“The ship’s security card is over there.” She pointed to a building that we walked towards.
“How the hell are you doing this?”
“You remember asking about my Chrono Psionics? Well, even the most developed on the physical plane fall fairly flat with ours. Now that the time fracture is gone, all the various pathways in front of us are clear. I am just choosing, and telling you, the correct ones.”
“Isn’t that kind of powerful if you can see all the options time could take, and I am able to act on it?”
“Quite so.” She nodded turning around to look at me for a moment.
“A limitless actor, who is given perfect information…”
A guard had opened a door in the back of the building and turned away from us, propping the door open with his foot while he went to the bathroom.
Proud nodded to me. “It’s the red one with an orange stripe.” I slipped in behind the guy, hoping I could see the card easily, which I did, and grabbed it painfully in my mouth, slipping back out and around the corner.
“Unbelievable,” I said between closed teeth, shaking my head, holding the exact card she said I would find.
I was about to walk in front of the guard’s shack when she grabbed my arm, shaking her head. “He is going to see this regardless, and a lot of other paths are converging here. We just have to run now. The ship is the silver one with the red trim on its tail fin. I gave you enough energy that you should be able to manage it.”
I nodded and we started running. A bit later I heard yelling and a few shots exploded across the pad. Twice Proud physically pushed me to one side or another while a round hit exactly where I once was. I held the card up and the ship responded, then we both jumped in as the door closed. I was breathing hard, holding the ground, then lifted my body up and started laughing before she joined in on my jubilation.
“We did it!”
“Not yet,” she said coldly, nd I looked at her with worry. “Start the ship, then we will be okay!” She laughed at what was probably a joke to her.
“Right.” I nodded and went to the bridge, starting the ship with a few pushes of my chin and hitting a random coordinate in it. Suddenly the ship was taking off. The ruins of the ReCorp building were visible as we gained altitude. “Do time fractures happen often?”
She shook her head, frowning. “Unbelievably often. Just about every space faring race runs into this at least once through their various particle accelerators trying to ‘understand’ the universe. They never realize they will not understand anything that way. It only leads to destruction.”
“Thanks for coming to save me. Seriously.” My head went back and forth a bit, maybe trying to shake itself free of everything going on in it. “But now, is that it? You are off to stop another time fracture? Are you going to leave me?”
“Only if you want me to.”
“Hardly. I’d love you to stay with me. If I could be so selfish to request it.”
“Well, then I will!” she stated loudly, hugging me.
“Isn’t it your job to stop the fractures?”
“It was. Perhaps you do not understand. I was created to stop that fracture, and now it is stopped. So in a way, I am without a purpose. You felt purposeless, but I am much more so. You were born, in the physical sense, and I was born in a different sense, with my sole purpose being to pair with the most responsive physical element, that’s you, and stop this local time fracture. So now my purpose is complete. It is like the immune system of your body, the task is complete now I am adrift.”
My mind was still trying to comprehend everything when she started laughing, “I thought it was really funny about your white blood cell thought. In a way, that kind of more accurately describes me. I was ‘born’ to combat this problem, and now that it’s over, so is my purpose. It may be hard for you to comprehend, but I am far more ‘white blood celled’ as you phrased it than you.”
“Why are you a girl though? There are way too many aliens out there for me to believe that the universe’s form would be a Solarian.”
She laughed a long time at that. “Hardly. I was simply created in the form that the reactive element would find most pleasing. As you are a heterosexual Solarian, this form seems sufficient, did it not?”
I started laughing. “Wow, I remember you saying something like that a million times ago it seems. No, you are perfect, but that’s what you were created to be, right? Created in such a way I would find you impossibly intriguing, all to ensure I interacted with the element to stop the fracture. So I don’t get it, I still am confused about two things. You actually did stop those bullets in that battle right? But how?”
“As you know, I am actually a physical element in true physical reality, but to make it so I appear to multiple people is hard. But did I in any way change the reality of what those soldiers thought might be happening? To them, they would never know where a spray of rounds ends up, so because you did not die, they simply would think they had missed, all at the cost of my energy of maintaining a physical body.”
I continued, “The other is you sometimes used the plural when we talked about this succeeding, and it was always like ‘it will happen, We won’t allow it to fail’ kind of thing. It almost sounds like you have done this before? Or is that some sort of ‘we are all connected thing’? ”
“No, to your first, yes to your second. I am simply stating the connection We all have with everything. I was created solely for this fracture. I still have the knowledge of the universe though, for I am a major part of it. I think I had told you before that the fracture would be created endlessly until it was fixed. I had complete confidence it would come to completion.”
“So will you…can you stay with me?”
“Of course! We will be together forever. I will stay with you in this form while your physicality lasts, and I will personally escort and stay with your consciousness through the Line. I think it is a way of the universe saying thanks!” she stated happily.
“Ha, so are you the prize for my service or what?”
“Is that what you think of me? I would not think so.”
“No, you are right. By the end of all of this, I was not doing any of it for myself, or for the universe, none of that. By the end I was doing it for you. Those million iterations, we became friends on a level beyond just you needing me to do something. I hope it was not just some attraction created into you, because it feels very real. We connected by consciousness or maybe it was our soul. On the level where we are often alone, we…or I did anyway, felt like I was not alone. Not in the place it counted.”
Her eyes were crying tears of happiness. “I do not know if I could have phrased it better about connection on that strange level. I am proud of what you did Tre, infinitely so.”
“Ha!” I hugged her tight, weak as it was. “I think I definitely got the best universe incarnation, for sure.”
“Me too!” she laughed giddily. “The reacting agent I mean!”
“Oh damn, my hair!” In the reflection of a console, I noticed my hair was haggard-looking from being locked up so long, but the thing that had changed was now it was completely neon white.
“Yes, that is what happens to Solarians who have had contact with beings like myself. I am composed of a high concentration of Axls, and such levels are deadly to you. Well it would be if I let my essence out of control. At the very least though, I constantly radiate them, and it causes you to be stronger and faster, but it leads to you dying earlier…and the white hair.”
“Damn, that’s pretty scary. Being in love with you is killing me?”
“It is, in a way, but do not worry.”
“You will protect me right? You always have.”
“And I always will, Trego.”
“Forever?” I asked.
“For infinity.”
Afterword
Thank you for reading Proud Infinity, I hope you enjoyed it. First and foremost I had wrote the first draft of this story somewhere around 2011,
and a few years later when ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ came out I was shocked by how similar the plot was. I found out later it was based on an older book ‘All You Need is Kill’ but I couldn’t help but grin throughout the whole movie. EoT doesn’t capture nearly the darkness that a plot like this I think would actually invoke in the person such as suicide and hedonism. One of the biggest differences I hope was apparent was that there was not perfect recollection of past events. Other than that, in EoT there was no mechanism for how memories would go in the past, it seemed a bit too convenient, and perhaps not as compelling.
I had a lot of fun writing Trego, and to some people I shared the story with was surprised by almost a universal agreement of him being too arrogant and perhaps a bit of a dislike for him initially. I mainly was going for someone that had a strong ‘natural intellect’ that wasn’t a book-smart kind of guy and in general drifted through life rather than has a strict plan he lived by and was fiercely independent. Proud is an embodiment of his version of a ‘perfect girl’ and I hope the subtly that his chemistry was not as high at first with her than the android Mitreah, and this was a reflection to a little bit of Trego in general not being honest with himself at first. Proud was fun as well, where I could make her over the top in some ways such as her sex appeal, but also have a subtle coyness that was rooted in a deep caring.
Overall this story had a lot of major VayneLine plot points namely about LineGods and Fate/Destiny. The LineGod plot comes to play a major role in the VayneLine books.
Visit Vayneline.com for more information on this story, and all other stories in the VayneLine universe. I plan on being very active with any readers, and I hope to have a base of loyal fans that enjoy the deep, complicated stories as well as having an author that is ‘hands on’ with his readers. If you have any comments or questions about this story or others, do not hesitate to visit the site, or email me at [email protected]
-Eric
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