“The chain,” I said.

I reached for the clasps. The right one opened easily. I held the chain in front of me with two fingers, like it was something dangerous. I had a strong feeling it was. I set it down on the coffee table.

We both stared at it, with Lucy’s eyes occasionally darting to my face. Every minute or so, one of us would touch my smooth chin. I even brought up the selfie cam on my phone for the first time ever. There was no shadow of the whiskers under the skin. Even the razor burn was gone.

“How—”

“What—”

Those and other single words were the only ones we spoke for at least five minutes. We also threw in such classics as ‘why,' ‘but,’ ‘you,’ and ‘I.’ Neither of us could form a coherent sentence.

“What did it feel like?” Lucy asked the first complete question.

“Hot,” I replied, “Like when I fastened it, but the whole chain, and my face. Or maybe cold.”

I met her gaze.

“You’re wondering what else it can do,” she said.

“Aren’t you?”

“Of course. But, who knows how else it affected you, other than the obvious?”

“I feel fine.”

“We should be careful.”

“Of course.”

There was never any serious doubt that we were going to try it again. We’d do it safely though. We’d be methodical and careful. Surprisingly, we didn’t do any permanent damage. Not then, anyway.

I insisted on being the guinea pig for the evening. My stated logic was that if there were side effects, I was already going to get them, and we needed one of us unaffected to try to find a solution if some cropped up. Since, as a psychiatrist, she was also a medical doctor, she was the logical choice. Not stated was that I didn’t want to risk Lucy. I think she picked that up anyway. 

We discovered a number of things that evening. First, and most obvious, was that the command didn’t have to be a command to change. It could be a command to do something, say something, whatever. That discovery resulted in me making dinner, even though it was her turn. I didn’t mind that because she asked first, and my cooking’s a little better anyway. I told myself I’d resist, but once she told me to make dinner, I just did it. 

I wasn’t without volition. I made a meal that I usually only made for myself, because Lucy didn’t like it. Lucy didn't find that as funny as I did, but was a good sport about it.

There were a lot of other discoveries.

Once I fastened the chain around my neck, Lucy’s commands had no effect until she’d also touched the chain. I could give myself a command right away, though. It was Lucy’s idea to try that. But, if Lucy clasped it around my neck, which didn’t work if I didn’t want her to (it just wouldn’t clasp), my giving myself a command didn’t have any effect.

Whichever of us was the one who put the chain on, it wouldn’t come off until I had fulfilled a command. With a physical change, that could take anywhere from a few seconds, like it had with my beard, up to ten minutes (or longer, as we discovered later). When Lucy told me to make dinner, it stayed locked until the food was on the plates.

Early in the experiments we found that I couldn’t grow back the beard. We tried a lot of different phrasings, but the chain didn’t react. No cold heat, and no unlocking. We did manage to restore my hairline to where it had been in my twenties. Then we couldn’t reverse that, either. 

So, the changes were one way. Once we realized that, we got more careful.

By the end of the evening I had no whiskers, a restored hairline, and my appendectomy scar was gone. I was also an inch shorter. The loss of height didn’t bother me as much as the fact that Lucy didn’t ask me first. After that we agreed on no unapproved changes.

The commands to action made me much more uncomfortable than the physical changes. I wanted to know the limits of that, so I came up with the next experiment. 

I had Lucy order me to call my mother.

That may sound weird, but that was something I was never, ever going to do. She’d done enough damage already, and I saw no reason to give her a chance to do more. Lucy tried to talk me out of it, but I knew it wouldn’t kill me, and it was very important to me to know if the chain could make me do something I absolutely did not want to do.

When she gave me the command, I learned something new. I could feel that I had a choice. I could say no. But, I knew that if I did say no, the chain would never work for me again. It was so weird to have that knowledge dumped into my head. I wasn’t willing to give up the chain yet, so I did it.

I called my mother.

I was the most relieved man on Earth when I got her voicemail. I didn’t leave a message.

That near miss drained me enough that I was ready to be done experimenting for the evening, even though I desperately wanted to map out the thing’s capability further. When I waffled, Lucy settled it by dragging me to bed.

“Or, you could put it on again, and I could tell you to go to bed.”

I declined that generous offer.

🔗

The next day was Friday, and I got very little done. I should have been able to take a half day, based on where I was in my current project, but I barely got where I needed to be by the end of the day. I was an anxious mess until Lucy got home.

She’d stopped on the way home and grabbed curries for us, so that we could dive right in. Since I hadn’t sprouted horns, dissolved into slime, or become a Republican, we decided it was probably okay for her to be on the other side of the testing this time. More accurately, she decided that, and I couldn’t come up with a good reason to deny her.

We learned quite a bit more about the chain’s properties that evening. Lucy had grabbed a notebook at work, and we made notes there. Neither of us were comfortable putting them online, even if we couldn’t articulate why.

One of our first tests showed us that the chain did not have to go around the wearer’s neck. It worked just as well around a wrist, an ankle, or even their waist. Wherever it was placed, it would retract, unnecessary links disappearing, until it was small enough that it couldn't be removed.

The most important thing we learned that evening, though, was that the changes from the previous evening could, in fact, be undone. Changes we made that evening, however, couldn't be. So, there was some delay before a change could be undone, and it was less than twenty-five hours. We both guessed it would be twenty-four.

That discovery let us get a little more adventurous. No, not like that. I had red hair until midafternoon Saturday (we’d guessed wrong. The interval seemed to be about sixteen hours.) Lucy was two inches taller. 

Then there were things we’d never want to do, but we wanted to know if they were possible. The youngest we could make one of us was right around eighteen. The oldest was the age we’d started all this at, so, for me, fifty-three, and, for her, forty-eight. We couldn’t mess with our minds or memories. That one was a big relief. It’s one thing knowing that we wouldn’t do such things to each other. It’s another thing to know that we couldn’t.

By Sunday night, we felt like we had it mapped out, and we finally paused and thought about it. Not the details, but the big picture.

“Magic is real,” Lucy was the one to say it out loud.

“And we have some,” I replied.

I didn't want to say it aloud, but I couldn't help but wonder. Could this fix us?