Microstory 1106: Xearea Voss

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Xearea Voss was one of the last Saviors of Earth. No one knows how the powers that be who control the system of salmon choose who will be the next Savior, but it doesn’t appear to be random. A lot of people in the world of salmon and choosing ones are capable of teleporting, but the Savior is in a class of their own. They can’t control when or where they jump, or where they land. Once they arrive, they have an innate sense of what they’re meant to do, and they almost never fail. Some believe that a Savior is detoured to a pocket dimension after each egress, and given mission parameters by someone, then sent off to the new location without conscious memories, but no real evidence suggests this. Their minds are probably encoded with subliminal instructions, using a psychic connection of which they are not fully cognizant. Unlike most Saviors, Xearea was aware of her destiny before it came to pass. Her older brother, Camden was salmon as well, whose pattern regularly pushed him back in time exactly one hundred years. He wasn’t given a specific job while there, but he ended up being recruited by a secret task force composed of competing intelligence agencies from a handful of allied nations. Xearea had always believed she would one day be called to action as well, though she assumed she would begin working with Camden. It wasn’t until a mysterious enemy from her future came back to kill her that she learned she was something else. When he and a group of his men attacked her when she was a child, a group of other men showed up to protect her. They continued to do so for the next few years, until it was time for her to begin her work as Savior.

Several years into her new life, Xearea was tasked with protecting a political leader from an assassination attempt on the steps of a park in the middle of the city. This sort of mission was usually handled by a salmon known as The Kingmaker, but for some reason, she was chosen instead. Perhaps they believed the leader would respond better to an unassuming teenage girl. This leader was well-liked by most, but hated by a select few, who believed humans should be the only intelligent species on Earth. This far into the future, the world was now home to a plethora of others, like androids, transhumans, and genetically engineered so-called designer babies. He was an advocate for the rights of these others, and not anywhere near alone in his beliefs, but his assassins considered him to by the linchpin in the movement towards equality. It wasn’t really a movement anymore, though, since they had long been accepted into society. The assassins were not convinced things couldn’t be changed. Most of a Savior’s saves cannot be undone, but this was an unusual case. A choosing one whose name remains unimportant was the man responsible for the attempt at the leader’s life. Time travelers altered history all the time, but they didn’t purposefully meddle too much in human affairs, because they just didn’t care all that much. He kept trying to go back into the past, and providing back up to himself on those park steps, but Xearea defeated him in every reality. No matter how many versions of him he sent after her, he just couldn’t win. So he decided to go back further, and kill her before she ever had the chance to stop him. We all know how that turned out, though. Xearea wouldn’t die until many years later, at the age of 79.