Microstory 868: Fall at the Final Hurdle

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I’m an extremely competitive person, and I quite frankly don’t understand people who aren’t. What’s the point of life if you’re not going to develop, progress, get better...be better, than everyone else? What are you doing with your time if you’re just sitting there, content with being mediocre. I’d sooner kill myself than waste away with no purpose. Obviously not everyone can be the best, but people who don’t try just don’t make sense, and I can’t stand them. Thing is, I can’t stand other competitive people either. We’re all alphas, so we easily get on each other’s nerves. I’ve never been in a fight in my whole life, but I can’t hold in my anger this time. There’s this one guy from Easton High who I have never been able to beat, in any track event. I’m always so incredibly close, but I just can’t make up that fraction of a second. But I’ve resolved to correct that in my last event before I graduate. If I don’t win this, I’ll forever be a loser, and that is not acceptable. I push myself harder than I ever have before, and almost feel like I’m gonna pass out. I’m about to do it when something hits me in the chest. Whatever it was, it was small, but even that is enough to make me fall face forward, right on the hurdle. Looking back, I guess I’m just lucky I’m alive, but I was not so clear-headed at the time. I know he threw a rock at me, or something like it. My lane was right by the the grass, I so I couldn’t find it to prove it; not that the police would have dusted it for prints, or anything. The first thing I see when I come to is my nemesis, jumping up and down at the finish line, rousing the crowd, and proverbially patting himself on the back. The rage boils up inside of me, then explodes. I hop right over the hurdle from a standing position, and bolt right for him. He’s so shocked at seeing me keep going even though the race was long over than he can’t move. I barrel right into him like a charging rhino. I want to punch him in the face, but I hold myself back. No matter what anyone tells you, I showed restraint; it wasn’t because the other racers kept me away from him. Needless to say, I regretted what I did, but the principal didn’t care. That bitch expelled me three days—three days!—before my last final exam. It’s so late in the year that I can’t even transfer to a new school. I’m going to have to go to summer school just to graduate. I still don’t know if college will let me defer a year so I can take care of this. Whatever happens, though, I know I’ll fix it, and probably still graduate early, because I’m a winner. And that’s something people like my bitch principal could never understand.

Microstory 866: Pierced Through

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I’m sitting in the morgue, along with six strangers, and we’re all waiting to find out what we’re doing here. I already have a job in a mortuary uptown, and have no interest in a change of scenery. I only came because I was curious. People in my line of worked aren’t known for being poached by competitors. There’s a body on a table in the middle of the room, covered with a sheet. We’re obviously here for it, but why would there need to be so many of us? Finally a woman comes in and informs us that this is a particularly nasty case, and one that needs to be solved quickly, which is why they brought in a whole team. We’re here as temporary medical examiners, working for a government contractor, with employment to be terminated upon completion of the project. We would only work on a second case if necessary. One of the guys just leaves without saying a word, much to our apparent new superior’s dismay, but she could do nothing about it. The rest of us stay, but not everyone is happy about it. “I work a alone,” says one guy, making it painfully obvious that the only reason he works alone is because no one would ever want to work with him. He immediately takes over the investigation, insisting that he take charge of the file, and remove the sheet from the body. I see his face when he first lays eyes on the victim. He wants to jump back in fear, but he’s clearly restraining himself. He notices that I caught his microexpression, and he is not happy about it. We’ve all seen our fair share of death; blood, broken bones, terrifying mutilations, but I doubt anyone has ever seen this. The woman is covered in dermal piercings, in what looks to be a pattern, but no discernable one. After a quick examination, which I do unprompted, I conclude that all the piercings were done postmortem, which means this wasn’t just how the woman lived. The murderer pierced her body himself, to make some kind of statement. We just need to figure out what that statement is, and hope it somehow proves that he doesn’t plan to do it again.

He does it again. We still haven’t figured out what the piercings mean when another victim is found the next day. He’s displayed her in the middle of a park, wanting us to see it as soon as possible. Killers like this want to be discovered, and recognized for their work. They might not want to be caught, but they want us to know who they are. Over the course of the next five days, one new body shows up about every twenty-four hours, each one killed by suffocation, and we still haven’t made any progress. There’s no evidence that he plans on stopping until we stop him, so I come in after hours one night, and try to work on my own. It’s not that I think the others can’t contribute, but I cannot sleep with this hanging over my head. As I’m going over the medical files, the loner examiner walks in with a smug look on his face, and tells me that he’s called our boss about me coming in alone. He’s sure this will get me kicked off the team, but it doesn’t. Our boss calls in from a business meeting on the other side of the world to tell us she doesn’t care what we do to get the job done, as long as everything comes together in the end. That’s it. That’s what we have to do. We have to put all the bodies together. The pattern is continuous, not independent...he’s telling us a story. I scramble for the stack of photos we took, and start arranging them in different ways, looking for a way to solve the puzzle. Finally I see it, but I need to arrange the bodies themselves to get a better look. My nemesis reluctantly helps. I was right, it’s part of the logo for the company that we’re currently working for. Is this why we were brought in; because our boss knew it had something to do with them, and she couldn’t trust her own people? I suggest this possibility out loud, but my colleague disagrees. I turn around to find our boss with a knife to his throat. “It’s not about the company,” she says. “It’s about this team.” I question what exactly she means by this when the guy who quit before we got started rolls in with a seventh body, and uses it to finish the puzzle. He smiles and declares that they’re ready to go. The piercings suddenly begin to glow, and the bodies sit up. I stumble back in fear. “Contact the rest of your team,” our boss orders her accomplice. “We need to proceed with the second half of the puzzle.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 15, 2039

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Death. Death was lingering in the air when they woke up on the morning of tax day. Last year, after staying off the beaten path for a while, they met back up with Loop Trail and followed it due North. At some point, though, the trail started heading away from their destination, so they went back to walking in the woods. They kept going for about six hours, taking special pills that maintained their endurance and speed, but required a higher intake of calories to compensate. They had to cross the creek twice; once with a bridge, but another by wading, because walking all around the bend would have taken far too much time. They had passed their halfway mark at eighteen miles, and decided to make camp, hopeful that their tent would remain in place during its time alone in a remote spot in the middle of nowhere, knowing that this was a longshot. Somehow, however, the powers that be treated the tent as they do clothing, and seemed to send it to the future with them, along with all of their belongings. That was nice to know, for future necessity.

Upon exiting the magic tent in 2039, they found everything around them dead. The trees, the grass, the brush. It was all blackened and deteriorated, for as far as their eyes could see. Some of the wood was still burning. They walked down a ways toward the creek and saw the water to be thick and blackened as well. “What happened here? Did that huge volcano finally erupt?”

“No. Forest fire,” Leona explained, looking across the distance. “And a really bad one, at that. It destroyed a great deal of the landscape. There must have been a heavy rain right after it too.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It’s not,” she said. “It would be why the water is black. Ash runoff.” She reached over to feel a still-standing tree trunk. Her fingers turned black. “My God, this probably happened only yesterday.”

“Reaver.”

She fumed. “It’s very likely. Though, the summers of this last decade have been some of the hottest on record for this area. It might have just been caused by a heatwave.”

“It’s April.”

“True, but as bad as he is, his attacks have been precise. Tactical. This seems...reckless. Messy. It’s overkill, and why did he start the fire yesterday instead of today?”

“Perhaps he had intended on it lasting longer, but the rain came on. If he had started after our jump, we could have seen it coming.”

“I won’t rule it out. We are certain of other times that he’s tried to kill you, so I wouldn’t give him a medal if this turned out to not be one of them.”

“What do we do now?”

She took a few moments to process what were probably a thousand options in her head. “What we do now is have a clearer shot to the city.”

“We keep going?”

She shook her head, not as an answer, but as a general distaste for their situation. “We have no choice.”

As they were packing up their things, Mateo asked, “you’re sure it wasn’t the volcano?”

“No, Mateo. It wasn’t the volcano. Don’t ask me that again.”

They continued to walk, but this time without so much of the woods. After two more miles of straying from the creek, because it was no longer the easiest route, they came upon Forest Rd 30050. Waiting for them was a man, leaning up against a luxury car in a chauffeur’s uniform. He smiled, and they were worried that their family had tracked them down. But they should have been more worried.

The man looked at his watch. “That’s funny. You’re late.” He paused to consider the possibilities. “I must have stepped on a butterfly this time.”

“Bradbury reference,” Leona said. “You must be a salmon.”

“I’m afraid not,” the man replied. “I just work for one.” He opened the back door and pointed a gun at them. “Get in.”

Mateo and Leona looked around for an escape. There were plenty of places to run, but there was nowhere to hide.

“You know what they say about futility,” the man said ominously.

“No, I honestly don’t. What do they say?” Mateo asked.

“They say get in the fucking car.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard that.”

They abided his orders and stepped in. He climbed in afterwards and kept his weapon trained on them. “Take us home, Harrison,” he said to his car’s artificial intelligence.

“As you wish, Dave.”

Leona let out a kind of snort-chuckle-cough thing.

“Yes, a computer talking to someone named Dave. That’s hilarious,” Dave said.

“I don’t get it,” Mateo said.

“Right,” Dave said. “I was told you were kind of dumb.”

“Well, if that’s a reference, I must have been away at the time.”

Leona shook her head. “You weren’t.” She turned her attention back to Dave. “How much is Reaver paying you? Do you even know what he wants with us? He wants to kill us. He’s evil.”

“I don’t work for Reaver,” Dave responded. And it sounded like the truth. He seemed like the type of person who wasn’t afraid to hurt someone, but who would never lie. He probably never needed to. “Reaver’s man, Allen, is waiting for you on Forest Rd 30060. The fire didn’t spread that far, so he’s trying to use trees as cover. I wasn’t afraid of you seeing me, because I do not intend to hurt you.”

“What do you intend? And who do you work for?”

“I work for his nemesis, his archrival, his opposite.”

Mateo felt a little uncomfortable, but decided to voice his thoughts. “I kind of figured that I was his nemesis.”

“From what little I know, you’re an enemy, but you weren’t designed as his counterpoint. I wasn’t told why he hates you so much. My boss can do what Reaver does, and has been using this power for years to quell Reaver’s power as much as possible. Certain events have led my boss to believe that it’s time you met. For real, this time.”

“What do you mean for real?” Leona asked.

“Well, like I said, my boss can do what Reaver does. Their pattern is the same.”

“We don’t know what his pattern is.”

Dave eyed them with disbelief and curiosity. Then he looked down at the minibar, trying to work something out in his head. “You knew it before. Reaver must have told you after getting to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Leona seemed to understand. “You’re talking about an alternate timeline.”

“You met my boss under different circumstances yesterday. But we’ve changed things now. Maybe I shouldn’t take you.”

“We didn’t meet anyone yesterday.”

“Yesterday from my boss’ perspective; not yours.”

“I am so lost.”

Leona massaged Mateo’s knee. “It’s all right, honey. You’ll get there.”

But he didn’t get there. Skipping an entire year every day he understood. His teleporting aunt he understood. But when it came to his father’s seemingly random time traveling, The Doctor’s apropos appearances, or The Delegator’s sporadic use of Stonehenge, it just hurt his head. Dave refused to explain further, insisting that he not speak another word to them until consulting with his mysterious boss. Leona didn’t try to help either, instead claiming that it would only confuse him more if she tried to explain things without having all of the facts.

The car drove them all the way into Idaho and informed them—since Dave wasn’t talking—that they couldn’t go to any of the nearest airports because Reaver would be monitoring those. Harrison transferred his consciousness to a relatively small but sleek and futuristic aircraft that was hidden in an empty grain silo. It rose into the air, commanded the top hatch to open, and then shot straight into the air. Mateo and Leona watched as the ground flew away from them, but then Harrison tinted the windows completely because they weren’t allowed to know where they were going.

The trip only took a few hours, but Leona told him that they could be anywhere on the planet by that time, due to advances in air travel. They were tucked away in a pleasant and comfortable prison room at this undisclosed location. Before leaving, Dave said that his boss would wait to speak to them until tomorrow/next year so that they could have the entire day to discuss matters. Used to being out of control of their lives, Mateo and Leona agreed to not worry about what was happening. They stuffed their faces full of food, watched a movie trilogy that both of them had missed about a group of people in another galaxy who wore jackets that let them manipulate reality to their liking, and fell asleep on the most comfortable bed in the history of history.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 31, 3118

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Everything changed. Mateo was no longer in the Snow White coffin. Instead, he found himself on a comfortable bed inside of a larger dome. There was no discernable way out of the dome. He looked around for a seam, and banged on the glass, but it was useless. Around the dome were machines and other instruments. The rest of the room was empty, except for a man who was staring at him without a hint of surprise. “Welcome back, sir.”

“What is this? Where am I?”

“You’re safe. We need to keep you in there or you’ll be contaminated. We built this facility around your jumpsite so that you would never breathe the open air.”

“What year is this?”

“Thirty-one-eighteen.”

“No, that’s not right,” Mateo reasoned. “It should be 2024.”

“It should be, yes. But it isn’t. The machine that the old scientist had you in disrupted your pattern, and threw you here. And it’s a good thing it did.”

“Why is that?”

“You are very special to us. Your genes are the key to the revival of the human race. You are to become the father of a multitude.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I’m not biological. And even if I were, I would already be contaminated. Everyone is. The few living humans are incapable of reproducing. You’re the first pristine person we’ve encountered in decades.”

“And you knew I was coming?”

“You told us.”

Mateo nodded. “That makes no sense.”

“You helped us build this place,” the man explained. “Yesterday.”

“If you’ve already met me, then why didn’t the other me help you with your virus problem?”

The apparently non-human laughed. “That version of you was contaminated, along with everyone else. After today, you will travel back to your time period, and then you will resume your pattern. Centuries later, you will jump into a year after the virus is first released, and it will infect you.”

“But it won’t kill me?”

He shook his head. “That’s not what the virus does.”

Mateo sighed. “What do you need from me? This me?”

“Samples. Lots of samples.”

Mateo let the machines run tests and take samples from him, partly because he didn’t feel like he had a choice, but also because if there was even a slight chance for him to save humanity, he couldn’t risk refusing. They needed a lot more than Professor Andrews had. He was feeling a bit violated, honestly, especially since they at one point gave him anesthetic and took some of his seed. But he learned a little bit more about how the world had been developing. Biological humans were a dying race. The man was hesitant to tell him too much, including how the infection began. They were worried about him going back and altering the timeline. He could make things better, or he could make things worse. There were too many variables to count, and even a nanite transhuman was incapable of accounting for all of them. The dangers of time travel. But if that were true, how were the powers that be justifying their intervention in the timeline? Once the machines were finished, and the samples had been safely taken out of the enclosure, Mateo took a much needed nap.

He must have dreamt of it, because when he awoke, he remembered the device that Daria had given him yesterday. The man scanned it with his high tech robot eyes and nodded. “I could read that easily, but not from out here.” He waved his hand at the dome. “You actually have everything you need in there, but you would need to build the interface from parts.”

“Teach me,” Mateo asked.

And so the man went about giving him instructions. He had him strip parts from machines they no longer needed, and haphazardly put them together. He even had to use a sort of soldering tool to mold the pieces. Finally, he had what he needed. He inserted the device and let it play.

A video automatically came up on the screen. On it was a man he didn’t recognize. He had a sinister smile on his face. “Mateo Matic. The Transient Hero of Earth. You’ve not yet met me, but I know you. I’ve been scouring the timeline, looking for when I could be rid of you before you cause me so many troubles. I’ve been trying to kill you for, well...days. But something always protects you. The powers that be don’t ever let us get close enough to end each other. But I found a loophole. I set in place a series of events that eventually led to your dear aunt Daria giving you this device. It took me a long time, but we’re finally here.” He took a drink from something and slammed it back down on the table. “You’re done! And you haven’t even started!” The machine exploded.

Mateo was thrown into the other side of the dome, but remained conscious. The fire began to consume the bed, and the oxygen was quickly being ripped out of his lungs. He banged on the glass again, and begged the man to let him out.

He just looked back at him in horror. “I can’t let you leave. If you become contaminated, you’ll carry the virus back to the past and make things even worse.”

“But if I die in here, then I can’t go back, which means I can’t return using my regular pattern, which means that I’ll never help you build the dome in the first place!”

“I have to trust that you won’t die,” the man responded. “But I can do nothing from out here. My hands are tied.”

He looked for a way to snuff out the flames. They had left some drinking water for him, but it wasn’t nearly enough to put the fire out. He opened every bottle and started drenching himself with it. The explosion had compromised the integrity of the dome, but the weakest points were very clearly on the other side of the fire. He grabbed some kind of large instrument, then jumped onto a cart. He slammed the instrument into the glass. It didn’t shatter, but it opened up enough for him to escape. He fells to the floor on the other side and began to crawl. There were tons of cuts and second degree burns on his body. He reached out, hoping to receive some help from the robot man.

But the robot man made no move towards him. He stared at him stoically, like he was weighing his options. “I’m sorry.”

“Please. Help!”

“I can’t let you go back to 2025. The virus is bad enough in our time, but we have technology, the human race will survive. We might be different. We may even be unrecognizable. If there is no cure in your uncontaminated blood, we will still find a way to keep going. But we would never survive an early 21st century pandemic.” He started to walk away.

Mateo struggled through the blood in his throat. “Wait, just wait. I’m the cure, right? Well...I was the cure. So, cure me with my old blood.”

“We don’t know how long it’s going to take to develop a cure, or even if there is one. You may be fruitless for us. And we can’t risk losing what few samples you gave us by returning some of it to you on blind faith. I’m very sorry, but your journey is over.”

“But if I don’t survive, I can’t go back to 2025. We just went over this. You need me to build the dome whether I’ve been infected or not.”

“The past can be changed; this much we’ve uncovered. But if it were going to change, it would have already done so from our perspective. As soon as you broke out of the dome, your future—our past—was altered. Yet the dome was still constructed. I don’t know how, but it’s there. Someone must have built it just the same. I’m made out of nanites. I can shift into any shape I choose. Perhaps the man who helped me build it was never you at all, but an imposter.”

“Don’t do this,” Mateo begged, then coughed up a little blood.

Before the man could say anything else, one the walls lit up and turned into a video screen. The man from the message before was back again. “Did you think that that explosion was meant to kill you? That was just the primer. Now it’s time to paint this room red.” He let out an evil laugh.

Mateo prepared himself for another explosion, but yet another man appeared out of nowhere, took him by the shoulders, and jumped them both out of there.

Hours later, Mateo woke up again. He was on a bed of leaves and grass in the dark, but the moon was bright and seemed larger. A teeny tiny dinosaur that looked like a triceratops hopped around nearby. His wounds had been treated with some kind of high-tech liquid bandage. He rolled onto his side and looked around. The man who had taken him out of danger was holding a musket and keeping watch for danger. “Hello?”

The man turned around, but his face remained obstructed by shadows. “How are you feeling?”

“Alive.”

“Alive, and in the Cretaceous period. Great story for your kids.”

“You slungshot me through time, like my aunt.”

He tilted his head. “I don’t think sling is a verb.”

“What’s your name?”

The man looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight.”

“I can’t know the name of the man who saved my life?”

He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “It’s my job.”

“No, it isn’t. You could quit. Eventually the powers that be would give up on you.”

“You’re just as tenacious as your mother.” The man stepped closer and showed himself by the moonlight.

“Oh my God. You look like me.” It was his father, Mario. Midnight came.

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