"So... you actually built a time machine??"
Your nerdy childhood friend Alice rolls her eyes.
"Well, not really," she says. "You can't actually travel in time. But this here," she points to a wardrobe-size contraption blinking with lights and packed with wires, "can alter events from the past. Think of it as a corrector, if you will."
"Wow." You look at the sci-fi dream in awe.
"Of course, the use of this stuff can potentially be dangerous. We can never know how a certain event from the past might have influenced our future. Granted, if you, an ordinary person, turned right instead of left one day a year ago, the probability that it would have altered the fate of the whole world is rather low... but it's never zero."
"Yeah, yeah," you say. "I get it, the butterfly effect and all that. But you can't think that my little life would really have that much of an impact on the world, can you?"
"Well, it's unlikely, and that's why I'm allowing you to use the machine. Once. Remember, whatever you change in your past, might change your life forever. Also, it could be almost impossible to revert."
Alice smiles a bit condescendingly. "Think about it for a minute. You're rewriting your past. Moments after the change is made, you'll forget that there had been a change in the first place. It would have always been your past."
You frown, contemplating the paradox until you feel steam rising from your ears. "Okay, whatever. I'm going to change my life for the better anyway."
Your friend nods. "Enter the new data here." She points at an open laptop.
You get to work. You are getting a chance of altering one life event, and you know exactly what you want. After your parents divorced when you were nine, you stayed with your mom. You want that to change. You hated your childhood, spent with a strict, controlling person who policed every snack brought into the house. It cost you years of therapy and battling a difficult relationship with food.
I wanted to have stayed with my dad, you write.
You blink. At first, nothing seems to change. And then suddenly, you feel like your body is inflating. Your previously toned chest gets buried under a layer of flab. Your neck is enveloped in a fatty ring. Your fingers turn chubby. Your legs thicken. Your butt inflates and droops.
New memories fill your brain. Getting to stay with your dad after the divorce. The combination of your dad's guilt about what it had put you through, and his terrible cooking skills, meaning that every other day, he'd get takeout for dinner. Eating fast food a couple times per week. Growing from a thin child into a chubby teenager, and then a fat adult. Habits that you formed deep in childhood never going away: drinking full sugar sodas, never taking the stairs, opting for video games instead of playing basketball. Still visiting your mother from time to time and getting shamed for your figure.
You blink. Your friend Alice is standing before you. You think she was explaining her time machine to you... but you haven't gotten to rewriting your past yet, have you? You scratch your double chin pensively. Absent-mindedly, you think about how your sweatpants are digging into your lower belly. It's probably time to upgrade to 3XL.
"So, what are you going to change?" Alice asks.
You smile, cheeks dimpling. "I had an okay childhood," you say. "Dad was pretty nice. But mom was still such a bitch whenever I visited her. I... I don't want to have those humiliating memories in my head. Like, I get it, Mom, I'm fat. You don't have to be so mean about it."
I wanted my Mom to be nicer to me, you write.
Blink, and you're sitting on a mobility scooter.
Your rolls are spilling everywhere. It's your third scooter, and it's getting a bit snug.
You got your first one when you turned eighteen.
Ever since the divorce, both your parents tried to find a way to buy your affection. And they mostly did it with food. Every other day, Dad would order takeout, and every time you visited Mom, she would prepare a spread worthy of a Thanksgiving. It was no wonder then that your weight quickly soared, climbing through "normal", overweight, and reaching obesity when you were only fourteen. And you only got fatter since then. When you started high school, your walk turned into a waddle, and by the time you were seventeen, walking was becoming a bit too hard altogether. You were so grateful for your first scooter. It made things so much easier - unfortunately, it broke after two years. You simply outgrew it.
You look up, painfully craning your neck and feeling your chins bulge into each other. Before you stands your friend Alice. She's pretty fat herself, and no wonder - your parents would let you invite her over and feed her incessantly when she was there. But she's got nothing on your weight, of course. She barely waddles.
"So," she says, munching on a donut, "what do you want to change in your past?"
You smile dreamily. "My parents were so nice to me after they divorced. I wish they did it when I was even younger."
**
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