Shadows of Olympus (Universe in Flames Book 6)

by Christian Kallias

  My rage intensifies and a natural release of adrenaline happens. I decide that if I die, so does he. I get back to my feet and start running. My blaster is aimed at Ahmed. I can still use my super speed. I roll to the ground to grab the blaster and set it to overload as I lock it magnetically on my thorax. I’m gonna need all my strength and both my hands to grip myself onto Ahmed.

  I hear another shot and a split second later I feel a bullet travel through my right thigh. Sparks flow as the bullet hits the mechanically enhanced augment inside that particular area of my leg. I lose balance and stumble forward but I manage by miracle not to fall to the ground.

  Ahmed turns to face me. I’m still a good ten feet from him and I now limp.

  “Agent Seeker, what are we going to do with you?”

  He opens his right palm and a blaster pistol flies from his ship and magnetically locks into his hand. He aims at me and fires.

  It hits my blaster, still overloading, but it doesn’t explode right away. Instead it flies upwards, spinning in the air, making a high pitch screeching noise as I am catapulted backwards from the blaster impact. Before I hit the ground my blaster explodes and flames spring all around it. Ahmed erects a personal shield that protects him from the inferno. I am not so lucky and I can feel the intense heat and flames burn my flesh as I close my eyes.

  I can’t see him anymore but I can hear his footsteps travel away from my position. The sound changes as he steps onto the metal ramp of his ship.

  I have failed. And I’m about to die. My brain can’t process the enormity of it all.

  How could I fail? How could I have been so stupid?

  I try to pry my eyes open but only my left eye opens, and only partially. It’s enough to see the dark grey sky above. The sun is now behind a huge, dark cloud.

  I hear the engines of Ahmed's ship hum to life, and I feel the ground shaking when it lifts off.

  “Agent Seeker,” I hear through his ship’s speakers. “It’s been fun as always, but now it’s time to say goodbye for good.”

  I muster what’s left of my strength and bring my head upwards. The pain from my neck wound makes it near impossible but I fight through it and manage to see a blurred image of the ship now hovering atop the roof of the building that is surely to become my grave.

  I hear his plasma guns powering up.

  “Allahu Akbar,” says Ahmed through his speakers.

  The last thing I see is two bright green plasma shots coming my way.

  C H A P T E R

  III

  I scream from the bottom of my guts and I’m surprised to hear my own voice. I’m standing on my bed in my apartment, soaking in sweat.

  “Condition red! Emergency shield activating,” says TAINHA in a panicked voice.

  I see the flashing blue cubic-shaped shield come to life all around my bed as the emergency lights in my apartment come on. They give every piece of furniture and every wall a reddish hue.

  What the feck? A nightmare?

  It takes my augmented brain a couple of seconds to compute and realize that I am still alive, safe and sound on my bed. I can feel my heart beat so fast that it feels like it wants to break free from my ribcage. I know TAINHA is talking to me; I hear her voice intonation, but right now I can’t make out what’s she’s saying to me.

  I have had nightmares before, but this felt more real than any other lucid dreams I ever had in my wretched life. It’s like I died and was resurrected, and my brain has trouble dealing with it all. I feel dizzy, disoriented and terrified all at the same time. Small rivers of sweat are traveling down my face.

  “Cole . . .” I barely register what TAINHA says. “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

  TAINHA is genuinely worried about me. Heck, I’m worried.

  “I’m okay . . . I think. What’s the date?”

  “Earth year 2175, March the 7th.. It’s six twenty-three in the morning, Cole.”

  The date matches the mission. I wonder if that wasn’t a dream but something else . . . Perhaps I’ll be put into active duty later today?

  What the hell does it all mean?

  “Should I call for a medical emergency, Cole? Your vitals are worrying me; your heartbeat is off the charts.”

  Of that I have no doubt. I feel like my flesh is still burning and I’m being consumed by plasma fire.

  “Denied,” I say, trying to calm myself down.

  “What the hell happened, Cole?”

  “The only explanation that makes sense right now is the mother of all nightmares.”

  “That must have been one hell of a nightmare to send most of your body’s vitals into overdrive like this.”

  “Yeah, it was . . .” I correct myself. “It was something else.”

  “I’ve released a tranquilizer into your bloodstream via your nanites to help you regulate your heartbeat and counteract the adrenaline overload you have received from this . .. experience.”

  TAINHA turns off the force field around my bed.

  I bury my face into my hands. I can already feel the soothing effect of the tranquilizers acting on my system. I’m starting to breathe more deeply now. It calms my internal chatter. I am a little more focused now, less overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of the lingering memories. I still struggle with the concept of this being just a dream; even when I try to convince myself of it, I feel it in my heart and deep down in my bones that I could be wrong.

  I need a shower.

  Before I have time to ask TAINHA I can already hear the water starting in my bathroom. I sit on the border of my bed, looking at my feet. The feeling of the smooth carpet under my toes is soothing me. I look at my naked body, I see no new scars, no damage from the fight with Ahmed. All evidence suggests this was a nightmare.

  “I can sense your internal turmoil, Cole; perhaps we could talk about it? Would you like that?”

  “Later, TAINHA, but thank you.”

  “At your service, as always, Cole. You know you can tell me anything.”

  I know, indeed. Truth be told I would probably go insane if it wasn’t for her. And I don’t think of her as a thing either. Her AI matrix is so advanced and she demonstrates so many emotions that I sometimes think she is more human than I ever was. Perhaps she is.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Cole, but I appreciate you thinking so.”

  I must be broadcasting my thoughts all over the place.

  “Engage privacy mode, TAINHA.”

  “Have I said something wrong?”

  “No, TAINHA, but I need to be alone with my thoughts, just for a little while.”

  I hear a beep inside my head and I can feel TAINHA’s subtle assistance on my body turn off. I don’t really need her help outside of deployment, but I’ve become accustomed to leaving her on most of the time. I feel sorry for deactivating her during my sleep, but nighttime is the only moment when I can escape it all. The last thing I want is for my AI augment to see my most intimate fantasies. But now I wished she had been online to record this. At least if she replayed the dream to me I could be sure it was one.

  When I arrive under the shower, the water splashes against my skin at a perfect one hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit. It doesn’t take long for me to relax. Water has always soothed me. Nowadays it’s a privilege to have a water shower with all the restrictions and the quotas that are put in place. But being one of very few Time Agents for the Rewind project, I can have whatever I want. All the luxuries that only the ultra-rich can afford are given to me, no questions asked. I can eat meat as much as I want, honey, wine . . . I sometimes feel self-conscious about all of that.

  Why does ninety-nine percent of the planet have to make do without so many of the things the human race once took for granted? That’s the world we live in, that’s why. Water was polluted on a large scale in the twenty-first century and potable water is now a rare and expensive resource. Being a nostalgic son of bitch, I am always amazed when I watch movies from the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. P
eople used to have everything they could ever dream of: water, clean air, and all the food they could imagine. They squandered it all, not seeing how unsustainable their ways were, and they were greedy in their pursuits. Once the last of the Amazon forest was gone, everything started going to shit. The ice caps melted and shortly after the oceans rose. Ninety-five percent of all animal species on the planet perished in the nuclear winter that followed World War III. The Earth was never meant to be put under so much strain, and it became a dying world, barely able to sustain the few hundred million survivors.

  We knew it, of course; everyone knew deep inside their mind, even if it was just a doubt in a dark corner of it. They knew that destroying the ecosystem so we could eat all the fish, meat and fast food we wanted had to have a price one day. The scientists tried to warn us. Whistleblowers tried to wake up the human race from its semi-comatose state. We didn’t listen, even though they warned us we wouldn’t all see the end of the century under these conditions. Others debunked their claims, calling them alarmists at best, and heretics at worst. Now look where it got us? We can barely feed what’s left of the human race. The animal kingdom is all but extinct, and everything that made the world a wonderful place has been taken away. Now, we’re living in a glorified desert where life is slowly but surely heading towards its final oblivion.

  The water feels so good, I can only imagine how people make do with sonic showers. Sure they clean the skin efficiently, but nothing beats the sensation of hot water splashing and trickling down one’s skin.

  I bet the ones that thought it was bullshit talk to warn us about our unsustainable ways are thinking different now, or they would if they were still alive. Sure augments and advance in the medical fields have raised the maximum lifespan of humans to up to one hundred and twenty years, give or take, but only the rich can afford to have their lives artificially extended beyond the now morbid forty-two years old average lifespan. We’re basically back to the Stone Age now in terms of mortality. When it became clear that we had royally fecked up, that this world would not regenerate from the damage we did to it, well, it was too late. The megacorporations incited all the governments to establish some drastic measures, and one of them was population control. They controlled whatever was left of the world’s food production, which wasn’t much, so they told the politicians what needed to be done. To say the transition was harsh is putting it mildly.

  The human race couldn’t survive in its entirety. Not all ten billion of them could be fed. But then some super-strain viruses took care of reducing that number to a healthier five billion, give or take a few million. And that was even before World War III. Then came new and terrible STDs that were very efficient in bringing down the population, much more so than the laws of limiting the family unit to a maximum of four persons. Was the Earth trying to rework the equation of a sustainable world on its own? Or were those measures implemented without public knowledge to deal with the situation? I wonder.

  People need to feck, no matter what we tell them; we are, after all, at least in that regard, animals. We can’t live without the pleasure of the flesh. So a super STD like HIV-6 that could turn you impotent in hours and have you draw your last breath in less than a week after that, became a blessing in disguise for controlling population growth. If there is one thing humans like more than having sex it’s to be alive. The usual contraception methods, once a good way to protect against the spread of these SDTs, were rendered inefficient. HIV-6 contained a protein that would burn through latex and other materials. The only safe way to have intercourse was to be subjected to a battery of tests beforehand.

  Soon the sex-bots were created for the recreation sessions. Their AI makes them feel human enough, and their artificial bodies, perfect recreations of human flesh and skin to the touch, didn’t pose a risk health wise. They also helped reduce the birth rate quite a lot. Nowadays one must be either rich or very determined and a bit of a daredevil to try to have children. The avalanche of viruses the humans have faced in the past century made it difficult to birth a genetically safe child. People used to be paranoid about genetically modified organisms. Yeah right! The first and second generation of children were only affected with mild to severe allergic reactions, sometimes to compounds made by our own damn bodies, like histamine. But these were the easier symptoms; the other ones that installed themselves over the generations into the human body, those are the real kick in the ass. What did we think would happen when we created seeds that poisoned our soils, one pesticide at a time, while killing precious fauna? Every insect, animal, or fish all served a function in the eco system. But no; we were arrogant and thought we could play god and get away with it.

  I sometimes daydream that I could, by either a miracle or accident, jump back in time more than the limited 717 minutes I’m allotted. I dream of jumping back into the twenty-first century and hitting everyone on the head, showing them where they are headed, making sure they take it seriously. But that’s all it is really, a fantasy, a utopian dream . . .

  We now live under domes. The only way to recycle the air efficiently is to limit the amount of it you need to recycle. Some say that the soil must have healed by now, that soon we can try again, do better. Long gone is the Internet the way we knew it. It’s now just a network whose sole reason to exist is to make sure megacorporations know everything about you. There are only seven megacities left in the world. There are rumors that some humans have adapted outside of the domes in spite of the radiation and established colonies. But since no one is allowed outside, that’s all they are. Rumors.

  And then there are the terrorists. They call themselves freedom fighters and claim we must reduce the human race to a bare minimum and start over, start smarter. But if there is one thing that people are good at, it’s striving for survival. We are no different than animals in that regard; we’ll do whatever it takes to breathe just a little longer. No matter the cost.

  That’s where I come in. When acts of terror are unleashed upon the world, I am sent back in time to fix these aberrations. You could say I have the most important job in the world. Heck, sometimes I believe it myself. I’m just a glorified soldier but apparently something in my DNA allows me to travel in time without turning into a pile of goo. There are only a handful of us. But we aren’t told how many.

  I turn off the water with a wave of my hand. I don’t feel like stopping but I must have been showering for at least fifteen minutes, reminiscing about a past that is lost, probably forever. It’s an indulgence that comes with the job. I save lives so I can use all the water I want. It doesn’t seem fair sometimes but the hot water helps my muscles and overall mood, which are both critical for me to achieve my missions. The people financing Project Rewind know that and they’re not gonna spare any expenses as long as I keep delivering the results they expect of me. It’s been a little tense at headquarters lately. I have never failed a mission’s primary objective, but Ahmed . . . he has become my nemesis, the one terrorist whose head I still can't deliver on a silver platter, no matter how much I try. It’s like he knows I’m coming for him every single time. Sometimes I get paranoid and think he must have inside help for him to always escape the way he does. Then I realize it’s easier to blame someone else than myself for failing to accomplish the task of killing the son of a bitch.

  The floor of the shower turns blue and a whirlwind of ionized air dries my body in less than two seconds. My hair is lifted upwards for a brief instant. When it goes back in place, I’m fully dry.

  The thought lingers in my brain.

  Does Ahmed get inside help?

  I know I’m being paranoid, but that would explain why he is always a step ahead of me. Which couldn’t be possible considering that I’m the one traveling back in time, I have an incredible amount of useful intel as I make the time jumps. That’s how I devise the best plan of action; that’s how I stop the terrorists’ nefarious plans. By knowing what to look for, at what time, and making sure TAINHA and me go for the course of action tha
t has the higher probability of success. Yet he keeps getting away from me.

  On the other hand, being a little paranoid is why I’m still alive after so many years of deployments. I have received so many medals I don’t know what to do with them. At first I was proudly showcasing them on my wall. But then I realized I was the only one looking at them, so what was the point? So I took them down and piled them into an old shoebox under my kitchen sink.

  Loneliness. That’s the one thing that defines me the most. I am not allowed to have friends. I can’t socialize. I can’t form emotional attachment as it could hinder my judgment when I get deployed. My enemies could use them against me.

  I was enlisted after my wife got sick and died. We couldn’t afford the medication she needed to stay alive. My soldier’s salary was barely enough to allow us to eat and have something resembling a roof over our heads. Of course all that changed once my particular genetic aberration was found during a routine medical test. I wish I could go back in time. I wish I could save her. But it doesn’t work that way. I can only jump back seven hundred and seventeen minutes, not a second more. Barely enough time for me to actually complete my missions. There have been many close calls over the years.

  I asked the eggheads at the labs once why we can’t jump further back. But after two minutes of their technobabble, my brain melted into a puddle of boredom. I’m no scientist. To each his own. All I know is that it isn’t possible. Perhaps one day, but not today.

  And then I remember they made me infertile and unable to feel sexual pleasure. For the same reasons I’m not supposed to be emotionally attached to anyone. The first three years I was doing fine in these conditions. But there’s something particularly soul-sucking to be alone all the time. I can use sex bots, but even then, I can’t really get the kind of pleasure I would like from them, no matter how much I try. I wonder why I bother really. I guess it’s a sanity thing. My brain copes better if I lie to myself that I have some sort of activity resembling sexual intercourse. But who the feck am I kidding? They neutered the shit out of me. I understand why they did it and I was informed beforehand, at the time when I was losing everything I held dear. My sweet Vassiliki. She would be disgusted with me if she was still here. Or would she?