The Child Regret Department

The human existence is worthless.

I say this not with a grain of salt, but a whole bag of it. It’s something I’ve learned over the years of my life, during the days of my career. Something that I’ve thought about a lot, and now something I’ll never change my mind of. And, as of now, it’s something that continued to stay on my mind like a permanent cloud of flies around my head as I drove to my mother’s house to pick her up.

The car reeked of sweat and cologne. The taxi driver I had tranquilized, hid in some bushes, and stolen the taxi of must have had a problem. As I drove through the streets of the city I was born in, the stranger in the backseat of the car quietly glanced out her window at the glowing lights in the night. The perfect evening for a date.

She didn’t know me yet. Wouldn’t for at least another half a decade. And if we’re talking about my current appearance, another three decades. At the current moment, she held no love for me at all. I was her silent taxi driver on my way to delivering her to the first date with my father. A date that she said she had been late to. But it had been, according to her, a magical night. She had told me they were destined to be together, her and my father. That this night was a night that was supposed to happen, exactly how it did, that the event was the will of Father Time himself. That I, their only child, was the greatest thing that could ever happen to their average lives. They said I made them so proud, they loved me with all their hearts, and that I was to be their lasting legacy on this earth. And it would all begin with this night. The two of them were to meet at this restaurant--nothing too fancy, but nothing too modest either--downtown, where they’d eat at a patio outside looking at the dark starless sky with fairy lights glowing up the evening as if they, manmade objects, were to replace the stars themselves. Only, my job wasn’t to bring her there. It was the opposite. I was ordered to never bring her there at all.

Let’s start from the beginning.

I remember living in constant anxiety in my childhood. People were constantly droning on about the end of times. Illegal immigrants flooding borders of nearly every country worldwide. Food shortages and rising prices. Seas of people at grocery stores. I have this one fond memory of me as a little kid, I don’t know how old, perhaps still a toddler, of just staring at this bright television screen as it played the news, my head tilted to one side as I struggled to understand what they were saying. But I saw many things. I saw my favourite playgrounds being uprooted for skyscrapers. The ice cream shop my parents and I would go to every weekend going out of business and being replaced by an apartment building. Politicians shouting to crowds of people on podiums and shaking their fists as the people chanted back. 

When I was old enough to comprehend things, I understood that they were all worrying about the end of the world. That the only solution was this innovative new company at the time that promised a deathless solution to abortion. I was probably still holding a teddy bear at that age. The first time I heard of the company was when I came home from school one day, still small. I rushed to the kitchen where my mother was cooking dinner and my father was on the counter. They were deep in a conversation. I didn’t hear a single word, I was too preoccupied with what I had to show them. When I reached my mother I shoved a piece of paper into her face. “Look! Look!” I said. “I drew a city!”

“Wow!” said my mother, who had to cut herself mid-sentence while talking to my father. “That’s amazing!”

“They look just like the new skyscrapers they built right outside the neighbourhood, right? Don’t they!”

“They sure do, sweetie. Oh, that one might be a little too tall.”

“Oh. You’re right! I’ll fix it!”

When I went to sit on the dining table to edit my picture with my crayons, my parents continued their conversation.

“I still think it’s unethical,” said my father. “But who am I to question the demands of people? It seems like this method is growing in popularity day by day.”

My mother pursed her lips. “I don’t think it’s too bad. It’s only done when both parents of the child regret having them. We’ll never sign up for that.”

“No, we won’t. And you’re right, it’s only for the regretful ones. But it blows my mind how many of these regretful ones there are! Almost like they all keep this universal secret!”

“Who are you talking about? Reckless teenagers?”

“No. I can see why this would be good for them. I’m talking about married couples who planned to have their children.”

My mother went around the counter. I felt her presence behind me and she put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up from my seat and grinned. “Look! I fixed the skyscraper! And I noticed too that I used too much black crayon here, and the tree over here looks funny…”

As I rambled on, she seemed to smile at me with a face that said I’ll never let you go.

Let’s fast-forward. I’m thirty years old. I had a good university education, served in the military for a short while, and had a short career in financial advisory. Nothing stuck. Even at thirty I still didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living. I had lots of time left, but it was going to run out fast if I didn’t decide soon enough. That’s when I decided to apply for the agency the whole world was talking and criticizing about. The Child Regret Department.

It was this fancy business where all its agents wore grey or black business suits and held brown briefcases, walking around a futuristic underground base with white and blue architecture and pretty women with clip boards in lab coats and safety goggles. I was hired on the spot. They told me they could use a person like me. I had a military training background and I was familiar with one of the greatest factors that contributed to the divorce rate: money. I remember they specifically told me, “Oh! You worked in financial services? You must be used to seeing parents splitting all the time!” After a brief pause, thinking it was such a strange thing for them to say, I made light of the situation and told them, frivolously, that yes, I couldn’t say I wasn’t familiar with my fair share of divorcee clients. “So you’ll be fine! You must be so desensitized to it,” they said, making it worse.

I received an ID with my name on it: Rory Hunt. I became an agent for their company. I never truly took the time to think about what I was really doing. All I knew was that I wanted to experience the time travel technology they invented, and that I was helping the world with a noble cause by preventing the births of unwanted children by sabotaging the romance (or sexual assault, I’ve asked if the agency did cases like these and they said yes) between the two original lovers. 

The company promised a harmless and inconsequential experience for its clients. After the job was done the child would disappear from existence and the couple would continue life as if they had never met. Calculations would be done to ensure the timeline wouldn’t be drastically changed from the loss of their romantic affair, and the world would immediately adjust. Reality would change and everyone’s memories of the couple would even disappear. No big explosions or fireworks. No toodley-tots or widdley-winks in the continuum. No problems at all.

During this time, I didn’t tell my parents about my new job. In fact, I didn’t tell them much at all. They were going through a rough patch together. Whenever I was at their place they constantly argued and bickered. It wasn’t me, I promised myself. It was just a phase. My folks were flowing through the same river of marriage all couples did. It’s not my fault. I just had to let them be. This was proven whenever my mother would hug me (a few tears in her eyes, I’d notice) and tell me I was her sweet little pumpkin. I would feel my inner baby come out, letting my tears flow as I embraced her for warmth. In her eyes, still an innocent child. And I’d play the role willingly. Then, on other days, my father would invite me out to play golf. It wasn’t me, I told myself. Why would he do that if it was?

I drowned myself in the focus of my work. Every mission was hard. Not physically or mentally. Emotionally. There was a sort of negative influence on my psyche as I ruined cars, shut off the internet of online daters for weeks until they’d forget the other, and gave powerful laxatives to poor men and women in restaurants to complete my job. Sometimes, I had to do more extraordinary things, if the mission called for it, and if their love was stronger than most. The worst I’ve done was being forced to burn a man’s face by slamming it on a stove, searing it and making him less attractive forever. The love between him and his girlfriend was powerful, truly a Herculean example most could learn a thing or two from, so I had deemed it absolutely necessary and had called the department for authorization. To my surprise, they said yes, giving me the go-ahead. If my higher-ups didn’t question it, so didn’t I. That was what my moral compass devolved into: allegiance to my employer. After burning his face, the man’s girlfriend tried to stay with him the best she could, but at some point she couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve learned on the job that you can love someone but not be attracted to them. Love might be unchangeable, in some ways or others, but attraction isn’t. And so she had to leave him, and I got paid. 

I’d see the look on their eyes each time they would break up. Some, I could tell, would be okay with it in the next few days. Some were devastated. Some were alarmingly close to clinical depression. I’d stay heartless about it through it all. Every mission. It was just a job and I had to pay my bills somehow. It was good pay, too. The job was high in demand and more important than ever. I just told myself every time that these were complete strangers to me, I didn’t know them at all, and I would never see them again. But still, something in me changed in the years I did these missions. I did, as a matter of fact, become completely desensitized to the failure of romances, like they told me I was when I got hired. Completely indifferent to preventing the beautiful lives of dozens and dozens of future children. Maybe it was in me all along.

On and on my parents’ phase went. Every time I visited, they were in a bad mood with each other. Maybe my father didn’t do this, or my mother lied about that, I never knew what they were arguing about. Because of all the yelling and the hugging of me (to make me or themselves feel better, I didn’t know), I began to visit them less. When enough time had passed, and when I had planned it completely and was ready, I told them I was moving to another city for work. They weren’t happy about it. I remember feeling the effects of my decision hurt their relationship even further as I drove down the highway, the sun beginning to set, on my way to a new home far away from them. Sometimes I pictured that they were arguing about me. Impossible, I thought. I was the love of their lives.

I went on many of these precluding missions. Too many to count. But the number of them rose year after year, I could tell. Things were beginning to change in the world. Things were getting serious. The Child Regret Department was expanding globally, with headquarters being built in places from Hong Kong to Mexico City, from Buenos Aires to Berlin. I remember Tokyo getting one late. Others really early, like Hanoi. Then, some places never, like the Middle East, most of Russia, some of Africa, Central America, and the Philippines, for various reasons all relating to the unethical nature of the service (or fears of overpowering Western cultural influence, guess for yourself). But it wasn’t the department growing that cursed the world with pandaemonium. No, it was the effect of its globalization. Something much worse.

I began hearing reports about it on the news. Empty streets. Silent parks. Abandoned towns. A see-saw creaking in a quiet corner with no children on it as the rustling leaves of fall blew in the wind. Nobody was looking for long-term relationships anymore. People that wanted to fall in love never did, thanks to the department, and because of this people were disappearing everywhere. I flocked to the internet and saw more over the following days. Disturbing videos of ghost towns devoid of anyone wanting the houses on sale. Haunting cities of eerie streets full of newly constructed buildings for no one. The human population was descending faster than a jet plane skyrocketing to the ground. It was exponential. One day at work, a male coworker at the department told me it was drastic because the people we precluded were destined to birth more people, and those people were destined to birth their children as well. It was a chain. No, a tree! And we were the survivors.

“How can we remember that there used to be more people?” I said. “I thought time’s supposed to continue as if they never existed. That’s what the department told us. Seeing these empty towns with newly built buildings… how do we know they are supposed to have people in them? How do we know the human population is less than it should be?”

“We don’t remember that there used to be more people,” he said, sipping his coffee. “You’re right. We’re not remembering anyone at all. But scientists and mathematicians put two and two together in their labs and chalkboard rooms, and they blame the department. They think the population growth is being way slower than it should be. We’re not remembering anything. We know there are more people that should exist.”

I took all this in with a chill down my spine. I was frozen in fear for a good minute or two, unsure of what to even think. My coworker was unfazed. He even laughed and slapped my shoulder. “I mean, why should more people exist, anyway, am I right? We’ll be bigger fish in a smaller pond. Less choices on Tinder! I heard in the Dark Ages people just married within their own village because no one travelled far from their homes. Can you imagine? People’ll just have to settle with who they have! It’s great!” He touched my shoulder again, until he finally read my mood. “More coffee?”

But I felt his fear, too. Even if he was putting on an act. Everyone had it. The fear of emptiness, nothingness, oblivion. Growing in each of us as much as it was for the entire population. People we never knew were disappearing (or never appearing), there was no way to prevent it because there was no love left in the world, and the silence of a fragile humanity was getting louder than ever. Every couple regretted their children. We survivors had an unfamiliar kind of dread that made us stay awake at night, sitting in our stomachs as we hugged our childhood teddy bears and kept our night lamps on.

One day, I was hit with good news. I received a call from my mother. My parents and I made sure to stay in contact with calls every once in a while, so it wasn’t necessarily a surprise. She told me, in the happiest voice I’ve heard her use in years, “Your dad and I are having a date night. He’s taking me out!”

“Wow!” I said. “That’s great!”

“Yeah,” she said, as if she didn’t believe it herself.

“Where is he taking you?”

“The new Brazilian steakhouse downtown. I researched about it myself. It looks really good.”

I smiled through the phone. I hoped the relief of my parents patching up their marriage wasn’t visible through it. “It’s like you’re dating again.”

“It really feels like it, doesn’t it?”

My parents had the strongest bond I knew. They always fought, but it didn’t matter. I knew how much they always loved each other in the end. And I knew how much they loved me. I was certain about all of it like I was about the sun rising the next day.

“Oh, sweetie, come visit soon, okay?” said my mother. “You know how proud we are of you. Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

“Mom, please.”

“…Fiancé?”

“I’ll visit soon, I promise.”

“You better!”

I was right. The disturbance to their harmony was just a phase, just as I had thought. The good news lifted my spirits enough that I enjoyed the next few missions the department sent me on. Every romance I’d preclude, I’d laugh with glorious apathy. You two aren’t meant to be together. But my parents are! They love each other, hahaha! They love me! I’d think this as I’d drop a worm in their dinner date pasta or start a rumour that one of them cheated on the other.

Then things got worse society-wise. The population drop reached dystopian levels of nightmare. The surviving scientists said that the world’s memory didn’t remember the times there used to be more people. Just a couple of days ago everyone, including me, could have known a neighbour next door but now continue living as if they never existed. Because they hadn’t, there was no way to tell. The only way they knew this was happening in the first place was through their theories and math. No one was having babies. They even claimed that there should be more scientists helping them on this research, but it was possible they were disappearing too.

Some people protested and said they were lying. There were no disappearing people. There had always been only three billion people in the late twenty-first century. Not eight, nine, ten like the scientists thought there should be! People began podcasts online and riots on the streets. The world was in disagreement. I couldn’t say I agreed with the scientists. I mean, the world having more than three billion people was pretty unbelievable. Ten billion? No way.

But something in myself told me to trust the scientists. It began when the Child Regret Department announced that they were having trouble hiring new agents. A conversation I had with a coworker one day led into the topic.

“I had a different type of preclude mission today,” she said. “Sexual assault preclude mission. My first one. I had to beat the little s**t to a pulp to make sure he never went near her again. So now the baby doesn’t exist. It was fun. Normally they’d get someone else to do these types of missions, like Gustave, but I think he’s got a lot on his plate right now. The department’s running low on free agents.”

“Why is it such a big deal?” I asked.

“They think it’s because agents we would have had are not existing. So, in essence, they’re disappearing.”

“Wait, what? The disappearing people are affecting us now? We don’t have enough agents?”

“Well, I suppose. If the population is getting smaller then it makes sense the department would have trouble finding suitable agents. It’s possible you once knew other coworkers here and have talked to them but now you don’t.”

“You’re the only coworker I’ve ever talked to here,” I admitted.

“Are you sure? No one else, ever?”

“Yes.” I sipped my coffee. “What’s going to happen to us? What if our lives get affected? What if the person that interviewed me for this job disappears, and I never become an agent here?”

She shrugged. “As far as I know, if things are meant to happen they happen. They’d have found a different person to interview you, and you’d still get the job and be here in this moment. Who knows, maybe that’s actually what happened, and the person that interviewed you now wasn’t the original person that did.”

“I’m scared. I know you now. But what if I wake up tomorrow and forget--no, never know--that you existed?”

“You won’t feel a thing, then. No need to be scared. Like I said, we probably knew more employees here than we do now.”

“If people regret a child and have another with different people, why is the population declining? Shouldn’t it stagnate?”

“Maybe they regret those children too. Maybe they end up living a thousand lifetimes with a thousand different partners and they regret all their children in general. They go to the CRD every time. Maybe the CRD has had to preclude romances of the same clients over and over again for each timeline but in our perspective only once because they get erased. We don’t question the CRD. You just follow their orders, okay? And you know what? Maybe the world as it is isn’t built for children to last. Maybe regretting children is universal.”

“I refuse to believe that! My parents would never do that to me.”

“Alright, alright. I believe you.”

When I received my next mission, I learned I was wrong.

I went to the pneumatic tube one day to get my next task. There was a whoosh sound as it appeared in front of me in an opening in the tube. I grabbed the scroll and unrolled it. In big letters were the words: Standard Preclude Mission. Mission Year: 2055. Clients/Targets: Mr. Vincente Oliver Hunt and Mrs. Joselita Camilla Hunt. Use any means necessary.

Dread filled me like ice in my bones. Normally this was impossible. It was against the contract for CRD agents to receive a precluding mission for their own parents. It was extremely personal and there would be inevitable conflict. But the department told us things were getting desperate and the demand for our services were still high and preclude orders needed to get done. So I didn’t know the exact reason why they chose me for this mission. It could be simply that, that there were not enough agents not busy for the mission, or there was a big mess up. Well, like my coworker friend said, you didn’t question the CRD. You only followed their orders.

In the following days I brainstormed possible explanations for this. They got the wrong names. They got the right names, but they’re different people with the same names as my parents. There was a huge system error in the tubes, the computer overheated with how many preclude orders we were getting. But at the heart of it all I dreaded the worst yet most plausible scenario. That my parents had ordered it themselves, privately and deliberately.

The mission told me, before anything else, before even them, that my parents failed to save their marriage. They didn’t know I worked for the department. Oh, how could I have been so stupid not to tell them? Stupid, stupid me! But how could this be? They loved each other! I knew it with absolute certainty, and I would have let God struck me with a divine bolt if I was wrong! How could they keep this secret from me? How dare they? I was furious, but also confused at the same time, and miserable and conflicted and strangely apathetic in some ways. As if my brain was overloaded with emotion and could no longer feel it.

There is this idea going around nowadays that no one owes anyone life. I didn’t know where I got it, perhaps the protesters on the streets and news or somewhere online. The point is, parents don’t owe their children life before they’re born. But when they do give it, they owe them a good life, because they made the decision to bring them into the world, not the child. It’s true that sometimes they don’t make that decision, maybe they’re forced into it due to the evil of other people. But if you don’t let the CRD take care of it for you, you’re forced to give them the best life possible. Period.

It’s a preached-not-practiced sort of mantra that people seldom follow. Sometimes I think it’s why there’s so many problems with people in the world, or that there’s so many evil ones out there. Maybe it all depends on the childhood; everything hinges on it like a ball on a weak string.

Well, I had a great childhood due to my parents. But now they wanted to undo it all. I guess the CRD allowed you to avoid divorce as well. But then I thought, maybe it wasn’t that at all, maybe the problem was truly me. Maybe two parents can love a child so much that they don’t want them to be born as the world spirals into chaos. It’s possible. Or maybe, just maybe (my heart filled with terror at the thought of this), two parents can love a chid so much but still, despite everything, regret having them and would rather wish for a time before the child existed, before their love for the child existed.

I cried all night one night thinking about it.

On one stormy afternoon, I was at home, still not having begun the job. The department was getting impatient with me. I told them my time machine was malfunctioning, it was having trouble going to the year 2055. But that I could fix it myself, soon. I didn’t know if they believed me or not, but it didn’t matter. They were generous with giving me time, knowing the nature of my mission. Yet they were apathetic to it all the same, as if they said, Don’t hesitate. You won’t feel any pain. You’ll simply cease to exist. Like a free ticket out of this damned world. How great is that? How can you refuse? It’s what we all want.

I agreed. My parents agreed for me, too. So why was I still so hesitant?

I grabbed my childhood teddy bear from my closet and brought it outside. The sky was grey and the wind was harsh and loud. The storm had gotten worse, and I could see the trees outside as if being pushed by an invisible force. My home had its backyard facing a little forest. It was atop this grassy hill, and it was fairly nice. I bought it with the money from my job. Like I said, it paid well. I was climbing this grassy hill now, although the powerful rain wet it so much it turned muddy. When I got to the top, I was facing the forest. The bottom of the hill had this muddy ditch that was the entrance into the woods. It was exactly what I was looking for. I threw my childhood teddy bear straight down the hill and into the muddy ditch. It softly spoiled itself on its side in the moist mud.

I laughed like a maniac.

Then I celebrated like it was New Year’s Eve. I spun in the rain, my face to the bleak sky, my arms and tongue catching the droplets as I went around and around again and again. I breathed in the smell of wet leaves and I tasted the freshest water in the world. Lightning flashed in front of my eyes, straight above me, flashing like a light show before the thunder followed. I smiled harder, keeping my tongue out and my gaze straight up. Spinning and spinning like the world didn’t matter. Because it didn’t. I didn’t.

If I did this, this mission, I kill myself. I die. So I yelled. I used all the power of my lungs, raising my arms to the sky even higher. 

“Thank you!” I screamed to my parents, wherever they were on the planet. My head was dizzy, my clothes were soaked. I was cold and alone. This was better than alcohol. “You regret me, but I don’t regret myself. Thank you for my life. You may not have owed it to me, but I owe you everything. Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Then I yelled this last part: “Woo!” The thunder boomed in response. God telling me everything would be okay.

I ran inside, searching for my time machine, gathering all the tools I’d need. I was going to do this mission. My loyalty lied with the CRD. It was the only thing that made me feel I was worth something, that I had to exist. Well, now I didn’t have to exist. This mission proved it. But I would do this for them anyway.

The teddy bear, at the bottom of the ditch, would stay there cutely and innocently, living without purpose, covered in mud and perpetually smiling for the rest of its life with its dark, cold, dead eyes. Like it, too, felt alive.

#

I went ahead with my mission, bringing us to where I was right now. My mother in the taxi with me. Me driving to who knew where. It didn’t matter anymore! Nothing really did!

I took in the sights of the world of 2055. Time travel was the original reason I took my job. The streets of the city were alive. There were tons of people walking on the road, walking into movie theatres, laughing on benches, chatting on phone calls. Cars honked and we were stuck in heavy traffic. None of them knew what was to come. The world would never be the same. It would never change as long as the CRD existed and continued precluding lives.

At my orientation for the job, they told me how the company first started. Perhaps I could go on my own mission, a mission to preclude the existence of the department, using my time machine. I could go back in time to the moment it was created and sabotage it. I thought about the insane number of people I’d save, or rather, un-kill. Because I’m not saving them. But, while I would be dooming them to a worthless existence, I’d say it’s better than no human existence at all.

“So, we’re headed to a steakhouse. You like steak?” I asked, just for the sake of speaking to my mother one last time, making intentional wrong turns as I spoke. In my mind, every kilometre we drove away from the restaurant where my father was waiting for my mother was one year gone from my life.

My mother turned her head from the window and faced my back, her face lighting up. “Oh, I love it! I’m going there to meet up with someone for a date.”

“Nice,” I said, although I knew all the details already.

“I actually knew him in high school. We were good friends, but we never dated. Out of the blue, he texts me that he wants to take me out. And here we are.”

“Oh, so you know him already. Do you like him?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I didn’t think much of him at the time. But knowing he wants me now? Yes, I guess I do. I don’t know, maybe I liked him all along since high school. Right?” She laughed.

What? Okay, that wasn’t what she told me. She said she didn’t actually like him until the third date. She lied to me. I mentally laughed it off. No doubt she twisted the story to her favour when telling it with my father.

“Say,” I said as we passed an intersection, “this might be a strange question. But how would you feel if it doesn’t work out? With him, I mean.”

“Well, why would I think about that right now,” she said, still laughing. “This is the first date. We’ve just begun.”

We’ve just begun.

“You’re not scared?” I said, my voice choking. I hoped it was my imagination. 

“Scared? Scared of what?”

“I don’t know! The future? If your children are going to think you gave them a good life or not? If for any reason you stop loving your husband?”

She laughed again. “You’re odd. I don’t think that far ahead. No one really does. Do you think about when you’re going to die?”

Do you think about when you’re going to die?

It was in this moment that I had my own regret. I regretted joining the Child Regret Department. My mother loved life--and she passed that on to me. I knew this before going on this mission, yet I still went on it anyway. Stupid me, that’s just how I was. Stubborn. But maybe I could still preclude something: preclude my nonexistence. All of a sudden, where we were driving mattered.

I was on a path away from the restaurant now. But there was still time to fix it.

“S**t! I made a wrong turn,” I said, trying to sound as real as possible.

“Is everything okay?” said my mother anxiously. I rolled to a stop at a red light. I took a deep breath and turned in my seat, our eyes locking.

“Yeah, everything is fine, miss. We’ll get there shortly, I’ll turn around. It’s not a big mistake.” I smiled, and her face filled with relief. She wouldn’t miss this date for the world, knowing how much she’d love my father in the coming years. Even if I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I turned around just as the traffic light turned green, unable to get rid off this stupid smile creeping up my mouth, and I drove on with an interesting thought that this was actually the first time she’d ever see my face. It wasn’t a significant thought. Not at all, really. But it was sort of funny and curious to me, and I almost laughed. This odd idea in my head that I’d get to see my mother’s face before I was born, and as if I’d get to decide if I wanted to be born to her. Like a choice to be her child or not. I don’t know, call me crazy. A choice to be alive? It was a choice that didn’t exist, but, I feel in every version of me out there, I’d say yes to it anyway.

###