The Last Minute

The clock on the wall had a dead man’s heartbeat—slow, deliberate, and utterly indifferent to the man walking toward it. Victor Laine felt each tick reverberate through his bones, as if the mechanical hands were plucking at the strings of his remaining moments.

“Forward,” commanded the guard to his right, voice muffled behind the silver mask that reflected Victor’s own distorted face—eyes too wide, skin too pale, a stranger wearing his features.

The corridor stretched before them, pristine white and humming with that peculiar static that seemed to whisper of other men who had walked this same path. Victor’s shoes squeaked against the polished floor, marking time in their own desperate rhythm.

Every twelfth step, the lights above them flickered—just a microsecond of darkness—but in that darkness, Victor saw… himself. Not reflections, but versions. A Victor in expensive clothes boarding a plane, passport clutched in trembling fingers. A Victor in a courtroom, arms raised in triumph as evidence exonerated him. A Victor in a casket, face peaceful, death having claimed him years before this moment.

“You’re experiencing temporal echoes,” said the guard to his left, voice clinically detached. “Standard side effect of proximity to the Time Debt System. It will pass.”

Victor’s throat constricted. “Those are… real? Other possibilities?”

“Irrelevant possibilities,” the right guard corrected. “Only this timeline matters now.”

The corridor seemed to breathe around him, expanding and contracting like a living thing. On the walls, transparent screens displayed countdown clocks—dozens of them—each marked with a prisoner number and a name. The numbers continued their relentless descent even though Victor knew those men were long gone.

“Ghost clocks,” he whispered, the term coming to him unbidden.

“Focus forward,” the left guard instructed, prodding him between the shoulder blades.

Victor’s hands, bound before him with shimmering restraints that seemed to phase in and out of solidity, trembled uncontrollably. The world felt increasingly unstable, as if reality itself was beginning to fray around the edges of his perception. Was this what happened when you approached your own end? Or was it something about this place—this sterile hallway leading to the extraction chamber—that bent the rules of existence?

A face appeared in his mind: Benjamin Hadley, his former business partner. The man he was convicted of murdering. Benjamin’s features seemed to shift and blur, sometimes smiling, sometimes accusatory, sometimes bearing the fatal wounds that had ended his life. Wounds that Victor hadn’t inflicted.

“I didn’t kill him,” Victor said, the words escaping as barely more than a breath. “I would never have—”

“Your guilt or innocence is not our concern,” the right guard recited, as if reading from a manual. “The Time Debt System measures only what is owed.”

The inmates they passed whispered through the narrow slits in their cell doors. “Don’t let it take your name,” one hissed, his eyes reflecting something ancient and terrified in the clinical light. Victor couldn’t tell if the man was warning him or pleading for himself.

“What does that mean?” Victor asked, but the guards maintained their mechanical stride.

The corridor narrowed imperceptibly, or perhaps Victor’s perception was expanding—hard to tell which was the illusion. The static in the walls intensified, a soft crackling that reminded him of old radio stations caught between frequencies. In that white noise, he could almost discern voices, fragments of sentences, a chorus of the erased.

“I didn’t kill him!” Victor suddenly shouted, the declaration bursting from some deep reservoir of desperation. “The evidence was planted. The security footage was altered. The blood samples—”

“Irrelevant,” the left guard interrupted, voice flat as the horizon. “The system only measures time owed, not guilt.”

Victor’s perception fractured again with the twelfth step. This time, he glimpsed a young girl with his eyes and chin, waving goodbye from a sunlit doorway. His daughter—but he had no daughter, not in this timeline. The vision pierced him with a loss more profound than his own impending death. A future that had never existed, yet somehow still being taken from him.

“What you’re seeing,” the right guard said with an unexpected softness that momentarily humanized the mask, “those are time echoes from potential branches. Best not to look too deeply.”

The walls seemed to breathe faster now, the ghost clocks ticking with increasing urgency. Victor noticed that his own reflection in the silver masks had aged—lines deeper, hair grayer—while the guards remained unchanging. Was time already beginning to warp around him? Was he experiencing minutes as seconds, or hours as minutes?

The corridor ended at a reinforced door that hummed with suppressed energy. Above it, a final clock—larger than the others—displayed a blank countdown, waiting for his name.

“In there?” Victor asked, though he knew the answer.

The guards didn’t respond, merely positioned themselves on either side of him as the door slid open with a pneumatic sigh. The chamber beyond was circular, its walls lined with monitors displaying graphs and measurements incomprehensible to Victor. At the center stood a reclined chair that reminded him simultaneously of a dentist’s office and an electric chair—mundane and monstrous in equal measure.

The Warden waited beside it, clipboard in hand, his smile as thin and precise as a paper cut.

“Mr. Laine,” he said, inspecting the document with exaggerated care. “Your sentence is forty-three years. Standard extraction.”

Victor stared at the number, incomprehension giving way to a cold dread that pooled in his stomach.

“That’s… longer than I could possibly live,” he said, voice suddenly small in the vast room.

The Warden’s smile widened a fraction. “Ah, yes. First-timers often misunderstand. You see, Mr. Laine, the Time Debt doesn’t just take your years.”

“It takes every potential future that would’ve branched from you,” the Warden continued, his voice soft yet penetrating, like water seeping through stone. “Every child, grandchild, and life your existence might have sparked. The victim’s family gets all of it.”

Victor’s knees buckled. The guards tightened their grip—not supporting him, but preventing collapse. In his mind’s eye, he saw branches of possibility withering, futures folding in on themselves like dying flowers filmed in reverse. The state wasn’t just killing him—it was erasing his bloodline from history, harvesting not just what was but what might have been.

“That’s not—” Victor’s protest died in his throat as the room seemed to shift around him, planes of reality sliding against each other like tectonic plates. Was this real, or had his mind finally fractured under the weight of injustice?

“Standard procedure,” the Warden said, checking something off on his clipboard. His movements left faint tracers in the air, as if each action existed simultaneously across multiple planes. “The Benjamin Hadley estate will receive your time debt as restitution. His descendants will enjoy the years that yours never will.”

The guards guided—pushed—Victor toward the chair. Its surface looked both invitingly soft and clinically hard, a paradox of comfort and torture. As they strapped him in, Victor noticed his own hands seemed semi-transparent, as if he were already beginning to fade from existence.

“I’ll miss her birthday,” Victor whispered, the thought emerging unbidden.

The Warden paused. “Whose birthday?”

“My daughter’s.” The conviction in Victor’s voice surprised even him. He had no daughter—not in this timeline—yet the grief of missing her celebration felt more real than the restraints biting into his wrists.

The Warden’s expression flickered—concern? Irritation? Uncertainty?—before settling back into bureaucratic indifference. “A temporal bleed-through. It happens. The mind tries to consolidate alternate timelines as extraction approaches.”

Electrodes were attached to Victor’s temples and chest, each connection sending ripples of coldness through his skin. The machine hummed to life around him, and screens on the walls displayed his vitals—heartbeat, brain activity, and a third measurement labeled simply “TEMPORAL MASS.”

“You won’t feel pain,” the technician assured him, voice mechanical yet not unkind. “Just a progressive awareness of… dissolution.”

As the machine powered up, Victor didn’t feel pain—just a crushing awareness of vanishing futures cascading through his consciousness. His daughter’s laugh (never born). The book he might’ve written (never published). A funeral where he’s mourned (never held). Each potential reality flared briefly in his mind before dissolving, like stars being systematically extinguished.

The screen before him flashed: "EXTRACTION: 43 YEARS (PRIMARY) + 317 YEARS (LINEAGE)"

“A generous restitution,” the Warden murmured, satisfaction coloring his voice. “The Hadley line will prosper for generations.”

Victor’s vision began to tunnel, the edges of the room growing dim. In that dimness, he saw faces—people who would never exist because of him, because of this moment. Yet somehow, impossibly, they were watching him with eyes that held no accusation, only a strange, collective patience.

The machine suddenly stuttered—a hesitation like a skipped heartbeat. Victor felt it in the core of his being, a momentary reprieve in his dissolution. The lights flickered, not just in the regular twelfth-step pattern, but in wild, syncopated bursts that left lingering afterimages on his retinas.

The Warden’s clipboard slipped from his fingers. “Why isn’t it stopping?!” His voice had lost its bureaucratic polish, revealing the ragged edge of fear beneath.

Victor watched, detached yet acutely present, as the extraction counter on the main screen continued its relentless climb: 500 years. 1,000. 5,000. Each number representing lives that would never breathe, voices that would never speak, stories that would never unfold—yet somehow all contained within him, compressed into this single point of consciousness.

A technician lunged for the control panel, fingers dancing desperately across illuminated touchpoints. “It’s pulling from the wrong timeline!” The panic in his voice cracked through the clinical atmosphere. “It’s taking time from everyone!”

The walls of the prison began to vibrate, a low-frequency tremor that seemed to emanate from the foundations of reality itself. The ghost clocks on the wall shattered one by one, their countdowns freezing then splintering into fragments that hung suspended in the air like crystallized moments.

Victor watched as the guards’ silver masks began to crack, fine lines spreading across the reflective surfaces like capillaries beneath skin. The fractures widened, revealing glimpses of the faces beneath—faces that aged with terrifying rapidity, skin withering, eyes sinking, hair whitening and disintegrating until only dust remained inside the collapsing uniforms.

The Warden reached toward Victor, his hand extending with impossible slowness. Between them, the air seemed to ripple with visible currents of time—rivers of possibility converging and diverging. Victor noticed with detached fascination that while everyone around him aged and decayed, his own body was becoming more substantial, the transparency of his hands reversing until they appeared more solid than they had in years.

A final message flickered on the screen before him, letters forming not from digital pixels but from what appeared to be condensed light:

"INNOCENCE HAS NO DEBT TO PAY."

The chamber imploded—not with violence but with a gentle inward collapse, as if space itself were folding around a singularity of concentrated time. Victor felt himself being drawn into that fold, not torn apart but rather carefully deconstructed and reconstructed, each atom catalogued and reassigned to a different layer of reality.

In that moment of transformation, Victor understood. The Time Debt System hadn’t just measured the debt of his possible futures—it had measured the debt of justice itself. And finding that debt immeasurable, the system had turned its extraction not on him but on the very fabric of the reality that had wronged him.

His last sensation was of falling upward through layers of possibility, each one a window into a life he might have lived, could still live. The faces of guards, the Warden, the technicians—all frozen in a moment of horrified realization—grew distant, smaller, insignificant.

And somewhere far away, in a world that no longer remembered his name, Victor Laine took his first breath.