[ WP ] Time travel exists , and a new form of capital punishment is introduced : Transporting the convict back to the worst , practically unsurvivable , places in human history to find yourself in . You are such a convict , and just got sent back . You will do anything to try and survive .

Eleven years alone in a room will do things to a person that little else will. From time to time, I heard the men in the other cells talking to themselves, to imaginary companions, proclaiming their innocence to anyone who would listen, and attempting to cheat the executioner of his task and failing. That was the one rule -- you did not get to take yourself out of the game. They did it, and they did it when they were ready. I assumed legal arguments, bureaucracy and the like were at work in some way, but it could just as easily be an engineered part of the experience. That was the worst part- not the imprisonment, not the death, the worst thing was our force-fed ignorance. Maybe that was just me. 
 
 You know what eleven years alone in a room will do to a person? It kills everything good in them, and leaves nothing but what they are at their core. Time erodes you and leaves your psychological frame bare to the elements. You loved music, your children, or your farm? Not anymore. What is love or kindness in the face of isolation and death? A memory, not a reality. If you want to know what makes a person tick, lock them up for a decade and they'll gladly enlighten you. 
 
 For the guy next door, that meant accessing romance novels on his Book and masturbating furiously at every opportunity. He was fond of informing the neighborhood of the details. The guy above me tried to steal an election from the folks who had rightfully purchased it. He talked a lot about justice, right and wrong that first year. By the second year, all he wanted was some goddamn nachos. Every minute of every day, it was nachos, right up till the moment they sent him. Some grim moment in history was graced by a once-idealistic middle aged man, who doubtlessly shrieked for nachos and then died without a shred of dignity. Proof the system works. 
 
 What remained in my case was the animal desire to live. I had that. I also had my Book. 
 
 The Books were censored heavily. Nothing current, nothing relevant, and no way to communicate with the outside world. But survival did not require communication. It required only a plan. So I planned. History books were plentiful, and I read them all. I read the balanced ones, the political diatribes, even the historical fictions. I read about the Dark Ages, the Crusades, all the wars, and the Final Fall. I made notes in my head, reviewed them, and recited whole chapters from memory. If I had the time and inclination, I could transcribe here the entirety of four books about the effects of the Black Plague on southwestern London. More importantly, I could describe ways of fabricating antibiotics and find a way to Poland without a map from anywhere in Europe. You did n't know the Plague spared Poland almost entirely? I knew. I picked up a bit of conversational Polish, just in case. 
 
 That would have been an easy one. 
 
 I'd always assumed they'd let us know what was happening. Maybe we'd get last rites or a pat on the back, who knew what I was expecting. What actually happened was that one evening ( or day, the lights were never off ), I fell asleep on my bedroll, and awoke to an air raid siren blowing an `` all clear'' signal. I was laying on a hospital bed, with a confused doctor standing over me. His clipboard bore Japanese characters. Knowing I'd have trouble passing as a Japanese man, I stood, shook the doctor's hand, and said `` Danke''. 
 
 I'd have questioned him further, but my location was pretty obvious. If you wanted to kill a person, there are few better places and times to leave them than 7:09 AM, August 6, 1945 in the Shima Surgical clinic in Hiroshima, Japan. The place was humble and not terribly memorable, which is probably why it came to be known to history as Ground Zero. The doctor had questions, but the `` all clear'' siren meant I had 66 minutes to locate a church in a land that did not trust foreigners. 
 
 Hiroshima did not look like a city at war. It was pleasant, the sort of place I might have lingered in if not for the impending destruction and the inherent distrust of tall white gentlemen. I noticed that I had period clothes, and wondered if it was a time travel thing, or an attempt to give me a fair shot. I suspected the former, because I think they might have given me a watch otherwise. A woman stared at me as I stormed out of the clinic, clutching her daughter close. I must have looked deranged, and my question could not have helped much. 
 
 `` Where is the German church?'' I asked, using the entirety of my Japanese vocabulary. 
 
 She only stared, so I picked a direction and ran. A moment later, I put the same question to a shopkeeper. This one, though frightened, managed to point in the direction from which I had come. I turned and ran again, hoping my urgency would n't worry him enough to summon the police. 
 
 Not long after I saw it, a humble Jesuit mission church attached to a private home. If the accounts I'd read were correct, the church would be destroyed, but some unknowable combination of factors would spare the house, and all inside it from both the blast and the subsequent fallout. The house was the only island in what would shortly become a sea of death. 
 
 Knowing my fate would involve death at some particularly unpleasant point in history, I had learned to speak German as well as a person who had never heard a word of it could. I entered the church, and explained to the man there that a bombing was incoming, and that I knew because I was an American soldier who had knowledge of it. He smiled, nodded, and asked me to leave. 25 precious minutes later, I'd succeeded in frightening him enough to get him into the residence, where a small group of Jesuit missionaries gathered around a table and stared at me. One of them offered me tea. 
 
 The wall clock said we had less than two minutes left when I heard the singing. The song was cheerful, and horrifying at the same time. Through the window, I saw a group of twenty or thirty children, led by a young woman, on their way to school, or some kind of outing. Two minutes meant no negotiating. I grabbed a knife from the Jesuit's counter and dashed outside with it. The last child in the group was a girl. her hair was an absolute mess but she smelled like mint. I remember that. Mint. 
 
 I lifted her carefully, and placed the knife at her throat. 
 
 I expected pandemonium, but nobody panicked. They stared at me, helpless. Someone shouted and ran for help. The young woman who was guiding the children gaped in horror as I indicated she should lead the children into the house, where the shocked Jesuits waited. She did this, but once inside, the missionaries mounted a counter-attack, and tried to escape. I held them off, and kept them inside the building. A hoe stood in the garden along the side of the house, and placed through the handle of the door, I was able to brace it against the building so it could not be opened. 
 
 It was about then that I heard the plane overhead, and remembered my situation. It's funny how you forget everything sometimes. The last thing I thought was that maybe you ca n't kill everything good inside a person, after all.
