by Vassar Smith
Chapter 7
The first Retrogression Procedure is probably the most traumatic. Not only does it retrogress one’s body to an earlier age and a smaller size than any subsequent Procedure will, but also (besides the added trauma of anything painful when experienced for the first time) it’s that first Retrogression Procedure that deletes most early-childhood memories. Although a second (and definitely a third) RP can have other complications, memory loss is not one of them.
The Procedure was the same both times. For two weeks I was forced to take several rounds of oral medication daily. These contained an engineered virus carrying with it my own mitochondrial DNA, which the United State had on file, flawlessly preserved like everyone else’s. This “pristine” DNA, taken shortly after my birth and cryonically preserved (as was done for many reasons long before the advent of retrogression technology), was essential to executing the Retrogression Procedure. Although there was nothing else funny about it, literati still note with amusement that this pharmaceutical development both took to its logical extreme the term “retrovirus” and gave it an ironic double-entendre.
The final step was the operation itself. The subject, sedated and secured, lying on his back, was put through the retrogression chamber, where he underwent a sequence of surgeries alternating with bombardment by lasers, ultrasonic waves, and electromagnetic energy. What the virus had done at the cellular level, the combination of bombardments and microsurgery in the retrogression chamber completed on the organic level and in physical manifestation. Free radicals and superfluous minerals—toxins—were removed. Several kilograms of calcium and appreciable amounts of salt were collected in the chamber’s filtration system after every Procedure. The hydrogen and oxygen were released as air or water, the nitrogen absorbed into the air.
A general anesthetic was administered, but it did not take full effect before the subject was well into the Procedure in the chamber. The trauma is indescribable. I’ve read accounts of the physical pain and auditory discomfort that many people experienced centuries ago when having a cavity drilled and filled by a dentist. I’ve lived through earthquakes of 7.5 and seen videos of greater ones. The noise, the tremors, the sense of danger and helplessness are unforgettable. But they pale beside what a person feels during that operation in the retrogression chamber. Even after the anesthetic has rendered him unconscious, the subject still feels as though he were suffering through the end of the world.
When I awoke after my first RP, I was not without any memories, just most of the experiential memories of my life before adolescence. I knew my name and could recall a little more than half my life, but found myself now with the body and practical skills of a two-year-old. I saw, to my horror, that (for obvious considerations) I was wearing a diaper. I also soon discovered that when I tried to talk, a lot of the words were hard to pronounce or just wouldn’t come to my tongue. I was a toddler again and had to redevelop my motor skills as well as my communication skills.
As soon as I was well rested and had been checked by the doctors, I was given to a middle-aged couple, Mel and Marina Barker. They led me by the hand or carried me when we went anywhere, and they strapped me into a little child’s safety seat whenever we rode anywhere in their hovercar. They took me straight from the State Hospital to their apartment, where they already had a room for me—all painted and furnished in a manner to be expected for a two-year-old boy’s bedroom.
The Barkers weren’t poor, but they weren’t rich, either. The outlay for my furniture, toys, and clothing no doubt cost them quite a bit. I was touched by the intensity of their commitment to me and the hopes that they had placed in me and nurtured for me.
However, the situation was far from a story-book scenario. After the initial relief and the novelty had worn off, I was tormented by unspeakable boredom, not always, but most of the time in the first couple of years. I did find diversion in some of the toys and picture-books they had gotten for me. But I sometimes occupied myself with these objects less for my own amusement than to keep my benefactors from thinking that I didn’t appreciate what they had done for me. They were good, kind people... but dull... so dull!
Chapter 8
Retrogression had not diminished my verbal comprehension, but I did have to learn to read again. The first time anyone is retrogressed, the Procedure exacts the “double whammy” of not only obliterating most memories of one’s original childhood but also taking away nearly all skills acquired after the original biophysical age to which one is retrogressed. I found it both eerie and frustrating.
I could recall reading, could even recall much that I had read as a young adult, especially from my years at Columbia University, where I had majored in history and graduated with honors. Before succumbing to the allure of owning property and fine possessions—and making the fortune necessary in order to acquire them—I even worked in the National Archives in Washington and wrote a number of articles which got published in rather prestigious periodicals. Yet, when I looked at words and letters now, I might as well have been trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese ideograms.
Fortunately, it took me a lot less time to reacquire the lost skills and practical abilities. My new parents were quite helpful. They not only encouraged me to talk with them—thus providing all the practice I needed to regain full powers of speech—but also spent time teaching me spelling with large, plastic letters. Within just a few months I had not only regained full control of my bodily functions but also become fully literate again. Relearning to write took quite a while longer. Still, by the time I was “four,” that is, by the time I had been with the Barkers for two years, I was using the home computer to access the Internet for anything I wanted to read. Of course I had to be careful which sites I visited, and be careful about who was around when I got on line, but I managed to avoid freaking out my adoptive parents. Thank God for the ’Net, though! Besides the Bible and a dictionary, the only bound books in the Barkers’ residence were cookbooks and business manuals.
Then, when I was “five,” I discovered why reading meant so little to the Barkers: It would have interfered with their serious drinking. They were both “functional” alcoholics. As soon as they came home from work each day, they would each have a highball to “relax.” Then they would each have at least one glass of wine with dinner every night. That was just limbering up, though. It was after I had gone to bed that they really got plowed.
The first time I woke up before they had retired for the night, I looked out of my room instead of calling them. They were together in the living room as I had expected, and they were sitting in front of the holovision set. But they weren’t paying any attention to the program—they were both sloshed to the gills. Little wonder that they were both out of sorts several mornings a week, or that they kept the bathroom cabinets filled with medicines for headaches and indigestion; or that they made several trips a month to the recycling center and left with quite a few credits for all the bags of glass and plastic that they turned in.
Still, I have to state two points here to their credit. First, they were always “functional.” They never drank during the day; they never missed work because of drinking the night before; and, more important, they neither neglected nor abused me. Second, unlike the many who become angry or difficult when “under the influence,” both Mel and Marina Barker, when lit, became positively beatific, as though they didn’t have a care in the world. They weren’t mean or cold when sober, and they weren’t sloppy with sentiment when drunk; but they both were markedly more affectionate and sociable in the latter state. I thought them a prime example of the old Roman proverb: “In vino veritas.”
Chapter 9
A retrogressee’s body usually develops as it did in one’s original childhood and adolescence. So, I had to spend ten years with the Barkers before I started going through puberty. But only three years after that—at “sixteen”—I was able to leave school with a diploma, honors, and a full scholarship to college (Princeton this time!). I also
got legally emancipated. The Barkers did not take umbrage. It was all done amicably.
Throughout our years together there was neither acrimony nor great closeness between us. I called Marina and Mel “Mom” and “Dad” more out of courtesy than out of affection. I did feel some fondness for them, but thought of them with appreciation and respect more than with sentimental regard. Still, when we ate our last meal together before I left for college, it brought tears to my eyes to hear them tell how proud they were of me, how much I meant to them, and what a positive difference I had made in their lives for the last fourteen years. We hugged several times that night and also at the airport the next morning. This occasion was a watershed rather than an aberration. The whole semester we exchanged complink calls and e-mails once or twice a week. I greatly looked forward to seeing them at Christmas.
That was not destined to happen. The week before Thanksgiving, my adoptive parents were killed on a business trip to Denver. Their flight crashed. No one on board survived.
I mourned the Barkers’ death, and I honor their memory. Still, I would be untruthful if I denied that I was both interested and gratified to learn that I was the principal heir to their estate, an inheritance of considerable worth. They might not have been rich, but the benefits of their combined life insurance policies, plus the settlement paid by the airline, all put me back into the financial standing that I had enjoyed twenty years ago.
Chapter 10
The problem with getting a lot of money is that it turns out to be never enough for the pretentious tastes and expensive habits that one—especially if he is young—then develops. To my credit, I did not drop out of college, but went on to earn my (second) Bachelor’s Degree and even an MBA. Nor did I squander the fortune I’d received. I bought stocks, real estate, and other sound investments. I didn’t score a bull’s eye every time, but my successes vastly outweighed my losses.
It still wasn’t enough. I moved to San Francisco, bought a condo, an aircar, designer clothes, all the trappings of wealth. Then, not satisfied with my lot, I made two big mistakes that I really should have recognized as such at the time and thus avoided.
The minor one was getting married. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting married. But one really needs to think very carefully beforehand, to know one’s intended very well before tying the knot. At a party one night I fell for a drop-dead gorgeous brunette named Sheila. The more we talked—and danced—the more right we both felt we were for each other. She took me to her place for the night. After that, we just knew we were made for each other. Believing all that we had told each other (especially after doing the Big Bang), we flew to Nevada the next day and got married in Las Vegas. We celebrated too long, though, and by the time we got to our room, we were both too tired and buzzed. We fell asleep as soon as we got into bed.
The person I woke up next to in the morning was the same, but the personality was one I hadn’t seen before and never wanted to see again: mean, angry, capricious, argumentative... By noon I was convinced that no amount of pleasure could compensate for incidents like this. Sheila apologized at breakfast the next morning and ascribed the whole thing to a medical condition: alcohol, missed medications, etc. I tried to let her down as gently as possible, but I knew my best course was to get out of this disastrous union as soon as I could. So, I sought and got an annulment.
The major mistake, though, was running afoul of the law again. Not satisfied with my returns from legitimate investments, and (again) furious with several social moguls (but cultural pygmies) whose proposals, if followed, would have led me into a financial sinkhole, I put together a pyramid scheme, subtly disguised of course. It worked so well, that I managed to fleece several of the “sharks” as well as the “sheep” in high society. I realized that the “pyramid” would collapse eventually, and I made plans accordingly, to disappear before then, with my major assets safely relocated overseas.
That had to be done very carefully, and gradually. I had hardly begun addressing this matter, when everything suddenly came unraveled.
It was no weakness of mine, but rather my partner’s—drugs—that did us in. Once he got arrested, he ratted me out, making a deal with the Prosecutor. In return for his testimony, which proved crucial at my trial, he got only a five-year prison sentence, which was later commuted to construction work on the Moon Colony. He wound up serving no prison time at all!
No such option was accorded me. All my personal property as well as other assets were confiscated. The minor investors who’d gotten burned by my scheme were out of luck, but the State compensated the major investors with the proceeds from the liquidation of everything that had belonged to me. And again Michael Tadlock disappeared from the world: I was retrogressed for the second time.
Chapter 11
Anyone who has not actually been through the operation in the retrogression chamber cannot fully appreciate how grueling it is. The patient is conveyed (prone, secured, and sedated) on a moving track through a tunnel-like chamber. The devices performing the operation (under the Doctors’ direction and control) make—especially inside the chamber itself—a shrill, horrible, nearly unbearable noise. The person undergoing the Procedure feels as though he were being carved up and shaken to pieces at once. And in a sense he is. When anyone emerges after the operation, he’s certainly a lot smaller than when he went in.
I remember how badly my bones ached, almost like a tooth during a root canal job. As if that weren’t horrible enough, I also felt sick to my stomach. Beforehand they do administer intravenously a “timed” anesthetic. But it’s still pretty rough.
They don’t retrogress anyone after the third time. In those few cases (Talk about genuine incorrigibles!) when it was administered, a fourth Retrogression Procedure always proved fatal. The Procedure is so arduous, that it is not allowed to be imposed upon anyone over sixty who has not undergone it before. Anyone who has been retrogressed once is exempt from a second retrogression if he has reached the chronological age of eighty. A third retrogression is not permitted after one has reached the age of ninety. There’s a limit to what the body can endure.
Nor do they allow retrogression on anyone under eighteen. While specialists have not been able to alter or “fine tune” the result of the Procedure,the outcome has proven 99.9% predictable, with only that 0.01% of deviation and aberration. Theoretically, a person between ten and nineteen years old should emerge from the operation as a baby about a year old and less than two. But for some reason, the younger the subject, the greater the chances of variation from the standard outcome. In one documented case (a medical, not a punitive application) they retrogressed two adolescents, one thirteen, the other fifteen, both in the early stages of a progressive, fatal illness. While the thirteen-year-old emerged as a healthy toddler, the fifteen-year old did not survive. He was transformed into a fetus too young to survive outside the womb. That sounds strange to say in an age when human embryos can be grown full term to healthy babies—not just conceived—in a synthetic environment approximating the natural one. The sad fact is, though, a fetus formed in the retrogression chamber simply cannot be transferred into the necessary synthetic environment in time, not a fetus in the first month or two of development, anyhow.
Deviations have also occurred at the other end of the age spectrum. In each of these five known cases, the subjects—all close to the maximum age permissible for the Procedure under the law—emerged from the operation retrogressed only to the onset of puberty. While some might consider this outcome fortuitous, it proved onerous for the subjects in that it made them much harder to place in an adoptive or foster home. Thus it condemned them to years in institutional care.
A small but significant number of those subjected to a second retrogression face an ominous complication of another kind. As mentioned already, the body, after the first Retrogression Procedure, proceeds to grow and develop as it did originally. For second-time retros, however, the body can take much longer—years longer—to mature.
Like other world-altering phenomena, retrogression has had a noticeable influence on the language itself. Just as, centuries ago, one first said that he had “made a videotape” of some scene, then some time later might say more succinctly that he had “videotaped” it, then still later might simply say that he had “taped” it, here a similar streamlining of language occurred. Linguistic purists at first spoke of someone’s having been “subjected to retrogression.” With the wonderful adaptability of the English language this unwieldy and rather pompous expression was soon replaced by the etymologically quite correct verb “retrogress,” as in: “Tomorrow they will retrogress him.”
In the same way, the expression “person subjected to retrogression” was almost immediately replaced by the new noun “retrogressee.” Of course the adjective “retrogressive” had already been around for ages. However, not only did that word thus acquire an additional specific application, but indeed that application became its most frequent usage. Naturally the streamlining went even further in colloquial usage, where the word “retro” soon sufficed for all three functions: noun, verb, and adjective. Unlike “damn” and the worn-out “F” word, to date “retro” has not yet made its way into adverbial usage. For that, people still have to say—yes, all five syllables—”retrogressively.”
It affected statistics, too. Legally and socially as well as scientifically, a retro’s age was indicated in two terms, usually written as numbers with a slash between them. The first of these indicated one’s phenotypical age, the second his chronological age. Put quite simply, the second is the person’s age in terms of the number of years he has been alive; the first is the age that he (or she) ought to look, after the last Retrogression Procedure.
Thus, when the Barkers took me in, my age was written as 2/25, showing that I was biophysically a two-year-old, but had been alive for 25 years. Before my second RP (as it’s come to be called for short) I was 27/50. Once the Procedure had been carried out, my body was transformed back to what it had been when I was five years old. So, my new phenotypical age was 5, but my chronological age remained the same. Hence, officially my age then became 5/50. Now, four years later, it is written as 9/54. What really makes it complicated is that both 9 and 54 are officially my age. While under certain laws a retro retains specific rights, privileges, and responsibilities of an adult, under other laws he is subject to both the benefits and the restrictions of measures enacted to protect and control children and juveniles.
