Just One Change

It was a beautiful sunny, spring day and Hiro was enjoying his lunch alone on a park bench near work. His thoughts roamed from the 10 emails he needed to send out this afternoon; the tweets he wanted to send out this afternoon to his multiple twitter accounts on topics of politics, climate change, and his favourite sci-fi show; to the shape of his coworker Ericas ass; to his boring baloney sandwich.

But mostly it was about Erica. Her red hair, he shining eyes, and her ...

(thwap!) Something hard landed on his head and he jumped up brushing his hair thinking some seagull had just shit on him. But his hands were clean. He looked around at this lunch, now on the grass and his water bottle tipped over and spilling slowly out on the bench. There was also something else...there was, a device?

It looked like a step counter, or a kitchen alarm clock? It had a tiny LCD screen and three keys on it. It might be a kind of "pager", wasn't that a thing? If it was it was ancient, maybe from the 90s! Its colour was odd though. It was simultaneously both red and blue, it looked old and cracked and yet crisp in a way. As if it had just come off the assembly line.

The screen had dull blinking green light. Hiro sat and looked at it, cradled in his hands.
Text started to appear one letter at a time on the small four line screen:

Just One Change : change anything, universal, irreversible.
< 320 characters, you will remember The Before.
You have 5 minutes...starting...now.

It was ridiculous. Was it a prank? A reality show? A strange urgency began to grip him, a sense of history. He knew somehow that this device, or the hyperdimensional, transtemporal device that it was an avatar of, had appeared to people in a meaningful form all throughout history, but very rarely. Every few centuries someone, somewhere had the chance to alter a rule. To make the world different, better, new again. What did they choose? Did they cure hunger? Did they eradicate plagues? Did they stop wars? Or did they indulge in an easy to express, always at top of mind fantasy?

What should Hiro do now? The screen blinked with the remaining time.

4:23

He was a twitter master! His fingers were honed on short, concise messages, he could do this.

3:58

He entered his text, flawlessly in one stream, editing and compensating for space as the clock ran down. Just before zero he pressed the "-->" button and the device buzzed. Then a strange thing happened, it ceased to have ever been there at all. Hiro remembered having the device, the strange off-blue-red colour it had. He remembered what he entered and pressing the button. He thinks he remembers seeing a confirmation smily emoji. But now the device didn't exist. And he know that it never had. This wasn't a contradiction to him.