No time to waste playing around, Jeff thought. It's time to grow back to normal for both of us.
He opened his settings in the Chronivac program and changed his age back to 16 and then opened his sister, Emily's, settings and changed hers back to 10. "Let's do it," he said. Already imagining how nice it would be to be taller and stronger again, he hit the enter key, and the machine whirred to life.
Immediately, he felt a tingle pass through him, and he knew that it was working again. "Yes!" he cried. Then, he looked at the Chronivac, and saw the light change from glowing green to flashing red again. "No!"
An error message popped up reading, "Intermittent signal. Transformation incomplete."
"What the hell does that mean?" he asked aloud. Of course, the machine gave no response or clarification.
He felt his body changing, nonetheless. He could feel his arms stretching longer in front of him, while his behind grew larger... well, behind him. He could feel his head changing a bit, but there was a strange sense that things were getting out of proportion. Yes, his arms were getting larger and his hands were growing, but his legs didn't seem to be changing at all. And then, suddenly, it all stopped and the machine beeped.
"Changes complete," a message read on his screen now.
Looking down at his body, Jeff could tell that his changes were anything but complete. He pushed his chair back from the computer with his long arms and carefully slid off the seat to stand on the ground. The feet and legs below him were a little boy's feet and legs, but the arms beside him were his usual teenager arms, which hung off of him like a gorilla's.
"Shit," he said, hearing his voice sounding as young as before. "What the hell happened?" he asked, now noticing a more nasal tone to his voice. "I need a mirror."
He tried to take a few steps, but stumbled as his weight distribution had suddenly shifted in strange ways. Additionally, his legs felt a bit too wide apart, making him sway his hips a bit as he walked in a straight line. He leaned forward slightly and found that he could rest his knuckles on the ground in front of him if he only crouched down a little. He tried walking forward then, gorilla-style, on four limbs and found that to be the easiest way to move now.
Trying to ignore how strange crawling along on his hands and feet felt, he made it to his parent's bedroom and then knuckled his way up to their mirror.
"Oh, God!" he cried. "I'm a total freak!"
In horror and disgust, he catalogued his uneven changes. First, his arms had grown back to normal teenager length as did his hands, but his torso and his legs were still the size of a 4 year old's. Placing a hand flat next to his foot, he compared sizes and found the hand to be larger. His butt and hips had grown back to teenager size as well, which gave him an awkward-looking hourglass figure around the middle. It also explained why his little legs felt so spread apart. He turned sideways for a moment to look at how far his comparatively big butt jutted out behind him and sighed. He checked down his pants to verify what he could already feel; his penis had not grown any older in spite of his larger butt. Looking over his whole body, he realized that somehow his clothes all fit his misshapen form. At least one thing about him was the right size.
His other changes were more subtle. His ears had grown back, and stuck out from his head comically large. His nose had grown as well. On his regular face it had been average-sized, but on the face of a little kid it appeared huge.
"Oh, man," he moaned rubbing his too-large nose with a too-large hand. "What am I going to do?" He considered going back to the Chronivac, but realized that anything he tried with it now only made the situation worse.
"Jeffy?" a voice called from downstairs.