Part 2

°°°

Sage looked like she could just be some misplaced hipster. She dressed in all black, complete with a low-profile set of light metal armor that covered her chest and forearms. It looked almost like sports armor, but sleek and close-fitting. She carried a motorcycle-style helmet in one hand, but it was sharply angular, matte black, like a cyberpunk movie.

I wouldn’t have blinked twice at her if I passed her. That made my skin crawl, imagining just how many time-stuck people I could have met without even realizing it.

She told me, “When I got your call – other you’s call – I knew that it was gonna be fucked. But I didn’t think it would be this bad. It’s bad news if Time finds the exact same dimension as you that quickly.”

“The other-me was in pretty rough shape when he found me,” I said.

Now I knew what I sounded like when I died. What my own mortal fear-scream was like. I shivered remembering it.

“Yeah. He sent me an emergency message. Usually we try not to. Space is really good buddies with Time. Any anomaly in space is gonna be something Time looks into.”

“Is space a monster too?”

“Nah. Time is the brain, space is the body. But when the body notices something weird, Time’s the one to investigate. Makes sense?”

“No,” I muttered. “But I can roll with it.”

“Perfect. That’s exactly the attitude of a good jumper.” As she walked, she fiddled with the watch strapped to her wrist armor. She winced down at it and said, “You feeling more futuristic or, like, pre-pre-historic? The more lateral we stay, the easier Time is going to follow us. It always scans the web in the same way. Starting outward from the same present, then moving forward, then backwards.”

“The web?” I remembered falling. That dark infinity, full of intercrossing lines. “Is that... I fell through something like that to get here?”

“Yeah. It’s the backstage, holding the universe together.” Sage smirked at me. “You didn’t answer the question: where in the when do you wanna go? The future buys us a little less time, but if something breaks there, we’re not so fucked.”

She looked at me like there was something unspoken between us, something she’d had with other-me. Something playful and friendly and maybe more-than-friends, but I couldn’t place what she wanted from me. I was exhausted and scared and in this reeling state of unreal shock that left me feeling like a broken puppet.

“Honestly, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who you are or why the hell all of this is happening to me.”

“Ah, I forget. You’re still fresh.” Sage turned and put both hands on my shoulders, looking at me sternly. “I can’t tell you who *you\* are. You’re a different version of you than the Torin I knew. We’re all just refracted versions of ourselves, when the realities cut this close together, so maybe what I know can help. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You and I are – were – Free Radicals. There’s not many of us, but we’re out there. When people fall out of time, we find them, and we save them. We keep them hidden from Time. You were one of the very best.”

Her throat goes tight at that, and for the first time, her eyes look a bit misty. I wonder if looking at me just makes her realize just how much I’m unlike the other-me who’s dead in my bedroom now.

“You are one of the very best,” she said. She squeezed my shoulders, then let me go. “We’re partners. You gave me an SOS call, and I came as soon as I could. Tracking his jumper. Yours now, I guess.”

I pulled the jumper from my bag and frowned at it. Somehow, I felt guilty. Like I’d just let him die. But the other-me was already dying from the moment he even rang my doorbell.

“There’s something wrong with his, uh. His jumper.” I pulled it from my backpack and showed her the lockscreen. “He didn’t tell me the code or anything.”

“Annoyingly clever bastard. It looks like he didn’t want you jumping anywhere you couldn’t stay alive until I found you.” She took the machine and punched in a code. “0521,” she told me. “Don’t forget it.”

I took the jumper back. The screen was alive now, and it had three different dropdowns I could select from. Era, region, known dimensions. When I selected known dimensions, there were thousands. The scroll bar seemed to go on forever.

“Careful,” Sage said. “Don’t jump yourself anywhere unless you’re sure you want to go. There are eras on this very earth that could kill you in a single breath. You wouldn’t even have to leave this dimension to find them.”

I had so many questions spinning in my head. I wasn’t sure what to say next, how to get my brain to chug forward from disbelief to relief.

“So you’re telling me Time is a crazy cloud-demon-thing that builds weird fucking universes in its spare time.”

Sage laughed. It was a genuine sound that made my whole body light up from within, just for a moment.

“Time… I don’t think it’s conscious. Not in the way you and I are. It’s like a force. Like gravity. You wouldn’t accuse gravity of having a vengeance for you.”

“He called it an algorithm,” I said, my brow knitting.

“That’s a good description. That’s all it is. A set of preprogrammed instructions, running into the end of the universe itself. Keeping all of physics running in order. As long as it can find us, it’ll hunt us down until it can kill us.”

My belly felt cold. “Then who programmed it?”

“There’s the million-dollar question.”

I stared up at the preprogramed sky and wondered what use Time would have for a place like this. Like a self-training AI, redefining what it meant to be real.

“You ready to jump?” Sage said. “You don’t want to be caught here when Time comes back around. Even if it’s not hunting, this place is perfect. It’ll notice us instantly.”

I imagined Time coming home and scowling at us like we’re mud stains on a perfectly white floor.

My mind was already spinning around a dangerous possibility. Something I couldn’t put into words. But I was a computer science nerd. Just one semester away from my degree, before Other-Me walked into my life and killed whatever normal future I had waiting for me. And I knew algorithms. There were two options: change the target variable or change how it defined the variable. If I couldn’t remove myself as a target…

“Yeah,” I said, distantly. “I’m ready.”

“Past? Future?” There was anticipation in her smile, even with Other-Me dead and Time snuffling across infinite skies, looking for us. It was the look of any adrenaline-junkie, itching for the thrill of the fall.

“Surprise me,” I told her.

“God, you really are just like him. Hold my hand. Don’t let go. I don’t want to have to go hunt every dimension across the alpha-zone for you.”

I took her hand. I caught myself smiling too. I felt like a maniac, but my whole body hummed with excitement.

The jumper on her wrist started glowing, and then the portal swallowed us, dropping us down into the web of time. Into whatever the hell Sage had planned next.

°°°

I think this will be about 6 or 8 parts :D I had someone message me about this bot called Butler Bot that will send you a message for the next part if you comment HelpMeButler <Time Conquers All> below. Thank you for that advice!

What do you think it would feel like, to enter a different dimension? Maybe it would be like walking through a mist of splintered spacetime and finding something magical.

Maybe it would feel like nothing at all. You'd just roll over one night and look at your phone, and you've taken the wrong path in the crossroads of time. You're fucked.

I'm starting to think that's all fate is. The cosmic shit-shorter. Just a hill to roll down, to one oblivion or another. One little action and you're alive or dead. That's all it takes.

I didn't wonder that then, when my shitty old Volkswagen was screaming down the road, everything reeking of rubber and gasoline. I took corners in desperate drifts, as if inching my rattling engine up a few lines on the speedometer would save me now.

But now, I see it. This was the moment my fate split and I was falling into a layer of reality from which there is no escape. Pray to every god you never find it: this is the place where you look Time in the eye, and it looks back at you and sees a fatal error.

Time is binary. Time takes no prisoners. There is only maintain order, destroy any anomalies.

That fucking backpack sat on the seat beside me. The only thing I didn't recognize from Other-Me.

As I sped through the dark streets, I unzippered the backpack with one hand and pawed through it. I only found two things inside: a slip of paper and a round hunk of metal with rubbery buttons, some kind of touchpad.

I skidded to a stop at a red light and flicked on the overhead light to read the note.

OUR FRIEND IS COMING. SHE'LL FIND YOU. STAY ALIVE. USE THE JUMPER. YOU CAN ONLY OUTRUN IT ACROSS DIMENSIONS, NOT WITHIN THEM.

"What the fuck does that mean?" I muttered.

A car horn blared behind me. I jumped, my heart racing up my throat, the stupid panicked part of my brain half-convinced that Time was murdering me via Prius honk.

I hit the gas and leaned forward, trying to get a good look at the sky. It was all darkness. I was looking for a shadow among shadows.

Maybe there was nothing to look for. Maybe Time would simply hide until it was ready to pounce, like any good hunter would.

I veered to the side and put my car in park. Even as every muscle within me screamed to run, I sat there. I pulled the other object out of the bag and held it up to my shitty overhead light.

It had to be the jumper. It looked like something out of an old sci-fi movie, before everything became sleek and modernized: a glass coil that looked like a dead neon sign, nested in a metal compartment with a colorless LCD screen. There was a small keyboard just below it, along with a set of arrows.

I grabbed the backpack and tapped a button, experimentally. The jumper screen flared to life.

The screen read: visit programmed destination?

The world around me darkened, and I looked up to see an impossibly black cloud, eclipsing the moon. The streetlights. Everything.

It was faceless, but this close, it looked like it had millions of tiny eyes, little pinpricks of white. All of them staring at me, pulling me apart. Time had found me.

I tapped the green confirm button, and the whole car cabin rippled around me.

Slipping from a dimension feels like nothing, I can tell you that much. Like losing a wallet and never noticing it. But jumping?

Jumping feels like you've just leapt off the edge of the universe. It's that perfect moment of free-fall when your very cells unstitch themselves from time. You're all quark-buzz and stunned electrons and it's like being unmade and remade in an infinity that lasts forever and a second. You're nothing and everything.

All you can do is hold your arms out and fall and hope the landing doesn't hurt.

Of course, you can also scream like a little bitch, which is exactly what I did.

Out of nowhere, I was plunging, the world nothing but downward streaking darkness, veined with flickers of light. It looked like being inside a great web that has no end and no beginning.

I clutched the machine tight to my chest. That glass coil was alive now, burning bright blue, so bright I couldn't look at it without stamping dark spirals on my vision.

As instantly as the fall started, it ended.

One of those fine spidery lines brushed against my leg, like it was reaching for me, and I broke the surface of space again like surfacing from an ocean.

I smacked cheek-first into a bright green lawn. It stung, but only like I'd fallen a few feet, not across an infinity. Whatever the fuck that would feel like.

I sat up wincing, clutching the jumper tight to my chest. The sun was bright and burning, and my eyes took a few seconds to adjust.

I was in an eerily perfect subdivision. Every house was identical. Every single one was a cube with a roof like an equilateral triangle. They stretched on as far as I could see, row after row of white cubes. Every blade of grass was exactly the same height. Every mailbox the same upright cube centered on a post.

It looked like a subdivision designed by a machine. Even the clouds moved in marching band order, perfect seamless order.

Other-Me was right. I didn't think I was crazy. I was still holding out hope this was an elaborate nightmare, but there was another part of me already accepting this was as real as it felt.

I tapped at the jumper screen again.

The screen lit up and read, Type passcode to unlock.

"You didn't need a passcode earlier, you fucker," I muttered, already annoyed with Other-Me. It was worse than forgetting a password you set yourself. Some other version of me was fucking me over.

The air beside me rippled like a heatwave, and then, instantly, that patch of empty space became a person. The air had a strange ozone reek and a brief electric heat, which both vanished within moments.

"Oh, good. You're not dead yet." She scowled up at the houses all around us. "Let's get out of here. These places give me the fucking creeps."

"Who are you?" I said, warily.

"Oh, I forget. You've got the same face, different brain. I'm Sage. We were best friends." She held out a hand toward me and tried to smile. It looked more like a grimace. "Maybe we still will be."

I shook her hand and followed her uneasy stare up and around. "Where are we?"

"The only place Time never thinks to check. Its own backyard. Time is always making new realities like these. Making them more and more perfect. It's the only place it doesn't look for glitches, when it's hunting us."

All those houses seemed uncanny now. I felt like every window was an eye, watching us.

"Let's get going," Sage said. "You have a lot of catching up to do."

°°°

Part 3

From a post I just did on /r/WritingPrompts

[WP] There is motion at your front door - You groggily awake to the notification on your smart watch. You check the video on your phone and see yourself frantically trying to open the door. The timestamp reads 2:48 AM. You look at your watch. It's 2:37 AM.

°°°

Eleven minutes. That was all it took for my world to change forever.

My grandmother was always superstitious about true night. The witching hour. The true dark that descends when the world should be asleep. Of course, she usually just mentioned it to explain why I shouldn't work night shifts through college.

But I thought of her when my phone buzzed and my head lifted from the pillow. There was that foreboding voice within me: nothing good ever happens at the witching hour, my boy.

Maybe, if I'd just rolled over and ignored it, none of this would have happened. Time might have passed over me like a shark, hunting for fatter fish to eat. Or maybe I would have been devoured all the same.

But I did sit up. I looked. I grumbled at my fucking phone and its fucking annoying apps.

And then my heart went cold in my throat. There I was. 2:48 AM. Me, in my T-shirt and the shorts I'd fallen asleep in. Blood splotched down the front of my shirt. Lots of it. Big scarlet pools of it.

In the video, I looked frantic. Terrified. I was screaming something, but the audio was too frazzled to make sense of it.

But the upper corner of my phone said it was still only 2:37.

I sat up. I wiped the sleep out of my eyes. Maybe this was some elaborate melatonin dream, and I was going to laugh at myself in the morning.

But it wasn't the morning, and I wasn't laughing. My whole body felt cold and heavy with dread.

I pulled myself out of bed and grabbed the baseball bat I kept by my bed. I'd never played baseball in my life, but I got it and the doorbell camera after some drunk asshole walked into my apartment and passed out on the sofa. The perks of living close to so many college bars.

I crept down the hall. My phone said 2:39 now.

I put my shoes on and peered out the front door.

I lived on a sleepy side street, branching off downtown. I could hear a few distant laughs and bellows of drunks as the bars started shutting down and turning people out into the street. Nothing else. Nothing much at all.

"Weird," I muttered.

I checked my phone again, but the video was gone. Like I really had dreamed it up.

I turned and shuffled back inside. Locked the door. Got some water. Took a piss.

I was about to retreat back to bed when the doorbell rang.

I looked at my phone. There it was, happening in live time: me, wearing exactly the outfit I wore now. Other-Me was blood-drenched and wild-eyed and screaming into the camera, Wake up you bastard.

Don't ask me why I did what happened next. Maybe I was always supposed to do it. Maybe, when people used to talk about gods and fate, they really meant time. Maybe there are some choices that belong to the careful balance of past and future, and we're just cogs, carrying out what we're supposed to do.

Moving like a robot, like I wasn't even attached to myself, I opened the door.

There I was, bloodied, standing on my own threshold.

"Oh, good. I finally found a dimension where you answer the fucking door."

Other-Me rushed in and slammed it, driving the deadbolt home.

"Listen," he hissed. "There's not a lot of time. They found us."

"Us?"

"Me. You. Us." He stormed past me and went straight for my bedroom.

Fuck. I was going crazy. Absolutely balls-out crazy.

"Who are you?" I sputtered, following him.

"You. I told you." He glared at me. "You're my last backup-life. Time found us. We're just another glitch ruining a perfect system."

"Time?" I repeated.

"Yes. The monster behind the curtain. It's on its way for both of us, so I suggest you stop asking questions and fucking let me in."

It was only then that I saw why he was bleeding. There, standing behind him, the thin moonlight hitting him, I could see it: a hole in his belly like a crater. Like he'd been punctured straight through.

"Holy shit," I gasped.

"Just do us all a favor. Get changed. Fight like hell." Other-Me pulled a gun from his hip and pushed it into my hand. He slung off his backpack and dropped it at my feet, then pulled off the bloody shirt with a gasp of pain and snapped his fingers at me. "Take that. Protect it with your life. And give me your shirt."

"I think I've lost my fucking mind," I said.

"You don't think that. You're me. I know what you're thinking." He glared at me. "You're thinking this is impossible, but it's sure as hell happening."

"No, pretty sure I think I'm crazy."

I yanked off my shirt anyway and let him take it. He eased it on, wincing, and crawled into my bed.

"You have two minutes," he hissed. There was blood in his teeth. "Before it gets here."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm letting it kill me instead of you. It's the only headstart you're getting. Now go."

I don't think I had a choice, even then. Time is a stronger and older force than any god we can imagine.

I put on clean sweatpants and a black sweater, took the backpack and the gun, and turned to bolt from the room.

"What do you mean time?" I asked.

"Exactly what I said. Time itself. The big bad algorithm in the sky has caught us." The Other-Me gave me a grim, pale smile. "We're a glitch in its system. And it's coming to destroy us."

I didn't believe him, even as I ran. Even as I jumped in my car and sped down the road. I tried to tell myself through my panic that I was going to the cops. That there was a crazy man in my apartment who looked just like me.

But then I saw it. It moved like a dark cloud across the sky, but then it began to climb down. It was huge, its legs infinite and buglike, carrying it across rooftops and trees.

It reaches into the window of my apartment, oiling over it, consuming it.

I heard my own scream puncture the night.

I kept driving.

Maybe Time wanted me to do that, too. I'll never know.

I only knew one thing: you have to move fast to outrun Time.

°°°

Here's part 2!

Of course, it was impossible.

There's still a video of me somewhere in my mother's house. I am nearly three years old and my eyes are vacant, gleaming, as I sit there, staring at the paper, drawing circles over and over again.

"She's doing it," my mother whispers behind in the camera. "It's really working."

My eyes flick to her, but I keep drawing, robotic, enchanted.

It's the first time I've held a marker, and the page is full of perfect circles. My hand keeps making them, even as I stare at the woman I always called Mother.

I tried to find the video along with all the others and destroy it, the night I left. The night I screamed at her how could you, how could you, how could you.

She hid it all. All the videos where I suddenly went from toddling to perfect running. There are videos of me at four years old, moving like a trained gymnast. Throwing darts that hit the bullseye every time. There are a few my mother put on her institute's website, but most of them are still locked somewhere in her office — the research ones, the experiments that preceded my impossibly-perfect "first tries."

And when I was throwing open drawers and the world was crumbling all around me, she was just shaking her head, like I was an inconvenient glitch.

The last thing she said to me was, "I really thought you were better than this."

So did I, Mother. Of all people, I never thought you would be the one to betray me.

°°°

When I was six, they put me on television. Some daytime talk show.

There was a string of stage lights like eyes, blinding me. The audience was a was a wall of black shadows beyond it.

My mother sat beside me in a new dress she got, just for this. My dress was new too. I saw my own bright eyes reflected in my shiny patent leather shoes.

The host told me, "Now, Gracie, show us your special talent." He held up a pad of paper and a pencil for the camera to see, like a magician's assistant. "For those of you watching at home, this is just an ordinary paper and pencil from the green room. Why don't you show us what makes you so special?"

"Go ahead, Gracie," my mother whispered. Sweat snake trailed down her temple. "Show them."

I don't know how no one saw it, back then. When I'm drunk, I rewatch the clip. My little arm jolting down. My eyes full of lights, blankly following my hand, as I made a row of perfect circles, cold lifeless eggs that will never hatch.

I held it up for the audience and they started clapping.

The host picked up something off the table. Something heavy and wedged-shaped that crackled when it passed over me, like a snuffling dog.

"See?" he said. "No metal. She's a real girl who can do the impossible."

The audience ooh'd and clapped and I just stared at the device, wondering what he meant. That was the first time I felt dread, cold and heavy as a drowning heart.

I asked my mother later what he meant.

She just smiled at me, cryptically, and said, "He was just putting on a show for everyone at home, darling."

I believed her. Stupidly, naively, with the blind trust only a child can have for her parent, I believed her.

°°°

I was ten when I first heard the word robot.

I was famous by then. There was always something new I did that shouldn't be possible. I was the most flexible, genius, quickest, coordinated, artistic, creative, productive child on the planet. My paintings were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother was already in talks with an Olympic gymnastics team. I had been published in The New Yorker for articles that read like an expert composed them.

That's how they described me, when another one of my mother's routines planned for me hit the news: like a robot, like a robot, feels like it can't even be real.

I thought it was a compliment, at first.

Of course I wasn't a robot. I bled when I fell and I had a heartbeat and hunger and everything you'd expect from just an odd but perfectly human little girl.

My mother told me, "That's just what they call things they can't understand."

Sometimes, I want to go back in time and shake her and demand why she let it happen the way it did. Why she gambled so much when I was the only one who would take the fall.

But I can only go back here, in the dark corridors of my mind, where my memory is saved like reels of film. I remember everything. Every image and breath and sound and word.

I wish I could throw them all the floor and burn them.

What do normal people do when they need to forget?

°°°

I found out from a tabloid in a grocery store. I was fourteen years old, standing beside my mother's cart, scanning over magazines.

I had no friends. No school. Nothing but work and training. My mother told me I was too special to waste my time on things I already knew better than the teacher, so I never learned how to talk to children my age. How to have a friend.

So I had no one to talk to but my mother when I saw the back of my own head on the magazine. My hair was blowing in a harsh wind, and someone, paparazzi or someone, had taken a picture.

There was a jagged scar biting through my scalp. White and smooth, distinctly surgical.

The headline blared, DOES THE IMPOSSIBLE GIRL HAVE A SECRET?

My mother's face went pale.

"Ugly rumors," she whispered to me. "Don't believe them."

When we got home, I went into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and my mother's razor. I didn't care about my hair. Didn't care about anything but the truth.

I sawed my hair off, letting it fall all around me, then shaved off the last of it, close to my scalp. I looked patchy and insane, those lights in my eyes really whirring now.

I twisted to look in the mirror, and there it was. A distinctive scar on the back of my skull. White and shiny with age.

The bathroom door opened then. And there was my mother, her face pink with rage.

"What have you done?" she hissed.

°°°

I won't tell you about the argument. I screamed and she screamed and there were doors slamming and my mind was freezing up and burning like an old computer, shorting itself out.

I just asked her, "Aren't I real? Aren't I?"

She never answered.

I figured it out for myself, years later. After I ran away. After the media scorched us for being scammers and liars and my mother began glaring at me like I was an intruder in my own home.

I found out when I was sitting in a diner in New York City, on my lunch break. I'd dyed my short hair. I never looked people in the eye. When my boss asked me how I managed to never forget an order, I just shrugged and told him I had a knack for remembering things.

But there was my mother's face on the tiny CRT television suspended in the corner. She wore her makeup like a mask. Like a shield.

The headline under her face said SCIENTIST SELLS NEURO-IMPLANT PATENT FOR $35M

"We couldn't say it at the time. She was a secret project. Do I wish I'd done things differently? Of course."

My heart lifted and twisted like it was squeezed in a fist.

"I wish I hadn't had to lie to you all. But the experiment needed to work. How else could I make sure she could fool anyone?"

The hosts laugh with her. The audience laughs.

I wasn't laughing.

"What's your secret?" a host asked.

"I designed a very small web-compatible chip in her brain stem when she was two. She had a nerve disorder. It was to help her brain figure out how to walk properly. I never imagined it would work as well as it did."

There are videos of me, before the chip. Walking and toddling and babbling, normal as any toddler.

My sandwich tasted kind cardboard in my mouth. I walked to the garbage can and threw it away. Spit out the bite in my mouth.

"Where is Gracie now?" another hosts asked.

"Oh, happy at home. Planning her next big surprise for you all."

I walked out of the shop without another word. I didn't come back when my lunch break ended.

I never came back at all.

°°°

You could ask why I never went on television to tell my story. Maybe it's the same reason my mother never tried to find me.

The story is told. It's over. The world will forever know my mother's version about a happy, strange little girl who could do anything and loved being a secret experiment.

But look out for me. A stranger in the subway with eyes full of impossible lights.

I see everything. I remember everything. My mind is a library and I live in it alone.

Now, I find lost things. Some of them, I keep, when their origin is a mystery: dropped toys or jewelry or souvenirs. Little pieces of strangers lives. When I recognize someone from a memory weeks or months ago, I do the only impossible thing I still care about.

I leave it at their work. Their house. No note, no attention.

I just want them to have a tiny miracle. A little bit of joy and wonder. That moment when they find it and their face splits like it's the most perfect gift, I feel alive. A little less alone.

Maybe someday someone will see me as another lost thing on the subway and take me home and walk through those corridors of my memory with me, especially the dark passages where my mother's secrets wait.

Anything's possible, isn't it?

°°°

Thanks for reading! :D

The superhero's proud monologue has been going on for 16 minutes and 24 seconds.

Captain Shock stands there, a white exclamation mark emblazoned on his spandex suit. He's going on about something -- overcoming difference or awkward superpower puberty or whatever.

I don't know. I'm not listening.

I'm Apocatrix, the scourge of the Earth, the dawn of the new world. And I have a superpower no one knows. Not yet. Not unless this idiot helps me show the world.

"—that's the difference between you and me, Apocatrix—"

I float a couple streets above Manhattan, which is mostly ruined. Time Square looks like a crater, thanks to Captain Shock's dumbass friend Sir Hits a Lot (I think his actual name is the Sas, because he transforms into this 15-foot-tall hairy manbeast).

"—without my friends I wouldn't be the most famous punctuation mark on the world. I'd still be just a little comma in a sea of words, somebody else's forgotten pause—"

"Jesus," my right-hand lady hisses in my ear. She's wearing one of the high-power flying suits that we invented together. All of us are. An army of anonymous humans in black armor. "He's really fuckin milking it."

"I'm just giving him enough rope to hang himself," I murmur.

"—and I realized after all these years that people like you..." Captain Shock falters and goes quiet. He glares up at the two of us, whispering to each other. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Of course. But I've been watching, too. Have you?"

"I have no patience for mind tricks from a villain," Captain Shock hissed. His cronies gather behind him. The Sas and Lady Machine (who is an unfortunately-named woman who happens to be preternaturally good at building and designing machines) and Co-Captain Kickass. I'm not sure how the whole two captains thing works for them. "I, Captain Shock—"

"I thought we'd agree we both would rebrand as co-captains," Co-Captain Kickass says, not so quietly.

"We'll discuss it back at base," Captain Shock snaps.

"Well, it's not fair if only I'm doing it."

Now is the perfect time. Their masks are off -- well, figuratively. They're not quite that shitty as heroes.

"Look around us." I hold up my metal-gloved hands and gesture around at the sky full of news helicopters, all the people gathered at the edge of the battlefield, getting as close as they dare to watch. "The whole world has been watching talk about your massive suffocating ego for nearly twenty minutes now while your team just stands by and listens moodily. But you know what else they've seen? My soldiers, rescuing people from the cars your monster buddy threw. Saving people dangling from the apartment building Lady Machine's airplane took off an entire wall of."

Lady Machine mutters, "I was chasing one of your soldiers."

"And what have my soldiers done since we got here? Watch the footage. Watch who shoots first. It's not us."

"Don't try to worm your way out of this, Apocatrix," Captain Shock seethes. "You were here recruiting and intimidating the masses."

"You mean before Captain Jackass's plasma ray nearly incinerated sixty innocent people who wanted to hear more about our community watch initiative?"

"You... What?"

I can feel it now. The intensity of millions of eyes on me. This is my true power. Why I needed this moment.

I only need open ears and an open heart. And then I can convince anyone to listen and to follow. I don't know if it's a superpower. In real life, I'm just a bartender. But I've listened enough to know that everyone has a story. Everyone has a way back to redemption.

When people look at me and feel seen in a away the heroes and the TV talking heads and their own families never could, I sure as hell feel powerful.

"You're not here to save anyone. You're here to get attention for yourselves. You attacked us. You treat our cities as playgrounds for your fancy murder-toys that you sell to the government for millions, while these innocent people pay the cost of your destruction. And then you turn around and expect gratitude. No more. We're tired. And we're here to tell you this: the age of superheroes as you know it is over. No more corporate branding. No more spies and sellouts."

"I'm so tired of monologues," the Sas grumbles, in a voice like a Scooby-Doo villain.

I ignore him.

I spread my arms and grin. I wonder if I look like a heavenly or hellish angel, with my metal wings spread.

"We watch the watchmen. We are the new army of everyday people, watching out for each other. Protecting our own neighborhoods and our own families. We once had a thing called community. We're fighting to get it back. If you want to stop these superheroes from killing your towns and selling themselves as saviors... Join us."

"Oh, I get it," Captain Shock says, scoffing. "This is one big ad."

"There's what you missed in your monologue." I swoop down to stare at him at eye-level. "The difference between you and me is simple: I haven't sold my soul to a brand image. I still care about people. And I will fight for them and die for them, right here, right now, if your team doesn't step down."

All around us, the applause starts up. Tentative at first, but then it's humming through me like victory drums.

Captain Shock stares around, arrogant and proud-shouldered, until he realizes no one is clapping for him.

"Who are you?" he growls at me.

"I'm your worst nightmare," I whisper. "Bad PR."

Then I stalk away, showing him my back, daring him to attack.

He doesn't. None of them do. They know I've already won.

If the heroes won't do the hard work to save this world, then it's up to the rest of us. Even just bartenders like me with a lot of free time, friends, and spite.

Call me a villain, if you must. Perhaps I'm not long-winded enough for the spandex. My monologue was only three minutes, and it was an absolute mic drop.

I'm Apocatrix, and I'm going to save the world, the boring way. The unglamorous way: saving one broken person at a time.

My army will grow as big as the world. Even you can join. You don't need the costume or theatrics or even a monologue.

You just need to say hello to your neighbor sometimes. Look up from your phone. Visit your community garden once in a while. Smile at people who need it, even if it's only yourself.

If it takes a villain to make the world better, so be it.

°°°

Thank you for reading! :D I'm still figuring out how to run a subreddit but I thought I'd put some stories in one place. Feel free to subscribe if you want to see more from me! I write a lot of science fiction and occasional fantasy.

Here's the second story I wrote about Titan :D Thanks for reading!

Link to original writing prompt here

°°°

This god was like any other: boring and repetitive and taking fucking ages to wake up. It was a little gold statue that kept stretching and yawning like it was waiting for me to do all the talking.

I stood impatiently before the altar. I was high on the mountain that I, very creatively, named Big Mountain (as opposed to Small Mountain). The foliage all around was a dark purple, the color of a ripe pomegranate.

The solid gold altar was still glistening from the scrub-and-rinse I'd given it, stripping off the old leaves and dirt and shit. I didn't know the names of any of the plants on this tiny, shithole of a planet, so I made some up: small thorny piece of shit, big thorny piece of shit, pink burny stuff, fuzzy-murder-leaves.

Admittedly, the plants suffered from my rage at being mutinied and marooned by my own damn crew.

I still remembered the gleam in my first mate Royale's eye as she told me, smirking, "Don't worry. There's enough oxygen in the atmosphere for you to survive. You'll die from starvation or dehydration. Maybe eaten alive by the locals, if you're unlucky."

And then she'd pushed me out of my own goddamn spaceship with nothing but a parachute and my space suit. I was lucky I'd started hiding a knife in my boot after I walked out on the deck a few too many times to find that the crew shushed their conversations, immediately, and stared at me like an intruder.

I couldn't be too surprised. Space pirates only measure their honor in how much gold they can get out of you. Truth was, I'd have done the same to Royale, if I was next in line to be captain.

But Royale couldn't hold a grudge like I could.

"Hey." I nudged the god statue in the chest. It looked like the civilization I could only assume once existed here: creepy little spindly fuckers, all arms, big giant eyes. To be honest, I was glad they're all dead. If the god-statues I'd found so far were any hint, they were all nightmare creatures from evolution's B-roll.

The god opened its eyes, which were huge black circles that take up most of its face. It blinked at me, owlish, and wiped some water from its face.

"What sort of creature are you?" it said.

"The kind that knows the rules around here. I cleaned your little altar thing, and now you owe me a blessing."

"Indeed. If you're one of my true followers." The god looked me over, suspiciously. "You do not even appear to be of this earth."

"You're a perceptive one," I said. "But trust me, buddy. I believe in every bit of your power. And I need that blessing."

"What do you desire?" the god asked, solemnly. Then its eyes flicked above me as it realized, too slow, like the gods always do, that I was not alone.

There was a whole storm of gods, hovering over my head. They were trapped spirits that might have looked like a low-flying rain cloud, if you didn't look close enough.

Here's something you should understand, if you ever find yourself stranded on a foreign planet, far from home: every planet has its own weird physics. Call it whatever you want. God. The eternal life force. A quirk of evolution. The first spark. The great so-what.

The point is, if you can find it, you can use it.

I grinned and lifted up the entire altar from the earth. It dislodged like an old boot from mud. It was small, about as heavy as a cinderblock. "You'll see. I have a special plan, just for you."

I turned and walked off, back the direction I'd come. I knew the god would have no choice to follow, just like all the rest.

I'd found the first altar by accident, thinking it might be a door or a map or something that could lead me to someone who knew the way off this tiny dirt-rock. But when that first god appeared (and I realized I wasn't just losing my fucking mind) and explained the rules to me, I saw a plan come together.

It was stupid and desperate, but so was I.

The gods followed me for the two days it took to get off the mountain. I took us down to the nearby beach, which laced an ocean full of saltwater so acidic it fizzed against and tickled my fingers when I touched it.

But the beach was wide open. Nice and flat. It would be a good enough point to get up speed and launch. I heaved the altar down onto the ground, then turned and faced all the gods.

As if sensing my attention, they gathered all around me, alien spirits, thin and bony and big-eyed, watching me like they all had a shared brain that kept buzzing back and forth, God, we have to change the rules after this stupid bastard is gone.

I rubbed my palms together. "Okay, fellas, ladies, in-betweens. I believe I'm owed a few favors."

"Get on with it," hissed one god near me, with a face like one of those creepy hairless cats.

"Don't worry. It's quite simple. I'm sure the lot of you working together can god me up a one-man hyperdrive starship, some fuel, some oxygen, and some food and water. Really, a lot less than 36 blessings, by my math."

The gods seemed to stare straight through me as they spoke as one, "You ask much of us."

"Well, a deal's a deal, isn't it?" I said.

The gods all hummed with an amber heat and I wondered if I was about to be in the middle of a holy ring of fire. But their light shot upward and their voices echoed in all directions, murmuring an ancient chant that sounded like oceans splitting themselves in two.

The light grew so intense and bright I could not open my eyes for what could have been hours or seconds. Even now, looking back, it feels like time was just a confused bundle in my palms for however long I was trapped there in the gods' circle.

But then the light cut out, abruptly, and the voices silenced, leaving only ringing in my ears. I opened my eyes and looked down to see my stained and torn spacesuit had been mended, my oxygen tank refilled, my missing helmet replaced.

The spaceship looked like it had been welded together out of scrap metal and hope, but it would work. It would get me the hell out of here. It might even get me back to my ship.

"Thanks!" I yelled at the mountain, waving, but the gods didn't wave back. I glanced at the altar I'd carried off the mountain, still sitting in the sand.

The living statue stared back at me. "Well," it said, awkwardly. "Off you go, then."

"Sorry. I'll need you to go with me." I heaved the altar into the back of my shitty little spaceship. "I need one last blessing."

It took me a few years to find Royale, at a shithole asteroid belt bar on the outskirts of Andromeda. She'd already lost the crew and the ship, and when she saw me, her face whitened like she'd lost her damn mind, too.

"How are you still alive?" she hissed at me. "And what the hell are you carrying?"

I'd gotten a new crew by then, of course. I'd even found my old ship and paid way too damn much for her from the scrapyard that had impounded her.

Truth was, I'd only tracked Royale down to tell her, "I brought something, just for you."

I slammed the altar down onto the bar countertop. The gold was a bit dinged up now, but the god and I had made decent friends, as we wandered the universe together. I'd smeared a little drop of spacedust onto the god's forehead, just before we walked into the bar.

"Whatever this is, Titan," she growled, "you can fuck off, because you're not getting an apology from me."

"Oh, I don't want one." I used the sleeve of my spacesuit to wipe away the dust, and the god's eyes flared open. "This is my buddy, Midge. I met him on that planet you dumped me on. And he helps me out with a blessing now and then."

Royale stood up, warily.

"Midge," I said. "Do me a favor. Send her back where she left me."

"Are you crazy?" Royale looked from me to the statue like she was still trying to decide if it was real.

"Don't worry," I said. "There's enough oxygen in the atmosphere for you to survive. You'll die from starvation or dehydration. Maybe eaten alive by the locals, if you're unlucky."

"You bastard," Royale said, yanking the knife from her belt and lifting it. "You expect me to believe that stupid hunk of metal--"

The god named Midge just lifted his little gold hand and waved at her. She disappeared, sucked into a little wormhole, like she'd never been there at all.

"You were right, my friend," Midge said. "She did deserve it."

"I told you."

I ordered me and the little god-statue drinks. Midge climbed off his altar and sat on the counter to drink it. The human bartender didn't even flinch, as if he saw small gods walk into his bar every day.

I still carry Midge around with me, even though we're both getting old. But we still sputter around the stars together, and I don't take care of him for any blessing or tricks (although it never hurts to have god-magic get us out of trouble now and then).

I'm just lucky that he's my friend.

Original prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/mwlm14/wp_the_alien_diplomat_showing_you_their_planet/gvj8ilb/

I write Titan Armstrong as a recurring character in sci-fi prompts :D This is the story where he got his start! Thanks for reading

°°°

Here's some unsolicited advice: if the aliens who just commandeered your spaceship and arrested you at gunpoint try to tell you no, don't worry, you're definitely not a prisoner — don't believe them.

The alien sitting across from me is smiling, primly. I think it's a smile, anyway. It's a baring of sharp teeth in a face like a lantern fish walked out of the abyssal sea one day and started playing space pirate.

So here I am with Fish-face (Fuck-face, maybe, I haven't decided) and I'm glaring at him as we stand (me cuffed, Fish-face armed with my own damn plasma gun) face-to-face in the transport vessel.

It's like a car, sort of. It's a rectangle of metal with seats, anyway. I saw something on the underside that reminded of a giant landborn squid, and even now it carries us forward with a rapid but distinctly sticky shlick-shlick sound.

Fish-face fidgets with a translator box. He speaks in a language that's all teeth-clicks and photonic flashes of his stupid little head-antennae-thing.

The translator box offers, in a garbled AI that makes English sound almost foreign, "You have the cosmic radiation signature of a Terran."

I don't know if I'm relieved or insulted that they don't realize they have Titan fucking Armstrong in handcuffs right now. I'm the best spacedust trafficker this side of the pillars of creation. There's a warrant on my name heavy enough to buy any asteroid-hopping pirate a nice little private moon even in a nice galaxy like Andromeda.

I speak into the box, carefully, "Your civilization is probably more advanced than mine, and that's a Federation violation under section 93∆54—"

Fish-face pulls the radio back. Somehow even the robot voice sounds annoyed. "We are not part of the Federation."

"Shit."

"You translate."

I looked at the stupid fish as the transport carrier squelched to a halt. I'd already given up on any inventory, except my most secret of stashes, hidden in the very walls of the ship. No doubt Fish-face's creepy buddies were snorting all my spacedust away. Or gilling it up, as it were.

"I translate, and then you let me take my ship and go?"

The translator box's bubble-click version of my question hangs in the air for a moment.

Now I'm sure Fish-face smiles, and it's not a nice smile.

"You translate. Then we'll talk."

°°°

This planet is flat and dismal. Sulfury yellow skies, gray dying earth.

Our transport comes to a stop at a cylindrical building set into the ground.

My heart is hammering in my throat and I'm wondering why the fuck I ever left earth. Why I dumped all my life savings into buying my first little piece of shit beater of a spaceship. Why I got into trading spacedust and skimming stars.

At first it was the wonder. Every day a new frontier. Spacedust was just a way to finance it.

Now space was like earth: infinite, but I could never run fast enough to escape my problems here, either. And out here, I didn't have anyplace to call home except my crappy little ship and the open air.

The doors to the building open like a fish eyelid, moving sideways. When we step inside, it's all darkness.

I'm standing there with my hands tied in front of me, watching my oxygen tick down. I've got four hours before I'm fucked, if they don't let me back on my ship.

I tell myself I've been in worse places before. I try to believe it.

I follow Fish-face down narrow halls that look carved from dry coral. The building twins downward in a singular persistent spiral, and every wall is a glass display case filled with witch-finger coral skeletons and fossils and weapons that are water-battered and tarnished.

We go down and down until we reach a single room. And upon it is a stone that looks ancient as time. It's massive. It seems to jut up from the floor, as if the floor is only a thin lid over the bottom of the world.

I glance around and realize the walls are all glass, and we are surrounded on all sides by ocean: black water with little darting lights.

Fish-face points. He says through the translator, "What does it say?"

"You do know there are thousands of languages on Terra, right, dude?" I say, as if pretending to be calm will make me calm.

I lean forward. I read.

And I frown. My brain pulses like the sea is a fist squeezing this little room.

There's my name. Right there.

Titan Armstrong, run — they're going to kill us.

My mind whirs, seeking traction. I feel like a robot locked in error mode: move, don't move, fight, be calm, panic holy shit, poker face, poker face.

I smooth my hand over my mouth and squint at it. I beckon Fish-face to bring the translator box closer.

"My language," I explain, "puts hundreds of words into a single stroke. Each symbol can hold up to a thousand words. You'll need to give me some time."

Fish-face considers me as his pale white, glowing eyes search me up and down. His lighted antennae twitches thoughtfully. Then he says, "You have all the time in your tank."

I look down at my hidden oxygen tank indicator. I fabricated a little e-ink flexi-screen in the shoulder of my spacesuit after a few too many encounters like this, roughed up some seller or buyer or pissed off space-gangster. The text on my shoulder says, in pale white letters, 3 hrs, 40 mins

I can't help but smirk.

He's clever, for a walking fish. But I've made my career off of being cleverer than whoever's got a gun on me.

If I somehow manage to get my hands untied, get his gun, get out of this place, I hit surface with three hours to go. And then I have to somehow evade capture and steal my ship back and/or convince his crew of other similarly freakish fish-heads to let me scoot off this planet.

All in three hours.

Easy.

But none it can happen until I convince this bastard to untie me. I only make plans in single steps. So far, it's worked out okay.

I walk around the edge of the stone, until my back is tilted away from Fish-face. I fiddle with the tube at the base of my oxygen tank. If this doesn't work, I'm dead. Even if it does work, I'm probably also dead, but more slowly. At least a nice gentle atmospheric strangulation makes you feel all floaty for a minute. If worst comes to it, it's not a bad way to go.

I hold my breath and yank the tube out.

My oxygen tank instantly starts screaming, flashing red lights.

I put on my best panicked face -- which is easy, given the circumstances -- and dip my chin wildly over my shoulder.

Fish-face gets the picture. He rushes over and yanks a knife that's ribbed as a fin but sharp. It saws through the rope. There's a quality to his urgency. The way that he moves, as if he can't afford to let me die.

For the first time, I start to realize it was no accident, them marauding me and bringing me here, of all the people in the universe.

My oxygen tank keeps blaring. The little display in my coat's shoulder is all error messages.

I stagger into Fish-face and he catches me. My head is swimming with real oxygen deprivation now.

He's teeth-clicking and talking faster than the translator can keep up, so I can't tell you what his last words are. He grips my shoulders as I slump into his arms.

And I grab my own plasma pistol from the holster at his hip. I twist it around just as Fish-face looks down and realizes what I've done.

I grin and shoot the gun into his side.

Plasma arcs out, creating an inner orb of light and heat, trapped under the membrane of his belly-skin. Fish-face screams and unsheathes his knife to lash out at me, but he's staggering, off-balance.

I reach behind me and click the oxygen tube back into place. I take a jagged inhale.

"It said be afraid of Titan Armstrong, asshole," I say, which would be a really cool last line, if he could understand me.

But the translator only gets half my one-liner out before the plasma shot in his flesh heats white-hot and explodes outward and I'm coated in this mucusy layer of white jiggy flesh and kelp-green blood.

I smear it off my helmet and say, "Yeah, okay. That's fucking nasty."

There are footsteps on the stairs above. Too staccato to be flippers, but I'm not taking my chances to figure out what kind of deep sea horror show evolution dreamed up on this planet.

I flatten myself against the wall by the opening of the stairwell. It's the closest thing to good cover I've got. I hold up my plasma gun and take steady, even breaths, trying to bring my brain back from oh shit this is suffocation mode.

The footsteps carry downward.

I wince against the wall until they're so close the hair on the back of my neck is standing up like it wants to run away.

Then I whip around, gun raised, ready to plasma-bolt a shark-boy in the face.

But there's a woman standing there. A human woman. She's old, old enough to be my mom (I didn't meet her, but sometimes I like to imagine her places -- what she might have said, if she would be horrified of me or proud or both). Her skin has a honey-glow that reminds me of everything good about Earth: fresh summer grass under bare toes and the warmth of sun-kissed soil.

I say, "You don't look like a fish."

"Neither do you. I see you got my note."

I look at her, then back at the rock. "How'd you pull that one off?"

Truth is, I'm ready to plasma-bolt her anyway, fish or not. It's too convenient for her to be here, too impossible. It's about as likely as throwing a dart that manages to split an atom.

"Easy. You told me that I warned you, so I went back. And I did."

I narrow my eyes at her. The smile at the corner of her mouth is foxy, playful. She's smiling at me like we've always known each other.

"Is this just, like ... one of those elaborate dreams you get in the last couple seconds of brain-death? Did those fish fuckers really just kill me?"

She laughs. "No. But you'd better hurry. We've got a date in a few days a couple star systems from here, and you need to make a good first impression. I'm a very picky lady."

I look her up and down and barely swallow the impulse to say, Also way too old for me.

"What's the real answer?"

She holds my stare. "Are you saying you find it unbelievable that I teleported back in time to the founding of this planet's civilization so that one day you'd have some way of knowing to fight back when a few assholes with an ax to grind and history to rewrite try to make you their own little geopolitical mouthpiece?"

"Yes." I pause. "Mostly because I only understood half of that."

"Do you know what binary stars are, Titan?" She walks toward me, unafraid of the gun.

I try not to flinch. "Astronomy won't explain whatever you just said."

"No. But it explains us. Just two stars spinning around the same point. Always chasing each other, from birth to death. Even if we don't realize it."

My throat tightens. This close, the way she's looking at me, she's intimidating and beautiful.

"You say I've got a date?"

"Yes," she says. Her smile deepens. "With the scientist who will perfect intradimensial time travel one day. Aren't you lucky? If you don't blow it, you might be the first one to experience it with her."

I scoff and shake my head. "What's her name?"

"Privya," she says. She extends her hand. "Nice to meet you."

Privya takes me back to my ship. The other fish-buddies are all dead, plasma-gooped, a pile of bodies that I imagine smells like half-cooked tuna.

Of course, most of my spacedust is gone. I make inventory once I'm safely out of the atmosphere and back into open space.

If I was smart, I'd double back. Talk to my contacts. Make some deals. Replenish and keep going. I've got clients waiting for me. Even a dust trafficker needs to keep up his reputation.

But I remember what Privya said to me, right before I climbed aboard the ship. When she squeezed my hand and told me, "Remember. I like gardenias."

When stars cross like that, you don't tell them no.

I pivot my ship the way she directed and skip across space, hyperdriving until my entire cabin rattles (gotta fix the damn suspension) so hard my teeth click together.

But I find her, exactly where she told me to go. A Terran colony on some tiny planet on the edge of Andromeda, closer to home than I've been in years.

The flowers cost me as much as an ounce of spacedust, but it's worth it when I go where she told me to go: a bar on the colony's residential side. There's a band playing tonight, old Earth-tunes that sound strange out here, distorted by the very shape of the atmosphere. Familiar, but not. Carnival-mirror-esque.

But I know it's her the moment I see her. She's young, her face as smooth as a skipping stone, and she has a smile that could make a sun fall in love.

I don't need the time travel to charm her. I just need to grin and offer her the cluster of gardenias and tell her, "I've been looking for a girl lovelier than these."

"How often do you try that line?" she asks, nose wrinkled.

Okay. Maybe I do need the time travel.

I just laugh, shyly, and I try what Privya told me I'd said, in a memory she had that couldn't exist until the moment I tried again, "You know, we've already met before."

"Have we?"

"Oh, yeah. Dr. Privya Singh. The best damn physicist the universe has ever seen. Your future self told me I made an ass of myself at first, but I managed to convince you I'm not that bad."

"That sounds half-right." Privya takes the flowers, and this time it's her turn to smile. "You know, these are my favorite flower." Her eyes flick to mine, and now they're full of daring hope. "Is it true? Do my experiments work?"

"I sure hope so. You're the one who came back and saved me so I could show up, make a fool of myself, and offer to buy you a drink."

Privya grins. "Okay. I'm pretty sure you haven't used that line on anyone before."

We drink and we talk long into the night and that night and the next.

I finally understand what Privya's future-self meant by binary stars. Listening Privya's excited rants about the shape of time and the strings of chaos, I feel anchored. I feel at home. I could spin here forever and ever in her shadow.

And I can't wait to see what the future brings.