Humanity has been chasing after immortality since time immemorial. Ancient Chinese emperors drank serums with quicksilver to try and live forever, and European alchemists toiled to create the elixir of life. Other groups and other people tried various techniques over the centuries to try and live forever, all with varying degrees of failure. Things were about to change, though. What was once the dream of mystics, hermetics, and occultists was about to become reality.
The Boro Corporation is a shadowy entity. You'll see no mention of it on the Wall Street Journal, DOW JONES, or NASDAQ. Funded with grants and the generous patronage of certain cosmopolitan businessmen and businesswoman, the Boro Corporation's mission statement is the complete mastery of the human body and human mind; no more and no less. After billions in expenses and after years of research, their labor had produced something miraculous: Chemical Saturn.
The science behind regression is complicated. It's still beyond our abilities to time travel, or otherwise engage in temporal warping. The Boro Corporation wisely decided that chemical regression was the answer. However, the first experiments were unspeakable failures, and those forays into science are better left unspoken of. Nevertheless, those trials taught the scientists and researchers at the Boro Corporation all the ways to not use Chemical Saturn. It couldn't be ingested, couldn't be inhaled, and it couldn't be injected. The answer to regression was in shampoo, believe it or not.
Merely rubbing Chemical Saturn into your skin produced results, but they were muted. The results just weren't fast enough. The answer was in the blood-brain barrier. By applying Chemical Saturn to the scalp, it was able to bypass the blood-brain barrier and work its miraculous effects.
The effects of Chemical Saturn were undeniable. Every subject treated with it did become younger. The devil, however, was in the details. The three main drawbacks of Chemical Saturn were: the slow and uneven pace of the regression, unavoidable mental regression, and other, unforseen changes.
It turns out that not all regression is created equal. Over 90% of sujects that used Chemical Saturn found their secondary sexual characteristics were the first things to regress. Hairlines would be restored to prepubescent levels, hair would become thicker, bald spots would disappear, body hair would fall out, the voice would become higher pitched and most noticeably of all: the subject's private parts would shrink and regress. After the secondary sexual characteristics regressed and disappeared, the subject's body would slowly "catch up" to the rest of the changes.
Although scientists were confident that they'd be able to even out the pace and progress of the regression, no amount of tampering with Chemical Saturn was able to change the fact that test subjects would always regress mentally. The progress of this process usually took a certain shape. Time and time again, test subjects would experience a rush of sexual activity as they regressed, abruptly followed by the complete cessation of all sexual urges. Subjects would forget about their old lives, and begin to think their changing appearance was perfectly normal. Interestingly enough, some crystallized information would remain. Like an amnesiac asked to drive a car, regressed subjects would be able to recall some information, such as the contents of a book they had read a month ago before they had started regressing, while simultaneously being unable to remember that they used to be older.
The final side-effect of Chemical Saturn was the risk of unexpected changes. Many subjects that used Chemical Saturn would end up looking nothing like how they did as a child. Some subjects with blonde hair would end up with black hair, and some subjects with black hair found that they became blonde when they regressed. Straight hair to curly hair; curly hair to straight hair, long hair to short hair; short hair to long hair, tall to short; short to tall, the gamut of changes were almost limitless. In some cases, a subject's race or even gender was altered. However, no matter how visibly a subject changed, they would believe that they had always looked that way. The Boro Corporation has a well-documented case where one subject, who had once been a black man, swore up and down as a Japanese boy that he had always been like this, and could not identity old pictures of himself as a child.
You must understand that despite these drawbacks, the Boro Corporation still had what was effectively the means to eternal life and biological immortality. However, The backers and donors funding the corporation had no interest in becoming children again, they wanted to be able to enjoy the prime of their lives with full mental and physical faculties. That's why the Boro Corporation was always testing Chemical Saturn, always refining the formula. And yet, things were still moving too slowly for the company's donors. They weren't getting any younger, and a fear of death was making them pressure the Boro Corporation into speeding things up.
The company had only taken in volunteers to be test subjects before, and usually only people that nobody would miss were allowed to become subjects. The slow pace of the research was good for secrecy, but the board of directors issued the R&D sector an ultimatum: accelerate your research or have all funding pulled. With no other choice, the decision was made to move ahead with secret test trials.
The idea was simple: select certain individuals to use a new and updated version of Chemical Saturn. The subjects would be chosen for the minimal amount of fuss that they would cause if they disappeared. Their homes would be mailed free samples of Chemical Saturn, renamed and relabeled "Panacea Shampoo", promising healthier and better hair. Pamphlets would be included, along with an extra gift: micro-cameras that would record and report on the subject's regression. The only question was, who was getting their very own Panacea Shampoo care-pack? Whoever was (un)lucky enough to get a Panacea package in the mail would find their life irrevocably changed.