Chapter 11: The New Normal
The world was a white, viscous fog. Consciousness was not a stream but a series of fractured, drowning sensations—the oppressive heat, the chemical burn in each minuscule lungful, the unending, grinding pressure that felt less like a force and more like the universe itself deciding to occupy the space where his body used to be.
He had passed beyond inches. The measurements had lost meaning. He was a speck, a mote, a hypothetical particle in a cloud of his own dissolution.
Outside the glass, forms moved like continental plates shifting in a slow, blurred dream.
Then, a new sound penetrated the muffled thickness. A key in a lock. The crisp, distant click of a deadbolt turning. The heavy suck of a door opening against its frame.
Footsteps. Not Chloe’s light, predatory pacing. These were sharper, more assured, a crisp tap-tap of heels on hardwood that vibrated through the floorboards and up the legs of the table into his jar-world. They entered the living room and stopped.
“You’re back just in time.”
Chloe’s voice, booming but directed away from him, toward the newcomer. It held a note of proud, almost giddy accomplishment.
The other voice that answered was lower, smoother, a dark ribbon of sound that somehow cut through the jar’s insulation more cleanly. “I finished early. The committee was surprisingly pliable.” A pause. The owner of the voice moved, her shape a tall, slender shadow beyond the fogged glass. “What’s all this?”
Chloe giggled, a sound that to Matthew was like boulders cracking together. “The final phase. I’ve been running a closed-system experiment. Direct delivery. The saturation is incredible. I think he’s almost reached the quantum level. Look.”
A giant shape—Chloe’s hand—wiped a swath of condensation from the outside of the jar. The world beyond cleared in a arc, like a porthole being scrubbed.
Hailey’s face appeared in the cleared glass.
She was beautiful in a way that was cold and precise, like a masterfully carved blade. Her dark hair was pulled back severely, emphasizing high cheekbones and eyes the color of polished flint. She wore a tailored charcoal pantsuit, looking utterly incongruous in the casual chaos of the living room. She peered in, her gaze analytical, detached.
Matthew, a shuddering, near-invisible point of misery, tried to scream. No sound, no movement of air was possible. He was a stain on the glass floor.
“I see a… shimmer,” Hailey said, her nose wrinkling slightly. “Is that him? Or just a refraction in the condensate?”
“That’s him. Or what’s left of his localized spatial field. The biological form is… let’s say submicroscopic. The trigger’s effect in this concentration appears to be asymptotic. He might be approaching a theoretical limit where further reduction would require more energy than his mass holds. It’s fascinating.”
Hailey straightened up, her lips curving into a slow, approving smile. She turned to Chloe and clapped her firmly on the shoulder, a comradely, solid thump. “You’ve outdone yourself. Truly. The apparatus is elegantly brutal. No diffusion loss. Total environmental control.” She glanced back at the jar, her flinty eyes gleaming. “A masterpiece of applied dominance.”
“Thanks,” Chloe said, beaming as if she’d just received a prestigious award. “Wanna see the reset? The data’s logged. We can start fresh.”
“Please do. A baseline re-establishment. For comparison.”
Chloe moved with the brisk efficiency of a lab tech concluding an experiment. She leaned over, her fingers—each now the relative size of a subway car—working at the duct tape sealing the hose to her body. The ripping sound was monstrous. She detached the hose from herself with a soft, wet pop, then sealed the open end with a quick twist and a fresh wad of tape, trapping the last of the foul atmosphere inside. She disconnected the other end from the jar’s seal with a series of clicks and unscrews that echoed like docking machinery.
Then she simply pulled the large cork-like seal from the mouth of the jar.
The effect was not an inrush of fresh air. To Matthew, it was a cataclysm. The pressurized, saturated horror he was drowning in suddenly had a direction: out. It streamed upward, a visible plume of warmed, spoiled air escaping its prison. The fog on the glass vanished, drawn out in the exodus.
The relief of the pressure’s cessation was so profound it felt like a new kind of agony. He lay, a microscopic fossil, on the now-cool, clear glass.
Hailey watched, arms crossed. Chloe rubbed her hands together, fingers poised over the open mouth of the jar like a conductor’s.
“Okay,” Chloe murmured, more to herself than anyone. “Full-spectrum reversal. Contained field re-inflation. Let’s see if the substrate remembers its original shape.”
She didn’t chant. She didn’t make a gesture. She just focused.
And the world turned inside out.
The compression that had defined his existence for an eternity did not vanish. It reversed.
It was not growth. It was a violent, explosive un-collapsing. Space rushed back into him. The sensation was of being inflated by a cosmic, relentless pump. The glass floor, which had been a vast plain, rushed upward to meet him—or he rushed downward to meet it. His perspective ballooned nauseatingly.
The jar, a stadium, became a large container, then a modest vessel, then a mere obstacle surrounding him. He was a balloon animal being twisted and filled too fast. Bones clicked and groaned, stretching back toward a memory they had almost forgotten. Muscles snapped taut over re-expanding frameworks. Skin prickled with a million fiery needles as it covered new, suddenly vast acreage.
It took seconds.
One moment he was nothing. The next, he was a naked, gasping man, curled fetal on the cool, polished wood of the coffee table, the open mouth of the empty glass jar looming beside him like a silo.
He vomited. It was a dry, wrenching heave—there was nothing in his shrunken system to expel. His body shook with violent, whole-body tremors. He sucked in air—real, relatively clean air—in ragged, sobbing gulps. The scale was wrong. Everything was terrifyingly large, but not as large as it had been. He was his own size again. The concept was bewildering.
The living room ceiling was high, but not infinitely so. The couch was big, but not a mountain range. The two women standing over him were tall, imposingly beautiful, and utterly in control, but they were human-sized.
Yet their presence filled the room more completely than any giantess ever could.
He tried to push himself up. His arms, his own familiar arms, wobbled and failed. He collapsed back onto the table, his cheek pressed against the wood. He could smell its lemon polish, and underneath, the faint, unforgettable sourness that had been his entire world moments before.
“There he is,” Hailey said. Her voice was calm, measured. “A little worse for wear, but all pieces seem present and accounted for.”
Before Matthew could gather a thought, a wish, a plea, they acted.
It was not with a word or a gesture he could see. It was a simultaneous, silent focusing of will. He felt it in the atmosphere first—a sudden, profound stillness, as if all the air had turned to lead. Then it hit him.
The pressure descended.
It was nothing like the compression of shrinking. This was external. A metaphysical weight, vast and incontestable, settling onto every square inch of his skin, pressing him into the hard surface of the table. It pushed down on his organs, flattened his lungs, made the simple act of drawing breath a strenuous, conscious labor. He couldn’t lift his head. He couldn’t twitch a finger. He was pinned, utterly and completely, not by gravity, but by the sheer, concentrated weight of their supremacy.
He managed a choked, gurgling sound.
Hailey stepped forward. Her heels clicked on the floor. She leaned down, placing her hands on her knees, bringing her face level with his where he lay paralyzed. Her perfume was something expensive and icy, a sharp contrast to the organic odors still clinging to him and the room.
“Hello, Matthew,” she said. Her tone was pleasant, almost conversational, but it carried an absolute, bedrock authority. “That looked… uncomfortable.”
She studied him, her flinty eyes missing nothing: the tremors, the sweat-sheened skin, the naked vulnerability, the raw terror in his hazel eyes.
“This,” she said softly, the word a verdict, “is your new normal.”
She reached out a hand. He flinched internally, but his body couldn’t obey. She didn’t strike him. With a forefinger, she gently, almost curiously, traced the line of his spine from his neck to the base of his back. The touch was light, but against the crushing pressure holding him down, it was a brand of fire. It was a reminder that any sensation he felt was by her allowance.
“You exist because we allow it,” she continued, her voice still soft, yet filling the leaden air. “Your comfort, your pain, your breathing, your very size—all are ours to command. They are variables. Parameters we adjust for our interest, for our study, or,” she paused, her finger stopping between his shoulder blades, “for our amusement. Do you understand?”
He tried to speak. A strangled squeak emerged.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” She stood up, brushing a nonexistent piece of lint from her trousers. She turned to Chloe, who was watching with her phone in hand, a scheduling app open. “The re-materialization seems stable. No apparent cellular memory degradation. Good. The container method is efficient. We’ll use it again.”
Chloe nodded, tapping her screen. “The data log is robust. We can track decay rates, recovery times… lots of variables.”
“Precisely.” Hailey turned her gaze back to Matthew, a businesslike efficiency in her demeanor. “Now, we need structure. Chaos is useful for initial breakthroughs, but sustainable observation requires routine.”
She walked over to the armchair, the one that had been Matthew’s, and sat down. She crossed her legs, looking every bit the executive in a board meeting. “I think we should establish a schedule. For his care and conditioning. And for our access.”
Chloe perched on the arm of the sofa, leaning forward. “Makes sense. Split the responsibilities. And the fun.”
“Mornings with me,” Hailey stated, her tone brooking no argument. “I prefer a clear, disciplined start to the day. He’ll be cleaned, assessed, and prepared. Evenings with you. Your… hands-on methodologies seem more suited to the de-stressing period after hours.”
Chloe grinned. “Playtime.”
“If you wish to term it that. Weekends…” Hailey let the word hang, her eyes drifting to Matthew’s paralyzed form. “We’ll see. Joint sessions, perhaps. Or special projects. We can decide ad hoc.”
“I’ll calendar it,” Chloe said, her thumbs flying over her phone. “Shared calendar. You’ll get invites. Morning block: seven to noon, Hailey. Evening block: six to midnight, Chloe. Weekends: TBD. Subject to change based on research needs or social engagements.”
“Acceptable.” Hailey steepled her fingers. “We’ll also need to define his baseline state. Full size seems practical for general domestication and interaction. But it must be a conditional baseline. He should understand it as a privilege, not a right.”
Matthew listened, the horror crystallizing into a cold, sharp shard in his chest. They were discussing him like a piece of equipment, a pet with complicated upkeep. The schedule, the blocks of time, the terms—“domestication,” “conditioning.” His life, already smashed, was being neatly organized into their digital day planners.
“Agreed,” Chloe said. “Baseline is revocable at any time, for any duration, for any reason. Or for no reason. The jar is always an option.” She shot a look at the glass cylinder, and Matthew felt a fresh wave of nausea.
“Now,” Hailey said, shifting in the chair. “Let’s test the obedience parameters in this baseline state. Release the hold. Let’s see what he does.”
The crushing pressure vanished.
It was so sudden he gasped, his body lifting an inch off the table before slumping back down. The relief was dizzying. He lay there, panting, his muscles throbbing with phantom weight.
“Get up, Matthew,” Hailey commanded. Her voice was not loud. It was just absolute.
The wish, the compulsion, the civil obedience—it was stronger than ever. It was not a suggestion. It was a rewrite of his voluntary nervous system. His body moved before his mind could form a protest. He pushed himself to his hands and knees, then, unsteadily, to his feet. He stood naked on the table, shivering before the two seated women. The height difference was gone, but the power differential was an abyss. He couldn’t meet their eyes. He stared at his own feet on the dark wood.
“Look at me,” Hailey said.
His head snapped up, chin trembling.
“You will learn to anticipate needs. Mine. Hers.” She glanced at Chloe. “For now, a simple test. Chloe, would you like a drink? I know I would.”
“Sure. Wine. Red’s open on the counter,” Chloe said, not looking up from her phone.
“Matthew,” Hailey said. “Fetch the wine bottle and two glasses from the kitchen. Bring them here.”
It was so ordinary. So devastatingly normal. A simple errand. And it was an impossible mountain. To turn his back. To walk, naked and exposed, off this table, across the living room floor that now felt like a gauntlet, into the kitchen—his kitchen—and perform a mundane task for his captors. The humiliation was a hot, thick paste in his throat.
He didn’t move fast enough.
Hailey sighed, a faint exhalation of disappointment. She didn’t look at Chloe. She just flicked her gaze toward Matthew.
It felt like a rubber band, vast and invisible, snapped around his left ankle.
With a sharp, painful yank, his foot was pulled out from under him. He crashed to the table surface on his side, a sharp pain blooming in his hip.
“When given an instruction, you move,” Hailey said, her voice bored. “You do not dawdle. You do not ponder. You perform. Now. Get up. Fulfill the request.”
Tears of frustration and shame welled in his eyes. He pushed up again, stumbled off the table onto the floor. The carpet pile was strangely intense against his bare feet. He walked, a stiff, mortified gait, toward the kitchen. He felt their eyes on his back, measuring every hesitant step.
The kitchen was a monument to his old, neglected life. A single dirty plate in the sink. The half-full coffee machine. And on the counter, a bottle of Cabernet, already uncorked, and two clean wine glasses standing upside-down on a towel.
His hands shook as he picked up the bottle. He fumbled with the glasses, righting them. He carried them back, the bottle clutched to his chest, a glass in each hand, trying to hide behind them. The return walk was longer, heavier.
He stopped before Hailey’s chair, unable to look at her.
“Pour,” she said.
He set a glass on the small table beside her, then the other. He struggled with the bottle, his shaking hands making the neck clink against the rim. He filled Hailey’s glass, then Chloe’s, leaving them both appropriately half-full.
He stepped back, holding the empty bottle like a shield.
Hailey picked up her glass, swirled the wine, took a sip. She didn’t thank him. It was as if he were a functioning part of the environment, a useful automaton. “Acceptable. Clumsy, but acceptable. You’ll improve with repetition.”
Chloe took a large gulp of hers. “Yeah, not bad for a first try. Now, sit.”
He blinked, confused.
“On the floor,” Chloe clarified, pointing to the space on the carpet between her perch on the sofa arm and Hailey’s chair. “At our feet. That’s your place when you’re not performing a task.”
The command in her voice brooked no hesitation. He lowered himself, sitting cross-legged on the rough carpet, the wine bottle still in his lap. He was below their eye level now, looking up at them. A pet in its designated spot.
The two women drank their wine, chatting casually over his head, as if he weren’t there.
“Did you get the funding for the neuro-link project?” Chloe asked.
“Provisional approval. The board wants another demonstration. Next Thursday,” Hailey replied.
“We could use Subject M here for that,” Chloe said, nodding down at him without really seeing him. “The pain-response mapping would be more nuanced than the drones.”
“Perhaps. We’ll see. His psychological frailty might introduce noise into the data.”
They talked of work, of obscure research, of a colleague’s failed experiment. The conversation was a blur of technical terms and casual cruelty. Matthew sat, the reality sealing around him like a cement mold. This was it. The schedule was set. His will was gone. He was a resource, a test subject, a piece of furniture that could sometimes fetch wine.
Hailey finished her wine. She placed the empty glass on the table. She looked at her slim wristwatch. “My block is technically over, but I’ll consider this evening’s transition part of my initial conditioning. Chloe, he’s yours now. For the evening block. Do try not to break him before morning. I have a series of dexterity tests planned.”
Chloe smiled, setting her own glass down. “No promises. But I’ll keep him in one piece. Mostly.”
Hailey stood. She walked to the door, collected her briefcase. She paused, her hand on the knob, and looked back at Matthew, sitting small and naked on the floor.
“Remember your schedule, Matthew. Be ready at seven. Clean. Compliant.” Her flinty eyes held his for a second, freezing the last remnants of his defiance. “Your existence has a purpose now. Be grateful we provided one.”
She left. The door clicked shut with a sound of terrifying finality.
The silence in the apartment stretched, thick and charged.
Chloe uncrossed her legs and slid off the sofa arm, landing softly on her feet. She stretched, her sweatshirt riding up, and groaned with satisfaction. She looked down at him, her earlier scientific detachment melting away into something warmer, more possessive
She stretched, her sweatshirt riding up, and groaned with satisfaction. She looked down at him, her earlier scientific detachment melting away into something warmer, more possessive. The silence after Hailey’s departure wasn’t empty; it was filling up with Chloe’s unspent energy, a crackling static that made the hairs on Matthew’s arms prickle.
“Just us now,” she said, her voice a low purr. She began to pace a slow circle around where he sat, her bare feet whispering on the carpet. “No more committee talk. No more schedules for a few minutes.” She stopped behind him. He could feel her gaze like a physical weight on the back of his neck. “It’s just playtime.”
A soft, tuneless whistle began to curl through the air.
It was light, joyous, entirely at odds with the leaden dread solidifying in his gut. She whistled as she walked over to the grand piano, dragging a single finger along its polished black flank, producing a discordant, shuddering groan from the strings inside. She whistled as she peered again into the empty glass jar on the table, her reflection grinning back at her from the curved surface.
The whistle broke into a giggle.
It was a genuine sound, bubbly and unchecked, the sound of someone anticipating a profound and personal joke. She turned back to him, her hands on her hips, her eyes sparkling with malicious delight.
“You know,” she said, conversationally, “we’ve explored spatial parameters pretty thoroughly. Location, scale, containment. We’ve messed with your physics.” She tapped a finger against her lips. “But there are other axes. Other variables.”
Matthew remained frozen on the floor, the wine bottle a cold, dead weight in his lap.
“Tonight’s parameters,” Chloe announced, her voice taking on a ceremonial rhythm, “are going to be different. A new branch of inquiry. Let’s call it… temporal reconditioning.” Her grin widened. “Here’s the rule. Simple. Clean. Every time I fart, you’re going to get a year younger.”
The statement hung in the air, absurd and horrifying. It wasn’t the brutal physics of shrinking, the crushing of space. This was something else, a theft of time, of self. His past, his accumulated thirty years, was now a currency to be spent by her digestion.
He finally found his voice, a raspy, broken thing. “Wh… what?”
“You heard me,” she sang, skipping lightly over to the sofa and throwing herself onto it, sinking into the cushions. She tucked her feet beneath her, looking like a girl about to watch her favorite movie. “A year per toot. Rolling back the clock. Cell by cell, memory by memory. I wonder what goes first? The wrinkles? The cynicism? That pathetic little seed of hope you’ve been clinging to?”
She laughed again, hugging a cushion to her chest. “God, this is going to be fascinating. The de-aging process isn’t linear, you know. It’s not like a video in reverse. The body prioritizes. Muscle tone might improve before your brain sheds certain neural pathways. You might become a physically fit teenager who can’t remember how to tie his shoes.”
She leaned forward, her eyes locked on his. “I’m hungry. All that… research… works up an appetite.” Her tone became imperious, a child-queen issuing a decree. “I want you to go make me bean burritos for dinner. From scratch. None of that frozen garbage. You’ll find everything you need in the kitchen. You used to cook, right? Before you gave up and started living on delivery and despair?”
The command, layered on top of the insane new rule, was a cognitive hammer blow. His mind scrabbled for purchase. The kitchen. The beans. The ordinariness of it was a torture device. To perform a domestic task while holding the knowledge that his very age was contingent on her bodily functions was a form of psychological splitting he couldn’t navigate.
“Move,” she said, the playful edge vanishing for a nanosecond, replaced by pure steel.
The civil obedience jerked him to his feet. The wine bottle clattered to the carpet. He stood, swaying, naked and exposed in the middle of his own living room.
“Ah, ah,” Chloe tutted, waggling a finger. “You’re not going into my kitchen like that. You’re filthy. You smell like my jar.” She wrinkled her nose. “Go shower. Now. Be quick. I’m starving.”
The walk to the bathroom was a walk through a haunted house of his own former life. The corridor walls seemed to press in, lined with phantom memories of a time when a locked door meant privacy, when a shower was a place of solitude, not a mandated cleansing before servitude. The bathroom air was cool and stale. He avoided his reflection in the mirror above the sink.
The shower’s blast was scalding, then icy, as he fumbled with the knobs. He scrubbed at his skin with a rough washcloth until it burned, trying to erase the lingering, phantom scent of the jar, the intimate sourness that felt etched into his sinuses. The water couldn’t touch the deeper contamination, the feeling that his very boundaries had been dissolved and poorly reconstituted.
He was drying himself with a thin, rough towel when her voice echoed down the hall, bored and impatient. “Tick-tock, Matthew! My metabolism is calling!”
He had no clothes. His own, from his shrinking, were a shredded heap somewhere in the hall. He wrapped the towel around his waist, a pitiful shield. He padded back into the living room, his skin tingling, hair dripping.
Chloe was on her phone, but she looked up. “Better. Not great, but better. The towel stays. I like the look. Now. Food.”
He turned and walked into the kitchen, a space he had avoided for weeks. The overhead fluorescent light flickered once, then buzzed to full, cruel brightness. He saw the can of black beans in the cupboard, the tortillas, the wilting onion and forgotten pepper in the crisper. The mechanics of it were still there, buried under apathy. He found a skillet. He began to chop the onion, the rhythmic thwock of the knife on the cutting board the only sound besides the hum of the light and the distant, terrifying silence from the living room.
The sizzle of onions hitting hot oil was a smell so normal it was painful. It spoke of a life where cooking was a choice, where a meal was an end in itself, not a precursor to unknown horror. He drained the beans, mashed them roughly, stirred in the spices he found. His hands worked on autopilot, but his mind was a trapped animal, darting against the walls of the new rule.
Every time I fart, you’re going to get a year younger.
How would it feel? Would it be like shrinking, that visceral, internal compression? Or would it be subtler? A loosening in the joints? A blurring at the edges of memories he’d rather forget?
He spooned the bean mixture onto tortillas, rolled them clumsily, placed them in a baking dish. He grated the last of a block of cheddar over the top, his movements getting faster, driven by a primal desire to complete the task, to fulfill this one simple command and perhaps, perversely, find a moment of safety in compliance.
As he slid the dish into the preheated oven, setting the timer, he allowed himself to lean against the counter, gripping the cool laminate. A moment of respite. The kitchen was hot from the oven. The smell of cooking food, normally comforting, was cloying and threatening.
Her voice came from just behind him. He hadn’t heard her approach.
“Smells okay,” she said. He flinched violently, almost upsetting a dirty plate balanced by the sink. She was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, hip cocked. She had changed into soft, grey lounge shorts and an oversized white t-shirt. She looked comfortable, at home. She owned the space around her, and by extension, him within it.
“So,” she said, her head tilting. “While that’s baking. Let’s establish the baseline. For the new experiment.” She pushed off the doorframe and took two steps into the kitchen, forcing him to shrink back against the counter. “How old are you, Matthew?”
The question was a trap. He knew it. He swallowed, his throat dry. “Thirty,” he whispered.
“Thirty,” she repeated, drawing the word out. “Thirty years old. A whole three decades of experiences, lessons, failures. Formative traumas, boring office jobs, that time in college you tried to grow a beard and it came in patchy.” She smiled, her eyes luminous with mischief. “Right?”
He gave a single, stiff nod.
Her smile became a beam of pure, unadulterated glee. “Not any more.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t strain. She simply relaxed, her posture softening, and let it happen.
It was a short, blunt sound in the quiet kitchen. A firm, conversational puh.
It wasn’t the weaponized blast from the jar experiment. It was casual. Offhand. A period at the end of her sentence.
The effect on him was anything but casual.
It was not a physical compression. It was a unraveling.
A wave of intense, warm tingling washed through him from the core of his being, a sensation not of pain but of profound, cellular alteration. It felt like diving into a warm lake and feeling your whole body become buoyant, fluid. His joints, which had held the subtle, accumulated stiffness of three decades, suddenly sighed with a forgotten elasticity. A faint, permanent line that had been etching itself between his eyebrows—a product of frustration and loneliness—simply melted away, the skin smoothing as if filled by an invisible, erasing hand.
But it was more than skin deep. A memory, sharp and clear—the sickening shame of being laughed at by a girl in tenth grade biology—flickered, not fading, but its emotional charge suddenly detached, like a picture falling off a wall. The memory was still there, but the sting was gone, replaced by a vague, youthful embarrassment that lacked the depth of years of reinforcement.
He gasped, looking down at his hands gripping the counter. They were his hands. But… sleeker. The faint roadmap of veins on the back seemed less pronounced. A tiny, almost invisible scar on his knuckle from a childhood bike accident seemed to soften, its edges blurring.
“Twenty-nine,” Chloe breathed, watching him with rapt, scientific fascination. “Look at you. Just like that. One little puff and a whole year of hard-lived life… undone.” She stepped closer, invading his space. She reached out and pinched the skin on his cheek, pulling it gently. “Skin’s already bouncier. More collagen. Amazing.”
The timer on the oven beeped, a shrill, mundane sound that shattered the moment.
Chloe dropped her hand. “Ding! Food’s ready. Serve me.” She turned and sauntered back into the living room, leaving him vibrating with the awful, rejuvenating echo of what had just happened.
He was twenty-nine. He was physically twenty-nine. A year of his life, not just in time, but in the physical and subtle emotional weathering that year contained, had been casually wiped clean by her. The horror was passive, insidious. It wasn’t being crushed; it was being erased.
With trembling hands, he put on an oven mitt, pulled the bubbling dish from the oven. The cheese was golden and molten. He plated two burritos, found a fork, and carried it all into the living room on a tray he’d never used.
She had arranged herself on the sofa like a monarch, the TV now on, playing some inane reality show with the volume low. She patted the space on the coffee table in front of her. “Right here.”
He set the tray down. The food steamed, smelling of cumin and melted cheese.
“Good,” she said, not looking at him, her eyes on the TV. She picked up a burrito with her fingers, taking a huge, careless bite. Cheese stretched and dripped. “Mmm.Not bad. A little under-seasoned. You’ll get better.” She spoke with her mouth full. “Sit. Floor.”
He sank back to his designated spot on the carpet, the towel bunching beneath him. He watched her eat, demolishing the first burrito in four large bites, then starting on the second. The mundane act of consumption was now a terrifying countdown. Beans. The old joke echoed in his hollow mind. The musical fruit.
She finished, licking her fingers with exaggerated relish. She set the plate aside with a clatter and settled back, rubbing her stomach. “Oh yeah. That’ll do it.” She let out a soft, contented sigh that wasn’t a trigger, but it made him tense every muscle.
She eyed him over her toes. “You’re probably wondering about the mechanism. Is it the sound? The gas itself? The intention?” She giggled. “It’s all of it, dummy. The wish makes the connection. My bodily function is the delivery system for the command. The command is: reverse temporal accumulation by one unit.” She burped softly, not bothering to cover her mouth. “The burritos are just… fuel. For the time machine.”
A low, gurgling rumble emanated from her midsection, audible even over the TV. It was a deep, organic sound of processing. Matthew’s heart began to hammer against his newly-youthful ribs.
She felt it too. She shifted, a slight, almost imperceptible tightening in her abdomen. Her playful expression sharpened into one of focused anticipation. She wasn’t just waiting for it to happen; she was curating it.
“Feel that,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Building pressure. That’s potential energy. Stored temporal adjustment.” She looked at him, her gaze drilling into him. “Don’t you want to know what twenty-eight feels like? You were probably in better shape at twenty-eight. Less defeated. Still thought you had a chance out there.”
She gave a tiny, controlled push.
It was a longer, softer sound than the first, a rolling brrrrl that escaped on a sigh. It was lazy, saturated with the meal she’d just consumed.
The wave of warmth hit him again, deeper this time. It was a plunge into a warm, erasing current. The slight, constant ache in his right knee—a relic of a long-ago hiking fall—dissolved into nothing. He felt taller, not in stature, but in posture, as if a weight he’d forgotten he was carrying had been lifted from his shoulders. His face felt strangely bare, and when he raised a hand, he found the faint, perpetual five-o’clock shadow that had been his adult hallmark was gone, his jawline smooth as if he’d just shaved.
More than that, a layer of mental callus was scrubbed away. The grinding, daily resignation to his lonely apartment life, a mindset that had taken years to固化, simply softened. A spark of that older, more naïve frustration—the kind that made you angrily apply for jobs you’d never get, rather than just giving up—flickered in its place.
“Twenty-eight,” Chloe announced, sipping from a glass of water she’d produced from somewhere. “See? Isn’t this nicer? We’re peeling away the damaged layers. Getting to the fresher stuff underneath.”
She shifted on the couch, drawing her legs up. A more insidious, building tension filled the room. It wasn’t about single events anymore. The beans were working, creating a landscape of potential within her. She could feel it. He could see it in the slight, contemplative press of her lips, the way her hand rested on her lower stomach.
“It’s cumulative, you know,” she said, her voice dreamy. “The effects. Each reversion… it stacks. It doesn’t just take you back to a snapshot. It alters the trajectory. Who knows what you’ll be like at twenty-five? Or twenty?” She let out a small, experimental puff of air that wasn’t a trigger, just a test. He still flinched. “You might be fun. You were probably more fun before life beat it out of you.”
A tighter, more pronounced cramp seemed to pass through her. She winced, not in pain, but in concentration. Then, a rapid, staccato series erupted, barely more than a whisper of sound but devastating in their continuity: pfft-pfft-pif-pfft.
Four. In quick succession.
The unraveling became a torrent.
It wasn’t warm tingles. It was a dizzying, headlong slide down a chute. His body blurred through changes. The minor softness around his middle that had appeared in his late twenties snapped tight into the lean, defined abdomen of his early twenties. His hair felt thicker, the brown richer, less tired. The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes vanished completely.
But the mental shift was a vortex. The memory of signing the lease on this apartment, a moment of adult commitment, frayed at the edges, its significance shrinking. The solid, entrenched understanding of how bills worked, of tax forms, of the crushing inertia of a full-time job—these concepts suddenly felt like cumbersome instruction manuals for a machine he hadn’t yet been forced to operate. A restless, unfocused energy buzzed in his limbs. He wanted to move, to do something, but the target of that energy was gone, replaced by a foggy anxiety.
Twenty-four.
He was twenty-four. Six years, gone in four casual, digestive afterthoughts.
He swayed on his knees, clutching his head. “Stop,” he mumbled, his voice higher, clearer, lacking the rasp of late nights and silent despair. “Please.”
“Stop?” Chloe echoed, as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. She rubbed her stomach in a slow circle. “We’re just getting to the good part. The system is fully engaged.” She let out a longer, thoughtful sigh that trembled on the edge of becoming something else. “You know, at twenty-four, you were probably still living with roommates. Playing video games too late. Thinking about girls all the time with that frantic, hopeless energy.” She looked at him, her eyes alight with insight. “That’s it. That’s the core we’re uncovering. That desperate, lonely boy. The one who made the wish in the first place. We’re just… removing the scar tissue that grew over him.”
A deep, lengthy gurgle crescendoed within her. This one was substantial, a building pressure that promised a seismic release. She closed her eyes, a faint smile on her lips, leaning into it.
This wasn’t an accident. This was a harvest.