I wake to hear someone calling my name. My eyes flutter open, the light outside blinding me momentarily. I am extremely confused, why is my bed so hard? Why am I even sitting? I am supposed to be sleeping in my hotel bed, waiting for the alarm to ring so that I could start getting ready. What is happening?

I look up to see a woman. She has black hair, tied back in a ponytail. Her face is pointed and she has a mean gleam in her eyes. She seems to be enjoying waking me up from my restless sleep. As I took in my surroundings, I saw my hotel room replaced by a – playground? The woman, stood at the front of a group of children who were all looking at me curiously, making faces and then giggling and pointing at me. I assumed she was their teacher. But even so, why was she disturbing me?

“What did I tell the class about separating from the group John?”,the teacher started, looking straight at me.

“John? I am Jack Parsons. Who is John? And why are you asking me?”, I replied.

“Really now, you should be ashamed of yourself! Not only did you break the rules, but also are you now trying to cause more trouble by pretending to be someone else”, the teacher told me, her eyes wide and her expression showing anger, “Enough is enough! You will come with me to the school bus right now so that we can leave. We are already half an hour late.”

She went to pull me up by my hands but I resisted, thrashing and twisting. It was then that I really took in my body. I was shocked, absolutely horrified. My momentary lapse of movement allowed the teacher to pull me up and towards the bus. I could only be lead by her, too stunned to resist.

What shocked me was this – my 83 year old, frail, weak body had been replaced by this young body. I assumed that I was the same age as the other children, around 9 or 10 years, trailing behind us. This was absolutely mind blowing. My experiment had actually worked. Though it had worked a few years too late, it still had!

See the thing is that when I was in my fifties, I realized that I was too useful for the world. I was a pioneer in the field of technology and science, my inventions revolutionary and my theories and experiments completely ingenious. So, in order to ensure that my legacy lived on, I decided to become my own legacy. I withdrew from public life under the guise of old age, while working tirelessly in private to create a technology that would transfer my mind and soul into another body during the last moments of my life. It would secure my position in the world future while making sure that no suspicions arose.

However, though I had managed to make such a machine, it did not work. The calculations were all correct, the measurements all precise, but still there was some missing element that prevented it from working. I spent months looking through the machine, trying to think of what was missing, but I came up empty handed. I had eventually given up, sending the machine to a secret location storing all of my life’s works.

Eventually life moved on and with it, so did I. The entire plan lay forgotten in the back of my mind. But now, here in this body, I realized that I had succeeded. And the moment I saw the words on the billboard through the bus window, I understood the thing that had been missing the entire time.

The words on the billboard read, “Jack Parsons dies at 83. Leaves behind no legacy.“