Fifteen-year old Mark Kremzer was in his bedroom getting ready for school one morning, when he heard a weird buzzing sound behind him.
As Mark spun around to investigate, his job dropped and he saw the strangest sight – out of thin air, a sparkling yet static lined, holographic image of a beautiful, young woman was materializing.
“What... Who are you?” Mark sputtered.
“I am your descendant,” said the woman. Her voice echoed and reverberated in a strange, metallic way as though she were speaking through a long, steel tube or something.
“How are you doing this?” Mark asked.
“No time to explain,” said the woman. “Just please listen. The future depends on it. I am from 214 years in your future. I'm here to give you something...”
As if by magic, there appeared in Mark's hands a thin, plastic box with several buttons like a calculator or remote control.
“You must use this device to change the course of history,” said the woman. “It has the power to alter reality itself. Only you will be aware of the changes you make to history. Everyone else will remember the world always having been the way you've transformed it with this device. You can alter reality in some pretty wild ways.”
“How does it work?” Mark asked.
“Please, we don't have time!” said the woman urgently. “Total destruction will sweep the globe unless you succeed. Everything depends on you using this device to change reality. A terrible disaster will inevitably occur in 214 years unless you can successfully alter the course of human events enough by...”
But as the strange woman spoke, her voice began to buzz with static and her holographic image wavered and flickered, as if distorted or disrupted by something. Then, she abruptly vanished.
Mark would've thought the whole experience a strange dream, or possibly a hallucination brought on by eating too many expired Slim Jims the other night... but he couldn't deny the physical reality of the small, thin, remote control he now held in his hands.
“What is this thing?” Mark asked himself. “How does it work? And exactly what am I supposed to do with it to save the future from total destruction?”
Mark examined the device and found it had only six buttons, each one labeled in tiny print, almost too small to see. The labels read: Body Swap, Personality Swap, Age Transformation, Size Transformation, and Physical Fusion. The label on the sixth, final button read: Undo.
“I guess maybe I should experiment with it a little,” mused Mark. “See if I can figure out how this things works and just what I'm meant to do with it.”