Zoe looked at the thing that the man was holding. "What is it?" she asked, yawning.
"Well, I'm glad you asked. It's a retroactivator." It looked a lot like a smartphone.
"A what?" Zoe was still half-asleep. Maybe she heard the man wrong.
"A retroactivator," the man repeated.
Nope, she heard right. But what the hell was that?
"Well, imagine you or someone else made a decision in the past...this could change that decision..."
"And...you are showing this door to door?"
"Well, actually...you're my first door...I've discovered that the device is completely useless to me..." He said.
Zoe rolled her eyes. This was mildly entertaining, but it was 6AM. "Look...are you off your meds or something?"
"No...I can see how you'd think this was crazy. But...I can't change decisions in my own life, because I can't do anything that would prevent the retroactivator from being invented. It would create a paradox. I see you're skeptical...what was the last decision you made...?"
"Opening the door to a crazy guy at six in the morning," she said.
He punched in some information on the screen. "If you'd just stand there...you'll be shielded from the effects. Come back to the door afterward."
"Yeah, what..." Zoe suddenly found herself on the stairs, halfway back to her room. "What the hell..." she muttered, and turned around and went back to the door. The man was standing there. "Convinced?"
"So, what do you want?"
"Well, you can try my invention...or you can say now, I activate this again, and you go about your life as if you never answered the door, because for you it didn't. And I try next door."
"With the Drullers?" Zoe said.
"If that is who lives next door, then yes," he said. "Now, do we have an understanding?"
She thought about it. She could make people make different decisions? "Yeah."
He handed her the device. 'It is all yours."
"So, what's the catch?"
"No catch actually." Well, there was, but Zoe had already said yes.
He was gone before Zoe could change her mind. She looked at the device. It was still set on her decision to open the door. There were options. It noted that the most probable was now didn't answer door, where it had previously been the second...and the remaining options were less probable. This was going to take some getting used to. Where would she start?
