Amiel Macht sat eating an overpriced cucumber sandwich in a café, and light-years away in a galaxy he'd never even heard of, lightning struck a pool of primordial soup and the first life form that planet had ever seen came into being. Moments later, he took a sip of coffee, and an asteroid the size of Montana struck the planet, destroying this tiny Precambrian organism. As Amiel flipped through the newspaper, he desperately fought off a sense of overwhelming guilt.

You see, Amiel had a great secret. Amiel was the most important person in the universe. He wasn't quite sure how he found out, whenever he looked back on it, it just seemed like the kind of thing he'd known instinctively. He was even less sure how it had happened. Perhaps he'd been born that way, destined for greater importance than the rest of mankind combined. Perhaps he was God, and he had hit his head at some point and his entire life was that of an amnesiac deity. Perhaps he'd done something to deserve it, though whether that something would have been a great sin or a great act of good he could never decide. It didn't quite matter which it was, since he highly doubted he'd ever done anything major enough either way. Aside from his huge cosmic importance, he was really depressingly mundane. He wasn't completely dull- he rather liked "My Little Pony", for instance, but he somehow doubted that that was sufficient oddity to warrant such special attention.

As a result of his importance to the world, every single thing that ever happened was dictated by Amiel's thoughts and actions. Through a complex language of signals and signs that he neither knew nor even fully understood, Amiel's every movement and thought severely altered the substance of probability. He didn't know how his actions would affect cosmic events, and he wasn't entirely sure he'd be willing to face the tremendous responsibility of knowing if he were given the chance. The only purposeful manipulation he ever tried came about in high school; as an experiment, he stole the school mascot's lobster costume and went ice-skating at midnight. The next morning, he read a news story about a school bus full of children in Atlanta that had spontaneously combusted. Ever since, he had been very careful to never try and alter the fabric of reality by dressing up as a crustacean.

For the most part though, Amiel tried to drive these facts out of his mind and live as normal and boring a life as he possibly could. He did this partly because it seemed to be the only sensible coping mechanism to a man in his situation, and partly because he secretly suspected that the more peculiar his life was, the more disastrous the consequences. Considering how peculiar being a living pseudo-god was already, he inferred that dwelling on it too much would be the absolute worst thing he could possibly do.

Unfortunately, every morning when he read the paper and he casually gazed along the obituaries and assorted disasters across the world, he was painfully reminded that all of it was his fault. Every. Single. Tragedy. That ever befell anyone was his singular responsibility. This re-realization always shook him desperately for a few moments, but he usually recovered soon enough.

Today was different. Today had been a particularly bad news day. As he gazed on at the particularly high number of tragedies that had befallen the world recently, a distinct feeling of terror bubbled up in his stomach that he could not shake. A dozen different countries seemed to be on the brink of war, and crime rates seemed to be at an all time high. As he read a story about a powerful earthquake in Asia, he realized that the earth itself seemed to be lashing out at its inhabitants.

Amiel was shaking with revulsion and fear as he contemplated all of this, and he set down his coffee cup lest he shatter it in his hand. He sighed heavily, darkly amused by the irony in his situation. Here he sat, the being with the most influence in all of existence, and he felt completely and utterly powerless. It felt that as long as he existed the world would be in pain, and that there would be nothing he could do about it for as long as he lived.

The answer then hit Amiel with a jolt. While he existed the world would be in pain. There would be nothing to do about it for as long as he lived. Amiel jumped up, too excited about the prospect of actually being able to finally take the situation into his own hands to feel frightened or nervous. He then immediately sat back down again, realizing that people were staring and that he'd have to think this through carefully anyway. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd get a second shot at, after all.

Poisoning himself seemed like the best method. He didn't have the fortitude to off himself in any sort of violent manner, and the only other thing he could think of was eating 12 cheeseburgers a day and never exercising, and that seemed an awfully round-about way of doing things. He would find the most potent poison he could, an entire bottle of painkillers if that's what it would take. He'd find it, and he'd write a note, and then he'd get himself somewhere comfortable but secluded so that no one would find him and then...

...And then what? He'd kill himself? He'd be dead? The most important being in the entire universe, dead? What would that do? What would the consequences of that be? Would there be a new most important person, someone who could be even worse than him? Would the universe just go on without any sort of unwitting dupe making all its decisions for it? Would the whole thing just implode upon itself and cease to be? Could that happen? Could he even die to begin with? Would the cosmos allow that of their most cherished possession?

Amiel felt a great pressure gripping his chest as this great disappointment befell him. He could not kill himself, he could not solve things, he couldn't afford to. If he tried, a million different things could happen, many of them terrible, and given his luck those were likely to be the things that would occur. Sighing heavily and slowly trying to resign himself to his fate and his newfound hopelessness, Amiel ordered another cucumber sandwich.