The End Button

         Twenty miles below the surface of the earth, a man opened his eyes to utter darkness. As soon as he stirred, sensors reading his movements triggered florescent lights twenty feet above his head. When they had all fully lit up, the man could see that he was in a room roughly the size of a football field. The walls were covered with white padding in a tile pattern, and as the man sat up he felt that the floors were made of the same material. He pushed at it with his hand, and foam membranes held the shape of his indent perfectly before rising to an ambiguous flatness in a split second. And in the middle of the room, there was a padded pedestal.
         The man was wearing a battered trench coat and a pair of stained slacks. He wore no shoes. The shirt under the trench coat depicted a smiley face, however it was full of holes and the smile had worn off into a black smear. His hair was so messy it looked like it was frantically trying to escape his skull. His eyes were dull blue, and his gloves he was wearing had the fingers cut out of them. The man raised his hands to wipe his eyes, the sides of the trench coat made a scratching sound on the stubble growing on his face. It was then he noticed, to his surprise, that he was wearing a silver band around his neck.
         “Wh-,” the man choked out before the silver band around his neck contracted with an electrical shock, which brutally but efficiently cut off any sound he made. He tried again, to the same effect. The man tried to take off the band, and was briefly electrocuted. He tried to scream in pain and frustration, and this resulted in such a shock that he fell on the ground.
The man stood up again and started to make his way to the pedestal, although his first few steps proved haphazard as the foam absorbed his weight. After he figured out how to move across the room, he reached the pedestal after a minute or so. It was about as high as the man’s waist, and seemed to be made out of the same material as the floor. As soon as his gloved hand touched it, a hissing sound was made and a shape grew from the center of the pedestal. It formed a half sphere and promptly turned bright red. And on the red half sphere, the words END appeared.
The man stood, mouth agape but careful not to make any sound, and stared at the button on the pedestal. Suddenly, a tile on the wall directly parallel to the man lit up in static like a television. The man uttered a gasp before he could stop himself and was briefly shocked. The tile went from static to an image of three men sitting at a rectangular table, directly facing the man in the room. Above each one’s head, there was a number; one, two, and three. The man in the room could only see the three men on the television-tile from the waist up and from the looks of it the man under the number one was wearing a lab coat, the man under the number two was wearing army fatigues, and the man under the number three was wearing a black long-sleeve sweater with a beret.
“Hello there,” Man One said.
Man Two nodded.
“Hey man,” Man Three said with a wave.
The man in the room waved back, bewildered.
“You…” began Man One as he looked at the others, “…you are probably wondering what you are doing here.”
“And who we are,” said Man Three.
The man in the room nodded.
“You do know who you are, correct?” said Man Two.
         The man in the room looked at his shoeless feet for a minute, and then nodded.
         “Good,” Man Two said and looked at the others, “the drugs we have him were of the correct dosage.”
         Man One looked at some papers he had in front of him on the desk and looked back at the man in the room.
         “May sixth, thirty years ago. You enlisted as a recruit in your country’s army. You were eighteen. You were praised as being a responsible and moral solider, and you quickly rose through the ranks. After the army-“
         Man Two cut him off and continued, “after your service you went to college and received a degree, double majoring in literature and sociology. You became a successful professor and wrote many best selling novels, in which the subject matter pertained to the basic concept that all human beings and society was good-natured. It was about this time that you met your wife and future mother of your three children.”
         Man Two nodded at Man Three, and Man Three looked at the man in the room from the tile.
         “Ten years passed, in which you lived happily with your family. You were now thirty-five. Then, while you were attending a book signing for your biggest selling novel as of the date in question, a man broke into your house and attempted to rob you. When he met resistance, he brutally beat your wife and murdered your three children. When the police arrived, he was gone and your wife was dead. You were unreachable that night at the book signing, which quickly ruled you out as a suspect. You found out the next day. Shortly after that…”
         Man Three looked down at the table and Man One shuffled some papers some more. Man Two cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. Man One finally looked up and resumed speaking to the man in the room.
         “Suffice to say, you suffered a severe mental breakdown. You cut off all the ties you could with your old life, devoting all of your time and resources trying to find the killer of your wife and children. Two years later the man’s corpse was found in a dumpster behind a bar down town, it was very badly mutilated and the only way to ID it was through DNA evidence.”
         Man Two cleared his throat again, and looked up at the man in the room.
         “You were not satisfied with the killing of your family’s murderer however. You became obsessed with finding every person you could who had murdered another person and proceeded to murder them. You became a vigilante for those murdered unjustly, however in your own pursuit for your own satisfaction you became one of them as well.”
         Man Two looked at Man Three, who continued.
         “Then seven years ago, despite avoiding arrest from the countless murders you committed, you turned yourself in to the police. The trial that followed was closely followed by the media. The court, surprisingly, found you clinically insane and sent you to a mental facility instead of prison. You stayed as a resident there for a year, however you soon found a way to break out and you did so. For the last three years you have been living on the streets as a homeless person, and have not spoken to anyone as long as you have chosen this lifestyle.”
         There was a silence as they all looked at the man in the room.
         “Is this information all correct?” Man One asked.
         The man in the room sat on the floor, hugging his knees. His face was just starting to dry from the tears, and he nodded. He nodded and then shook his head and buried it into his knees again. He tried as hard as he could not to sob, however he did utter one, which was immediately silenced by the collar.
         “Well good,” said Man Two. “Everything is going smoothly so far.”
         The man in the room looked up at the men in the tile, his eyes bloodshot.
         “Now,” said Man One, “onto the business as to why you are here.”
         “After World War Two,” said Man Two, “the government set up a program that was designed to survey humanity’s growth morally and socially. It was assigned the task of continuously judging whether or not…basically…the world was heading in the right direction.”
         “To put it mildly,” said Man Three.
         “Ultimately,” said Man One, “we decided quite recently that the direction the world was heading in is a bad one. After presenting this to the government an agreement was set up that said if the world didn’t change it’s ways drastically in the near future then the human liquidation of it would be necessary. For a more peaceful way to counter the inevitable.”
         “With such a powerful decision on our shoulders,” said Man Two, “we came to the conclusion that we were not qualified to determine the fate of the world and humanity.”
         “First we thought that the general public should be the decider of their own fate.” Man Three shook his head. “We gathered up groups of people and conducted in depth surveys of their opinions on the world.”
         “All in all it was just a big mess,” said Man Two. “Because of the risks of leaks we had to liquidate all those surveyed. We staged all the deaths, but the toll was in the thousands.”
         “Finally,” said Man One, “we came to the conclusion that the fate of the world could in fact be decided by one man. However, he would need to be the RIGHT man.”
         “He would have to experience mankind at its highs…” started Man Two.
         “…And it’s lows,” said Man Three. “He would need to know both sides of the human spectrum…”
         Man One finished, “but he would need to be neutral as of the time of the decision.”
         The man in the room gazed at the screen-tile as if he was daydreaming. Then his eyes widened and his mouth opened in a gasp before he caught himself. He stood up quite quickly and backed away from the podium. He then proceeded to turn around and run towards the wall farthest away from the men in the tile. As soon as he reached it, he fell to his knees in exhaustion. Just then, the tile directly in front of him lit up. The man recoiled in horror.
         Man One was smiling. “This room represents the pinnacle of our governments technology. Every tile in this room can easily be transmuted into a screen. There is no escape from the decision.”
         Man Three was smiling too. “I know it seems like a tremendous decision to make, but it’s yours to make. We extensively researched you, and among at least a hundred others that qualified, you were the one we wanted. You are the proverbial…” he laughed, “…the proverbial Atlas! Doesn’t that excite you?”
********************************
         After lying on the ground for several hours, the man in the room was suspected dead from shock or a heart attack. So, as a test measure, the four tiles his body encompassed were fed a mild electric current. With no response, more electric shock was added and the man jumped up with a yelp. Clutching his neck and running away from the electric tiles, he finally came to rest at the foot of the pedestal.
         He looked around the room, and saw no sign of the tile-screen anywhere. He sat there for a minute or so, trying to constantly scan every tile in the room at the same time. He was just starting to think that maybe this was some drunken dream, and he was just asleep in the alley he preoccupied. Or maybe he had overdosed and fell into a coma.
         A loud booming voice interrupted his wishful thinking and filled the room with its presence.
         “You must decide in the next five minutes.”
         The man threw up his arms and fell onto his back.
         “If you do not choose to end the world this room will be pressurized and will compact, killing you instantly. If you should choose to end it, however, you will be killed in the same manner as the rest of us.”
         The man had so many thoughts racing through his head, so many questions he wanted to ask them. But he knew he could not say anything. He only had to time to make a decision, and it wasn’t hardly enough for a decision of this magnitude.
         The voice came on a final time. “The time to decide is now.”
         The man stood up slowly.
         He walked over to the podium.
He let his hand rest on the button, thinking to himself that it only took a little pressure to end humanity. He thought of his wife and his children. He didn’t believe in an afterlife, however it was better than the agony his life had become. He closed his eyes and placed his other hand on the first one. He let out the breath he had been holding and leaned down on the button. It collapsed so easily he first thought that he missed it. But when he looked he saw that the red was just starting to fade away, and END was barely readable now. He looked up at the wall just as his vision started to fade to white and his hands vaporized in front of him.

         The universe was silent again.