He’s the one holding the trigger.
But here’s the twist he just realized: if the machine sees all futures simultaneously, then his death scan is only one possibility. The others are worse. Much worse.
The image showed his skeleton—not as it was, but as it will be : fractured, pierced by three metallic objects, lying in a shallow grave beneath an unfamiliar sky. The timestamp embedded in the scan read: . ultimate x ray
In one of them, he’s not the victim.
Within days, the U.S. government shut down the project, calling it “epistemologically hazardous.” But Aris understood the real danger: if the Ultimate X-Ray could see any point in time, then anything could be found. Lost nuclear launch codes. The location of Jesus’s remains. The exact moment of your own death. He’s the one holding the trigger
But the true horror came when Aris turned the machine on himself.
The Ultimate X-Ray isn’t a tool. It’s a weapon that fires backward and forward through causality itself. And somewhere, in a lab not yet built, someone has just turned it on. Much worse
The machine didn’t just image density and atomic structure. It imaged time .