by Glover, Nhys
‘Me? I’m the injured party here.’ He yelled at her as he stormed around the room, using his hands to emphasize his points. ‘I saved her fucking life! And in payment I get:’ He held up one emphatic finger. ‘Shot.’ He held up a second finger. ‘Brought to wacky world where people aren’t people anymore, they’re science experiments gone wrong, because they can’t reproduce like real humans, can they?’ His third finger went up. ‘I’m told I can’t go back to my world, where I have a real important job to do, because, hey, I’m dead or MiA.’ And finally, he held up his fourth finger as he strode back to Cara and waved it in her face. ‘And then, oh yeah, to top it all off, I find out that now I’m shooting blanks too, because I came through that Portal thing. I’m as sterile and broken as the rest of you! Give me a break, doll, that’s more than anyone should have to cop in one lifetime!’
‘Poor Luke, feeling sorry for yourself, much?’ Cara returned with icy distain. ‘Do you think you’ve got it tough? Then try living through Armageddon, where everyone you’ve ever known dies in front of you, and you find out that the human race ends with you. That you will never have kids. That no one will ever have kids! And still you have to keep on living, not just the normal four score and twenty, or whatever it was, but on, and on, and on for hundreds of years – without love, without family – Because if you don’t, the race ends. Extinction. Phifft.‘ Cara clicked her fingers together. ‘The End.’
She stared him down for several long minutes, both of them panting with fury.
‘I felt a bit like you when I came here. It wasn’t fair that I had to give up my old life. It was a good one, and I wasn’t that old. I had plenty of good years left in me. But then I heard Jac’s story, and I thanked my lucky stars that I lived and died before that awful time. That I didn’t have to go through what they all went through. And that I was given the chance to start again: To live a healthy, extended life, here in this beautiful place. To love more than I thought it was possible to love, and to be useful.’
Luke stared at the fiery blonde before him, feeling her words pummel him like a boxer’s right hook, over and over again. Put that way, he did sound like a spoiled child crying ‘It’s not fair!’ as he tried to pack up his bat and ball, and go home.
He went to war knowing his chances of survival were limited. They had never pulled a punch when they told him what he was getting into. If he was honest with himself, he never expected to live long enough to father kids. His was a candle that burned brightly, and then snuffed out.
Why was he so angry about all this? The reason suddenly came to him as a self-loathing kicked him in the guts.
He was angry because his chance to die a hero had been snatched away from him. His consolation prize was an endless life of perfect happiness. And that just wasn’t good enough. He’d met a woman who made him feel complete. A kind and gentle soul, who had done nothing but try to help him from the first moment she met him. Instead of going down on bended knee in gratitude, he’d been making her pay for her kindness ever since.
He certainly was a chip off the old block!
‘Nobody expects this to be easy for you, Luke. But try to understand that you aren’t the only one who’s suffered here. And these people are offering you so much … and asking nothing in return except that you take it.’ Cara spoke now with gentle compassion, as she placed her hand on his arm.
He coughed as he tried to clear his throat of the blockage that had formed there. He felt fragile and overwhelmed by his scathing self-realisations.
‘Yeah, okay, I got it. I’ll try to … do better. But I’m not cut out for this place. I’m John Savage to this Brave New World.’
‘You’ve read Huxley?’ Cara asked in surprise.
‘I may be a dogface, but I ain’t illiterate.’
‘No… no. I didn’t think Huxley wrote ‘Brave New World’ that early… Trying to remember what happened when drives you stir-crazy here. Wait till one of the Newcomers starts talking about TVs, computers and microwaves. You’ll be taking a crash course in post-war technology in a hurry.’ Cara laughed.
‘Why’d Truman announce the end of the war?’
Cara looked a little stunned for a second at the change of subject. Then she grimaced sadly. ‘Roosevelt died not long after winning the ’45 election. Truman was his Vice President.’
Luke felt as if someone had told him a beloved teacher had died. The sudden pain in his chest was awful.
‘Did we really win the war by dropping a bomb powerful enough to flatten a whole city?’ He found himself asking the biggest question that had been nagging at him, since that first day.
‘We sure did. And it freaked everyone out so much for the next ten or twenty years that they were building fallout shelters in their back yards, just in case. Of course, then biological warfare and terrorism became the big fear. Oh, and global warming and the destruction of the environment. That’s just a few of the disasters you were lucky to miss.’
‘How could we do all that? I don’t mean us in the States, I mean us as in people?’ He couldn’t get his head around any of the destruction Faith had told him about. ‘Did the West Coast really sink?’
‘Yep. Glad I wasn’t there for that one! But I know how you feel. We humans are destructive little critters. Not on our own, not all at one time. But in increments. A chemical designed to kill the insects that eat crops, ends up poisoning the soil – that was DDT. Plastics, designed to keep food longer and replace the trees we were cutting down by the million, turned out to be incapable of breaking down like normal organic materials, and just piled up and up in monstrous great landfills. Fluoro carbons used in spray cans and refrigerators – ice boxes to you – that we then discover could destroy the ozone layer. That’s the layer that keeps the harmful rays of the sun from burning us.
‘Little things, one at a time, so no one noticed until it was too late. You know, if you put a frog in water, it will sit there while you bring the water to the boil, and it slowly boils to death. It makes no attempt to get out of the hot water. That’s what we were like.’
Luke had no way to take in all she was telling him. But the overall message got through. His people had destroyed their world. And these people, what was left of them, were trying to rebuild it. Better than before.
‘So, if I stay here. What can I do to help? I’m not about to sit on my thumbs forever.’
Cara laughed and touched his arm. ‘I’m sure we’ll find a use for you. How would you feel about orchestrating some of our grander Retrieval plans… a bit of military logistics and knowhow would be extremely useful. We’re a little out of our depth on Faith’s mission.’
‘Faith’s mission?’
‘Yes, hasn’t she told you?’
‘She told me some cock and bull story about children going to death camps. You telling me the Nazis actually did that?’ Now that he had started to let this reality in, he was being forced to accept so much more of what he’d been told.
‘Yeah, it happened. I wish I could say it didn’t. Two million people gassed, starved, experimented on, or shot. Horrible, nightmare stuff.
‘When the Child Retrieval Program was given the go ahead, Faith approached us about something she’d read about many years ago: A rumour that a carriage full of children had mysteriously disappeared on its way to Belzac, in Poland. She suggested that we might have Retrieved them. Of course, early on, we were very conservative about our Targets, in case we created a temporal displacement. That’s changing the past, which then changes the future – now. But over time, and because that little girl is a lot tougher than she looks, we started considering her idea. Usually we claim one child per jump. To Retrieve one hundred a fifty women and children – highly traumatised women and children, I might add – is a huge challenge for us.’
‘So, you plan to go back to 1942 and snatch a carriage off a Nazi train, because there was a rumour it happened?’ He couldn’t think of anything crazier. ‘Rumours are just that. You can’t risk manpower on such an enterpr
ise, without substantiation.’
That was his job, after all. That was why he was there in Poland in August 1942. To substantiate rumours.
‘Absolutely. So we did just that. One of Faith’s first Jumps was to the day after the carriage reputedly disappeared. They collected enough data to determine such a carriage was discovered empty, and that none of its inhabitants were ever recaptured. You met Faith on her final recon with her partner Zygmunt. We’ve had to put the mission on hold, while we considered our options, following his death.’
‘Isn’t this time sensitive? Have you time to consider your options?’
‘Huh! That’s one of the joys of time travel, my friend. On this side, we have as long as we need. If that carriage was taken by us, it doesn’t matter if we do it tomorrow or a hundred years from now, it will still happen on August 11 1942.’
Luke tried to consider that, but his brain couldn’t take in the ramifications. He gave up with a shrug.
‘Don’t worry. It’s a bit like visual acuity. Unless you’re trained to think or perceive a certain way, your brain just can’t take it in. By my time, the concept of time travel was common place, and people had played with all the possibilities. I’ll tell you about one of my favourite movies, Sliding Doors, some time. It’s not about time travel, as much as multiple realities. But it fits with time travel. Oh, and get Faith to show you Terminator. It’s an excellent way to get your brain cells flexing.’
‘Terminator?’
‘Yeah. The Governor of California, Arnie Schwarzenegger, starred in a movie about time travel. I think it was in the 80s.’
‘A governor was an actor?’
‘Actually an actor became governor. And that isn’t the worst of it. You heard of Ronald Reagan?’
‘You mean the Hollywood actor?’
‘Yep, the 40th President of the United States.’
A lot of the chaos and insanity of the future suddenly started to make sense. His people had started taking actors seriously? It was popularity carried to the nth degree.
‘Enough for now. Poor Faith will be a mess, wondering what we’re talking about. Please try to remember she has done nothing wrong by you. She saved your life, going against our Protocol here, to do it. Give her a break, huh? Suck it up and be a man.’
Luke had never heard a woman speak like this. She could have been an army drill sergeant. He found he respected her for it.
‘I don’t seem to be able to help taking my frustrations out on her. She’d be better off staying clear of me.’ Owning up to his own shortcomings was hard. But knowing what he was doing to Faith was harder. He didn’t want to keep hurting her. He just didn’t know how to stop.
‘Do you care about her? I mean truly care, not just have the hots for her?’ Cara tipped her head to one side, and studied him intently.
‘Yeah, I do. She’s swell. I’ve never met a gal like her.’
‘And I can tell she’s being overwhelmed by her emotions for you. That’s rare here. Really rare.’
‘Yeah, she told me those clone things don’t have the urge to reproduce, so sex is a no go.’
‘Not just sex. Heightened emotions of any kind are a no go. I don’t know whether the clones do that, or the trauma does. It’s as if they were so desperate to stamp out their negative emotions, after everything that had happened, that they stamped out the positive ones too. They’re sort of in a perpetual state of numbness. PTS – shell shock to you. A whole society in permanent shell shock. And Newcomers, most of whom are old when they come here, are happy enough to go along with it.’ Cara sighed.
Luke frowned as he considered that insight. ‘You know, I found Faith crying her heart out on the floor of the shower after we… after we had sex… great sex that she was fully into. I’d rejected her because of this clone thing, and she just fell apart. It was like those serene walls of hers just all came crumbling down. All this pain just poured out. It was terrifying. I didn’t know what to do.’ He knew he was inviting another brow beating from the tough Cara, but he needed to understand, in case it happened again.
‘Yeah, Jane told me. She recognised what was happening. We’ve both been through it with our men. To be able to feel the intensity of love, she has to pull down those walls. It makes her extremely vulnerable. More fragile than she’s ever been. And Faith has always been sensitive and fragile, so I’m told. That was why we were all rather shocked by how insistent she was over this mission. This is a girl who wouldn’t say boo to a fly.’
‘She sure said more than boo to Arian Poster Boy when he had a go at her for bringing me back.’
Cara just about choked on her amusement. ‘You really have to stop calling him that.’
He knew Cara was married to the blonde giant. What was wrong with him? Did he want to alienate everyone in this place, permanently?
‘Sorry, yeah. It’s just how I saw him that first day.’
‘I won’t tell him that. Although Hakon reminded me a bit of a Nazi.’
‘Hakon?’
‘Boy, I’d forgotten what an overload all this is. Okay, when Jac Retrieved me from 2011 he was in another body. His own cloned body made from his DNA – Ummm his genetic blueprint. It was his ninth and last body, so they thought. Another Jumper called Hakon died in-situ, and his spare shell, or clone body, was still in storage when Jac was mortally injured. Against Protocol and all they believed possible, Jac managed to exceed his nine life limit and integrate with a body that wasn’t his own. He got Hakon’s body. And it freaked me out big time, at first. But I was so grateful to have him back, I would have taken him in any body.
‘So back to what you were saying. Yeah, the original owner of my Jac’s body looked a lot like a Nazi pin-up boy. A real cold fish.’
Luke had to sit down. His legs were definitely going out from under him this time. Cara was telling him that the kid he’d met that first day was not only three hundred years old, as Faith had told him, but he was wandering around in someone else’s body? How was that even possible?
‘I couldn’t do that,’ he croaked, running his hand across the soft stubble on his head.
‘Take on someone else’s body? You’d be amazed what people will do for love. Jac didn’t want to leave me. He broke all the rules, so he didn’t have to.’ Cara’s face was a picture of awe, as if she couldn’t quite believe someone would do something like that for her.
‘I don’t want a clone. I’ll see out my days in my own body. I don’t want to live forever.’ He knew he sounded like a stubborn idiot, but the whole idea of the clones still freaked him out. He couldn’t imagine waking up in another body, one just like his original, or a totally different one.
‘Your choice, of course. Although they would have taken DNA from you during the op and will be growing you a new body, as we speak.’
‘What the fuck?’ The horror of that thought made him want to up-chuck. Somewhere in this fairy land they were growing another him?
‘It’s for emergencies. Everyone has a back-up in storage.’
‘No. I won’t have it. Tell them to get rid of it. I won’t have you people using bits of me to grow one of those monsters!’ His voice was high with panic.
‘Do I look like a monster to you?’ Cara snapped, throwing her long, ash-blonde hair over her shoulder.
‘You are in a man-made creature. A lifeless Frankenstein’s monster. You might be okay with that, but I’m not,’ he snarled back at her.
‘Fine. Throw our greatest gift back in our faces, you ingrate! Jac was right about you. Hard-headed grunt!’
‘Grunt? I’m a pig now?’
‘Grunt is a slang term for a soldier during one of the wars… Vietnam? I don’t know. But it sure suits you. I’ll have Faith reassigned. Loving you is going to destroy her.’
Suddenly the threat of losing Faith out of his life seemed real. Even though he’d agreed that she was better off away from him, having Cara now threatening to make it happen, was unthinkable. He couldn’t lose her. Not now that he’d found h
er. To live out his days in this perfect world alone? He’d rather die.
But that was selfish of him. Cara was right. Faith deserved better than him. If her painful emotions were coming up, then she was doubly vulnerable right now. He didn’t want to be responsible for causing her more hurt.
‘Do that. Keep her the fuck away from me, okay?’
Cara stared at him as if he was some repulsive horror. Wasn’t that what he was calling her?
‘I’ll do that. I will do exactly that!’
Without another word, Cara turned and stormed out of the room. Luke followed, heading for the doors that led out of the building.
The sound of children chanting a song came to him from the glassed-in classroom he passed. Happy children, saved from terrible lives or deaths, destined to be assigned new bodies, so they could live forever. He shuddered at the thought.
Chapter Twelve
‘I want you prepping for the mission, Faith. Jane has agreed to take over with Luke until we decide what to do with him.’ Jac’s voice was steely.
‘What to do with him?’ Faith whimpered, despite herself. Those words sounded so ominous.
‘Yes. It would appear that he is not settling in to his new life. If he can’t…’ He left the alternative unspoken, as they both knew what happened to those who crashed and burned. But what if he didn’t? What if he just didn’t fit in? Maybe there was a place for him on one of the other communities, a place where his physical prowess might be useful. Wasn’t there talk of exploring new territory now that the population was growing? They would need someone who could protect himself, going into that unknown territory.
He didn’t need to die.
‘I am sorry I have failed you. Jane is far wiser than I am and may well be able to get through to him.’ She hated to admit it, but her words were true.
‘You have not failed, Faith. This warrior is little more than a savage. Our world is so far out of his paradigm that he was never going to be a suitable candidate. You did the best you could. And Jane is not wiser, she is just closer to his age and time-line. She may see ways in that we cannot.’
