One minute ago

Tom and Lucy have been best friends since they were toddlers. Now they were in their twenties and felt something more profound than a friendship. Or that was what Tom thought that night. The complicity, the way they looked at each other, suggested something special going on. They sat on a park bench. It was a warm summer night. After sipping wine and eating cheese talked about their lives.

And then Tom leaned over to kiss Lucy. She delicately pulled away as soon as she noticed Tom moving in for a kiss. Tom panicked: not only did she not feel the same way about him, but he had just ruined their friendship forever. Nothing would ever be the same again.

But Tom had a secret weapon up his sleeve. As a final robotics project, he created the Minutron machine. This prototype time machine allowed him to rewind and erase the effects and memories of any event that had happened in the last 60 seconds of his life. Only him and Minutron's memory could remember what happened. It was only a prototype, so he only had 30 seconds to decide whether to activate Minutron.

After the failed kiss, he didn't even need 5 seconds to activate the erasing and rewind one of the most embarrassing and potentially destructive episodes of his life. Luckily, the machine did its job. Lucy remembered absolutely nothing, it was as if the kiss had never happened, and they spent the rest of the evening chatting distractedly about banal topics.

Tom used to be someone incapable of making decisions or acting boldly. Now, thanks to Minutron, he could act even brazenly and recklessly, safe knowing that any stupidity he committed was reversible. As long as it was not a fatal accident, or if he hesitated too long and took more than 30 seconds to activate Minutron. Tom was quite adept at making quick decisions about potential screw-ups in his life. He used to hate public speaking and dread telling unfunny jokes. But now he was careless and enjoyed making up sassy and witty jokes on the fly.

If the joke fell flat, he could always activate Minutron and pretend that nothing had happened. One day he thought he was telling the most hilarious joke in recent memory. He was already picturing himself as the latest sensation of the comedian circuit. But after finishing the joke, no one reacted. He got scared, activated Minutron, and immediately ran away depressed. Apparently, he was even worse at telling jokes than seducing his friend.

20 years later, he was on his own. Aside from his engineering skills, everything else had been a failure. He had saved the embarrassment of countless awkward situations, yet he felt like a complete failure. Nobody could remember he had made a fool of himself, but who cares? He had nothing, aside from his Minutron machine. One day, the phone rang. It was Lucy. Her first words were:

- "Why?"

- "Why what?" Answered a puzzled Tom.

- "Why didn’t you kiss me that night?"

- "But I kissed you, and you turned me away! Hey, one second. How do you know I kissed you?"

- "Your Minutron machine system code now is open to the public. Everyone that had an event erased by the machine received a copy of what happened that erased minute. I can't believe you erased the kiss."

- "But I insist, you rejected me."

- "I had bad breath because of the cheese. I just was going to tell you I needed ten seconds to clear my bad breath, and then I would give you the longest kiss ever. I had been waiting all my life for that moment and wanted it to be special. But you know I am timid, so you had to take the lead. But you erased the kiss, and after that, I just felt dizzy and weird but still couldn't recall anything." Lucy was furious:

"I thought that night it would be the night, but after nothing happened, or that was what I believed, I kept my distance from you and, several years later, got married. My life is fine now. Things could have been different, but now we just must get on with our current lives and pretend that nothing happened. It won't be that hard considering that your stupid machine made me believe nothing happened."

-Tom was too stunned, frustrated, and shocked to say anything. He just muttered to himself: "Oh fuck it, what a stupid way to ruin my life! Can't believe how I blow it!"

The next day he read in the news that someone had found in the machine memory his erased joke, and after making it his own, he became the most successful comedian of the decade. It seems the joke was too sophisticated for the audience. Still, if he had waited just 10 seconds, the entire audience would have had a fit of laughter. Minutron had also ruined his comedian career.

But he couldn't blame Minutron; it was his fear of spontaneity. He had to control everything and wasn't ready to face the consequences of his actions, so he had erased all the potential opportunities of his life. He saved some potential embarrassment but had ruined his life.

After venting by banging his head against a wall, he suddenly witnessed Minutron and picked an ax to destroy it. But Minutron, after 20 years, had grown into an even more powerful machine. Every time he destroyed the machine, Minutron self-regenerated using its time rewind powers. Finally, Tom put himself into the machine and clicked erased and rewind one million times in a row.

He didn't manage to destroy the machine but destroyed his memories of everything. It was like someone had poured acid on his brain and burned off his memories. Everything was gone, not just his knowledge of engineering, but also his knowledge of everything in his previous life. Tom started studying hard, and within a year, he had earned a doctorate in physics and mathematics. For ten years, he has been the leading expert on time travel and the universe's origin. Recently gave a talk on the origins of the universe in which he mentioned he wished he could go back in time and change one thing. He said he had the urge to do it because he felt he had missed something important. He then said that he wished he could go back in time and kiss someone called Lucy.

A team of experts improved Minutron and became a successful prototype to prevent and predict car accidents. It also repeated continuously: "Live your life, don't try to control everything, be spontaneous."