Current Outline

Foreword

Kroʊnɒs

A Rough Draft

04.04.1968

Prologue

Introduction of Rose Butler, a nonbinary teenager with regenerative abilities.
They accept a ride from a middle-aged woman after being kicked out of their parents’ house due to recovering from a gruesome car crash right in front of their eyes.
This woman is revealed to be a yet-unnamed supervillain who takes over their body.

Chapter 1

Introduction of Olivia Castle, a mid-20s Black woman and retired agent of the top-secret Roosevelt Organization, an independent group founded to deal with “Enhanced” people.
She has been pulled out of retirement by Director Linda Johnson, an adopted British-Thai immigrant and Olivia’s ex-girlfriend who is the current director of the organization after its founder passed. An incident involving a white supremacist with explosive abilities, in conjunction with an escalating number of cases over the last two years since Olivia left, has made it clear that conventional methods of dealing with Enhanced are no longer viable under the current circumstances.
To that end, Olivia has been asked to shepherd a new “Gifted Program,” which was attempted once before, but ended disastrously. Director Johnson is optimistic, though.
Introduction of the program’s first three members:

Quint Sommerfeld, a 17 year old blonde teenager who has been in the organization since birth due to his unstable teleportation powers. The recent invention of a regulator to control them has made him field-ready.
Tambara Zamani, a 17 year old Nigerian immigrant whose Enhanced intellect was highly sought after in order to stabilize Quint by inventing the regulator. She has since received a degree of martial arts training in order to operate in the field.
Mei Xing, a 17 year old girl who moved from Hong Kong with her father after developing her Enhanced strength and durability in the wake of a supervillain attack that cost her her mom. Her dad owns the cafe the chapter takes place in.

Olivia is convinced to give the program a try for her old flame’s sake.

Chapter 2

After an unusual experience teleporting to the Box, the organization’s main headquarters in Arizona, the team gets to know each other better by touring each of their rooms.
Quint’s room is about what one would expect, save for it being unusually tidy. Olivia attempts to get more answers about how his teleportation works, most notably why he’s the only one who can remember doing it, but is rebuffed rather abruptly.
Tambara’s room is inhumanly well organized and showcases her extraordinary intellect from a young age. It is revealed that she acquired her powers young, and that she was nonetheless forced to go through public school in order to service her social development, which did not appear to go as planned.
Before they can tour Mei’s room, they are interrupted by a new case without warning.
Cut to third-person narration in which the villains of the story are introduced, primarily centered on a man named Gabriel. This cut away establishes the company “Falkner Enterprises” as being a front for their activities, drawing upon their connection to the incident mentioned in Chapter 1 and their involvement in the case which the group was summoned to investigate earlier in Chapter 2. A group of subordinates is assembled to carry out the plans of their leader, a figure known as “The Visionary.”

The Visionary is a billionaire named John Falkner Jr. who took over his dead and particularly despicable father’s company. He endeavors to create a world in which monsters like his father will never exist again, by whatever means necessary.
Gabriel Lantham is his right hand man, a Black man who can predict the future.
Another bodyguard is Dan Peterson, a Caucasian man with rage-based super strength and PTSD which is triggered by the use of firearms.
A major subordinate is Julia Rau, a Korean-American woman with the disturbing ability to grow duplicates of other people out of her own body, as if by budding.
Finally, another subordinate is Patricia Warburton, a Black woman whose singing voice can put people to sleep in seconds.

The chapter concludes with Dan Peterson leading a group of copies created by Julia to investigate a potential new recruit for their organization.

Chapter 3

Back at the Box, the Gifted Program is apprised of the situation: a young man named Aaron Williams rose to prominence via sculptures made of scrap metal, which they believe to be the result of Enhanced abilities due to the unusual frequency of large pieces he’s produced. The group assembles some necessary equipment before going to the Detroit Museum of Art to investigate further.
Cut to third-person narration in which Aaron Williams’ home life and origins are shown in greater detail, explaining how his Enhanced ability to manipulate matter came after he put his struggling family in danger of eviction due to an art commission gone wrong. Using this ability, he has made a highly successful career for himself, culminating in one of his art pieces being featured at the Detroit Museum of Art. He leaves with his family determined to build them a way out of their unstable financial situation.

Chapter 4

The team arrives at the museum and enters the building from different directions, using small spider bots to monitor various sections and leaving Olivia’s gun in Quint’s care so that Olivia and Mei can enter the museum directly.
Olivia engages Aaron in conversation, but slips up due to her rustiness and causes him to bolt, forcing them to send Quint after him as a backup.
After a brief scuffle, Quint manages to get Aaron to stand down and explains the situation to him, leaving him to ponder their offer. This ends up backfiring on them as he is confronted by what appears to be the man named Gabriel from Chapter 2.

Chapter 5

The team is forced to engage the Visionary’s agents at several points:

Olivia and Mei face Peterson, but Olivia is swiftly knocked unconscious due to his immense strength, forcing Mei to do battle with the man. This battle eventually ends with Quint teleporting the man to cruising altitude above Lake Tahoe right as they would’ve begun fighting seriously.
Aaron is held hostage by Gabriel, who attempts to use a strange chemical weapon on him before Aaron escapes and Quint teleports Gabriel into custody.
Tambara is ambushed by Rau, whose martial arts skills she is able to overcome thanks to her fast movements and her trusty wrench.

Chapter 6

With the mission being nominally successful, the group return to the Box and Olivia attempts to interrogate Gabriel, revealing they know about his connection to John Falkner Jr. and that the billionaire has been arrested on trumped up charges along with the copies created by Julia, but Gabriel’s confidence in the Visionary’s plans unnerves Olivia.
Later, while examining the strange chemical device, Tambara realizes its purpose: it can rewrite others’ brain patterns to match those of this “Visionary,” making anyone who is exposed to it serve his objectives of their own free will.
An agent of the organization who captured another of the Visionary’s subordinates is then revealed to have been compromised in this way, giving his life to activate the device they were studying and forcing Olivia to seal herself in with it in order to save the others.

Chapter 7

With Olivia comatose and presumably about to turn rogue any minute, the others scramble to get her to the medical wing in the hopes of extracting the compound.
Meanwhile, Olivia is trapped inside her own mind with a mental manifestation of the Visionary, causing her to experience her most painful memories of her dead sister, Diana.
Through these memories, it is revealed that Diana was an Enhanced girl with powerful electrokinetic abilities whom the Roosevelt Organization caught wind of due to her work as a vigilante, prompting Olivia to join the organization in order to look after her. This led to Diana being the flagship member of the first Gifted Program, a program which would end in tragedy due to the inference of the supervillain seen in the prologue.
This supervillain, a body-hopping serial killer named Elaine Davenport, takes Diana’s codename, “Misfire,” for herself, using Diana’s kindness against her by posing as one of the bystanders caught in the crossfire of their last mission. With Diana’s powers in hand, Misfire burns through the rest of the Gifted Program’s members alongside many other agents. When she threatens to kill Linda as well, Olivia is forced to shoot her beloved sister in order to stop Misfire’s rampage, leaving her utterly broken as a result.
The Visionary attempts to get Olivia to see things his way, but Olivia is able to resist his lies thanks to Tambara and the doctors interrupting the conversion process, allowing her to wake up after she “kills” the Visionary inside her head.
When she wakes up, however, it is revealed that the compound forcing her to relive her trauma ended up giving her telepathic abilities that she can’t turn off, overwhelming her to the point of needing to be sedated once again.

Chapter 8

Left reeling from the revelation that Olivia is now Enhanced, Director Johnson and the others also find themselves dealing with a rather pissed Aaron using his powers to break out of the facility, ultimately being pacified with the assurance that his family will be told of his whereabouts and his questions answered. The Director is invited to rest while the Gifted kids handle the necessary exposition for Aaron.
The history of the Roosevelt Organization is explained via Tambara’s nice presentation.

18 years ago, the Denton Meteor burned up in the atmosphere, but what was left of it crashed into the eponymous town of Denton, Arizona, giving superpowers to a number of residents including the organization’s founder, Alexander Roosevelt.
Although the US government covered it up, Roosevelt knew other cases would pop up sooner or later, so he used his old military connections and a partnership with the CEO of a forward thinking company called Starlight Astronautics to form his own counterintelligence agency right under everyone’s noses.
The primary benefit offered by Starlight Astronautics comes courtesy of its CEO, Marcus Grant, who developed memory-altering superpowers that he found a way to replicate through the “Forget-Me-Not” satellite, a device which regularly wipes the recent memories of anyone on Earth who gets too close to figuring out any of the many secrets which the Roosevelt Organization is tasked with hiding.
The Roosevelt Organization grew slowly but steadily from this effort, making use of agents carefully embedded into many major intelligence organizations and law enforcement agencies in order to operate on a global scale.

Enhanced are divided into three categories: nonviolent “Class 1” individuals, who simply want to live peaceful lives safe from interference; “Class 2” individuals, who use their powers against innocent people and must be imprisoned in an arctic facility known as the Fridge; and “Class 3” individuals, whose powers are so dangerous that it is recommended they be terminated upon identification in order to protect the world.
Left with plenty of misgivings about the organization, but also nursing a grudge against the Visionary and his agents, Aaron is left to consider whether or not to help the team out.

Chapter 9

With their boss out of commission, the team is left somewhat unmoored and working to unravel the Visionary’s plans as best they can.
Quint and Aaron end up having a conversation which brings up Quint’s complex feelings about his upbringing, causing him to turn to Tambara for comfort and making her reflect on her complex feelings about the family she left behind in Nigeria.

Chapter 10

Diverting away from the team, a group of largely insignificant agents tasked with taking the unconscious Dan Peterson from where he fell into Lake Tahoe discuss the logistics of their work before they are ambushed by Misfire, who takes advantage of Rose Butler’s regenerative abilities to jump in front of their truck.
During this violent incident, it is also revealed how Misfire survived: by exploiting the laziness of one of the drivers, who had been told to dispose of Diana’s body, but instead pawned it off onto a friend instead while forgetting to mention the necessity of wearing rubber gloves in order to block out Misfire’s powers. This allowed her to possess him and dispose of Diana’s body to cover her tracks, then escape from the Box and continue her activities in a more careful fashion until she stumbled onto Rose Butler quite by chance.
Due to swapping bodies in order to catch the agents off guard, Rose Butler is revealed to have resurrected themself using their powers, and they attempt to get away before being caught and re-possessed by Misfire.
With everyone but Peterson dead, Misfire wakes him up, and the two agree to a tentative alliance by hijacking the truck without the organization’s knowledge, Misfire wanting revenge on Olivia while Peterson believes this violent person may be “saved” by the Visionary and is quite useful to his plans besides.

Chapter 11

In light of Olivia’s new telepathic abilities, Director Johnson makes use of a unique memory-altering device implanted in her brain to bury the knowledge of how she became Director by altering Roosevelt’s will shortly before his death, all in pursuit of making the organization better for Olivia’s sake.
In the process, the device also forces her to relive her explosive breakup with Olivia in the wake of Diana’s death, only for that too to be buried as part of her effort to keep this terrible secret hidden from Olivia’s newfound telepathic abilities.

Chapter 12

With Olivia conscious and still coping with her new powers, they are able to uncover the thoughts of the “Gabriel” they have in custody, who is revealed to be a duplicate of the real Gabriel created by an Enhanced ability along with most of the other apprehended agents. Suddenly back at square one, they attempt to wring what information they can out of Gabriel using Olivia’s telepathic abilities.
Cut to third person narration in which the real Visionary and his “disciples” are shown engaging in their own plans, confident that they are beyond the organization’s reach.

Chapter 13

The Visionary gets a phone call from Peterson informing him of their status, wherein the Visionary instructs him to head for the Starlight Astronautics launch site in Montana.
Meanwhile, Rau and Warburton go to the dingy business of “Babel,” a Class 1 Enhanced individual with the ability to decipher any language. This ability has allowed him to hack into the organization’s database through a burner phone they gave him, giving him the inside scoop of the Gifted Program and everyone’s abilities for the Visionary’s benefit.
The Visionary himself, with Gabriel accompanying him, breaks into the home of Marcus Grant, an old friend of the Falkners who was more of a father to the Visionary than his own father was. With the Visionary using his gas to convert Grant to their cause against his will, the Roosevelt Organization is put in grave danger.

Chapter 14

The organization learns the gist of the Visionary’s plan: to hijack an upcoming rocket launch by Starlight Astronautics, known as Prometheus, and use it as a vehicle for delivering a large enough quantity of his gas to convert the entire population of Earth.
The team has their marching orders, but not before they take a “break” by performing a check in on Babel which ends with Olivia exposing the duplicate left in Babel’s place after he sold out the organization. When she learns that Misfire is alive and hijacking another body, she coerces Director Johnson into letting her and her team pursue them despite her clear conflict of interest, spelling imminent disaster.

Chapter 15

The battle starts gruesomely with the team running the pair off the road and Olivia plugging Misfire full of bullets, only to be wounded in the side once Misfire makes use of Rose’s regenerative abilities. From there, the fight goes from bad to worse as Aaron is quickly incapacitated, Mei is unable to do significant damage to Peterson at his maximum power, and Quint’s regulator is destroyed, forcing him and Tambara out of the battle.
Quint and Tambara are stuck in his alternate dimension to try and fix the regulator, causing Tambara to have a breakdown as she deals with the fact that the girl she loves may potentially be dead out there along with the others.
Meanwhile, Olivia is nearly killed by Misfire, but spared due to Peterson’s noted aversion to guns, which he explains is because he was involved in a school shooting as a teenager. With Peterson unwilling to kill any of them due to the Visionary’s ideals, Misfire is forced to back down and the duo steal the team’s vehicle to continue on their way.

Chapter 16

Bitter over how she nearly got them all killed, Tambara hits Olivia with her wrench hard enough to scar, which Olivia doesn’t mind despite Director Johnson’s fierce protest.
While Tambara goes to comfort Mei, who is feeling useless in the wake of her failure to stop Peterson, Quint and Aaron have a brief conversation before he teleports away now that his regulator is fixed. He arrives at Tambara’s room to find that the pair have made their mutual feelings evident, to the relief of all, but calls them both for a meeting with Olivia to discuss her recent actions.

Chapter 17

In the end, Olivia is reprimanded by having her assume a more hands-off role, with Mei being promoted to field leader in her wake. Olivia and Director Johnson have a conversation about what she did and what she will have to do to stop the Visionary, with Olivia reluctantly agreeing to kill him in the hopes that it will wipe out his compound.
Meanwhile, to deal with Misfire, Director Johnson uncovers a long-buried biological weapon from before she took over: a paralytic toxin derived from the ability of a former Gifted Program member which she intends to use to paralyze Rose’s body and force Misfire to abandon it so that she can kill her once more.
In the process, Linda also reflects on what it will mean to stop the Visionary’s utopian cult and whether or not she has truly distanced herself from Roosevelt.

Chapter 18

On the day before the planned raid of the launch site, the Gifted Program is tasked with aiding the final preparations before diverting to check on Marcus Grant.
When they arrive, they find that the converted Grant has shut down the “Forget-Me-Not” satellite and used spam bots to mass-upload a video exposing everything the Roosevelt Organization has been trying to hide, creating a breach of information too big to fill without killing Grant in order to immediately regain control of the satellite.
Because Olivia is unwilling to do this, their secrets are exposed and the government is onto them, providing the perfect distraction for the Visionary and his agents to proceed.

Chapter 19

Misfire is brought to the launch site along with the Visionary’s other agents and pokes holes into their ideology by briefly turning them against each other before the Visionary intervenes by having Gabriel hold her down while he converts her to their cause.
During this conversion process, Misfire’s backstory is revealed, tracing the path of her murders from when she developed her power to escape life in prison for killing a fellow high schooler and over the course of numerous other bodies she used up in pursuit of her own desires. The vision culminates with her possessing Diana and watching Olivia kill her from Olivia’s perspective, causing her to empathize with her attempted murderer.
With “Elaine” now fully converted, she desires nothing more than to die in recompense for her atrocities, but the Visionary and his agents convince her to live by sharing how they were shaped by their traumatic pasts and why they fight for a better future.

Gabriel lost his wife when the cops were called on them outside their own home, so he developed precognitive abilities to prevent such tragedies from occurring.
Julia Rau’s father was killed as part of a hate crime during the pandemic, causing her to develop her power so that crimes like this could never occur again.
Patricia Warburton’s daughter died because she was forced to carry an unviable pregnancy to term, killing both her and Warburton’s grandchild, so she developed her abilities in order to soothe others’ pain.
As he angrily admits, the source of Peterson’s rage is none other than the US government’s continued inaction on gun violence in America, despite all of his efforts to effect change through peaceful means over the years. He developed his powers from a desire to do something about it by force, but believes that the Visionary pulled him away from that violent path.
The Visionary confirms that watching his father die unrepentant after assaulting his mother and abusing them both shattered his faith in humanity, causing him to develop his ability so that he could create a better world.

Through these brief speeches, Elaine is convinced to help them using Rose Butler’s powers, unwilling to reflect further on the cruel irony of her actions.

Chapter 20

With their secrets exposed to millions, the team proceeds as planned while Olivia does her best to convince the president, Carl Winters, not to take drastic measures against the hundreds of converted people on that launch site. Winters refuses, ordering a military drone strike to wipe out everyone there so that the Visionary’s plans do not succeed.
Olivia is briefly captured, only to be rescued by Quint and taken to the rendezvous point so that she can proceed with the rest of the team to attack the launch site.
Brief cut-away to Julia and the Visionary, who are hidden in the launch site after she used her abilities to create many more duplicates to speed up the launch. He bids her to rest and promises that she will wake up to a better world when this is all over.

Chapter 21

The chapter begins with a vague description of the attack’s aftermath in which Olivia muses on where each of the kids will go along with herself now that this is over.
Reaching the launch site at midnight, the team is able to overcome the first wave of civilian resistance, only for Mei to be caught up fighting Peterson one last time. The decision is made for Olivia to search for the Visionary, Tambara to try and shut down the military’s drones, Aaron to stop the rocket, and Director Johnson to search for Elaine, with Quint ready to jump in and provide assistance to any of them if need be.
In the end, Olivia and Tambara’s efforts are thwarted by Warburton’s singing ability being broadcast through their communicators, causing them to fall unconscious.

Chapter 22

The fight between Mei and Peterson is dramatic due to their being in a more isolated area away from the base, but Mei is able to grow strong enough to stop him and knock him unconscious after failing to get him to see reason.
Tambara manages to stay awake long enough to almost shut down the drones before she is interrupted by some converted agents and Warburton herself, who she isn’t quite able to stop from knocking both her and Mei out when she arrives later.
Left on her own, Director Johnson takes advantage of Elaine’s converted mindset to force her to give up Rose’s body after killing the duplicate of Gabriel to provide her with a host. Elaine agrees to leave Rose to spare them the pain of the paralytic toxin, but not without warning the director against becoming a monster.
Left without much in the way of backup, Aaron is forced to fight through hundreds of people using his powers to their fullest, leaving him too weak to get to the rocket before he is intercepted by Gabriel. Thinking that separating him from the ground will inhibit his powers, Gabriel fails to predict Aaron bending Gabriel’s own body in order to escape his headlock, leaving him in agony and leaving Aaron with too little time to stop the rocket before he’s incinerated as it takes off from the ground.
Olivia wakes up just in time for Quint to take her and the others out of the building and back to Director Johnson, only for them all to be distracted by a panicking Rose and the sight of the Visionary’s rocket taking off into the sky. In a desperate move, Quint and Rose are ordered to teleport into his alternate dimension in order to escape, knowing that they are the only two people who could survive there for long.
In the end, everyone else is converted. The Visionary succeeds...for a time.

Chapter 23

Trapped with nowhere else to go, Quint does his best to calm the amnesiac Rose down from their panic over what they did while under Misfire’s control. Afterwards, the pair are left to bond for a while before eventually discovering that Quint had the hidden capacity to transport himself and others to where he was in the past. Using this ability, the pair travel back to moments before the rocket launch to try and eke out a victory.
With Quint knowing to focus on Aaron and Elaine inadvertently erased from reality when she is supplanted by Rose, the pair manage to save Aaron from his fate and help him to dismantle the rocket, allowing Quint to get rid of the military’s drones by strategically shutting off his regulator while Director Johnson hunts down and kills the Visionary.

Chapter 24

With the Visionary’s death, his former cultists are no longer converted and largely free to live their own lives with the exception of his arrested disciples. However, there are other questions left to resolve as a result of Quint’s newfound time-traveling powers, which are revealed to be quite destructive and apparently part of the reason he survived his birth. This information in particular was covered up by Roosevelt and an unnamed scientist, who were split on whether or not Quint ought to be kept alive.
Left bitter going into a meeting with President Winters, Quint nonetheless leverages the fate of their drones and the threat of his powers to extract five concessions from him:

A full pardon for everyone in the Roosevelt Organization.
Everyone in the Roosevelt Organization remains at their current postings.
Generous financial compensation for the Gifted Program members.
Legal protections for everyone in the Gifted Program, namely citizenship.
A comprehensive review of everyone currently imprisoned or killed by the organization in order to make sure that they are prosecuted fairly for their actions or that their loved ones are compensated for their losses, as the case may be.

In the end, Quint goes into an emotional breakdown over his issues which the president unexpectedly comforts him through, causing him to seek out Rose in order to help them with their issues as well. This leads to the teasing beginnings of a possible romance.

Chapter 25

Two months later, the group is at Olivia’s cabin celebrating Tambara’s 18th birthday, but the fun is spoiled somewhat by Tambara having to get through her mom to reach her siblings over in Nigeria, then reignited by the welcome arrival of her girlfriend Mei.
Meanwhile, Quint and Rose have taken to staying together in secret to help Rose through nightmares after returning to their biological parents didn’t work out for anyone involved. This leads to Quint having an argument with his parents over wanting to leave their home himself, which Rose attempts to offer him advice on how to deal with based on their own experiences. They then kiss him, bringing to mind some traumatic half-memories of their time under Misfire’s control while Quint is unfortunately kept unaware of their plight.
The pair return to Olivia’s cabin with Aaron and his family in tow along with Quint’s parents, allowing them all to celebrate the occasion...with the notable exception of Director Johnson, whose presence Olivia yearns to have as part of this domestic moment.

Epilogue

Olivia and Director Lin are once again having a meal together in Mr. Xing’s cafe two months after what is being referred to as “The Day The World Forgot,” having a light argument over certain figures questioning Tambara’s academic credentials in the news. This argument is predicated partly on Olivia being overprotective of her due to serving as Tambara’s new legal guardian in place of her mom, which she claims makes her entitled to vent her frustration on her new ward’s behalf.
With Director Lin remaining quite busy adjusting to the new expectations placed on the Roosevelt Organization, Olivia is left in an awkward position wherein she wishes to have a deeper connection with Lin without having to commit to working for her again.
This eventually develops into a genuine argument between them which is being stealthily observed by the Head of the Fridge, Dr. Harold von Brandt, Roosevelt’s original intended successor and a hidden nemesis of Director Lin who is conspiring to expose her for her crimes in order to bring the organization back to how it used to be under Roosevelt.
The novel ends with the news reporter in the background casting doubts on the Roosevelt Organization’s newfound transparency through a branching quote amidst the argument:

“...and so we are forced to consider just how public and transparent the new Department of Enhanced Human Affairs truly is. How can we be certain that everything about their activities has been released to the public, that they are no longer harboring any secrets? How can we know that they are truly on our side, that their agenda is conducive to the well-being of humanity? How can we trust an organization that hid from us for so long...and still seems to shun the light?”
“Perhaps we will never know. Perhaps they have never truly left the darkness.”

Postscript

Kroʊnɒs

A Rough Draft

04.04.1968

The sunset was the most amazing thing.

To be sure, there were many details which amazed me about that day. Features I recognized from old photographs of the site: the light pole hanging over the street across the motel; the trees in front of the boarding house whose name remained unknown for centuries; the room in the boarding house itself, with its peeling walls and wooden window frame and to date the only bottle of aftershave I can think of that has ever been preserved in a museum. More recent additions to the visual record, too: a 1968 Ford Mustang parked in the front lot of the motel, a plane flying across the evening sky from Memphis International Airport (then called Memphis Municipal Airport) to Kansas City.

But seeing all of these details with my own eyes paled in comparison to the sunset. The sun was at just the right point above the horizon for the clouds to take on a slight red hue when crossing in front of it. Anyone a few blocks away from the hotel would stop, look up, and think briefly, “Wow, that is beautiful,” before going about their evening activities. On any other night, under any other circumstances, it would’ve been beautiful even from where I would stand. In context, that was amazing, in a morbid way.

One of the greatest human beings to ever live had looked up at that sunset, and for a split second thought, “Wow, that is beautiful.” Right before he was shot in the head.

We all know the story, and if by some strange circumstance one didn’t, any search in the Hive Public Archive can tell them what happened, down to the second.

April 4, 1968, 5:58 p.m.: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., renowned civil rights advocate, spoke to colleague Reverend Ralph Abernathy regarding a mass he planned to hold in support of striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. He was staying in room 306, jokingly referred to as the King-Abernathy suite.

5:59 p.m.: King got up off of a desk chair and opened up the door to the balcony.

6:00 p.m.: King stepped out onto the balcony and looked up at the sunset as it crossed the clouds. A wreath would later be placed indicating the precise location where he stood.

6:01 p.m.: A 30-06 Springfield cartridge bullet, fired from a Remington Model 760 rifle in a boarding house across the street, struck King’s right cheek and shattered his jaw. As it traveled down the spinal cord, it shattered several vertebrae and severed his jugular vein and major arteries. His necktie was ripped off as he fell backwards, bleeding profusely from his cheek.

6:02 p.m.: Abernathy heard the shot from inside the room and rushes out to his old friend’s side, already moving to rush him to the nearest hospital. Later, his friend Andrew Young will rush to him and discover that he still has a pulse.

6:03 p.m.: Witnesses saw a man, James Earl Ray, fleeing the boarding house from where the shot was fired; he’d been renting the room it came from. Fingerprints on the rifle and a pair of binoculars were later confirmed to be his. He will be arrested two months later in London.

7:05 p.m.: After being rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital and a cardiopulmonary resuscitation, King never regained consciousness. The sunset he had perhaps marveled at ultimately occurred at 6:19 p.m., 46 minutes before he died.

That’s the official story. The story elaborated upon in personal autobiographies written by King’s close associates in the decades to come before they died of more natural causes. The story which would be summarized, evaluated, and summarized further in countless editions of US history textbooks. The story which, although briefly contested by the King family on behalf of Ray in 1998, would remain the historical account, and would ultimately be confirmed to be accurate, without any room for error, many decades after everyone alive when it occurred was long dead. And here I was, in a position to witness it myself.

Except, somewhat unfortunately for me and especially unfortunately for history, someone else had other plans.

Now, at 6:00 p.m. on April 4, 1968, a white ex-con and avowed racist named James Earl Ray was preparing to shoot Martin Luther King Jr. in the head, before a mysterious man suddenly appears in a flash of light, startling him and causing his gun to be lowered slightly before firing. The bullet strikes against the pavement in the parking lot, producing some slight debris which scratches the window of the Mustang.

At 6:01 p.m., King, startled by the gunshot, retreats into his motel room, taking cover behind a desk. Abernathy locks the door and proceeds to ring up 911 behind similar cover. Meanwhile, as Ray turns to shoot this sudden intruder, the intruder pulls out a small device, much like a handgun, but glowing with a pulsating blue-white plasma. He discharges this strange weapon at Ray, which immediately burns a clean hole through his chest, 0.2 meters in diameter. Suddenly bereft of much of his heart and any bone, skin, and muscular tissue in the affected area, Ray coughs up a weak sputter of blood before falling to the ground dead.

6:02 p.m.: The avenger looks at the corpse with grim satisfaction for a fleeting instant before immediately moving to escape. He puts another device, a small metal hemisphere with a glowing red light in its center, onto the floor. The mechanism releases a series of small needle-like protrusions which easily latch onto the floor tiles. The red light begins to blink as the device beeps repeatedly, rising in pitch and frequency as the seconds pass. He then throws the door open on its hinges and sprints out of the room.

6:03 p.m.: Witnesses, who had previously been busy panicking and taking cover from the unknown sniper, look out from the sides of their cars apprehensively and see a man fleeing the boarding house towards the highway, at speeds which seem far too fast to be human.

And then…

6:04 p.m.: I show up. Right as the red dot stops blinking.

******

I’d say that the blast hit like a truck, but to do so would be overselling trucks by a long shot. Saying it was like getting hit by a Boeing would be more accurate, but that’s beside the point. The point, of course, can be summed up in the jumbled up word soup of curses I tried to mix in with my screams of agony.

Even with R&D’s new nanite-based armor plating, the blast still hurts like hell. Not to mention the nanites are subdermal. They tossed them all in solution and stuck a needle in my arm. And needles are already one of the worst things ever. So combining that with tiny little robots stored in my skin cells seeping out when needed is just rubbing salt in the wound. Almost literally; whenever it activates, it feels like a million little cuts are opening up in my body and being aggravated with grains of salt. There are times when I would’ve preferred whatever was about to hit me for how much it hurts.

The bots are made of CNT-Kevlar for maximum ballistic protection and shock absorption, acoustic foam in the earpiece components for noise cancellation, as well as a few other alloys I don’t quite remember and don’t want to know. Alex would know-they were the project lead, after all-but asking them is an invitation for a long tirade on budget cuts, design limitations, and a doctoral thesis on all the reasons their supervisor Jirad is just about the dumbest person in the solar system. And really, my peace of mind is better off for it. Last thing I need is having nanites in my body that literally crawl in my skin, while also giving me melanoma or something.

And naturally, even with this wonderfully freaky gizmo, I’m still sent careening through the wall of the room, the wall of the room next door, and bits of the wall and floor of about 4 other rooms diagonally before I come falling out onto the pavement of the building’s parking garage. Right on top of the window frame of a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro.

Ouch.

The sound of the glass of this majestic vehicular treasure, crunching and shattering harmlessly against the shell as I get back up with a groan, only accentuates the pain. But it’s icing compared to the screams of agony from the 15 boarders and staff injured in the explosion. And the sight of the bodies of 5 more whose screams were abruptly silenced by a fun size H-bomb. Getting up takes a lot less work after that.

Infrared specs spot the perp hightailing it west from the landing point. LiDar clocks him going 80 kph, corroborated by the “Sprinter” gear he’s got. That in and of itself isn’t strange. What is strange is that, based on the readout, the model he has should tap out at 65.

He must have tricked it out because he knows our latest model taps out at 78, I thought. But how would he…?

Focus. Focus on the mission.

The rush from the Sprinter definitely helps in that department. Factoring in his distance, the obstacles along the highway, and estimating the stability of his mods, I would catch up to him 2 seconds after his Sprinter runs out of power in 10. Most of the traffic on the highway is on the opposite side, but as the perp tries to evade me, he ends up face to face with a front bumper and barely manages to evade, stopping in place and using the Sprinter to leap onto it and then push off the hood, catapulting him to the side of the freeway. Seeing an opportunity, I leap up to dodge the car behind me while pointing a pulse gun at him, proximity setting.

With all of the adrenaline going through my bloodstream, I don’t register this immediately, but for some strange reason, his stabilizer hasn’t gone out. Of course, I don’t have time to ponder this, for by this point the EMP shorts out his Sprinter mid-jump, causing the circuitry to fuse. Which means the shock guards are also probably dead, and considering LiDar has him going 15 kph mid-air...not an ideal situation he’s found himself in.

Fortunately for him, the perp’s got fast reflexes; the electric shock to his limbs from the Sprinter circuits only distracts him a second before he manages to get into a roll as he hits the ground. First stroke of luck on his part: he hits the dirt and not the concrete. Second stroke of luck: the malfunctioning Sprinter unit, more or less reduced to bundles of live wire, is largely torn off of his body from the collision. And, unfortunately for me, as I land and sprint towards him, he gets a third stroke of luck as well: a young woman who trips over him as he is completing the roll, obviously trying to get away from the source of the nearby gunfire.

Because a hostage was exactly what the situation called for.

******

Optical readout shows the woman as Margaret Evans, now 22. Brown hair, brown eyes. Evidently African American, sixth generation immigrant. Her maternal second great grandmother, Anna Matthews, was 7 when the 13th Amendment was ratified. From there, Evans’ ancestry traces back to various regions in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, until eventually reaching Nigeria and Benin. Aside from that, the DNA file places her as having distant relations all over the globe, with 2 particular family ties in Tennessee and Missouri being the result of the horrific circumstances involved in several maternal generations’ conception. She’s currently employed as a waitress at the Arcade Restaurant, on the corner of South Main and Calhoun Street(later renamed “GE Patterson Avenue”). And she’ll never get a job she isn’t ridiculously overqualified for from here on out, I think sardonically.

Has a husband, Sgt. Edward Evans. Went into the army on June 13, 1964, when they were both 18; they married two days prior, after dating for approximately 2 years, 2 months, and 13 days. She was a month pregnant then; her child, Rebecca Evans, would be born prematurely on November 7 of that year. The following year saw then-Private Evans deployed to Vietnam, where he served with distinction until his death on December 3, 1970. Mrs. Evans would not know of her husband’s abusive relationship with a yet-unnamed Vietnamese woman until September 2, 1976.

Her mother, Constance Matthews, is currently employed as a secretary to their local congressman; she will live until August 10, 1986, where she will die of lung cancer. Still working, of course. Her father Aaron Matthews has been deceased since April 27, 1951, where he was shot by a Chinese soldier, Han Zhao, in the First Korean War. And Evans herself will live until December 7, 2028, one month after her granddaughter, Mary Evans, will be elected to the US Senate on the Democratic ticket in Tennessee.

Or she’ll have a plasma bolt burn through her skull on April 4, 1968, if I screw this up.

I take a step forward. 4.3 meters away. The perp isn’t happy.

“Take another step, and I’ll burn through her damn skull!”

Carried in bits and pieces throughout Evans’ sobs of terror is her repetition of these instructions.

Deep breaths, I think. He’s bluffing. He has to be. He’s wearing a black mask, so Facial Recognition can only give a rough estimate based on the contours of his facial features pressing up against the mask itself. I pull up Voice Recognition; even with the muffling, it manages to identify a possible profile. Cross referencing with Facial Recognition gives a 98.65% probability of match.

Alexander Wilson. 25, largely Caucasian. Blonde hair, green eyes. Lives in Swalwell, California. Police records indicate he had a handful of friends he made in college; no significant other by his own admission. Some of his professors considered him to be “somewhat radical,” citing a fervent admiration for King and the Black Panther Party. Was committed to his local Mental Health Services clinic for a week when he was 24, following reports that he appeared to be hearing voices that weren’t there. Appeared to be improving following a prescription of antipsychotics.

His motive is easy enough to guess: save King in the hopes of maintaining the Civil Rights Movement for the approximately 22 additional years King could’ve survived at most based on the condition his heart was in at this time and the medical technology available. It’ll take about 2 hours for Analytics to go through the data on what this would ultimately mean, but the preliminary evaluation indicates King surviving may have less of an impact than one would think. Based on the records, one would think Wilson killing anyone, let alone Evans, is an empty threat. But then again, I’d just seen him kill 6 people, three of whom were African American. So I wasn’t putting anything past him.

I don’t move another step.

“You don’t want to do this, Alexander,” I say in as best a calm, imposing manner as I can muster.

His head jerks around slightly. Whether he’s that tense or just surprised I know who he is, I can’t tell. I continue on.

“You clearly admire Reverend King too much to so blatantly renege on his values. His beliefs.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off me, but I can sense the shame he feels.

“Of course, what do I know? I’m not the one who just murdered six people over the last five minutes to save a pastor steadfastly committed to nonviolence. Nevermind the billions erased from existence just by you being here.”

Christ. Cool it on the snark, Stevens. Now isn’t the time to piss him off.

He’s upset, but evidently more with himself than me.

After a few seconds of silence Wilson says ominously, yet in a strangely bashful fashion, as if it’s embarrassing to admit, “They-they said sacrifices had to be made. To make the world better.”

It’s fortunate that he can’t see my eyes widen involuntarily in apprehension.

“Who’s ‘they?’” I ask, largely sure of the answer but still having doubts. I rechecked the profile; Wilson only stayed in the MHS center a week. The doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia, on the lower end of the spectrum. Prescribed D-054, a mild antipsychotic. Tough enough to kill the voices with the efficiency of a hitman without causing any side effects aside from mild nervous ticks. I turn on Medical; scan shows a concentration of about 2 parts per billion of the stuff in his bloodstream. Neural scan indicates dopamine reuptake is down 267%. Dopamine levels from a brain scan taken at the MHS a week after he left were about 3.5% above normal, under the medication; now they’re 303.26% above. I can’t even imagine what’s going through his head right now.

“The others.”

He says it so simply. So matter-of-factly. As if these voices, these hallucinated entities telling him to erase billions of people from existence, are not anything to revere, nor are they anything to be afraid of. They just exist.

If the intention of his comment was to scare me, he sure as hell succeeded.

“The others,” I repeat, as if to double check.

After another few seconds, I continue, “And these-these ‘others.’ They...they speak to you?”

He nods. It’s strange. He doesn’t seem to have loosened his hold on Evans, yet he also doesn’t seem to be responding to her attempts to escape throughout this whole conversation, beyond a brief, unemotional tug each time she tries to break free. Like she’s nothing but a dog on a leash, trying to run out and explore while the humans are talking. Just a silly little dog who refuses to behave. Inconsequential.

The thought makes me want to scowl slightly. It sure as hell isn’t helping my anxiety, but I try to remain calm.

“Are they speaking to you right now?”

He shakes his head. “Not anymore.”

“But they were before?”

He nods again.

I decide to change tack.

“Your stabilizer’s still active,” I state. This should be obvious to anybody; if it weren’t, well...we wouldn’t exactly be having this pleasant little chat.

He nods, a tad more frantically this time.

“That EMP, it should’ve shorted it out. It didn’t.”

Another nod. He’s following the logic decently so far. Evans isn’t, of course, but to be fair, if I were in her situation, I wouldn’t be all that concerned with weird future-person speak compared to my concern to not get shot.

“Which means you must have modified the stabilizer. Attached some kind of blocker to shield it from the EMP. Am I right?”

He nods.

“May I see it?”

His head jerks back a bit from side to side, anxiously. The ES I’ve got strapped to my side compels him to do so despite his own curious judgement. He shifts to the right a pace, revealing the stabilizer to be almost directly behind Evans before abruptly shifting back, grabbing at Evans a bit more tightly.

It’s a standard stabilizer, same model as mine. Current. I have no idea where the hell he could’ve gotten it from. The punishment for stealing or replicating a stabilizer is definitely severe enough that there are and never will be any black market dealers willing to take the risk. Every other case involves either an outmoded stabilizer taken from some junkyard we haven’t cleaned yet or a stolen stabilizer pried from an officer’s cold dead hands. Just above where the serial number should be is where I see a small device, no bigger than a pinky finger. Except it isn’t a blocker, as I had originally assumed based on the premise that the stabilizer was an older model. The latest models already have blockers designed to take the pulses generated by our own pulse guns, just to be on the safe side. But apparently Wilson, or whoever gave this to him, wanted to be on the safer safe side, because this thing is clearly not just a blocker. For some reason, my scanner can’t penetrate the casing of the device, but based on the readings from the stabilizer, it seems to have increased the resistance to EMP pulses even further. However, before I can speculate as to why, an abrupt change in Wilson brings me back to the present.

He’s beginning to get agitated, although whether it’s due to not hearing the voices or fearing the voices returning suddenly I can’t tell. I assume it’s the latter, and try to respond accordingly.

“Alright, Alexander, listen to me. Just...just drop the Electron Stripper, and let Miss Evans go, and we can work something out, okay?”

He’s getting even more agitated now.

“They-they won’t like that.”

I’m starting to get even more stressed as well, but I do my best not to let it show.

“You don’t have to worry about them anymore, Alexander. I’ll take you back with me. Put you back on D-54. You’ll never have to hear any of those voices again, for the rest of your life.”

He hesitates for a good 15 seconds. Then he starts to lower the ES away from Evans’ head.

That’s it, buddy. Just calm down, and drop the gun. Give me an opening, and then...then...

Hold up. Wait a second.

He’s beginning to hyperventilate. Going into full on panic mode. His hand’s twitching. He’s losing his grip on the gun.

Hey, hey. Take it easy, buddy. Don’t do it.

Seeking a reassuring approach, I do what, in retrospect, was probably the best and worst thing to do.

I take a step forward.

3.7 meters.

He isn’t responding. He just keeps twitching and mumbling, trying to keep his hand on the gun and Evans at the same time. Seizing the advantage, Evans jams a high heel into his foot and makes a run for it, but Wilson quickly turns the ES on her with a scream of fury.

I don’t shout, knowing any entreaty I make would be too late and fall on deaf ears. The bolt only grazes her left leg, but leaves enough of a hole to cause her to stumble, allowing Wilson to grab her and put his left hand around her throat.

Crap. He must have taken strength mods-the pressure sensor’s putting that one hand at 26 psi. Her wind pipe’s already collapsed! Come on, think!

Before I can draw my own ES, he lifts up his right hand. The hand with the gun, that’s been charging this entire time because he accidentally switched modes while fumbling with it earlier. The hand that isn’t twitching anymore, now that it knows what to shoot.

The gun is aimed right between the eyes. I can feel the targeting laser beading down on the spot, as if it itself could burrow through the nanite shell. Ordinarily, an ES shouldn’t be able to in one shot, but based on the energy readings, this one will. He must have amped up the ES too. But, of course, I couldn’t be bothered to notice it.

He’s shouting something vaguely comprehensible, but I can’t quite catch it, and the solace of being able to look through the auditory records afterwards rings hollow considering the situation. My right hand dives for the ES on my right side, only to realize after the fact that it would’ve been too late.

******

As far as deaths go, the second mission out on patrol is...less than ideal. Better than the first, or training, but still very bad. At least on the bright side, in a morbid way, anyway, the software for the sensors just came with a new feature, released about a week before I started this job. The ability to record and store a last will and testament, to be sent immediately to the officer’s partner once the sensor registers that they and/or the stabilizer are in fact dead and gone. They made everyone at the department write one, even though the mortality statistics have gone down in recent years. They thought it was important, considering the officers will likely have loved ones who won’t remember them should they be erased.

Mine was relatively simple.

To my family I’ll give all of my remaining earnings and insurance. Even if they don’t remember me, I want to at least repay them somehow.

Alex gets my badge as well as my computer, with my selected media files stored inside. All 300 terabytes of them. I already set up a special watch-list for them, a sort of tribute to all of my favorite visual programs throughout history. Early to mid 20th, of course, like all of the Looney Toons shorts and Flintstones, but also late 20th and 21st works, like Blade Runner(the original, not the 2017 sequel. Definitely not the 2083 reboot), the original Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, etc. And there are a few more contemporary programs on there as well. They’ll love them, I’m sure of it.

To my old friend Elena from Analytics, I’ll leave a collection of all of the shows we’d binge together on the weekends. Subtitles on, of course. I’ll also leave her my trusty d20. It’s up to the group whether they want to keep Flora the Elven Ranger alive, or if she’ll merely live on in the adventurers’ hearts. And as for the whole group, I’ll leave my video game archive, to be distributed as they see fit. I wasn’t quite sure who should ultimately take care of Whiskers, but I’m sure the gang will work something out.

I also sent Elena...something else. I was planning on sending it to Mary at some point. Maybe. Eventually. But I didn’t want to put it in here because I didn’t want to make her feel any worse. Elena will know what to do with it, though. She has a certain knack for that.

Overall, my affairs may not be in that great an order, but at least they’re sorted out to some extent.

And so there I was, simultaneously fighting for life to the end while also strangely at peace. True, 25 isn’t exactly a long run, but it works well enough.

But as always, peace tends to be broken. And in this case, it was broken by another ES firing a plasma bolt right at Mrs. Margaret Evans.

I could feel it. Not just the physical impact of the bolt, but the emotions behind it. I could see it in her eyes as she realized that the bolt had burned clean through her lower torso, tearing through her spinal column and skin tissue as it burned a clean hole through a major artery. It was as if, in that split second, she knew. Even without realizing it, without even being capable of pondering it before she died almost instantly, and without hearing anything from any of us, she knew every last detail about what she was leaving behind, what would now never occur.

She would never see her daughter grow up and marry a good man, one she’d be proud to call her son in law, while working as a secretary for a Memphis based law firm. She would never see her granddaughter become the first African American woman elected to Congress representing Tennessee. And her granddaughter would never see her own daughter serve with distinction as a captain in the Air Force during World War III. Nor would Captain Evans see her daughter put life and limb on the line time and time again, trying to keep the community near a military base in Inchon that adopted her when her family was ripped away from her alive in a nuclear wasteland.

And so on and so forth; one generation of Evanses now orphaned, and another twenty four erased, just like that. It was as if Margaret Evans knew all of this, and wanted to cry in anguish and scream at the injustice of the universe. But before she could, she was dead, a single tear shed from her right eye seeming to contain within its insignificant volume all of those unexpressed feelings as it fell to the grass below, soaking the leaves and mixing with her blood.

My heart was telling me all of this, telling me to break down and cry, and damn anyone who tried to tear me from the spot. My brain tells me something else which it insists is far more vital: that the bolt was specifically aimed so as to damage the casing on Wilson’s stabilizer and shut down its EMP blocker. And it says that the scanner confirms that the blocker on the stabilizer itself is inactive, and that I have a clear shot. And so, my heart and my brain form a non-aggression pact. If my heart lets me drop all of the sentimental stuff and do my job, the agreement reads after milliseconds of vigorous debate, my brain will be more than willing to accede to my heart’s wishes at a later date.

So I anxiously raise my pulse gun with my left hand, adrenaline fueling its rise upwards as it comes to rest aiming right for Wilson’s stabilizer. Without giving my conscience the benefit of time to think it over, I fire a pulse at it, shorting it out in a single shot and instantly engulfing the world in a blinding white light.

******

I’d never witnessed a reset up close before. On my first mission, I was blinded by the perp I was pursuing just as I fired my pulse gun, so I didn’t actually see the reset, only heard a vague jumble of backwards voices for a second before everything went back to normal. And while I was in Analytics, I’d seen it dozens of times, but it was always abstract then; just everything-the data, the pictures, the media-kind of snapping back into place, unceremoniously. Like the universe had merely hiccuped.

But this time was different. First, there was a flash as the paradox occurs. That much was to be expected. The scream Wilson utters as he’s erased from existence, a scream which seems to echo distortedly across time and space, was...less expected.

Once my vision clears, I hear the backwards voices, but also witness everything seeming to move in reverse more rapidly than normal. The perp is gone; as far as anyone outside of the department and a few other places know, he never existed to begin with. After all the pain he went through, everything he did snaps back into place in the end. Even Margaret Evans, who I see walking past us briskly just a couple dozen meters away from where I just saw her die. In the end, despite having erased billions, as far as the universe is concerned, he only erased himself when all is said and done.

Remembering protocol, I immediately activate the stealth mode of my shell. The shell responds immediately, casting me into an invisible cloak of bended light and switching to the InvisiCam, casting the world into a sort of red and black tint. Kinda like that old video game console Nintendo half-heartedly pushed back in the 1990s, only slightly less headache inducing, surprisingly. I continue to watch the process unfold over a minute or so.

I’m grimly made aware of the end when I hear a gunshot ring out in the distance. Hear the panicked cries of witnesses nearby. See an ambulance race across the highway to St. Joseph’s. And it’s at this point where the gunman who killed Margaret Evans makes himself known.

“You hesitated,” he says simply.

His voice, slightly more old and worn down than he himself is, rings out clearly across the auditory link. I hang my head slightly.

“That plasma bolt would have killed you, do you realize that?”

Yes. Not helping.

“Why didn’t you take the shot?”

I don’t need your passive-aggressive rhetorical old person crap. You know damn well why.

“You had a clear shot on him the entire time, and yet you stalled. You tried to talk your way out.”

Seriously, stop it.

“You tried to diffuse a situation that didn’t matter and which would barely be remembered, all to save someone who’s been dead for God only knows how long and wouldn’t even remember you when the whole thing was over!”

Mother-!

“I KNOW!”

Even though the stealth mode renders us inaudible to anyone other than us, it feels as if everything in the area has paused and taken note of my immature outburst. I sit down on the grass, face in my hands. And watching this whole spectacle and shaking his head in disapproval is none other than the man I somehow manage to appreciate and utterly despise with every fiber of my being at the exact same time:

Keith Buchanan. My partner.

Technically speaking, he’s 103, although the inhibitors he takes on the regular ensure that, provided he’s cool with higher blood pressure and the occasional twitch, he never looks or feels more than a day over 55. It’s supposed to set the cut-off at 35, but there’s only so much it can do with about 70 years’ worth of intense stress in the conventional service. Sure, his eyes have remained that same piercing brown, and his mental faculties are about as sharp as anyone else, but it’s not a miracle drug. It can’t make his full head of grey hair return to its natural dirty blonde, for starters, nor can it get rid of all of the wrinkles on his face. And as far as his temperament is concerned, he might as well be old enough to have landed on Omaha Beach.

They say he’s had more juniors serve under him than anyone else in the department. It could simply be due to him being one of the first officers on the program. Could also be his own skillfulness as a mentor, helping his juniors move up into the senior ranks. Or it could be his own irritability, stubbornness, and occasional vulgarity towards his juniors that motivates them to transfer to a new senior or back to Analytics or R&D or wherever they came from initially just to get away from him. I believe it’s a combination, in a ratio of approximately 30:10:60. Whatever the reason, in about 87.5% of all cases, he’s the first senior any incoming officer gets.

And right now I’m the one he gets to chew out.

Training was brutal, as was to be expected, even though he didn’t personally oversee it. That was Officer Imari, a woman who was considerably more chill. But the five minute rant I got from him after the first mission is one to be remembered. From what I’ve heard, he likes to let his juniors take the second mission for a bit before jumping in. See how they make it on their own. See if they got what it takes. So having nearly died this time, I’m ready to get absolutely torn to shreds. He sits down, and takes a deep breath, as I tense up. And then…

“...Look. For what it’s worth...you’re not terrible.”

...I’m sorry, huh? Can you repeat that, please? Think I missed something.

“You’re fast. Think on your feet, respond with intelligence rather than instinct. Already guessing the perp’s next move and planning accordingly. You know the tech inside and out, and judging by what I got from the scan readings, you know exactly what to look for when examining a suspect. You’re honestly a pretty good cop, if I do say so myself.”

...Huh. This is...odd.

Where’s he going with this? Is this some kind of chew-out fake-out I’m looking at here?

After a few seconds, I finally decide to ask, “So what’s-?” before he immediately puts a hand up to stop me. He then continues.

“That’s your problem here, Heidi. You’re a cop. A damn good cop, but still a cop. And the thing you need to realize, above anything else, if you want to make it in this field is that we’re not cops.”

“Sure, we walk around with badges and sidearms and all that. We drive patrol cars, go out on our own beats. Walk around crime scenes. Do detective work. All that jazz,” he says, using an old 20th century expression I still don’t quite get even today.

“But the fundamental difference between us and cops is that cops are locked in the present. Everything they do has far-reaching, irrevocable consequences on the lives of the people in their community, including their own. Wrong person put in jail, procedure for arrest not quite up to scratch, shots fired at the wrong guy, or just being caught off guard could put you and a whole bunch of other people in some pretty hot water. Not to mention it’ll wreck their conscience for the rest of their lives.” He pauses for a second to let the whole thing sink in before summing it up: “Every action they take, it means something.”

I only remember later that his record clearly shows how much he knows what he’s talking about.

“But with us agents, our actions don’t mean anything at the end of the day. I shoot the grandmother of the first black senator from Tennessee, it means something...until you take out the stabilizer, causing the whole thing to reset and Mrs. Margaret Evans to continue to live and give rise to her talented descendents unabated by all that we’ve done over the last few minutes.”

“You were doing that part of the job fantastically-focusing solely on the mission and getting the guy. Adapting to the situation, ready to deal with the unexpected. But once he grabbed her, and put the gun to her head, you hesitated. Because in that respect, you’re still thinking like a cop. Still locked in the present. You’re thinking that the situation needs to be diffused so that nobody has to die, when all you need to do is whatever it takes to undo the situation, and nobody has to die anyway. Except the perp, that is.”

He pauses, to make sure I’m absorbing the information. He then continues, “What you need to do in order to think like a temporal agent is just let go. Let go of the tragedy of the person’s death. Let go of the moral concerns. Let go of the conventions from which your reality in the present day has always been constructed. Out here, none of that means squat compared to fixing it all and completing the mission. By any means necessary.”

I’ve heard some shorter variation of this lecture before, from about 5 other people. But I can tell this will probably be the revision that finally gets through my thick skull.

“I just want you to keep that in mind, because I promise you, next time I won’t be ready and willing to save your ass. Capiche?” he asks, probably smirking a bit. Another one of his stupid old person expressions. I chuckle politely.

“Capeche, or however the hell you say it,” I say somewhat wryly.

“Great.”

He selects an option on the optical readout, sending a signal to the nearest pod to pick us up. After about a minute, it arrives under cloak, and begins lowering to admit us. The dorsal hatch is lowered so that we can step onto it and rise up into the device, which we promptly do. After briskly walking to the cockpit, Keith takes the wheel while I deactivate the shell standing nearby. The pinpricks open up again as the nanites crawl back into my skin.

“Now, let’s get all of this data over to Analytics pronto. My show’s on tonight,” Keith says.

“Bebop?” I ask with a smirk.

He chuckles. “You know me too well. But no, actually. Something else.”

I chuckle in reply. “I still don’t get why you watch that anime. It has, like, no pacing, and the monologues just go on and on and on.”

“Hey, you’re one to talk, Miss Trekkie.”

“I-! Um...”

Crap. He’s got me. Quick, think of something witty.

“Okay, you know what? W-whatever, man.”

Ah. Nice comeback, Heidi. Really showed him.

He chuckles some more before taking off and slowly rising the craft back upwards into the stratosphere before we head out. Just as the craft begins to shift forward, I glance at the clock. 6:19 p.m. I look out the window, and am greeted with the fleeing red form of the sun as it flits beneath the horizon and casts the city of Memphis into a two hour twilight.

“Wow...that is beautiful,” I say, a bit louder than I had intended.

“Wow what?” Keith asks, confused.

I glance over, surprised.

“Hm? Oh, sorry,” I say, somewhat sheepishly. “Just admiring the sunset.”

03.13.2568

We all have that moment at least once in our lives. That moment when you finally realize that dream you’ve been chasing your whole life-gaining recognition, being able to live off of doing what you love, getting your dream job. Those first few days afterwards, you feel on top of the world. Like you can do anything. Like you’ve just kicked off a new, exciting phase of your life, and it’s only going to get better from here.

And yet...something isn’t quite right. Something you can’t quite place. Something which keeps nagging you more and more as the days go on.

You don’t understand it. You-you did it. Only a handful of people thought you could. You sure as hell weren’t one of them, even after everyone told you you did it. You beat all the odds, jumped all the hurdles, passed whatever tests they put in front of you. You might have conquered it all with flying colors, even though you almost certainly didn’t think so. And now you’re free to reap the benefits of all your hard work. The status, the pride, the feeling of accomplishment, the sense that you’re making a difference in someone else’s life, everything. You should be happy...shouldn’t you?

It’s at this point where the Something makes a resurgence. It becomes crystallized into any one of a thousand forms. Maybe you’re unhappy because you don’t think you deserve this position you’re in. Maybe you’re unhappy because it isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Maybe you’re unhappy because the pressure has started to get to you. Or maybe you’re unhappy because you’re gotten sick of having to force yourself to look happy about the whole thing. Whatever the reason, that Something is still there. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

After that incident, I only got the faintest outline of that Something. In that moment, I had far greater concerns.

******

We spent the rest of the jump in salient silence. “Salient silence” is different from all-around, all-encompassing silence. More specific. When you’re in salient silence, you’re still talking, but in a way that purposely avoids important stuff in favor of trivial matters. I believe the 20th and 21st century vernacular is “small talk.”

“Hold up. You watch the original series?”

I’m surprised anyone still does, to be completely honest. I mean, sure, the public archive has all of them on file and readily available to the networks, but I always thought that was more of a formality than anything. For completion’s sake.

“Yep,” Keith replies. “That a problem?”

There was a problem, but of course I wasn’t going to be totally cool with bad mouthing my senior.

“Oh, no. No-no problem. I’m just, uh-”

“Surprised that any civilized person could watch something so unapologetically backward?” He asks rhetorically, with a rather smart-alecky smirk.

“Um, well, maybe not quite so, um, pointed as that, but-”

He interrupts me with his usual bemused chuckle.

“Just...why? Why would you want to watch that instead of the revised edition? And why Rick and Morty, of all things? What could you possibly get out of that crude drivel?”

He simply smirks.

“Why was Shakespeare in the old high school English curriculum? Dude spent his whole life talking about stabbing maidens’ heads and maidenheads and starting more misogynistic fictional tropes than I can count,” he finishes with a chuckle. “So why would anyone study that, hm?”

“Obviously because they hadn’t quite developed enough to wonder if that perhaps wasn’t good literature after all,” I say, slightly annoyed.

He chuckles some more.

“Or maybe the intent was to teach those brats a little something about history. In the hope that they took their earphones out long enough to learn something.”

“Well, okay. That was the 21st century. Back when they blew each other up and gassed each other for not believing in the right spiritual construct. Back when they beat each other senseless and demanded they kill themselves over their little Internet for having an incorrect opinion. Back when they had to be reminded that bigotry was bad every second of the day lest they elect an old white maniac to the presidency of the United States while your back was turned.”

He laughs in a curious fashion, as if he both agrees with me and also cannot believe how ridiculous I’m being. I get the sneaking suspicion he only does it this frequently to me, which only furthers my annoyance.

“Yeah, the 2010s were a fun time,” he says with a wistful smile, obviously thinking of old memories during his early years with the agency.

“The last time I was there, I got several dozen lumens shot into every individual cell in my retinas, and nearly got blown up by a terrorist. I think I’ve had my fill of those backwards idiots.”

He shrugs. “Says you. They thought they were a more just and moral society than any previous, and in that respect they were right.”

“So did the neanderthals.”

More chuckling. He’s beginning to tick me off.

“Anyway,” I continue before he can come up with a smarmy retort, “The point is that they obviously didn’t care enough to learn anything from that torid prose or any of the other ‘classics’ they read back then. We’re discovering more and more about history every day now. In a few years, there could very well be nothing left unknown.”

He just looks at me now. He doesn’t seem to find this amusing.

“We’ve clearly learned from history. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”

His response seems at first like it’s being contrarian just for its own sake. I never seriously considered it, but in retrospect, I definitely should have. For even in its simplicity, it managed to prompt a discussion which would soon lay at the heart of everything:

“Have we?”

******

And on that note, we come out of the jump and back into Memphis, Tennessee. The sun in this particular Memphis descended past the horizon about 3 hours ago, but that doesn’t even begin to cover everything. The difference between where we were and where we are is like night and day, on two different planets, in two different galaxies, on opposite sides of the ever-expanding universe.

The Memphis we left was in the middle of a city-wide strike of African American sanitation workers striving for better conditions and an end to hiring and workplace discrimination. The man whose death we just assured had come to the city in solidarity with these workers, at a time when faith in his message of nonviolent civil resistance in pursuit of freedom among African Americans was beginning to pale in comparison to their faith in their Colts. His murder would turn it into a war zone as riots swept the United States over the next few weeks.

But today...well, most immediately, there is no discrimination in sanitation in Memphis or anywhere else, because there are no human sanitation workers to discriminate against now. Not to mention racial discrimination in general has been out of style for centuries anyway. The factors leading from the Memphis of then to the Memphis of now are far too complicated to go through speedily. It was about 600 years of history between then and now, after all. Lot changes.

Looking down at the street from a few stories above back then, you’d probably see a fair amount of unemployed people lining the sidewalks amidst a throng of workers rushing to their myriad of jobs. The national unemployment rate was 3.6%. Not sure whether the decimal point today goes down to the negative 10th or 11th power, but in layman’s terms, the unemployment rate is 99.a-whole-lot-of-nines%.

To someone from that time, this figure would evoke panic and an image of total societal destruction. A post-nuclear wasteland or a futuristic dystopia where some ruling upper class lived in luxury at the expense of the forgotten masses of poor people or sentient robots who labored for their pleasure. They wouldn’t think any just society could operate in such a condition-surely they didn’t expect the government to just give everyone a check and send them on their way?

Well, actually, they did, but of course the same generation that invented trickle down wouldn’t even consider that that just might work.

Technically speaking, more than that tiny percentage left over is hard at work on something, but only that percentage actually needs the money to remain alive. The rest of the population does a lot of the same stuff that past generations did. Writing, cooking, painting, architecture, fashion design, politics, athletics, military service-all fields in which humanity can still contribute something are just as popular now as they were before. The operative difference in motivation between then and now is simple: they want to, but they don’t need to.

The General Income check that the Department of the Treasury sends to everybody residing throughout Earth’s territory is already enough to cover today’s standard living and medical expenses; whatever profits or payment they get for their work is icing. In the case of some, like politicians and athletes, they don’t even get paid; they stay purely out of their own commitment to the field, their donations managed by a separate, automated account.

Of course, even a world like this has the occasional lunatic who would choose to be ungrateful for these great benefits. Who would choose to be unsatisfied with that which they are already entitled, and even with the profits they could have incurred engaging their intellectual and creative talents in worthier pursuits. Who would instead engage upon a career of base pursuits and immoral acts for some unfathomable, twisted ulterior purpose in the present. But, naturally, those few mad souls are countered one to a thousand by brave individuals inclined to detain them purely out of their own righteousness. And should the most despicable of these criminals seek to destroy the lives of billions upon billions outside of the present, for whatever reason, well...that’s where we come in. We go in and fix what they break. So the rest of the world can continue to live as it’s supposed to, these criminals must be taken care of without hesitation. Cold, yes, but it’s no less than what they deserve. This is what I have been taught from the moment I joined the agency-what all of us are taught, and what our experience in the field has only reaffirmed over and over again, without fail.

...Hasn’t it?

******

I look out the window for a bit, still taking the whole scene below in. Keith turns around to look at me, then chuckles.

“Heh. I remember that expression. Feels like it’s been forever since I looked out the window after a mission.”

I chuckle in spite of myself and walk towards the cockpit, leaning on the nearby chair..

“Dude. It’s been, like, 10 years. The ‘grizzled old veteran reminiscing on their days as a young cadet’ doesn’t quite work when the cadet was still old enough to have been the young apprentice’s great-grandfather.”

I thought he’d scowl at me, but instead he just laughs for a bit.

“Maybe, but that doesn’t change the feeling behind it,” he says before smiling wistfully. “Being plucked from the world you know into a living historical tapestry before heading right back to behold the splendor all over again...there’s something about that that takes off a lot more years than these damn inhibitors.” He chuckles some more. “At least for me, anyway.”

I smile a bit too.

“Nah, nah, I-I get that.”

We just kind of stay quiet for a couple seconds before I add on.

“The thing that gets me is the pacing.”

He seemed confused, so I elaborate.

“I-I mean, we just jumped to maybe a minute after we both left to take out Wilson, and yet everything already feels so...different.”

He nods sagely.

“Yeah. Figuratively and, heh, kind of literally.” He says this last bit as he points out a building a couple blocks from the jump point. The Arcade Restaurant, I realized, only in this time it’s been a historical monument for 75 years. 3 minutes before we left, a plasma conduit ruptured inside. When we left, a dozen repair drones were flying overhead, assessing the damage to the restaurant and gathering materials. Now, they’d just about finished sealing the conduit and were already halfway through the reconstruction. All in a minute.

“Jesus,” I say, awestruck.

“I suppose it’s my turn to curse all this newfangled technology,” Keith says with a laugh completely intended to make him sound as old as possible.

I laugh. “Then I guess it’ll be my turn to denounce your short-sighted, old-fashioned ways.”

“Ah, you young whippersnappers!” He says overdramatically, “Never showing any respect to your elders!”

“If my elders are worthy of respect, I shall do so,” I say with over exaggerated bravado.

“Oh, bah, humbug!”

At this point, he can’t keep up the act and just kind of breaks down laughing. I follow suit with a chuckle. In truth, while the humor was helping, there was still something in the back of my mind warning me to be on guard around him. And, of course...other things.

After a minute, as the craft cleared Memphis and began ascending upwards towards the stratosphere, the mirth dies down as the autopilot comes to life, and I sit down in the copilot’s seat. For a moment it’s clear that Keith is trying to say something, but not sure how to start, until finally he says slowly:

“You’re still thinking about Wilson, huh?”

My eyes widen slightly, more of a reflex than anything, and I nod somberly.

“I-I mean, it wasn’t like he was the first one, but...” I’m not sure what to add. I just know that something is different here.

“It was the first one you saw,” Keith finishes. I nod again.

“ Not only that, but...the first one, Ransom. I mean, he bombed the 116th Congress. Killed nearly 600 people. He could’ve gotten help; he just didn’t care. He enjoyed it. Watching them suffer.”

I took a breath. I didn’t think that it’d still be bothering me this much three weeks later, but evidently…

“But Wilson, talking to him, I could tell, you know? He knew he needed help. He was desperate for it.”

Keith’s expression hardens.

“For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t matter. There wasn’t a defense for Wilson the minute he jumped. He forfeited that right the minute he decided to erase over 100 billion people from history.”

Suddenly I began to feel a lot less sure of myself.

“The punishment for historical alteration is immediate erasure. That’s the way it is, and frankly, the way it should be. For a crime of that magnitude, there is no other suitable course of action.”

“I know. ...I know,” I say, on cue. Truly, I did know. But something about Wilson made me unsure all the same.

Meanwhile, Keith turned back around and looked up as the craft continued to ascend beyond the stratosphere and into orbit.

‘Really, what I’m worried about with Wilson is all the tech he was able to get.”

Back to business, huh? I think. Alright. I nod in agreement as he continues.

“A Sprinter V going 80 instead of 65, an H-6 mine, and not to mention that EMP blocker...” He furrows his brow. “It’s definitely going to give Analytics a headache.”

“Yeah...” A thought occurs to me. “Where do you think he got the stabilizer?”

“A current model like that? It’d have to be off of an officer,” Keith says. “But as for which officer, only one relevant case comes to mind.”

I stare wide-eyed for a second in recollection.

“O-oh. It was...”

“Officer Imari, 3 months ago. Your instructor during training.”

“Who I was brought on early to...to replace.” Suddenly I felt as if this situation became a little less routine and a lot more suspicious. That-that can’t be a coincidence, I think in my apprehension. But why…?

And, of course, it’s on this macabre note that the station comes into view. The official name for it is the Kroʊnɒs Temporal Monitoring Station. The codename for the project was “Olympus,” off of the Greek Titan Chronos’ seat of power. Working stiffs like me and the gang call it the Clock Tower.

35 kilometers wide, 50 kilometers high, and home to 347,543 permanent residents, all employed within. It’s got a cargo capacity of about 150,000 kilotons, a fusion reactor powerful enough to run the continental United States for a hundred years on a full tank, more pod bay doors than HAL would know what to do with, and the most powerful maneuvering engines global taxpayers’ money could buy. It’s been labeled as one of the great technological marvels in all of human history-an orbital space station larger than any previously developed, cobbled together in about three weeks and sent off with a 24/7 chronal stabilizer for everyone’s trouble. To us, it’s just “work.”

“Attention unknown cruiser,” a voice abruptly, yet calmly, comes through on the communication feed. “This is a restricted area. Identify yourself or prepare to be boarded.”

The warning is spoken almost robotically, but I can sense that the speaker already knows who we are and is repeating the same stock warning everyone gets as a formality. Still, protocol demands we respond.

“Olympus, this is Pod 45, Officers Keith Buchanan and Heidi Stevens commanding. Request permission to dock.”

The line is silent for a few seconds as the operator runs through Voice Recognition to check and double check, probably with that same sluggishness which such tedium naturally leads to.

“Confirmed. Please proceed to Bay 34, Pod 45.”

“Thank you.”

With that, the transmission shuts off and Keith guides the pod towards Bay 34 with something vaguely resembling a smirk, but different from his usual smartass smirk. More pitying, almost, yet still amused, as if he’s trying to stop himself from chuckling at the poor operator’s expense.

“Thank God I never had to work a shift in there,” I mutter under my breath.

At this point, Keith’s resistance breaks down into a full chuckle that seems vaguely...nostalgic.

“Wait a second, do you mean to tell me...”

And now it’s a laugh.

“Oh, God, no! No, no, no, no, no, no,” he repeats, almost wheezing, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in Operational Communications. No, it’s just...” He pauses for a minute.

“What?”

He takes a deep breath before replying.

“My first junior worked in there.”

If I’d been drinking coffee, I guarantee you it would’ve been spat.

“Diana Sandoval?!”

He begins to laugh. “Yup!”

“Commissioner Sandoval?! In Operational Communications?!”

God, he’s just guffawing now.

“YUP!” He manages to croak out between laughs, “She couldn’t wait to leave! She was the first person they hired for the department and the first to transfer into Security!”

I literally had to sit down.

“Wow. To think someone so extraordinary came from somewhere so...not.”

He manages to stop laughing for a second, and says, smiling wistfully, “Yeah, that she was. Is. Still is.” Then a chuckle. “I mean, hell, half my old juniors still have old posters of her in their crew quarters. Never could tell how she felt about that, but knowing her...” He chuckles some more.

And then...an eyebrow. And a look.

“Heidi,” he states simply, a strange hybrid between a question and a statement.

I don’t want to answer your questatement, thank you very much.

“Heidi,” he says, gasping in his stupid mirth.

No, please. Please stop.

“Do you, or do you not-,” he has to pause to take a breath. “Have a poster of Diana Sandoval in your crew quarters?”

And thus the reddening begins.

“...I don’t have to answer that.”

“Bullshit.”

“I plead the Fifth.”

“You’re not being interrogated in a criminal investigation, Heidi.”

“Your tone says otherwise.”

“I’m still your superior officer. Want me to make it an order?”

“If you do, I’ll disobey it.”

“Heh. ‘So it’s treason, then,’” he says, quoting one of the million Star Wars flicks. One of 11 which I despise with every fiber in my being.

“You know I hate it when you quote that film.”

“Yes, I do.”

“In any event, you have no authority with which to enforce such a frivolous command.”

“Heh. Wanna bet?” He says with his usual smirk as he reaches for the transmitter and opens a channel.

“Operational Communications, this is Officer Buchanan, Pod 45. Under Provision 56-B, 05.23.2566, I hereby request a health and safety inspection of Officer Stevens’ crew quarters.” He turns around and grins like a madman when he catches my embarrassment.

After a good 15 seconds, the same voice as before responds.

“Officer Buchanan, your request is denied.”

He sits up with a start, confused.

“Denied? On what grounds?”

We can both hear a quite audible sigh from the operator.

“Officer Buchanan, you are aware that, per Article II, Paragraph VII of that same provision, our computer system at Operational Communications is obligated to monitor and transcribe all communications of and between the personnel of this station, verbal or digital?”

He does something I haven’t seen him do as of yet. He breaks out into a nervous sweat, even if for only the briefest interval.

“Yes, I am aware of that provision.”

“And you are aware, Officer Buchanan, that this extends to all vehicles stored within this station and all personnel therein?”

“...Yes.”

They’re enjoying this, I think, simultaneously embarrassed and immensely satisfied seeing the look on Keith’s face.

“And you are aware, Officer Buchanan, that should I, the supervisor on duty, believe any of the content of these transcripts to be indicative of a security risk to the station or its inhabitants, or of an executive offense on the part of a superior officer, that I am required to fully report the content in question directly to Commissioner Sandoval herself?”

Keith pauses a full ten seconds before finally gulping out a strangled, “Yes.”

“Good. I just wanted to make sure you were aware,” they say. I can tell they’re grinning ear to ear on the other end of the line, and frankly, even after being embarrassed like that, so am I, watching Keith squirm.

Keith doesn’t respond, so the supervisor decides to add one last detail.

“And just so you know...I happen to like this job.”

With that, the transmission is shut off once more, and we dock with Bay 34 in total silence, our roles momentarily reversed.

03.13.2568(1)

After the EM scan came out positive, two Hoplites surprised us. Technically speaking, they’re with the Internal division of our department, Security. They tend to be the people who don’t quite pass the examination for the agency by very thin margins, prompting the Commissioner to transfer them to Internal in recognition. For whatever reason, everyone calls them Hoplites. Don’t quite know why-maybe it’s just part of the Olympus motif, maybe it’s out of respect-but that’s what they’re called. I recognize one of them-Sam Merriwether, one of the people in my-or, rather, Elena’s-D&D group. I didn’t know them beforehand-think Jordan brought them in one day and they just kind of stuck around after she left-but they’re pretty cool. Calm, funny, patient-overall great with people. And Abel the human swashbuckler is an absolute cinnamon roll.

Still, even though I was glad to see them, that didn’t change the fact that officers getting an escort to Analytics was...unusual.

They said hello cordially enough, and I had replied in kind when Keith, in his usual fashion, cut to the chase as bluntly as possible.

“Any particular reason for the welcoming committee, Officer?”

Sam seemed kind of confused, and looked to their partner. Jim, I think his name was. But Jim obviously didn’t know any more than they did, based on the casual shrug he gives them in response.

After a bit of back and forth, Sam hesitatingly replies, “Well, I understand it’s rather sudden, Officer Buchanan, sir, but...um...” They pause for a second before finally finishing, “Commissioner Sandoval feels that she should personally examine this particular case of yours.”

Keith seems a bit taken aback by this, and I can’t blame him. I was getting all the more apprehensive over the prospect of the higher ups demoting me over my mistake, and this looks like it’s possibly confirmed that rather imminently.

Well, at least on the bright side, Keith won’t take much heat for it, I thought to myself, He might as well have tenure at this point.

Suddenly Keith’s next question snaps me back to the present.

“Any particular reason?”

This time Jim answers, much more confidently.

“While you were pursuing Wilson, some of the butterflies collected data on the surrounding area. We think it might bear some relevance.”

Neither of us are particularly convinced.

“Data that our readouts didn’t pick up already?” I ask, confused. Our readouts are almost as good as the butterflies’ sensors, maybe even a bit better in some areas. How would they pick up something we didn’t?

Jim nods. “There are certain EM waves your scanners have more trouble picking up compared to our sensors. And even if you did, it’s certainly possible that it slipped your mind. You were pretty busy, after all.”

Keith looks at me, and I nod. We activate our readouts simultaneously and began to search the EM sensor logs for that particular time interval-0:10:34 according to the chronometer, freshly recalibrated to the present time frame.

In the midst of doing so, I hear a beep as Sam lifts up their transmitter and sends us the particular frequency of the wave they picked up.

At first, I don’t see anything beyond general background radio noise, but after a few seconds it occurs to me to isolate each individual background wave and compare them to the posted frequency. After about 12,045 near-matches in the 99.9% range, the computer manages to come up with a 100% match.

“I’ll be damned,” Keith mutters. He evidently found it too. And with that, we close our readouts and look back at Sam and Jim.

“Yup, it’s in there, alright,” Keith confirms.

“Buried under twelve thousand plus background waves, but it’s in there,” I add.

Curiouser and curiouser. Keith seems to echo my thoughts when he concludes, “There’s no way in hell that that’s just some random reading.”

Sam nods. “From how she said it, Commissioner Sandoval seems to agree with you. So...” They gesture to themselves, and then to Jim. We nod in agreement.

Jim begins to pivot slightly. “Well, now that you’re satisfied, shall we?” He gestures towards the door out of Bay 34 and into the long hallway leading to the lift to our division of Analytics. Me and Keith nod, and they step out of the way to allow us to head forward before stepping back into place and following us, Jim behind Keith and Sam behind me as the door closes with a hiss.

******

The trip down the hallway is short and uneventful. Saw a few acquaintances half-walking, half-stumbling out of their quarters. Graveyard shift, I think somberly. Poor souls. Forgot it was past 10 already. As we enter the lift, I yawn in spite of myself. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn in after this briefing, I think to myself, resigned to another 5 hour night before being shoved awake by the Analytics results.

While we’re in the lift, Jim and Keith strike up a conversation.

“Does Dee think the EM wave could be some sort of unregistered device?” Keith asks.

Jim seems a bit off-put about him calling the Commissioner “Dee,” but he answers anyway.

“You’ll have to ask the Commissioner.”

Sam later adds, “All she said about it to us was that the precise frequency ‘looked familiar.’”

“Hm...” Keith looked like he was searching for some long lost memory for a second, but he quickly shook his head. “Yeah, not ringing any bells, but I’m sure Dee’ll unpack it all when we get there.”

After a few seconds of awkward silence in the lift, I felt Sam step forward slightly and lean a bit closer.

“Still up for game night?” They whisper covertly. I chuckle and turn around to smile at them in response.

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Keith, as per usual whenever the subject of D&D comes up, rolls his eyes and mutters something about “Archaic make-believe.” Sam snickers a bit and gives me a look. I can tell we’re thinking the same thing: Old people, am I right?

Sensing our amusement, Keith shows a hint of his usual ill-boding smirk.

“Say, Officer Cho, you ever go to Heidi’s quarters for these little ‘game nights’ of yours?”

Oh.

Sam, of course having no knowledge of our prior conversation, legitimately considers this query.

Oh no.

“Eh, usually we all go to Elena’s for game night.”

“Ah, yes. Good old Elena,” Keith responds politely, his smirk diminishing as his hunch appears to have been incorrect.

Please don’t bring up the time Elena got sick.

Sam seems to think for a bit more.

Please don’t bring up the time Elena got sick!

“Although...there was one time where we had to relocate.”

NO!

Keith’s smirk returns. “Oh?” He asks, dripping with fake surprise as only a question from him can.

No no no no no no no no!

I immediately shot a look at Sam warning them to abort, but they had already turned their attention to responding.

“Yeah, Elena got sick maybe 3 weeks ago,” they say, chuckling. “Common cold. The eternal scourge of humanity.”

Keith genuinely chuckles at that in return. Him and his sense of humor.

“So we had to meet at Heidi’s that week.”

The eyebrow goes up and the smirk is quickly hidden behind a veneer of innocent curiosity.

“Anything in her quarters you noticed? Family heirlooms, keepsakes?” He pauses for a moment to glance at me and add, “Posters?” before turning back and finishing with, “That kind of thing?”

Abort abort abort abort abort! I try to send to Sam telepathically, but with no success. Fortunately, just as they’re about to answer, they notice me, panicking out of my mind, right behind Keith.

“N-not that I can recall, s-sir,” they say.

Jim finally bothers to notice the conversation and pipes up, “Why are you asking them, anyway?”

Keith pauses for a split second, his plan foiled. He’s about to craft a clever response when Jim, obviously having heard something from the Commissioner about her continual source of annoyance, shuts him down: “She doesn’t have a Sandoval poster in there, Buchanan.”

There it is again-the slightest trace of sweat on his forehead.

He’s about to defend himself when the lift door opens. The noise prompts him to turn around, leaving him face to face with the most intimidating woman ever to live:

Kroʊnɒs Commissioner Diana Sandoval.

Graduated top of her class at West Point. Ended up being the first person brought on to work for Operational Communications the day the station was built 10 years ago, but by that point she was already engaged in basic training for Security under the first officer brought onto the program, Hunter O’Malley. I’d later learn that her time spent in Operational Communications remains a record to this day: 5 days, with the average for all future officers in that department being around 75. She entered into the program officially as a junior under Keith, and set records there too: 24 missions in 2 months, and 2 months before being promoted to senior. After that, she began taking on juniors and continued to serve with distinction, rising through the senior ranks until she became senior, 1st class, 3 years after joining the agency. When Commissioner Halifax retired, the choice to succeed him was obvious.

She didn’t go into the field anymore, but that didn’t matter-she still awed and inspired every officer in the program with her iron will and unshakable conviction. Those few who opposed her, politicians and PR directors and the like, came to fear her relentless push towards pursuing what she felt was best for the agency.

Lyndon Baines Johnson has nothing on her, I think as I watch my superior officer stand 2 feet away from a force of nature of his own creation.

“Keith,” she says simply. She doesn’t seem particularly upset to see him, but not exactly overjoyed, either. He’s just kind of there, almost like a fly on the wall.

“Dee,” he replies just as robotically, but I can perceive a slight, bemused smile on his face.

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps.

His smile quickly morphs into an awkward slant, a single sweat drop emerging on his forehead.

“Understood, madam,” he says with a chuckle no different than usual, but I could tell he had to expend actual effort to get it out smoothly. She regards him quizzically for a second.

“Did I interrupt something?” She says with a mixture of suspicion and sarcasm which appeared to be directed to all of us at once even though she was only looking at Keith. Sam, Jim, and I all dart our eyes first to each other and then to the Commissioner. Suddenly another detail sneaks into my head-it was rumored by some that the Commissioner had taken strength mods. Class V. Strong enough to stop a moving car.

Keith tries to stay as relaxed as he can. “Nothing important,” he says in his best approximation of his usual chipper tone. “Just a little elevator chat, you know how it is.”

She raises an eyebrow in the exact same manner as I’ve seen over a thousand times whenever Keith feels the need to express his doubt. She replicated it flawlessly, down to the precise elevation of the eyebrow from its resting state and the time interval in which said motion was accomplished. Evidently something of Keith rubbed off on her, I thought absentmindedly.

She looks at him sternly for a couple seconds. Afterwards, the most fleeting sign of a smirk passes over her features for only a millisecond. Evidently Keith’s demeanor had also rubbed off.

She gestures to the two Hoplites and waves them off to return to their typical station. They abruptly comply, likely expecting her to have seen through Keith’s deception and to swiftly engage in retribution. Sam manages only a hurried wave before they speed-walk to their post, slightly in front of Jim. In tune with them, I had involuntarily held my breath for much of the exchange, and had to abruptly exhale.

Like everything else, she noticed it, too.

“Still jumpy, Stevens?” she asked in her usual authoritative tone. A tone which communicated that she honestly couldn’t care less about how you’re feeling, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to put up any appearances to that effect. She was merely following social convention. I of course had some doubts that she was that cold, but if it was all a front, put up purely to encourage obedience, she definitely played it convincingly.

“N-no, sir-uh, madam! Madam Commissioner! N-not at all! I was just...um...”

I probably would’ve rambled on for quite a while and made even more of a fool of myself, but she swiftly and efficiently cut me off.

“Christ, at ease, Stevens. It’s fine. Anyone would be jumpy after a close shave like that.”

So Analytics already got the info transmitted by our readouts, I think after a second of stunned silence. ...Crap.

At the moment, though, I couldn’t afford to ruminate over how my career was likely over-I had to respond and end the current conversation.

“Y-yeah. M-maybe a little,” I say with a nervous chuckle. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d reprimand myself, but frankly, I could’ve approached that much, much worse.

I was greeted by the same cold, dismissive stare. Eager to get on with business, I piped up, “I-I’ll go ahead and, uh, head into the briefing room.”

“You do that,” the Commissioner said coldly.

Keith, in a rare moment of genuine sympathy, adds, “We’ll catch up in a second. Me and the Commish have some things to discuss.”

As expected, the Commissioner wrinkled her nose slightly at being referred to as “the Commish.” I didn’t wait around to see her full reaction, however-I was already walking briskly down the hallway. I’d only hear what they discussed much later when Keith recounted the conversation.

******

Officer Keith Buchanan and Commissioner Diana Sandoval watched Officer Heidi Stevens nervously evacuate to the briefing room in Analytics before the latter waved towards a door to their right. For convenience, the Commissioner recently ordered 13 unoccupied offices to be converted into soundproofed “quiet rooms” for the use of high ranking officers. As per Provision 56-B, an audiovisual record of what occurs in the rooms must be provided to the chief officer of Operational Communications, but nevertheless, these rooms are far more private than the Commissioner’s own office.

The pair entered, and once the door was re-sealed and chairs drawn, Commissioner Sandoval drew her palms together in what could almost be construed for prayer, giving a long, exasperated sigh.

Officer Buchanan leaned back nonchalantly and waited for a couple seconds. When Commissioner Sandoval didn’t respond, he leaned forward, ready to say something. She looked up from her contemplation and stopped him cold.

“Did you badger those kids about the goddamn posters again?” Before Keith could interject, she stopped him again, his subtlest behavioral ticks already confirming her suspicions. “Jesus Christ, Keith! What the hell is your fixation on those stupid things?!”

Keith chuckled and contemplated this for a second, certain he wouldn’t be reprimanded. “I don’t know. Guess I just get a kick out of my first junior being looked up to so much.”

She sighed deeply a second time, putting her hand to her face and shaking her head repeatedly. “Why is it that I always have to be the adult whenever you’re involved?”

Keith laughed at this, to Sandoval’s chagrin. “Give yourself another 70 years, and you’ll find out the answer. Once you reach triple digits, you stop giving a damn.”

“That implies you’ve ever given a damn,” she responded, exasperated.

He laughed heartily once again. “Oh, how you wound me, Dee!”

“I wasn’t kidding earlier, you know,” she said a bit more angrily. “I hate it when you call me that.”

“Ohoho, I know!” he said before breaking into laughter once again.

One final dramatic sigh left the Commissioner with her face on the desk. “Seriously, Keith, stop it,” she muttered, defeated. Keith, finally appreciating the gravity of the discussion, complied begrudgingly.

“Just wanted to try and loosen you up a little,” he said, chuckling. “You seem to be under a lot of stress.”

“Like you’d give a damn about that,” she muttered cynically.

“Aw, hey,” he said, a bit more consolingly. “You know that isn’t true.”

Yet another sigh, and she got back up. “We’re getting off track. I called you here to discuss that new junior of yours. Officer Stevens.”

Keith’s expression hardened. He sit up straight. “What about her?” He asked, already knowing the response.

She pulled out a display pad. “Frankly, I don’t think she’s cut out for this line of work,” she said plainly.

“She passed training,” Keith countered. “Got high marks-higher than anybody else has managed in 2 years.”

“Training and the field are two different beasts, Keith,” she replied. “I don’t give a damn how well she scored. This,” she said, pointing to a readout recording of Heidi’s close shave with death on their second mission earlier that day, “This is an embarrassment.”

“And how well did you do on your second mission, De-Diana?” Keith retorted.

“I got to the perp in 20 seconds and shot him in the spine 10,000 feet in the air,” Commissioner Sandoval countered in turn. “Your junior spent 2 minutes trying to reason with a crazy person and nearly got her skull melted by an ES.”

“Well, not every officer in the program can be as badass as you, Diana,” Keith said, chuckling.

“They should be,” she replied, completely serious. “This department doesn’t have room for bleeding hearts more concerned with a 500 year old walking corpse than fixing the fabric of reality. That’s what the GPD is for back on Earth. Or Internal.”

Keith said nothing, clearly trying to come up with a response and failing.

“This agency cannot afford to become caught up in moral concerns. We have one job-. That’s it,” she finished before adding, coldly, “I would think you of all people would understand that particular principle.”

Keith’s expression hardened further. “That’s uncalled for, Commissioner.”

She sighed again. This time her hand went to the bridge of her nose.

“...You’re right. You’re right, I’m...I’m sorry,” she eventually concedes. “But that doesn’t change my point. And if you can’t effectively counter it, I’m going to have to transfer her to Internal.”

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The Lion's Dungeon

Random Rough Draft #1

Current Outline

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Postscript

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