Ten.

Ten seconds, thats all I have. I’m in the room. I have the injector. The child is sleeping. No one else is here.

Nine seconds. Child, no a baby. A newborn. The cap is off the injector. The most hated man of all time. Loved out of fear by millions. Even in my time he is a nucleation point for hatred.

Eight seconds. Murderer. We’ll have that in common now. I’m at the bassinette. I’m ready for this. It’s happening now. Stick him like I practiced.

Seven seconds.

Six seconds. You are a cancer on existence.

Five seconds. Were you born this way?

Four seconds. I’m running out of time. Stick him. The autoinjector will do the rest. Millions saved. I’ll disappear.

Three seconds. Training. Follow your training. What if…

Two seconds. Is this us? Eye for an eye? Two eyes for 200 million? Remove a hell from earth at the source. He would do this to me. That’s it!

One second. What if…

I have an idea.

---

“What happened?”

“Did you do it?”

“Is it done?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“He didn’t do it?”

“I have an idea. Settle down, hear me out. We’ve got a time machine. We’re not thinking big enough.”

“It’s not a time machine, it’s a wormhole generator. It calculates the requirements specific to its relative present field, which includes your existence within the field, and a shit-ton of math before using the accelerators to create a time dilation that lands you not only when and where but doing so without scrambling your brains like eggs. Then it turns the wormhole into a donut reversing the whole thing to bring you back without annihilating you, even compensating for the movement of the Earth through space in the time you’re gone.”

“Shut up nerd. Focus. It’s a time machine. We have time. We can do better. Think about it like this. Yes, I didn’t go through with it. He’s a baby! I can’t believe I ever thought I could! Babies aren’t responsible for anything. Consider this, would adult Hitler kill me as a baby?”

“Hell yeah!”

“That’s the point! We’re better and shouldn’t be doing this, or we’re not and shouldn’t be doing this.”

“We have been over this so many times. I should have gone.”

“No way you could do it, either. It’s a baby! We are programmed to protect babies at all costs. Really think about it. You want to send back a psychopath to stop a psychopath? It’s a baby. No go ahead, I’ll wait. Let’s see you put the thoughts of the actual actions necessary to do it through your big brains. All of you.”

“The autoinjector was supposed to make this easy. You wouldn’t even be there when he died.”

“But it turns out that doesn’t matter. I still would have to take the action and do it. But, I had an idea!”

“You don’t have ideas. Not good ones. It’s not your thing.”

“Can I borrow the time machine for, let’s say, an hour a week?”

“You mean like a rental? No! It’ll work only during the next month or so before it has degraded too far.”

“I’m going to finish the mission. Send me back with a fake identity and I will finish the mission. But don’t give me ten seconds, I might need 50 years.”

“Even if we rebuild the machine after degradation, it would be a different machine than the one that sent you back and therefore wouldn’t know how to pull you.”

“Then figure it out while I’m gone, or don’t. If it works, I’ll be 85 now which is well over that time period’s average male life span.”

“We could figure out your identity and search for your grave. Then we’d know if… Nevermind.”

“Thanks, but I don’t care to visit my own grave. Besides, it may turn out there’s no grave.”

“We’re getting side-tracked. So you go back and kill him when he’s a teenager?”

“No, I go back and don’t kill him at all.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The answer is so obvious! Ladies and nerds I go back, and I get Adolf Fucking Hitler accepted into art school!”