Microstory 899: Tragic Magic

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A long time ago, before motor vehicles were invented, the pathways between buildings were narrow. The people of the time could not conceive of the need for wider roads. A couple individuals needed to be able to pass each other going opposite directions, but not much else. As technology progressed, the city of London grew larger, as did its streets. But the city center was still the same as it ever was, leaving little room for practical living. But the buildings were old, and made as beautiful architecture. Londoners did not want to destroy them, and build anew, so city officials struck a deal. Witches were commissioned to widen the streets with magic, by adding an extra dimension of space in between the space that we perceive. Normal people cannot detect this higher dimension, so we interpret it as nothing but emptiness. Over time, the memory of this act faded from people’s minds. Those who were around when it happened died off, and their descendants did not believe the stories. Eventually, even the stories stopped being told, and we were left with a normal city that only a few surviving believers were aware was actually held together by magic. Now in modern day, those original wonderful buildings have been upgraded, dismantled, and replaced, but the magic remains. Even amongst those who know the truth, only one family is aware of what happened to the witches. Some believed them to be immortal, and to still be living up to today. Others thought their descendants now protected the city. Both are right. Both are wrong. The witches have been passing their souls down their own generational lines all this time. Out of each family, three children are born. Two must live on, and live full lives. The other must relinquish their body, and agree to be supplanted by one of their own parents, sometime after adulthood, but before age-related fertility problems threaten the cycle. But of course, this has led to diminishing returns, and the last full-powered witch died yesterday.

It has always been my family’s responsibility to care for the remaining powered witches, but there is only so much we can do. With no equal mate, the last witch was incapable of conceiving any children who could bear the burden of her power. She married a nice man, and raised three lovely children, but they could not possess magic. So when she finally passed on, the London spell automatically dissipated, as did all other magical spells. The central buildings were suddenly sent hurtling towards each other. A great many people were killed or hurt in this, but most of the buildings themselves remained intact; if only closer together. Two buildings, however, were not so lucky. I met my wife three dozen stories up in the air, above the street. For whatever reason, the architect responsible for both of our respective buildings decided later to construct extensions from both of the penthouses, so they were only a few meters apart from each other. This allowed us to carry on conversations from opposite buildings. I was attending to the last witch’s body when magic turned off. The penthouse extensions crashed into each other. My father and wife, who were chatting up there, were quite nearly killed. But this was not the only spell affected. The last witch used magic to cure my wife of her cancer, as a sort of profoundly beautiful gift, but her illness returned upon the end of magic. A toy tiger that had been passed down the family, and presently belonged to my son, turned out to be a real tiger. We still don’t know which witch transformed it, when exactly, or why. As my father and his daughter-in-law were trying to make their way off the extensions, the tiger ran across it, and tried to attack them. My father was forced to pull it off the edge, sending both of them falling towards their deaths. But there was one more gift the witches bequested to us before their end. I had with me a secret reserve of magic that I was told would be good for one further spell. I used it to save my father’s life, as well as the tiger’s, landing them both safely on either side of a fence in the nearby zoo. But a second spell cast itself, completely out of my control. It turned my son into a new witch. And it was he who put the buildings back to where they belonged, repaired all the injuries and deaths caused by the temporary loss in magic, and erased everyone’s memories of the whole thing. But we don’t know what to do next.

Microstory 898: Gerrafy and Nanomouse

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Research log, July 31. A lot of people know that only one species of giraffa exists in modern day, but what I’m the only one who knows is that that is not true. There is another, extremely rare, but very much alive species that I have named the gerrafy. The few I’ve encountered were seven meters tall, but they were all female, and—based on giraffe sexual dimorphism—I believe they can reach upwards of eight and a half meters. I discovered the first specimen living in the depths of none other than the Amazon rainforest. If ever you were going to find an animal no one knew existed, it would be there, so I was not surprised. What I was surprised to find was a second hitherto unheard of species of mouse that I believe to now hold the record for the smallest in the world. The African pygmy mouse comes in at a length of only a few centimeters, but the shipayan nanomouse is barely one centimeter long, and I do not currently possess a scale sensitive enough to measure its weight. Even more interesting, these two phenomenal species seem to enjoy a symbiotic relationship between them. The gerrafy protects the nanomouse from predators, while the mouse rids the gerrafy’s fur of parasites, and other pests, which seem to be particularly fond of the oils its skin excretes. I’ve by now found a couple dozen specimens of gerrafy, and I’ve yet to find one that does not keep a nanomouse with her at all times. I’ve also never seen one of the mice away from its gerrafy companion. One would think there would be a population discrepancy between them, but I have not seen evidence of that yet. I will continue to study these beautiful creatures. I’ve taken one pair of them to the abandoned Museum Salinas, which was the only location I could find large enough to accommodate the beast. They have broken free of their cage, and are racing down the hallways. I believe they have made their way into my colleague’s truck. I will update tomorrow.

Microstory 897: Wrong Guy

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Depending on how you look at it, I was either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time. I’ve always been a curious fellow, and fairly observant, but not particularly brave. Mine was one of the last cities to still have payphones, and I happened to be waiting for one when a man was inside of it, having a very heated conversation. I wouldn’t have been there if my phone’s battery hadn’t died, and I didn’t need to alert my daughter that I would be late that night. The man was trying to keep his voice down, but when people are angry, they’re known for having trouble controlling themselves. I could pick out a few good sentences when his back was turned to me. Unless he was acting, or just joking around, he had just kidnapped someone, and was demanding payment for it. My assumption was that I was on some prank show, be it a new one, a revived old series, or as part of a crappy attempt at online video superstardom. It seemed too risky to just ignore the possibility, however, that it was all real, and simply go about my business. As soon as he got out of the phone booth, he started speedwalking down the street, so if I had stopped to call the police, he would have gotten away. Besides, I thought, if he really is ransoming someone, the cops probably already know about it. So, like the right fool I am, I started following him all sneaky-like. He never caught on to my pursuit, and he led me right to his secret lair, where he was keeping a young boy tied up in a chair. I didn’t see anyone else around, so when the kidnapper was in the bathroom, I raced to undo the kid’s ropes, and carried him out.

My instinct was to get as far from the area as fast as possible, even if that meant going away from a phone I could use to call for help. I was right to not stop, because the kidnapper came out soon thereafter, and started chasing us. I noticed a woman leave her car running as she went up to a building to deliver flowers, so I stole her car, and drove off. I asked the boy where he lived, and he gave me the name of a small town that was thirty miles away. Clever, taking him so far away that the cops aren’t even looking in the right place. Worried that the man would have a car of his own, I didn’t stop driving until we were safely out of the city. We stopped at a diner, and I let him out so we could borrow a phone, which was just another dumb thing I did. Had I walked in there alone, no one would have paid attention, but everyone by then had received the Amber Alert. They were just sitting there, staring at us, like a scene out of Vanilla Sky. I tried to reason with them, and claim that I was the rescuer, not the kidnapper, but no one believed me. I tried to just leave the kid there, and let those people deal with it, but he refused. He must have developed an attachment in our short time together. Anyway, we got back on the road to strategize how I could clear my name, knowing full well that my picture would soon be part of the Amber Alert too. The cops set up roadblocks, and chased after us, and honestly, I thought it would only end in my death. But then the bombs went off, and none of that mattered anymore. Amid the chaos, I finally got us back to the kid’s hometown, but his parents were nowhere to be found. We’ve been traveling the country together ever since, just trying to survive, like everybody else. So that’s our story. How did you guys meet?

Microstory 896: No Small Parts

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Our only saving grace when the aliens came to take over our planet was that they severely underestimated our will to fight back. They didn’t send enough ships at first, and while they were able to enslave a good chunk of the population, they left the rest of us enough time to learn their ways, and come up with countermeasures. What we discovered was that once an individual was being controlled by one of the aliens, their minds could never be saved. Even if you killed the alien that was controlling them, they would just continue doing whatever their last order was; whether that meant walking in one direction without stopping, or shooting at other humans. We were forced to start killing our own kind, and I tell you, I do not envy the people responsible for that front. A team of brilliant scientists managed to capture some of the invaders, along with the humans they had enthralled. They spent months studying the permanent neural link between them, and could find no way of severing that connection. Then one woman showed us the way, but not because she somehow knew how to stop the aliens, but because was already a visionary before this all began. She was what one would call a transhumanist. She believed that man should shed his biological limitations, and “upgrade” to more advanced systems. While her achievements were remarkable, before the war started, they were also illegal in most jurisdictions. She had to conduct her experiments in secret, using a handful of extremely willing volunteers, as well as herself as guinea pigs. She realized that she and her people were incapable of being influenced by the alien mind control, if only to some degree. Simple math proved that the higher the number of upgrades one possessed, the easier it was for them to resist the control. That was our solution, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy, or quick.

Humans evolved to be what we are today due to a series of happy accidents, and genetic traits that mostly only passed down because they just happened to support the species’ ability to survive. All of our organs function automatically, so that we don’t have to concentrate on each process all the time. We feel pain to alert the brain that something is wrong. We form clots to patch wounds. We are simply not designed for modern medicine, which is why every major biomedical breakthrough has come after years of finding ways to trick the body into accepting aid. Just as it’s possible to transplant certain organs, under certain conditions, from one individual to the next, it’s possible to install nonbiological components. But this requires a lot of time, because the body always needs to adjust to the foreign object. It’s primed to reject it; because it could be a threat to the body’s survival, which means people can’t be upgraded all at once. The scientists began the process of upgrading as many people as they could, as fast as they could, but it was proving to not be enough. Finally I had to come out of the shadows. You see, transhumanists weren’t the only ones immune to alien control. Since I only had a sample size of myself, I had to guess, but I suspected the reason aliens couldn’t break my mind was because that mind is not what they expected. When I was in college, I was diagnosed with autism, which is a medical condition every single person I met told me was a disadvantage; something that we must try to correct. It took me a long time to get over the stigma, and to realize that I was not diseased; I was just different. Even before all this happened, if I could have flipped a switch, and stopped being autistic, I wouldn’t have, because it’s a part of me, and it’s made me the kind of person I am today. And the kind of person I am is one with the natural inclination to help and protect people. I didn’t need to replace my body with the upgrades, so I knew it was my obligation defend those who did need that. My latest assignment is to protect the princess, and she is proving to be a handful, but I’m honored to do it, because we have to win this war. We just have to.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: September 13, 2190

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Vitalie admitted with no shame that she chose to print the teleporter gun in 2188, against the group’s wishes, almost as soon as they had downloaded the plans for it. She had snuck into an empty unit in another wing to use the synthesizer in secret, then she hid it in the same cabinet where she ended up stuffing Hogarth. They fought about it as much as they could after Hogarth used the gun to completely dismantle Harrison’s substrate, but they were forced to move on to more pressing matters. Harrison’s systems were still partially online, since parts of his neural network still maintained a level of cohesion. Leona and Hogarth discovered that he wasn’t transmitting any data, but also that he was supposed to. There was no telling when Ulinthra was going to send someone after him to figure out why he wasn’t checking in. They had to figure out what they were going to do with him.

They took this opportunity to hide Hogarth away permanently in this arc’s secret floor, which they found to be at the bottom of tower 4. They instructed her to do absolutely nothing with her days, except watch TV, read, and eat. She was not to invent any new machines, or study the teleporter gun, or anything. If they were going to be able to use her as a secret weapon, they needed to bide their time. That was the reasoning behind waiting on the teleporter gun in the first place, and Vitalie’s failure to recognize could be their ultimate demise. By the time Leona and Ecrin returned from dropping her off, Brooke and Vitalie were nearly finished cleaning up the mess of android body parts, and consolidating them to a pile. Leona scanned each scrap to make sure they would not be any further threat to them. Then she hacked into his central processing unit, and storage units, to erase all data entirely. Ulinthra was going to have to find out what they had done at some point, but there were details they didn’t want getting out.

They waited all day for retaliation, but nothing came. If Ulinthra and her people knew that Harrison had been destroyed, they weren’t showing it. And if they didn’t know, then why not? Brooke crawled into her stasis pod just before midnight, while the other three crawled into their respective beds. They woke up the next year to still no reaction. This was making them nervous. Perhaps Ulinthra was biding her time as well, and letting the four of them stew in their guilt, and dread their consequences. Or maybe Harrison just wasn’t as important to her as they thought. While none of them was qualified to diagnose mental disorders—certainly not from only a handful of interactions—she did show all the signs of a psychopath, and if this was true, relationships would be difficult for her. Leona had the recollection of a timeline where Ulinthra was happily married to two lovely men, though. She was violet and dangerous in that reality, but not psychopathic. Was she the same person here, or different?

Leona couldn’t eat anything for breakfast. The others were okay, especially Vitalie, who was not at all apologetic for what she had done. Leona wanted to argue with her more about it, but also not really. Harrison in this reality was not the same one she met those years ago. Hell, he didn’t even look the same, but she still felt a sense of loss at his destruction. And there was still that fear for what was going to happen to them because of it. Vitalie asked her if she wanted to go ahead and make the call, but Leona decided against it. One of the biggest flaws in their plan was that Ulinthra could eventually catch onto it. If her Round Twos were too significantly different than her Round Ones, she would start to wonder why. In order to maintain the facade, they had to occasionally act like they were as powerless as anyone else. Today was a perfect chance to do that, because Ulinthra had to hear straight from them what had happened to Harrison, even if that meant hearing it for the second time.

Leona suddenly jumped up from the table, and opened the closet door. She pulled out the hover sled that the workers had left in case they wanted to rearrange Brooke’s pod. She dragged the blanket wrapped around Harrison’s body parts onto the sled, and started to leave. “Go about your business,” she said before closing the door. “I’m doing this one alone. No pennies today.” She clipped the sled’s proximity fob to her pants, and walked out of the unit before anyone could argue.

“Let her through,” Leona could hear Ulinthra order her personal guardsmen through the radio once she had made to the lion’s den.

Leona walked in and raised the sled high enough to drop it down on Ulinthra’s desk. “Do you know what this is?”

Ulinthra stared at the blanket. “You showed it to me the first time I lived through this day.”

“So I don’t need to explain what happened to him.”

“I would like to hear it again. Let’s call it...self-corroboration.”

Leona was going to be as honest as possible, while leaving out any unnecessary information, like the fact that a genius named Hogarth Pudeyonavic had suddenly showed up in their unit through an explosion, or that she was the one who had killed Harrison. “The real Harrison would never have taken his duties to you this far. This thing on your table was an imposter, and he was a problem. I believe I did you a favor. The other Harrison would have just left, like he did before. This one would have turned on you. You dishonored the real Harrison by giving this one the same name, and it sickened me. So I killed him.”

“How?”

“Non-food synthesizers are lined with a special coating on the glass that prevent external light from interfering with their sensors. This allows you to watch extraordinarily detailed objects being printed without affecting the instruments with minute changes in their environment.” This was not an entirely accurate explanation, but these high-level 3D printers were indeed built with special glass.

“Seems excessive, but okay...”

“When Fake!Harrison tried to teleport one of us to...wherever it is he would send someone, I held up a printer plate. The beam that reflected back at him was unstable, because it’s not really designed to do that. It teleported parts of him, to different places. We’re not sure where all of him is. This is just the bulk. I know we’ll be punished, but I am confident that it was worth it.” She started walking away.

“You overestimate how much he mattered to be,” Ulinthra shrugged. “He was just a toaster.”

Leona looked back over her shoulder. “You and I both know that’s not true. He was the only person in the world who knew exactly who you were, but still didn’t leave.”

“I thought you said he would eventually turn on me.”

“He would have, because everyone does. But in every reality where it’s happened, you never believe it until it happens.”

“You act like you know more about the continuum than I do. I’m the one who had her brain blended to a hundred and one percent.”

“That’s true, and it’s true that I didn’t even know that was possible. But I don’t have to know every version of you to know you. You’re gonna lose. You’re gonna lose everything.” Leona tried to leave again.

“How should I punish you? I may not have cared much for Harrison, but he was still my property.”

“I would be devastated if you killed yourself,” Leona lied unconvincingly.

This made Ulinthra grin. “I’ll think of something.”

Leona took a walk on the platform to clear her head, stopping only to grab some altitude gum. When she got back to their arcunit a couple hours later, her friends were all in the middle of naps, including Brooke. Leona was about to lie down next to her and get some depression sleep in too, but Ulinthra’s voice came on the arcwide system.

“Residents of Panama Arc Two, a few of you have decided to take it upon themselves to defy the Arianation. They have murdered a loyal supporter of mine; someone who has been with me since the beginning. But I am unable to punish them, so I have no choice but to punish you. Please direct your attention to the nearest viewscreen.”

“Everyone out of their room!” Leona ordered.

They came hustling out so they could watch together on the main screen in the living area. A drone was delivering a live stream of one of the hanging towers.

“Is that...?” Vitalie asked.

“The tower that Hogarth is in? It is, yes,” Leona confirmed.

“This is what happens when you can’t listen,” Ulinthra said through the speakers.

They watched in horror as a military drone slid into frame, and pointed its weapons at the base of the tower, which was attached to the platform. It was only a few dozen stories tall, which meant the bottom floor was still hundreds of meters up in the air. The drone fired its weapons at the base until it was enough to sever the tower’s connection to the platform. The streaming drone tilted its camera down so everyone could see thousands upon thousands of people fall hopelessly to their deaths. But then something happened. A massive portal opened on the ground below the tower, and swallowed it up. Where did they go, and who was responsible for taking them?

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Fervor: Clinica Titanica (Part IV)

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Famous female explorer, Ida Reyer, shaken from having thought she was gonna lose her precious Compass of Disturbance—which I had a feeling was more powerful than we could imagine—left the apartment, looking for an exit portal to somewhere quiet where she could make sure it was okay. Hogarth offered to take a look at it for her, convinced that what happened to her before was not going to happen again, but Ida was not so confident. She wasn’t really a part of this, and she felt she needed to get away from all of us as soon as possible. That’s understandable. Meanwhile, Hogarth was busy with her own situation anyway. She needed to have a good long conversation with Hilde, away from everyone else. I could hear them raise their voices every once in awhile from the other room, but it never seemed to get too heated. From what I gathered, Hogarth had just spent some time in the future, and in fact multiple points in time. Whatever the compass had done to her, it continued to have an impact on her relationship with the timestream, forcing her to jump around aimlessly. Since this involved Hilde, and people Hilde knew, Hogarth couldn’t say too much about what was going to happen to them, which must have been frustrating.

I asked Leona how she felt about all this, since she too could be seen on the other side of the portal that FarFuture!Hogarth opened. Leona just shrugged, revealing that it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered something like that. “Avoid alternate versions of herself,” she said. “Rule number four.” I also learned from her that she had created a whole list of time traveling etiquette, which were apparently in use amongst people like her throughout time and space. She typed up a copy of the list for me so I could keep it for reference. We spent our time last night looking through the Book of Hogarth. I’m no scientist, so I was having trouble understanding it, but she is, so she should have at least had some semblance of what it all meant. She admitted to being lost with it, though.  We worked on it for hours, looking for any clue as to how to decipher it, but anything she could interpret as meaningful was also somehow over her head. There was some pretty high level multidimensional math going on in there, whatever that was. As Slipstream was ordering me to go to bed, since I’m still a little baby, Leona appeared to be experiencing some revelation about the book that I was not given the opportunity to hear until the morning.

“Time,” Leona says simply over breakfast.

“Yes, it’s weirder than we thought,” Slipstream responds. “What about it?”

“That’s exactly right,” Leona continues. “Time isn’t linear. Make a mistake? Go back and fix it. Want to see what your great grandparents looked like when they were children? Easy. Need more time? Well,  that can be done too. But there’s one thing about time that can’t be manipulated, despite the fact that time and thought seem to enjoy a particularly close relationship.”

“What’s that?” Hogarth asks as the one person there who could truly follow Leona’s logic.

“Learning,” Leona says. “Learning still takes time. You have to practice, and reinforce, and you have to be patient.” She holds up the book. “This thing doesn’t just give you secrets. You have to earn the right to understand them, and that takes real time. It changes. Not before your eyes, but I’ve looked at a page, flipped to the next one, and then flipped back, to find it different. I still don’t understand it, but it’s changed. It’s adapting to my level as a reader, and scholar.”

“So only smart people have any hope of figuring that thing out completely?” Hilde supposes. “I guess I’m out.”

“No, it doesn’t take intelligence. It takes time. Yes, Hogarth and I may need less time, but that goes for anything.”

“How much time do you need to identify what we’re meant to do with the book in the first place?”

“That’s impossible to say,” Leona tells her while preparing to take a drink from her juice, “as I’m sure you surmised before I even answered that question.”

“All right,” Slipstream says. “I’m still not sure what we’re here to accomplish at all, so I guess take the time you need. My main job is to take care of Paige until her fathers come back.”

“No, it’s not,” I argue calmly. “Mireille was my babysitter. You just stumbled upon this.”

“No, that woman said I was placed here to be on the team, or whatever. And...”

“And what?”

“And she wasn’t the only one. Someone I trust implicitly encouraged me to help with this,” Slipstream says vaguely.

“What exactly did they tell you?”

Slipstream looks between me and the book. “He said to turn to the next page in the book of my life. I didn’t emphasize those words; he did. It was a clue.”

“That could mean anything,” Hogarth points out.

“It means this,” Slipstream begins. “We’ve all been asked here to stop some virus. We were asked to do this by the future version of the woman who is apparently responsible for it, in this weird 12 Monkeys sort of situation. I don’t know what this book can do for us, but I know I have to help. Not all of you know who I am, of what I’ve done. But I hesitated when I was asked to help rid this city of gun violence. I didn’t see the vision right away, and I actually charged for my services. I regret every roadblock I put up that stunted the effort, because I think Kansas City is better for having achieved what it did. My experiences over the last several years have taught me that when something needs to be done, you have to assume that no one else is going to do it. We’ve been putting one thing off throughout this whole thing, and I think that’s a mistake.”

“What have we been putting off?” I ask.

“We need to find out who the present day Jesimoo—uhh, help me out here.”

“Jesimula Utkin,” Hogarth says.

“Right, her. We need to do recon on her. Who is she? Where is she now? Is she already in the process of releasing this virus? Has she already released it?”

By the time she finishes her sentence, I’ve already pulled out my phone and run a simple Google search. “Jesimula Utkin,” I start. “Founder of CEO of J.U. Mithra Labs. It’s a small pharmaceutical research outfit, based in Independence, Missouri.”

“Oh, God,” Hilde says. “Not Independence.”

“What’s wrong with Independence?” I ask, not having grown up around here.

“Don’t worry about it,” Slipstream says, shaking her head.

“Well, either way it’s about a half hour away,” I say, having mapped it.

“Okay.” Slipstream stands up. “I’m leaving in thirty minutes. Anyone can come help...except for Paige.”

“Ha,” I scoff. “Your friend told you to turn the page. I’m the Paige Turner. He never said anything about leaving me behind.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m sixty-six years old.”

“Paige,” Slipstream scolds me.

“Fine, I’m fourteen, but—”

“She’s coming,” Leona said, inexplicably my advocate. “I’ve been doing this a long time. If someone as powerful as Jesimula Utkin wants her to be involved, she’ll be involved. Things get worse when you resist. If you leave her here, she’ll end up somewhere we don’t want. So keep her close.”

Slipstream continues to doubt, but is on her way to changing. “It’s just recon,” I remind her.

“I guess you wouldn’t be the first VIP I’ve been charged to protect. Twenty-nine minutes.”

We pull into town an hour later with no plan. We park in a grocery store lot next to J.U. Mithra Labs, and sit there. When I ask what we’re waiting for, Slipstream reminds me that we’re just doing recon. I think we should go in and check it out, but Leona is hard at work, studying the history of the company. While they do conduct clinical trials, they don’t just take anyone off the street. You have to apply online, and that’s only after first being approached by one of their representatives, usually at a career fair. It’s all very secretive. If one of us walks in there, they will not be doing so with very good reason, and will immediately come off as suspicious. I get antsy after hours of waiting, though, so if no one is going to actually do anything, then I guess I have to. That’s what Slipstream just taught us with her big speech in which she came this close to acknowledging the title the newspaper gave her: Champion of Kansas City.

I’m sitting in the middle seat, so I can’t just slip out, but I can lie about having to go to the bathroom in the store again. I try to sneak out the back exit as soon as I get in there, but then I start thinking about how people like me in movies always use the bathroom excuse, yet rarely do those same people ever actually have to pee. They spend the rest of the film running around in their adventure, but never do they have to stop for real. It’s an innocuous thought that should have been fleeting, but it manages to make me have to pee, so I turn around and take care of that first.

Hilde is waiting for me when I finally do make it to through the door. “I saw what you were going to do,” she says with a smirk. “I realized I had to go soon after you left, so I wasn’t stalking you, or anything.”

I look around. “Why didn’t you call the others?”

She looks around too. “Why would I do that? Five people walk into a clinic and ask for directions, and the receptionist finds it strange that half of them didn’t just stay in the car, so they get arrested. Two people walk in asking for directions, and it seems normal.”

“You’re helping me?”

“I’m the next youngest one here. I know what it’s like. Let’s go, before they close.”

We cautiously cross the void between the store, and the laboratory. I think about rolling on the ground like a secret agent, but it’s not necessary, and I know I’ll regret it later.

We walk into the building just as the receptionist is leaving. “Uh, can I help you?” he asks us in a fake chipper voice.

“We were just looking for the interstate.”

“I can tell you how to get there. We should go, though.”

A voice comes on the intercom, “this is your final warning. All nonessential personnel, please exit the building.”

“We really do need to leave,” the receptionist says. “They’ll be locking the doors.”

“Departure imminent,” the voice says.

The receptionist suddenly stiffens up, and his eyes glaze over. “I must go,” he says in an even more robotic voice. He does an about-face turn, and leaves, as do a couple other people who appear to be in their own trances. We hear the doors click locked behind them.”

“Departure in thirty seconds,” the voice announces.

“What does that mean?” I ask Hilde, but of course she doesn’t know.

“Get me in this building!” Slipstream shouts at Leona and Hogarth from outside. They either saw us come in here, or started getting worried. The two geniuses have opened up the security console, and are trying to unlock the doors. Sparks fly out of it, and knock them back.

“Initiating memory field,” the voice announces. Light radiates from the walls of the building itself, and spreads out. As it covers my three friends, they act drunk and confused, and stagger towards the parking lot.

“Prepare for departure,” the voice says finally. The space outside the building warps as my friends instinctively stumble back away from it. But then they start walking towards it again, quickly going right back to where they were. Then they suddenly leave, walking backwards. The few workers who just left come back in, also rapidly walking backwards, but they’re not really inside. They’re just briefly occupying the same space as we are. We’re not going back in time so much as time is reversing, and it’s doing so faster and faster. We watch traffic moving backwards, days being unlived, and buildings being unbuilt. Weeks become months, become years, become decades, become centuries. The city disappears, and we’re left in the middle of nowhere.

“Reintegration imminent,” the voice informs us.

We stop, at some point in the past, before the area was settled.

“Titan,” I whisper, because soon after I was transported from my original time period of 1971 to 2023, I started immersing myself in as much time travel fiction as I could find.

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Microstory 895: Three Speed, Part 2

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...And now the conclusion

While I don’t have any flight training, since the plane I’m stealing is already running, I manage to figure out the basics before anyone has a chance to stop me. Despite the shouts of anger from what must be the pilot, I get it going down the runway, and up into the air. Using the plane’s radio, I also figure out how to get ahold of my mechanic coworker, who says she know a perfect place in the mountains to let the bomb wrapped around my neck go off, and that she’ll meet me there. As I’m flying to my potential salvation, though, I start doubting this whole plan. The guy I put on the hitlist is an outlier, and the only one of his kind. I can’t damn anyone else to this; not when I have a choice. Like I’ve said, my life doesn’t mean anything, so maybe it’s best if I end it now. I decide to find a nice safe spot away from people to fly in a holding pattern, and let the clock run out, satisfied with my decision, but the next two hours comes up, and nothing happens. Was the guy lying, or am I out of range all the way up here? Maybe he never expected me to find an aircraft. I might survive this yet. I circle the place where my friend wants me to land, and take some time to read through the flight manual. The landing procedures sound intuitive, but this isn’t something I can just try out; not when there’s now a chance to get out of this pickle. By the time I land—in fine fashion, if I do say so myself—yet another two hours comes and goes, and still no explosion.

Not willing to taking more of a risk than I have to, I keep jogging, all the way into what looks like a gold mine, or something. My mechanic is already waiting for me there with her tools. She takes some time to inspect the device around my neck before agreeing that we really are out of range, and the terrorist who did this must have intended to stay close enough to me, because he hadn’t programmed a distance failsafe. He had, however, installed an anti-tampering feature, which meant it would explode as soon as she got if off. She determines that she can freeze it, and give us a buffer of up to three seconds. That doesn’t sound like enough time to me, but she promises that her plan will work. She takes out a can of dusting air, and sprays it onto the choker, then she quickly breaks the clasp, and tosses the bomb into another room. She isn’t able to close the blast doors all the way, but it’s enough to protect us. It was over, or so I thought. A man suddenly appears out of nowhere and snaps a different choker around my friend’s neck. “Congratulations on being the only one who managed to get this thing removed.” He hands me a gun, a choker bomb, and a detonator. “Now it’s your turn. I tell you the same thing I tell everyone. You have one day to find the man you put on the hitlist. Put the bomb around his neck, and give him the same instructions you were first given. If he dies, she lives, and so do you. Or you can kill him right away, along with yourself, and end the cycle of violence forever. You choose.” I don’t hesitate to shoot the man in the head. Then I grab the can of air and tell my friend to walk me through how to get her choker off.

Microstory 894: Three Speed, Part 1

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Something about me must have just screamed easy target, because I can’t understand why I would have otherwise been chosen. I keep a pretty low profile, so I couldn’t have any enemies. My first thought is that it’s a case of mistaken identity, but the guy clearly knows exactly who I am, which means it just doesn’t make any sense. I’m not an important person, and I’m not white, so it’s not like the news was gonna cover my story. Sorry, not sorry, I didn’t make the world the way it is. I’m just some random guy who works at the county recycling center. I don’t even own a car, which is why he found me riding my wee little three-speed bike along the old highway. He pulls up next to me in a cargo van, and it looks like he’s alone. He immediately points a gun at my chest, but says he doesn’t want my money when I offer him a tenner. He just orders me to put this weird-looking choker necklace around my neck. It’s not really my style, but I can’t think of much of a reason to not comply. As soon as it’s fully clasped, he relaxes and smiles with relief. After a moment, he catches his breath, and shows me this little remote, saying that it’s a detonator set to trigger the bomb around my neck if I don’t do what he says. Apparently having seen an overrated action film franchise from the 1990s, he says that the bomb will go off if I don’t keep moving, or if I don’t add the name of another one of my friends to his hitlist every two minutes. When I point out how absurd that is; that I couldn’t conceivably keep up with that kind of timeline, he clears his throat and contends that he said hours, not minutes. That’s doable, not because I’m willing to send one of my friends to their death, but because I’m confident I’ll be able to get this thing off before that will matter. He gives me a minute to retie my shoes, and stretch a little, before he activates the timer. He then hands me a PDA where I’m meant to list my doomed friends. I get back on my bike, and turn around to head for the recycling center.

One of my coworkers is a mechanic by trade with an engineer for a mother, so surely she can help. I try to call her on my phone, but I can’t get a signal, even as I’m riding directly underneath what I know for a fact to be a fully operational cell tower. The choker necklace must have its only blocker. Only later do I realize why the guy who’s doing this to me looked so familiar. I met him at a party once. He was my neighbor’s friend, and seemed totally normal. What the hell is going on? I pedal faster as my two hours approaches, but hit a pothole, and bust open both of my tires. There’s no way I’m making it back to work now. I know someone who everyone thinks is my friend, but I secretly hate. If I have to choose anyone to die, and if it means I and everyone else survives, then it might as well be him. It’s a terrible thought, but I would rather it be him than my dentist, or something. I try to jog to get as close to my destination as possible, but it’s pointless. I slow down just enough that I can type out his name without a bunch of spelling mistakes, and beg the flying spaghetti monster for forgiveness. Just when I’m thinking about how I can’t keep this up for much longer, I see the little airstrip I always pass on my way to work. I detour in that direction, and find it surprisingly easy to steal a plane. There is some hope left in the world. I think I can get it to taxi, but takeoff is going to be another issue.

To be continued...