That was the day I returned to full babyhood. I can still think, but my body and reflexes are those of an eleven-month-old baby. Paul used his power-of-attorney to have me declared mentally incompetent and was made my guardian. It wasn’t difficult; once they proved my identity to the judge, my diapers and pacifier made all their arguments for them. The judge said it was a clear case of “res ipsa locutor”, or “the thing speaks for itself”. I only wished I could have spoken for myself as well.
They took some of my money and bought a complete set of baby clothes and outfitted a nursery for me. Gina “adopted” me as her baby and I’ve come to love her as my mommy. I’ve accepted my new role as her baby and spend my days playing happily in my playpen or crawling on the rug. I’m living in an infantilist’s paradise. My previous life as a scientist is fading into a dim memory as time passes. It’s hard to believe that only a few months ago, I was a respected scientist running a laboratory. Paul dismantled the machine and has gone on to fame and fortune in his researches. Everyone seems to be happy with the final outcome of our experiments, but I find myself wondering, what would have happened if I wasn’t an infantilist? Was Paul’s theory too pat? What if everyone had a secret desire buried deeply in their subconscious to become a baby again? Would they be affected the same way I was? I’ll never know. But then, it’s not a baby’s place to know anything. A baby’s purpose is to love his mommy and to have his mommy love and care for him. And she does!
As a working scientist, I should have known that the risks of employing the unknown effect of a temporal field on a human subject were high. My wife is a researcher who had spent the last ten years perfecting a device that altered local entropic states. It changed the direction of the arrow of time within the field’s area. Objects placed under the field’s influence became younger with respect to the rest of the universe. When we conducted tests with living animals, however, the results were not what we expected them to be. The animals regressed as we expected, but their consciousness seemed to be unaffected. We subjected them to every psychological test we could think of, but there was no degradation of mental function. As nearly as we could tell, consciousness was independent of the material state of matter. It was this curious result that led to my volunteering as a test subject. My wife was hesitant at first, but the animal trials had gone so well that I was able to persuade her to make the attempt. I was convinced that with a little more research we could crack the secret of consciousness.
I gazed in the mirror while waiting for my wife to get dressed and saw the toddler I had become in only a few minutes under her projector; a fat-legged two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded…training pants.
I’ve been trapped in the body of a baby since early this morning. I considered the sequence of events that had led to my predicament. It started with me volunteering to be the test subject. My lust for knowledge had caused us to make a terrible mistake. There seemed to be some sort of limit to the reversibility of the effect we hadn’t encountered with the lab animals. My wife thought it had to do with the magnitude of the change that was induced. The lifespans of lab animals being so short, we were only able to regress them a few years. It simply never occurred to us that a time change of over twenty years might be dangerous. She’d had such success with animals that my confidence level had been high, and neither one of us had anticipated any problems.