Drop Point: Episode 9: Back to the Future, Part 2

Click to read the previous installment of Drop Point.

Previously on Drop Point:

Kyle Carter was sent back in time in order to give information to Earth’s moon military base regarding something called the Siren. But the file got ‘lost in transit’ and Kyle arrived at the base empty-handed. He met Commander Piott and Doctor Morris Bradley. To get the rest of the information from the file, Bradley hooked Kyle up to a machine that would allow him to retain more by making him re-live his memories. But when he tried to pull Kyle out, there was an explosion in the lab, and Kyle was caught up in a world of collapsing dreams.

Kyle Carter had almost screamed three things at once: “I’m back!”, “Nggghh!” and “Ouch!” Unfortunately he was untrained in the science of using both sets of vocal chords, and it came out as “I’m bounch!”

One of his roommates, Charlie if Kyle remembered right, propped himself on his elbow and looked at Kyle. “What?”

“Sorry,” Kyle said, rubbing his head tenderly. “I just… had the weirdest dream.”

“Then dream up a better one, I’m dead tired and it’s an unholy hour,” Charlie said as he rolled onto his side. Kyle remembered the half-belief in the dorms: any time from one in the morning to seven in the morning was considered ‘unholy’.

“Yeah,” was all Kyle said.  He rolled over too and tried to sleep, back in the room he’d called home for four months. Once he realized that wasn’t happening, he slipped out of bed and walked down the hall to the space he was about ten minutes ago.

“Doctor Bradley?” He whispered.

….

There was a silence, but a loud silence, on the other end, like white noise.

“Doctor Bradley?” He asked again, this time a little louder. “What happened?”

….EH….

Something came through, but cut off again, as if the microphone wasn’t working.

Footsteps, growing louder.

“Doctor Bradley!” Kyle hissed angrily, trying hard not to shout.

Kyle, something happened. When I tried to bring you out, the machine shorted out and blew up my computer. But don’t worry. Just don’t die in the next few minutes while d I get it fixed and get you out.

The words just don’t die echoed in Kyle’s thoughts, and not from the communication. Why did the doctor have reason to suspect any dying might occur in the next few minutes?

Suddenly an explosion rocked the building, and Kyle stumbled to the floor. Behind him, a chunk of the ceiling fell and hit the ground, spider-webbing across the concrete. He was launched into the air for a moment, and landed on his arm against the unevenness of the ground. He groaned and more smaller rocks and dust fell down. There were loud shouts, close and distant. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a large sign tipping over the side of the roof, threatening to fall at Kyle. The letters RM-A were lit up red angrily, and Kyle just had time to jump to the side as it slid in, bounced off the ceiling chunk, and landed on top of him. He pushed it off himself. What was happening?! This had never happened.

His mother rushed into the room and hugged him. His mother!

“Baby, are you okay?” She held him close, but he had his arms out in utter confusion and terror.

“What’s going on?” He shouted. “Where’d you come from?”

“You’re with me, on Earth. You’re safe, honey.”

Kyle Carter was most definitely on Europa, and most definitely not Earth. When he turned his head and saw the colossal ice cream - vanilla, double scoop, with a caramel candy shell- floating in the sky, spinning slowly as it floated past Jupiter, he figured it out: his memories were collapsing, with him in the center.

Kyle pushed his mother away and turned the corner of the dorm hallways, and ahead of him, all five doors on each side swung open simultaneously, spilling out different colors of light. Kyle peeked into the first and saw a cold night in a park. He stepped into the room, and found himself standing in the doorway of a men’s restroom on the back of a small facilities building. He remembered this night: it was his first kiss. He turned, feeling a sense of nostalgic surrealism at all these sudden changes in setting, to find another Kyle Carter sitting on a park bench, arm over the shoulder of a girl at school. He didn’t remember her name, but recognized the long blonde hair. He turned around, walked back into the men’s restroom, and found the dorm again.

He ignored the rest of the doors, knowing they’d spill into this melting pot of memories anyway, and ripped open a closed door at the end of the hall. There it was, the giant ice cream cone, directly underneath him. The floor, which had somehow turned into a thin film of sustenance fluid, gave away under his feet and sent him through the air, a full seventy feet, before hitting the caramel shell, smashing through, and getting buried in the vanilla ice cream. It was freezing, and he pulled himself out.

While Kyle makes the dangerous trek across the candy shell towards the lopsided mountain in the distance, which is actually the curly swoop on the top of the ice cream cone, the omniscient Narrator will whisk you away to what is going on outside.

Doctor Morris Bradley was rushing around the table. Kyle lay before him, shuddering violently against the cold metal restraints. The giant machine had catapulted him into a neural fusion of his brain before falling and landing on Kyle, slamming quite a few needles through his face. It was still connected by two bare wires, thank God, or the poor boy’d be dead. If he wasn’t already, which was an option, since his eyes had been punctured and his mouth was ripped apart. There was blood everywhere. The room was rubble from the explosion. The glass barrier in front of the station had shattered and ruined the equipment. If Bradley could remove that glowing needle from Kyle’s brain without hurting the boy or further damaging the machine, he’d live for sure, most likely.

But first he had to remove the now-partitioned machine from sitting on top of Kyle’s upper body.

The omniscient Narrator shall now whisk you back to where Kyle is sitting on the swoop of the Earth-sized ice cream cone.

Kyle was sitting on the swoop of the Earth-sized ice cream cone, feeling peaceful for the first time in hours, despite sitting on an orbital dairy treat, watching one of Jupiter’s moons, the core of this museum of his life, fracture and explode with the sheer confusion high above him. He was pretty sure that if he stayed on the ice cream, which he was going to do, he would eventually be floated away from the museum and be in perfect peace and silence until Bradley solved whatever was happening and yanked him out. He knew that, as with all planets, the center of the ice cream would heat up and start to melt, but he’d be back in real life before then, so he continued to lay on his back and enjoy the unimaginably-massive splendor and grace of cosmic nature without a care in the world.

But it wasn’t to last. Half an hour or so later, Kyle saw a large flaming chunk of Europa plummet towards the ice cream cone’s horizon. It landed with an explosion of milky white liquid and yellow chunks, and a deep, staccato crack echoed across the delicious caramel terrain. Trailing behind the noise, a giant crack started making its way towards the mountain.