by Ryan Schow
My insides twist and roll at the idea of immortality. My guts seize at the thought of this girl, of me. The implications alone dispel rational thought!
“So you’re here, but this nest place, it’s in another time?”
I already know this. I’ve been listening to her. I just can’t seem to connect the dots, to make it all fit together as perfectly as it does for her.
“Yes.”
“When are you from?”
“Twenty-eight thirty-two is my current year.”
A popping noise in my head, like the sound of my sub-conscious mind turning inside out, puffs out of me. We’re talking untold amounts of disbelief. My mind right now, it’s a four a.m. hooker, as in totally exhausted, as in officially done. Words seem so inadequate right now.
I can’t even think straight!
This is so much worse than finding out Jake is a traveler. So much worse than knowing he’s old AF and pining after his dead wife. Because I don’t know what to do, I turn on the media player.
Hellyeah’s song “Be Undeniable” plays and it has that sort of angry yet fitting message I’m not sure I should ignore. All I want to do right now is crank it up until the speakers shutter and blow apart.
The music shuts off on its own. Alice, she just looked at the radio and it shut off.
“Don’t do that,” I snap, turning it back on with my mind. Not moving a muscle, using just her mind, Alice shuts it off again. Heat rises into my face and I want to start cursing.
“You can’t win against this version of me,” she says. “I’m infinitely superior to you in this time.”
“You’re just a little girl in my world,” I retort. Meaning I could end the five year old version of her and she would never exist.
“Is that a threat?” she asks with humor in those usually dark eyes. “Are you actually threatening me?”
We sit in silence for awhile until I can’t take it any longer. “What did she do that she should end up here, looking like that?”
I’m referring to my future self.
“It’s a long story that has something to do with you turning Presidents’ bodies inside out in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands. Think of Jack the Ripper, or Charles Manson, or even someone like Ed Gein, and then multiply that by a thousand and that’s her.”
“Are you effing kidding me?” I gasp, my foot coming off the pedal.
“The way you dispose of the filth of the future, it’s brutal and bloody, and it happens so quickly and so violently people can’t process it. There’s not much violence in the future. Not anymore. That’s your thing, though. Killing people in brutal fashion when brutality is at an all time low.”
My mind is spinning a dizzying web, making my brain feel turned inside out, and the slightest bit delirious. These are merely tricks on my mind. They have to be!
Are you an implanted suggestion? I almost ask the girl beside me. A bad dream? Looking in the rear view mirror at the comatose future me, I actually pinch my own arm and tell myself to wake up.
“You’re awake, Raven. This isn’t a bad dream. This is real.” I reach out and touch Alice’s face. Poke it gently. It reacts. It looks at me and says, “Like I said.”
“So who did this to her?” I ask. “To me. I mean, Jesus Christ, Alice, she looks like she survived something…worse than awful.”
“I’d say she might not survive the trip back home, but it looks like what she’s survived makes her nearly immortal.”
“I can be killed, you know.” And apparently with my hacked off arm and my hacked off leg, I can lose pieces of myself as well. Pieces that won’t grow back.
“I know. So did they. It’s that they didn’t kill you after all this time that makes me think torture was their motive. Never death.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“After all the things you did, after your holy reign of terror, it’s not really as unbelievable as you might imagine.”
Good Lord, what have I become?
My foot smashes the accelerator again and the speedometer climbs to one hundred ten miles an hour. We’re making good time through the desert. Not that it matters. I know I need to get to Holland, but what can he do? The me in the back seat is not even conscious.
“I have to call Holland,” I say. “He can meet us at the lab.”
“Ah,” she says, “Holland. I can’t say I’ve missed him. It will be interesting, catching up.”
Activating the Audi RS5’s Bluetooth, I say, “Dial number,” then give the car Holland’s number. It rings through.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he answers, his voice rancid with sleep.
“Yeah. Save it,” I say, all business. “You need to meet me at the lab in an hour. I have, well I have a problem.”
“You have a thousand problems,” he grumbles.
“It’s…the future me. She’s hurt. Actually she’s really f*cked up.”
“The future you?” he stammers. All the sudden there’s no sleep in his voice at all.
“Yes,” I say, looking at Alice, who’s looking back at me. “Just trust me, Holland.”
In the phone I hear his cat adamantly meowing for his attention. I swear to Christ, that cat is the only normal part of him.
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll be there.”
Righteous Dickless Killers
1
The body of The Assassin, controlled from the far reaches of time by The Operator, he slid like wet sewage through a wormhole, flopping naked onto the hard Nevada asphalt in the dead of night. The body looked like something wrapped in an intestinal cocoon. The Cocoon, however, was made of a cellophane-like transport gel used to send The Assassin back in time.
The Operator remained hundreds of years in the future, but he was also there, in 2015, able to control The Assassin’s body in her time. The time he was in now, Raven de’ Medici was young and naïve, not yet the murderous, serial killing thing she’d become.
The Operator’s elation spiked. It always did the moment the body broke through the cellophane and inhaled its first swallow of the local oxygen.
To his immense satisfaction, The Operator was given by The Matriarch the right and privilege of ending Raven de’ Medici’s life, further stamped with the “kill by any means necessary” order. If he had a brain, or a body, The Operator would have rejoiced. He would’ve dreamt beautiful dreams. He would have wept. To have the kill order for Raven de’ Medici…ah!—how he envied and admired the elusive girl! He had for centuries now. That’s why ripping her limb from limb until her soul fled her body once and for all held such monstrous appeal.
And now, with the vessels of three cloned assassins at his disposal and express permission from The Matriarch to tie off young Raven’s miserable life, The Operator ached to lay human eyes on her, to break protocol and inhabit one of the bodies. He wanted to experience hand-to-hand combat from inside the flesh. Decades had passed since he allowed himself that privilege. Decades since he abandoned the safety of The Hive to take full interior control of a body.
The Assassin—The Operator’s killer controlled from hundreds of years afar—he looked like a normal twenty-something boy, but with an impossibly fit physique and tall black hair styled in the loose twist of a candle’s flame. His eyes were dark, nearly black beneath and around the lashes, a condition of the genetics used to create the inhabitable clones rather than some fashion statement. The Assassin, like the other two identical assassins lying in wait far, far into the future, was genetically flawless, save for a couple of significant features: his impossibly large pupils and an absence of any male genitalia.
In the ordering of his trio of assassins’ bodies, The Operator found the luxury of reproductive organs unnecessary, for the task of his synthetics was specific in nature: kill with efficiency, kill with brutality, kill with artistry. His assassins did not possess carnal want. Sex was a sidebar, a distraction, completely useless for what they were. Their sole task was to hunt down a person, then dispose of the person
of interest with ruthless expediency.
The Operator’s three favorite words were mutilation, decapitation, and disembowelment. He was also quite fond of humiliation and torture. These words ruled him, made him, defined him. And the genetic creations assigned to him—these righteous, dickless killers—they had no time for sex, nor were they wired to even consider such messy acts of physics and emotion.
This was not programmed into their physical DNA.
The Assassin’s silver eyes blinked side-to-side, then they made a ninety degree roll in his head so blinking became an up-and-down thing. Pupils dilating wide, The Operator—running the mission from The Nest deep inside The Hive eight hundred years in the future—activated The Assassin’s night-vision in the year 2015. A second later, clothes materialized onto the boy. Simple clothes: green kaki’s, black military issue boots, black fitted tank top. The Assassin stretched his legs and arms, curled and uncurled his fingers and toes; he then rolled his neck, flexing his brand new vertebra, readying himself for the hunt.
Up ahead, glowing in motion in the dark desert night, half a mile away, were the flashing red and blue lights of two police cruisers, the fake-sunshine glow of flames from an overturned eighteen wheeler and an exploded car. The Operator started The Assassin walking toward the inferno.
Ahead of The Assassin, nearly thirty feet, a scurry of movement caught The Operator’s attention. A low desert creature crossing the road. The Assassin/Operator stopped, tilted his head.
Interesting, he thought.
An animal.
The Assassin’s upper lip sprung into a curl. His nostrils flared. Then a noise filled his head, the sound of it reverberating through eight centuries of time into The Operator’s awareness. The sound was mechanical—dull and winding, gaining volume and texture behind him.
The Operator had only been on the actual Earth a dozen times since his migration to the cloud cities three hundred and forty-two years ago, so being there, in 2015 in the Nevada desert, this was one more interesting, if not intriguing expedition. He forced his consciousness—his soul—through the time construct, until it crashed hard into The Assassin’s body. The sensory charge alone through the space-time continuum was painfully euphoric and unsanctioned, a veritable rush he missed far too much.
No more remote control, he thought. No more Nest.
The Operator, now in full interior control of The Assassin, he turned around, to the sounds at his back. What is this? he wondered. For centuries he was a soul in a box detached from danger. Now he was flesh and blood, a soul allowed to inhabit something more human.
Standing dead center of what must be a bend in the highway, he startled at the expanding horizon of artificial light and how, whatever was coming, was headed for him far too quickly. The last thought he had as the automobile rounded the curve and came into full view was: I just got in this body and now I’m going to die.
The Assassin’s hand shot up and the automobile bearing down on him—a sedan—its rear end thrust into the air at his command. The Assassin arched his body backwards at an impossible angle to avoid being struck while using telekinetics to lift, redirect and flip the car over his head (with barely an inch of space to spare between the bumper and his face); the entire contraption and the family inside it soared upside down and sailed twenty feet high into the air. Using his other hand, The Assassin stood, spun around and sent the automobile and its startled occupants into The Void, making the car disappear from this and all elements of time. The Void was a place inside The Nothingness created for the single purpose of disposing of both his prey and his victims. The automobile and everything in it was sucked into a perpetual blackness thousands of times darker than night. Swallowed into the flat space between the layers of time. Compressed—alive but trapped and dying—like a black hole that was always open but led to the ends of nowhere.
Silence again. The almost darkness of a cool desert night.
Being soul-inside-the-flesh—not separated, insulated and numbed by distance and time—The Operator (now The Assassin) relished the real, physical danger. He was a more effective killer this way. One could rip and tear a person apart by remote non-occupancy of The Body, but it was less perilous, and the split-second advantage needed to pick apart someone as ruthless and crafty as Raven de’ Medici was never fully realized. To be at your sharpest, to really have that razor’s edge, you must be inside The Body. You needed to be The Body.
Melded to flesh, The Assassin looked down at the physical body he now occupied, put physical hands on his person, got familiar with the look and feel of it. He felt his mouth smile. What a feeling! There was no millisecond reaction lag. He was operating in real time!
He stood under the moonless sky and with a thought, the clothes and boots vanished. He simply stood there, naked, letting a warm desert current waft itself soft and earnest over his untouched skin. He stirred, breathed deep, expelled an exultant, almost sensual sigh. Both The Nest and The Hive had their benefits, but there was nothing as exhilarating as being anchored in the flesh!
In his time, what they called feeling (the manufactured version of it anyway), paled next to the real thing.
“You need different clothing,” the voice in his head said.
The Control Center.
All The Assassin needed was the thought of clothing and clothing materialized on his body. In the historical database of The Body’s atomic computer, The Assassin accessed “fashion styles for the year 2015,” then browsed thousands of styles of clothing in milliseconds before selecting something to his liking. A half a thought later, The Body was properly sheathed in the day’s fashion.
He inhaled the desert scents from his real nose into his real mouth, shuddered at the earthy smell of the air: damp asphalt beneath his feet, a curious hang of dust denoting the pounded texture of the dirt around them. But nothing else. The Assassin put one foot in front of the other and took his first steps as a human being toward the lights and burning vehicles.
That’s where she’d be.
Raven.
Rather that’s where he hoped she would be. His information was spotty at very best. Accurate, relevant history for this time period had always proven difficult to come by. So much of the details of this time were lost in the nuclear holocaust of 2082. Entire networks of data destroyed, sprawling cities abandoned for decades due to nuclear fallout, five billion lives eviscerated either from the initial blasts or years later from the devastating effects of acute radiation poisoning.
Still, he’d find her.
The Unkillable Monster
1
Me and Alice’s new body, we take the mutilated, broken version of my future self to Holland’s lab. It’s early in the morning. Holland’s waiting for us. He looks at me bleary-eyed and chewing on his molars, and through gritted teeth he says, “Is this supposed to be you? This limbless abomination?”
“If you can believe it,” I say. Did I say I hate that f*cking word? Abomination. It’s sort of what Damien called me at Maggie’s funeral right before I vowed to never talk to him again.
Holland rubs his eyes and says, “When is she from?” His clothes look like he dragged them from the hamper.
I stop, feel myself go very still, then look at Alice who’s studying Holland. “I don’t know where she’s from,” I mutter. Looking at her stained, disintegrating prisoner’s dress, so filthy and worn, it looks like future me hasn’t changed clothes in years. Like time and constant wear ground holes and grime into the fabric. Alice said she got me out of a lightless hole in the desert hundreds of years from now.
“I said, when is she from,” he replies, “not where.” The way he says this so casually, it’s like the whole idea of time travel isn’t completely preposterous. Which makes me wonder if he knows that time travel is now possible. Obviously.
Alice answers Holland: “She’s from the future.”
“I got that part on the phone,” he replies, looking at Alice with inquisitive, almost offended eyes. “How far out, I mean? A
nd who are you?”
“Alice.”
Now it’s Holland’s turn to fall deathly still. “My Alice?”
“I was never your Alice. But yes, I am that Alice. We need to see if we can get these restraints off. We need to see if her body can still use The Fountain of Youth serum to regrow limbs.”
“Unbelievable,” Holland says, looking mesmerized and overwhelmed, his brain stuck on Alice more than the future me. I want to snap my fingers in his face and demand that he focus, but I manage to control myself. Barely.
That such a horrific man has the capacity to still be surprised moves me. As an early twentieth century monster with a body count in the hundreds of thousands, he is officially one of the worst mass murderers of our time, and not rehabilitated by any means. Yet here he stands, looking handsome and innocent and in awe of a girl who could be every bit the human atrocity he is, or worse (future me).
Looking at Alice, I say, “Is that what those are? Restraints?”
“Calling them restraints is like calling a category five hurricane ‘a breezy affair.’ Those aren’t restraints, Raven. Those are permanent torture devices.”
2
So I was tortured. Entire limbs were severed from my body, and that wasn’t enough for my captors. I had to have torture devices put on me. My preternatural stumps had to stay as stumps. Basically they found a way to counteract the Fountain of Youth serum in a hideous fashion.
“These round, milled plates, they aren’t merely metal end caps for your stumps. This is a gory contraption. One humans weren’t meant to survive. You’re different though. You were never meant to die. You were pitched into a hole in the middle of the Saudi Arabian dessert, two hundred miles west of Oman, which is in the desert two hundred miles from anything. That’s were I found you. That’s where you were left to rot.”
“H-How did you find me?” I ask.
