Trooper
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Writing Prompts
Tópico para compartilhar esse estilo de texto. Embora não seja um "Rome, sweet Rome", achei bacana:
[WP] You're midway into your flight when you, feeling bored, decided to surf the Internet. You read breaking news about another plane disappearance. You're on that flight.
http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPromp...n_you_feeling/
Part I
Quote:
"Philadelphia", the old man whispers in my ear, just as I open the headline on /r/news.
"What?" Is what I ask, looking from the words in front of me (New York bound United Airlines Flight Disappearance - Live Coverage) to the man on the seat behind me. He is smiling, looking straight ahead at his little Adam Sandler movie on my headrest. He doesn't seem to acknowledge me at all.
I shrug, and I look back at the article.
Flight 6674 of United Airlines, from Paris to New York, has been missing since 2:46 PM East Coast Time this Monday. Radio communications have been down for at least two hours, and the tower has been unable to communicate with any crew aboard the flight. The aircraft started deviating from its course at about 1:13 PM, heading south into the --
The article goes on, explaining exactly how it was that the plane I was taking now had disappeared and was missing from every radar in the world. I scratch my head.
"Philadelphia", I hear, in my ear again. Again I turn back. And the man is asleep, now.
"Excuse me", I say, to a passing by flight attendant. "Are we experiencing anything unusual?"
"What do you mean, sir?"
"Are we changing course? Avoiding a storm, or something?"
"Not that I am aware of, sir."
She's smiling in a funny way. Looking straight into my eyes, like she means the exact opposite of what a smile usually means.
"I'm talking about this", I say, and I'm about to turn my laptop towards her and show her the article when I notice her mouth. She's not smiling anymore.
She's mouthing the words "Shut up" in silence. Her eyes are locked on mine.
Then a second goes by and she's smiling again, and she keeps pulling her cart down the aisle like nothing has happened.
I look at the screen and the article now reads "Five Things You Had no Idea The Kardashians Are Up To."
I frown and I open Google. I search for 'Flight 6674'. Nothing. It's following its scheduled course, according to United Airlines website.
"You mean to tell me you never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?" I hear, again from behind me.
I turn around. "Look, sir, I --"
I shut up. The old man is not an old man anymore. He's young -- easily thirty years younger. But he looks the same. Same eye color. Same face proportions. Same body and same clothes.
"The USS Eldridge", the young man says, smiling like I'm a child. "October 28, 1943."
"What?"
He shakes his head, then goes back to closing his eyes and resting his head.
I frown. I feel dizzy and lightheaded. I look around.
Thepeople around me carry on their affairs as usual, but it's...
There's something.
Something off about them.
The man listening to music. I follow the wire down his chest. The headphone doesn't seem to be connected to anything.
And wasn't the child by the fat woman's side a boy?
Wasn't the male flight attendant blonde? His hair is black now, as he rushes past the aisle and disappears towards first class.
An old lady looks straight at me from a couple of sits back, and she's scribbling something on a notepad on her lap.
The tall guy sleeping next to me. I check his wristwatch. The arrows are frozen at 1:13.
"Ladies and gentlemen please prepare for descent in the JFK airport. Fasten seat belts and please raise your seats to upright position."
I look out the window.
Gleaming beautifully against the afternoon sun are two tall, twin buildings, the way I remembered them from my childhood. Twin buildings tall reaching the sky the way I remember them being before September, 2001.
This can't be, I think, turning my head to face my laptop screen.
I try searching for "USS Eldridge. Philadelphia Experiment."
No internet connection.
"When we land", the young man-used-to-be-old man behind me whispers, in my ear. "Walk with me."
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Part II
Quote:
The experiment was allegedly based on an aspect of unified field theory; according to some accounts, unspecified "researchers" thought that some version of this field would enable using large electrical generators to bend light around an object via refraction, so that the object became completely invisible. The Navy regarded this of military value and, by the same accounts, it sponsored the experiment.
I rise my eyes from the paper, feeling lost like a prostitute's son on Father's day. "What is this?"
"This is the Wikipedia entry for the Philadelphia Experiment", the old-man-now-young replies. "Not that there is a Wikipedia yet, in the world. But there will be. Let's not get into the semantics of time travel, though."
"What -- I --"
"Look, they tried to make a ship invisible, ok?" The man tells me. "But it went awry. The ship actually disappeared. It showed up in Norfolk, Virginia. And the crew... well they showed up weird."
I look down at the paper again and I keep reading.
Some crew members were said to have been physically fused to the bulkheads, while others suffered mental disorders, some re-materialized inside out, and other still supposedly vanished.
"This is true?" I ask. "Sounds like something I'd read out of a Snopes page."
"What? That's the part you have trouble believing?" The man asks. "You're sitting in a park bench with a rejuvenated old man in 1986 New York, son."
He has a point, I think, looking around. We're in a park bench, resting in the shade of the WTC South Tower. All around us, people go about their business right and left; suited men with no cell phones to their ear; kids wearing long hair and leather bracelets and Aerosmith and Sex Pistols shirts; no iPads or gadgets on outside tables of cafés and a lot less Starbucks around.
I see a crazy bum screaming nonsense in the corner (because some things never change).
"They did something, that morning in Philadelphia. They messed with things they shouldn't have. They woke something powerful. Something they couldn't comprehend."
"Are we expecting Cthulhu anytime soon?" I ask.
(I use humor as a defense mechanism when I'm terrified. It's why I suck on first dates.)
"This is serious, son", the man replies. "Weird things have been happening ever since the Eldridge. Roswell. Area 51. JFK."
"What's weird about JFK?"
"Well, he didn't die. Not the first time around."
I look at him like what?
"I remember the shot missed him, and the guards caught Oswald. A couple months later I woke up and it was November 22 all over again. Same day. My wife said the same things to me at breakfast, and my coworkers made the same lame jokes. It was like Groundhog day, except at 12:30 pm, in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't miss the shot, and JFK died. From then on, the next couple of months were quite different. That's the story as you know it. That's what everyone remembers."
I blink repeatedly, trying to make sense of his words. I notice two men in trench coats standing by a corner on the other end of the park, staring at us, then back at their wristwatches in perfect sync, like they're NPC characters in a shitty RPG Maker game.
I wonder if I'm going a bit too paranoid.
"So... What? Things are changing all the time?"
"Well, 'time' is tricky word to use here, but yes... To sum it up, ever since Philadelphia, the linear progression of time in our world has experienced some... jumps, if you will. Sometimes it's minutes long. Sometimes hours. Sometimes years. And sooner or later after it, something changes. And I'm the only one who remembers it."
I rub my eyes. I look at the man. He lights a cigarette.
"How do you know all this? I mean... Why are you...no one else remembers JFK not being murdered."
The man looks at me, cigarette resting between his fingers and on his lips. He pulls it and speaks through thick, white smoke. "Because whenever there's a jump, I jump with it. If I'm in a car, I bring everyone with me. In a bus, ditto. Or on a plane." He pauses. "Though no one seems to remember anything, except for me. Well, and you, now."
This is all too insane. I would rise and get up and tell him to fuck himself right now, if what he was saying was more insane than the clearly 1986 New York landscape around me. But it's not.
It's about the same amount of insane. So I might as well listen to him.
"Who's doing this?" I ask. "Who is making the changes? Why haven't I aged? Why did it look like the flight attendant knew about this? And the old lady scribbling on the plane? The boy that turned into a girl?"
I feel like I'm living the plot of J.J. Abrams' new TV Show.
I hate J.J. Abrams.
"Those are questions I cannot help you with", the man tells me, getting up. "I have learned not to question these things a long time ago. I advise you to do the same."
He starts walking away. I get up. "Wait. How do you know all this? About the Eldridge ship on Philadelphia and everything?"
He turns back.
He pulls the cigarette from his mouth. "Because I was there, Psycho Alpaca. I was on that ship."
He turns around and keeps walking. With his back to me, he screams, in the distance:
"If you miss home, I suggest visiting the 77th Subway Station. Lovely there, this time of year."
I look back at the other end of the park.
The two men in trench coats are gone.
_________________________________________
Listen. I'm at 77th right now. This is where I'm posting this from. There's a hotspot here, don't ask me how that's even possible. I'm beginning to understand what the old-young man meant by Don't question these things.
Memories from the Future, that's the name of the network. No password required.
I'm trying to trace it to a source, see if I can find who the hell the connection belongs to.
I'll try to post more updates later. Wish me luck.
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Part III
Quote:
Ok. Ok. We need to chill here. Be cool. Let's get started.
I didn't trace the connection. The one on the subway station. On 77th. I tried, but I couldn't trace it.
It traced me, though.
I'll explain:
I slept on the subway tonight. Well, I tried. Got about as much sleep as you'd imagine someone who just traveled back in time by accident would get, which is not much, I assure you.
I slept there because I didn't want to stay away from the hotspot. I'm terrified of losing the connection to my home time. So I slept to the wooshing sound of trains coming and going and New Yorkers complaining about Ronald Reagan.
I woke up an hour ago. Hour and a half. I'm not really sure. It was deserted, the station, when I woke up.
Have you ever seen a deserted subway station in 1986 New York? It's terrifying. Really, really creepy the way you think of horror stories and stuff creepy.
But to the matter at hand. I woke up and I checked reddit, and oh boy were there a lot of notifications. Thank you for the kind words and for the support, everyone, I'll try to get through all the messages fast as I can. I didn't really have enough time, then.
I did, however, had to make time to answer one particular message, which was a PM, which I noticed in my inbox with the title "Memories from the Future". That PM almost made me soil myself, I have no shame in admitting.
(I did soil myself today, and I'll get to that in a moment. It wasn't just yet).
Here is what the PM said:
_________________________________________
from [UNDISCLOSED] sent 1 hour ago
Count to ten, then look to your right. A little gray mouse is going to pass by, sniff around under the Brooklyn subway map and disappear down the tunnel.
(Stay on 77th. We are coming.)
_________________________________________
And those ten seconds were the last ten seconds I remember not freaking out.
Yes, it's been an hour and I'm still freaking out, that's what I'm saying. Because the rat was there, and it did all those things it said on the PM. It sniffed and it disappeared down the tunnel, exactly like the message said it would.
Yes, the rat was there. Who wasn't there, for that matter, was me. I replied the message with a polite WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU AND WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON and got up, heading for the exit, laptop open in my arms as I walked.
An answer came before I could go far, though, and it read like this:
_________________________________________
from [UNDISCLOSED] sent 1 hour ago
Stop running and sit on the floor. Now.
_________________________________________
And I did. I don't know why, but there was something in that message that made me think that if I didn't do it, something awful would happen. Maybe it would. We'll never know, because I sat.
I stopped and I sat and where I was now was a long tubular corridor of "Red, White and You" Coke Ads, graffiti and faded red tiles. It was deserted, and even more freaky than the actual station where the trains come and go I was sleeping at.
And then, new message:
_________________________________________
from [UNDISCLOSED] sent 1 hour ago
Youtube. First recommendation.
_________________________________________
I did what it said. I opened Youtube, and the first recommendation video was entitled Psycho Alpaca.
There's really no way for me to actually described faithfully what happened then so you can feel exactly like I felt, but I'll try. Here we go:
The video opened on the face of an old man with a scar on his forehead. This wasn't the plane old man. I've never seen this old man in my life. He was a new old man.
Behind him were people working on computers and reading things and passing by here and there. The scenery and the technology was definitely 2015, not 1986. It looked like a lab of some sort.
The twin trench coat NPC dudes passed in the background, rushing left to right off focus behind the old man's face. The old man smiled, and then he begun talking.
"Psycho, I know this is confusing. I need you to listen to me. What you experienced yesterday was a time jump. It is something intentional, not an accident. Something we have been working on for quite a while."
"What the fuck do you mean by we?" I screamed to the computer, feeling like an insane person, because I knew fully well it wasn't going to answer back.
Then it answered back.
"Please calm down, Psycho. Everything will be explained in no time."
(This was the part where I soiled myself, if you were keeping tabs).
My voice trembled as I answered. "You can hear me?"
"Yes, I can. What you need to understand is that these changes we are making, they are for the best. We are working for the benefit of mankind, not the other way around. The man you met today, on the plane, he works with us. He was advised not to tell you anything, though. To pretend he didn't know what was going on. We felt it would be better for you to be brought up to speed by a familiar face."
"You?" I asked my computer screen. The man's face was not familiar to me at all.
"Please be patient. Everything will be explained in time. What I need you to do now, Psycho, is please look to your right."
So I did that. I looked to my right. Standing on the far end of the dark tunnel was a tall figure shadowed by shadow.
(I realize this is a shitty way to say someone was obscured by darkness, but to hell with it, I just traveled in time, I have no time for fancy descriptions.)
(I also realize I used the word 'time' twice in the same sentence and that it read weird, but I won't change it for the reasons aforementioned).
Anyway, the silhouette was standing there, freaking the bejesus out of me.
Then it took a step forward and I could see its face. And it was the old man with the scar. The one in the Youtube video. He extended his hand.
On the laptop screen, he said: "Please come with me."
So, naturally, I ran on the opposite direction.
He didn't go after me, far as I could tell. Granted, I only looked back once before making a turn and disappearing from his sight, but what I saw was him just standing there, hand still extended in silence, as if waiting for me to change my mind.
I didn't. I ran out of there and into the streets and what felt like the whole extension of Manhattan island.
Then, when I felt like I couldn't run another second, I stopped. I looked around, hands resting on my bended knees, trying to get a sense of where I was.
Where I was looked like a dark, deserted street.
I spotted a bus stop next to me, and I made way towards it. I noticed someone sitting on the bench but, from behind, all I could tell was that it was a female.
I made way around to the front and I stopped. The figure sitting on the bench was the flight attendant lady.
(the one that told me to shut up, back on the plane).
She looked up from a book on her lap to me. For a second, she didn't do anything. We just stood there, facing each other.
Then she turned her book my way, and I could read what she was reading.
Scribbled in pen over the words printed on the pages of the book were three letters.
RUN.
I looked from the book to her, feeling all the hair in my body rising like powdered iron exposed to a magnet. I whispered, under my breath:
"What?"
Then she opened her mouth and started screaming insanely. She didn't move a single other muscle on her face. Her eyes didn't wrinkle, her forehead didn't frown. She just opened her mouth and screamed the loudest scream I had ever heard. High pitched scream. Non-human sounding scream.
So I ran again.
And I feel like I'm running out of places to run to.
_________________________________________
All right, I finished typing this. Where I am now is on a back alley close to the 77th station. I got a NY Yankees blue cap and something I improvised as a scarf I found lying around behind a dumpster.
I look like a disguised celebrity.
I'm going to try and walk past 77th unrecognized, fast as I can. Get close enough so I can at least post this up on reddit. If you're reading this, then I did it. Yay me. I'll try to post more updates as soon as I can, but I don't know how long it's going to be before I feel comfortable getting close to the station again.
If you're not reading this, then they probably caught me, and it makes no difference what I type here because no one will read it anyway, so Big Giraffe Orgy.
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Part IV (final)
Quote:
I am home.
Home as in 2015 home. As in on the same timeline as you. I'm back from 1986, and I don't even have a spiked bracelet or a Bon Jovi vinyl disc to show for it.
Let me tell you how I got back:
_________________________________________
They got to me, after my last post. I had barely hit 'submit' on the screen when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned back, and it was the old lady that was behind me on the plane (the one that was scribbling furiously and looking at me).
I said "Hey!" and she stuffed my head inside a black bag. Then I felt something pinch me in the arm, and I passed out.
Where I woke up was that lab I saw on the Youtube video. At least it looked like it. White walls, computer screens. Fancy stuff. And me, alone on a chair in the middle. Silence around me.
I don't know how long I was in there for. I roamed around. I tried the door (locked). I looked on drawers and closets for something that could help me escape, but there was nothing. I panicked, for a while, out of boredom.
When I had finally given up the door burst open, and who came inside was the flight attendant. The one with the in-humane scream and the book. She stood there by the door, looking at me for what felt like ages.
I said, "Yes?"
And she walked closer to me, and she rested a hand on my shoulder, and she said, "They are going to hurt you. The wooden door with no knob on the end of the main hall is your only way. Go for the door when --"
And then a hand sprouted out from nowhere behind her head and covered her mouth with what looked like a piece of wet cloth. Then her eyes rolled up and she passed out, and the man standing behind her held her body and gently placed it on the floor.
That man was the old man with the scar. The one from the Youtube video.
"Walk with me, Psycho", he said, signaling the door.
I didn't really have much else to do, so I accepted the invitation, and down a long, white hallway that seemed to go on forever we went.
"I know you have a lot of questions", he started, walking by my side. "And I'll try to answer them best I can. The first thing you need to understand, though, is that this started out as something good. Something that would benefit mankind."
He said mankind in a way like he wasn't a part of it. So I decided to ask.
"Are you an alien?" I wasn't even embarrassed about asking this, and I didn't ask it in like a mocking tone, like trying to express that I found the very notion of him being an alien ridiculous.
No, I was pretty serious. I actually wanted to know if this man was an alien.
The man snorted. "No. No, Psycho, I am not an alien. I'm all human. This way."
We made a left on another endless-looking hallway. "I am a scientist. I am a man who made a pretty big impact on the world, in the year 2055. Do you know what I did?"
"Sorry, no. But I'm from 2015, so don't feel offended."
"I know when you are from", he said. Then he continued in the same monotonic voice, "Psycho, I was amongst the first scientists who were able to understand exactly what had happened, that October morning in Philadelphia. I figured out and wrote down the equations that lead to a full understanding of how exactly the fabric of space-time had distorted. What exactly had happened. I did that in April, 2055."
"Huh", I said, because that's exactly how much I can contribute to a conversation involving the distortion of space-time fabric. "Huh... Huh."
"But I did more than that. Please, step inside." The old man with the scar signalized a double black door in front of us and, seemingly to his command, it opened. I walked into a large room with weird looking machines and screens and people in lab coats all over the place.
There was a wooden door with no knob on the far left side.
"This is our headquarters. A temporary lab we bring with us, whenever we jump."
"Wait. You jumped, too? I thought only me and the old-young guy had traveled in time."
"Psycho, the people on that plane, when you jumped, they work for me. Including the gentlemen you met earlier today. Even I was on that plane, though I don't think we saw each other."
I took a good look around. The scribbling old lady was by a computer screen, typing away. The two NPC dudes, checking on some equipment on the other side. The man listening to music with the phones attached to nothing was checking some papers by a metal desk.
"So they were in on it?" I asked, confused. "Everyone on the plane was in on it?"
"Well, not everyone, but we'll get to that in a moment."
"What about the flight attendant? Why did you --"
"The flight attendant also works for us. But... well..." Here the man with the scar seemed a bit uncomfortable. Even embarrassed. "In our line of work, it's easy to become... unstable. We travel back and forth in time and -- well -- the human brain wasn't really built to comprehend or deal with this kind of thing. Unfortunately, Miss Dangley's mind couldn't quite handle the pressure of our line of work. She is going to be treated and medicated. You can understand this, right?"
As if on cue, two man in lab coats passed by, each carrying the flight attendant by one arm, dragging her across the room.
Her dizzy, drowsy eyes met mine, and then she looked away at the door with no knob, like she was trying to tell me something.
"Look, sir", I said, turning to face him. "I'm going to be honest here: there's nothing about this I can currently understand."
The man with the scar smiled. "Let me try to clear everything for you. A lot of this is going to sound confusing, but bear with me."
He took a deep breath.
"When we first solved the problem of the Philadelphia, back in 2055, we were able to retrieve a single survivor from the Eldridge ship. This was Captain Jackson, the man you met on the plane. The one that turned from old to young. He was fished from his time to ours, in 2055, through a series of complicated process I won't bore you with, but that had to do with the research I was conducting at the time.
When information on my research -- and the man from 1943 I had retrieved to 2055 -- reached the government, some very powerful men took over. High government people. Suited people. FBI. NSA. Some agencies I hadn't ever hear of, before. They took over my research and, suddenly, my team was working for them.
They turned the research into a project, which was called Project Hurricane.
What my theory had made possible for these men to do was, in short words, to assemble a team to travel back in time and change the course of human events. Not just to 1943, but to anytime we chose. Jackson, the Captain of the Philadelphia, was -- and still is -- the jump man of our time travelling team. He is our link between 2055 and all times that came before. How the system works is we place ourselves -- the team -- alongside Mr. Jackson aboard a high speed transport -- a plane, or a fast train, for instance -- and then the jump happens. We can travel to whatever time we want.
This is how we got from 2055 to 2015. And then from 2015 to 1986, which is where we are now.
Don't ask me why it is so. We just know that the jump only works when Mr. Jackson is traveling at fast speeds. So that is what we do.
Project Hurricane's scope was to fix the Earth. The year 2055 was quite different, before we meddled with the past. John Kennedy and Khrushchev, for example, almost destroyed the Earth through nuclear war, before we intervened.
The 'spaceship' that crashed in Roswell was not filled with little green man at all, but with something much more sinister, and it hadn't actually crashed, but rather landed safely on the New Mexico Desert. We changed that, too.
"Wait, wait", I said, pressing my eyes shut, trying to absorb it all. "So you've been jumping back and forth through the twentieth century in order to change potential disasters that might have destroyed the Earth?"
"Not potential, Psycho", the man replied. "Those disasters actually happened, before we went back and changed them."
I nodded, beginning to understand what he was saying. Or at least I thought so.
"Anyway. There were side effects, as you may have noticed. We found out soon enough that the people inside the trains and planes we used to jump, they traveled with us, to whatever time we were going to. As a matter of fact, you are the first of these victims to actually remember the jump."
"So the other people on the plane..."
"They left JFK airport believing they always lived in 1986. They're out there right now, living life as if nothing is wrong.
Which brings us to the issue at hand, Psycho. To the reason why we jumped here, in 1986. You see, this is our last ever jump."
"What?"
"The side effects. These 'time orphans' -- that's how we call the people we left stranded on a time they don't belong to, like you -- they're beginning to disrupt the future. They're changing and meddling with the past, and we are experiencing some very bizarre -- and dangerous -- consequences of that.
You've seen this happen first hand, actually. On the plane. The man that changed his hair color. The boy that turned to a girl."
"So, let me see if I got this straight", I said. "You guys have been jumping back and forth in time, changing the course of human history, and leaving a trail of 'time orphans' on several different times in human history. And these time orphans are causing the world to collapse, in the future?"
"They are changing things that, to them, seem tiny and small, but some of them have horrible repercussions in the future. Which is why we are here. The jump you took part in, this one from 2015 to 1986 -- is our last. This is the jump that is going to end Project Hurricane."
"End Project Hurricane?"
"Yes. We have found that the only way to stop the potential disasters of having the time orphans meddling randomly with the past is to end the Project all together. Before it even begun."
"So all the changes the project did? JFK and Roswell...?"
"They'll be erased. But this is a small price to pay in order to protect the future from random shifts in reality caused by the orphans."
I had no time to try and absorb all that at the moment. So I pressed on the subject that concerned me the most:
"And why am I here? What is my job in this?"
The man with the scar looked at me and frowned. Then he shook his head. "No. No, Psycho. You weren't supposed to be here. You were an accident. Like I said, you are an orphan. We didn't know you were going to be on that plane. And we definitely didn't know you were going to be the first time orphan to actually remember the jump. It is a remarkable coincidence, if you think about it. But that is all."
"But if I -- "
I stopped. Something had occurred to me. "Why is this a remarkable coincidence?" I asked, cautious.
The man with the scar closed his eyes.
"What are you doing in 1986?"
He opened his eyes again.
"We are here to prevent your parents from meeting each other."
I stared at him blankly. "What?"
"We need to end Project Hurricane, Psycho. It destroys the world. No matter the good things it did -- avoiding atomic attacks, wars, genocides -- the consequences of the project itself -- and of leaving people out of their time zones to meddle with the future at random -- are much worst. We've seen what happens in the future. Chaos. Destruction. Death. We need to shut down Project Hurricane before it ever begins."
My heart was beating fast, now. Everyone in the room was looking at me.
I glanced at the door with no knob quickly. Then back at the man with the scar on his forehead.
"What does this have to do with my parents"
"You need to not exist, Psycho."
"No! What are you talking about? I have nothing to do with Project Hurricane! I don't even know any of you!"
"You have everything to do with Project Hurricane", the old man said. "And the only way to stop Project Hurricane from existing is to stop you... from existing."
The man's eyes locked on mine. He looked sad, defeated. Like he had long ago resigned to a truth he couldn't fight against.
"I wish it didn't have to be like that, Psycho. I really do."
"No... No", I mumbled, looking left and right with my hand extended in front of my chest. I felt dizzy, like I was about to pass out. I felt sick.
I looked at the door with no knob again. This was it. Now or never.
I wasn't following most of what was going on, but I did know this: I wasn't going to stick around to watch them trying to make me not exist, whatever the hell that meant.
I made a run for the door, without thinking twice.
"Psycho, no!" The man screamed, as I got closer to the door with each step. "If you go through this door, you're going to close the time fold for all of us."
I pushed the door open.
"If you go through that door, we have to start over. Project Hurricane happens all over again. And all over again we're going to have to go through losing so many people to realize it was a mistake. Don't let this happen, Psycho."
On the other end of the door was nothing but darkness. Not like a dark room, no. I mean actual darkness. Like the universe actually ended after that door, and there was no more space there. Like a solid darkness. I looked back. The old man with the scar on his forehead was looking at me with sadness in his eyes.
"It won't change anything, Psycho..." He said, sadly. "It will just make people suffer all over again. Then we will invent Project Hurricane again, and again we will realize it was a mistake. Then we will have to come back again. Because this has to be done. You have to cease existing."
He was crying.
"It's the only way, Psycho."
I looked back in front of me at the darkness.
I took a step forward.
_________________________________________
And now I'm here. I fell and I fell and I fell through the dark, to the point where I actually thought I'd never stop falling. But I did, and when it happened, I had landed on my seat, on the flight from Paris to New York, except in 2015 now.
The young-old man behind me was not there. Neither were the weird flight attendant or the man listening to music with no music device.
The plane landed on JFK with no issues, and I headed home.
I am fine now, as far as I can tell.
Well... Not fine fine, per se. I did feel a bit dizzy a couple of hours ago and I threw up and I passed out. I banged my head pretty nastily against my center table.
I actually had to get stitches at the hospital. But I'm fine.
Far as I can tell, I'm perfectly fine, and this was all just a weird, in flight dream. Those damn pills I take to calm myself, whenever I take a plane. Yeah. That's probably it.
I wash my face, and I raise my eyes to my reflection on the medicine cabinet mirror.
I touch the stitches on my forehead lightly, and they burn in pain. I pul my hand away.
"Ouch", I mutter.
That hurts. It's probably going to leave a scar.
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