The feeling of receiving an Amazon package you didn’t order must be similar to how a fish feels when looking at a worm on a hook. You want it, you know you’ll take it, but some deep down preservation instinct is telling you not to trust this. Nothing is free, that instinct says, there are only trades where you don’t know the cost.

So when people started receiving the packages they opened them but then they posted online asking what the scam was. And also… what were they? Some kind of watch, obviously, sleek and stylish like an Apple product but unbranded, yet all they did was show a number that counted down once per second. Usually ten digits, sometimes less, never more.

Articles started to be written. More people were getting the watches and posting about them and tech journalists passed off their best guesses as answers. It was something to do with credit card fraud, one might say, or something to do with fake online reviews. Obviously the more outlandish rumours and conspiracies were false.

People shifted from asking ‘why’ to ‘what’ and tried to figure out what the watches did. They wouldn’t work on anyone under 18 and would show a different number when put on a different person. Put the watch back on the same person and it would show the same number, less the number of seconds it had counted down.

Then a woman got a watch that had a five digit number: 93,455 and counting. At one second per tick the first watch to hit zero would run out in just over a day and its owner was livestreaming the event. At thirty seconds to go her ex broke into her apartment. At precisely zero he shot her.

More articles were written telling people the watches weren’t what everyone now knew they were. Police took boxes off people’s porches, Amazon ceased all deliveries, but still the watches came.

People with watches who were running out barricaded themselves inside their homes and had heart attacks in padded rooms. People with decades left to live jumped off bridges on livestream and became vegetables.

What really cemented the hopelessness of changing fate though was the town where everyone’s watch ran out at the same time. People with the same number moved there and started a cult. People who tried to leave disappeared. At zero seconds they all drank the Kool-Aid.

Free Will Theory went the way of the Flat Earth. Criminals were deemed not responsible for their actions and let go; people didn’t bother with work; eighteen year olds given their first watch had smaller and smaller numbers as deaths of hopelessness increased. Why choose to do anything when fate is out of your hands?

Human lives were, undeniably, as predictable as clockwork—and without hope, they were winding down.