Three months passed, and again I came home to another note on my table. This time it was shorter. It simply said:
Samantha, we need to meet. Soon. W.
One line. Rough, almost sloppy handwriting. Wanderer again.
I crumpled the note up and threw it in the garbage where it belonged.
Months passed. Work started to get rocky for me—many of the higher ups were feeling pressure to stop delivering the so called “scare pieces” I was writing, and more than one aide to an important figure had stopped by the office to “suggest” that whoever was writing such pieces stop before accusations of libel could be made. My boss stuck his neck out for me as far as he could, but in the end he could only do so much.
One month later, I was let go. There were a lot of reasons listed on the actual slip, some with a little weight—such as the accusation that I wasn’t a very good “fit” for the team—and some that were not—including an accusation of sexual harassment from a woman on another floor who already had filed six other harassment complaints that year—but I knew what the real reason was. My boss had done what he could to keep me, but in the end his boss had been the one with the final word, and she’d wanted me gone. Gone because my news stories poked at messes they didn’t want exposed; the kind of thing that stirred up trouble.
I walked out of work that day without so much as a pat on the back from anyone, my status now “persona non grata.” No one else wanted to risk being associated with a firebrand. My release had made it quite clear, in fact, that no other news agency would take me either.
Which admittedly left me in a bit of a rough spot. I had a decent savings account, but I couldn’t last on it for forever. I had enough followers and fans after my few years that I could try to go solo and start up my own site, but out from under the umbrella of the news agency I’d worked for, I’d have far less protection. There was no guarantee that I wouldn’t end up suffering some “accident” or something now that the news would be almost completely inclined not to look. And the people I’d been “bothering” were certainly the type that could arrange such.
In short, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Maybe that was why when I got home and found yet another note on my table, this time I didn’t throw it away.
It was short, about the length of the other two, but sloppy, written with a trembling hand.
Samantha. Please come. Tonight. Door unlocked. Hurry.
It hadn’t even been signed, but I knew who it was from. Wanderer. Desperate to talk to me, for some reason.
And oddly enough … I went. Maybe it was because I didn’t have anything else to do but mope about my bad luck, but I went. I got into my car, put it in drive, and began making my way across town.
On the way I tried to make sense of my actions. I felt like I should turn around, or maybe call my mother. Go back to life as I’d lived it for so long.
But something else was fighting that feeling, pushing back against it. The hollow in my chest was making itself known, shouting for me to travel onward for some reason I couldn’t fathom.
And so I did. The code to open the front gate was still the same from when I’d rented a unit of my own to get inside over a year earlier, and I could hear gravel popping against my tires as I rolled to a stop in front of Wanderer’s place. It looked the same as it always had—and probably always would, I expected.
There was no sense in putting it off. I took one last look at the note he’d left me and tossed in on the passenger seat. No one came when I knocked, but the side door was unlocked, and I let myself in. It was time to find out what was so urgent. If it was an apology, it was going to have to be a good one.
But it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t what I’d expected at all. I walked inside with my shoulders back, my chest out, and my hands clenched at my sides, ready to let Wanderer know that he needed a pretty good reason to be bugging me again … When I slowed, stalled, and then stopped, all thoughts of argument fleeing my mind. I wouldn’t need them.
Wanderer was dead, his body slumped on one of the metal seats, helmet sitting on the ground next to him. Instantly I could see what had killed him, what had done him in. There was no blood, there were no wounds. The one thing he couldn’t outrun had caught up to him at last.
Old age.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: The revelation that my once hero had been an old man, or the fact that he was dead. Both seemed improbable. I’d gone through enough phases of hero worship as a child to have gone through at least a dozen imaginary iterations of what Wanderer looked like under his helmet—but all of them had been romanticized in some way. At one point he’d been embarrassingly similar to a guy I’d been crushing on. Another time he’d been a royal “exile in hiding” type. Heck, I’d even taken some inspiration from one of my favorite games and envisioned Wanderer as a warrior woman who was only assumed to be a man.
None of those visions had ever come close to the reality that was sitting before me that night. Faint, wispy grey hair ringing a shining, waxy scalp. Pasty, almost doughy skin that was an unhealthy, almost nauseating shade of white. Not a white that said it was his natural skin color, but a disgusting, pale shade that confirmed he’d not seen the sun in decades. He’d probably burned horribly whenever he’d gone out without his suit.
I checked his pulse, of course. I had to. My fingers prodded at the soft, cold flesh around his neck, probing for some kind of sign of life. Had my life been a horror movie, that would have been the moment when his eyes snapped open, his hand wrapping itself around my wrist as he either tried to eat me alive or delivered one last, cryptic message that wouldn’t make sense until the final moments of some climactic event.
But none of that happened. Instead I pressed my fingers into the cool flesh around his neck, trying to ignore the uneasy swell of nausea that rolled through me as I probed for a pulse, and counted, giving myself a full minute of contact just in case. Nothing. I pulled my hand back and wiped my fingers against my pant leg, trying to rub the feel of Wanderer’s dead flesh away from my fingertips.
Gross. He wasn’t breathing, and there wasn’t a pulse. From the temperature of the body, he’d been dead for some time.
On the other hand, with his helmet off, I could at least get a good look at his face. The analytical part of me immediately went to work, cataloging the various features of his face and trying to pick out some clues about his past.
I didn’t get very far. First, he was old, and the ravages of age made some of his more indeterminate features even harder to identify. Second, he definitely hadn’t died in the best of health—the almost waxy look to his pale skin told me that. My medical opinion wasn’t exactly informed compared to a doctor, but I could at least see that from one perspective he hadn’t been lying. At least, I didn’t think so. He certainly looked human enough. Just generic human, or terran as he’d called it, with a serious skin condition by virtue of not getting enough sun.
Now what? I thought as I took a step back. Of the scenarios I’d pictured on my drive over, this hadn’t been one of them. I’d been expecting … well, there had been a lot of different options running through my mind, to be honest. But this? I had no idea where to go. I’d thought of arguments, counter-arguments, ways to graciously accept an apology while hinting that I wanted a better one, but this …
Well, one thing was sure. I wasn’t getting that apology. I did have access to a doozy of a story, though, if I really wanted it. I wouldn’t even have to expose the rest of Wanderer’s history.
Then again, there would be drawbacks to being the one who’d found Wanderer’s dead body. And with my name already a black mark among the local news elite, it wouldn’t be hard for them to spin my story into something that reflected negatively on me.
I almost laughed. Almost. Here I was thinking about my life and how it would change if I told anyone, and Wanderer was sitting on technology that most governments would kill to get their hands on. In fact, I could almost picture how that would go: I
’d have to call someone to report the death. Local authorities would arrive and would start to question me while the other news agencies plastered the story across the air, where if I was mentioned at all it would probably be part of some smear campaign by my last boss. I’d get maybe one or two stories from my own perspective out there from my phone before agents in black suits arrived and confiscated the entire area, myself included. I could look forward to wonderful days of being tested, poked, prodded, and interrogated on the premise of an eventual release.
Saying anything to anyone was looking less attractive by the minute. Still, I couldn’t see Wanderer inviting me to his hideout just to put some sort of difficult decision like that on me. Mostly because if he’d known that he was dying, leaving his hideout earlier that day to deliver the note to me had to have been a big risk, and I couldn’t see the self-admitted coward taking that kind of risk for a last-minute dig at me. Unless I’d left more of an impression than I’d thought.
But no, that didn’t make sense either. Because the smart thing to do would be to turn and walk away. Keep myself out of it completely. Wanderer might have been a coward, but he hadn’t been unintelligent—after all, he’d kept the entire city playing his game for years.
Which meant that it had to be some other reason. The problem was, as I stared down at the dead face of my hero, I wasn’t quite sure what that reason was.
In retrospect, it’s actually kind of embarrassing to me that it took as long as it did for me to notice what I was probably supposed to have seen the moment I walked into the storage unit. Despite my rejection of all things Wanderer in my life, I’d still given myself tunnel vision the moment I’d locked eyes on the dead time traveler.
But I couldn’t stare down at his corpse forever. For one, it was creepy. For another, eventually my mind just reached enough inconclusive thought trains that it wanted more input, and I started casting my eyes around the rest of the unit, looking for any clues, anything else that might tell me why Wanderer had wanted me to come if he’d known he was going to die.
That was when I noticed that the rear door of his ship was open.
I had to check it out. What kind of journalist—no, what kind of normal person, for that matter—could pass up the chance to see the inside of a spaceship? I rose from Wanderer’s side, my eyes fixed on the open ramp as I began to walk towards it. Like last time, the rear of the ship was facing away from me, so I couldn’t see what the inside of the ship was like until I was practically able to step inside.
It was … less futuristic than I’d expected. I’d expected an inside that looked like something out of Star Trek, all aglow with bright lights and colors. Instead, the inside of the ship looked more like something out of Alien. Simple, utilitarian. In fact, I probably could have been easily convinced it was the inside of a box truck rather than a spaceship.
The cargo he’d been hauling during his last run had been shoved to both sides, making a pathway through the middle that was worn from years of booted armor striding back and forth. The path terminated at the far wall, leading right to a door that I assumed opened into what had been Wanderer’s living space.
The cargo itself was a little unusual. I’d expected based on his description to see cardboard and wood, the same materials we used. Instead, the variety of crates and containers stretched across the small bay seemed to mostly be metal. I couldn’t see any way to get inside of them either. I stepped up to one of a set of six, tall, rectangular crates that almost resembled large, upright lockers, getting a closer look at what I guessed was the front of each. Outside of a small discolored patch in the metal, I couldn’t see any sign of how to get in. I couldn’t even tell what was in them; the only labels that I could see were simple, stark barcodes—something completely unhelpful to me without a reader. I gave one of them a push, but it didn’t budge. Whatever was inside of it, it was heavy.
I continued forward. The metal door separating the cargo bay from the rest of the ship didn’t pose any significant challenge, opening easily as I tugged the handle to one side and sliding aside into the superstructure of the ship. So it had doors that slid into the walls. There was at least one feature of the ship that fit with what I’d seen on television.
I’m not sure what I’d been expecting when the door finally opened on the rest of Wanderer’s ship, but I do remember feeling distinctly disappointed. From appearances, it wasn’t much—there was a small bed, a small bathroom with what looked like a very narrow shower, and a small kitchen set that appeared to fold out of the wall. Beyond them sat a huge row of control, switches and gauges that looked a lot like the cockpit of a commercial jet. If it hadn’t been for Wanderer’s armor and everything else I’d seen, I probably would have assumed that that was what it was.
Maybe it didn’t help that all of it was off, and that the only light was coming from a small bar over the bed, but again, it didn’t look at all like I’d envisioned. In fact, the only thing that did was the small set of robotic limbs folded along the wall near the bed. I wasn’t sure what they were for or what he’d used them for, but the way they were folded into the wall reminded me a bit of a waiting spider. I felt a shiver run down my spine.
Still, that aside, the cockpit and living area didn’t exactly scream “future” to me. That is, not until Wanderer himself appeared in the center of the room.
I screamed. Not my proudest moment, certainly, but looking back I feel pretty justified in the reaction. One minute I was staring at empty, open air, the next moment Wanderer himself, sans helmet, was standing in the middle of the cockpit. I jerked back, slamming the back of my head into the low-hanging doorframe and letting out a curse that would have had my mother on my case for weeks.
“Wanderer!” I shouted as I shook my head and pulled my eyes up from the deck. “What in the hell are you …”
I let my voice trail off. It wasn’t Wanderer. Not really. Now that I was looking at him, I could see that something was off. His body was glowing, putting out a soft light that was softly shading the rest of the room. Not only that, but he was translucent. By squinting, I could just barely make out the shape of the pilot’s seat behind him.
From there, it took my searching eyes only a moment to trace out the faint points of light in the corners of the room that served as the source of what I was seeing. I took a step forward and waved a hand across one of them, watching as the image of Wanderer distorted and shifted, the colors bleeding into one another until I pulled my hand away. Then I waved a hand through the image itself. Nothing.
It was a hologram. I felt a brief sense of validation. At least something on the ship was similar to what I’d expected the future to look like. A small part of me shouted that it was marketable too. Very marketable. I could probably retire the day after I filed a patent on something like that.
I pulled my hand back and looked at the image a bit more closely. No, I realized as I watched it blink. Not an image. A recording? Judging from the weary, ragged look to Wanderer’s face, it had been made recently. Very recently. He looked almost dead.
A rattling hiss echoed from somewhere in the room, and I jerked once more before realizing that Wanderer was taking a deep breath.
“Hello, Samantha,” he said, his voice raspy, with an odd lilt to the way he spoke, like he was fighting to push the words out but just barely getting them past his lips. He sounded weak. No, more than that. I was hearing his voice without the suit’s distortion. That was why his voice had sounded odd during our interview. It had been an accent, yes, but he’d also been old.
“If you’re hearing this, it means that you finally came. That, or you somehow bludgeoned your way past whoever found my body, and in that case I’m sorry, because upon hearing this, some people in dark suits are going to have a lot of questions for you. If that’s what happened, well, then it’s your fault for coming at the wrong time.” He paused, sagging. He was visibly winded by his speech.
“Either way, this message was set only to play for your voice, and no one el
se’s.”
“Get to the point,” I growled as he caught his breath once more. Even though it was just a recording, I was feeling a familiar, angry flame swell in my chest as he spoke. As sick as he looked, I still couldn’t feel sorry for him.
“I guess, in a way, this is my last will and testament,” he said, and for a moment a look of deep sadness moved across his face, his eyes falling towards the floor. “I’d hoped to be able to give this to my kids, but I guess this is what life is going to give me.”
“Now,” he said, pausing to take a deep breath. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry for what I did.” His eyes came back upwards, looking roughly in my direction. “Just try to understand, all I wanted to do was get back home to my family. I never asked to fight in that piss-dogged war, I never asked to get blown through time. I guess your city was asking for a hero, and it thought it got what it wanted. I’ve been selfish, and a coward, but I’m not sorry about it.” He shook his head. “I just wanted to go home again.”
“But that doesn’t mean what you said that night wasn’t true. I’ve always been a coward, Samantha, through most of my life. I’m flawed. Even if I’d wanted to, I never could have been the hero that this city wanted. I did good, sure, but for my own, selfish reasons. I was never going to get home, but I wouldn’t accept that. Now—” A cough ripped through him, and for a moment his message was disrupted as his body jerked, his hands coming up in front of his mouth as he shook. Loud, wet, guttural barks echoed through the cockpit.
“Now I’m forced to admit that I’m never going home,” he said, wiping his mouth. Something dark and wet shone against the back of his armored hand. “I couldn’t go home even if I wanted to. More and more I’m certain that this was never my timeline to begin with; too much doesn’t add up.”
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head. “My suit is telling me that I’m going to die soon. Has been for a while. I was sixty when I came here, and I never did take good care of myself before.” He coughed again, and I began to wonder if there was a point to his rambling. Was this it? One final message to justify himself and his actions?
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