Choice?
The setup...
You go to sleep one night, and in your dreams you are in a medium-sized room full of monitor screens. One by one the screens light, showing sequences of events from every year of your life from childhood up to within a few years of the present. Memories come flooding back as you take in all of the many places visited, things done, and people met. Some of the memories are as familiar as a pair of comfy old shoes, and some had been all but lost.
Amid this you gradually become conscious of a chair behind you with various apparati connected to it, including a helmet that would fit comfortably about your head. Another screen beside the chair displays the thing's function and parameters - it will send your mind back through time Quantum Leap-style into your younger self from any point in your past, though no further back than age 10 and no more recently than the previous year. You will take along all your knowledge, experience, and intelligence from the present but will also retain your younger self's immediate memory (all the minutiae that had occurred to that point, so it won't suddenly look like you were possessed by a ghost or something), and your personality will be that of your present self (if it's significantly different from the one you'll be leaping into). As you went to sleep before coming to this place, when you engage the device you will wake up on the chosen day of your past in the body of your younger self.
The instructions go on to explain that once the device in engaged, you will have two options, each with its own stipulations.
>>>Option A aka "Vacation"<<<
1. The quantum-leap will last for one year, from date to date. If you choose to jump back into the younger you of 12 August 1998, you will wake as younger-you that morning and return to the present upon going to sleep the night of 11 August 1999.
-> 1a. On the night the 'leap' is to end, an irresistable sleep will overcome you - there is no way to extend the sojourn.
-> 1b. If you do anything that kills you during the 'leap', it ends and you are returned to the present.
-> 1c. The dates of your departure from present and arrival in the past do not have to line up - if you make the leap from the present on 3 November you will return on the morning of 4 November, no matter what date/month was your destination for the 'leap'.
2. You may take along with you not more than four objects, each of which ~must~ fit wholly and easily into the pocket of a regular pair of jeans.
-> 2a. Any electronic device you take will continue to operate, though unless one of the other objects you chose was a charger or it runs on regular batteries it won't last long. Likewise, if you take a cell phone with you further back than the invention of cell networks, it won't get any connectivity. Likewise you will not be able to use bank/credit cards unless your account already existed in the time to which you 'leap'.
-> 2b. Anything you take with you ~to~ the past will return when the 'leap' is over, but nothing ~from~ the past can be brought back to the present.
3. When you return from the 'leap', it will be to the present that you left. Anything you did 'differently' from the original past does not alter the present to which you return. The entire thing was merely a chance to re-live a year of your life to see what it would be like with all your older self's experience etc.
4. As with the above, while ~you~ will always remember the events from your 'vacation' into the past, no one else in the world will know of it or remember anything other than what had been in your actual past. The "Vacation" option is like jumping into an alternate timeline, rather than straight backward along your own.
>>>Option B aka "Do-Over"<<<
1. There is no return from this option to the present - in this option, your self completely leaves the previous time track and re-establishes itself at the destination point, whenever that might be. As before you retain all your personality experience and so forth, but this time the 'swap' is permanent with no way to ever return to the 'present' that you left. You are literally re-living your life from that point onward.
2. No physical objects may be taken along in this option. Only your mind makes the 'leap'.
3. Obviously unlike the "Vacation" option you will now have to deal with lasting consequence. If you die after making the 'leap' then you die, game over, too bad for you.
4 .This option also allows you to make long-term ~plans~, such as investing in companies that will later be worth billions or possibly creating/inventing something (or patenting an idea) before its "time". You can also carefully plan out how things in life will unfold, and make up for missed opportunities or avoid large mistakes.
5. You will never again have the chance to do the 'leap', and when you finally have re-lived life to the point where previously you went to sleep and got the chance to do it, nothing happens at all. You will continue to live normally until you eventually die.
You go to sleep one night, and in your dreams you are in a medium-sized room full of monitor screens. One by one the screens light, showing sequences of events from every year of your life from childhood up to within a few years of the present. Memories come flooding back as you take in all of the many places visited, things done, and people met. Some of the memories are as familiar as a pair of comfy old shoes, and some had been all but lost.
Amid this you gradually become conscious of a chair behind you with various apparati connected to it, including a helmet that would fit comfortably about your head. Another screen beside the chair displays the thing's function and parameters - it will send your mind back through time Quantum Leap-style into your younger self from any point in your past, though no further back than age 10 and no more recently than the previous year. You will take along all your knowledge, experience, and intelligence from the present but will also retain your younger self's immediate memory (all the minutiae that had occurred to that point, so it won't suddenly look like you were possessed by a ghost or something), and your personality will be that of your present self (if it's significantly different from the one you'll be leaping into). As you went to sleep before coming to this place, when you engage the device you will wake up on the chosen day of your past in the body of your younger self.
The instructions go on to explain that once the device in engaged, you will have two options, each with its own stipulations.
>>>Option A aka "Vacation"<<<
1. The quantum-leap will last for one year, from date to date. If you choose to jump back into the younger you of 12 August 1998, you will wake as younger-you that morning and return to the present upon going to sleep the night of 11 August 1999.
-> 1a. On the night the 'leap' is to end, an irresistable sleep will overcome you - there is no way to extend the sojourn.
-> 1b. If you do anything that kills you during the 'leap', it ends and you are returned to the present.
-> 1c. The dates of your departure from present and arrival in the past do not have to line up - if you make the leap from the present on 3 November you will return on the morning of 4 November, no matter what date/month was your destination for the 'leap'.
2. You may take along with you not more than four objects, each of which ~must~ fit wholly and easily into the pocket of a regular pair of jeans.
-> 2a. Any electronic device you take will continue to operate, though unless one of the other objects you chose was a charger or it runs on regular batteries it won't last long. Likewise, if you take a cell phone with you further back than the invention of cell networks, it won't get any connectivity. Likewise you will not be able to use bank/credit cards unless your account already existed in the time to which you 'leap'.
-> 2b. Anything you take with you ~to~ the past will return when the 'leap' is over, but nothing ~from~ the past can be brought back to the present.
3. When you return from the 'leap', it will be to the present that you left. Anything you did 'differently' from the original past does not alter the present to which you return. The entire thing was merely a chance to re-live a year of your life to see what it would be like with all your older self's experience etc.
4. As with the above, while ~you~ will always remember the events from your 'vacation' into the past, no one else in the world will know of it or remember anything other than what had been in your actual past. The "Vacation" option is like jumping into an alternate timeline, rather than straight backward along your own.
>>>Option B aka "Do-Over"<<<
1. There is no return from this option to the present - in this option, your self completely leaves the previous time track and re-establishes itself at the destination point, whenever that might be. As before you retain all your personality experience and so forth, but this time the 'swap' is permanent with no way to ever return to the 'present' that you left. You are literally re-living your life from that point onward.
2. No physical objects may be taken along in this option. Only your mind makes the 'leap'.
3. Obviously unlike the "Vacation" option you will now have to deal with lasting consequence. If you die after making the 'leap' then you die, game over, too bad for you.
4 .This option also allows you to make long-term ~plans~, such as investing in companies that will later be worth billions or possibly creating/inventing something (or patenting an idea) before its "time". You can also carefully plan out how things in life will unfold, and make up for missed opportunities or avoid large mistakes.
5. You will never again have the chance to do the 'leap', and when you finally have re-lived life to the point where previously you went to sleep and got the chance to do it, nothing happens at all. You will continue to live normally until you eventually die.