system was disconnected from the originating universe. What I had been trying to produce was a static temporal field for long term storage of objects. What I had produced was something altogether different. All I had been able to deduce was that the field’s arrow of time was oriented oppositely from the direction it took in this universe. Instead of being static, the field reversed the aging process for the objects enclosed within its boundaries. The rate of change was astonishing. I had only been under its influence for a few moments before the coils had overheated and melted down. When I emerged from the field’s influence, my body had rejuvenated into that of a toddler. Strangely, my mind seemed to be unaffected by the transformation that had befallen the rest of my body. I was stunned at first, but after I regained consciousness my memories seemed to be unaffected. I was as if my memories were encoded in a way that was disconnected with the overall state of my body.

I conjectured after the accident that memory was encoded in the tissues of the brain in some type of holographic format where the information for each event was stored at every location in the brain. From the way that my total sum of memories had deteriorated over the last week, I was sure that my original thesis had been wrong. They acted more like a three dimensional wave where every element was being constantly reconstructed by the brain. My youthened brain apparently did not have the ability to fully recreate the original wave of my consciousness. As a consequence, every minute that passed left me a little less than I had been a moment before. In the parlance of my undergraduate students, I was losing it! The intricate mathematics I had devoured so easily years before was gone now, as was my understanding of temporal field structures. Since advanced theories of Physics are little more than a specialized application of mathematics of tensors and groups, I was not particularly surprised when the loss of one was tied to the loss of the other. Unfortunately, their loss meant that I didn’t have the mental tools to find the solution to my problem before my consciousness returned to whatever ground state from which it had sprung. My only hope was that there would be some sort of intrinsic limit on the deterioration that was occurring. I reasoned that the opinions of the mothers I had heard in the past when discussing their child’s development were right and that infants had well developed personalities. If that was true, then my brain could support my consciousness, albeit at a reduced level of functioning. My only escape from my fate seemed to be the possibility that my body would start growing again so that it could fully support the wave phenomena that had been my former self. Otherwise, I was doomed to spend the rest of my life in this playpen. I thought back to the instant of transformation and wondered if I had missed something that I could communicate to the team of researchers that working on the problem now. It had all seemed so mundane, just another ephemeral moment in the stream of events that had formed my existence as a Physicist.