The plan took sec­onds to ex­e­cute. 59 sec­onds.

It was planned for 58. All things con­sid­ered, not too bad.

The process of plan­ning took much longer still. Not dozens of times as long; not hun­dreds. There are over four­teen hun­dred min­utes in a day, and it was eas­ily sev­eral days of plan­ning, even con­sid­er­ing meals and those few times you slept.

You planned it on your own. You went over it time and time again. This time, you had in­for­ma­tion. This time, you knew what to do.

This time, you weren’t at­tempt­ing to break into the li­brary, but just into this ran­dom man’s home.

He’s def­i­nitely ran­dom, in the lit­eral sense of the word, for he chooses spon­ta­neously to do the most ran­dom things.

You could­n’t plan for every­thing he could do… but you could plan for the cat­e­gories of things he might do.

And, though he does ap­pear en­tirely ran­dom, it’s re­ally that he’s im­pul­sive to the ex­treme. It is some­times pos­si­ble to pre­dict what he may do. If an op­por­tu­nity too-good-to-pass-up sud­denly ap­pears, he will take it.

That is, if it does­n’t give him an idea which he finds even bet­ter.

In the end, the plan, for all its con­tin­gen­cies, was sim­ple:

Knock on the door. Talk to him. And fi­nally, one way or an­other, pre­vent him from us­ing his power. You know what he did. You know what his im­pulses lead him to do.

As you dis­as­sem­ble your un­used gun, you feel the power flow­ing through you…

It’s like a sliver of a per­son, sit­ting by your ear, whis­per­ing…. “What if you had some ice cream? What if you killed some­one? What if you sung a song? What if you de­stroyed the world?”

At the time, tak­ing his power seemed like a bril­liant idea.

Now, you’re not so sure.