Drop Point - Act 4 Chapter 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: ONE AND A HALF BEGINNINGS

A hooded young man ran down an alley somewhere south of New York City. It was dark and very rainy, something common. When he was a child, he remembered, it was a lot colder. Right now it was 85 Fahrenheit, probably.

At the boy’s feet, a newspaper danced across the wet pavement.

He remembered at some point who he was, but that was a long time ago. The only thing he knew for sure was his name.

Ithacus Blaine bent over and picked up the newspaper, which was sopping wet and ripping apart in his fingers. After painfully examining the stump where his left ring finger used to be, he pulled the hood of his jacket up and wiped the rainwater out of his eye lens. The crappy thing came out in his hand. Blaine swore and tried to push it back into his eye, but his skin became slick with rainwater and blood.

Nothing was happening the way it should. It was supposed to go a lot better than this. The one person he had really trusted was supposed to pick him back up. That person had dropped him, of all places, into New York City, December 5^th, 2020.

Blaine grabbed the hood of his jacket again and tried to clear the eye socket out. He couldn’t see anything. When he managed to fit the eye lens back into his eye, he saw something on the other end of the alley.

An old dumpster.

If there was a god, Blaine thought, this was a morsel from the King’s table.

He limped over to it as fast as possible and swung the lid up. The scent of dead things and sewage drifted up to him. It was hot and dirty. But it was dry.

He climbed in and slammed the lid shut above him, resolving to visit his friend very, very soon.

Gene Colbert was lying in his gaming chair, about to pass out from the heat, when someone rapped on the door of his dorm room.

“It’s open,” he mumbled.

“Package for Colbert,” the boy said. He looked like a freshman. Gene smirked. “Just toss it on the bed.”

The kid did so, and left. Gene swiveled in his chair and stared at the box. After a moment, he stood up and picked it up, turning it over, looking for… That’s weird, he thought. No return address.

      Gene shrugged, and popped it open. Inside was a compact disc and a square of paper. The disc he dropped on his laptop, and the paper he started reading:

“Dear Mr. Colbert, I am sending this software to you as part of a contest you have been entered into. You were hand-chosen by my associates and myself. The disc is a word processing program which you must use to write and submit your work. You have one year to write a minimum 50,000 word novel which begins in the year 2455, but not for long. The introduction is already written for you; the rest is of your own creation. I wish you luck. – B.”

Gene looked down at the CD, deep in thought. “B?”

The laptop took a few seconds to boot up. He slid the disc into the side. A little logo popped up of a rose flashing different colors. The title BLU-ROSE TECHNOLOGY faded in. Music swelled up like an orchestra drawing to the climax of a very complex song.

Black.

Gene waited for a moment, stunned. Did his computer crash? Was the software actually a virus? That was stupid of him. He was about to cold-boot it when the screen flickered in again. It looked like a regular old novel–writing program. Nothing really special. There were already a few paragraphs typed in, a lot of which was blanked out. He was about to start reading, but a box popped up.

WELCOME, GENE COLBERT!

YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS ONE OF THE EIGHT BETA-USERS OF BLU-ROSE TECH WRITING SOFTWARE. IN ORDER TO BEGIN YOUR NOVEL, YOU MUST FIRST FILL OUT THE CREATE A CHARACTER FORM IN THE NEXT BOX!

> Continue

CHARACTER INFORMATION

[*Not required unless the information is of importance to the story]

Name:          Kyle Carter

Sex:          Male

Age:          [Fifteen]

(For some reason, it wouldn’t let Gene change the age. He continued, deciding to fill out the non-required information just in case.)

Parent(s) names:          Rachel Carter, Seth Carter

*Eye/Hair/Skin Color:          Brown/Brown/Caucasian

*Birthplace:          Oak City, New Pavilion, Earth

*Birthmarks:          None

*Other:          None

> Submit

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CHARACTER SUCCESSFULLY CREATED !

CLICK TO CONTINUE !

> Continue

The box closed, and he started reading what had been written already. This time, all the blanks were filled in, presumably with the information he’d just typed in.

Kyle Carter was born in the year 2440AD in the midst of an intergalactic war. Earth and its associates began a process that resulted in a secret operation: find a child whose lineage was unaffected by the war, and send him or her back in time to the roots of the political conflict, and retroactively prevent the war. The reason the child’s lineage was important was simple: to prevent a paradox in which the child was simultaneously born and not born due to the existence of the war. It’s complicated.

Kyle Carter was in a group of eight fifteen-year-old children, one of which would be assigned this job. He succeeded all three challenges and was chosen. But when he went back in time, he had lost the information given to him that would prevent the war.

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The room was set deep in the underground of Europa, underneath a military academy in an unknown state. Thirty-nine men in uniform stood in two rows facing each other like an aisle. They were waiting for the historic moment when in an instant, they would go from being high-ranking men of honor to being stay-at-home spouses, some other occupation, or completely disappeared. What was so ironic about this historic moment was that, when this fifteen-year-old boy was finished, it would not go down in history. It wouldn’t even have happened.

But before all that happened, the fifteen-year-old boy had to go back in time, which he was rather reluctant to do. He had a few questions first.

“What do you mean, ‘perfectly safe’? That thing looks like it’ll hurtle me into deep space!”

Kyle Carter was a bit nervous about his first ride in the Depositor. It was made to transport molecules to predetermined space-time coordinates, which for Kyle was the first moon base in year 2335, about one-hundred and twenty years ago. Kyle was selected to change the future, and he was all for it until he learned it was literally through this thing. They chose him out of about five others at the military camp that these people were one-hundred percent sure would not be affected by the change in time - preventing a 120-year intergalactic war in the past would surely change the bloodlines of millions of families throughout the galaxy.

Kyle glanced at the manila folder in his sweaty hands. The man in the lab coat to his right, Professor Caldwell, one of the Depositor’s initial designers, sighed as if he hadn’t thought to himself when planning the week’s to-do list that he would be explaining this fairly simple concept n-thousand times to a kid he met that one day about a month ago upon his arrival.

“It’s perfectly safe, I promise. Just get in there, give them the file, and we’ll pull you back up. On your end, the whole thing will take, not even an hour,” he shrugged.

“On my end? What end would that be? Is it too late to resign my post as hero of the future?”

“Technically, your going back and doing this will create a future where you never went back in time, so you won’t be much of a hero. You won’t even remember as soon as you return.”

“How comforting.”

There was a moment of silence. Kyle nodded at the men standing around him and the Depositor. They saluted him as if he were a general. He stepped up to the metal staircase and glanced into the blur.

The Depositor was a strange thing. This ‘perfectly safe’ piece of machinery was simply a large, iron ring about ten feet across. It looked as if someone had gotten a good deal of it done before throwing his tools down and left it there, incomplete. Inside the ring was a viciously spinning swirl of billions of slightly greyish colors, twisting and boiling and flashing and eye-meltingly deep in eternity. It was rattling too. The Depositor was very shaky and loud, like it was going to break down mid-transit, ripping him into bare atoms and scattering him out across the systematic universe.

So this was it. The past six months of rigorous physical training and classes in advanced quantum physics were leading up to this day. No, this very hour. This hour was his. Kyle’s mother had called him from their small house in New Pavilion to tell him they were erecting a bronze statue in his honor on every Mutual Interest Party planet in the Orion Arm as the entire galaxy held their breath, waiting for the instant when the Universe skipped over to a completely different timeline. Sure, it had cost thousands of billions of galactic dollars, but no one cared; in only a matter of time, they would all disappear as time forgot the entire ordeal.

One of the soldiers behind him, apparently impatient for the internal monologue to end, planted a good foot in Kyle’s back, sending him tumbling into the lights screaming.

Knowing he didn’t want to see the inside of a wormhole, Kyle closed his eyes quickly. The experience in the Depositor was strange. It sent a thousand sensations running through his body at once.  It was something like this:

All around him there was the unbearably loud roaring like a lion in a jet engine. He was being yanked through eons of everything. His legs started melting out of his ears. His body was pulled through his nose and out of his backside. His hair stuck out like needles and pulled themselves back into his head. Fingers sprouted out of his elbows and started clawing at his back. Brain fluid leaked from his eyes and pooled up behind his eyelids. His feet dropped out of the top of his head, falling like pebbles into a deep well that was the end of this infinitely long tunnel of lights.

And suddenly it was over, in less than three seconds.

Before he even opened his eyes, he puked, drenching himself in the gross fluid. His head was spinning, and his body’s nervous system was failing to tell him what he was buried in. He coughed and sputtered before trying to move. Could he open his eyes? His feet pressed against something without feeling how hot or cold it was, or its texture. He slid through whatever it was he was in with fair easiness as he straightened up. And then all his senses came back to him. His feet were against cold glass. He was buried in lukewarm sloppy, gooey yellow substance.  Kyle was in a 4-foot deep tank of sustenance fluid, the stuff that they leak into the soldier’s pods in slow-time deep space travel.

He pressed his head against the lid, and with some force, un-clicked it. He stretched his arms and slopped the food all over the floor, with a heavy, strenuous groan.

And the rest is history.