A man pointed a gun at me and I knew he was going to shoot. I looked at him, a nondescript white man, middle-aged, dressed in a shirt and slacks with glasses on. The kind of man one would ignore while standing in a line at the bank. Except for his eyes, there was something wrong there. They had no expression. One would wonder if he was lost in thought or looking right through you.

I asked him, "Why?" Why did he want to kill me?

His voice was calm, not robotic but in a tone that showed no feeling as it spoke. "It's nothing personal. I'm just doing my job. I'm from a future you will never see. I've been sent to kill you, to get rid of the goodness."

In the one flashing second that passed between his words and the action that would end my life, I thought about what he meant...

Nothing personal. Just doing my job. From the future. Sent to kill you. To get rid of the goodness.

So many thoughts flew, in one stream to the next, faster than light.

Someone's job in the future is to go back in time to kill someone, to get rid of the goodness. As if goodness were a threat to their society and its existence could be measured in some arrogant mathematical god-like calculation, to differ between good and evil. What society would want to get rid of goodness?

An evil society. An evil society in the future where the existence of goodness is considered a threat. I knew not what made me good or that I was the cause of this goodness to be eliminated. But it gave me hope. Why?

A threat of goodness meant it still existed in an evil future. This goodness threatened an evil society's way of living, of which its purpose would be to perpetrate evil, erasing goodness for more evil feeding on itself like a snake eating its tail. But such a society would cease to exist. What measure of evil exists without goodness as its comparison? What is dark without light? (A struggle of opposites together... such is life.) Evil could not exist on its own, just as goodness would not. Life is a struggle, an exchange of energies. One takes over the other, never wasted. Without this there is no life, static existence is null, nothing exists.

I knew all this already. How could this man and his evil society not see this truth? Goodness survives because it goes against evil, in constant battle. To give up and succumb is not good and does not support life and its existence. Did this knowledge make me good? My life seemed inconsequential to me and empty because I had no purpose, filled with society's trivial pursuits. Yet here this man (I think he was human), from an evil future claimed I must be gotten rid of. I was important enough for that. Why did this horrible deed make me glad in some self-aggrandizing way? As if I were some martyr. But that was arrogance... He could just be crazy. A madman on a rampage. My death, sad as it would be in the present can't mean much to the future. Unless one knew how it would turn out... What would my life become? What could've been? I thought of Jesus, murdered on the cross. Yet those who committed the murder (getting rid of the goodness), had fulfilled the purpose after all when Jesus came back to life as one with God. What if he had lived? Would he have served his purpose, had he not been sacrificed?

With this last thought, the gun fired.

It went through me with searing pain. I panicked in my last few breaths. Would I go to hell?

Pain.

Agonizing pain.

No more sight.

Down a dark tunnel.

No more feeling.

No more thought...