The first changes she made were subtle. The early graying of my hair was changed into the chestnut brown of my youth. The crowsfeet at the corners of my eyes I had gotten by spending too much time squinting through the optics of instruments vanished in a minute under the projector. She always changed my features back at the end of each session. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; reversing my entropic state for longer and longer periods to give me an increasingly younger body. Last week, I was an adolescent, then I was back in my old body again without a problem. A series of small mishaps caused us to delay the final tests until Thursday. The project seemed to be cursed by gremlins; every time we turned around something else had failed. First it we had a galloping glitch in the digital to analog converter boards for the power driver unit. Then the calibration on the coils started drifting for no apparent reason. After that a filter capacitor in the fifteen volt power supply started to go and put a three volt ripple on the fifteen volt line. Finally we tore down the entire unit and checked everything before continuing the test series. If I had had any idea of what was going to happen to me I would have smashed the circuit boards and hauled the broken shards to the dumpster myself.

When we tried to change me back we discovered that this metamorphosis was different. For some reason I couldn’t return to my former state. I became more and more frantic as my wife tried various combinations of settings to restore me. The banks of computer equipment and field generators that surrounded me seemed simultaneously familiar and ominous as we toiled to return me to my original body.

When my wife turned off the machine and walked over to the test stage to sit down and talk with me, I knew we were beaten. She told me that she had tried everything she could think of, but nothing had worked. I put my face in my hands and wept bitterly in anguished frustration over the news. Pauline patted my back and told me it would be okay, she would take care of everything. She wrapped me in a blanket and carried me out to our car in her arms. I cried like a small child on the ride home, fearing the consequences of our experiments with nature. What if she couldn’t change me back? Would I be forced to grow up all over again? The thought sent shivers down my spine. Surly she’d find the means to restore me to my proper entropic state. I just couldn’t bear the thought of being a toddler again.

When we got home, my wife put me to bed while she went shopping. I awoke later in the afternoon and discovered I had wet the bed. I was in a panic. What was Pauline going to say when she saw what I had done? I stripped the bed as quickly as my diminished body would allow and dragged the dripping mess into the laundry room. I had set up the stepstool in front of the washer and was stuffing the sheets into the top when I felt something was amiss. I turned around to see my wife standing there watching me.

“And just what do you think YOU’RE doing?”, she inquired imperiously.

I sputtered in embarrassment as she walked up to the washer to examine the load. She looked at the sheet, pulling the folds over to reveal the wet spot I had made. “And just what is this?”

Pauline fixed me with an icy stare as she said, “Did you wet the bed?”

I nodded silently, too embarrassed to talk. “I see,” she said. “…I guess we’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”