The sound comes from your phone while you are crossing the street, illegal to imitate and impossible to silence. Every phone half a mile around you is making a different one. It's followed by the strangest silence you have ever heard as people and cars have suddenly stopped. You know everybody is looking at you but your eyes are fixed on your phone screen. It's easier to look at the counter and the red button under it than at the people around you. You wish you could shelter in the strangeness of that thought.
You have owned the Machine for five seconds already. It's not really a machine and you don't really own it but there's a button on your phone you could press to destroy it. If you do it the people around you will lynch you in their rage. Almost everybody wants you to do it and is lying to themselves they would do it in your place. It's unfair, you think to yourself. You'll own the Machine for a minute of which seventeen seconds have already passed. It's the people looking at you. If you were alone you would do it and face your death with calm (that's not your fantasy: in your fantasy you escape a world secretly relieved even as they hunt you down, but it's not a fantasy you can sustain for long; you have owned the Machine for thirty-five seconds). You breathe in. Deep. You'll press the button when you breathe out. You hold and hold and hold your breath and when you have ten seconds left owning the Machine you let the air out and do nothing. It takes an hour for the last five seconds to pass. You are seeing without seeing the counter and the button and you blink and it's your lockscreen. You're surprised by this without knowing why. People and cars resume moving, not looking at you or at each other. They want to hit you in their disappointment but they don't. You tell yourself you were just too slow and fantasize about having pressed the button. Somewhere else in the world somebody has owned the Machine for three seconds.