Takuto Kimura had seen many dark days in business.
He had survived hostile takeovers, market crashes, and that one time the coffee machine in the office broke and the interns tried to replace it with herbal tea. But nothing—nothing—could compare to the tragedy of watching a brand-new iPhone slowly sink into a puddle of warm baby pee inside a toy tent shaped like a cartoon dinosaur.
Moments earlier, it had all seemed so promising.
"Finally! A chance to contact the outside world!" Takuto whispered, eyes gleaming with desperate hope as he cradled his mother's smartphone like it was the Holy Grail. He had found it hidden in her wallet, nestled between loyalty cards and old tissues—clearly underestimating her digital defense strategy.
He darted into the nearby toy tent like a tiny fugitive, hands trembling with excitement. "If I can just contact Vice President Nakajima, I can initiate a covert operation to restore my adult body!"
Pointing the phone's camera at his squishy, baby-fat-plumped face, he braced for disappointment.
But then—
"Face recognition successful."
His jaw dropped.
"What?!" Takuto gasped, squeezing his cheeks. "Apple's biometric system can actually penetrate baby fat?! Either that or… wait—has my adult face already sagged to toddler proportions? Is that why people kept calling me 'adorable' in board meetings?!"
Still in shock, he opened his email app. His tiny fingers began to tremble as he typed a desperate message to Nakajima:
[Urgent! It's Kimura. I've been cursed. Turned into a child. Please advise.]
But then—tragedy.
His left thumb slipped. Then the right. Then he accidentally sat on the screen.
What Nakajima received was not a plea for help, but:
[ejirj!w shi mc,xza zao yv...]
Three minutes later came the dreaded response:
[Your email has been flagged by the IT department as a potential keyboard cat incident. Please refrain from letting pets access corporate devices.]
Takuto stared at the screen in horror.
"No… no! Curse you, tiny sausage fingers! Curse you, cat memes!"
In frustration, he hurled his baby bottle at the floor, but due to an unfortunate bounce, the nipple rebounded and struck him in the forehead like a rubbery boomerang of doom.
And then, disaster went from digital to… biological.
He paused. Felt a strange warmth.
"No… no, not now—!"
Looking down in dread, he saw it.
The iPhone.
Lying in a reflective puddle.
"Oh dear lord."
"Takuto? Who are you talking to?" came his mother's voice from outside the tent.
Thinking quickly, he threw a stuffed bear on top of the iPhone like a mobster hiding a body under a rug. "N-no one! I'm having a... strategic meeting with the bear!"
She opened the flap and saw the scene: a trembling toddler, a wet phone under a soggy teddy, and a suspiciously shiny puddle on the tent floor.
"Oh dear," his mother said kindly, utterly misunderstanding the situation. "Did little Takuto get so into his game that he forgot to go potty?"
She confiscated the phone with the same loving-yet-deadly efficiency with which one might disarm a toddler holding scissors.
Takuto slumped against the tent wall, defeated. That night, he furiously scrawled in his doodle notebook—his only remaining medium of expression:
"The biggest pain point of the mobile internet age—diapers are not compatible with wireless charging."
The next morning, he rose with a new resolve.
"If digital fails me, I shall turn to analog!"
Thus began his Paper Renaissance.
He drew an entire corporate structure in crayon. The org chart included himself as CEO, his classmate Ai-chan as "Chief Distraction Officer," and his arch-nemesis Matsumoto Jr. as "Unethical Competition."
In the bottom corner, he carefully added a QR code. It was crooked. It was barely legible. But it was there.
He handed the paper to Mrs. Nakajima, who had come to pick up her niece.
"Scan this!" he said, eyes gleaming with hope.
"Oh my gosh!" she gasped, nearly in tears. "Did little Takuto draw a maze? So talented!"
And with that, she stuck it to the fridge with a magnet that said "Live, Laugh, Love."
His rescue message… trapped between a vegetarian curry recipe and a macaroni art portrait of a dog.
He stared at it, utterly hollow inside.
Later That Evening
Seated on the toddler potty, legs dangling, Takuto entered deep contemplation. He had tried tech. He had tried art. But perhaps… he needed to innovate.
Five minutes later, his mother found him attempting to glue pieces of diaper packaging together with his own spit.
"Sweetheart, what are you doing?"
Takuto looked up, completely serious. "Building cloud computing infrastructure."
"…Out of diapers?"
"Yes. It's a hybrid system. Absorbent and scalable."
She gently took away the wet cardboard. "Okay. No more Shark Tank reruns before nap time."
Meanwhile, At Kindergarten
Arts and crafts time had begun. The room smelled faintly of glue sticks and betrayal.
While the other children were cutting out smiling sunflowers and making puppets from paper cups, Takuto was creating a fully operational prototype of a "smart waste management system" using rubber bands, glitter glue, and a suspicious amount of string.
He called it: The DiaperNet.
The idea? Smart diapers that track, alert, and provide analytics.
"It's brilliant," he whispered. "From potty training to real-time reports. I can even build a subscription model—Diaper as a Service."
But before he could pitch it to Yamada-sensei, the worst happened.
Enter: Matsumoto's Son.
In a cruel twist of fate, the reincarnated version of his former business rival, Ryota Matsumoto, had also turned into a toddler—and was now Takuto's desk buddy.
"Wow!" the boy said. "Is little Takuto building a castle?"
He then grabbed Takuto's "Lego keyboard," declared it "under attack," and smashed it to bits with a loud, "RAWR! Dinosaur time!"
Takuto looked at the scattered remains of his F5 and Delete keys. Rage bubbled within him.
"You scammed me in the last life," he growled internally. "And now you're messing with my code?!"
Before he could retaliate with a glue-stick sword, the teacher clapped her hands.
"Children, it's nap time!"
"No!" Takuto screamed (internally again, of course). "You can't schedule rest when I'm on the verge of digital transformation!"
But his protests were ignored. A blanket was tucked over his squirming body. A lullaby was played on loop.
"Defeated… by the biological clock," he whispered, tears slipping down his cheeks. "We used to conquer markets. Now we get timeouts."
And Yet… Hope Endures
Takuto refused to give up.
Each day, he built more from less. Juice boxes became servers. Diapers became data vaults. Play-Doh became… well, Play-Doh, but he used it symbolically to represent "malleable strategies."
One week later, he had a functioning toddler-scale intranet using empty tissue boxes, yarn, and a complicated series of blinking lights (stolen from the Christmas decorations closet).
He even held a presentation for his fellow classmates titled:
"Digital Integration for the Sand Economy."
Yamada-sensei clapped politely. The rest of the kids ate crayons.
But still, a spark of respect was born. Ai-chan began taking notes (okay, she drew hearts). Kenta agreed to partner in "BlockChain" (they literally chained some blocks together). Even Matsumoto's kid began cautiously observing instead of destroying.
And when Takuto finally connected two tin cans with a string and whispered, "Nakajima? Can you hear me?"—he swore, just for a second, there was static on the other end.
That night, while brushing his five remaining baby teeth, Takuto looked into the mirror and gave himself a nod.
"I may be in a onesie. I may be wearing a hat shaped like a bear. I may smell faintly of applesauce and betrayal. But mark my words…"
He raised his toothbrush like a sword.
"…I will digitize this daycare."