Chapter 1

It is quite an interesting sensation, going from 230 iq back to 130. Well, not exactly 130, as my brain is still developing in this body, but I digress.

It’s almost like your mind forgets how to do things. Concepts that you thought you knew become harder to comprehend, memories become fuzzy and unclear. Worst of all, by far, is the feeling of lethargy that comes along with the swap back.

I imagine it is similar to a sports car that was left in a barn for half a century. Where it once was a shining example of engineering and technical achievement, ready to perform at its pinnacle, now there only sits a rotted rusty lump of metal. It’s engine filled with gunk and nonfunctioning, it’s floors rotted out, its roof collapsed. Yes, all the parts are there and it is theoretically the same thing, but the difference is monumental.

That was the feeling which assaulted me, like a slap in the face, when I woke up one morning.

To me, just yesterday the world was bright and vivid, yet clear and understandable. Just yesterday, my mind was active the moment I opened my eyes, working towards solutions to problems that my subconscious had been mulling over the night before. Just yesterday I could do things in my head that people, in the current time, couldn’t. Calculus? Like simple addition. Differential equations and thermodynamics? Easy as 1,2,3. In fact, just to keep myself occupied I had been working on the launch equations posted in the morning newspaper.

Now, that isn’t to say that I was some genius to end all geniuses. In fact, I was only a little bit smarter than your average person. (A little bit being subjective here)

I sat up for a moment, marveling at the feeling of being young again. Not fake young, like the drugs that “reverted” the exterior of your body, but truly young.

*Probably a little to young*

You see, this morning I awoke to find that I not only had a lethargic mind, but an incredibly young body… My body… From about 270 years ago.

You see, somehow I had managed to reenter my body from about kindergarten, with almost three centuries of memories. Foggy, hazy memories, but memories, knowledge and life experiences all the same.

I sat on my bed baffled for a few seconds as I processed everything.

Was I dreaming? No, my mind is too sluggish for that…

In my dreams my thoughts were always snappy and efficient, this was… different.

It was like my brain was half asleep and I needed a dunk in cold water to wake it up…

With a sigh I got out of bed and started to stretch a little bit, getting a feel for my tiny, much younger body. It had been a long time since I had felt this good, this fresh and new. No muscle pain, no joint pain, no scars or things you just had to live with. The medicine in the future was good, very good, of that there was no doubt, but three hundred years on a human body left its marks, despite medicines’ best efforts. The children born at the time of my death would most likely have been able to live a millenia or more, but most of that technology came about after I had lived well into my later years, and it had limited effect on me.

In fact, it almost universally came about after the discovery of a wonderful substance by the name of TLDR87. Something radically simple to make in retrospect, but quite odd in its ingredients and thus was only discovered by accident about 67 years from now, in 2087.

TLDR87 was quite a strange drug. Well, drug is sort of a bad word for it, as it was more like a chemical cocktail that had various effects on the body, the most prominent of which was the drastic increase in IQ. The other effects included were mostly side effects of the things used to make it, and even in my day the science behind why it worked was quite complicated and outright banned in some places due to the unethical nature of some of those effects.

You see, in the early days of the drug, when almost no one was ‘enlightened’, when TLDR87 was given to a patient by a person, the patient would become subservient to the person administering the drug. It was postulated that this was caused by the subconscious knowledge that it was the person who was administering the drug that was responsible for the increase in IQ and mental abilities. This dependency was very very strong and permanent in the early years of the treatment. TLDR essentially reverted the brain back to it’s formative state, and the brain relearned how to do things, much faster and vastly more efficient than it had before. This formative state ended up being centralized on the dependency towards the person who administered the drug. This dependency only grew with the effectiveness of the treatment.