these things will happen...

“Can't you see the margins are too wide?” he yelled at the walls. The walls cringed back from the abuse, or so he imagined, being a short man and nearly bald. At least the walls should fear him, if nothing else did. He sat on a stool and ate his soup. A wee mousy peeked out from its bed of tatter in a corner, under a broken shelf.

Two men looked through a port hole down at the captive man. “What is he doing now?” “He is yelling into the air. And waving his arms.” “Let me look. Oh, he is eating the soup.” “Fantastic.”

The little man was a throwback. Some officials from a division across the ocean had found him wandering in the streets. He didn't speak the updated dialect of the reset language. His speech was archaic, at least two or three hundred years ancient. Some of the locals had been throwing bread at him and the little man was growing fat, sitting against monuments, shouting at the birds. They finally crated him up and sent him to the research institute.

“Where did he come from?” “Maybe an aberrant time shift.” “Aren't they all regulated?” “Sometimes one will get away...”

The rodent was agitated. A colored light started flashing from the ceiling, twenty feet overhead. The little man saw the mouse chittering and scrambling in the corner. He started muttering at it.

“I suppose you will be wanting some of my soup. Well I ain't got any crackers to go with it even. What kind of nitty natty place is this anyway? No crackers, pfaw!”

The two men exchanged looks. “Is it working?” “I think so, it is starting to. I wonder what he is saying?” “The transcripts will tell us, if the program can decipher them.” “Certainly. Oh look, the mouse is going forward with our plans.” “Excellent.”

The colored light was blinking and the mouse began running circles in confusion. The man put down his bowl and stood up to get a closer look. He slapped his hands together and laughed. “Dance mousy, dance dance dance.”

The mouse darted across the floor right at the little man, who came from a time familiar with mice and hadn't any fear of the creatures. He knelt down and put a hand on the floor for the rodent to climb onto. The mouse was incensed, and bit down on the man's little finger, then ran up his arm and jumped onto his head, started rummaging around the only tuft of hair it could find and hunkered down, breathing hard.

“Freakin' little shit!” howled the man. But he didn't jump up and slap the mouse away. He settled back onto his stool and leaned into the corner.

“He's sleeping. With the mouse in his hair!” “Astounding. But will it work?” “The contagion is taken from storage, who knows?” “Well, time will tell.” They watched for an hour, taking turns, until one of the men started to see a rapid progression from the mouse induced serum. “He is changing!”

Three days later, the man got up from his stool, walked to the door and entered a code into the glowing blue sensor from his enlarged frontal lobe. He looked back into the room with his left eyeball, and into his mind with the right. He was eight inches taller, equipped with a flowing manly mane and the mouse on his head had grown veins that spread from forehead to the occipital.

The two men rushed down from the loft and watched as the man walked into the glass assessment tank. A simple diagnostic program pushed air around his body and inserted microscopic aluminum viruses into his veins. He stood on a polymer disc that rotated and his hair stood wholly on end. All checks complete. Integration formalized. Modern man fully functioning. They grinned and opened the airlock.

“How do you feel?” “Do you remember anything?” “What was the world like three hundred years ago?”

“I feel like a god. I remember eating steak, sipping wine, and loving women. It was great and you are the two butt ugliest mother effers I've ever seen.”

“Oh.” “Well, do you have any questions for us?”

The man thought about it. His mental processes were amazingly fast. He could do computations in his head that only computers could accomplish in his time. “Only one. Are there jetpacks yet?”