Humans have always wanted to play God. And there was nothing wrong with that. We saw the world, all its injustice and cruelty, and we wanted to offer something better. So how is it fair that we should be punished for it?

That’s what time travel was—our punishment.

Unlike what the government, the scientists, and even popular sci-fi shows like to claim, time travel had actually been invented in the sixties, only a decade after the explosion of the world’s first hydrogen bomb. Though we had figured out how to send someone to the past, we never solved the next step of bringing them back. And still we started Operation Mercy—the Allies’ desperate gamble to prevent the horrors of the 40s by assassinating Adolf Hitler.

The very first man sent had been a painter by the name of Bob Ross. At the time, the less resolved men had wanted to try the peaceful option. His mission had been to cut a tally inside a great oak tree and then prevent Hitler from rising to power. When history had not changed except for the health of a single oak tree, we had thought the mission a failure.

So then we sent another, this time, a man we knew would succeed no matter the odds—an older soldier with six numbers tattooed into his arm. Before he had gone through the time machine, he had looked at us with misty eyes and saluted. A miracle. That’s what he had called it despite knowing that he would most likely not live long enough to reach this point in time again.

We had waited with held breaths and as soon as the machine had stopped whirring, we had checked our designated oaks. Two tallies. But history had not changed. Well, there had been a single detail that had shocked the world. Hitler had been killed with six numbers tattooed onto his arm.

“What do you think about this?” Anthony asked me, newspaper in hand. It was a paper from 1945, headlining the autopsy of Hitler. Apparently, the man had branded himself with the same numbers as a Jewish prisoner that had been killed at Auschwitz.

“One of ours?” I asked.

“Unless you think Hitler would tattoo himself out of solidarity.” He crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it aside. “Shit!”

The designated oak tree had twenty three notches in it already. Those were twenty three unsung heroes, willing to die for some greater purpose. Yet, somehow, Hitler had still lived long enough to enact the worst horror to ever befall mankind. Worse yet, all clues indicated that we were the cause of it.

“Do you think that maybe we caused the holocaust?” Anthony asked.

I swallowed. “If we went back twenty-three times already, then there’s gotta be a reason. Maybe we stopped something even worse.”

“Worse than the holocaust?” Anthony stared at me aghast. “Jesus, man. We’re talking about 400,000 Jews, gassed and burned alive. Can you think of anything worse than that?”

I clenched my fists and rolled up my shirt sleeve to reveal six numbers tattooed into my skin.

Anthony glanced away and his voice lowered. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding and let go of my sleeve. “But no, I can’t think of anything worse than that, than watching both your parents burned alive with you in line to do the same.” I had listened to their screams, them begging me to run, and I hadn’t. It had only been dumb luck that had saved me. The soldier had run out of gas.

“Let’s pick this up again tomorrow.” I told Anthony and walked away.

All the lights in our laboratory had been shut off. Only my flashlight illuminated the way back to the time machine. I stared at the rounded hunk of metal and then of the video feed of our designated oak tree. Twenty three failures. I grabbed a knife and a gun.

“This ends at twenty-four.” And I stepped into the time machine.

Time travel had not been as colorful as I had expected. There were no whirling blues and blacks or sensation of falling endlessly. I had simply blinked and in that moment, I found myself staring at our designated oak tree with twenty three tallies. I took my knife out a carved out twenty four before hiking out of the forest to the edge of Berlin.

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