The house was zooming with activity that night as his kids were walking around making phone calls and carrying boxes back and forth. They were very excited and happy, but also very busy. They were getting ready for Tom's fiftieth birthday, inviting all of his friends and family for a big celebration over the coming weekend. Henry had moved out nearly five years earlier and was now married with a young child of his own, but he came back rather often to visit and was eager to help plan the party. What he and Susan wouldn't say to Tom's face was that they were tremendously worried about their father, who seemed distressingly sullen so soon before the half-century mark of his life.
At this particular moment, Tom was out in the garden, looking at two nondescript depressions in the earth that a stranger wouldn't have noticed. Tom couldn't get his mind off the two German shepherds that had been buried there with little fanfare. Max, his beloved pet, occasionally called Zeus for his commanding demeanor, had perished at about the time Henry got married. He had become pained and unable to move well in his old age, and the veterinarian could do nothing except kill him painlessly with anesthesia. Tom had cried privately for weeks after that, while Samantha seemed to become even more depressed, realizing that she was unlikely to age any more gracefully or meet a more dignified end than Max did.
Tom kept Samantha for as long as he possibly could, barely willing to part with her under any circumstances. He tried very hard not to treat her as anything more than a common pet, since he had voluntarily left their marriage behind to protect himself, and he felt a significant amount of shame and guilt for having done that. Over time, Samantha had adjusted to her powerful new senses, her four-legged locomotion, her diet of animal protein, and her daily walks with the man who had once been her husband. Sometimes it got hard to remember what life was like for a human, but the remaining 10% of her mind could never forget that a human was what she once was. And that part of her never did really forgive Tom, no matter how well he treated her as a dog. But over the years, as her joints stiffened up and her large shepherd ears lost their keen canine edge, it started to become increasingly clear that she had increasingly little time left. Tom refused to let her go, even when she could barely hobble outside to do her business. And finally, one day, it was over, and Tom buried her right next to Max.
It was about two years since that happened, and Tom could not stand the thought that he was about to have dozens of people coming over to celebrate his fiftieth birthday when he had basically stolen nearly all of his wife's remaining years along with her humanity. In some ways he felt like a murderer, knowing what he had done. Anyway, he knew he could expect a nicer monument and a more expensive monument than his wife got, when the time came. The fact that his kids were preparing to pamper him, not having any idea what he'd done to Samantha, was torturing him on the inside. He could never admit the truth, but he wasn't sure he could live with it either.
So late that night, after Susan had gone to sleep and Henry had returned home, Tom opened his closet and blew the dust off the Chronivac. He hadn't even tried to use it in years, to frightened too after how badly his experiments had turned out the first time. But this time he was going to use it on himself, and it was going to be permanent. He would not dare living as a human male or as his children's father for one day longer. He had accidentally and then deliberately taken away the essence of his wife's being from her, and now he was finally ready to give up his own in payment. Yes, his children's father would "disappear" nearly ten years after their mother did, but he assured himself they would be willing to move on. He certainly felt he did not deserve them after watching Samantha grow old and die as a dog.