But by the end of the day, after dinner with his now aged father and teenage son, Simon got to thinking about the changes Jay had made to all of them.
If this was reality, if this was his family, his one shot at being a father, Simon wanted to do it right.
"Hey Jay," said Simon, knocking on the doorframe to Jay's room.
"Hey."
"All finished with your homework?"
"Yeah. It was easy."
Simon looked at his best friend--no, this wasn't his best friend. Not anymore. It was his son. A tremendous feeling of pride and fatherly love swept over him. "He's part of ME," Simon thought to himself. "No...no, he's really not. I know that...but...in THIS world he is."
"Come on Dad, quit hovering. You're creeping me out."
"Sorry son. Just wanted to check in on you." And then he added, slightly awkwardly, "I'm really proud of you."
"Ugh, Dad, cut it out. You're being weird. Shut the door."
Simon smiled and closed the door behind him. He turned to walk down the hall and noticed his body ached.
"Long day?" asked Bryan.
"Yeah, Dad," said Simon. "I mean--" he was about to say Bryan, then caught himself, accepting the new reality.
"You mean what?"
"Nothing, Dad."
Bryan leaned back in his chair, putting the newspaper down. He folded his arms over his enormously fat body. He'd put on more weight, it looked like.
"Y'know, son," said Bryan, with a creak in his voice, "I know it seems weird to say so, but you're...you're my best friend."
"Aw, come on Dad." Simon shuddered a little. Had Jay and Bryan really lost all memory of who they really were?
"No, I mean it. I feel like...we've always been best friends." He turned his head and started hacking. "Hey, get an old man his pills, wouldya?"
Simon obediently rose and went to the cupboard in the kitchen, his movements totally automatic. He shouldn't know where Bryan's heart medicine was...or that it even WAS heart medicine...but somehow he did.
"I don't know how many more years I've got with you and Jay--"
"Dad," Simon interrupted, "Don't talk like that."
"No, I mean it. I'm fat and old and likely to increase in both in the next few years, heh heh heh..."
"The doctor told you to start exercising, Dad."
"Son, I just want to tell you, I'm real proud of the job you did raising Jay all by yourself. It wasn't easy raising him and taking care of me and the business. And when I die, the business is yours and Jay's."
Bryan kept talking, but Simon had tuned him out. That was it. This may be his new world... his best friends may have been turned into his father and son, but he wasn't ready for this. Talk of Bryan--his father dying... He couldn't just sit by anymore. Not when he had the power to do something about all of this.
"Dad, hang on a sec."
Simon ran to his room, as best as he could being 37. He sat himself down at the Chronivac.
"If this is our world, I'm going to take back that time we lost. Sorry, Jay. You'll be a teenager eventually."
Simon typed in the appropriate changes, reducing their ages by 8 years each. He set the changes to take place over the next 8 hours, while the slept.
He thought about his father. "He loves being the big guy. I don't want to take that away from him. But I can't lose him." Simon brought up Bryan's profile. He noticed a tab he hadn't seen before.
HEALTH
"Bingo."
Simon moved the slider as far to the right as it would go. "Perfect health. Excellent." He double-checked to see that Bryan's weight hadn't changed.
"Well, as long as he's the picture of perfect health, why not give him a little more padding?" He slid the slider for WEIGHT a VERY slight bit further to the left. The last thing he wanted was an immobile father who was good for nothing but riding around in a scooter. But he also knew how much his father would enjoy waking up to a little more girth.
MEMORIES
"Huh, what's this?"
There was an option to control how much or how little of their past they were able to remember of the changes that had taken place, including their lives before...when they were best friends at a sleepover.
"Only vague memories for Jay," said Simon, knowing how much trouble Jay was apt to cause if he woke up realizing he had been shrunk back to being a pre-teen. Besides, Jay was his son now. How odd would it be for his son to remember that Simon wasn't really his father? Talk about motivation for some serious teenage angst later on.
"But for Dad..." Simon pondered this for a moment, then clicked the slider over about as much as he moved the WEIGHT slider, giving Bryan slightly more vivid recollections of their times as best friends, before the Chronivac had genetically merged the three buddies into three generations of blood relatives. Who knows? It might be helpful if something came up and they needed to discuss returning to their former states.
With that, Simon clicked APPLY. The Chronivac displayed an 8 hour countdown timer. Everything was perfect. He was pleased. He had managed to fix everything. They would continue on, as long as the Chronivac kept them in this reality, to live this happy, comfortable life as father, son, and grandfather.
But Simon knew that there would come a day when the Chronivac would change them back. This wouldn't last forever. He knew it instinctively. Something may have gone wrong with his programming such that the transformation lasted longer than just one week, but the day would come. Part of him knew it was for the best. But the other part, the part that was now screaming loudly in his heart, wondered if it ever had to end...