Do you know why? Because relative to my point of view, I’m running at about twenty miles per hour. That’s fast for a human, but slow for a cross-country vehicle. It means that when I go from coast to coast, I’m spending two months doing nothing but running. I don’t get tired. I don’t get hungry. I’m not aging any faster than normally, relative to objective time… though the first few years of using my powers, that was always something I worried about.

But I do get bored.

Two months of seeing the country unfold a bit at a time, with nothing but your own thoughts. No sounds. Not even the wind in your hair. The interphase field that moves molecules around to keep me from destroying myself or everything else in my wake prevents that.

I’ve always been a solitary person. I don’t mind having some time to myself. I’ll take a hundred mile run sometimes just to get some hours to spend clearing my head or thinking through a project. Trying to make a living and be a superhero, it’s nice to be able to steal some moments out of thin air here and there to do the brain work. After all, I can push up the speed a little when I’m sitting in front of a computer, but only so much.

So short trips are fine. Longer ones are for emergencies only. If I were going to run across the country for fun, I’d have to stop every few hundred miles and spend some time moving around in real time just so I didn’t go crazy.

Still, you asked me what the worst thing about my powers are, and honestly, as bad as that can get, that’s not it. The absolute worst thing is when I get there too late. I can all but stop time, but I can’t make it go backwards.

Bullets travel thousands of feet in a second. That’s nothing compared to me, but it’s fast enough. They’re faster than the speed of sound. If I hear a gunshot, the bullet has already hit its target before the sound hits my ear.

Imagine arriving at the scene of a shooting that’s already in progress. Someone’s just been shot. Now imagine you’re seeing it slow motion. No sound. Just visuals, slower and sharper and realer than anything you’ve ever seen in the movies.

A moment not quite frozen in time, not quite suspended in front of you… and you could step out of that moment, you could speed it up, but there are still bullets flying and people in their paths and you can’t let go and step back into the normal flow of time until you’ve saved everybody else.

Do you have any idea how small a thing a bullet can be? How hard it is to spot in mid-air even when it’s barely moving? How big an area a burst of gunfire can cover by the time I know about it? Most of those bullets will probably bury themselves in walls or trees or the ground, but not all. Any one that I miss could end or change a life.

You see it like this: there’s a blur and suddenly I’m standing there with everyone’s weapons at my feet and a hand full of lead. What you don’t see is how many times I go back and forth, how meticulously I search the area, how wide a zone around the action I comb, how far I stretch time from my point of view in order to be sure… and when I come back down, it’s never because I am sure. It’s because I’ve given up. Because I’ve realized that I’m making myself crazy.

I can’t stop all the bullets. I can’t be everywhere at once. No one can, of course, but I have a power that lets me feel like I should be able to.

I wouldn’t give it up, of course. Not for anything.

But you asked me what the worst thing about my power is, so I told you. It’s not something I’ve ever told anyone before, but then, that’s not the sort of question most people ask.

It makes me wonder what the downside to yours is.

The new year rolls over, stretches, sits up, and looks around. It notices with a slight blush the bare limbs of its trees. It notices the layers of ice and snow that the old year had piled on before its departure. It is a look that the old year had the maturity to wear well, but the new year finds it gaudy.

It’s time for a change, the new year thinks, and it begins the slow process of peeling back the blankets of snow, of shaking the sleepy world out of its stupor. Out with the white, in with the green. Hello, everybody!

The old year looks back. It remembers when it was so young and thought everything was flower blossoms and babies. The new year would learn soon enough. It would find out there were more interesting things to be done with leaves, and then it would get bored with them entirely. The old year could try to tell the new one that it would all just end up in the same place, but there was little point. The new year wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t believe. It had to learn for itself.

Time marches forward. It never looks back.

He takes walk-ins, but most of them are from his regular customers and people referred by them. Few people notice his little shop, tucked between the chain pharmacy that bought out and replaced the little neighborhood pharmacy and a used book store that is more of an expensive hobby than a business. His little glass door has no sign on it, though there is an aged and fading barber’s pole next to it.

His first customer of the day is a man wearing a conservatively cut suit. He takes his hat off and hangs it on the peg by the door as he comes in, revealing in the process a thinning head of white-gray hair.

“Morning, Sam,” he says.

“Good morning,” Sam says. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Almost ten years,” the customer says.

“The usual, then?”

“The usual.”

Sam lowers the chair for the man to sit in, then elevates it up to working height. With elaborate care, he covers the man’s suit and takes his spectacles.

“We’ll start at the top and work down,” the barber says. He puts on a pair of gloves. Into the palm of the glove he squirts a brilliantly colored blue lotion, which he works into the man’s hair. “We’ll just let that sit… now tip your head back, please.”

The man obeys. He closes his eyes as Sam lathers his face up. The barber produces an old-fashioned straight razor, the handle inlaid with aluminum at a time when aluminum meant money, and then very carefully goes to work, shaving the years off the man’s face.

It’s a delicate business. A razor needs to be incredibly sharp to cut time, and the barber’s hands need to be incredibly steady. A single nick, a single cut, a single scrape and his customer could be bleeding seconds and minutes all over the place.

Sam is a professional, though, and with a professional’s practiced care he shaves off the last bit of foamy lather. He hands the man a towel and turns the chair around to face the mirror, revealing a dignified-looking man of fifty or so, with a full head of silver-gray hair and a face that’s only just beginning to show lines and only in the spots that give a man character.

“How’d we do?” Sam asks.

“Looks good,” the man says. “Much obliged.”

“Come back and see me soon, then.”

“Maybe in another nine or ten years,” the man says.

“As I said,” Sam says. “Real soon.”

Like clockwork they clattered around their tracks, reaching each destination exactly at the appointed minute and hour. Not a second sooner. Not a second later. The Yeats™ brand entropy engines were powered by the flow of time itself, whose inexorable passage could not be halted or even slowed appreciably.

At least, not at the speeds at which the trains traveled.

There were few problems at first. But then some undesirable aspects of this relentless efficiency became apparent. That the trains could not be halted was as much a curse as it was a blessing. Any time there was an accident down track, it became a race against time to prevent the arrival of the next implacable locomotive from compounding things. Once the schedules were set, it was impossible to alter the railroad timetables in the slightest… the 8:15 from Newark would always be the 8:15 from Newark. If this was no longer convenient or desirable for the men who had built the train, it was necessary for them to bend around it, altering their schedules and even clocks and calendars.

Time, after all, waits for no man.

As inconvenient as these small things were, they were nothing compared to the trouble that loomed. One of the selling points of the entropy engine project had been to reduce the dependency on non-renewable energy sources, but no one has the luxury of assuming they have unlimited time. Time may be running out. Many of the busier rail lines are already running on borrowed time.

But say what you will… at least the trains run on time. Would anybody willingly go back to the old way, now?