Waldemar Kristiansen is going to whip this ship into tip-top shipshape, and
that’s his private guarantee. The turn of phrase makes him giggle, but he
doesn’t say it out loud to others. He doesn’t really say anything about it.
He’s just going to make it happen, and people are going to accept his
changes, whether they like them or not. Or they’ll die fighting it. He just
needs to get out of this locked room first. Sure, he’s been in here for
several months now, and he has not found any chance to escape yet, but he
will. He’ll figure it out. He comes out on top. That’s his real job. That’s
why he’s the captain, even though someone else has been masquerading as him
since he won the competition for the chair.
Pronastus Kegrigia flashes back into the room after two weeks of no contact.
“How’s tricks, my old friend?” he asks in that annoying speedvoice he uses.
The guy doesn’t even try to slow his voice down so it sounds more normal to
Waldemar.
“Let me out,” Waldemar says simply. It doesn’t feel like he’s talking
slowly, but he knows that he is, and he can see how bored Pronastus gets
while he’s waiting for him to finish what should be a quick and easy
sentence. He recognizes that impatience. He has seen and felt it in himself.
Pronastus is wearing his face, and he’s not using it right!
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Okay, that line was too fast. Waldemar
could barely parse it. “Just be glad that I didn’t kill you.”
“You still need me,” Waldemar reasons. “You need me to tell you how to act
like me. I’m not afraid of you.”
“I won’t need that for much longer,” Pronastus contends. “I only kept you
alive to make a smooth transition to your new personality. I needed to start
out with a familiar baseline, so people won’t detect a sudden shift in
behavior, and grow suspicious, but I’m just about where I wanna be. Admiral
Jennings is wary of me. I can’t tell whether that’s because he suspects that
I’ve stolen your likeness, or he just knows that you’re a grade A asshole,
and I’m stuck with your terrible reputation until I can slowly change
people’s minds. That’s what the new personality is for.”
“I am not an asshole, I am the best this ship has to offer. I am not
burdened by things like emotion or personal attachments. I only care
about the success of the mission. If you will just let me have my life back,
I will do a thousand times better than you ever could with my clone.”
“You’ll never get the chance,” Pronastus argues. “You won’t understand this,
but I am doing everyone a favor by taking your place, including you. There
are things I know about the future. You would have been absolutely
miserable, and you would have made everyone else miserable trying to find
happiness. Waldy, you can’t be happy. You’re neurologically incapable of it.
I doubt you can even grasp the concept. Just stay in your slowmo world, and
wait for the mercy of my bullet once I’m finally finished with you.”
“People will notice,” Waldemar tries to say. “Silveon knows me better than
anyone. He knows what my brain struggles with. He’s the one who taught me
how to act more like an emotional being. When he gets back, he won’t be
fooled by you, no matter how gradually you change.” He intentionally didn’t
mention his wife, Audrey, who also knows the real Waldemar, and won’t long
be fooled by this impostor. Waldemar doesn’t love her, because he doesn’t
understand what love is, but he is committed to her, and he genuinely
doesn’t want harm to come to her. Pronastus better not be touching her.
Pronastus sighs, but sped up, it kind of sounds more like a cough, which
Waldemar finds humorous. “I debated whether I would tell you, but now that
I’m confident in the effectiveness of this timehock, I might as well be
honest. Silveon doesn’t know anything anymore. Silveon is dead. He knew too
much about me, so I had to kill him. He did not leave for an away mission on
the Perran Thatch to get his mind off of his parents after they died. He’s
been dead the whole time. It happened within minutes. They actually saw each
other briefly in The Buffer. It really messed with their heads.”
Waldemar begins to seethe. He doesn’t love Silveon either, but he has been a
good friend. He knew what Waldemar was. He knew that he was different, and
didn’t feel things like the other kids. But he didn’t run away. He didn’t
even just uncomfortably accept Waldemar’s differences. No, Silveon has been
his greatest supporter since they were children, and actively put in the
effort to make him a better man. It worked. Without Silvy, Waldemar would be
an absolute piece of shit. He’s still not a hopeless romantic, but he
recognizes the value in others, and that he should treat them with respect,
because that’s what people expect out of him. Waldemar would not have become
captain without Silveon’s personal sacrifices. He deserved so much better
than this. In anger, Waldemar lunges for Pronastus, but as always, he
misses. He’s too slow.
Pronastus smirks, and casually steps out of the line of fire. “Good job,
buddy!” he jokes. “You almost got me this time, you’re getting faster.”
It’s true. Waldemar has been spending most of his time here improving his
speed. If he can learn to move extremely fast, it might be enough to get him
on the same level as this jerk.
Pronastus checks his watch. “I’ll have to get you another dose of the
timesuck, and increase the potency so you’ll go even slower than before.”
“That will be even more frustrating for you,” Waldemar argues. “You grow
impatient with how long it takes me to talk now. If you slow that down even
more, our conversations will take forever. You’ll go mad.”
“I’ll live,” he defends. “You won’t.” He races towards the other door. He is
annoyingly smart. The first time he came back, Waldemar tried to wait by the
door to attack him and escape, but instead, Pronastus simply used the second
entrance. He will always use the door farthest from Waldemar. There doesn’t
seem to be any weakness to exploit. “Goodbye, Waldemar Kristiansen. I’ll be
back at some later date.” He points to the food synthesizer, which he
modified to only produce slop. “Better ration your meals from now on. As
punishment for trying to hit me yet again, I’m not gonna refill the
feedstock today. Good luck with that.” He leaves.
Waldemar sighs, defeated once more. Surprisingly, the first door begins to
open again. Did Pronastus really just run down the hallway so he could come
back? Waldemar happens to be standing next to it right now. That’s the whole
point. He’s not that stupid, is he? No, he’s not, because it’s not Pronastus
at all. It’s Silveon. “He told me you were dead. He took credit for your
murder.”
“He deserves credit,” Silveon says. He sounds normal. His voice isn’t sped
up at all. He’s really good at slowing down to match Waldemar’s slowmo mode.
But why would he even think to do that? How did he find him?
“How did you find me?”
“I followed Pronastus,” Silveon replies as he’s rolling up Waldemar’s
sleeve, and cleaning the skin with an alcohol pad.
The smell sickens him. His mother drank. He hated her. He hated her so much.
Hate is one emotion that he can get behind. He turns his nose away so he can
breathe.
“For a pathfinder, he sure is bad at spotting a tail,” Silveon goes on. “I’m
sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I had to make preparations first.” He’s
sliding a rubber band up Waldemar’s arm now, and tightening it above his
elbow.
“Not that I mind, but what exactly are you doing?”
“Fixing you,” Silveon answers. He takes a syringe out of his pocket. Slips
the cap off with his lips, which he spits out onto the floor, and injects
Waldemar with something.
Months ago, after a doppelgänger abducted Waldemar, and injected him with
the timesuck, the effects hit him immediately, but they didn’t affect his
body evenly, and not even instantly permanently. His heart felt like it was
racing while his arms felt like they were swinging through molasses. His
legs felt okay for a moment, but then his heart slew down more than ever.
The image on the news erratically changed speeds as his brain was trying to
figure out whether it was supposed to be framejacking or framelagging. This
is all happening again now, about the same as before, but hopefully to more
favorable results.
Silveon shows him a handheld fan. “Focus on this.”
Like the broadcast before, the fan keeps changing speeds. It sometimes looks
like it’s running in reverse, and sometimes moving in slow-motion. After a
minute or so, it settles into a more reasonable speed. “Okay, I think I’m
okay.” Waldemar takes a step back, and performs some deliberate movements.
He shakes his arm, kicks his legs, and jumps up and down a little. To him,
when he was on the timesuck, everything felt normal; at least that’s what he
believed. But unlike how it would be if this were a timesuck room,
there was a biological component to the drug. He didn’t realize he was so
stiff and held down until this moment, now that he can finally move about at
normal speed. “That feels a lot better.”
“So you feel all right?” Silveon presses.
“Yeah, it’s fine. What you said earlier, did Pronastus kill you, or not?”
“He killed me all right, and I recall being dead, but I don’t have any
details. All I know is that someone had the power to send me back,
and they agreed to do so. I don’t know who it was, or anything else about
it. I just know that they had to give me a clone body.” He pulls his cheek
down. “My scar’s gone. See?”
Waldemar looks, but then frowns and turns away. He’s the one who gave
Silveon the scar in the first place. When Waldemar was still quite young,
and Silveon was even younger, it was the latter’s birthday. Waldemar had
seen videos from the grand repository of entertainment of pranks where
people slammed their friend’s faces into birthday cakes. But he screwed up,
and a candle ended up being lodged in Silveon’s eye. The doctor made the
necessary repairs to the eyeball itself, but it was days before anyone
noticed an untreated secondary wound on the skin that had to heal on its
own. It left a permanent mark on Silveon’s face, which could typically only
be seen when you looked closely, but also sometimes under the right
lighting, at the right angle. Waldemar is particularly adept at clocking it
since he was the one who made it.
“Hey,” Silveon says in an assuring voice. “It’s okay. And it’s fixed now. My
original body is gone. Probably stuffed into an incinerator. It’s like it
never happened.”
“Except it did.”
“That’s good,” Silveon encourages. “That’s called guilt. We talked about
that, remember? And this...” He waves his hand around his face. “This is
forgiveness.”
He knows. “I remember guilt,” Waldemar acknowledges, “and forgiveness. I
don’t need the flash cards anymore. I remember gratitude too, though I still
don’t know if my face is capable of showing it, so to clear any uncertainty,
let me say...thank you.”
“My pleasure,” Silveon replies. A genuinely good guy. Waldemar sometimes
wishes he could be him, but also likes his own efficiency and resilience.
“Now. Where is he?”
“He’s probably back on the bridge,” Silveon begins. “Now, I have a plan to
put you back where you belong without anyone ever knowing that it
happened. What we’ll do is—”
“No, don’t worry about that. The plan is simple, and I’ll take care of it.
You’ve done your part. Thank you again.”
“Waldemar, you can’t kill him. We’ve been over this.”
“No, I’m not gonna kill him. Is that what you’re worried about? You should
have more faith in me. You’ve taught me a lot over the years. But this right
here is captain’s business, and you don’t have clearance. I’m not going to
give you any details, but I assure you, I won’t be murdering anyone. The
next time you see me, it will be me again. We’ll come up with trust
passwords so you’ll know I’m legit, but I don’t want to do that here,
because he might be watching.”
Waldemar and Silveon leave the room to create their shared password to avoid
any identification failures. The former than uses his biometrics to enter
the Captain’s Stateroom. He has never stepped foot in this unit before, and
it has been a long time coming. Audrey is there. “Good morning, wife.”
“It’s the afternoon,” she says.
“Right.”
“Didn’t you have work to do in engineering today? thought it would take all
day.”
“When was the last time we had sex?”
“What?”
“When was the last time we had sex, or did anything sexual, really?”
“It was this morning,” she replies. “Did you genuinely forget, or are you
mad about something, and trying to pick a fight with me?”
“It’s nothing like that.” He takes both of her hands in his. “I will explain
everything, but you have the right to know that you were violated. That was
not me, but an impostor.”
Audrey gulps, and stiffens her upper lip. “I understand. I mean...I don’t
understand, but I understand.”
“Okay. I’m gonna go take care of something, and then we’ll have dinner
together.”
“Okay,” she agrees solemnly. He has said things like this before. She’s a
good girl. She knows not to ask questions, argue, or get in his way.
It takes weeks to find him, but Waldemar employs his secret police, and
Pronastus eventually runs out of paths where he eludes the might of the true
Captain of Extremus. The two of them are back in timehock, but their roles
are reversed.
Pronastus is now moving too slowly to get out of his predicament, or fight
back. “I have an advantage, though. I see the way forward. I will
legitimately find a way.”
“Good luck with that,” Waldemar snaps back. “Unlike you, I’m not without
mercy. You kept me in here for six months, I’ll only keep you here for
three.”
“And then what? You’ll kill me?”
Waldemar chuckles. “No. Then your real torture begins.”
