Six and a half feet of polished chrome was standing over me waiting for an answer. I really didn’t know anything, but I had a time tested idea in mind. Lie. Because if every beast in this future-scape believed I was hiding some mysterious power that could make Shades whimper, then maybe I wouldn’t be worth a bite.

From baby gazelle to porcupine...

Unfortunately, the longer I considered all the various lies, the more tense and suspicious Centurion’s cape appeared to be. He, it, both of them, whatever. I had to assume everyone was on to me already. I was never great at social navigation, anyway. It was going to be a lot easier to just tell the truth.

Eighty Three decided to save me before my hesitation made Centurion any more suspicious. “He’s a little mushy right now, but he’ll cooperate. It’s my fault, I should’ve left him in the box.”

That decided things for me. Maybe I didn’t really know any of them yet, but they fought a war for me down there. I wasn’t going to let any of them dive on a discipline grenade for me now. You have to have some kind of code in life. “I’m fine. Actually, I’m glad they let me out. But honestly I was just bluffing. I have no clue what that guy was talking about.”

“Bluffing…” Centurion echoed skeptically. His black eyebrows lifted slightly.

I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together anxiously.“Yea. Sorry. I don’t remember anything before these two woke me up.”

I half expected Ten to chime in with wasn’t me, but he didn’t.

“Look at me,” Centurion said. To my own surprise I did just that. At his best Centurion had a way of issuing commands that was polite, belittling, and fully undeniable all at once.

The barges pulled away from the overlook as we took each others measure for the second time. The setting behind him changed from dimly lit mountain summit to twilight sky as he spoke. “You don’t remember anything before they let you out?” he asked. “And you can’t wield telepathic or telekinetic powers? Confirm.”

“Yup...” I may have harbored Jedi fantasies for as long as I could remember, but dreaming isn’t doing. “Confirmed,” I said, worried that yup was too informal for Centurion.

Centurion seemed convinced enough. His mind was obviously on other things anyway, because he flew off without saying another word. The barges banked slightly to follow him. Below and behind, my mountainous home for two centuries began dissolving into the shadows. I waved. It wasn’t exactly a tearful goodbye, but it hurt a little. All I had left from my old life was a gown, which was also the only thing I owned in my new life.

Shades’ muffled outbursts caught my attention, and I watched Blackbird drag him into a metallic popup cage. She was careful not to bounce his head off the bars, and that didn’t surprise me. The interrogation technique she and Centurion used seemed too bad-cop bad-cop for her, even if she had reason to hate Shades. This seemed more like her.

When she was done with that she sat down in the copilot’s chair and made herself busy. I watched them work for a while. The pilot was flying without a yolk, stick, or a wheel. All he had were little red lightning tendrils leaping up from the dashboard into his fingers. It was just like the lightning under Ten’s vehicle, which meant we had a field of it underneath our barge.

The other legionaries were unwinding from battle. Some were sitting. Some were standing. The gunner and pilot had their helmets engaged, but the rest were hairing it out, as they liked to say. As I sat there watching them compare exploits and talk trash, it suddenly hit me that every single one of them could have been the great great great grandchild of some anonymous voice I heard in a Call of Duty lobby over two hundred years ago.

That was not a healthy train of thought. I got the butterflies in my stomach again, and I could almost feel that dose of anxiety shooting through the back of my skull.

Say what you want about Ten, and I’m sure you will before this story is done, but what I have to say about him is that he was good at recognizing my breaking points. He wasn’t always patient, but that night he was. He saw the cracks forming and tried to caulk them with distractions. “Centurion’s cape...” he said. “It’s almost as creepy as Shades, right?”

He decided to play into my earlier obsession, and it worked. I raised my eyebrows and went pbbsssh. “Finally. So that thing moves on its own?”

“It does that all the time,” Ten told me. “That’s how I know it wants to smother me in my sleep.”

“Heheeyup,” Eighty Three said. “But Centurion doesn’t really wanna hurt anybody.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Ten nodded his head in agreement. “Unless someone is a threat to Analog or any of our allies,” he said, counting me as an ally with a quick point of his finger. “In that case he sets his morning coffee down, and they’re cold before it is.”

Eighty Three nodded and raised his eyebrows. “True beans.”

I was still red in the ears over being counted as an ally, but I really needed to know something. “Don’t you mean cool beans?”

Ten answered that one first with a tiny smirk on his lips, the first sign of one I could remember seeing. “He doesn’t.” He said it like he was trying to give me fair warning.

“You wanna know why I say it like that?” Eighty Three asked, poking my shin with a boot before sitting down in front of me in a Buddha pose.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but this was an important moment. Everyone needs friends. “All ears,” I said.

“Some people say cool beans. Well you knew that, obviously. But you know about bean counters? You had accountants, right? They make sure all money adds up, that the numbers are true...” He paused and outlined an invisible sign in the air. “True beans.”

“Oh holy crap…” I blurted with a groan. “That can’t really be why.”

“He writes old sitcoms in his free time,” Ten said. Instead of sitting on the deck next to us, he whistled a high pitched note, which caused one golden block of bench to retract into the deck then pop up underneath him. When he sat, the top of his head came level with Eighty Three’s, and that was obviously why he didn’t just sit on the deck. I tried not to snicker about that, but I still can’t remember if I did or not. “Which one is your favorite again?” Ten asked his friend.

Once again Eighty Three defied the odds by managing a bigger, brighter smile. “The Office!”

“Come on,” I said. I didn’t want to hear about that. I couldn’t handle it. “You don’t watch The Office.”

Ten saw what was happening and tried to change the subject. “He shouldn’t, because he keeps showing up late to training sessions.”

It was too late. I was stuck on The Office. It was better if nothing real could be associated with this world, and I needed to break the association somehow. “Riiighht. Okay then, finish this sentence.” I chose the most obvious quote because it was the first one that came to mind. I even put the appropriate emphasis on the Bs. “Bears. Beats. B-”

Eighty Three pointed at me and practically yelled, “Battlestar Galactica!”

“Ah…” was all I could say to that before I started choking up.

That did it. For the first time it truly hit me. Passed away over two hundred years ago, Becca had told me. Which meant I had slept for at least that. Two centuries plus whatever, depending on what year it was when they broke me out of my cryo chamber.

I remember thinking it was a weird trigger. You’d think it would’ve been a picture, or a song, or visiting the ruins of my old neighborhood in South Bend. Nope. It was a Jim doing a parody of Dwight quote. That was my moment of realization. All the happiness, all the joy and love I knew, the entire world that was connected to that show… It was all gone.

Just so you know, it isn’t the hyperventilation that kills you when you go into shock, although I have to say it does make you feel like you’re dying. It’s literally your broken heart that kills you. But before mine could quit on me, someone stuffed a squishy square into my mouth and closed it in.

I swallowed the magic cough drop involuntarily. Whatever was inside it absorbed quickly and stopped everything, but it also caused instant drowsiness. The last thing I tried to say was this is so f-.

I didn’t pass out immediately. Apparently I had some unique resistance to that. However, I didn’t have the will or the metabolic energy to act even remotely awake, so I just collapsed like a slinky across Eighty Three’s waiting hulk biceps.

Ten walked alongside as Eighty Three carried me to a pop up cot and laid me down, and after I was strapped in, the two of them had one of their patented exchanges. Eighty Three kicked it off. “So I was thinking…”

“Jay Bob’s has the best butter fries, not Uma’s?” Ten asked. Apparently that was a running debate.

“Haaa… No. You know better.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Shade’s and all those bots were probably already in there.”

“Probably.”

“So it wasn’t because they heard Kevin screaming.”

“But you still shouldn’t have let him out of the box.”

“Because of his head?”

“That, and you never really know what a levitator is capable of.”

“Then why didn’t the Academy train us on that?”

“They did, they just don’t make it a point to remind us, and you weren’t paying attention.”

“I paid attention, Ten.”

“I don’t mean generally… You weren’t paying attention that day. I remember.”

“What? Where were we? When was th-”

“You know why. You were writing notes to Kara…”

“Ten… We have to call her Blackbird… We’re on mission.”

“Give me a break, Emilio.”

“Stop that.”

“Sure, Eighty Three. We have bigger problems anyway.”

“Yea. Like what were Shades and those bots doing down there? And that cyborg? Why do they all know Kev, and what was all that about seeing him in dreams?”

“Exactly. Also… Was it a trap? Was Kevin the bait? Who was the trap for?”

“Good point, bud. And also… Why the heck did you bring Becca up out of the lab?”

“I wanted to see how Shades and Kevin would react.”

“You don’t think they’re working together, do you?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“Kevin’s a good guy, Ten. I can tell.”

“So what if he is? The trap wasn’t necessarily for us, or for Shades, it could be aimed at much bigger targets. Kevin doesn’t have to know he’s a time bomb to blow up the Council, or maybe even Rushmore.”

“Woh, hey, don’t say that. Don’t.”

“We’ve been losing this war lately. You have to watch Kevin.”

“Oh come on, Ten… I don’t wanna spy on Kev, you know I don’t.”

“You just met the guy. And who said anything about spying? He trusts you, so you get to babysit. That was Centurion’s call, not mine. Copy?”

“...eeyup.”

“Alright. Thanks.”

“Hey Ten… What’d you find down there?”

“Nothing.”

“Ten…”

“I said nothing.”

I wish they would’ve waited just one more minute, because that was the worst lullaby I’ve ever heard. I dreamed lucidly of a clock ticking impetuously… Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.