by Agster, Joe
This is as complete and full of a kiss they could possible share. She connects his lips with hers, locking them tight and not letting go. Suddenly she feels a tingle, then a strong tingle. Then, her head fills with visions: The moment they first met at the Vyxx club. The other moments when she rejected him. The FBI holding cell. The drives to the Hanford site bunker. Meeting her mother in the bunker. The suborbital flight to Hong Kong. All those days and nights walking around Hong Kong, comparing it with her childhood visits. The space flight to the asteroid. All of it comes rushing into her head, so vivid and powerful, memories that she will never forget. She remembers it all. Through this final kiss she feels every memory emanating from the depths of her soul, restored to her consciousness every moment they had spent together.
She releases her lips as this incomprehensible moment. “I saw it all Friend! From the moment we met, every moment we shared across time. Your kiss allowed me to remember… all of it. I was with you, through all your six day journeys. I re-experienced us making love all the other times.”
He cannot believe it. This is truly amazing to him. She continues, “I am complete and happy now. As much as I don’t want you to go, you gave me something I’ll always carry with me, forever.”
Tears continue to flow down her face, along with his. “It’s time for you to go.”
“Goodbye, Cassie. I don’t know how, but I know we’ll see each other again.”
“I know you will return to me, Friend. I feel it.”
“Until then,” Friend clenches his heart. “Love yourself, always. Be everything you were meant to be.”
He blows her one final kiss, then walks toward the white light. Perhaps this is the afterlife. He can only wonder as he is consumed by grief of the unknown. He looks around for a brief moment, pondering where Mason could be, wondering why he never returned at any moment of these final six days. As the light beckons to him, he assures himself he will undoubtedly uncover the truth about who Mason is, just he will discover who he is. As he feels reassured in the moment, he walks into the eternal brightness of the white light. He then disappears, and the light collapses into nothingness.
After he leaves for good, she cannot help but feel ready to move forward in her life. She never told him her one final secret, but she feels it lingering: the power he projected onto her. It never fully left her. Her father would be proud of her at this moment, helping to save the world. The rest of her life is now, and she understands her destiny is an inevitable truth that lay before her. She will miss him, but now a piece of him will always be with her. She gazes at the sky once more, thinking back to that boyish charm he was in the beginning, and the true warrior he was in the end. She pauses to reflect on those memories once more, laughing hysterically as she plays it back in her mind those first times they met. She eventually settles down and smiles while pondering on the whole adventure. She is now ready to take on the world.
She looks up at the wondrous meteor-filled sky one last time, before using her newfound powers to vanish into the night.
36
Aftermath
“Guardian? Guardian Weston Hale?”
The elder woman patiently calls out his name, clinging to hope of a conscious response soon. She wonders if he’ll remember anything at all, his position in the Protective Force, his rank of Guardian, or even his name. She stares at her reflection in the observation glass, adjusting her glimmering white robe by removing the cling beneath the sash. Her silver hair nearly matches her robe, and the redirected image from the glass reminds her of her age and her long tenure as the High Grantess, the highest honor bestowed for scientific prowess. But at this moment she plays the role of caretaker, as her life’s work is about to be validated. The unconscious man before her is about to prove that it is indeed possible to make the round trip through time.
It's a blur, all of it just a white blur. He tries to open his eyes wider but it does no good. He then tries to sit up, but doesn’t yet have enough command over his motor functions. He hears the voices, but is slow to make any sense of them. The transition into consciousness is a process, an arduous one at that. At the moment all he can think about is if it was real or not, the asteroid, the city with colorful lights, Cassie’s kiss. Was it all a dream?
“Grantess!” The steward frantically enters the chamber, calling to the elder woman. “Is he… alive?”
“Yes! Prepare the recovery team. We need to make sure the transition process goes smoothly, or else he’ll go into a nervous shock. Hurry!”
In the few minutes afterward as the entire facility is frantically waiting for any news, he seems to have regained some control over his facial muscles, enough to utter some type of sound.
He looks up to scan the room. It is a cold and dark uncomfortable place, about fifteen meters wide and deep, with a much higher ceiling. The chilly, crepuscular lighting is just barely enough to see the door centered opposite, with tinted observation glass flanked to both sides. His sleeping chamber is wide, parched along the wall. The vast machinery that supports the chamber continues to hum loudly, adding to his unease.
“Who… who… am… I?” It takes most of the fibers of his being to vocalize those sounds.
“Your name is Weston Hale. Please, take it easy. You’ve been out for a long time.”
“Ma… son. Mason. Where is he?” he vigorously asks, his voice slowly becoming clearer.
“Guardian Hale. Just rest. Try not to think too much right now. I promise, the answers will come in time. Over the next hours, your conscious mind in this reality will fuse with the consciousness you’ve come to know for so long.”
It’s a delicate balance she must maintain. He needs to acclimate back into his current physical world, but too much curiosity will drive him into a psychotic shock. She calmly verbally orders the machine to induce calmness, to prepare his transport into recovery.
Sihia Citadel Research Tower, Recovery Room 12A
Friend, or as he is starting to remember his true self as Guardian Hale, removes himself from beneath the sheets of the circular bed, unable to relax any further. The large room provides ample comfort, suitable for meditation and self-reflection.
The radiant sunshine from the western sky blankets the room with abundant warmth, let in by transparent pane that takes up the entirety of that wall. These are not the crude, silicon-based windows he had grown accustomed to in the primitive world he came from, no these magnetic viewports can be bent and shaped at will, and can be penetrated with ease. But at this height they would be set to hard magnetism, preventing such a feat. Through the pane he reflects on the sheer beauty of the massive waterfall, set perfectly among the crystalline towers that make up the skyline, adorned with the lush greenery growing meters high in perfect harmony with its host structures. This view of the city is a picture perfect utopia, if there ever was one.
The Grantess enters the room, breaking his concentration. Over the past few hours he reflected on his journey, and its preparation beforehand. He can finally recall her final parting words before he went into the superconscious meditation chamber, separating mind and body. She said, “Find yourself first.” Those words echo throughout the breadth of his cranium, as those very words were often spoken on his first day.
He is slowly remembering his involvement in the Time Crossers program, learning about its inception a decade ago. Time crossing entails a complete separation from mind and body to travel through time. The body here becomes lifeless as the mind wanders through the infinite expanse. It is still experimental and incredibly dangerous. The mind can be trapped in its own hellish reality, induced by extreme psychosis and manic schizophrenia. He remembers the day he boldly volunteered to go on this quest, where he was told he had a low probability he would ever return, where a great unknown awaited him. But for the sake of this great society… no humanity, he realized the importance.
Her eagerness coaxes her. She must know what he experienced. If he had the mental stamina to endure, to make it to the end beacon
that signifies the great fork in time between the great asteroid impact and its prevention, returning here safely, he must obviously be ready for debriefing.
“Weston. It is a great honor for you, becoming the first time crosser to ever go that far back in time, and make the return trip. Your mission, your knowledge is vital to our continued research. Please tell me, what can you remember?”
Weston explains, “I couldn’t remember myself, not even until the very end. I only held notions, suppositions about who I was and where I was from.”
“It was well over a thousand years ago,” the Grantess smiles, looking upon the waterfall. “No one has been able to go that far back and survive. But it was a risk we had to take.”
A man dressed in a white suit appears in the room, the automated door closing swiftly behind him. Weston recognizes him as Alka, the Grand Councilor’s chief aid. He is imposingly tall yet light-footed, one who pays excruciating attention to detail in words and etiquette. He walks over and promptly hugs the weary Hale, who still hazily considers himself Friend.
“Congratulations, Weston. You are the first to successfully cross the boundaries of time, and finally open up the all-elusive post-asteroid timeline. The council is fervently waiting for a report.”
“The post-asteroid timeline… yes.” Weston calls out, his thoughts furtherly emerging from his nebulous mind.
The post-asteroid timeline. It was the mission. Time crossers have gone back that far before, but placed their return beacon close to their spacetime insertion point, within minutes or hours, so they can conduct analysis and observation then safely return. Gaining access to the post-asteroid timeline was pivotal to the Grantess’s research, and to the great nation of Sihia. It is the holy grail of crossing—finding out why the world plunged into darkness a millennium ago, why they failed to stop the asteroid that destroyed their world, just as they were on the verge of something great. It is widely accepted that the ancient world was at the forefront of an inflection point in their evolution, close to a breakthrough that would have changed history forever.
Time, as we know it, is not a single strand, but endless strands, intermingling at infinite points, in a complex convoluted web. A crosser doesn’t just travel backwards or forwards, but jumps across. Each time he would die, he would create a new timeline in the multiverse. And so he looped over and over—endless strands sprouting from a single point in spacetime, ironically just as Cassie explained.
But a time crosser needs a beacon to return. His only chance of return was to stop the asteroid, because the return beacon exists at the very same point as the insertion one. It, of course, was inaccessible due to the asteroid impact, meaning his mission was almost sure suicide. But with his safe return, other crossers can now return to that very point, to further explore that alternate world, one where the asteroid never destroys society, but one where the nation of Sihia never exists.
Alka interrupts his train of thought. “Guardian Hale, the council wants to meet with you immediately. Peril draws close.”
Weston remembers. He has after all trained his whole life. He knows the Sihians are a peaceful society, made up of pacifists, philosophers, and dreamers. But he and other guardians have been preparing for the inevitable clash that they all hope never comes to pass, something the nation had avoided for centuries: being attacked. As time ticks, violent, barbaric forces are drawing close to their borders. The council feels an attack is imminent. If so it would be as abstruse as the ancient world. But for every problem, no matter how dire, there is an ultimate intellectual solution, and most believe that will be found by the time crossers.
“Tell us Weston, what is it like in the pre-asteroid ancient times?”
The question stokes a flash of panic in him. His heart just sinks completely inside his chest like a frightened turtle in its shell. As his dual consciousness continued to fuse together, his consciousness fixates on the inevitable truth: Mason is not Mason. Mason is High Commander Turyk Hale. Mason is his father.
“Oh the highness! Mason is my father!” Weston yelps suddenly, standing tall as he gawks his own reflection.
“Mason… what?”
“I need to go back. I need to rescue him.”
Grantess looks to sooth his weariness. “Weston, your father has died. You know this.”
Weston explains, “He did die here, in this reality, but his existence lives on.”
“Weston, you are thinking of time as sequential. If this Mason you encountered is truly the High Commander, it is his being from a long time ago.”
“No you don’t understand. He is still there, alive. I get it now. We all have an ‘other.’ It is our unconscious shadow, our alternate self endlessly plotting to destroy us. When we are killed by this other, we die here. You warned me of this. But he was never killed. He brokered a deal with his other, so that they both may live in perpetuity.”
The Grantess is perplexed. “How do you possibly plan to bring him back if he has no physical body here?”
Alka, growing impatient at the tangent this conversation took, looks to steer things back on track. “Guardian Hale. Our society is crumbling. We are besieged on all sides by bestial tribes. Your opening of the post-asteroid timeline is pivotal to our survival. Now let other time crossers explore the newly opened world and learn from it.”
Weston, fully experiencing and now understanding the world from where he came, discerns the danger. “Alka, you are playing with fire. They are savages, unevolved, endlessly violent, animalistic. They have not even begun to understand the higher power, where life evolved from. They are plagued by conflicting dogma, and many don’t believe in the outer world at all. Even the barbarians outside our nation’s walls are more esteemed.”
“That may be, but that’s up to the council to decide,” Alka explains, as both men stand tall, but Alka’s presence being much to bear. “With this new opening, we can learn so much from them. They were on the precipice of something great, something that we can use to protect our great society forever.”
“I will speak to the council. Then I will return to find my father. He possesses boundless wisdom. If I can restore his memory, we will be a key asset in our fight against the barbarians. The council will understand this.”
Weston stands along the magnetic barrier, leaning against it to look closely on the waterfall, to hear the waves crashing down. He now understands his accomplishments. He now understands the path before him. He is a guardian, one of the special few, the unabashed brave, the most strategic of minds, designated to protect their world. But if he has one chance, once chance at all to bring back his father, it is a path he has to take. After all, it was his father who help commission the Time Crosser program, and who became the first one to successfully make the trip.
Whether they like it or not, above all else, he is a time crosser.
There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
Luke 21:25-26
About the Author
Born and raised in Las Vegas, Joe Agster has always been fascinated by space travel, time travel, technology, and Asia. Eventually graduating from UNLV with a degree in computer science, he moved around a bit, making stops in Seattle and Chicago where he worked various companies big and small.
In 2015, he decided to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a sci-fi novelist, combining all those lifelong passions into one compelling story. "The Final Six Days" is his debut release.
Today, Joe lives outside Las Vegas with his wife and four children.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Dedication
Author's Note
Part 1: The Escape
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part 2: The Awakening
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
About the Author
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Dedication
Author's Note
Part 1: The Escape
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part 2: The Awakening
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
About the Author