Steve tripped and fell onto the burning sand.
"Ow, damn. What the hell?"
He looked back to see what he had caught his foot on. Half buried and glimmering in the sun was a beautiful azure bottle stopped with a cork. He pried it from the sand and held it up to his eyes. The rays from the sun reflected and refracted through the bottle at strange angles, as though they were obscured by some type of liquid, though the bottle felt light enough to be empty. Intrigued by this, Steve pried out the cork and gave it a whiff. It smelled odd. He sniffed it again. Suddenly, there was a great billowing of smoke from the mouth of the bottle. Startled, Steve dropped it onto the sand and watched in stunned silence as the smoke coalesced into a humanoid form in full Arabian regalia.
"Master," it said as it bowed.
Steve stared slack-jawed for a moment, then broke into laughter.
"A genie? Yeah, right. There must have been something funny in that bottle."
The genie was visibly offended by this.
"I assure you not, Master. I have waited many moons in my glass prison for another to awaken me. Now that I am free, I am able to grant you any one wish your heart desires."
Steve pondered this.
"Only one wish? I guess wishing for more wishes is out, and I suppose wishing for more genies is, too?"
The genie nodded.
"I do not have the power to go beyond my own limitations. A single wish is only worth a single wish, and a single genie is only worth a single genie. You may wish for another wish, if you have a taste for recursion."
Steve waved his hands in the air.
"That won't be necessary, thanks. But anything else is fair game, right? Do I have to make a wish right away?"
"My patience is deep as the sea and stretches far as the stars."
Steve cocked his head.
"Could've just said 'no'."
The genie stared, unfazed.
"I think I have an idea of what I want, though. Now, you won't do anything until I say the words 'I wish', right? And that didn't count."
The genie nodded.
"Okay, good. So, I was thinking that it would be cool to stop time. But voluntarily. And only for everything around me, but not me. Like, I want to be able to move around and stuff. Can you do that?"
"Quite easily, Master. If that is what you wish, I will make it so."
Steve stood and scratched his chin a moment.
"Yeah, okay. I wish I could voluntarily stop time for everything except me while still being able to move...and stuff."
The genie bowed his head, then vanished. Steve stood perplexed for a moment, then looked at his hand; in it was a perfectly ordinary stopwatch, ticking away. He turned it over -- on the back were his initials. He looked at it for a moment, smiled, and clicked the top.
Darkness. Panic. Steve looked around frantically. As he turned his head, he caught glances of his surroundings, his eyes hitting packets of light suspended in the timeless void around him. Suddenly, his chest began to burn. He tried sucking in air, but it too was frozen just beyond his reach. He began running frantically, gulping in the air and following the intermittent trails of light that he could. As he ran he fidgeted with the stopwatch, but the button had not come up again. He pried at it, but could not force it up. Soon, exhaustion took its toll and he collapsed in the sand, breathless.
Dr. Mandrake sighed.
“I’ve done a full autopsy. As far as I can tell, he just died of asphyxiation.”
Dr. Stephens gave him a blank stare.
“That’s it? Was he strangled, or what?”
Dr. Mandrake shook his head.
“It looks like he just stopped breathing. I can’t figure out how.”
“What about the bottle? It had traces of DMT in it. Could that be the cause?”
Dr. Mandrake shrugged.
“If it was, it would be the first time I’ve heard of a reaction like this. We won’t know for sure until we get the toxicology report, though.” Dr. Stephens snubbed his nose in frustration.
“Damn. Well, I guess I’ll have to look like a jackass when I tell his family that we have no idea why he died. Did he have any belongings with him when he was brought in?”
Dr. Mandrake motioned to the pan across the room.
"Just a stopwatch. It's broken."