by Ryan Schow
Future me in her badass steampunk outfit with her badass gun just looks at me—like I need to answer the question—then she cocks and eyebrow, sports a mischievous grin and turns to Sebastian. I don’t stop her when she starts to speak.
“The point of her story, love, is that an entire world wasn’t ready for the truth. You see, they didn’t know enough about astronomy or philosophy or even science to disprove Galileo, so they charged him with an indefensible crime and put him on permanent house arrest. There are things you don’t know that you will find impossible, but they are only impossible because you do not know enough of the science of the future to even form a base of knowledge.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re not twins,” future me says.
“Then what are you?”
Getting out of bed, fixing the bedsheet around me, I say, “I’m her, and she’s future me, and at one point, both of us were Raven.”
His eyes roll a bit and his face goes slack. Sebastian wavers and starts to tip over. The phone slips out of his hand but with my mind I catch it, and just before he falls over and cracks his head on the floor, I use my mind to gently ease him down.
The towel falls aside and both me and future me are now staring at his wiener.
“Did you do that?” I ask.
She just grins. With my mind, I float the towel back to cover him and future me starts to pout. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a dick like that?” she asks. The pain in her voice is real, and I feel bad for her. For us.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “And why do you stink so bad?”
Future me takes off the hat, pulls off all her clothes and struts naked past Sebastian heading for the shower. I follow her in the bathroom, strangely embarrassed about seeing my future self walk naked and brazen though the middle of our condo. Like she’s someone else.
She steps in the already hot shower and moans like it’s the best thing ever, then—with her head tilted back under the stream of hot water—she says, “It’s been four months since I’ve had a shower.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“Why haven’t you showered for that long?”
“I’m going to leave you with that lovely surprise.”
Is she for real?
“Why would you do that?” I ask. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because I’m back, which means you’re leaving. It’s best you get your own answers, just in case the future isn’t the same. Because if it’s not, then whatever I have to say won’t matter.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, hands on my hips, pissed off that I just connected with Sebastian, that he now knows the truth about me, which means if we have any hope of a future together, this needs a delicate touch. And based off what I just saw, future me doesn’t have it.
“You already left for the future, dummy, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“Me and Sebastian just had sex. I don’t mean to be a basic bitch or anything, but he’s mine. Not yours!”
“Save the tears for a firing squad, sister. I earned him too, and then future me came back and got me. Right before she got him. Don’t you see? This time travel business is just us moving in cycles, in the shadows of the past. These shadows, though, they’re our roadmap into the future.”
“When is it going to stop?”
“Maybe this is it for me, but maybe it’s not,” she says, smelling the shampoo in the tall blue bottle. “It’s impossible to say. Every time we travel, things change the slightest bit. I learned this when past me killed that buttfuck, Adolf Hitler. We had to do it. That genocidal son of a bitch never died in Berlin like everyone thought. The FBI knew it and the Russians knew it, but history left it out of the history books, so I did something about it, which means you did something about it, too.”
“I’m not going,” I announce, steadfast.
By now she’s got half the bottle of shampoo on her head and the lather is foaming up everywhere. She doesn’t even care that it’s running into her eyes, she’s so thrilled to be showering.
“Why are you so skinny?” I ask, looking her over. The way her arms are toned but beanpole skinny and her ribs are showing, it’s filling my head with questions. Even her tits have gotten smaller, her butt a little less…bubbly.
She looks down at her body, then looks at me. “Take off the sheet.” I do. The differences between us are pretty stark. And here I thought I was too thin.
She must feel like a gosh damn rail.
She fills her hand with more shampoo the goes to work on the unkempt rug between her thighs. “When the bombs went off,” she says, washing vigorously, “we sort of got caught in the middle. The worst of it all came to a head when the nukes were triggered. I thought I stopped them.”
“So did you stop it or what?”
“What do you think? Did I come back clean? Showered? Dressed to the nines in something pre-apocalyptic?”
She turns into the water, rinses herself.
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it!” she exclaimed.
Right then, we both turn to the sound of Sebastian shifting on the tile floor. He looks up at us both and doesn’t know what to do. He thinks he’s seeing double. Two naked me’s talking to each other. Sliding his legs under him, spinning slowly around and blinking lazily, he sits up against the wall, mentally frazzled.
“Why don’t you get in the shower with me, Sebastian, wash all the lovely jizz of hers off your dick. In fact, you should let me help. I’ll totally help.”
“Good Christ, Savannah!” I say.
“Good Christ yourself, Savannah,” she replies. “The last time I got laid was here, tonight, when you got laid, so let me at least be thrilled to see him again.”
“So…you’re you?” Sebastian asks. We both nod. He looks in the shower at future me and says, “So technically we just had sex a few minutes ago?”
“Yeah, but for me it was four months.”
Shaking his head, fully zombified, he gets awkwardly to his feet and wanders out into the living room, leaving us to talk. Half my brain is on him and how he’s feeling insane, and the other half is on her…me.
“Get him in here to shower with me,” future me says. She’s lost her jovial edge.
“God, demanding are we?”
“You have no idea what I just survived, what I’ve gone through,” she snaps. “So seriously, throw this bitch a bone. She needs one!”
Blowing out a deep breath, walking out into the living room wrapped in my sheet again, I go and sit down beside Sebastian and say, “I am a genetically modified human. Part of a program designed by the elite for the elite. It’s highly experimental, extremely painful, and it has caused me to have to erase myself several times over.”
“You aren’t possible,” he says, refusing to look at me. I can’t believe how pale he looks.
I take his hand and he almost refuses me, but then he lets me. I soften my tone, speak to him less directly that future me did.
“You wondered how I knew the things I knew, back when I was Raven, how I knew about Corrine, her schedule, how I knew how you liked your sex or where you eat your lunch.”
“So you’re what…some kind of a mutant or something? Do you read minds and change bodies?”
In his mind, he really wants to know, but he’s too scared to frame the question in a serious light for fear of sounding unhinged. So he uses sarcasm as a defense mechanism. I know sarcasm. I’m fully fluent in that language.
“The science revealed to the public, that’s the science from fifty years ago. A hundred in some cases. Like genetics.”
“So you changed your body?”
“It was changed for me.”
“That doesn’t explain her. The you in the shower.”
“I think she wants to explain it herself. To you. Right this second.”
“You want me to shower with her?”
“It’s what she wants, and since s
he’s technically me on a different timeline, then technically you’d be showering with me, and letting this version of me explain it to you.”
He’s shaking his head again, the walls inside his mind shivering, powering down, trying to force all this crazy talk out of his head because—like future me said—he doesn’t have the base of knowledge necessary to even contemplate things like whole body genetic modification and time travel.
“Go see her. She needs you right now.”
“I don’t even know her.”
“She’s me, dummy. Aren’t you even listening?”
“And you’re Raven?”
“Yes.”
He stands up, walks like a trauma victim into the bathroom, and from where I’m sitting, I hear future me say, “Don’t get in the shower with your towel on, retard, I’ve already seen you naked for Christ’s sake.”
If this life of mine hadn’t somehow turned into a three ring circus, I would’ve laughed and maybe joined them for a paranormal threesome. But I don’t. Instead, I begrudgingly get ready to leave this timeline, not knowing what the hell I’m in for. If it’s anything like being dropped in 1945 Berlin in the middle of a war zone, then it should be interesting.
The thing is, sweet Jesus, how many times am I’m going to die this time? I died enough in Berlin for a few lifetimes.
Black Hat Mayhem
1
Agent Whitney Clark was not a pretty woman when she got mad. And this cyber attack? Oh, boy. She was pissed. Anger drew out an ugliness in the woman Brayden barely understood. It was like a sour cry-face minus all the tears and blubbering.
“Will someone please tell me what the hell just happened?” she barked.
The agents were furiously tapping on their keyboards, all of them aware they just suffered something massive. No one could seem to get control of their screens but Brayden.
“You,” she growled. He felt her hot glare burning holes in his back.
While everyone else was getting denial codes and frozen screens, Brayden was crawling through 4Chan’s forums, looking for a tell, searching for something that would help him understand what just happened to the FBI’s internal network.
Brayden didn’t realize Agent Clark was standing over him. It sounded like she was accusing him of this, but he felt like she was smarter than that. He turned and looked up and she said, “Why are you active when no one else is?”
“I set up my own network because yours is not fortified yet. Obviously.”
“Instead of building your own fortress, perhaps you could have built our fortress. I mean, isn’t that what you’re here for?”
“Pipe down, Whitney,” he said, finding what he was looking for. Not that he’d tell her.
“I got something,” Agent Kessler shouted with excitement.
Me, too, Brayden thought. When Agent Clark left him for Kessler’s terminal, he jumped into the meat of an active 4Chan chat.
NICE HACK, he typed. Since his handle was anonymous like everyone else’s, 4Chan’s members didn’t know who he was, but they grew suspicious.
WRONG THREAD, PLEB.
He took a snip of the thread, saved it as a jpeg to a thumb drive, then typed: I’M COMING TO YOU FROM GROUND ZERO YOU FAT-HEADED CLOWN.
This got them riled.
A flurry of curse words appeared, then they abandoned the thread. But not before he had enough to try to track them. It would take time, but he’d roll through all their posts, constructing a profile with all the little digital crumbs they left behind.
It turned out Agent Kessler thought he had something to work with, but he didn’t. Agent Clark was hovering again, a blistering inferno emanating from her pasty, freckled face like some kind of portable furnace of unfucked, adrenaline-fueled fire.
“Fix this,” she snarled.
“Stop being all demandy,” Brayden replied, “and start asking your agents to do their job.”
Agent Bart Charles, that freaking Neanderthal, he was out of his chair and in Brayden’s ear in seconds, his anger something far worse than Agent Clark’s.
“You goddamn pretender!” he roared. “You did this!”
Shrinking back, Brayden shook his head and said, “Someone left a hole in the new system. If you source the breech, you should be able to back-trace it to your hackers. That’s your job, not mine.”
Clark kicked Brayden’s chair so hard it jolted Brayden’s spine all the way to the base of his neck. Agent Clark physically restrained the red-faced agent who was screaming at Brayden so hard, spit flew from his mouth. “If you hadn’t hacked us in the first place, we wouldn’t be setting up a new network, you little shit!”
“Stow it!” Agent Clark commanded, still physically restraining him, but having a time of it. The way his face shook with raw animosity, how his suit was rumpled up around his neck, how Agent Clark could barely contain him, Brayden was actually scared for a second.
“He’s right,” Agent Pope said. “The initial breech came from Brayden, and now we get this. I mean, seriously, we’re exposed here and he’s got something to do with it.”
Everyone was looking at Brayden now. None of their looks were kind, much less understanding.
“You better fix this,” Clark warned.
“If not for me and my ransomware, whomever hacked you in the first place would still be siphoning off information from your servers wholesale. You would have never been the effective unit you needed to be without me.”
Everyone rolled their eyes and seemed to get all huffy at his assertion. This didn’t deter him.
“Yes, I hacked your system, but it was easy because there were already holes everywhere. And when there are holes, when the hackers are burrowed in, things get really quiet. They go dead silent. But when you try to plug all the little holes, the hackers are going to try open more first by stealth, then by brute force. Forget malware, ransomware, phishing. We’re talking DDOS attacks, the kind that suck your bandwidth dry. I’m not talking about rootkits and bootkits anymore. These denial of service attacks are just the beginning.”
“So you’re saying we’re screwed,” Agent Young said.
“It’s like you’re exorcising demons. You have to dig in, find the problem, clean it out completely.” He took a deep breath, looked at Agent Clark. She was starting to calm down. “Rather than looking at me like I’m the problem perhaps you should figure out who opened up a highway in the system for these guys to travel down because it wasn’t me. I’m on my own network for one reason and one reason only.”
“And what’s that?” Agent Charles said in his snippiest tone.
“Because none of you are very good at what you do.”
Agent Clark’s face seemed to be cooling, but not fast enough for Brayden’s liking. Now the fire was back. We’re talking a four alarm blaze burning down the fleshy timber of her face. She was so pissed off at his assertion it was like bombs going off inside her.
“This all started when you got here,” Agent Charles growled.
“They already had access to your network, moron. Don’t you see? It’s like inviting a bum to stay in your house then giving him access to your clean clothes, your food, your wife…he gets cozy, starts to take ownership of your life. He’s all nice and sweet while things are going swimmingly, but the second you try to kick him out he turns into the devil. This hackers who gained access to your system, they didn’t like getting thrown out and they’re kicking their way back into the system and one of you amateurs went and gave this clown his or her opening.”
“Why wouldn’t they be more stealth?” Agent Pope asked.
“Because whomever did this doesn’t have to. He doesn’t want to.”
“Find out who did this,” Agent Clark snapped. “That’s priority one.” Then turning to Brayden, she said, “As for you, I need another network with firewalls like Fort Knox and I need it now!”
She stormed out of the bullpen; Agent Charles, however, he just stood there, glaring at Brayden, his mouth flattened into an angry slash
.
“You eye raping me, Bart?” Brayden said, but less confidently than he wanted.
“You were a nobody before,” he said, “but now that I know you, you’re on my radar and I could give a shit less what your contract says. No matter what happens from this point forward, as long as I live, I’m going to dedicate every moment of my free time to violating your rights.”
“Keep your gay fantasies to yourself, Bart the fart. I’m into women. Now if you’ll excuse me, the professionals have to work here.”
Brayden turned in his chair and went back to work on the computer. Outside, he was calm as a Hindu cow; inside he was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm.
Seconds later, Agent Charles slapped him upside the back of his head so hard he went dizzy and his face slapped forward into the computer screen with a loud ruckus.
No one said anything as Brayden bit back the tears.
2
After a gallon of coffee and a time out in one of her FBI safe spaces, perhaps the women’s toilet, or ten uninterrupted seconds staring at the water cooler, Agent Whitney Clark, ginger extraordinaire, freckle-faced and frigid, returned only slightly less ruffled than before.
She gathered the team together. For whatever reason, she included Brayden.
“Can someone please enlighten me as to what exactly happened? In technical terms?”
“We were compromised, our emails, personnel files including names and addresses,” Agent Romanova said. “But that was only after we lost most of our bandwidth.” Romanov was a waif of a man, about as skinny as Brayden used to be before he hit the weights and made protein shakes the go-to meal between peppered chicken breasts and entire mountains of brown rice.
“That’s been done before,” Clark said.
Her red hair was coming out of a ponytail in wispy little strands, and the top button of her FBI regulation blouse was open revealing a chest mapped with freckles and a pair of flat moles. Brayden tried not to imagine her naked, but he was eighteen and honestly, that’s what eighteen year old boys do. So he did, then he stopped because he couldn’t see himself liking what he saw.
