“What…why? How?” Mat slurred, forcing himself upright. His side screamed at him and his head swam, but he locked eyes with Raul. Tears filled Raul’s eyes and the gun trembled in his hand, but he steadied his arm on Foresight’s coffin and kept the barrel leveled at Mat.
“How could you do this?” Raul demanded. “I thought it was the Golden Ruler who had gone crazy, but it was you!”
“How?” Mat asked. Though the question was vague, Raul understood his meaning.
“Golden said that Foresight was gone, had been taken by the government. I knew that he hadn’t, but I figured that she must be right about him being gone, if for no other reason than that your op wouldn’t have worked if Foresight had been there to warn her. So I took Chronicle to his apartment and had him Read what had happened. Golden told me the day that he went missing. Chronicle read me the entire story of what went on.
“You took him!” Raul went on, his voice rising. “You kidnapped him and you locked him up in this…this thing. What is it even for?”
“Disaster prevention,” said Mat. He tasted blood, thick in the back of his mouth. He swallowed and continued. “Read the output. We were fixing things, making things better.”
“By imprisoning Foresight? He was a hero! He made things better! You could have just asked him!”
“He was…facade.” Mat swallowed again. He was finding it hard to focus. “Fake. Treacherous. Had to…be stopped.”
In his left eye, the diagnostics from Foresight’s coffin still showed their relentless rise. His heartbeat was up to fifty beats per minute, his temperature almost normal. Mat summoned up his strength for a final plea.
“You can still fix this,” he told Raul. “Trust me. Trust your friend.”
Mat coughed, and blood spattered the floor. “I did...what I had to do. Don’t let it—”
In the diagnostic feed, a new alarm lit up. Unable to find the strength to rise from the floor to see what was happening, Mat called up the video feed instead. He was just in time to see Foresight, his lips curved into a slight smile, slowly open his eyes.
XXI
“And so we find ourselves here.”
“And so we find ourselves here,” says Foresight, almost amiably. He gazes down at the bloodied, broken man before him, an artist admiring his handiwork.
Director Mathias Roche’s breathing bubbles in his throat, every painful gasp an effort. “How?” he manages. He swallows, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth as he does so. “How...d’you know?”
“Well. When I say ‘and so we find ourselves here,’ that implies a bit more directness than is quite true. Obviously, my first move upon waking was to step back several months to the night where you took me.”
Foresight shook his head, his expression a tight, fixed smile. “Oh, you should have seen Golden’s face. She came downstairs to a bloodbath, to absolute carnage.”
Roche’s eyes flick past Foresight, taking in the blood painting the walls of his control center. Foresight, noticing, waves his hand dismissively. “This was nothing. This was surgical compared to how I was that night. That was savagery, pure hate. Killing you wasn’t enough. I had to destroy you, eradicate you.
“Do you understand what you managed?” Foresight asks. He leans in closely enough that Roche can see the individual droplets of blood flecked across his face, a tiny constellation of destruction. Their eyes lock, Foresight’s burning with an intense rage, Roche’s struggling to hold on to life. “Do you know what you did? I am a god. I have lived countless lifetimes, spent eons tracing and retracing this same period, trying out every permutation. I have spent months of subjective time on a single conversation, adjusting the tiniest details until everything is perfect. Every glance, every gesture, every word choice serves my purpose, because if it does not, I simply step back and try again.
“Time means nothing to me. I am older than civilization, older than language, older than the human race itself. My span of years is my prison, but it is also my domain. I am inviolate here. None can stop me. None can touch me. I can simply try and try again. If something will happen only one time in a billion, I will do it a billion times until it works.
“And you very nearly took that away from me! You succeeded where no one ever could, where no one should have been able to. You defeated a god. And I, the all-powerful, escaped only through the sheerest luck. You nearly took an eternity away from me. And that, the expression of that rage, of that loss, is what Golden walked into that night, what she saw when she came downstairs. That was what remained of your body. I tore you apart with my teeth. When I was done, I stepped back and did it again. And again.”
“You’re mad,” whispers Roche.
“Unquestionably. I murdered her too, you know. The entire city ran red a thousand times over before I calmed myself enough to let go of that night. I vented my rage and my fear in a fury the likes of which the world had never seen. And which, I suppose, they still never have. It lives in my head, but nowhere else.
“And then I began my investigation. I had to know how you had done what you had done. And since you were certainly unlikely to tell me, at least all at once, I teased the story out of a hundred different people. Some did not even know that they had a piece of it, but over the millennia I have learned infinite patience. I can spend a decade tracking a target, replaying minutes and seconds until I have the information I need.
“‘So we find ourselves here.’ We do, yes. But it’s possible that it took me twenty years to assemble the story I have just told you. To learn every perspective, understand every motivation. Hostile sources, unwitting sources, sources of information that in this timeline would never actually come to pass—I cobbled them all together and reconstructed what you did and how and why you did it.
“LUAU—”
“Doesn’t exist, yes. In this timeline, this version, I never agreed to help you set it up. Through passive resistance and active, hidden discouragement, I prevented it from ever happening. It should have formed nine years ago, but I have kept it or anything like it from coming together. I have minimized our interactions and kept Foresight as the heroic standard of justice.
“And yet. When I told you this was self-defense, you knew exactly what I meant. Even here, even now, the seeds of your plan exist. Do you deny it?”
“You’re...a danger.”
Foresight laughed. “I am danger. Also hope and salvation, hell and retribution. I am a hero, but I have been a villain, and I will be again. I have been justice and perversion, altruist and demon. Through it all, I have been and will remain a god.
“For seeking to stop that, I condemn you to nonexistence. I will kill you here, and then I will step back and do it again. Not immediately, not in a blood rage like I did the night where you showed me my mortality, but with purpose. I will step back and back until I find a time, a life where you are no longer a threat to me, and you will never be allowed any path but that.
“Nothing you built here will ever exist. Nothing you were proud of here will ever happen. This I take away from you.”
And so saying, Foresight raises his knives and drives one into each of Roche’s eyes. Bloody jelly spurts forth as Roche’s body spasms a single time, broken limbs flopping, and then all is quiet.
Foresight withdraws his knives and takes off his blood-soaked jacket. He drapes it gently over the body before him, using it as a makeshift shroud. Blood slowly seeps through the fabric, staining the staring gold eye and turning its rays into bloody spears.
The sound of shouting and running footsteps comes from the hall, but Foresight takes one more moment to gaze upon Roche’s fallen form. He has, after all, all the time in the world.
“We will meet again,” he says to the corpse. “And again, and again.”
And then, with less than a thought, he steps back.
Mat Roche, age eighteen, wanders out of the testing center with a shell-shocked look on his face. Doomed to be a Null, an Uggo, he sees his dreams falling apart, his life featu
reless and empty before him.
“So man, how’d it go?” A voice in his ear, a projected image in his eye. His friend Judah is waving him. Mat sighs and thumbs the call accept on his earpiece.
“Bad. Turns out I’m a Null.”
“An Uggo, huh?” The projection of Judah hovering in front of him makes a sympathetic face. “I mean, that’s still cool, though. At least you’ve got something! Physical or mental?”
“Mental. Reader. Sibyl. I’m a good judge of character,” Mat says in a monotone. “So no, not really much of—”
A motion catches his eye. A young boy, no more than six years old, is laughing as he kicks a soccer ball. Mat’s guts twist as he realizes that the ball is heading for the road. The child, heedlessly chasing, has not seen the oncoming car. Parked cars are similarly hiding the boy from the driver. Only Mat, from his position, can see everything that’s about to happen.
“Wait! Kid, wait! No!”
Mat sprints for the road, waving his arms frantically. In his ear, Judah is shouting questions. The child has entered the road. The driver, eyes wide, slams on the brakes. The child looks up in terror, frozen. In a desperate dive, Mat lunges for the boy, shoving him out of the way. With a shattering crunch, the bumper of the car strikes Mat’s head, bashing him to the ground. The front wheel skids over his chest as the car, far too late, comes to a halt.
The driver scrambles from the car and leans over Mat, asking him something. Judah is calling his name over and over through the earpiece, and their voices mix together.
These waves really are well-engineered, Mat thinks inanely. That earpiece just survived a car crash.
Every breath is a symphony of knives. He can feel blood pooling in his ear, trickling down his cheek. His vision is blurry, barely functional, but he looks around for the boy. Did he save him?
The child comes into view. His knees are scraped and his elbows bloody, but he is otherwise unhurt. Mat sighs in relief. It was worth it.
The boy leans in close, looking intently into Mat’s eyes. He says something.
“Wha...what?” Mat asks thickly. Broken teeth scrape against his tongue. He can feel a deep lake of blood in his mouth, but even the idea of swallowing hurts.
The boy touches Mat’s face, focusing his attention. “Self-defense,” he says again. He watches Mat’s eyes.
“I don’t….” Mat says, trailing off. His eyes flutter closed, then open again, then closed.
“Then this is far enough,” says the boy, mostly to himself. A crowd has begun to gather, gasping and chattering amongst themselves. The driver is crying, telling everyone that it was an accident, a terrible accident.
The boy’s parents appear, his mother shrieking his name. With a quiet smile and one last look down at the man who almost defeated him, the boy allows himself to be led away.
AFTERWORD
I hope you’ve enjoyed Retroactivity! This is where I would traditionally cajole you to leave a positive review of the book online, and who am I to break with tradition? So please, if you liked the book, let others know. That way I get rich and famous, and you get hipster cred for being able to say that you knew about me before I got big. Are hipsters still a thing? I don’t know. I’ve been inside, writing.
If you’re not quite done with the world of Retroactivity yet, head over to http://retroactivityserial.wordpress.com. There you can find backstories on some of the characters, tales told more from their perspective. There were a lot of interesting facets that didn’t fit into the main storyline, and I’ve expanded on a few of them there.
While you’re browsing around the internet, stop by http://micah-edwards.com and see what else I’m writing. You can also sign up for my mailing list, become an advance reader for upcoming books, and more!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Micah Edwards is an author, a comedian, or a database administrator, depending on the day of the week. He also runs with Richmond, Virginia’s chapter of the Hash House Harriers, an international running and drinking club.
Micah’s works range from the serious to the absurd. He has written superhero noir, fairy tales for adults, Edgar Allan Poe for children and the Bible for the non-religious.
Micah writes frequently but irregularly on the subreddit NoSleep. He maintains a weekly online serial, and this and other projects can be found at http://micah-edwards.com.
He should probably narrow his focus. He’s also probably not going to.
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