“I don’t know. Though I’m not sure what several of those things are, and I suspect that you just made some of them up right now, that sounds like a lot of bad stuff. Have you ever tried making a list of all the good things in your world to see how it balances out?”
“Uh . . .” Stanley stared at him blankly. “Huh?”
“It’s just that you seem to put such emphasis on the negative that it begins to seem insurmountable. Perhaps you should pause to look at the positives? Like the entire time I have been here, I have yet to see anyone suffering from Ebola-AIDS.”
“I don’t think we have that here.”
“Exactly. And I’ve not seen a single person get mauled by a land shark.”
“That’s a thing?”
Chris shrugged. “I don’t know. Have you guys discovered genetic sequencing yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Then give it a few years. But anyway, back to why I’m here. While I was going through your social media looking for clues of how to find you, I was struck by how even though you in particular are a very negative person, you tried extremely hard not to get shot today. Normally when I run into someone who is truly Malthusian in their outlook, they just kind of curl up into a ball and die. So I thought if I just tried reasoning with you . . .”
“That I’d just let you shoot me?” Stanley snorted. “Fat chance of that.”
“If life is so terrible and doomed, why not?”
Chris asked that so simply and so sincerely that Stanley didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t know why he wanted to stick around this crap-sack world . . . But he kinda did. So he sat there awkwardly for a minute instead and then tried to change the subject. “Are you a time traveler?”
“Something like that. I could try and explain it, but it is very complex.”
“Yeah, right.” Even though Chris had demonstrated some uncanny abilities, that still sounded too far-fetched to be real. “Go ahead and try to explain.”
“Okay. I was given some education on the popular culture of your people so I could blend in.” Chris gestured proudly at his T-shirt, which though it was the right color for the city’s NBA franchise, read Go Local Sports Ball Team. “To put it into terms you may understand, you know how there’s always that thing in your movies, where someone goes back in time to kill that one Hitler fellow to stop that medium-sized war you people had? This is like that.”
“Wait . . . I’m going to turn into someone like Hitler?” Stanley was rather offended by that. Sure, he didn’t have many friends, and he knew he could be a dick at times, but he wasn’t a genocidal dickhead!
“Maybe. I kinda doubt it though. You seem like a pretty cool guy, Stanley. You might just be the next Hitler’s grandfather. I don’t know. I don’t make up the assignments. Nobody tells me why I do what I do, just what needs to be done for the good of the universe, and the parameters I have to work within to achieve those results. I think we’ve already covered my assignment’s parameters pretty thoroughly, so now we just need to get on with the heart shooting.”
“Hold on. If you don’t know why you’re supposed to shoot me, how do you know it’s the right thing to do?”
“That’s a great question. You really are sharp.” And Chris wasn’t being the least bit sarcastic. “I’ve just got to go on faith that the big boss knows what’s best.”
“Wait . . . Are you implying that you’re an angel?”
“Don’t be silly, Stanley.”
“Oh, good, because that would’ve sounded really crazy.”
“Right? My boss is the crystal core of a burned-out star which gained sentience six billion years ago. It’s basically a moon-sized supercomputer which searches for pivotal distortions and then sends facilitators like me to make improvements to the time stream. Angels are totally different.”