Author's Note: This story is taken from the Old (as of 2022) AR Archive Continuous Story archive. It is the work of many anonymous contributors and has been tweaked to fit this collection and has had details added to it to modernize and flesh the story out for narrative satisfaction. It's being added here to ensure it doesn't disappear as the old archive is abandoned.
Jim had ordered the device a month ago, and now was happy to be holding the Chronivac in his hand as he looked it over. It had all sorts of buttons on it along with two simple minus and plus buttons. It also had switches labelled MENTAL, CLOTHES, REALITY and MEMORY in addition to the buttons. It seemed a very complicated sort of device, one that had cost him nearly three months' worth of his pay from the warehouse but promised to be worth the expense.
Jim was a 28 year old warehouse worker for an online marketplace--who owned more warehouses around the globe to allow them to deliver anything within two days by drone to your front door. The warehouse was constantly churning over workers and Jim after two and half years, was starting to feel the pressure of exhaustion and wear and tear of working constantly on a concrete floor. The one source of light in his mind-numbing existence was his girlfriend, Sharon, for whom he'd purchased the Chronivac to provide them the opportunity to make their dreams come true--if the device did all that it said.
He'd have to test it out first, and Jim had decided to test it out in a local restaurant first. A few blocks away there was a renovated McDonalds and Jim decided to get something to eat from the 2 & 3 dollars menu. There were two women behind the counter who were more serving the drive thru than inside the restaurant, but Jim placed his order at the order kiosk and waited for the two women to respond to his inputted order as it printed on a receipt for them. The older, nearly elderly, woman was the first to notice the receipt and she called a set of orders back to the kitchen as she took the receipt and placed it on a tray, while the other late twenties year old woman opened the drive thru window to hand over their order. As the flurry of activity occurred in the restaurant, he hit the REALITY switch from AWARE to UNAWARE first to make sure no one noticed anything strange.
Jim decided to take his first experiment on the older of the two women, regressing her in age. He pressed the minus button down and looked to see what was happening. The older woman's face lost wrinkles, her hair darkened from gray to dark brown, while her features seemed to soften somewhat. The faint lines under her eyes vanished. The belt at her waist seemed a little loose along with her polo. When Jim stopped pressing the button the woman looked more like a senior in college, and now clearly the younger of the two women. He pressed the CLOTHES switch and a green button lit up, which he pressed, and immediately the woman's ill-fitting clothes snapped to fit her new younger proportions.