Albert looked at the notification from the System hovering, as usual, in the air before his eyes. It always took on different shapes and styles, making letters appear out of pure light at times, while at other times it manipulated the perception of what was already there to make itself blend with the place. This time, it was like an old VHS tape, with flickering text that was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
He could redeem the rewards from the quest he completed when he appeared in Elvenhome earlier that night, the action that set off the chain of events that eventually led him to where he was now, at his grandpa’s house waiting for his mother to arrive. But, just as he had skipped cashing in on the rewards then, he decided to do the same now. He was not in the right mind to learn a new skill, especially the skill he had in mind to learn with the auto completion of the quest the system would give him.
Right on cue too, because there was a knock on the door. His mother was here.
***
Samantha Cromwell had made good use of the trip by car, time for herself granted to her either by accident or by design, to reflect and cool down. The new reality was simple: her son was a magically enhanced individual who had been granted a ‘system’ by an unknown entity of unknown goals. The problem it posed was beyond a simple alignment problem, it was almost existential.
But now was not the time. The situation was dire. On her way to her father’s house she received a notification on her phone: it was the Quadrangle, contacting her directly through their preferential – and confidential – channel of communication. It was an encrypted message directed to her and her only, a recording of the live video feed from the surveillance cameras in the containment labs where the Eggs were being held.
They weren’t there anymore. The footage was blurry, but the interference was compatible with the kind of tampering she knew SpaceOps was capable of. The worrying, but totally expected, thing was that when she asked the on-site personnel for status updates, they claimed that all was in the green, and that nothing of note had happened. It wasn’t so much as them not having noticed the break-in, either. They had been, all of them, brainwashed already. She should count herself lucky that circumstances had forced her out of that place, or she didn’t know what would have happened to her had she stayed.
When she arrived at the house she was greeted by her grandpa sprawled on the sofa, sipping a beer straight from the bottle, and her son nervously pacing around the living room, running circles around the table and sofa. Lloyd was evidently amused, but neither she nor her son shared the mood. He was clearly more jaded and used to these situations that Albert was, but she should have been too, yet… this was too personal, too close to home.
At least she finally understood why the kidnapping hadn’t happened to Albert himself but to his friend. PsyOps was scared of him.
“Oh, hey Sam.” Lloyd said, pulling himself up.
“Hi mom. Everything okay?” Albert greeted her.
She schooled her face. “Yeah. Just thinking, that’s all.”
“I know. Me too.” Albert said. “I’ve been thinking about Marc nonstop ever since I saw that photo. If I could, I’d go there right now to rescue him. But I don’t even know where this CARF thing even is.”
“Don’t! It’s too dangerous!”
Albert smiled. “Don’t worry. I can’t. My teleportation only takes me to places I have visited before. It’s just… not fair. It’s not fair. Just because he’s my friend! I wonder how he’s doing.”
Lloyd cleared his throat. “We need to formulate a plan of attack. Albert, tell your mother about the Hazegem.”
“Right. I can rewind time, right now up to… 11 hours. When I do, everything goes back to the way it was before except for information on devices I have touched. And me. I stay in the same location relative to Earth and retain all memories and eventual wounds. But I can heal wounds so—”
“No wounds.” Sam said immediately. “I would never allow it.”
“But,” Lloyd interjected. “This opens up a lot of possibilities. As long as we manage to send him all the information he needs, it doesn’t matter if one of us dies. He can just rewind us back to life.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Samantha hummed. “This is interesting indeed. Dangerous but interesting.”
She didn’t like the idea of dying, but it sure as hell made for a huge advantage on their part.
“Let’s come up with a plan, we do it and then, eleven hours after that, you Albert rewind time right to the exact moment when we start to act. This way we can update the plan with all the information we gathered in the first iteration.”
“He can rewind only once, right?” Samantha asked.
Lloyd nodded.
“Mmh. We can’t afford slip-ups the second time around, then.”
After the basic information was laid down for all to digest, they finally moved on to the actual planning stage. The one thing they needed to do was to somehow get Albert all the way to the CARF without him sustaining more damage than he could heal. On this point Samantha and her father were in disagreement, but after a heated argument Samantha had to concede that the possibility that Albert would get hurt was real and unavoidable, and she had to accept it.
She didn’t like how lightly the matter was approached, and how readily Albert accepted the risk. She could understand her father, the man was a monster, but what exactly had happened to Albert that he was ready to accept pain as a fair price to pay? What happened to the hypochondriac son she had? He could heal, right, but that was not enough to satisfy her.
Still.
“A possible plan is that he reaches the CARF pre-rewind and then rewinds when he’s in the cell. From there it’s all a matter of leaving the range of the teleportation wards and teleporting out.” Lloyd said.
“I can’t take other people with me.” Albert said, shaking his head.
“You could repair the device.”
“No,” Samantha said. “Bad plan, dad. It doesn’t give us enough maneuvering time. We need to reach the CARF together, all three of us. One of us waits outside for extraction while the other goes in with Albert.”
“Post-rewind?” Lloyd asked.
“The final extraction, yes. Pre-rewind what we do is try to get there, as if we were doing the actual extraction, but just to get the lay of the land. We have no idea about what await for us now that PsyOps own the place. Once things start to get heated we rewind and we re-execute with foreknowledge. Or, if anything goes wrong, he rewinds once it’s clear he can go no further. It’s imperative that we do not enter the teleportation wards unless we are 100% sure we can pull it off to completion. For this I suggest that if we manage to get all the way to the CARF pre-rewind, only us two enter while Albert waits outside. We keep a phone line always open to relay information and video recordings while we try to infiltrate as much as we can, then once we hit a wall he rewinds.”
“Okay.”Lloyd said. “Good plan. Albert?”
Albert took a moment to think. “Sounds okay to me… I don’t know?”
Samantha shook her head, sighing. “He’s not ready. I hate this. He’s not ready, Lloyd, can’t you see?”
“What are the options?” He asked, getting up from the sofa. “What else can we do?”
“We go without him. That’s what. We send him updates on the phone. If we fail to report back, then he rewinds and we’ll know where it all went sideways.”
“I can do this, mom.” Albert said, trying to get her attention.
He was much shorter than her, even without her high heels. She glared at him, seeing him wither under her towering figure.
“You can’t. How long have you had magic? Two weeks? How long have you been ‘training’ with those system quests?”
“I…” he said, whimpering. But then he squared himself up, and suddenly it was as if he was the one towering over her, and she was nothing but a leaf in the wind. If he wanted to hurt her, she could not resist.
Then the moment passed, all that was left the memory of it already fading from her awareness.
On the other side of the room, her father glared at her just as much as she had glared at her son. She looked at him first, then at her father again, and all her resolve seemed to evaporate. But then the thought of her son getting hurt made her stomach lurch, and she felt her throat dry.
“I don’t want you to risk getting hurt, or worse…” she said in a small voice.
“Sam. Get a hold of yourself, for fuck’s sake!” Her father’s booming voice rattled her thoughts. “Grow a spine. You are not his mother now, you are Samantha Cromwell, head of the fucking BSA, you hear me?”
“Guys!” Albert said, trying to gain their attention. “We are wasting time. Rewindable time. Come on, pull yourselves together.”
Samantha stood straighter, and her eyes deepened. Having her own son snap her back to reality was the wake-up call she needed. Man, had he always been this assertive? She was proud, if a little bit offended at being yelled at.
“You are right. Plan A – where Albert comes with us – is more risky for him but gives us a lot of maneuvering room. He has magic and can escape at the first sign of danger. Plan B is much riskier. We don’t have mental protection and we could be turned into enemy agents without him ever knowing it happened. We’ll go with plan A. If any of you has a better idea, now is the time.”
They might have had a better idea, maybe. Maybe not. Nobody spoke and Samantha decided it was time to move out. The rewind window was approaching rapidly, with the Hazegem becoming usable at noon at the earliest. It was 5 in the morning now, which meant that the first possible rewind would be 7 hours from now.
“Albert, if you ever need to rewind, rewind back to this moment. If you do that we’ll see you disappear before our eyes and then teleport in, right?”
“Yes, that’s how it looks from the outside.”
“Very good. If that happens, then we’ll know something went wrong and we’ll change plans accordingly. From now on, you are the priority, okay? Do not get captured, injured or incapacitated under any circumstances. If you do…”
“Just don’t, kiddo.” Lloyd said. “It’s that easy. What was it you said that one time, git gud?”
Albert chuckled. Samantha smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. If anything happened to him, she would never be able to forgive herself. But this was not the time for such thoughts, and although risky, their plan was the best shot they had with the limited time and means they had.