Donna was a very private person. Actually, she would be better described as an intensely guarded person. It had to do a lot with our life and the betrayal that put us on this course, but she was also naturally this way. I was the only person, besides Jenny and some family members, who ever got to know Donna in any meaningful way. Now here she was, about to let people outside our tiny circle hear something that she had never told anyone about. She’d never even told me this part, but that was due to the mental block. At least I think that’s what it was. It’s hard to say sometimes.
Donna closed her eyes for a couple of seconds and calmed herself. I’d feel nervous about Donna driving this way but she could drive blindfolded if she had to. Okay, I still tensed up when she did stuff like this. The part of my brain that still clung to a sense of normalcy wanted me to scream at her to keep her eyes open while driving but managed to appear unfazed. The two in the back didn’t seem bothered at all. Donna opened her eyes and began to speak. There was tension in her tone. We could all tell she was serious. Well, more serious than usual.
“Just listen carefully,” she said.
Donna clicked the play button on the voice recorder and put it on the dashboard. After a few seconds of static and hissing, a man’s voice appeared. He sounded tired and nervous.
“So here we are. Um, this is where I die. I guess. I should have seen it coming. But then again, as much as I appreciate irony, I’m not finding any humor in this. I mean, I can’t see the future. I can see the past though. All of it. So you would think I’d be able to avoid something in the future if I really focused. Does that make sense? Is this irony? Am I using the word correctly? And why am I even pondering that?”
A pause.
“I mean, I’m about to die. Is the proper use of the word ironic even a priority at this point?”
An audible sigh.
“Anyway… So, what now? Oh, if anyone is tuning into my internal dialogue here (i.e. are you there God?) you might be wondering what’s going on. Although if there is a god and he, she, it, or whatever is listening, I suppose you would know what is going on. But, whatever, I got time to kill.”
A nervous laugh.
“So let’s just assume whoever is in on this moment needs some context to understand. For the record, I know there is someone listening. I don’t know how I know. But I know.”
He took a breath. I had to remember to breathe.
“Okay, so I am a soldier. There is no name, rank, or any kind of insignia on my uniform. If you must know, my name is Alex Cortez, Specialist, United States Army. This lovely place is a village in rural Iraq somewhere. Fill in the name of the village, pick a location, it doesn’t really matter at this point. The kind gentleman behind me with the gun to the back of my head is supposed to be my security. He is a spook, dressed as a soldier, just following orders. Serves me right, I guess, for working with shady government types. Anyway, further clarification, I’m a special kind of soldier. Well, more like a special kind of person. As mentioned, I can look into the past. More specifically, as I experience this ability, I can make time stop, and walk through the past.
In the context of this theater of operations, say a bomb goes off. I come in and rewind time. I can literally walk around the environment, rewinding and playing it back, and pausing as needed right in front of me. I can see events backwards, past the explosion, seeing who planted the bomb, who gave that guy the bomb, who built the bomb, and even as far back as who gave the order, given the right circumstances of course. I walk around the scene, looking for people and clues. If the bomb maker got the order on the phone, I can’t do much with that. Basically, I can follow anyone who happens to be on the scene. I could follow a person all the way back to their birth if I wanted to. So all this temporal backtracking can help capture the bad guys. It’s the best intelligence tool ever. Of course, if you were to see me actually doing this, I’d just look like I had my eyes closed, standing or sitting there quietly. Sometimes I had to tune out the audible sighs I heard from my security detail. At least at first. Took them a while to believe what I said I could do.
No one outside my special and non-existent unit, and the shady types up my chain of command of course, know about it. Which makes it easier to dispose of those like me when we become more inconvenient than useful. There are a few others like me, but not many. Well, I guess the proper terminology is that there used to be others like me. The others have had their contracts terminated at this point as well. But one small consolation is that I can’t really die. I can go back and forth through time as long as I like. Well, so long as I don’t cross the exact moment of my death, I can live in the past forever.
Well, sort of live. I can’t interact with the past. It’s kind of like being inside a 3D movie. I can’t change the script. It’s kind of lonely when you think about it. But never getting older, never having to eat or get hungry, etcetera. It has its appeal. All of history before my death is available to me to watch. And I’m going to do it, dammit. Like I said. I got time to kill. A lot of it. And don’t ask me how I know I can’t go past my death, I just do. It’s a feeling like standing next to a cliff and you can’t see how far down it goes.”
Another deep breath.
“Am I going insane? I’m just talking to myself. Whatever. Anyway… It was somewhere in this ramp up to deployment where the lives of my fellow Tracers and I got interesting. Oh, right. That’s what we became known as to the insiders. Tracers. We were part of what became Project Retrace. We can retrace the steps of anyone, so somewhere along the line, the name took root. As far as I know, I’m the product of some sort of secret government experiment. Yeah, I know. Big surprise. Experimentation in the military never happens.” he said.
“But it’s not exactly prevalent. That I know of. I think... So, the first hint of anything different was when we got our anti-Anthrax medication. Everyone was handed a little bottle of pills that we were to take on a scheduled basis, like any other prescription medicine. Five of us noticed that the pills we received were a different color from every ones else’s. They were the same in size and shape but the shade of color was off just enough to notice. We were assured that the color was because the pills were from a different batch and it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t give it much of a thought. As you may have guessed, our medicine packed a little something extra.
It wasn’t like you take the pill and instantly become Captain America. That would have been awesome. This was a bit more subtle. So subtle that the five of us that took the magic pills didn’t notice any difference in the way we felt or acted because everything was the same. What we didn’t know that a virus was in our pills. It was supposed to give us minor augmentations to our physical performance. Slightly increased endurance, strength, and stuff like that. Nothing that would be too obvious. We would have just felt awesome all the time. It was supposed to be a trial run to see if whatever they cooked up could work. If at this point you are wondering how I know all this, well, I can walk back in time. Anywhere. Remember? So, had it gone as intended, further tests would have been done with more potent upgrades. The next group would have gotten the super soldier dosage. But nothing happened and we were forgotten. It was considered a failure.
We wouldn’t have known anything about it except substandard contracting work intervened. We were helping push a fence back up that had fallen in high winds. Why us? We just happened to be in the area so why not? Anyway, to my right, was Lieutenant Clarke Duncan. If anyone was a poster child for the blond-haired, blue-eyed, All-American quarterback, the LT was it. He almost looked like frickin’ Captain America. Next to him was Specialist Charles McMasters. Chucky to his friends. He kinda resembled the doll from those movies, so dude was never going to not be Chucky. PFC Elizabeth Paz, my girlfriend, was on my left. I was going to propose to her when we got back stateside. She’s a Latin girl with a Southern accent. It threw me a bit at first when I met her. The stupid cultural bias in my brain had issues with her not sounding like she was supposed to. Yeah, I know, I’m a bit messed up for that. And obviously I got over it. Anyway, she grew up in Alabama. Liz used to hum On the Road Again by Kenny Rogers when we did convoys. And she makes her accent thicker when she wants to absolutely melt me. I never stood a chance.”
Silence. Then he cleared his throat.
“Sorry. I get distracted when I think about her. So, anyway. On her other side was Sergeant Tate. Donna to her friends.”
Donna could almost feel eyes in the car turn to her.
“Newly minted Sergeant, E-5. She seemed alright. I haven't been around her much. Anyways, we get this fence back up and a nice bit of rain starts. It was on and off all day so the ground was wet. Liz was almost done tightening a screw on a poll when it happened.”
A sigh.
“So, as it was explained, and later confirmed by us, there was some exposed wiring in the ground. I mean, you pay a bunch of contractors to do a quick and dirty job and this is what you get. I mean, last week we had a brand new building go up in flames because of shitty electrical work. Anyway, somewhere a piece of metal fence rubbed a wire the wrong way and we were live and plugged in for a couple of minutes before someone shut something down. We all had splitting headaches after. Yeah, you might be thinking this is some stupid wannabe comic book BS, but if you are listening to this, who looks stupid?”
A few seconds of silence.
“Okay, maybe let’s just move on. No one clocked that anything was happening at first but someone finally decided that it looked odd that we were just standing there, not moving. It was a dam miracle none of us were seriously injured. Not enough of a miracle though for any of us to get sent home, of course. But such is life. As hard as it is to believe, we were all back on duty within a few days. And that is when the dreams started.”
There were another few seconds of silence.
“Now I’ve dreamed vividly before. Dreamed or dreamt? Whatever. I’ve had dreams where thought I could actually smell something. But nothing like this. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was seeing my day in rewind. All day long in reverse like scrolling back through a movie. Then I would realize something odd was happening and it would stop and the day would play normally. Then fast forward. Then back again. When my alarm started going off, everything went forward at super high speed, in a blur up to where I closed my eyes. And then I woke up. It was too weird to talk about. If I wasn’t so weirded out by the dream, I would have noticed that at breakfast, everyone was pretty quiet and looked preoccupied.
The LT sat down and started talking about the weirdest dream he has ever had. Chucky chimed in that it sounded exactly like his. I admitted to the same and then Liz said she had the same experience. Sergeant Tate said she had a weird dream but couldn’t remember what it was. I think she was lying. After a couple of more nights of this, Liz came up to me and told me she had zoned out and dozed off while writing up a report and that strange type of dream happened. She woke up before anyone noticed. But she closed her eyes for a second to try and focus and time began rewinding again. She asked me to try it because she was freaking out and needed to know if she was losing it. I, being the dutiful boyfriend…” he said, sounding proud of himself.
“... tried it and nothing happened after a few seconds. I told her nothing was happening. She grabbed my hands and told me, ‘Try again.’ Her voice was calm, but there was a hint of fear and seriousness. As soon as I closed my eyes it happened. I went back only a few seconds, but it was enough. I let go of her hands in shock, and took a few steps back. All I could say was ‘What the hell?’ When I looked at her, she was a little more freaked out. She said she could see what I saw. I tried it again without holding her hands. It worked. And I could see back and forth in time. But I could not see past the moment I closed my eyes. We figured out that in order for her to see what I saw, she needed to hold my hands. The next day we talked to Chucky. He couldn’t make it work until Liz held one of his hands. I don’t know why that worked out like that. She could see what he saw too. For some reason I couldn’t see what other people were seeing and Liz and I decided to keep her extra little gift to ourselves. The three of us went looking for Sergeant Tate but ran across the LT first. He looked like he had not slept in days. When we told him what was happening, he didn’t believe us at first. But we convinced him. And sure enough, it took Liz holding his hand to activate. Later we found Sgt. Tate but apparently she got it working on her own. She never did tell us what exactly she saw.
The LT convinced us, or more accurately ordered us, to come clean to our CO. After that, the spooks showed up. Next thing you know, we were reassigned to a CIA outfit. We never saw Sergeant Tate again after that. After everyone involved figured out the extent of our abilities, the four of us began running missions looking for the bad guys. Liz and I still kept her extra ability a secret. I began to get the sense she was keeping more from me. I guess I should mention that by now none of us were sleeping very well. I mean, we did sleep, but none of us dreamed anymore. Sleep just brought on watching our days in reverse. And during sleep we didn’t have much control over playback. And when we woke up, it didn’t feel like we got much sleep. So as you can imagine, this didn’t help our mental states.
A couple months down the line, the LT began looking more ragged. He started to have side conversations with Chucky and soon after, Chucky was starting to look equally worn. Then one day the LT stormed into the lead spook guy’s office. He was a smug SOB. We never got his first name. His last name was probably fake and there is no point in exploring him any further because weirdly, none of us could trace him or any other of the CIA guys. Anyway, we heard yelling but could never make out what was said. The LT stormed out, grabbed his gear, and went out on a mission with his security detail. They got hit by an IED. The security detail made it. The LT didn’t. A week later it was Chucky who went down. This time it was allegedly a sniper.
Liz had been starting to get that weird frazzled look on her that the LT and Chucky had. It worried me because she admitted once that in spite of looking like she was holding it together, she had times when her mind went down ‘wild and irrational’ trains of thought when she was stressed. There were times she felt like she was not herself. Times where she lost time. Here words. Not mine. I don’t think she told anyone but me. I began to remember moments when she was just... different. Almost like a different person. And this was before we took the magic pills. There was this one time a few months before we got deployed where she acted like she didn't recognize me. I mean, the moment passed pretty quickly but it was a little scary. Fortunately stuff like that didn’t happen all that often. She would get mad when I asked what was going on or if she was okay. So at some point I just stopped asking and gave her space to figure it out.
So, now here we are. My security detail has me on my knees. I know what’s coming. I heard a call for an update over their radio. Then I recognized a voice from Liz’s security detail.
“Romeo Zero Four terminated,” it said.
“Romeo Zero Two pending,” replied the radio guy from my detail.
I’ve never heard those alpha numeric designations before. But it doesn’t matter now that I’m about to die. I’m oddly at peace. I think. I guess. I swear I can hear Liz whispering to me. She says, ‘It will be alright. Trust me. I’ll be with you.’ It almost feels like she is hugging me. I trust her. Liz had a mission today too. She looked more at peace then I’d ever seen her. Now I’m walking back in time. Forever I guess? Somehow I know she is back in her room, waiting for me. If I find her I think we’re going to ride this out together forever. Literally. Maybe the other guys in our crew are out there too, somewhere.
So, in closing, I don’t know who you are that is listening to me. But I know someone is there. I don’t know why I’m bothering to say anything but I think I just needed to tell someone what happened and that we’re alright.”
The recording stopped and no one spoke for the next couple of minutes.218Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNJPRiPJbsu
