The Sins of Time
Time was shattering into thousand sparkling fragments, he thought. Jared dug into his pocket and retrieved a rectangle of metal spiderwebbed in gold and silver circuitry, more reminiscent of a miniature motherboard than the key it was. He turned it over. It was warm, almost hot, though it sat in the cool of his pocket most of the day. It was living metal, burning from within. His arm twitched to cock back and catapult it as far as his strength allowed, but he wouldn't - no matter how much death it caused.
One hand gripped the key and the other stroked the chassis of the machine. It was his paradise. His purgatory. To the eye, it was a car, room enough for one. Squeezing into the seat, he inserted the key into the dashboard, thumbing on the power. Screens stuttered to life, showing the disasters that ravaged the world over. Not that he needed it. The roiling ocean below, with their thirty foot waves and the sharp taste of electricity in the air told him all. He stopped counting the times he watched the world end years ago. There were only so many times you could destroy the universe before you became numb to the final eve of existence.
The fear, the need to run, was a fist squeezing his heart of courage. He always ran. The machine made him this way. Slap in the coordinates and the machine whisked him to anywhen, except the future. There wasn't one anymore. He'd destroyed that on his first jaunt. The machine ripped a hole in time and space to make the trip. Only the hole was a vortex, a hunger that sucked everything into it, from all dimensions simultaneously. All of creation, not only the universe, but all of the multi-verse, as some called it, was being inexorably crushed.
In his naiveté, he jumped to when he devised the machine and persuaded himself not to build it. He saved the future. Or so he thought. But the pull of travel was too great. He succumbed to its call, no matter the consequences. It was his meth and he lived for the fix. Even now, he craved nothing more than to slide along the wings of time, to feel the rush and the power that was his alone.
But he wasn't going to. The flight wasn't in him anymore. The screams of the inhabitants of the countless worlds seared his veins. No more. He once solaced himself that his will was too weak and his sins too strong to set things aright. He was not that man anymore. He locked in the coordinates and activated the machine. As it whirred to life, he hit the buttons that would overload the machine in transit. Now activated, it would make the trip, detonating on arrival, destroying everything within a hundred yards. He locked in the coordinates of his past self’s location, at the moment he discovered time travel. They would meet one last time.
He closed his eyes and waited for eternity to take him.