The Butterfly Effect

I froze in my tracks. Rather, I stopped intentionally moving in a direction and foolishly struggled to maintain my balance as the floor beneath me shook with the strength of the earthquake that was rocking my whole house. A scream pierces the air and then another, until I can clearly the voices of all my family, screaming as everything shakes. Shamefully, the first thought that crossed my mind was, “I guess I’m not going out with my friends tonight.” But it was closely followed by a crushing concern for my family. I dropped to the ground and waited for the house to stop shaking.

When it finally stopped, I knew I had to muster the courage to actually walk downstairs and see what had happened. But first, I had to take several minutes to figure out how our house was still standing and how I was still alive after an earthquake that rough. But eventually, I began to walk down stairs, but I was still trembling as if the earthquake had never actually stopped, just moved inside of my body. I was terrified of what I was going to find when I walked downstairs, because I knew I would have to find whatever had caused the screams.

I, of course, found some picture frames that had fallen off the walls, windows that had been shattered, and chairs that had fallen to the floor. I could not see my family yet, and if it were not for the eerie silence, I would have assumed they were okay, because the damage done to the house was minimal. But it was far too quiet for that.

I reached the kitchen door and pushed it open slowly with a shaking hand. What I saw would leave me scarred and change the course of my life forever. Every member of my family appeared to be dead, but none of them appeared to be dead as a result of an earthquake. Both parents had bullets through their heads. My little brother seemed to have had his neck violently snapped. I heard a gasp and saw that my older brother had been fatally stabbed, but he hadn’t died yet. I rushed to his side.

It was hard to make out what he was saying to me between my tears and his jumbled words. Eventually, he just pointed out the window and mumbled something about a man in a red cap. And as I watched the life leave his eyes, I knew I would not rest until the man in the red cap payed for the pain he had just caused me.

But let’s be serious, my first response was not to actually chase down my parent’s killer myself. My first response was to have a proper breakdown on the kitchen floor that took several hours to get out of. And then I called the police, sure that they would make the man pay and that I would not have to personally serve justice. They just told me to have a funeral and that they would put someone on the case, but that no one had ever solved a murder when the man with the red cap was involved. But even then, I did not immediately decide to dedicate my life to carrying out my revenge. I got depressed. Tried to believe they had not actually died. Some more depression. All the normal stages of grief. It wasn’t until I became angry at my family’s death that things really started heating up.

And by heating up I mean I started searching my kitchen for clues. Which I did not find. So, I took another drastic step. I went to bug the detective like an angry pestering child. Which availed absolutely nothing. And at that, I almost gave up. But after I started having painfully vivid dreams of what the scene in the kitchen must have looked like, the small anger of a pained child turned into the revenge that drove me to the things I did.

Those things included several years tracking down the only time machine known to exist in the world (and maybe several years of training so I could actually kill the murder when I found him). I badgered police officers and politicians. Even wrote letters to the president every day for a year. But no one is going to tell the crazy girl where a time machine was; I had a slightly too revenge-crazed look in my eyes. Oh no. I got in through "science".

It so happened that the only reason the time machine was not open to the public was because no one knew enough about what would happen if someone were to change an event in the past. Would it change the events of the present times? Would killing Hitler cause you to not be born somehow and then you would be stuck in the past? Would inventing cars a little earlier make the zombie apocalypse happen? Or would changing an event create an alternate timeline where in one the event occurs as it happened the first time, and in the other it happens and creates a timeline where it happens the other way, and so on until you have several different timelines and universes?

And what does the scientific community do when they don’t know something? They experiment. But when the advertisement came out that they were looking for people to test a time machine, most people dismissed it as a scam. But then there was me, and I was desperate. I signed up as soon as I saw it. I had to go back in time.

When the researchers interviewed me, they told me I was supposed to go back in time to alter one very tiny event, such as the grade I got on a test in middle school, and report what happened. However, the time machine only operates internally so they had to trust that I would do what they said, and not just go to any period of time and ruin things forever. But of course, I wasn’t necessarily one to follow the rules.

I got in that time machine and programmed myself to about ten minutes before the earthquake happened. I convinced my whole family to take a spontaneous trip to the grocery store where I knew they would be safe. Then, I waited for the man in the red cap to come into the kitchen. And he did, just as the earthquake as was starting, but I was ready. All I had to do was grab his arm and press a button on the remote in my hand and we would instantly go back to the lab. I knew that taking him back there was probably a bad idea, but that was the way it was programmed. I just had to hope they would help me get him tied so I could kill him, slowly, to make sure he regretted his plans to kill my family.

In spite of the years I had spent looking for a time machine, I had failed to really do any research on time travel. So, when I grabbed the man and tried to travel back to my own time, I did not end up in the lab but was on the balcony of an apartment. Frustrated, I demanded the man tell me what happened and explain why we were not back in the lab. I didn’t really expect him to know though. So, when he answered I was surprised.

“Haven’t you ever heard of the butterfly effect?” he laughed sinisterly.

In that moment, I flashed back to reading about the butterfly effect. That was what the researchers had been testing, how changing something in the past would affect the future. Apparently, my preventing my family from dying caused me to not return to the lab. Angry at myself and at the man, I turned around and shoved him off the balcony. At least, I would get my revenge on him.

Or I thought I would, until he reappeared on the balcony, saying something about how killing him in a time that was not his own time could not actually kill him. Of course, that only served to escalate my anger, so I channeled all that anger into the kick I gave him to the head, and he crumpled to the floor. Satisfied, I turned around to go inside the apartment and figure out where he was. But he was there staring at me again.

Ready to kill several people at this point with how frustrated I was, I ran in the house and grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer and sent it flying into his chest. I was sure that would have to end him. But it didn’t. I ran to the nearest room and locked the door so the man could not come in and try to kill me, as would only be fair payment for all the things I had done to him so far. Then, I cried.

It took several hours before I figured out that I could not use time machines to change the past, that I would have to let what had happened happen. I knew I would have to take the man in the red cap back to his own time and let him kill my family. I couldn’t take my revenge out through time travel.

It nearly killed me to take him back. And I left before I had to watch him complete the event that had ruined my life. Once the event was restored, I was able to go back to the lab. I fed them some phony story about how changing the test grade got me into a better college and thus I didn’t come back to the lab at first. I never went back to the lab after that day, and I never saw the man in the red cap again. I never looked for him. It probably wasn’t worth it anyway. We’ll just say it was all a part of my grieving process.