Kirk: I suppose the first crucial minute will be when our youngest crew member returns to... to the moment of birth.
Spock: That will take place, taking into account a rapid increase in our regression corresponding to our increasing speed, in approximately eighteen minutes, thirty-five seconds, Captain. However, that will not be the most crucial time.
Kirk: Explain, Mr Spock.
Spock: Before that point is reached, we will all have returned to infantilism. And this means means that we are losing our knowledge concomitant with our years, and both at an alarming rate. It is possible that we will be too young, mentally, to operate the Enterprise at the crucial stage in our interuniversal passage...
Michael? Are you there, Michael? It's Ruby. I've come to say goodbye. Ah. There you are. I was almost too late, wasn't I? Soon you'll be gone, too. Shhh, shhh... wonder what's in your head. What's left of that brilliant mind? So much information in a brain too underdeveloped to make use of it. Why don't I take a peek inside? Oh, it's all pictures and noises. Is that Peter St John I see? Forget him, Michael. Look! Look what you made! You're the last of the human race! Your dream has eaten you whole! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE!
You don't understand, sir: this place is lethal to him. If we leave him here, he's going to keep getting younger. His body will start to shrink. In a few years, he'll have to go through puberty again - backwards. Can you imagine that? His pubic hairs will retract into his body, his gonads will rise, and he'll find himself in the soprano section of the school choir. He'll carry on growing smaller and stupider until some obstetrician pushes his little fat blue screaming body into his mother's womb, where he'll pend nine months struggling to split himself in a spermatozoa and an ovum, and he'll end his days swimming around as a sperm in someone's testicular sac.
—Kryten, Red Dwarf: Backwards
How old are you now, Miss Elphaba? Eleven? Twelve? How long do you think it'll take me to drink up all your remaining years and rendify you down to infancy? Perhaps I'll give you a minute to savour the helplessness of your predicament before I take what's left, before I let you feel what it's like to melt down into preborn cells. Won't that be a sticky ending?
—Morrible, The Land of What Might-Have-Been
I must find a way to correct Tommy of Earth, Only Much Smaller's aging process. If his reverse aging continues, he may disappear completely!
—Dinko, Pet Alien, "The Boy Who Cried "Waaah!""
God: You're born weak and frail. As time passes, you grow stronger. Beloved companion spop into existence and stay with you. Your body gets more beautiful andmore perfect, and then you spend years among lovers, and then finally you begin to grow smaller, overtaken by wonder and joy as your mind slowly fades into a contented oblivion, rocked forever to sleep in the arms of your mother.
Woman: That's the opposite of what happens. That's life run in reverse.
God: HOLY LIVING SHIT THE TAPE IS IN BACKWARDS.
Woman: That's the opposite of what happens. That's life run in reverse.
God: HOLY LIVING SHIT THE TAPE IS IN BACKWARDS.
