We left the hospital as soon as I got changed. Long black jeans hid my new prosthetic legs and a fresh set of blue shirt and grey cotton jacket warded against the breezy temperature. Though the robotic legs are functioning properly and I was capable of standing, they moved too slowly as they had not fully synchronised with my neural pathways yet. Thus, I ended up leaving the front door of the hospital in a wheelchair.

I had thought the world was bright upon waking up, that the light in the room was blinding. Once outside though, I realized just how wrong I was as my senses were bombarded with the colours and luminosity of the pale, azure-tinted sunlight.

Agent Matthews walked next to me. At his full standing height, he was a towering 2.1 meters, a full 30 centimetres taller than I would be when standing. He had offered to push my wheelchair but I declined, saying I should do such simple things myself.

“As you wish,” he had replied. His tone and manners reminding me of a butler, complete with a suit.

A black sedan was pulled up at the entrance with another man-in-black waiting by the car. This one had a full head of brown, ruffled hair. Instead of shades, this other agent wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and had deep brown eyes and a scar across his lips.

As we approached, Matthews introduced, “My partner, Agent Golph.”

“Call me G,” Golph cut in. He was audibly friendlier than Matthews. The standard good cop, bad cop. Mutt and Jeff. The sticky and the stickler.

“Agent G,” I replied, “Now that's a spy name.”

G opened the passenger side door for me and offered to help me in. I waved his hand away and slowly stood from the wheelchair before slowly pushing myself into the back seat. I lifted my new, heavier legs into the car with my hands. Matthew loaded the wheelchair into the trunk and took the driver seat while G went the long way around and sat beside me. In just a few seconds, the engine was started and we were out of the hospital's vicinity.

The engine was relatively quiet and the car's radio was turned off, dragging out the silence that had fallen in the vehicle.

Breaking the stillness in the air, I turned to G and asked one of the millions of questions on my mind. “Does my family know about this? I know we're under time constraints but I would like to see them again before going under.”

G, his voice with a hint of southern accent, replied, “Your wife was told an hour before you. She's on the way to the lab with your daughter now,” he removed his glasses and took out a piece of cloth from his shirt pocket to clean it. “Your mother and father are being escorted there as well.”

“And they're all okay with me doing this?” I asked a question which, in hindsight, I should have asked the moment the proposal for turning myself into a time ice pop came up.

Agent G stopped cleaning his glasses, put them back on, and kept the cloth. “I think that's something you should ask them yourself.”

I turned away from G, pondering the decision I made to be frozen, in order to save the world from a future I was not sure was going to happen. The city buildings of New Roagnark scraped the skies. Each one with their non-reflective solar panelled windows glowing under the setting sun, bathing the cityscape with a light teal. Hundreds of cement towers, held up by metal, wrapped in glass, unwavering even as they touched the heavens themselves.

Another question popped into my mind. “How did you guys know?”

G replied, “Know what?”

“That the world was going to end in a hundred and thirty-nine years? Kind of a specific number if you asked me,” I asked.

Matthews took a left turn onto a ramp and up onto the highway. “Your grandfather wrote a song that predicted the future,” the bald agent said nonchalantly.

At first, I thought he was telling a joke and I waited for the punchline. When I realized he was serious, I replied, “Wait, what?”

I looked to G who returned a look that said, Crazy, I know. But it's true.

Still disbelieving, I said, “You guys expect me to believe that my grandfather, a car mechanic, predicted the future with a song?”

Matthews, eyes still on the road, replied, “Doesn't matter if you believe us or not. Truth is the truth. We don't know how he does it, or why it only appears in songs, but he has never once been off. And technically, they're not songs either. They're hymns.”

“Wait, this isn't the only prediction he's had?”

G stared at me with a looked as if I've gone insane, which he reiterates when he says, “What are you? Nuts? The Forum wouldn't trust a guy for just one prediction.”

Oh sure, I sarcastically thought. Predictions of the future are like job experience after all.

Matthews continued, “What we know is that he was there sixty five years ago when the Mist came in. You know, the blue gas that's been hanging in our sky since we've been born?”

“Yeah,” I replied, nipping. “I'm dying from 'Mist Poisoning' aren't I?” the Mist had become a staple of our lives. A blue, high altitude gas that hangs in their own atmospheric layer, covering the planet. Poisonous to anyone who inhales it in large quantity, though not common as they never drop below their altitude enough to reach most of our noses. I was just unlucky, stumbling onto an air pocket of it by accident during a stroll through the park.

“Right,” Matthew answered. “After that, your grandfather predicted over a dozen events that are said to have been pivotal turning points in the history of mankind and prevented millions of death. The Battle at Orion. Little Haven Power Outage. The financial crash two decades ago. He got them all.”

“You're kidding?” I asked, to no reply. I assumed that the two agents were tired of explaining something they themselves felt was the truth so I moved on to my next question. “And what's this hymn that's suppose to have predicted the end of the world?”

Matthew said, “G? I'm driving.”

“Urgh...fine. Let's see...” G gave a few seconds of thoughts before starting the hymn to the familiar tune of The Chosen Way, the old boy scout hymn I used to sing as a child.

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Lost to the Father upon the end of days

The years will be coming where he will lose his way

For all the darkness that covered all men's reign

A light will shine, with my blood in his vein

Time will cease when the days turn into years

My son to son will quell all your fears

From limped till the end in one-three-nine days

He'll lead us through the last turns of the maze

Don't say it, I told myself. Hold it in, I reinforced. “That was a gay-ass song.” I hate me.

“I didn't write it,” G replied. “And before you ask, I don't know what the hell it means either. That's up to all the smart people to decide.”

“He means the decoders,” Matthew cut in. “We're here by the way. You got any more questions, you can ask Professor Hullway when we see her. She'd be able to tell you more.”

I leaned to the side of my seat to look out the front window as a building rose from the horizon. A clean, dome-shaped, grey structure stretched from end to end of the wind-shield. Like all the other buildings of New Roagnark, the E.F.A Headquarters was covered in non-reflective solar-window panels, glowing a slightly blue hue under the Mist tainted sun.

Matthews took the next exit that came up, and from the cross junction after, took a left turn onto the empty road towards the E.F.A Headquarters. Chain-linked fences surrounded the building; with only one concrete, arc-shaped guard house building at the end of the road that doubled as the entrance with a metal mesh gate.

As we drove up to the guard house at the end of the road, Matthews took a card out from inside his jacket pocket and held it out the window. A red light beamed from one of the security cameras of the guard house, following and scanning the card he held. Once the light disappeared, the metal mesh gate rose into the building and Matthew drove through without slowing down.

We drove up to the parking plate in front of the lobby entrance. G got out of the car first to retrieve my wheelchair, followed by Matthew after popping open the trunk. I opened my passenger side door and lifted my prosthetics out, dangling along the edge of the seat like a child on a swing. I stared blankly to my new limbs, still unsure of how exactly I should feel towards them before looking up to the front entrance of E.F.A HQ. The darkened glass automated door extruded a foreboding aura of what laid beyond them.

As G rolled my wheelchair to me, the glass doors parted ways and a woman in a white lab coat walked out.

“Professor Hullway,” Matthew greeted her before pointing to me. “This is Milton Jones. The subject for Project Dawn.”

“Yes Agent Matthews, I can guess that,” she replied snidely, her long, golden blond hair waving behind her lab coat, a pale lemon yellow under the blue sky, her black flats kicking up dust as she walked.

As I heaved myself onto the wheelchair, she stepped passed the two agents and knelt on one knee, face-to-face with me. “Milton Jones, I'm Professor Leah Leslie Hullway,” she had a foreign accent, akin to those from the Northern cities. Underneath her lab coat, she wore a knee length black skirt and a yellow frilled shirt, a similar colour to her hair. “I'm hoping the two agents have briefed you on why you're here?”

I adjusted my seating position, though again I was not sure why. With my nerves as good as dead, I couldn't feel discomfort. I replied, “Yeah. But I still have loads of questions though.”

“Understandable,” she replied, getting to her feet. “But I think it'd be best if we answered all that once your family has arrived.”

Matthews took out the remote control key to the car and clicked the lock button. The vehicle's light flashed and beeped twice before the parking plate began to lower itself into the ground to the automated parking lots below.

As the car descended, slowly revealing the view hidden behind it, I noticed a familiar sight forming over the roof of the lowering black sedan. A blue mini van had been halted at the metal mesh gate, with guards walking out of the guard house to inspect the vehicle. It was my wife's car. I wondered if that was the last day I would ever see her again. My next two weeks would be a long, long time away.