Terrified, I humored myself by absentmindedly dreaming of a mishmash of beer commercial slogans: "this silver bullet is for you." Yeah. I hoped to drink a cold brew once I figured out a way out of this. Problem was that nothing came to mind. The moment I unpaused time and moved forward to the next moment, the bullet would make an impact and I would perish.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that I needed to find a way to somehow go back to the previous moments and undecide to clash with the armed police of the Faddish regime. Perhaps go back to the beginning and decide not to use my powers to meddle with political affairs at all. That was my only way out of this, and... I couldn't admit it was bleak. The only thing I had going for me was that I had all the time in the world. Literally. Which might count for something, I guess. Another problem was that I had no resources, nothing to read, no Internet, and I understood literally nothing about the source of my powers. The first time I stopped time was when I met a girl I only dated once. We were on the subway and she was this close to stepping off before I caught her gaze. Suddenly, out of nowhere, time stopped, and I had the ability to think about every step I needed to take to make sure she saw me. After that it was simple, I just asked for time to stop or start, and it did.

I wished she were here now, or anyone. Argh! How was I even to attempt this? Maybe, just maybe there was some combination of words or thoughts that would do it. I had tried in the past to go back in time and to the future, and no set of words enabled that. My power was limited to freezing and unfreezing time and that was it. Yet, now I had time to really test every single combination.

At first, I set out with rabid abandon, throwing words to and fro "back in time, go to the past, previous moment." The list of combinations was endless and I cursed how many ways there were to say the same thing. Nothing worked. It was impossible to keep track of how long I tried, as the absence of time defied such a thing. It could have been the equivalent of years or even centuries of effort before the thought crossed my mind that I wasn't going to do it, that I had no choice but to unpause time and accept that fateful bullet. Especially since whenever I had those thoughts I had to go back and keep trying, making absolutely sure that I'd exhausted all the options.

When I did unpause time the world went black, presumably from the impact. Then I saw myself from above and assumed that I was ascending into heaven or something equivalent. I really was fooled up until the point I re-emerged into the control room, where they told me I'd died on the subway from being hit in the jugular by a beer bottle thrown by the boyfriend of the woman I tried to pick up, and that everything past that point had been experimental.

r/StoriesToThinkAbout