The first time it happened, we went back and tried again. Used the same badges, walked uninterrupted into the cool hallways of that DARPA research lab. It's sort of funny, you always think some top secret lab is going to be full of colored lights and shiny walls and walkways that clang and bang dramatically as you walk down them.

But it was like any other office. Plaster walls, coffee stained short carpet, break room the great melting pot of leftovers wafting someones leftover spaghetti, someone else's left over nachos, that guys curry and her pizza all through the halls. The door handles stuck, and the blinds probably hadn't been dusted in weeks.

But there it was. Office 238a, a particleboard door with plexi glass window. Black blinds instead of the standard beige, and a little 1-5 punch keypad like you'd find on a luxury car from the early 90's. Inside that office, in the third drawer from the bottom, on the left side was an envelope that would end the world. A drawing from a 34 year old physicist, eager to make a name for himself and get the hell out of government work and into the private sector, an Elon Musk wannabe with receding brown hair and a poorly shaven jaw line line and macchiato stains on his shirt. He probably wanted to go work for SpaceX or something.

But it was the drawing that mattered. Some sort of thorium reactor that would fit in a nuclear sub, or a rocket. It didn't matter. When it turned on, it ignited the atmosphere. We only narrowly got powered the thing down before it burnt it all off, like skin peeling off after the earth had a sunburn. Oops. Guess we messed that one up.

Over the next century there we were, sitting like a pink little kid on vacation on the beach in Hawaii, cancer shot up, plants died, the oceans rose, you know the drill. When the atmosphere doesn't block the sun, the earth heats up. Common sense, and bad news for us. Population dropped and we moved underground. Essential government personnel to one location, the rest of the country left to make it to converted fallout shelters, I heard they spent a month dumping all that nasty shit in Yucca mountain out into the desert of Nevada, turns all that radioprotection is just as good at keeping it out as it is in. Thats the biggest shelter now. A little more than ten thousand civilians, decommissioned military and some public services. Europe is set up like us, lots of them in Germany, the government in Sweden, with a few outliers spread out across the rest of the country. China and Africa went black about two years in, and if anyone is left in South America or Russia, they aren't talking to us.

Anyway, we thought we could change it. The same DARPA guys came up with some sort of machine. I'm not gonna try to understand it or explain it. I know it's got something to do with some sort of quantum bridge, that I'll probably get cancer by the time I'm forty, and that when your near it, every hair on your body stands up and your vision goes white.

I smelled the burnt air and the acrid fog of melting plastic every time we walked through. Next thing you know the four of us are standing in a parking lot somewhere in a shopping center in Lawrence Kansas. We go to the dollar tree next door, pick up some Oldspice body spray to cover the smell of living underground for two years, dry clean our suits next door, and head on into the "Pinnacle Applied Sciences" office.

Left, right, left. 1-4-5-2-3-1. The door swings open. I take the drawing. I plant the letter explaining that the office has been audited. We step out. A year later, the same thing happens, only this time its a guy in Montana, and the reactor is in Florida.

Time and time again, we repeat the plan. It's been almost a decade now. Someone else always builds it, someone else turns it on, and the world burns up all over again. By our count we've killed billions people repeating these 3 years over and over again.

It was the eighth iteration when we finally decided to change it. No more half measures we said. We waited in that office over night, and in the morning when he walked in, we shot him dead and ran. I didn't feel a thing. Every time we failed, I condemned something like 8 billion people to death, and they didn't deserve it, never saw it coming, and there was nothing they could do to prevent it. But they built it again, this time in China, and it was worse, they took much longer to power it down.

We resolved that if we couldn't stop it, at least we could warn them, and after a few tries we got it right. The US started throwing up shelters left and right, same with Europe. Then when it came, we all packed in. Within a year, they were eating each other. You can't grow enough food underground for that many people.

So this time would be different. Talked to the chief scientist, he's coming with us, we're giving up. Going to live our lives out in peace, somewhere new, a long time ago.

I stepped through the gate into rolling hills. The team followed, packs stuffed to the brim with medicine, batteries, electronics, everything you could need. Figure we'll set up here, maybe make something for ourselves, teach the natives a few tricks. Maybe this time it'll be different. Who knows, and who cares, I'll be dead by then.

This is Private Arthur Wilson, Codename: Merlin, signing out for good.