by Amy Field
Vanda turned and quickly ran towards the open door of the mine lift that stood at the far end of the platform that he had been working on. The lift door was open and, inside, men in mining suits were gesticulating for him to hurry. But as he got a few meters from the door, he tripped and fell forwards, landing with a bump flat on his face.
The screen of his helmet instantly cracked and then imploded. Vanda held his breath as the spice-filled air began to fill the inside of the helmet. With his eyes and mouth tightly closed, he got up and started running blindly in the direction of the lift. He felt a hand grab him and escort him inside, the door slamming behind them, followed by the sound of hundreds of little creatures scrambling all over the entrance.
“Should be safe,” came a reassuring voice out of the darkness.
But Vanda was too busy on the floor to pay any attention. Another suited miner knelt down beside him, trying to recompress his space helmet, the toxic atmosphere slipping into Vanda’s lungs. He was being exposed to the spice. He just lay there, choking on the air until he lost consciousness.
Vanda awoke, his head aching, a thin sheet of frosty sweat covering his anemic skin and his vision blurred, as it always was when he awoke. His time lapse needed to adjust itself to the temporal field. Only in his dreams was he able to live within the current moment and even then it was always a flashback or flash forward of some kind.
That day in the spice mine, Vanda had been exposed to one of the universe’s most unstable minerals: Kessalon spice. It was used to fuel the space gates that dotted the known universe and transported cargos and people from planet to planet, solar system to solar system, galaxy to galaxy through wormholes.
Vanda had left school with only a class four education, so it was either picking up trash on Earth or taking his chances on the colonies, where the prospect of big money was just as great as the possibility of death.
Hell, it nearly did kill poor Vanda.
After his exposure, he spent damn near four years in an off world institute being treated for temporal distortion. He had become a ‘shifter’ the doctors at the institute told him and would probably never be able to see the present temporal moment again. The spice had distorted his temporal field and from now on he would always see the future as opposed to the current moment. So if he looked into the corner of a room, he would only see what happens in that space in the future, not what was going on in the current moment.
At the Institute, doctor Kelvin taught Vanda how to meditate to get his times lapses down. With careful focus, he could get himself back to seeing around three or five seconds into the future. A man could live a normal life seeing just three seconds into the future. They also gave him medication for his lapses.
Vanda got up and walked over to one of the walls in his four feet by eight feet closet of an apartment.
“Medication, please,” Vanda muttered.
The wall opened up into a mini bathroom, complete with large cracked mirror, small medical cupboard and water basin. Vanda took his pill and washed it down with a glass of water. He then checked his lapse measurement from a little device that was stitched into the skin of his right forearm. He was currently thirty seconds ahead. “Not bad,” he thought. “The pill should kick in in half an hour and then I should be down to a cool ten or so seconds.”
Vanda decided to meditate. Through meditation, he had brought his temporal field down to around two seconds before, which was magnificent, and regularly got it down to around three. When he had first been admitted to the Institute, having been pulled out of that mine on the precipice of death, Vanda was three hours ahead. He couldn’t even walk and spent his whole time staring into space in his room. He wore a padded jacket for a full year while his temporal field calmed down, and the majority of the spice left his cells.
It was impossible to communicate with him because he was always living in the future; he could only ever answer the questions that you hadn’t yet asked. How would you go about striking up a conversation with someone who can only hear, at that moment, the things that you’re going to say in three hours time?
But over the course of four years, Vanda got his lapse down to around fifteen seconds maximum with his meds and regular meditation. With his improved condition, he was able to apply successfully for release back on Earth as an official ‘shifter’. This meant that the government would always keep tabs on him and keep him under surveillance, but he was free to live amongst society. He was chipped with a monitoring tracker and legally obliged to take his medication and regularly visit his contact, doctor Kelvin. His apartment was under constant surveillance, with every aspect of his private life recorded, but then again whose apartment wasn’t under surveillance in 2589?
He was also obligated to do certain favours for the government — ‘contracts’ they were called — and these involved helping the government to look into certain matters for them, help out, in particular, with issues. He mostly worked alongside the military on operations involved in taking on The Cause.
The Cause was a terrorist organisation that was trying to take on the government of Earth and bring about a socialist revolution that would see an end to the awful poverty that existed in the lower levels of the giant sprawling cities of the world. Even with all the minerals and resources coming back from the colonies; people still felt the need to uphold inequality. The Cause had aimed to shake up the world in helter skelter. But Vanda had seen destruction in them too. Death seemed to follow The Cause around like a dark spirit and while working with the military, he had seen, firsthand, several attacks by the organisation. In fact, he had prevented several of their attacks by seeing where they would take place and then relaying the information to the government.
Vanda worked in a large military complex designed primarily for shifters. They would have him adjust his lapse to one hour and simply sit him in front of a television screen with the news on. He, of course, would see the news an hour in the future. Once a news report came on the telling of an attack, he would simply have to write its time and location down on a piece of paper. This gave the military about an hour to stop the attack. Often he would sit for eight hours, and nothing would come on, a good day, as he called it. He worked two days a week, any more and he could stress his time lapse too much, doing nothing more than sit in front of a screen waiting for the news to announce a forthcoming atrocity.
He would see the scenes of future horror playing out on the channel; explosions; lines of bloodied bodies; masked men and woman running around with automatic pulse rifles. They were blasting innocent people as well as military forces; he saw plasma charges exploding, the blast field sending out a wave of chemical fire that decimated anything in its path, whether that was a crowd of people or a line of transports. He saw the anti-gravitation pods that the government forces used in retaliation, the things going off and creating a field of anti-gravity that reversed the Earth’s core gravitational field. It threw everything within it into the atmosphere; people were screaming as they flew up into the air, great big pieces of buildings flying up there too, people at the windows, screaming, jumping out. Carnage is what Vanda saw in The Cause; not freedom.
Today, though, he felt good. If he could get his lapse down to three seconds, then he would get to go out on his electromagnetic pulse bike (EPB). Those three seconds would give him a great advantage out on the slipstream of traffic that careered through the skies of the mega city, Neo York. With three seconds he could zip in and out of the other vehicles always one step ahead of their movement. It was the only real exhilaration that he got from his ‘abilities’, although he had received several warnings from the government for his careless riding skills. He wasn’t allowed to use his time shifting for any personal advantage other than those offered him by the government.
But it didn’t stop him.
He sat on his bed in the lotus position attempting to clear his mind and rein in his time lapse, ready for his ride. But this morning he found it difficult. His mind kept drifting forwards in
to the future. He hoped that his meds would kick in soon, but for now, his mind was racing forward. He felt something pulling his thoughts into the future and suddenly he was hit with a vision.
He saw a massive explosion coming out of the side of a building made up of lots of neon pictures— advertising. People were screaming and running for cover. He was standing in some open courtyard suspended between two large buildings. He thought that he recognised it as Neo Time Square. The building that had just exploded appeared to be one of the stock exchange buildings on East Wall Street. People began running past him, panicked expressions on their faces. Behind them were masked figures: The Cause. Military police shock troopers, who were setting off anti-gravitational devices, people blasting up into the air, screaming, were chasing them. The Cause was firing back with photon blasters and pulse rifles. All around droids fought with each other and with people on both sides. Innocent people were being hit in the crossfire and going up in pink flames, their whole body ionised.
But then in the midst of the carnage, Vanda spotted a woman. Her red hair shone and sparkled in the electric sun which ordained the building behind them. Her face was covered with hundreds of red freckles, and Vanda wondered whether he had seen her before somewhere. She was beautiful. He suddenly realised that he didn’t know her personally, but had seen her in several of his visions over the past few weeks. The redhead had become a regular feature of many of his dreams and visions of late.
She was running from the shock troopers, but would stop and turn now and then to fire back at them, her hair flitting around as she did so. She was clearly a member of the Cause. There was something about her, though, like a halo of light existed within her and threatened to break loose any moment and incinerate the world.
She ran past Vanda, who just stood and watched everything nonchalantly, fully aware that it was naught but a vision to him. As she passed him, the girl turned to look back at Vanda and in the expression that she gave, she appeared to recognise him. She stopped just past Vanda and began shouting something to him that he couldn’t hear over the sounds of the general screaming, gunfire and explosions. She appeared to want him to go with her.
But suddenly she was hit in the upper torso by a photon collider, her chest splitting open as the beam shot through her entire body, bursting out of her back. Her face instantly went dead.
Vanda screamed out.
He opened his eyes. Still on his bed.
“That wasn’t good,” he said to himself.
O was preparing the last of the sentry droids. Kale and the other programmers had programmed them sufficiently to survive around an hour before the military programmers could override their firewalls and reprogram them; potentially turning them on their former masters. Soon she would load them into the back of the transport, and they would be heading into the centre of Neo Manhattan and towards another suicide mission. Through their spies in the government, they had heard that the chancellor of the world bank would be visiting the stock exchange in person this very day to give a speech.
She prayed that government shifters hadn’t found out about their plans and that the government wasn’t already laying in wait for them. The Cause had a sufficient amount of their own shifters to put a temporal block over the government stooges and distort their visions, but even they could be foiled.
She finished loading the transport with a couple of the other members and then went off to examine the three other transports that would be loaded with weapons and personnel. That is personnel that were willing to use those weapons for the Cause, risking death to disrupt the status quo and change the future.
The fight had been going on for nearly a century now after the first shifters had come back from Kessalon telling tales of destiny in chains. They had foreseen in their visions a future of prosperity for the minority at the expense of the majority. They saw millions of people; children included, starving to death down in the lower streets of the world’s great cities while above the skyline others lived the lives of angels. The change had to come.
The long fight had been bloody, and millions upon millions of innocent deaths had been reported, as well as huge body counts on both sides. The insurrection of Neo Tokyo back in 2566 claimed the lives of thirty million people alone.
But it was war and people like O had come to accept this aspect of their lives; that they and everyone else were expendable so long as they fought against the dark future that those first great sages of the future came back from Kessalon to warn them about. Each side held the future in their hands and the present moment could wait until the war was won. They fought for the future at the expense of the present.
Once the final checks were achieved, O boarded one of the transports. Then all four black transports, the words Parcel Force sliding all over their surfaces, exited the large warehouse that sat deep in Old Queens, towards the bottom of the city. Soon they joined the general traffic of the airway and were heading towards Neo Manhattan.
Sat in the front of O’s transport with her was Kale and Bow. Kale was a computers expert and put his magician like hacking skills at the Cause’s disposal. Bow was ex-military, like O, and was once a gunner on a photon rig out on some government colony. He had seen firsthand what the government was capable of during his time serving in ‘Operation Clean Up’.
‘Operation Clean Up’ included the complete genocide of all indigenous species on all off-world colonies that got deemed dangerous, which included anything that was remotely hostile. This included practically everything, because when something invades your planet you tend to get a little hostile.
O had also been on these interplanetary clean up operations and had herself been part of activities designed to clean through whole communities of indigenous species; burning them down with chemical fires and gassing them with nerve agents— their twitching bodies lying on the ground, foam spilling out of their mouths.
People like Bow and O had their hearts broken out there and very nearly lost their minds. The Cause offered them a form of redemption and a true calling for their fighting skills.
“Everything good with the droids?” O asked the runt-like Kale.
“For the twentieth time, yes,” he answered from beside her.
“They cost us a hell of a lot, and we’re using practically all that we’ve got for this,” O stated.
“Don’t worry, chief,” Kale assured her, “they're not wasted.”
O then rubbed a cross that she had on a chain around her neck. It was an old relic from the times before moral rejection. Nowadays it was illegal to own a religious text or artifact, but some still existed on the black market. When she had come back from the colonies, broken at the atrocities that she had helped commit, she found the old religions comforting. Their tales of a world with morals, altruism, equality and shared humanity inspired her to join the Cause.
“I’ve always been meaning to ask, O,” Bow remarked from the pilot’s seat, “why you always rub that cross?”
“It’s good luck,” O muttered.
“You believe in luck?” Kale blurted out in disbelief.
“Yes, I do,” O slowly pronounced.
“Even though we now have people who see into the future and know that everything is predetermined. Because I’m afraid that leaves out mystical calculations such as luck.”
“The future can change, can’t it,” O spat back.
“Yeah, but only if the present is changed before the future has a chance to happen— meaning that one event always causes another; there is no such thing as luck within it.”
“I don’t know about you two,” Bow stated in his gruff voice, “but I’ve felt something else around me a few times; as if some entity or force was looking over me at that moment.”
“Are we talking about luck or the possibility of God here?” Kale interjected.
“Let’s just concentrate on the mission, guys,” O asserted.
They all shut up after that and made their way through the heavy traffic of the city’s airway,
clogged up with the midday congestion. The city towered up around them in massive formations of black metal and glass, neon lights glittering upon every surface in pulses, as if the city itself were alive and breathing. Below them, they could see nothing of the ground, which lay some three thousand metres below. The thick fog that rose up from down there often climbed to around a thousand meters in height and blocked any chance for those trapped beneath it to see up and those above it to see down. It was those poor wretches deep in the foggy ruins of the city that the Cause fought for.
As they neared a checkpoint on the edge of Neo Manhattan, O made a signal to the others, and each of them pressed a device on their wrists. Their bodies instantly began to convulse, and their facial muscles began recoiling into the most awful spasms like they were having a hundred strokes at once. After a minute or so their bodies relaxed and, with their faces now completely distorted, they each appeared entirely different in appearance. On their wrist devices, a counter began ticking down from ten minutes.
“No matter how many times I have to go through meta-morphing,” Kale remarked, “it still feels like taking a beating from fifty guys all in a twenty-second period.”
They pulled up to the checkpoint. On either side of them, genetic scanners burst with light beams that examined their genetic makeup. The metamorphosis would last ten minutes and in the meantime, their genetic codes would be changed. Kale had been hacking government files for the past month looking for the bio codes of city employees. Once he found them, he then programmed the codes into the teams meta-devices ready for use when they came to the security checkpoints. They had ten minutes before the process would become unstable, changing them instantly back. And ten minutes to get through this checkpoint, followed by another two, before entering the New World Stock Exchange.
Soon they were given the all clear and rumbled off, re-entering the slipstream of morning traffic. The city tower up over their heads so high they could barely see the sky above. It looked like a thin strip of blue river hovering over them. All the light where they were was artificial.