You have a superpower which gives you the ability to see someone’s future just by simply touching them. But after your wife gave birth to your son and you held him for the first time. You were suddenly able to see into his future in which he becomes a Brutal Dictator that destroys the world.
Nothing could have prepared you for this moment.
Not your friends’ celebrations. Not your parents’ suggestions and helpful tips. Not your wife’s hours of painful labour. Not your power.
None of it.
Here he was, a reedy note to his cries, fussing against the swaddling, face a little squashed, skin a blotchy red, little eyes scrunched shut and streaming tears. You had never seen anything so beautiful in your life. You sent your wife a dumbfounded look which she returned with a smug, if exhausted, grin.
The nurse offered him to you, and, despite years - your whole life - of being so, so careful about whom you touched, you didn’t hesitate - would never hesitate - to take him. Your son.
The expected sensation of your power veiling your eyes came -
Gunshots
Screaming
Death
People everywhere, so many people, fighting and fleeing and dying
The streets dyed with blood, ash falling from the sky like snow, fire colouring the clouds crimson, the sound of heavy boots hitting the pavement in tandem, shadows swallowing the world
On a pile of bodies, alive and dead both, a throne
A man smiles from it, his dark eyes gleaming
- and your joyful incredulity turns to fear.
You glance around, but with the busyness of post-birth protocols, none of the nurses or doctors have noticed. Your wife, who knows you so well and would see it in an instant if she were not so tired from the long hours of contractions, has not noticed.
You try to put the horror behind a mask of your previous wonder. You know it is insufficient against close inspection, but it’s the best you’re getting right now.
You look down into your son’s dark eyes. He has stopped crying, and stares up at you. As if awaiting your decision.
How can you allow this future to be? You felt the weight of the lives that man, your son took on his destructive path. The entire world was, would be at his feet.
But the only way to stop it, the only way to be absolutely sure it never happens…
How can you live with killing a child - any child, but especially your own? You know how it would feel, having touched others with such things in their futures, but that knowing is different from this knowing. You would not survive that choice; neither would your wife.
What is the worth of one family - of one small, fragile new life - against the hundreds of thousands in the future?
Your tiny son yawns, drawing you out of your grim contemplation. He makes quiet little smacks of his lips, looks up at you with those dark, liquid eyes of his, and promptly falls asleep.
As if released from a spell, you breathe deeply, and the rest of the room comes back into focus. Your wife smiles, less smug and more tired, and reaches for your son. She has eyes only for him right now, or she would see the shadows in yours and know. You pass him over, careful, so careful, and she holds him against her sweaty, bare chest, content.
She doesn’t ask what you saw, though you know this question will come later. Now you must make a choice, one that nobody should ever have to make.
Nothing could have prepared you for this moment. But in the end, it was never really a choice.
After all, the future isn’t set in stone.
You, of all people - you, who almost chose that path yourself, long ago - know this.
