Authors: Aaron Frale
I was on a boat. The water was crisp and clear. Waves gently lapped against the hull. The sky was beautiful, calm, and stretched to the horizon. I looked down at my body. An extremely tacky Hawaiian shirt clung to my skin. There were long white shorts wet and wrapped on my thighs. I pulled the shorts loose, and they made a sucking noise. I heard the laugh of a woman.
I looked up, and there was a beautiful woman with flowing black hair standing at the bow of the ship. She wore a bikini that left nothing of her amazing form to the imagination. Her sly smile suggested that she was up to mischief.
“Do you want to swim again?” she asked in an accented voice that I couldn’t quite place.
“No. But I can think of other ways we can spend the rest of the day,” I told her confidently, the person who I was at the party years ago was no longer.
She smiled, and her hands began to explore my body. I eased toward her and lowered my head for a kiss. Her head snapped up, almost breaking my nose. Water began to pour from her mouth. She stared at me with cold dead eyes. I pushed her away and stumbled backward. The water rushed from her bloated face. I cried out and tripped on some rigging.
Blood replaced the flow of water, and she began to gurgle. The bloating popped blood vessels. Her eyes and ears bled. A pool of blood formed around her and flowed toward me. She melted away, and the blood forming around my body began to flow up my skin. Her form drained away until it was nothing but a pool of red. The blood engulfed me and burrowed into my skin. I started to bloat and almost burst from the pain.
My brain seemed to rise out of my body. I was able to zoom into the microscopic level in the blood. It wasn’t blood but nanomachines. The robots were invading my system, and I was resisting. I realized that I didn’t need to fight the nanomachines. I needed to absorb them. I needed to become one with them. The machines flowed into my system. The pain ceased; the bloating quelled. I was absorbing their power and adding them to my own.
Nanette walked Jerry through the halls of the reprogramming chambers. She held him firmly by the arm, and he walked with conviction. His detox ended long before she brought him here. Agents had more control than most people brought into reprogramming. Her lover had convinced her of the future conspiracy. He knew of the torture he would endure from the future, but he went to reprogramming anyway.
The reprogramming chambers were conducting an experiment, and she had been an unwitting accomplice to it. Jerry was brave for facing his fate. They could have tried to run away, but they wanted to protect the people. She inserted her nanomachines into his body to record the events from the future. Her nanomachines would also block any foreign substances from entering his body. If Jerry could walk around and explore, they may be able to find out more about the operation. There had to be a weakness or a way they could get to the future without going through the chamber. Sending a person to find another entrance was the only way. She also had to account for the possibility her machines would be detected especially when they weren’t being passive like the ones Jerry snuck in 07760 earlier. So she inserted one more failsafe into his body. Jerry swallowed a pill full of nanomachines that would take a long time to digest. If her machines were disabled, the pill would restore his memories. The pill was carefully disguised to look like food matter.
The worst part about leading him to the chamber was that she could not kiss him goodbye. They would detect the residue on his lips and know that she planted something. She planted the nanomachines days before and set a timer. They should be powered any moment now. There were too many possible reasons why her plan would go wrong. Maybe his future self was still in a relationship with her and would help them. Maybe his future self knew the plan and would thwart it. She had to stop thinking about why the plan wouldn’t work and hold onto the fact that it could. The future was never fixed. People could make choices, and those choices could alter their destiny.
She looked her lover in the eyes as she unceremoniously stuffed him into the chamber. She wanted to be with him, but she had to keep up the appearances of an agent doing her job. There was no telling who was watching the camera feeds in the reprogramming building. He stared at her. By all outward appearances, the stare was empty and blank. However, she could see the emotional turmoil brewing under his eyes. He mouthed the word Russia. Her steadfast self-control crashed. A tear came down her cheek.
He locked eyes with her while the chamber charged. They spoke volumes with their eyes. They gave each reassurance, support, and love without words. She remembered the cases they worked together. She remembered how they expressed love with stolen glances or a turn of phrase. They learned to live with the oppression and valued their time together even if it was just exchanging data. There was a couple from a country long ago called North Korea. They were in a relationship forbidden by their oppressive government. During the seven years of their relationship, the couple would sneak out at night to spend time together. They held hands only once during their seven years. Nanette and Jerry were that couple, but they didn’t know it. The stolen moments during their job were the best in her life, and those moments may never happen again.
The chamber indicated that it was ready for reprogramming. He was about to be transported. She looked into his eyes and for the first time since they met, she saw fear. He vanished seconds later. She waited as the seconds passed, then minutes, and she probably would have been there all day when a nurse walked by. She regretted the tear when he never reappeared. She lost control and displayed too much emotion. She blamed herself for blowing the mission and assumed someone saw the tear and knew they were scheming.
“Miss?” a nurse said, breaking her from her brooding.
“I need to log vaporization,” she said.
“Right away,” The nurse said confused. The nurse scrambled to get her superior. Nanette was halfway down the hallway when the nurse turned back, “Aren’t you going to wait for my supervisor?”
“The prisoner entered the chamber and didn’t leave the chamber. Everything else you can get from the schedule logs,” Nanette barked down the hall. She had no time for bureaucracy, especially when she knew it was a show to make everyone feel better. One in every ten thousand prisoners would be “vaporized” and never rematerialized. A malfunction in the chamber would be blamed. The chamber would be shut down, and technicians would be called. The techs would make a show of repairing the chamber and life would continue. But knowing that the people ended up in a different location rather than becoming atoms meant that vaporized subjects weren’t vaporized. The future just didn’t want to give them up.
As soon as she exited the building, she connected to the network. She began to scour the police and news records of the time period where 07760 was located. She found information about a murder. Both 07760 and her lover were wanted in connection with a murder in a bookstore. The people manipulating the future thought they were clever. They probably brainwashed Jerry to commit the murder so that they could dispose of him in the past. She wondered if the failsafe pill digested yet. It would restore enough memory, but she couldn’t rely on it. For all she knew, they wiped him clean of her nanomachines and the failsafe.
After checking the history archives, she discovered Jerry disappeared after the murder. The police never caught him. She could not appear before the murder because for all she knew, he was transported seconds before it happened. Her best bet to catch him was after the murder. She checked to make sure she had blank IDs in her pocket. It was time to investigate a crime.
I didn’t care, and it had been that way for some time. I can’t remember the point when I stopped caring. It was either a gradual corruption of my soul or a specific moment where I vowed kill or be killed. My younger self would receive all the memories that I’d just as soon forget, but the task had to be done. My superiors would scrutinize me if I didn’t. I excelled at avoiding scrutiny. I figured there would be some emotion inside of me that would stir when I forced my younger self to relive bad memories, but there was nothing.
I decided to test out my ability to care. I reached out with my nanomachines. The machines buzzed through the city, scanning people until they found a target. In a tiny construction of scrap metal and cinderblocks lived a mother. Two small children were at her feet. While I couldn’t control her with my nanomachines, I could stop her heart. The child’s heartbeat accelerated as he no doubt witnessed his mom topple over. The other one must have been too young to know what was going on. Despite the havoc I caused, I didn’t feel anything for those people.
My younger self displayed so much passion. He resisted and fought for what he thought was right. I could not understand the difference between myself now and the person of the past. My past self cared so much. He had passion and strength in his convictions. There were setbacks and traumatic experiences in my past, but when did I stop caring? The child screaming for his mom to wake up should have made me feel something. I remembered getting my memories back as one of the most powerful moments of my life. But forcing my past self to do it wasn’t interesting.
I also didn’t remember resisting as much as my younger self did today. Was something different than I remembered about the encounter, or did it merely feel different because I was now on the other end of it? When I was young, I was confronted by my older self. I felt like I trusted myself or at least gave my future self the benefit of the doubt. My past seemed to be treating me with a lot of distrust. There was something more at work than I knew. My thoughts were interrupted by a transmission from the future.
My boss was calling from the future. Luckily enough, the past versions of us didn’t have the ability to make real-time calls through time. They could travel to the past, but the technology to send transmissions to the past was a tightly guarded secret. A little information kept people unaware. A lot of information made them dangerous. My past self had such old nanomachines. It was amazing we ever accomplished anything in those days. To people on the outside, it would look like I was lost in thought. To me, it was like a video phone in my head. My boss was a very well-dressed man. Did he remember this incident? If so, why didn’t he tell me that he would escape?
“I’m waiting for your delivery,” the future Jerry said.
“She’s coming. My past self is putting up a fight against my nanomachines,” I said.
“I told you to train him. Make sure he learns the ability, not make him an overnight sensation,” the well-dressed Jerry chided.
“He is resisting, but he’ll break. I have years on him.”
“Did you find my younger self yet?”
“He escaped.”
“But…that’s impossible. I never…”
“I’ve seen things that I’ve never done either. Something is different about this timeline.”
“Find my younger self and bring him to me.”
“Already working on it. My nanomachines are scanning the tunnels faster than my teams can search them.”
“Postulate. Why do you think the events are different here?”
“It’s just a theory, but I think they can feel emotions.”
“Impossible.”
“I know,” I said, equally as confused. The connection closed as my boss cleared my mind’s eye. Maybe I was beginning to feel emotions too. I stopped the heart of the kid who was crying over his mother. I probably felt sorry for him though I wasn’t sure. Maybe I stopped his heart because his crying was irritating. I didn’t know what emotions were supposed to feel like. I left the real small kid alone. The small one wouldn’t know what had happened anyway.
Jerry awoke from the memory loading into his brain. It all flooded back to him: the decision to help 07760, the conspiracy from the future, his scheme with his lover, and the nanomachine pill in his stomach. Nanette was brilliant. She stored all of his memories in the pill. She was in trouble in the shantytown. He had to save her.
He turned back towards the settlement. He moved faster than he thought possible. The thought of leaving her weighed on his mind. It was absurd to place so much stock in one memory restored from what was a flood of images like a dream. For all he knew, the images were fiction. But he had to go with his heart. The stoic rational side told him to stay back until he knew more information. But the thought of what could happen to her was too much and won over any sense of logic.
He crawled to the edge of the tunnel overlooking the city. The rubble pile he climbed to get to his vantage point was a lot steeper than he remembered. It looked dangerous. While his logic could not stop him now, it at least slowed him from charging forward into a dangerous situation. He needed to find out the best possible route down. He was lucky on his way up. He could have easily hit a loose rock. After he was satisfied with the route of his descent, he then studied the city for a moment and created a mental map.
A pair of binoculars would come in handy, and as if his body was responding to his desire, his vision zoomed forward. He was startled by the change in perspective and thought he was falling at first, but he realized fairly quickly that it was the vision changing and not actual movement from his physical location. His vision seemed to give him all sorts of information. It had biometrics on people, temperature, wind variation, and he even saw clouds of something flowing through the city. They must have upgraded his machines during his trip to the future.
According to the nanomachines in his eyes, the clouds were swarms of other nanomachines. From the rate of replication, they looked as if they were branching out in every direction. Most of the clouds drifted from house to house throughout the camp. Others drifted down the main exits and entrances. A cloud broke into two, and one began to drift towards the tunnel where Jerry was hiding.
He double checked the people to make sure no one was looking and scrambled down the rubble pile. Near the end, a misstep caused a few rocks to become dislodged. He jumped and rolled behind a pile of scrap. A man with an old style shotgun looked toward the noise and scanned the rubble. A nanomachine cloud turned the corner.
Jerry tested the limit of his power. He attempted to conjure a sniper rifle from thin air. No sniper rifle appeared. He would have to suggest a new upgrade. Nanomachines could synthesize objects out of thin air. The air was made of molecules, and if nanomachines could break apart the atoms in the air then objects could be made of “thin air.”
The cloud was almost near him. He would either face detection from the cloud or the person. He decided to take his chances with the person. With a full sprint, he charged from the alleyway into the torso of the man. The attack was quick and caught the man off guard. They both tumbled to the ground and rolled to a halt by a building. Jerry lost no time and landed a blow on the man’s face. He cried out in pain. The man probably didn’t have any nanotechnology to soften the pain. With another blow, Jerry rendered the man unconscious. He took the man’s gun and proceeded through the camp.
Jerry ducked and dodged people and nanoclouds as best he could. At one point, he was stuck between a growing cloud and a woman on patrol. He hit her with the butt of the gun and moved forward. He didn’t know if his nanomachines would hide him from the clouds, so he dashed through the city until he got to the adobe hut. There were two guards posted outside the door.
He circled the building and kept out of the guards’ sight lines. He got to the back of the building and dashed up to the wall. There was one entrance to the building, and he could realistically only take out one guard before the other had a chance to sound the alarm. He decided to climb the hut to the roof. He moved as quietly as he possibly could.
After making his way to the top of the roof, he stood over the guards. He attempted to spray nanomachine clouds of his own, but nothing happened. He tried to reach out with his mind, make a hammer out of thought, or do anything useful, but nothing happened. He had to take them out the old fashioned way. He dangled from the roof and jumped in between them.
Surprised, they both swiveled their gun towards him. Jerry pulled himself back up to the roof. There was gunfire, and one of the guards lay dead. One had seen the obvious ploy and didn’t fire. Unfortunately, his partner wasn’t as observant and gunned him down. The living guard was just registering what happened when Jerry jumped down on top of him.
Jerry moved on muscle memory because of his combat training. The first move brought the guard down to the ground. His second disarmed the guard, and the third was a knockout blow. The gunshot alerted everyone else. He could already see a nanomachine cloud racing towards the hut.