The infinite sea of probability states popped another virtual particle out of non-existence into one of the possible universes. It swam in the space until it’s life was expended and it was called back into non-reality. After a span of time, another particle took its place. In another possible universe, it had survived for a shorter duration before being called back into the Tao. This is/was/will be Maya, the illusion of existence that replicates itself infinitely and then disappears. It is life and non-life, death and non-death. It is all and nothing simultaneously. Creatures were born within it, grew old and died. Each creature’s life was reflected multiply across the manifold of possible existences. Every choice that was made opened a new sheaf of probability paths for the creature to follow. Some paths lead to greatness and some to sorrow. All paths come to the same end in the Tao; what emerges from the sea must return to the sea. In some universes time runs sidewise, in others it runs backwards. In others, time doesn’t exist. Only the eternal now exists in those universes. Past and future cannot even be dreamt of in those universes.

In an infinite sheaf of universes, all things are possible. This is the story of a man who’s life ran backwards in seven different universes. It was not what he wanted or what he had been looking for, but he found the way back to an earlier time in his life nonetheless. His story needs no explanation, for the Tao cannot be explained, it must be experienced like poetry……….

 

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child has to work for a living,

But a child that’s been born on the Sabbath day

Is fair and wise and good and gay.

As a scientist, I knew that this was possible. My associate in the lab had spent the last ten years perfecting a device that altered reality. At first the device took the probability function for a defined space and altered it randomly. As he modified the device and increased it’s complexity, it caused the objects placed within it’s field to change by varying the twenty-four dimensional settings on the machine. He discovered that the device’s behavior was governed by a set of arcane tensor equations that took him most of the ten years to interpret.

With the advent of high speed microprocessors, he was able to gang them together to form a massively parallel processing array to predict which changes the device would incur on the objects within the field’s area. The effects of the device became reproducible and we began to seriously experiment with the device. We started out small placing pens or pencils within the field and changing them into sticks of wood, quill pens, and other objects whose purpose we could never fathom. When we placed living creatures, such as lab mice, within the field we were surprised by the results. Although we could cause massive changes in the creature’s appearance such as hair and eye color, weight, size and age, the form of the creatures remained relatively constant. Each time we could change the creature and we would test it extensively for biochemical changes before changing them back. We experimented with rats, then pigs and finally monkeys before we decided we needed a human subject.

 

I looked in the full length mirror in Paul’s bedroom and wasn’t entirely displeased with what I saw. It wasn’t that I minded being like this temporarily, I’ve had fantasies since early adolescence of having this happen to me. It was just the idea of being like this permanently that frightened me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live the rest of my life in the body whose image was being reflected back at me. I gazed into the mirror at the figure of the same toddler I saw the day before; a clumsy, tottering, two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded…training pants.

For the past three days I’ve been trapped in the body of a baby. The world around me is a huge place that is strangely familiar, but terribly frightening. I was sorry I volunteered to be the guinea pig. We’d had such success with the lab animals that my confidence level was high, and neither of us had anticipated any problems. The first changes he had made were subtle. The color of my hair, the shape of my nose; always changing my features back as quickly as he altered them. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; manipulating the probability field to give me a younger body. Last week, I was a teenager, then he changed me back again without any difficulty. I should have expected something to go wrong. Everything had been too perfect. The machine’s calibration was dead on the first time we powered it up. Not a single component had failed in testing. We were ahead of schedule because the delays we had allowed for had not materialized.