When the theoretical physicists hand you a paradox, the only sensible response is to turn it into slapstick.

I spent a week thinking about the one-shot time machine. Not the Doctor Who kind, all whimsy and reset buttons, but the brutalist version: one trip, no return, no do-overs. The sort of gadget that turns your brain into a tangle of spaghetti by Wednesday. Most people, I suspect, imagine themselves as cosmic editors—nipping back to undo some specific scar, whisper a stock tip, or catch the girl who slipped through their fingers. My best mate said exactly that last one. He’d go back for the one that got away. I pointed out, with the gentle tact of a man lobbing a grenade into a daydream, that this would un-exist his children. Not kill them. Worse. Erase the very possibility of them. He faltered. Of course he did. Any sane person would.

That’s the thing about the machine: it’s not a vehicle. It’s a horror movie dressed in chrome. Go backwards and you’re the butterfly, wings flapping, obliterating everything you claim to love. Go forwards and you’re a ghost, abandoning your wife to a lifetime of unanswered questions while you gawp at hoverboards or choke on post-apocalyptic dust. And if you’re me—wheeling into the past in a powered chair, looking for all the world like a time-travelling cyborg who’s severely misjudged the accessibility provisions of 1780—you’re dead on arrival. Not metaphorically. Probably pitchforked.

I briefly flirted with the selfless escape hatch: jump to the future, find a cure, get fixed up. But then you’re standing at the door of the machine, and your children are behind you, and you realise you’re about to say goodbye forever to become a stranger with working legs. The last thing I’d say to them? I couldn’t do it. The battery would die on my own miracle. The machine, it turns out, isn’t testing your courage. It’s testing your ego. And the ego fails every time.

So what do you do with a universe-breaking paradox engine that you’re too morally queasy to use? You sell it. Not to an institution—they’d just weaponise it or hold a symposium—but to the exact sort of person who deserves to vanish. You pitch it to a tech-billionaire fanatic. Someone with more money than doubt, more hubris than sense. You frame it as the ultimate power move, the final frontier, and you watch him salivate. They sign the cheque. climb in. press the button.

And then gone – bosh. Not dead. Just elsewhere. Competing with their own past, mangling their own timeline, becoming their own butterfly. You, meanwhile, are several billion richer and the world is slightly less burdened by a person who names their children after spreadsheet functions or ‘cool’ cities they may have been conceived in.

You’ve not built a time machine. You’ve built the most elegant predator call in history. A lure shimmering with the promise of playing God, irresistible to precisely the sort of people the timeline is quietly begging you to cull. You become a Machiavellian zookeeper, silently holding the door open for the wealthy and the stupid, performing a kind of cosmic weeding with immaculate deniability. The most profound invention in human history, reduced to a glittering mousetrap.

I thought this thought experiment would go somewhere profound. Instead it went slapstick. A Feydeau farce with a body count. And I’m oddly at peace with that. The one-shot time machine’s true function turns out was never transport. It was a bullshit detector. It asked us what we’d actually do with this power, and we answered, honestly: we’d flog it to the biggest idiot in the room and hope they had the good grace to vanish.

The universe, I suspect, would approve.

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