“Are you sure you don’t want me to walk home with you?”

To Richard, the words sounded clear and natural. Had he been sober or just a little less stoned, he might have heard the words with a bit more clarity: 

“Harrr uuuu ssshhhssss nnnt hmmmmm uuuuu?”

Alethia smiled at his attempt at intelligible speech and said,

“Thanks Rich, but I am good tonight. Besides, you don’t want to be late in case Henry decides to stop in.”

She patted him on the back and bade Richard good night as he stumbled out of Rob’s house. If not for his job, Richard would have stayed in order to mingle and maybe even flirt some more with Alethia. That was not happening tonight unless Richard wanted to get fired. Looking for a new job was too much of a hassle though. 

Those thoughts threatened to sour his high. 

But Richard was a happy drunk. Mix weed and he felt great that night. His shift at Phaser Tag tonight would be more than a little sloppy, but that was why Tony and the other assistant managers existed. His altered mental state also muted his frustration at ending up in the number three slot tonight, again. Rob was the number four, as it always was. 

Numbers one and two were held by Rob’s wife Karen and Alethia. Rob’s wife always held onto first place on game nights. She was brilliant and occasionally a little intimidating. Naturally, the combination of alcohol and marijuana failed to improve his gaming performance. 

Fortunately for Richard, he did not have to drive that night. 

Two blocks from Rob’s house the chill in the air grew worse. Richard’s breath came out in giant gaseous puffs as he panted from the walk. He looked down at his paunch and sighed, 

“If I drank a little less, all of this walking would keep me in pretty good shape.”

A single clap caught Richard’s attention and he turned behind him. Standing almost two feet from Richard stood a man wearing a pin stripe suit and bowler hat. The ends of his mustache twirled up like he had waxed them. Richard tried that with his own sad attempt at facial hair and ended up cutting the whole mass off. This man’s soup catcher hung like a badge of status under his pointed nose. Angular, too much so in fact. That was what Richard thought of the man’s face as the man said, 

“Ah, a preoccupation with weight and fitness. I must be in the right place. Tell me sir, have you ever won the lottery?”

Richard shook his head to clear it. The British affectation to the man’s speech made his words hard to follow, even if Richard had been stone cold sober. 

“What? Lottery? Look man, if you’re selling something, I’m good.”

“Selling something? Perish the thought!”

The man said nothing further and stared unmoving at Richard instead. Richard’s amiable patience was hardly bottomless, but he was also interested now. 

“So what’s up?”

The man smiled and extended his hand to Richard, 

“You’ve won the lottery and I am here to tell you so. Help you collect your winnings and all that.”

Richard started to shake the other man’s hand, but Richard hesitated, 

“Is this some kind of trick or something?”

The man’s smile grew even larger. Through his grin he said, 

“Perish the thought!”

A week later, just a day later and Richard would have questioned the man’s non answer. Had he been one iota less drunk or high he might have wondered why the man insisted on shaking his hand. None of these thoughts occurred to Richard then. Instead he just thought how nice it would be to quit his job and still afford his gaming habits. 

Richard reached out to grip the man’s hand and touched his skin. It felt warm compared to the cold winter air around them. The handshake went on far too long without the man moving in any significant fashion. His smile did not waver, his hand did not move, and as far as Richard could tell nothing else moved either. 

Then he noticed that behind the man the leaves blown by the wind hung unmoving. Like a diorama or piece of wargaming terrain fixed with hot glue or putty; the brown and yellow bits of scrap paper floated without moving. 

Richard tried to speak. He wanted to ask, “What was going on here,” but his mouth did not obey him. He tried to pull his hand away from the man and that worked. Far better than Richard would have expected. The man released his grip, smile growing to the point of cutting his face in half. 

The instant Richard lost contact with the man’s hand his world melted beginning with the man himself. His face elongated to resemble a conehead. Then the effect continued until all Richard could perceive of the man was a long flesh colored length of spaghetti. He had the wherewithal to note how spaghetti was already kind of flesh colored as the rest of the world stretched into impossible strings. 

Richard’s body broke out in blazing hot sweat. He felt like he was being burned from the inside, then the outside and then every atom in his body felt like it was itself burning. He tried to scream, but his muscles would not respond through the flaming terror. Unconsciousness took Richard’s awareness and granted him a semblance of peace. 

The last thing Richard saw was the man with the bowler hat’s normally proportioned face, still smiling. He said, 

“Congratulations traveler!”

Pain. Beyond fire, beyond the mere blistering or charring of his flesh, but true foundational nerve pain. Richard could not find a word for it. Because, among other things, his mind felt the pain. As the rest of him did. 

A snap of fingers, a cold rush of liquid soothing pulsed through Richard’s being and the pain vanished like relatives during a personal catastrophe. Richard tried to flee those sour thoughts, but as usual when something bad happened, he remembered the year his parents died. His fourth sophomore year in college. 

Real analysis and Algebraic structures turned out to be harder than Richard anticipated. He should have known better than to take the senior level courses this year, even if he was technically on his fifth year of school. Only a few days remained during which he could drop these courses. 

He was sitting in his room contemplating that move when his cellphone rang. Rachel’s name and smiling face turned up on the screen. She stole his phone one day after he unlocked it — at her request — and entered her own picture on her contact. Richard considered not answering. Rachel was a hell of a lot smarter than he was and she might bust his chops again for his lack luster college performance so far. But at the same time, he wanted to talk to anyone right then aside from his stoned roommate. 

The bearded hippie angered Richard for a dozen reasons these days. Not the least of which was that the guy smoked weed like he followed Phish and yet had a 3.8 GPA. In math. The same major as Richard who did not smoke weed, smell like patchouli, or have a GPA over 3. 

He answered his phone to the sound of his sister crying. Not weeping, bawling her eyes out. She managed to cough out her news after several choking hysterical failures, 

“Mom and dad are dead.”

Richard’s memory was not great. Some people boasted of being able to see their memories like a movie in their head. Richard could do that with his imagination but never with his recollection. 

He remembered calling the airline and booking the tickets. He remembered the annoyed tone of the agent on the phone. He later wondered why he even bothered calling instead of going online. But at the time his brain was only limping along having lost its legs to a phone based mortar. After his tickets had been secured, time flashed forward in a blur. He stepped off of the airplane to find his sister waiting for him.

That image of his sister, her hair disheveled wearing a wrinkled dress she had probably been wearing for days, not even wearing makeup was another artifact stuck in his memory from that time. Even though she was his junior by six years, Rachel made all of the arrangements for his parents’ funeral. The accident — collision was the modern term he kept forgetting — was ruled the result of mechanical failure by the other vehicle. In any other circumstance, his natural curiosity would have demanded more information, but that felt like some kind of violation. 

Days after he arrived home, Richard finally called his school and withdrew. At the time he was relieved. His GPA and prospects for the future could not suffer another year of Ds or Cs. Richard intended to return to school, but in the back of his mind knew it would never happen. 

A week after the funeral, Richard moved back home. The only difference was that now he slept in his parent’s room. And he paid the property taxes now instead of his mom and dad. 

Bright light assaulted Richard’s eyes like crowd suppressants or multi-arch lasers. He tried to scream, but something filled his mouth. A hand pushed him back to the bed. He tried to resist, but the pressure was firm and unyielding. A dark shape blocked the light and Richard’s eyes focused on the oval. A silver-haired woman wearing a face mask like a doctor or nurse might wear said,

“Sir. Please relax. The combination of toxins in your bloodstream reacted in an unanticipated fashion with the schedule. You woke prematurely while we adjust the therapy. Please calm down sir.”

Richard was choking and yet not choking at the same time. His mouth, head, chest, arms and legs all felt numb. He could still feel his belly and hips, but the rest of him felt like the parts fell asleep. A new voice, this one male interposed itself on Richard’s consciousness.

Richard. Be calm.

The words held the force of a command. Richard stopped convulsing against the woman’s hand and the restraints that secured his arms and legs. 

We do not intend to harm you, but you could still hurt yourself. Do not try to hurt yourself, Richard.

Once again, the last sentence carried the force of a command. Richard could suddenly see much more of his surroundings. He lay on a metal table in a polished steel room. An IV bag hung next to his table with a large blue syringe sticking out from it. Both objects had tiny print on them, but Richard could not understand the language. 

Two people stood in the room, a woman wearing a mask and wielding various instruments and a man with his arms folded on his chest watching the proceedings. They both wore silver colored unitards that made them look like oompa loompas. 

Richard tried to laugh through the tube in his throat and only resulted in further choking. He lost consciousness for the second time. 

The third time Richard woke, he felt much better. He woke softly, like someone who cared for him had whispered into his ear. He opened his eyes to find himself in a modest bedroom. The walls were painted moss green with bright white trim. The carpet was piled and soft as down when Richard dropped his feet onto it. Two paintings hung in the room, one was the four-part psychedelic painting from the seventies that became so popular for political campaigns. A single object sat in each section of the painting, a bottle of Channel perfume. The name of the artist came to Richard when he wondered: Andy Warhol. 

The second painting was a of a pastoral lake scene. Two children and an older woman gathered fruit or clippings from a sparse tree on the shore of a silver lake on a grey foggy morning. Tears welled in Richard’s eyes as he looked on. This time, the painter and the painting sprang to mind: Souvenir de Mortefontaine by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. 

Richard had never studied art. He had no idea where that piece of knowledge had come from. Nervous, yet strangely calm, Richard turned to the door. A stout white door with four long panels and two small panels at the top led out of the room.

He approached the door but could not find a handle that would let him open it. Before Richard could touch the door, it slid open like a Japanese shoji. Richard stepped back, still feeling a sense of calm. A gorgeous silver haired woman stood in the doorway. She wore a cream dress that contrasted perfectly with her dark skin. Her eyes were slanted; she had epicanthic folds. Once again, a word popped into Richard’s mind that he could not otherwise account for. Behind her a steel hallway stretched in either direction from his room. Before he could look out of the door, the woman walked in and said, 

Stolen story; please report.

“Hello Richard Kain. My name is Astella Houri. Please call me Houri.”

She bowed and the door slid shut behind her. Richard said, 

“What is going on here?”

He knew intellectually that he should be upset by what was happening, but he remained calm. He could not even force himself to become upset. 

“I am very sorry for how you have been treated so far. Please let me explain. Would you like to take a seat?”

There were no chairs in his room. Did she mean the bed? 

Richard thought that as he turned and looked behind him. A small wooden desk had appeared at the wall as well as two stout black wooden chairs. The woman sat down, so Richard followed suit. The appearance of this furniture was not natural or normal. But Richard was incapable of being bothered by it right then. 

Houri said, 

“Thank you. Please let me explain. You were subjected to an illegal temporal anomaly that forced you out of the time stream. You met a man with a pin stripe suit, correct?”

“Yes, and a bowler hat and mustache.”

The woman’s posture straightened at those words. 

“Describe him further for me.”

Richard gave as much detail as he could, somehow including even the man’s scent, a detail he could not have recalled before. He smelled like ozone combined with old man aftershave. 

Houri nodded after Richard finished and said, 

“Thank you. That matches the description of a notorious criminal leader. You are alive because he used your temporal crossing as a decoy. When our people found you, we brought you here.”

“Where is this place? When is this?”

The woman smiled,

“We are in a sanctuary. The time is approximately seventeen thousand years after the first man-made nuclear explosion on Earth.”

Richard swallowed. He was calm, but he could still appreciate the gravity of the woman’s words. He said, 

“Why? What did you do to me?”

The woman nodded and said, 

“We saved your life. Without modification, you would have died minutes after your temporal transition. I believe that was part of the intention of your attacker as well. We are committed to saving people like yourself.”

“Okay, you saved my life. Why do I get the impression there’s more to it than that?”

“Because in addition to physical modifications and improvements, the therapy we administered also provides emotional and intellectual enhancements. Over the next four days, you will become stronger, smarter and healthier than you have ever been. More so than anyone else on Earth in your time.”

“Thank you?”

The woman grinned, 

“You are welcome. Most people in your position would be much more unsettled, as I am sure you have concluded.”

“Yes, I noticed that my responses are out of whack.”

“That is because Henry ordered you to remain calm. In addition to some the enhancements, you should anticipate development of some kind of Talent. Perhaps even more than one, though that is fantastically unlikely.”

“When will it wear off? Wait, talent like what?”

Houri smiled and said, 

“I am an projective illusionist. In part, I teach and help train new recruits. Watch.”

Houri held her hand up, palm facing one of the pale green walls. An image appeared there of a tall clean shaven man wearing hospital scrubs. His light brown hair was neatly trimmed to stay out of his eyes. He had the kind of killer physique Richard daydreamed about, but was unwilling to put the effort in to acquire. 

“Who is that?”

As soon as he asked, he knew the answer. That was more than an illusion, it was a kind of mirror.

“It is you, Richard Kain.”

“Damn. I look pretty buff, huh?”

“By your standards, I suppose so, yes.”

“So what is next?”

Houri said,

“We have four more days of minor therapy to administer, some additional training so get you used to your body, and we’ll begin orientation after that. Since you’re awake, I thought you might appreciate access to some reading material. It’s all from your century though.”

“Sounds like I am grounded to my room, is that right?”

Houri nodded, 

“We would prefer not to hold you here, but your safety is paramount. This is both a training facility and a mobile base. Due to the latter fact, you could be in grave danger wandering the halls.”

“Okay. When do I get my talent?”

Hour smiled again like she was laughing at Richard. He wondered if that was how she expressed her laughter.

“You already have it. The question before you is what does your talent do and how do you activate it. I will give you a hint: at first, the talent arises out of need. It initially responds like a reflex, once it has, you can start trying to control it. Good evening Mr Kain. I will be around tomorrow to speak.”

Houri touched the door and it slid open, 

“Oh, I almost forgot. Do you have any dietary restrictions we should know about? Any requests that might make your stay more comfortable?”

“Nope, I’ll eat anything that is actually edible. I dig seafood I guess. How do I access the books?”

“Tap the surface of the desk. A menu should appear with an assistant. I believe you will find the interface quite intuitive.”

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Mr Kain. Until later.”

Houri bowed and the door slid shut behind her. 

Richard walked over to the desk and tapped on the surface. After a minute spent exploring the UI, he had mastered this simple computer. He found several headings under “twenty-first century literature”. The ones that intrigued him the most were the years that followed his own. There he found a collection of comic books and novels that had not yet been released in his time. The library contained the complete works of George RR Martin as well as a decade’s worth of Stars Wars films. 

Richard was in heaven. The next two days passed in a blur of binge watching shows that had not yet been released and eating sushi he could not quite identify the origin of. If Richard had died during that two day stretch, he would have been okay with it. The room provided for all of Richard’s needs, producing a bath, shower, sink, and toilet on demand. This was the ultimate shut-in hovel. 

The third day of his vacation-esque confinement, Richard was reading the fourth major Unstoppable Wasps series when the room tipped and lurched under him. The comic book dissipated as the rest of the room turned into mist. Richard fell butt first onto a cold steel floor in a large steel room. Everything about the room had turned out to be fabricated. 

The door was a large steel plate with two handholds near the side. Richard gripped them and pulled on the door. It resisted only a moment before something in the mechanism snapped and the door slid free on its railing. 

Smoke and acrid ash filled the hallways and drifted into his room. Richard could run either right or left. 

Like a seasoned adventurer, he chose left. 

Richard had never run so fast in his entire thirty-odd years of life. His feet tore down the hallways like he had treads on his soles. He wondered if this was his super power as he turned a corner. Broken bodies littered the floor, all of them silver clad dark skinned people with large round cauterized holes in them. Richard did not expect to find as much blood as he did. He thought that the cauterizations would have meant no blood loss. Reconsidering the matter with his massive new brain, simple physics denied the claim to bloodlessness. Too much pressure and force would have been generated for there to be no blood. Maybe the laser or whatever killed these people vaporized part of their flesh. But it clearly did not vaporize all of it. 

Hence, blood. 

He stepped over them and continued running the only direction in which this hall led. 

Reflecting on the dead, he felt surprisingly calm. Those were the first corpses Richard had ever seen. He should have been ill. He wanted to feel ill. But somehow his brain did not respond correctly. Running and meta-thinking should have been mutually exclusive. Richard could easily do both as he simultaneously noted the explosions’ proximities and skillfully avoided them. He might have been a lower tier wargamer, but he was a first rung FPS operator. His own preferred term. Plus this was just like Phaser Tag, only he had no gun. And his body worked better than it ever had in his whole life. 

Richard identified the pseudo-hypnotic command, jammed into his brain by the unidentified stranger. As he thought about that man, several things happened. He ran past the first door he had seen so far that was partly opened and a visual impression of the man who had hypnotized him appeared in the left corner of his vision, like a heads up display. 

Along with the figure of the man and the opened room, Richard heard two more explosives detonate way too close to his position. He wondered where he was and small flashing map appeared in the right corner of his sigh. While all of this happened, two enormous words flashed in front of him: “Initialize []” and “Abort []”. 

Without knowing how to interact with the words, Richard just concentrated on initializing. The matching word flashed green and Richard’s sight went black. A high pitched whine sounded in his ears and his balance shifted wildly as he grabbed onto the slightly askew door handle. When he touched the metal it felt like he stuck his hand in a box of razor blades and then wrapped his fingers around him. 

In short, every neuron in his body temporarily went berserk. In a far distant corner of his mind, Richard’s consciousness rode a wave of calm before the reset he had just afflicted on himself. He tried to focus, to concentrate on something, but all he wanted right then was for the mixture of pain, pleasure, and mind rocking seizures to end. 

The process started with a reset and ended perfunctorily. The tiny sliver of his consciousness suddenly repossessed his no longer convulsing body. He had voided his bowels and bladder. His mouth tasted acrid, like he might have thrown up in it. His vision returned with a clarity Richard was unaccustomed to. 

Two warnings flashed: “Do not initialize while standing!” and “Disable neural reset prior to initialize during emergencies!”

Richard mumbled, 

“Wow, that would have been really helpful information before I did that.”

He stood and found himself in a commissary or quartermaster’s shop. He knew that because a floating label helpfully identified the room he stood in. Richard wandered where he could get fresh clothes, supplies, and maybe a weapon. 

His HUD produced floating overlays directing him to all three articles. Several other warnings and messages flashed in the periphery, but so many of them made it easy to ignore. Except for one that continually interposed itself in the forefront of his sight: “WARNING PROTOCOL EPSILON ENGAGED!”

Richard ignored that message while he picked out what he was looking for. Explosions continued to rock the building and Richard’s artificial calm started to erode. Staying in this room until nothing bad was happening seemed like a great idea. But first, he cleaned himself with a rag and threw a silver unitard on, the only piece of clothing present. 

The outfit shrank to his size. It felt wonderful, automatically adjusting to his preferred climate. It even exuded a pleasant odor that subtly varied while Richard considered it. He scooped up a small pouch that stuck to the silver uniform and a small stick-like object the HUD identified as a weapon. It resembled a wand more than a lightsaber, but Richard gripped it two handed and swung the stick around the room. Nothing happened. He shrugged and put the stick in his pouch along with food and medicine the HUD outlined.

Richard’s HUD high-lit one more object, or set of objects: a small pouch containing two more blue syringes along with a larger green syringe. He placed those in his pouch and sealed it like a really well made zip-lock baggie. 

The pouch looked flush against his uniform and would be very difficult to spot without already knowing it was there. 

“Now it is time to get out of here.”

His HUD showed a blue path on the floor that continued to the right out of this room. Not back to where his room was. He thought to himself. I want to go back to my room. The blue path flashed once and then faded. 

“Crap. Okay, out of here works fine then.”

The blue path returned and Richard stepped fully out of the hallway. Large swaths of metal had been slagged on either side of the hallway. All of Richard’s instincts along with his reason tried to corral him back into the supply room. But the path pointed the way and enough suggestion of calm remained that his fear in the face of the situation had still not taken control of him. 

Despite the calm, he knew that he was no longer running ahead of whatever exploded the hallways and murdered the defenders. 

He was running behind it. 

Richard’s main hope lie in avoiding the marauder at all costs. He was utterly unequipped to handle a strange fight. As he thought about hiding, he uniform extended a hood over his head and face. He could see through it suddenly, and could see that the unitard also sealed over his hands so that he could see through them. The HUD helpfully provided lines for his body when it entered his field of view. Otherwise, he was invisible. 

If he moved his hands really quickly, the jitter produced by his movement revealed his limbs. But otherwise he was a ghost. A Predator ghost. 

Richard slowed his progression. Now that he was convincingly hidden, Richard’s inner fears had quieted down. He needed to follow the path to his exit and everything would be fine. This was like playing D&D or an online RPG. Right now, Richard was a solo rogue and he needed to use his powers to escape the dungeon. 

Now that he could reorient his thinking, Richard felt much more at ease. Instead of laser blasted hallways, these were scarred by dragon fire and fell magics. Danger lurked ahead, of course, but he had trained his whole life for this. Richard — no, Rick the Rogue — would escape capture and return to his loyal party. 

After a few minutes of slowly crawling through the recent destruction, flashes and shouting up ahead alerted Richard to the presence of his enemies. He could not see where the bright flashes of light originated from or who fired them, so he assumed that they were also invisible. The blue path turned just up ahead, so Richard let himself hurry in order to make his escape. 

The blue path ended at a blank wall. 

Richard said, “AI Friend?” as the HUD outlined the large rectangle of the door and a smaller rectangle in the upper right. He touched it with his hand and the door shrank back into the wall and slid open. 

Richard walked into the room and his invisibility faded. Another message appeared in his HUD that he subsequently ignored as well. Inside of this room was a small hallway that ended at a second door. The panel to open this door was obvious and located at about waist height. He opened the second door as well. This was where the blue path ended. 

The room contained a large round platform raised on stilts in the center of the room. Next to the door a man stood over a console and looked behind him when Richard appeared. Richard recognized the man as the one who hypnotized him. Richard put his hands over his ears as the man shouted, 

“What? You can’t be here!”

The man’s face contorted between fear and rage as he looked behind Richard, 

“No! The door’s open!”

The man made a short gesture with his hand and a flash passed by Richard leaving a light trail in its wake. The man at the console looked down at his chest,

“No. You have to destroy the time… No!”

He coughed up blood and fell over. 

Richard screamed this time and lunged for the console, hoping to find a way to close the door behind him. He knew he did not want to look behind him to see what fresh horror had killed most of the time traveling strangers who helped him. 

In accord with his panicked thoughts, the door behind him slid shut. As the metal pieces clicked together, something heavy rammed into the door. The impact produced an explosion-like sound that shook Richard’s knees. The door withstood the assault, but only seconds later had started glowing red, as if something were trying to melt its way through. 

Richard shouted at the console,

“Take me home!” 

His HUD displayed the sequence he needed to enter in order to return to his time and place. Richard felt relief that the machine seemed to respond correctly. Almost as an afterthought, he said,

“Okay, how do I setup a self destruct?”

The protocol displayed itself before Richard and he realized that he would have to be here in order to complete the sequence. Once done, he could not then use the time machine to go home.

His choice was an obvious one. 

Richard punched in the acknowledgement sequence and watched the time machine whir into life. A blue field that resembled a sheet of lighting spun into existence. He ran up the platform and left the collapsing base and the time traveling defenders behind. He felt a tiny pang of guilt at denying the dead man his last request. But Richard needed to go home, somewhere safe.