Time shifts. And time shifts again. Reality snaps back like nothing changed at all.
Almost nothing.
Overhead cars flow like shooting stars with the neon night, dark and crisp around me. I am cold, but it is not the night air that makes me shiver.
I am standing on an earth that is perfectly oblivious of the reptilian gods that are flying through the vacuum of space from their distant, dark and cold world. A couple is walking in the distance, completely oblivious of the ancient leviathans sleeping far below them on this earth dreaming of the enslavement of all mankind. Overhead flies a jet, its passengers oblivious to the Sleeper Virus that will be released when the polar icecaps melt. All the people around me on this earth are completely obvious of the coming storm that will blow them all away like a fragile falling leaf.
There is blood on my hands.
There is a body at my feet, crumpled where she fell. Her running gear is still on her. Her head is skew and her arm wrapped behind her at a strange angle.
I remind myself of the costs of failure. I remind myself how one life means nothing against the whole of mankind. I remind myself of how my daughter died in the spiral feeds as the Symacrym descended upon my earth…
But I cannot help bending down and checking the body.
Dead.
“Hey! Hey you!” I hear a shout from behind me.
I swing around and see a man running at me. His body reads cybernetic implants and his attire indicates some sort of official. He will die of cancer in a little under ten years time. This earth still has governmental structures and governmental structures have enforcers of their laws.
“Stay where you are!” he is flying straight at me, anti-gravity boots with stabilisers thrusting as he zooms along.
I remind myself of the costs of failure. I remind myself how one life means nothing against the whole of mankind. I remind myself all of this, but still I hesitate for just a second.
But then I raise my right hand and activate the bio-circuitry embedded into my shadow mind that hosts the All Clock. I feel a tingle run down my arm as the energy fields warp out past my aura, the thin feeble fabric of reality begins to flow towards my will and tendrils of change spread out.
Time shifts. And time shifts again. Reality snaps back like nothing changed at all.
Almost nothing.
The policeman is no more. It is as if he never even existed in the first place. Probably a better fate than death, I remind myself.
She was seven years old when she died. My daughter, that is. That loss will never not haunt me, but my personal timeline cannot be changed by me.
I look up at the night sky and around at the twinkling city of lights and streets and people. Billions of lives all moving towards an unknown finite fate. This does not differentiate this earth from any other earth.
But at least this earth now has a better chance of surviving. Children everywhere will wake up tomorrow to slightly safer world.
On this earth, the Sleeper Virus has not broken out and infected the very air that you breathe. On this earth, the water sources have not all turned black as the sun was blotted out by the fallout. On this earth, the fire has not fallen from the sky, man has not turned on himself, the dead stay dead and the reptilian darkness from outer space has not descended upon the land.
What will happen on this earth?
That is the unknown.
But, I am here to stop it.
I take one last look at the body at my feet. She was a healer in this land, but her tools would have unleashed one of the ends of an earth.
Now she won’t. Now she can’t.
I remind myself of the costs of failure. I remind myself how one life means nothing against the whole of mankind. I remind myself of how my daughter died in the spiral feeds, and I feel the All Clock ticking in me…
She had to die.
They all do.
And then I am gone. It is as if I was never there.
Time shifts. And time shifts again. Reality snaps back like nothing changed at all.
Almost nothing.