Matt lay awake listening to the rain, staring into the darkness and thinking about what to do. It was late, the meeting was over and everyone but Jane was gone. Matt had retreated to bed and kept his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, until about eleven o’clock when he felt the covers rise and Jane get up and slip out for her usual night‑time wanderings. Matt gave some thought to joining her – maybe letting her spot him in the gym or playing some Xbox together – but decided against it. Better not to appear restless, lest the restlessness cause some omniscient watcher concern. So instead he just lay there, curled up on his side beneath the blanket, thinking hard beneath the sound of thunder and the space of an empty wall.
I don’t want to die. I just want my life to be simple. I need some way…
He needed some way to trap a time traveller. Except by definition that seemed impossible, because even if he constructed said trap under the guise of some other legitimate endeavour, any perceptive time traveller would simply see themselves being trapped in the future before the trap was even laid. So it either needed to be a perfect trap, one that could ensnare a time traveller faster than that time traveller could think – or there was no point in traps at all. Matt churned ideas over and over. Neutralisers were too slow. Disruptance fields didn’t seem to affect the Time Child in the slightest. His best bet, it seemed, was telepathy, because at the end of the day whatever its abilities the Child was still mentally human – but the telepath would have to be very, very good and disinclined, upon seeing eternity, to go crazy and gouge their eyes out.
Could Wally do it? If he could get the psychic to read his mind, maybe, then maybe Matt could explain the situation mentally and they could work together to do… something. Ugh. Matt’s brow furrowed in the darkness. How the hell was anyone supposed to lure a time traveller anywhere, let alone prevent them seeing that they were headed right into a trap?
Option Two, then, because Option One had more holes in it than Jane’s gym socks. Fight fire with fire; to try and get the one time traveller he knew was aligned with him – or, well, pretty reasonably hoped was aligned with him, given they were dating – trained to the point of being able to take on the Time Child on its own turf. Once he got past the initial sense this plan made however, Matt found he liked it even less than Option One. It was one thing to wager his or Wally’s safety on building a discreet trap nobody might fall for. It was another thing entirely to encourage his, let’s face it, occasionally emotionally unstable girlfriend, who he did genuinely love and care about, to go hurtling through the blinding madness of possibility. That was a lot to ask, not least because putting everything else aside he was still very, very reluctant to mess with time. He’d meant every word he’d said to Jane in their arguments. Time travel just generally seemed very, very dangerous. Almost too dangerous to be a last resort.
And the problem, at the end of the day, Matt had to keep reminding himself, was that he didn’t actually know anything. He was pretty sure, like maybe sixty to sixty-five percent sure, that he’d stumbled onto an extra‑temporal conspiracy – but he wasn’t actually certain. All he knew for sure was that one of his gunmen had, at some point, won some money from a lottery ticket. He had no way to confirm that was the Time Child’s doing; just a hunch. Who knows, maybe Louch just got lucky. Sometimes people did win things. And it wasn’t like Matt could go looking to see if the other would-be assassins had suffered similar strokes of good fortune, because the mere act now of going back and searching might make the Time Child suspicious. Or Time Children. If it was their doing. Which it might not be.
Jesus Christ. Matt’s thoughts spun so hard he was getting vertigo. He had no proof, because by definition a time‑manipulation conspiracy would be proof-less. But if there couldn’t be any proof, then there being a time traveller out to kill him looked exactly the same as there not. And he kept coming back to Occam’s Razor. What was more likely? That an unseen cabal of Time Children were secretly warring over his existence, or that some ignorant prick in a small town had won the value of a second‑hand Range Rover? Jesus. How was this his life now? Why couldn’t he just be like every other nineteen-year-old, anonymously blacked out on a dorm-room floor?
Eventually, when it became clear that sleep would not be forthcoming, Matt gave up and reached down to where his laptop lay on charge on the floor beside his bedside table. Discreetly, turning the brightness low, he opened the screen and shuffled up into sitting, quietly clicking around for a mental reprieve, going to places he knew he shouldn’t go.
www.bluin.com
->NeverSurrender
For those determined to seek the truth. You can find uncensored information here and anything else related. You have FREEDOM of SPEECH this is a safe place for everyone to talk about the future and what’s really happening in world events.
->PreserveHumanity
For the true humans unwilling to give up their humanity or to let it be redefined. For those proud of their powers and their way of life. Voids will not replace us.
For the past few months, ever since he first learned they existed, Matt had been quietly lurking in online groups of people who disliked him. Sometimes during the day when he needed a break from studying, sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep, never with any particular goal or telling anyone, as he doubted anyone would approve. What was the point, he could imagine them asking him – why immerse yourself in this nonsense? And in many ways they’d be right. The stuff Matt read on these subgroups was alternatively frustrating, scary and wearily depressing, and almost universally phenomenally stupid. Yet for some reason he kept returning. There was just something about these obscure pockets of online loathing that called to him, that were fascinating, and so he just kept on coming on back.
Posted by vir-mosorus 4 hr. ago
The Interview was so clearly staged it’s embarrassing. 2:17, 4:32, 8:11, 16:13, 18:55, the list continues… Amazed the mainstream media believes anyone swallows this crap.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
DDwaterbug <> 4 hr. ago
9:09 when they cut to “studio audience” you can see the shadows aren’t matching. And the sound quality suddenly changes, 9:11, 9:14, with clearly different echo effect. Geez, I wonder why that might be, it’s almost as if the two clips were shot in different studios /s. This is a game to them, they’re laughing at us, they’re not even trying anymore.
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GoldandBlack <> 4 hr. ago
Can somebody compile a supercut of all the CGI blunders? I want to show my dad.
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For the first couple of weeks, Matt had worried that the forums’ attraction lay in masochism or some deep‑seated self-obsession. Day after day, as he’d felt repeatedly compelled to return to Bluin and its spin‑off sisters, Matt had wondered if he had accidentally hit upon some new hereto‑untapped fetish, or if he was secretly filled with depression or self‑loathing and so was actively seeking out content designed to make him feel worse. Yet as the weeks passed, his mood remained stable and his self‑reflection continued, Matt came to realise this wasn’t what was happening; he didn’t hate himself, and he took no real pleasure – sometimes quite the opposite – in reading strangers’ virulent contempt. The appeal, it finally dawned on him, was that all these people were discussing events he was personally involved in, things which from lived experience he objectively knew. For once, and it was a bit of a revelation to realise how incredibly rare this was, he could actually read what people were writing on the Internet and say without a moment’s hesitation: “No, you are unquestionably wrong.” And that was in many ways a unique feeling; to be able to read peoples’ sometimes articulate, sometimes well‑sourced, sometimes rambling nonsense and say with total certainty that they were talking utter crap.
amen-to-me <> 3 hr. ago
Twenty+ mentions of blood and not once did they utter the word vaccine. Did they think a billion people would be watching and wouldn’t notice? Glaring omission. Guess the screenwriters were on the clock. It didn’t even make sense from a totalitarian point of view. Unless… the dictator’s grasp isn’t as strong as they wanted everyone to believe. They can’t lose face by admitting what actually happened. It’s Dawn this and Dawn that. If they let the truth rip through the cities there’d be mass uprisings. They’re just hoping by the time everyone wakes it’ll be too late.
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TheTranscendent <> 3 hr. ago
+amen-to-me Crazy to me how nobody acts.
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A better reasoned excuse might have been simply “know thy enemy”, and if anyone ever confronted him that was probably what Matt would go with. Lots of people on these forums professed to wanting him to die or suffer harm, not that they necessarily wanted to cause that harm themselves; most were circumspect enough not to be that open. Bans fell thick and fast in these places, moderators acted with impunity, and half of the subgroups he frequented were locked to private as soon as they started getting attention from mainstream Bluin users. But there’d been multiple occasions now when Matt had hitched a ride into those private forums, like some loner let into the nightclub early who wasn’t evicted once it went VIP. So long as he didn’t engage, so long as he continued lurking, Matt remained unnoticed. A fly in the forum, forgotten, with free reading reign.
Yeti1986 <> 3 hr. ago
It’s cute how main character reduces all criticism to “fringe” “crazy” people. Stuff, stuff, stuff that man with straw.
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MovingForward2Beg <> 2 hr. ago
+Yeti1986 And light an arrow.
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Nerrgal <> 2 hr. ago
+Yeti1986 The enemy is simultaneously strong and weak. We can dismiss them as a joke yet look out, here on live TV here’s one to show how dangerous. Good thing the cameras were rolling and a street full of pedestrians. DW verified and yet somehow we’re supposed to believe a bona fide GF just rolls through no checking? FF @ 15? Nah friend it’s non‑existent.
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At first a lot of what was written in these forums read like gibberish, but after you hung around for a while you sort of naturally picked the lingo up. “Main character” was shorthand for “Matt Callaghan”, since they had the same initials and it was sort of derisive. “DW” meant “DawnWatch”, a website some enterprising programmer had set up a few months back through which people could report and verify sightings of Lady Dawn. “GF” meant “green-fingers”, which was code for someone who took active steps to kill him, a combination of having a “green thumb”, as in a gardener who pulled weeds, and “trigger finger”. And “FF @ 15” was some gaming reference about surrendering, which Matt didn’t entirely get the etymology of, since in this context it meant “False Flag”.
References to DawnWatch always got Matt curious, so he tabbed out of the Bluin boards and, back propped up against some pillows, clicked over to the orange and white website to determine Jane’s current whereabouts. Presently she was “LOCATION UNKNOWN”, DawnWatch said, not seen for several hours, last sighted in Madagascar, though that was graded “UNCONFIRMED.” Matt resisted the urge he routinely felt to sign in and update the website to “SITTING ON MY COUCH.”
For what felt like hours Matt bounced back and forth, wading through diatribes and conspiracy theories like a sewerage inspector torn between interest and detachment at today’s batch of toxic sludge. Would there be corn in it? Some kernel of assassination? Maybe a watery whiff of time travel, which Matt was always on the lookout for, but which basically never showed. And now…
The uncertainty came back, an increased churning in his stomach and a quickness to his pulse. Matt half considered getting up and asking Jane if she could get some weed – but no, it was already too late, and the act might make the watcher suspicious. Why are you anxious, he imagined the Time Child thinking. Scrawny little blond-haired bastard. Matt closed the laptop, angry, unusually, at the forum morons and their lack of answers. Stupid Time Child, stop trying to save the world by killing me. Or… stop failing to protect me properly. Or get involved. Who the hell knows. God, his headache was getting worse.
It was close to 2am now, and biology was finally beginning to assert its dominance. Matt wasn’t Jane; he needed sleep, and his blurry eyes and the weird heat in his forehead brooked no delusions. Reluctantly, though his mind swirled with uncertain problems, before long Matt felt his eyelids growing heavy and his thoughts beginning to loop. I don’t want to die here, he thought; I just want things to go back to the way they were. I have to beat a time traveller. I don’t want to die… I want to go back… I have to beat…
In the darkened bedroom Matt closed his eyes, feeling his brain slipping towards fitful, restless slumber. His dreams, when they came, were of rows of blue-eyed children; of angry, faceless lizards; and of a clock slowly ticking out.