Relative Time: Two hours Premortem
System Time [NanG]: 2:02:32|PM_SEPTEMBER.17.2037
System Time [NanC]: 0:00:00|XX_X.XX.XXXX
Location: 42.09206945860221, -76.05570862382673
I’ve never been partial to summer’s scorching heat but the cold shoulder of winter wasn’t much better… and winter was certainly exposing both of her icy shoulders today. Just a month earlier, walking home from the bodega had been far more comfortable.
Personally I loved the transitive months of autumn. Not too hot or too cold. It was a goldilocks zone that unfortunately only existed briefly. “Hoodie weather” as Aubrey, my ex-fiancé cheerfully called it.
With my body curled in on itself to conserve warmth, I Shoveled about an eighth of a cheap bag of chips into my mouth. I had a slightly less cheap apartment (but not by much) in a three-story complex about seven minutes from the bodega, and it wasn’t like the dingy little market had the best food… it was just that they were open at two in the morning and happened to have the cheapest food... It was also blessedly within walking distance of my apartment.
I pocketed the cheap chips as the cold continued to work its dark magic.
Yes, I'm both lazy and cheap. In my defense I’m also broke and exhausted which pair beautifully with being lazy and cheap, so feel free to stifle your judgment. More than anything, I’m pragmatic when it comes to my daily priorities. It’s the inevitable byproduct of growing up dirt poor… and that pragmatism necessitated cheap chips at two in the morning. Again, don’t judge me…
“I need to invest in a warmer coat…” I grumbled to myself while pulling my worn aviator jacket tighter. I’d just bought it a few years back but it had gotten so much use that the lining was already shot.
…On queue, as if mocking me for my tone, a visceral shiver scooted its way from the back of my skull down my spine as a gust of wind buffeted me. “Son of a…” I gritted my teeth and quickened my pace after a brief pause to regain my composure.
I had been protected from the lion's share of the wind by the conga-line of two story apartments and small businesses lining Jackson Avenue, but that protection had just been cruelly stripped away. The little mini-mart wasn't an indecent distance from my front door but any measure of distance on foot, in this biting wind, was going to feel exponentially longer.
Midway along the route home there was about fifty yards of bridge that I was coming up on.. And that wouldn’t help keep me warm.
The dainty little homes and small shops which had mostly shuttered for the night, all but disappeared as I’d turned that corner off Jackson. All that was left before the bridge was a vacant parking lot used by out of town shoppers to easily get to the strip during the day, and a few street vendor stalls covered in wrinkly blue tarps. My wind wall was gone.
I raised my head a bit, tears pooling at the corners of my eyes due to the wind consistently drying them.
The bridge was one of those older cobblestone bridges that had been certified safe and paved over with a single lane for modern use. The town had a lot of updated historic spots like this. Normally the bridge itself was a place I’d often walk to with no destination in mind. The kind of place you would naturally gravitate to when you weren’t meaning to go anywhere in particular. “... But not amidst this godforsaken winter wasteland of a wind turbine I’m walking through…” I quietly cursed.
In NORMAL weather, I actually loved this bridge. It had a small outcropping halfway across with two benches and a street lamp. It was an amazing place to have a drink and listen to the static-like rush of the river below on a quiet night. The serenity while sitting on those benches was a well kept secret for people that grew up around here.
Aside from the new pavement and the suicide nets they had on either side near the ravines, it was like being in a time capsule. It was about fifty yards from one rustic end to the other. Neither end opened to anything extraordinary but it had steep ravines on both sides cordoned off by a stone wall which looked pretty unique in its own right.
The sound of the small city on one side and the suburban sprawl on the other were drowned out at the midway point. I’d found myself on those benches at both the high and low points of my life for that very reason. It was a place where it was easy to think.
Lost in thought with my shoulders hunched inward I plodded on.
As I closed the distance between myself and the other side of the bridge I noticed an odd sight. It wasn’t odd as to the what and where, but mostly as to the when… primarily that it was both the witching hour and the crest of a season easily defined as cold as hell in these parts. The odd sight was a figure. A figure of medium height and tousled dark hair, dangling their legs off the stone wall about ten yards to the right of where the bridge ended.
What really caught my attention was the frost-reddened skin, visible due to the boxers, bare feet, and tank top. Something was off.
I could hear the involuntary chattering of the underdressed figure’s molars shaking in their mouth. Their hands dug into the pock-marked stone of the cobbled wall as they leaned unnaturally forward, staring over the ledge. Alarmingly, the sapient icicle of a person had chosen a seating arrangement directly over a portion of the ravine where the netting wasn’t just damaged, it was sagging to either side, completely done-in.
I stopped in my tracks about fifteen feet from the figure, blinking a few times to clear the blur from my eyes. This did not look good.
Now… I wasn’t the type of person to needlessly involve myself in other people's business. In fact I loathed those people.
...There were times however, that I’d learned you absolutely need to bury your nose as deep into someone's business as it can be buried. For example… An in all likelihood, very mentally unstable person in their undergarments, atop a structurally unsound wall, overlooking a steep drop onto the jagged stone-littered shoreline of a river bed. That was the type of situation that required the burying of a nose.
I shakily cleared my throat, suddenly feeling a bit warmer. “He...Hey… you doing okay there?” The fact that I hadn’t spoken to anyone aside from the clerk at the bodega in a few weeks, coupled with my nerves made the words flowing from my mouth stick and stumble a bit.
The figure jumped slightly as I announced my presence but didn’t turn their head… and now that I had inched a bit closer I could make a clearer appraisal of their appearance. He was a young scrappy guy. His skin would have been pale if it wasn’t so red. A bit more red than the rest of his exposed skin were the puffy bags beneath his eyes.
“G-g-go away.” He croaked, his voice cracking. “I d-don’t n-need your help.”
I straightened up a bit, eyes widening “Well… it looks like you need a friend man. I’m not gonna pretend I know whatever the hell it is you’re going through but I’ve had my fair share of bad days. Nothing to be ashamed about.”
I surprised myself with how confidently I said all that. It was weird how someone can go on a sort of autopilot when the stakes are high… and oh boy were the stakes high. At first I thought it might have been the case that this kid was trying to off himself but now I was sure of it. The Best case scenario had evaporated as soon as I took a full measure of the guy. That best case scenario had been that the kid had just hit the sauce too hard and wandered to the bridge.
…But that wasn’t looking likely.
“You d-d-on’t know shit man.” he fired back, his teeth continuing to clack mercilessly.
This kid had to have only been fifteen or so. No fucking way I was letting him waste whatever time he had left as modern art on some shitty creek bed. So it was at that moment, I decided to do something incredibly stupid.
I moved slowly, but I moved consistently. A step or two every few seconds like I was attempting to sneak up on some prey animal scared out of its mind. “Not too far from the truth…” I thought to myself.
“Listen dude…” I said in the calmest tone I could muster given the situation. “I don’t get out of the house much. Hell, I work online doing data entry for shitty fly-by-night companies so I don’t have to get out much.” I let out a small, fake chuckle. “ …To be entirely honest with you, my life is liquid-ass. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I hadn’t considered sitting where you’re sitting right now.”
I subconsciously glanced to the edge quickly before reverting my gaze back to the shivering boy. That’s a long way down…
Tears were streaming down the young man’s face, his skin so cold by this point that even the warmth of his flesh wasn’t enough to keep it from freezing on his cheeks.
“You don’t know the first thing about why I’m here” he spat back at me, surprisingly without any chattering. He looked like his gaze was miles from here. Like it was dissecting a complex bit of clockwork that had stopped working. “Everything’s going to end.”
“It doesn’t have to… and I know it can feel like that sometimes” I said. one of my hands was slightly extended from my waist, looking as if I was about to attempt to scoop up an unruly kitten. He hadn’t noticed how close I had gotten… I was within five feet of him now.
Just as I was patting myself on the back for almost getting within grabbing range, his head torqued towards me, teeth gritted and eyes wide with anger.
“No MAN..!” He sputtered. “It doesn’t FEEL like it. It IS what it is!”
His eyes winced, looking far too heavy for someone so young. “Everything’s o-over… The world just doesn’t know it yet.” His eyes furrowed seriously, as if he’d forgotten where he was sitting and why for just a moment.
“...and that means me, you, everyone you’ve ever given half a shit and a squirt of piss about… Everyone is dead.” He finished matter-of-factly, his eyes returning to their former veil of sadness.
“Okay…” I thought to myself, deciding silence was the better part of virtue after hearing all of that. This guy probably had a mental break of some kind. I wasn’t equipped to unravel his ball of yarn even on my best day, and this definitely wasn’t my best day.
Unfortunately, just as I realized I wasn’t talking him out of this his eyes focused, recognition bleeding into them.
“Not good…” I thought, seeing him flinch, edging away slightly. I was within three feet now. Plenty close to grab and pull him onto the footpath opposite the wall if I was quick about it.
“YOINK!” I yelled, lurching forward.
In retrospect, I realize that yelling yoink as loud as I could wasn’t an optimal choice, but it certainly was a choice… I mean there were plenty of other things I could have yelled. Pizza, hairball, pineapple… Wu Tang forever? Regardless of my choice of vernacular, it did the trick, both confusing and surprising him enough to grant me the two feet needed in order to steal purchase on his tank top.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“NO DON’T TOUCH ME!...” He all but screamed, eyes wide and feral. His hands went to push me away from him but at the last moment they shot out to the sides.
“I don’t have cooties kid!” I grunted, pulling him backwards by his thin shirt. He was lighter than I’d thought. “We can sort this all out after you’re warm and not at risk of sky diving without a parachute!”
He struggled like an ensnared animal, still attempting to keep his skin from making contact with me.
“NO YOU IDIOT YOU DON’T UNDERSTA…!” His words were cut off as I grabbed his upper arm with my left hand and wrenched him from his perch. Almost immediately I wished I hadn’t.
Everything… and I mean everything…
…for just a moment, went stark white.
I’d imagine my face at that moment looked pretty stupid.
Well, that is… as stupid as one's face can look with enough electricity to power an entire inner-city arcade running through it.
Regardless, I didn’t have time to wonder how dumb the look on my face was because although it felt like time had stopped altogether at that moment, in reality, everything was proceeding very quickly.
Now… I’ve heard my fair share of jokes about getting electrocuted… mostly from my dad because of his seeming ability to get electrocuted by anything and everything of modern design. It was like that man was cursed when it came to getting shocked or electrocuted on the job. So when the next few things began happening in quick succession I couldn’t help but mentally scroll through the leg-length list of jokes about burnt toast and forks in light sockets.
First, it was the blinding flash.
Then… my body went rigid and everything, as stated previously, went white.
It felt like I had taken a hot boulder to the chest. Imagine the worst cramp you’ve ever had and magnify it by a thousand. I doubt even that level of pain could compare to the sublime torment dancing skillfully across every nerve in my body like a deranged ballerina toting a battle axe.
Next… the white hot pain stayed ingrained within every cell of my body, but the blinding flash was replaced by blurry vision. It was like having been surrounded by spot-lights whose cords were unceremoniously cut. I was seeing spots, but thankfully there was vision now.
It only took half a second for my spotty, blurry vision to clear.
Within the time it took to regain my sight, I realized another little problem… and I realized it mostly due to the fact that I could no longer feel my feet connecting to the ground.
I was falling.
The massive discharge had burst from the boy's body, through my hand, and directly into my chest… hurtling me both down and away from him. I was in freefall, the tips of my fingers still barely making contact against his palm.
No… actually I was mistaken... On a secondary, split-second inspection, I could feel contact with him but there was none.
Instead, a spidery tendril of what can only be described as blue lightning extended between his hand and mine. Like a Tesla coil without the mechanism, the web of electricity perfectly extended between our hands.
A look of horror was plastered upon the boy's face. His face portrayed a look that said he hadn’t meant for this to happen but something about the horror-soaked scowl on his face let me know that he knew why this was happening. That was the look of a face steeped in recognition and regret.
I was, of course, confused.
It was the kind of confusion only possible when a guy tries to stop another guy from jumping to their death, only to be unceremoniously ‘zapped’... and not just zapped, mind you… It was like getting to third base with the energizer bunny. Parts of me were zapped that I didn’t think could be zapped.
And what the hell was that text?
[https://i.imgur.com/pejLJf8.gif]
In front of me, as I shot downwards like a badly aimed roman candle, a screen had phased into existence. It had scrolling text with various chemical compounds and their percentages. It reminded me of a command line executable with the bare minimum of front-end development devoted to its creation.
I didn’t have the time to think about it. Hell, I didn’t even have the time to contort my body in a way I could land in a manner that wouldn’t be potentially fatal at this point.
I was not… good at falling. I would guess, I was even worse at falling while having a car battery shoved up my ass which is what this felt like.
I’d like to think I was the kind of person who could sherlock their way out of this… but I wasn’t. This was too much, and moreover it was too much too fast.
In the next few seconds all I could do was fall… watching the young man fly backwards, followed by an arc of aquamarine electric as he slammed into a maintenance shed. It was only half a second more until he disappeared from my view completely as I rocketed downwards…
Ass over tea-kettle and down…
Down, down, down…
When I finally met earth it wasn’t with a thud. I was greeted by the sound shale makes when it’s dropped onto wet mud. A disgusting crack muffled by soft, moist, flesh. I was going to black out now… for how long I didn’t know.
Relative Time: 5 minutes Premortem
The puzzle pieces had fallen into place. The jolt of being electrocuted and thrown down a ravine forty feet had scrambled my memories. I’d met the ground and lost consciousness from the impact, waking up in what I surmised was less than a half an hour?
It could have been longer, maybe an hour… an hour and a half? “Ugh…” I would have shaken my head if my spine wasn’t sawdust.
Luckily, after losing consciousness following impact (and then thankfully waking up) I’d stayed surprisingly lucid. Even in my desperate situation I was able to collect my thoughts enough to put together a timeline of events. I doubt however, that it would do much of any good.
I could tell I was dying. It wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ it was just a matter of ‘when’.
I’d just remembered the sound of when I hit the ground. That was the sound of something entering my chest from beneath as well as the majority of every rib in my body, my spine, and probably a few limbs, crushing themselves under the gravity of my descent.
I was almost glad I couldn’t look down to see what had impaled me. Probably a fucking rock…
“Nope…” I mentally told myself, trying not to let my emotions get out of control. “Remembering didn’t save me…” Although in some macabre way I was definitely glad to be cursed with the knowledge of the entirety of what had happened. The only thing worse than meeting your end is not knowing why you met your end.
…And to be fair, if my situation wasn’t so grim this would be hilarious. The entire situation was insane.
I was electrocuted by a person… a human being… A young, half naked human being… and I watched that same young man get blasted back into the side of a maintenance shed. He had most definitely been knocked out if not worse.
Upon contact with him I’d seen a strange screen of code. Then I fell a distance sure to kill most people, saw another weird pop-up accompanied by blinding pain, and…
I exhaled internally, trying to collect myself.
“And… none of it matters. I’m going to die here.” I thought to myself.
No… This wasn’t funny.
For a moment, I was almost able to feel the shaky muscles around my mouth and jowls contract in an expression akin to despair. I was paralyzed though… so I assume that expression was just mental, and I was in fact staring at the sky, drooling on myself like an idiot. All I could now… was think, and thinking in this situation bred far more terror than knowing I was about to die.
It was strangely peaceful. Just the static rush of the river with the occasional hum of a car on some side-street.
I let myself dismiss all the weird shit that had just occurred. What good was it at this point to complicate my last moments by being confused?
I was stripped bare with only the thoughts of things that had mattered most to me. I had spent the majority of my adult life keeping everyone at arm's length. I had taken my parents' deaths hard and retreated into myself further, playing a game of pay-check to pay-check by transferring one sheet of data to another sheet of data. It was a miserable existence.
The only way I managed to stay sane through all that was with my second mode of income, doing faceless video essays on games.
Ironically and not without a dark sense of humor, the video essays had just started to pay the bills enough that I could quit doing the data entry. I loved those stupid videos. It let me speak and delineate on games in a way that made me feel useful. I used those videos to talk about the intricacies of those games while shoe-horning in my own game-guides.
My game-guides weren’t like other guides either…
Whereas a lot of creators who made guides would focus on how to speed-run, or play the game in the most efficient way possible… mine were nothing like that. My guides took a simple premise from my video essay and expanded on it, beckoning the viewer to really enjoy the game. To experience it like I had.
*Sigh* I suppose it was a roundabout way of connecting people.
Whatever, it didn’t matter now. If I had devoted all of my energy to forming relationships with people and following my dreams of working in the game industry sooner then maybe I’d have done something of merit… something that mattered.
I mean… I didn't need to be someone that saved the world, but it would have been nice to be remembered.
With nothing much else to do aside from feeling sorry for myself, I thought back to my pragmatism. The taste of those cheap chips still lingered in my now unresponsive mouth.
I was an atheist. Not one of those annoying holier than thou, forum-skulking, fedora-sporting, atheists mind you… but just someone who hadn’t had any reason to believe in a higher power. Was atheism really a form of pragmatism?
The same skepticism that facilitated that belief however, was urging me to throw a hail Mary down the field. What did I have to lose?
…And anyways, a Socratic conversation between something that in all likelihood doesn’t exist, and someone who’s definitely about to NOT exist might just be absurd enough to take my mind off my inevitable end.
I stared into the sky, letting the calming song of the river's white-noise overtake me. The snow seemed friendlier now, looking a bit like it had when I was a little kid making snow angels in my parents yard. I couldn’t actually speak but I braced myself in the calm presented by my surroundings in order to lend weight to the words I was about to think.
If I’m going to do something this lame, I may as well do it right, I thought.
“Hey asshole.” I thought, internally grinning to myself. “My life’s been one big cavalcade of failures. I can’t even remember a time I’ve felt content with something I’ve done. Everything’s been a bid for survival or to distract me from how shitty everything is.” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “I’m dying here… I’m guessing most if not all of my bones are broken. I’d even wager that a good portion of my internal organs are a fine paste.”
The snow continued to fall, undeterred and unchanged by my internal monologue.
“...Everything I’ve done has been in service of myself… because I’m selfish. I’ve never once gotten to the point where I had enough power or weight behind my will to do anything of merit for anyone else… and that, I think…” I thought deeply “Is when I’m happiest. It’s when I was most fulfilled.”
I took a moment, really taking in the limited subtle sounds and sights available to me.
“...The truth is there’s an entire universe in between how I wanted things to go and what I was capable of providing for people around me… so I retracted into myself. The kind of clarity I have now is only afforded to someone on death's door so If you do exist… whatever you are… I have a big ask for you.``
I paused, really wondering if I should delude myself into the belief that saying any of this, even inside the sanctum of my own mind, mattered. Whatever… nothing to lose.
“...Forge me into something that’s useful.” I paused for a moment before continuing.
“...If there’s an afterlife, reincarnation, joseph fucking smith, or some equally unbelievable method for putting me in a position where might matches my willpower, I want that shot. I think… No, I know that’s what I want.”
I was quiet for a bit after that. I don’t know what I expected. Certainly not the parting of the heavens or an angel… But maybe, just maybe I’d deluded myself into hoping for a hand on my shoulder before the end.
> PROCESSING QUERY
If I wasn’t paralyzed I would have shit myself.
> BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES TERMINATING Scanning… 47% > QUERY ACCEPTED Scanning… 68% > INTEGRATION NECESSARY Scanning… 83%
"Hold up what are you..." I was barely able to finish my panicked thought before a jab of pain drove itself through my temples.
> CHRONOSTATIC HIBERNATION REQUIRED > ERROR
“You’ve gotta be fucki…” I trailed off, feeling as if I was being bathed in anesthesia.
…And that’s when everything faded.