At some point, Descartes must have philosophically screwed something up big time. Living was much simpler than “cogito ergo sum.” More like “I am me. Therefore, I must potty” — “sum ergo fart,” the complete and total state of being in every moment awake and asleep.

For those of you who are wondering: five fingers, five toes, two arms, two legs, one head, two nipples and most importantly one penis (though the possibilities if I’d been born in a new body with four or five… oh the opportunities). How I had been reborn human hundreds if not millions of light years away from where all humans had died was a mystery that I spent almost no time pondering.

Instead, my life consisted in examining my microcosmic world, four delicately barred wooden walls with a carved horse motif which kept me imprisoned. Day after day, I found myself on the luxurious fur of some noble indeterminate animal that I lay, slept, and shat. A window filled the room with sunlight from which I could tell that the world had a white-yellow sun much like the earth. Rays of light fell on my crib… I mean prison… and had I been able to roll over, I could have slept happy baby sleep under brightly warming solar beams. Over my head was a wooden toy that gently circled just out of reach in the faint breeze that wafted into the room when the window was opened. Oh, how I hated this toy. Always there, but my chubby baby arms unable to bat it away, or make it spin or twinkle faster.

Whenever I cried, which was surprisingly often. I fed upon, and a pair of mind-bogglingly massive breasts. At first, I asked the magnificent breasts, “Are you my mother?” but my question only came out as more cries and baby noises that were quickly silenced by stuffing my mouth full of nipple. And maybe had the cloth of my diaper changed.

Other than my attempts to talk, I was an oddly quiet baby, always studying the world around me, and eventually, I clued into the fact that while the woman with the massive mammaries fed me, she didn’t seem to care for me. Instead, the person who was always hovering, always picking me up and cooing at me, trying to tickle me and make me laugh was a smaller, much more conservatively chested, much more wealthily dressed woman. I from my limited baby senses, I liked the way she looked, and I enjoyed the way she smelt. From the perspective of an adult stuffed against his will, by the legal team of a sloppy intergalactic corporation, I decided that she must be “mom” and I might as well bond.

As to Dad, he didn’t stop by much. It took me a little longer to figure out who he was. My first clue was that he was dressed well. Then when a well-dressed guy came into the nursery where they kept me and picked me up and only laughed when I peed all over him, then took off his shirt and began to canoodle with my Mom, I figured I had a likely candidate. Still, I was new to this culture and traditions could be relatively liberal. This could still in theory — as unlikely as it seemed — be the pool guy or the plumber. I held out designating him as “Dad” until I saw him with interact with “Mom” a few more times.

I was not inactive. Sitting alone on my fur. When nobody was around but the accursed mobile overhead, I realized that from my celestial vision of the elements clashing across the planet, that I had been born upon a world of magic, and I wanted me some of that.

I spent day after day, saying things like “Status,” “Info,” “Home Page,” “Strength plus 1,” “Increase Intelligence,” and “By the power of Greyskull” in my head to absolutely no effect. I meditated for day after day. I felt deep into my chakras — whatever the hell those were — looking for the seed of power. And I tried to see with my inner eye. But it was all for nothing. Days turned into more days, which turned into weeks, which eventually turned into months, and all I got was the occasional “Who’s a grumpy baby.”

Oh, that’s right. I was making headway in learning the language. Who’s the man? This baby is, that’s who. I got Mommy and Daddy in like a couple days after my consciousness was reborn. After that, the vocabulary just kept coming. It surprised me. In college, I’d been forced to learn Spanish, and I’d tried to pick up French for a trip once. Both hadn’t stuck. But now as a newborn, the words were just flowing like magic into my synapse.

It occurred to me that the brain of a newborn is small, and busy building neurons all the time as it grows and learns, and yet here I was with a complete consciousness and personality. Learning language, crying, and pooping made sense. Being unable to communicate, made sense. But if I had the full thoughts of an adult male, why couldn’t I at least speak English? Why couldn’t I at least co-ordinate my hand and leg motions? I’d hardly been an athlete when I’d been alive, but right now I was unable to roll over or control my bowels. So the question of where were my adult thoughts originating from?

There seemed to be three answers to this question.

The first was that I was still on earth and just happened to be completely and utterly insane. If that was the case, it made a lot of sense. As an atheist, I didn’t believe in reincarnation, and the fact that I’d had done just that had been bothering me. If I was bonkers I might as well just enjoy the ride. I hadn’t been getting a lot of action my life over the past few years Who'd have thought that it would take some sort of forgotten hiking accident and a delusion about the end of the world to reveal my true fetish of sitting around in a diaper and having a massive fantasy tit stuffed in my mouth a couple of times a day. I hadn’t been aware I’d had this kink, but who knows how crazy people think.

The second possibility was that everything around me was real, but that somehow my reincarnated consciousness was separate and yet connected to my physical this world born consciously. As an example of this, with my adult earth brain, I could will my new-born head to turn, and my baby’s body head would move, but without the coordination of an adult. When I tried to talk in English, it came out in crying and gibberish, except 1) when I spoke the few words in the native lingo I knew and 2) when I spoke (to myself in private) the English, Spanish or French versions of the native words I’d learned.

This led me to believe that either the body I was inhabiting was not quite human, in that it had a much higher developed mental facility, useful for processing past lives of reincarnated spirits — considering the swirling mass of souls floating above the planetary atmosphere, this was possible. Or… and this got me excited… Magic. That a baby’s mind just could not processes the critical thought capabilities of a lifetime of experience, and so the 'me' that was 'myself' was somehow stored outside my new baby body but linked.

Oh… by the way. I hadn’t let Mommy and Daddy know I could speak. I hadn’t even said those two simple words. It was too soon. Way too soon. I was a careful and calculating three months old. I hadn’t paid attention during developmental psychology, but there was one thing I knew for sure. In primitive cultures, when you are defenseless — and being unable to roll over was the very definition of helpless — it is best to be under-estimated than burned at stake for being a demon. I would watch and wait, and would only talk when my parents started worrying that I hadn’t begun to jabber yet and not one moment sooner.