Time Machine: A Terrible Idea

A man builds a time machine. It drives him to suicide.

I’m sitting at a desk in a hotel in London. In front of me is a hypodermic needle and enough synthetic opioid to put me to sleep permanently. Yes, it’s come to this. But don’t cry for me. I haven’t been good. My death will make the world a slightly better place.

It’s best if I start at the beginning.

My wife Katrina and I used to have the most terrible blazing rows. Now, I can hardly even remember what they were about. A conversation would turn into a debate, and just when I’d think we were on stable ground, the debate would turn into a screaming match. 

I can’t put my finger on quite when I began to hate her, but by the time I left, I hated her with a passion. Neither of us had any respect for the other. None at all. Even so, I kept thinking we could get back on track somehow. 

I don’t know why I thought that. All evidence was against it. 

We had no children. She didn’t want any. We did have a beautiful house together, and a business, and I definitely didn’t want to lose those.

Was the situation my fault? I’m not sure. Perhaps, but it wasn’t until we had been together for six long years that I took the step that I can never undo, the thing that forces me to conclude that I am possessed by a deep and driving evil.

But none of that is why I am going to end my life after I have finished writing this account. No, the reason I cannot go on living is because I am no longer truly in possession of my own life. I am a pointless relic. An artefact that should not exist.

Now I am completely sure that if I had only got off the booze, I really could have sorted things out. It was just too easy to drink, instead. Drinking took away the pain. But anyway, none of that matters now.

You may laugh when I tell you what our business was, considering I’ve just explained that I was a drunk who hated my wife. We made custom wheelchairs for the disabled. Katrina handled the sales and the clients, and I made the wheelchairs.

Everything was going well till one of our wheelchairs drove a man named Rory Sandhurst down some steps. Fortunately he didn’t die, but he did break a leg. He sued us, of course, and we become engaged in an endless legal battle.

The worry of it consumed me. Katrina wanted to settle with him, but I refused. I wasn’t going to give away money that I had worked so hard to make. And yet, truth be told, I knew the whole thing was my fault. I had been drunk when I assembled the brakes on his chair. I can still remember thinking, in my drunken state, that maybe what I was doing wasn’t quite right, but then I thought, “nah, it’ll be all right”.

Stupid, stupid.

Instead of facing up to the consequences of my actions, I took to going for long walks with our dog, Ben. Ben was a border collie and he loved to run, out on the hills, although he was starting to become a little wary of me, after I’d shouted at him in a drunken stupor a few times too often.

Even Ben sided with Katrina.

It was a warm summer’s day when I found the box. Two days earlier there had been an absolutely torrential downpour, and it must have washed away the earth that covered it. I spotted something glinting at the foot of a cliff, mostly buried, and I took a stick and started digging it out.

It was made of metal and was of modern construction. It didn’t look like it had been buried for all that long. Back in the converted garage where I worked, which I referred to as “the lab”, I tried to open it, but it was firmly locked.

I thought about looking up lock-picking videos but a drunk has no time for subtlety. Instead I drilled the lock out.

Inside was an astonishing collection of papers. There were reproductions of ancient alchemical writings that I could make no sense of, and photographs of some blue thing with wires attached to it, but in amongst them I found a little book, hand-written, which seemed vaguely coherent.

I read it bit by bit over the next few days. Whoever had written it seemed in a kind of ecstasy of agony. He kept referring to some unmentioned and seemingly unmentionable sequence of events which he insisted “must happen” and would spell his death. Whatever these events were, he was apparently resigned to them.

This I gathered from reading between the lines, and from odd sentences here and there. It wasn’t the main subject of the little book. The main subject of it, I slowly realised, was the construction of a time machine. It was an instruction book for building a time machine, written by an individual who seemed in the process of losing his mind.

I had no way of knowing whether the instructions could actually work. That goes without saying. Probability and common sense seemed against it, but there is a perverse streak in my character that delights in doing whatever seems the unlikeliest and stupidest thing to do, and I decided to follow the book’s instructions.

I began to gradually assemble the machine it described, in the lab, next to my wheelchair parts.

The entire machine was to be scarcely bigger than a washing machine, but just big enough for a man to fit into, not that I actually intended to ever subject myself to the machine.

I began to spend more and more time on the machine and less and less time on my actual work. Katrina got angry with me for missing deadlines and disappointing customers, who were often in something of a fix and needed our wheelchairs urgently, but with the bloody-mindedness of an alcoholic, I ignored her. We were arguing all the time anyway. At that stage it didn’t much matter to me what the arguments were about.

Sometimes she’d barge into the lab and demand to know what I was actually doing, since I didn’t seem to be making much progress, but I just told her I was working on a machine to help me build wheelchairs more efficiently.

Even though the book appeared to have been written by a man with a tenuous grasp on sanity, and the writing was all over the place, nevertheless there was method in the madness. The book called for a series of experiments, where each stage of the machine was to be thoroughly tested before moving onto the next phase of construction.

I planned the first experiment in actual time travel in a spirit of great drunken excitement. The book called for a digital clock, or any other device capable of remembering the time and date, to be placed in the machine. When the machine would be activated, the clock would be sent backwards in time to a point three days earlier.

I planned the experiment for the 19^th of July, and for the clock I decided to use an old Nokia phone. On the 16^th of July I opened the door of the machine and found there a precise replica of the phone I already possessed, with the date set three days in advance.

The experiment had succeeded. Or rather, it would succeed, in three days.

I carefully compared the phone I had taken from the machine with the one I already had. There could be no doubt about it: the phones were identical. They even both had the same little scratches on their cases, in the exact same positions.

You can imagine that this set me wondering. What would happen if, in three days, I didn’t perform the experiment at all? The phone had appeared only because, three days hence, I would send it backwards in time. What if I decided not to do that?

Can the future change the present? Can the immediate past cease to exist, and all the joy and struggle that took place in it evaporate like water in a dish left out on a sunny day?

But the book cautioned against trying such a thing with all kinds of dire warnings. 

That night I went to bed by myself after Katrina had given me a piece of her mind, in a state between hopeful excitement and mental turmoil. The question of what would happen if, in three days, I did not send the phone back in time, really bothered me.

Around three in the morning, the answer hit me. Yes, there is a kind of fate, and there are fates that we cannot avoid. I was going to send the phone back in time in three days. That was inevitable now.

Somehow that allowed me to finally rest, even though I was wrong about it, and I gradually fell asleep dreaming of all the things that I was going to do with the machine. I wouldn’t tell anyone about the box, or the book it had contained. No, I would take credit for inventing the time machine, since the inventor had made it clear that he would soon be dead anyway, and by the time I found the box, must already have long since died. 

I would become the most famous scientist who had ever lived. Katrina would love me again, and would become filled with admiration for me. Rory Sandhurst would be easily paid off with all the money I would make.

Three days later I placed the phone, the original, in the machine and activated it. When I opened the door, the phone had gone. The copy, which I held in my hand, the phone that had gone backwards through time and had suddenly appeared three days earlier, had in effect become the original.

I regarded the machine with satisfaction. I had three or four whiskies inside me and I felt almost a sense of euphoria that only partly came from the successful completion of the experiment.

Even then, I remember suddenly feeling an odd pang of anxiety, as if something deeply unpleasant, perhaps even evil, awaited me in the near future. Was there really such a thing as fate? I quickly shook the feeling off.

At that stage, the machine was far from complete. It wasn’t powerful enough to send anything backwards in time much bigger than a phone, and it was a chaotic mess of wires and tubes and software. In its current state, it was a miracle it worked at all. I knew I had a great deal of work ahead of me. The machine had to be rationalised, stabilised, and ultimately improved.

Only when it had been made robust and could transport something the size of a human being would I announce my discovery to the world.

Increasingly I was thinking that announcing the discovery might not even be the way to go. What could a man do, in possession of a time machine? There was the obvious possibility of sending lottery numbers back to myself in the past, but that seemed silly and tasteless. I didn’t want to be known as a lottery winner. Who would respect me then? I thought about sending stock market information back to myself. I could become the world’s greatest stock trader without much effort.

Neither appealed to me as much as being seen as a great scientist. I only worried that someone could somehow uncover the true source of my apparent genius, which was of course, the metal box that I’d found through pure luck.

It seemed to me that the matter required a great deal of careful thought. Unfortunately I wasn’t so keen on careful thought that I was willing to stop drinking.

I was tinkering around in the lab, sipping whisky and whistling to myself when it happened. The large metal enclosure that formed the transportation chamber of the machine was closed and, I thought empty. I began to hear an odd clanking sound, exactly like someone trying to attract attention, and I quickly traced it to the metal box. 

I almost didn’t open it. I was afraid of whatever might be in there, but as usual alcohol came to my aid, and I flung open the door with a devil-may-care attitude.

A man fell out of the box, groaning. But not just any man. No, that man was none other than myself.

“What the hell is this?” I shouted.

He stood up stiffly and held up his hands in a gesture that was clearly intended to calm me down. I knew that gesture well. I was in the habit of using it on my wife regularly.

“Pete,” he said, “you’re a genius and in three weeks you’re going to send yourself back in time. That’s why I’m here.”

He slurred his words quite a bit and was clearly even more drunk than I was myself.

As the truth of the matter dawned on me, I began to laugh.

“You’re me!” I said.

“That, I am.” he said.

Then the sheer oddness of the situation washed over me, and my laughter faded.

“My God, this is weird.” I said, looking him up and down.

In some ways I was pleasantly surprised by my appearance. I was far cooler than I’d imagined. On the other hand, my face showed clear signs of alcohol abuse; signs which I’d somehow managed to ignore in the mirror.

“Tell me about it.” he said, rhetorically.

“You can’t stay here for three weeks.” I said.

“Actually, I can.” he said. “You’ve already thought this through, in the future. We’ll take it in turns to use the house. The critical thing is, our wife must never see both of us at the same time. We’ll put a mat and some blankets down on the floor and take it in turns to sleep here.”

“You’re not sleeping with my wife!” I said.

“Pete,” he said, “I’m you. Take some time to digest it. In three weeks you’ll go into the machine and come back here, and I’ll take over. There’ll only be one of us again. We’ve just got to get through three weeks.”

I was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I didn’t much like the idea of this twin of mine being around my wife or, as he put it, “taking over” my life. I hated my wife, yes, but I also loved her. Besides of which, I felt distinct pangs of jealousy. The problem was, he had an iron-clad argument in favour of his proposal: he was simply a future version of me. Whatever he experienced, I would soon experience.

“Why did you send yourself back a whole three weeks?” I asked in exasperation. “A day would have proven the point more than adequately.”

“Because you’re running out of money, my friend,” he said, “and I’ve got this.”

He produced a phone from his pocket and scrolled through a list of figures.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Bitcoin prices for the next three weeks.” he said. “With this, in three weeks of trading, we can easily make a million.”

That brought a smile to my face, and I began to laugh again. He laughed too. I put my arm around his shoulders in brotherly affection, and he put his around mine.

“Then let’s get to work.” I said, in-between peals of euphoric laughter.

I must be honest; the jealousy and the feeling of unease didn’t go away. I’d be lying if I said it did. He was me, yes, but he was also, for those three weeks at least, an independent human being. I started to deliberately pick arguments with Katrina just so future Pete, as I called him, would have to sleep on the couch. I was aware, obviously, that he represented my future, and that I was only forcing myself to sleep on the couch three weeks hence, but I found it very hard to fully apply the dictum of “do unto others as you would have done to you” to him, even though he was me.

In three weeks I would get into the machine, a million or more quid richer, and send myself back in time three weeks, armed with the Bitcoin data. Then our positions would be reversed. I would be the traveller from the future, and he would be the present version of me; the one that receives the unexpected visitor.

Except next time, he, or I, depending on how you look at it, would be expecting the visit of my future self. Or would he? Wasn’t I now partially stuck in some kind of infinite loop?

That idea made my head spin, and future Pete and I took to discussing it earnestly. 

He certainly wasn’t aware of being stuck in any kind of loop. As far as he could tell, this was the first time he’d ever visited the past. That gave us a certain amount of consolation, but I also felt somewhat angry at him for not having thought the possibility through.

Of course, he’d jumped into the time machine with his Bitcoin data in a drunken semi-stupor. Typical.

Two and a half weeks passed by pleasantly enough, in spite of my reservations. We actually got on like a house on fire, and seemed to know each other’s thoughts. After a week had passed we sent next door’s cat back a week in time, which meant a cat appeared not long after my future self had appeared. 

That cat ended up being our undoing.

But no, I’m lying, even now. 

It goes without saying that we were both somewhere between tipsy and drunk most of the time, and I don’t doubt that was the real cause of the problem.

We were animatedly discussing a proposed new configuration mechanism at one end of the shed, only a few days before the deadline when I was supposed to go back in time to three weeks earlier, and we happened to have a brilliant idea. We both thought of it at the same time. We both quickly rushed to the machine to see if our idea would work, but the cat got under my feet—or rather, I just didn’t see it—and I went head first into the still-exposed workings of the machine while carrying a large box of tools.

My future self consoled me, and assured me that no lasting damage was done. We would simply have to make some minor repairs and do some testing.

But it quickly became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to complete all the necessary tests by the deadline.

“We’ll just postpone it by a week.” I said. “We’ll set the machine to send me back to the time you arrived, as before, but I’ll travel back four weeks instead of three.”

“We can’t do that.” my future self said. “It would create a paradox. You know it. I have no memory of the extra week of testing, because we don’t do it.”

“I’m not risking my neck getting into a machine that’s not completely tested.” I said. “It might mangle me. Or beam me into outer space or something.”

“Don’t be stupid.” said future me. “It’ll either work or it won’t, but I’m sure it will. If you don’t go back, the consequences could be dire. We could end up creating some kind of terrible paradox.”

I knew he was right. I just didn’t want to accept it. The prospect of the machine malfunctioning terrified me.

He saw the expression on my face—he was exquisitely attuned to my moods in spite of being half-drunk—and said, reassuringly, “We haven’t got any choice, but it’ll be OK, you’ll see. There’s really nothing to be scared of.”

And then he went off to spend the evening with my wife and trade Bitcoin.

I set to work repairing the machine but I felt a profound sense of distractedness. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I’d already put in a full day’s work on the machine anyway, aside from an hour when I was tinkering with wheelchairs, trying to do as little as possible on the business to keep Katrina from becoming suspicious. After a while I gave up and I let my mind run on the thing that was bothering me.

What I was wondering was, what would happen to me if the machine malfunctioned?

I started reading the book again, and making some calculations. There was a lot of information in that little book, and some of it had gone over my head. As I studied and calculated, a startling possibility began to emerge. It seemed as though, were the machine to malfunction while I was in it, instead of sending me back in time it would instead create a duplicate.

A version of me would appear three weeks in the past, as we knew, but I myself wouldn’t actually go anywhere. Or at least, another version of me would remain in the present.

Were that to happen, of course there would then be two of us. The future me that had appeared almost three weeks earlier would not, after all, be simply myself in another timeline, but would be an actual copy of myself, like an identical twin who had stolen my memories.

The idea sent a chill down my spine.

I continued to verify my calculations over the following three days. Future me could tell something was up with me, but that idiot just assumed I was nervous about getting into the machine before we had been able to fully verify that all damage had been repaired.

He was happy that I volunteered to remain in the shed in the evenings, letting him sleep in the house with Katrina. I told him I wanted to carry on with the repairs, but instead I spent two more evenings checking my conclusions. 

I got into agonies over the question of what would happen if I got into the machine at the appointed time, versus what would happen if I didn’t. 

If I were to get into the machine, there was a high chance that it would actually work. Things would go back to normal, except, I’d be rich. But there was also a significant chance that I wouldn’t go anywhere at all. The machine would only create a duplicate of me, and that duplicate was the very man who was now in the house with my wife.

If I didn’t get into the machine, well, it seemed most likely that I’d simply be stuck in my present timeline, so again I would, in effect, be stuck with a duplicate version of myself.

I checked and rechecked my calculations endlessly, and I performed numerous tests on the machine, which returned inconsistent results. The thing definitely wasn’t functioning quite as it had done previously, even after we’d made all possible repairs. We had missed something.

By the time the evening of the day arrived when I was supposed to go back in time, I had developed a somewhat irrational presentiment that the machine would, in fact, malfunction.

This fiend in human form who had claimed to be me, was in fact probably a duplicate of me. My certainty was increased by the fact that he kept passing off all inconsistent test results as “nothing to worry about”.

I started to think he knew the situation just as well as I did myself. If I was right, the logical thing for him to do would be to simply seal up the door of the machine after I’d got in it, and wait for me to die. Then he could dispose of me at his leisure. Perhaps he could even somehow configure the machine to send me straight into the vacuum of outer space, where I would suffer a hideous death and would never be found by anyone.

And yet, in spite of all these thoughts, when the hour came for me to make the journey to three weeks earlier, I was still unresolved as to what to do about it.

It was only when he smilingly told me to get into the machine that my resolve finally stiffened. This vile oaf thought he could steal my wife, my house and my business and simply dispose of me like so much trash. It was obvious to me, all of a sudden, from his demeanour. 

I felt a searing hatred of this imposter who planned to steal my life.

“Let’s have one last drink first.” I said.

“Now you’re talking.” he said.

We broke out a small bottle of whisky and poured the majority of it into two glasses.

“I’ll fetch ice from the house.” he said.

“Don’t bother.” I said. “Down the hatch, a drink for the road so to speak, and I’ll be on my way.”

“As you wish.” he said.

I waited till I felt the liquor warm my arteries, all the while nurturing a burning hatred which I could barely conceal. Then, when he was finishing his glass, I took a screwdriver from a toolbox and plunged it into his neck.

I swear he didn’t suspect a thing until the very moment I drove the screwdriver into him.

Then he looked at me with a beseeching expression, as if to say “why?”, and fell off his chair, sprawling out on his back on the floor.

Blood spurted out in great gushes. A pool of it began to collect on the floor around him. I had to step back to avoid getting it on my shoes.

While I was standing there looking down at him slowly dying, I wondered how best to dispose of him. Perhaps, I thought, I could somehow use the time machine. Maybe send his corpse back to prehistoric times.

It was only as his breathing ceased and his eyes glazed that a brilliant idea struck me with the force of divine revelation. At least, I thought at the time that it was a brilliant idea.

Suppose I were to simply disappear. Take a plane to Spain, perhaps, and never go back. My wife would find my body. She would call the police, and they wouldn’t be able to find any sign of anyone ever having been in the lab other than me and Katrina, who occasionally entered to nag me about wheelchairs. Most likely they would conclude she had murdered me, and that stupid hag would spend the next twenty years in prison. At worst they would consider it an accident, and either way I would be legally dead.

There was enough money in the Bitcoin account now to last me the rest of my life, quite easily. Our plan had succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. I would never have to work on another wheelchair and my debts and the demands of my clients would be solely my wife’s problem.

Of course I would have to go and collect my passport from the house. Then a further delicious thought occurred to me. If I went back into the house now, Katrina would end up telling the police she had seen me after the time that the police coroner would conclude I had died. That would absolutely make her look guilty.

I almost skipped back to the house, feeling as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

“You look happy.” said Katrina, when I entered the house.

She seemed in a good mood, so I presumed future me had managed to avoid getting into any arguments with her that day.

“I am happy.” I said.

“Have you finished the wheelchair for Mr. Denning?”

I almost said, “who?” but then it came back to me.

“Oh, yes.” I said. “Exactly. It’s all done.”

“Can I see it?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.” I said. “I was thinking, how about we have a little drink and watch a film?”

“Pete, you’re already drunk as a newt.” she said.

“Then no drink, just a film.” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

She put her arms around me. How I hated her! But I was so happy, I positively beamed at her.

“You’ve earned it.” she said, and quite unexpectedly, she kissed me.

We passed a convivial enough evening. There were times when I almost thought I might be making a mistake, but then all of our horrible arguments came back to my mind, and I steadied my resolve.

Not until around nine o’clock did I announce that I had to go and do something in the lab for about an hour. I told her I’d forgotten one last finishing touch to Denning’s wheelchair.

I took my passport, my driving licence, the Bitcoin drive and some cash, and I headed into the lab. I smashed up the time machine pretty thoroughly. I put the book back in its box with the other papers. Then I went to the bottom of the garden, climbed over the fence that backed onto a public footpath, and marched off in the direction of the location where I’d discovered the box in the first place, carrying a trowel with me. I wanted to rebury that thing, just in case I happened to need it again in the future—a possibility which I considered unlikely, but one never knows.

I was confident no-one had seen me. It was dark, and the hills were deserted. After burying the box, I threw the trowel carelessly into a gulley and headed for the town. In the town I took a taxi to the airport, and in the airport I took a plane for Paris. I wanted to make sure no-one could track me, although I thought my plan pretty watertight.

In Paris I spent the night in a hotel, and the next day I hired a car and drove to Spain. Of course, I had no intention of ever returning the hire car. I would soon be officially dead, and dead people have no responsibilities. That was what I liked the most about it.

The subsequent two years seemed to go by in the twinkling of an eye. I drank, I visiting exotic clubs, and I gambled.

I bought myself a set of fashionable suits and a sports car.

In theory my lifestyle should have been difficult from a legal perspective, but I found that with money, bending the law is easier than you’d imagine.

I never thought of Katrina at first. I told myself I was living the high life, and I was happy, but the truth was, I wasn’t very happy.

At night, alone in the luxurious apartment I rented, whenever I finally tried to sleep, the thought started to haunt me that I had become nothing but a pathetic loser, who would one day keel over from a stroke or a heart attack and be missed by no-one.

About a year in, I began to try to find out what had happened to Katrina. Was she in prison? But I couldn’t find anything about the business of my death at all; not a whisper.

My drinking got completely out of control. One night, after passing out in a taxi and being left propped in my doorway, covered in my own vomit, by a disgruntled taxi driver, who also took my wallet, I decided something had to change.

I decided to return to England and find out what had happened to Katrina. I had to know. The memory of our arguments had faded and I had begun to regard her with a kind of nostalgia bordering on affection, fondly remembering the early years of our marriage, and I was beginning to almost half-think that if she wasn’t in prison, perhaps I could just confess everything and run off with her to some foreign country.

Naturally I’d have to leave out a few details, like how I’d expected her to go to prison and had delighted in the idea, and it would probably be necessary to fabricate an excuse for running off and leaving her, but I thought I might be able to manage it.

In any case, I was sure she most likely was actually in prison, and so, I told myself, there wasn’t really any need to decide what I would do if she wasn’t.

I booked a plane for England and the very next day I checked into a hotel in the very town where I had lived with her for six years.

The day after that I waited till it was dark and I made my way to our old house, pulling a hood around my head in case I passed anyone who knew me.

At the house, I peered into the window of the living room at the back.

What I saw enraged me beyond all reckoning. There was Katrina, sitting on the sofa, my dog resting his head on her lap. On the other side of her was—me.

It was impossible. I watched them for a while, strong and terrible emotions churning inside me, until finally I’d had enough and I retreated to my hotel room.

How could this have happened? The explanation dawned on me only slowly. At first I thought up all kinds of esoteric and unlikely explanations involving time travel, but eventually I arrived at the true explanation: the one that fitted all the facts.

I had not succeeded in killing my future self as I had imagined. He had been found, perhaps by Katrina, before all possibility of resuscitation had passed. I cursed myself for not having checked on his condition more carefully. I had thought his breathing had ceased, but perhaps it had simply become very shallow. I hadn’t bothered to check if he had a heartbeat.

After regaining his health he had simply carried on with the plan that he had had all along, and had simply taken my life.

The next day I broke into the lab. It was empty. I was relieved to find he had not reconstructed the time machine. Without the book, that would have been virtually impossible anyway. I also found no sign of wheelchairs under construction. Probably he had Bitcoin accounts that he hadn’t told me about.

For six or seven weeks I observed them covertly. I slept during the day, and in the evenings I prowled around, watching them through windows before they went to sleep, trying to fully understand what exactly was going on. 

Slowly, via many hours of painstaking observation, I arrived at a terrible realisation: a realisation that made me truly sick to the pit of my stomach.

Katrina and my clone were happy.

There could be no doubt about it. I saw the way she looked at him. I saw the way he looked at her. Only once did I see them argue, and fifteen minutes later they were kissing and hugging. It was sickening.

How was it possible?

It appeared my clone wasn’t even drinking. I never saw him drink anything but tea. The plastic bins outside the house, which once had been perpetually filled with empty cans and bottles, showed no sign of the alcoholic habit.

I made a trip to the hillside where I’d reburied the metal box and tried to dig it up. I didn’t have any definite plan in mind, but it seemed to me that the ability to travel in time could be exactly what I needed to sort out the mess. I could go back in time to before I had started work on the machine, and tell myself not to bother, for one thing.

The metal box was gone. 

I spent the whole night digging, thinking I must have been mistaken about the precise location of it, but there was no sign of it. Where it went, I don’t know, and I no longer care. Perhaps some fool with a metal detector found it while looking for Roman coins.

For a while I thought of killing my clone and taking his place. I went so far as to buy a machete. But cold, despairing thoughts swirled in my mind whenever I tried to sleep, and gradually I accepted the fact of the matter.

It was no longer he that was the useless copy. I was the useless copy. My life was entirely redundant and my continued existence could only bring sadness to myself and others.

I took a train into London and checked into a hotel. It didn’t take me long to find the lethal drug in a place like London. The drug dealer cautioned me that any more than a piece the size of a little fingernail would be the death of me. I bought enough to put an end to myself twice over.

Don’t cry for me. I haven’t been good.