She typed in a new sentence, squinting at the screen.
"Sophia is a 32-year-old daycare worker."
She carefully erased “32-year-old” and typed “22-year-old” instead. Or so she thought. Her fingers, clumsy and tired, slipped. The number changed to "2-year-old" without her noticing. She hit Enter.
The world around her lurched. Her body shrank rapidly, her legs wobbling as she fell onto her now chubby toddler knees with a soft plop. Her uniform puffed outward and transformed into a pastel onesie decorated with teddy bears.
“No-no-no!” she cried in a much smaller, squeaky voice.
Sophia reached for the phone, panicked—but her coordination was gone. Her chubby fingers mashed at the screen, which was now far too complex for her baby brain to fully process. She babbled in frustration, mashing random words on the screen.
She generated a new sentence:
“Jane is a girl who remembers being older.”
Sophia tried to remove “remembers”—but she deleted too much and clumsily replaced the sentence with:
“Jane is a 2-year-old girl who has always been a 2-year-old girl.”
The moment she hit enter, Jane—who had been trying to stack blocks into a gate escape ladder—paused, blinked, and tilted her head. She rubbed her soft cheek and giggled, then returned to her dollhouse. But deep inside, a piece of her still knew. The phone. Something about the phone.
“Fix it, fix it,” Sophia muttered through her pacifier-lisped voice, pulling up another sentence:
“This daycare has girls and boys.”
Again, she struggled to type, deleting “boys” and intending to replace it with “mostly girls.” But instead, the sentence became:
“This daycare has only girls.”
Reality snapped.
In an instant, the room shifted. All of Jane’s brothers vanished—no trace of them remained. Instead, there were now dozens of little girls running around the pastel-colored room, playing with dolls and tea sets. Even the posters on the walls changed: princesses, unicorns, and “Girls Rock!” slogans replaced racecars and animal alphabets.
Sophia stumbled backward in shock, falling onto her padded bottom with a soft crinkle. She burst into tears out of frustration—her baby brain struggling to handle the magnitude of the changes.
That’s when she heard footsteps.
A new worker, Miss Ellie, walked in holding a clipboard. She raised an eyebrow when she saw the tiny new girl in the corner crying in a rumpled onesie. “Oh? Who's this sweetheart? New arrival?”
Sophia’s eyes widened in panic. She couldn't let anyone find the phone.
Through instinct more than thought, she grabbed the phone with both hands and shoved it deep into the diaper bag of a girl playing nearby—an older toddler with thick curls and an empty sippy cup dangling from one hand.
“Hide,” she whispered, and crawled away as Miss Ellie scooped her up.
“Looks like someone needs a nap!” Ellie cooed, carrying the squirming, babbling Sophia toward the same playpen area where Jane now sat, stacking plastic fruit like it was a serious science.