I banged at Naoki’s door. The youngest offspring of a wealthy Japanese family, my friend had always been a sort of crackpot, the crazy scientist guy you find in comics. He had transformed his spacious condominium in downtown New York into a laboratory populated with strange contraptions, buzzing measuring instruments and heaps of arcane physics books. Kooky maybe, but level-headed. I looked again at my phone. “Come here at once, I need to talk to you.” his text said. This was no good omen.

The door cracked open and Naoki motioned me inside. As soon as I entered, he put a strange device, like a metallic pear with a small protruding tube, in my hand. I looked down at it then up at him. His face was ashen. 

“Press that switch,” he said in a quavering voice, pointing to a small nub on the device.

I did. A red LED blinked. Nothing else happened.

“You saw it, eh? The blinking red light?” he asked.

”Yeah, I did. So what?” I replied.

“Turn it around and try it on you.”

I spun the device in my hand. When the tiny tube faced me, I pressed the switch. A green LED lit up.

Naoki cast a triumphant glance at me. “See?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t really elaborate. This device,” he began, “is a thanatometer. It—”

“A what now?!”

“A [i]thanatometer[/i]. It measures the time the person you aim it at still has to live, and displays the result in colors from green to red. Blinking red means terminal.”

He paused, looked down, then back up to me. “I’m sorry to break it to you,” he slowly said, as if stressing each word, “but I have only a few more hours left in this vale of tears.”

“What?!” I exclaimed. “This is complete nonsense! How could such a device exist?”

“I have worked the theory out, and you’ll find the papers in my safe, if you’re interested. The idea is simple: you know we live in a four dimension world, right? Spacetime, as brainiacs call it. Well, this device probes into spacetime and measures your extension in all the four dimensions, time included. From that, it computes your lifespan, thus the time you still have to live.”

I looked at the widget I held in my hand in horror. Could it be true? Yet, it was well within Naoki’s unmatched abilities to create such a dreadful toy.

“You know how wicked human nature is, right?” he continued. “After I rigged it up, I often took it for a stroll, pointing it discreetly at random people in the streets. Sometimes I made striking discoveries: Ferrari, Corvette or other sport cars’ drivers, bike riders, simple pedestrians in their thirties, teens,  children and even now and then babies in their carriages, all blinking red. Who could’ve imagined?

“But it was a sort of seedy game, and I quickly got bored of it. So I tossed the thanatometer away in my safe, and took to using it only on me. Every year at first, then every other, then, you know, as I grew overconfident, every five years or so, like a routine checkup. Until this morning. Boom! Torpedoed and sunk. There’s no denying it, I’m done for.”

“But… But do you feel bad? Out of sorts? Anything wrong?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he answered, and a faint smile played on his lips. “Never felt better! I could even swim the seven seas if you asked me. Yet somehow I’m at death’s door. And now if you’d excuse me…”

He sidled past me, opened the door and went out to call the elevator. When he came back he nudged me outside. “…I still have a few chores to look after in private. Farewell, my friend!” he concluded, before shutting the door behind me.

I was too befuddled to react immediately as I should have. Instead, I tottered into the elevator and pushed the ground level button.

I was halfway down when the gun went off.