Doctor Malone thought she might be killed in order to protect these fragile essentials from her crushing, murderous hands, yet no one waited for her in the core chamber. No armed guards shouted at her to stop, and neither did she feel that tingling sense that always came when someone else altered part of her timeline. She could sense impending danger in those half-formed molecules that made up her future, but that was far easier to face than any danger in her inaccessible past.
The glass tubes were all around her in this circular chamber. Her latex-gloved hand gripped one, ready to crush. For the thousandth time she wondered if she could escape with the machine all to herself, without destroying it--just leave and never return, always running away from danger. Malone's affinity for the machine, even after all it had done to her life, was strong.
They had called her the Quantum Doctor because she had made the Machine cooperate unlike any other doctor in Saint Benrime General Hospital. Where other doctors used the Time Machine, she communicated with it; where other doctors used it to anticipate trouble during surgery, Malone used it to manipulate timelines and paradox and causality in very finite pockets of the human body, across myriad alternate realities.One month without a single death in the hospital won her every medical award on Earth.
She tried to train others to do as she did, to see as she did--but she found upon examining her techniques that, once measured and taught, they began to break down.
Worse, a bad intuiting of the quantum forces in time could lead to Earth-threatening paradox. More times than she could count in a month, Malone had to clean up after time-mucking nincompoop doctors, until finally, the Saint Benrime General Director's Board agreed the machine could not be used unless Malone were supervising. While supervising, she felt like an overly aggressive elementary-school art teacher criticizing every child's work -- "Not that brush stroke, this one!" -- and one day, she thought bitterly that she had wanted to be an artist before she ever wanted the responsibility of saving lives.
H.R. tried to help her. They couldn't allow her to leave the hospital - "Liability, you see, we're obliged to give everyone the same quality care, and if you're not here they won't get it" - but they offered to let her use the time machine to catch naps. That worked for a while, but one day she accidentally slept for two months instead of 8 hours.
That slip-up did not sit well with the Board. Someone hinted if she messed up like that again she might find herself at the wrong end of a well-placed time accident.
That was when she knew humans were not meant to time travel.
Now Malone stood in the cold core chambers of the time machine, and stared up at the security camera fixed on her. She wondered whether anyone in security was watching, and whether or not they would flip the trigger that would set off alarms and would trap her in here, but the tingly intuition that served her so well with the Machine told her it's okay, only the future is watching. Simultaneously she understood those folks in the future would condemn her for this, but Time never would.
"I quit," she told the camera, and with one final, freeing sweep of her arm, she broke the glass essences that both chained and linked mankind to the secrets of life.
