To Alter
You have seen enough wars to fill the hall of history. This was a particularly bad one. This dimension could cease to exist entirely. You had a protocol that told you not to intervene, only to observe the flow of time through matter.
Yet, you had grown attached to this place with its fall colors and misty mountains, and the people and their oppression. You wanted to make it better. You wanted to stop the nuclear bombs from destroying everything and all.
Others like you had taken steps like this. They were fired from the Ministry. You didn’t know what happened to them, but their actions were used as warnings in training for agents like you.
But here and now, inside a submarine, you watched the Doomsday Clock tick toward midnight. The pressure bubbled around you. The people with madness in their eyes were stagnant, waiting for a command to launch everything and all. Some held on to foolish hope that there would be a world to save after this, but there wasn’t. This was it, according to your calculations.
Sometimes you wondered what the point was of you, the agents, the Ministry, if the mission was to observe and compile data. Data for what?
You stepped closer to the soldier in charge of pushing the button to launch the nuclear missiles. The man sat there watching the map and the screen, waiting for his command to react to the warning lights. You softly touched his shoulder and whispered into his ear not to.
“This is not the time. Choose better than you are let to choose,” you said.
You watched the man drop his hands into his lap. He glanced behind him, looking straight through you. You took a step back.
Then he returned his gaze to his screen, dropped the launch module cover down, and sent a message that there would be no reply to the warning.
Instantly, you were pulled away from the submarine into the room where you had stepped into this dimension. Your handler waited for you. Sharon was pissed off.
You lifted your hand before she could say anything. “Do what you must.”
Sharon frowned and then sighed. “I always knew it would be you from my lot who would crack. Though after four hundred years’ worth of time, I thought you would be past it by now.”
“Doesn’t seem to work that way. Too much empathy, and too much time alone, standing on the sidelines.” I shrugged.
“Yeah, yeah, now come with me. You will be out of the field duty from now on. And yay for you, you get to monitor the dimension you just screwed up.”
—
Sorry about skipping yesterday. I had a terrible night’s sleep, and after morning yoga and breakfast, I headed to the couch and fell asleep. I never recovered from the nap to go back into writing mode. So today I returned to the parameters I got yesterday. I’m not sure I wanted to write this story the way I did. I knew this would be a time-travel story, but I initially thought it would be set in medieval times. What I got was an experimental war-tragedy written in the second person.
I have been reading and listening to different sorts of people about what to do in modern times and how to exist in all this, and the only answer people seem to give is that we need to pay more attention to others and our communities, and cultivate true connections with meaning. I still wonder if wars and other bad decisions can be avoided with that? Or does it leave room for madmen to wage wars and sell our rights without our consent?
Thank you for reading! Have a lovely autumn day and see you tomorrow ❤
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