T H E E N D ?
Farran.
It was a name. His name, or part of it, anyway. Somewhere, sometime, it had probably had significance to him or someone else, but its meaning to him was lost, probably for ever. But . . . what was strange was the fact that he couldn’t remember anything of his past life. He thought in words, and seemed to know what most of the words meant, but his life itself was totally gone from his mind.
Am I being born again? Was his first thought.
He opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was wearing a white tunic with no shoes or socks, or any other kind of clothing. But after pulling back the sleeve of his tunic to see his arms were covered with thick corded muscle and fine hair instead of the pudginess of a baby’s arms, he abandoned the notion of his reincarnation.
Where am I, then? He thought to himself. The air felt cool and crisp. Not cold enough to make him wish that he had some sort of protective garment other than the tunic, but not hot enough to make him wish he had less. He looked up to get his bearings, but instead saw . . .nothing. He stood in a vast white plain.
At first glance, it looked to be devoid of any intelligent life whatsoever, but as he scanned the horizon closer with the beginnings of fear in his gut, he spotted a small black dot, off in the distance.
On impulse he tried to walk towards it. Five seconds later he realized that he had not moved a muscle. He looked down at his legs and forced himself to move his right leg forward. He promptly fell flat on his face, without so much as throwing his arms forward to protect himself. The pain of his unshielded fall was enough to jar some of his muscles awake, and he pushed himself back to his feet.
He tried again to walk, and managed to some rather jerky steps towards the black spot. After two more falls his body seemed to remember how to walk naturally. Then, after finally feeling comfortable with that, he broke into a run. The black shape came steadily closer, and finally began to take form. After what seemed like an eternity, the shape took form. Finally he reached it.
The creature was white, and looked like, for the most part, a rabbit. It had short white fur but not tail at all, red eyes but with no pupils, and short ears instead of long. It opened its mouth to speak, and Farran noticed long, sharp teeth arranged in near rows, each gleaming white.
“You have come at last,” it said in a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice.
“Why am I here?” Farran asked without thinking. After a pause he said, “Who am I?”
The small creature cackled, and Farran decided that it must be insane, or at the least quite close.
Instead of replying in its own squeaky voice, the creature answered in a deep, clear voice not unlike his own.
“And the Chosen One shall be Reborn in
the Unknown. His coming shall
begin a great loop, in which he shall destroy the very thing he comes to protect. His goal must be to break the loop which he himself will create; the destruction of the Original in an attempt to save the Other. If the One fails, Hope fails with him. If the One succeeds, Light will continue to shine on All.”
Farran was taken aback. Clearly there was more to this creature than met the eye. Both of them were silent for several minutes as they regarded each other. It was the small creature who finally broke the silence. This time it spoke in the same high-pitched voice it had used when first addressing Farran.
“’Tis the Prophecy,” it giggled. “Your quest may begin. Find what destroyed your race—the Original—and you may be able to save all the Other as well. If not—“ at this point it broke off, laughing insanely. “Then you will remain here forever, with only little Gai to be your companion.”
“What do I have to do?” Farran immediately asked, deciding instantly that the idea of spending eternity with the little monster that stood before him should be avoided at all costs.
“And you never answered my question. Who am I?”
It cackled again.
“You who have no memory always seem to be preoccupied with who you were,” it said in a somewhat calmer tone of voice, “than with what you can become.” It sighed. “But Gai should tell you a little, he supposes. Your race, the Original, were eradicated. Not their fault, not their decision, you understand, but killed nonetheless. You must find who did it. They will be erased from existence. You must find who did it, or Hope for All is lost.” At this point it began laughing madly. After quite a while it finally calmed down enough to keep talking. “The Others, you see, are being destroyed by the thing you Originals call a plague. Only the Original have the knowledge of Healing required to cure the Others. Without them, hope is lost. Your hope.”
“Then what do I have to do?” asked Farran without missing a beat.
It spoke solemnly.
“You will begin changing times at random intervals. Hopefully, you will gather the information we seek. If not,” It paused to cackle again, “Then Gai will finally have a companion.”
“When do I start?” Farran asked.
The creature smiled. ‘The way back will come only once. Miss it, and you will die, along with Life itself.”
Without warning, the world changed.
The fact that it was dark was the first thought that penetrated his mind. After his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, he looked down at himself and saw himself clad in a horribly battered leather jacket, ripped and torn baggy pants that were too big for him, and shabby brown leather calf-length boots that hurt his feet.
He then realized he was in a forest at night, and there was a point of light not far off. There were several voices near it, and he set off on a headlong plunge towards them, desperate to see more people like him, after being stuck with that little monster for what had seemed like an eternity.
He came into a clearing, and saw nearly a hundred people, all dressed like him, clustered around a long, silver, angular shape with windows and two wings on either side. It lay flat on the ground, supported by three landing stubs the same color of the object. A ramp was extended from a hatch, and men and women in uniforms walked out of it at various intervals, each carrying crates or boxes of some sort. Farran slipped into the crowd beside an old man who stood near the edge.
“What are they unloading?” Farran asked him. The old man sighed wearily and crossed his arms.
“Survey ship just got back from another of those three-year deep space missions. They’re lugging out the crates from one planet that they find interesting, just because of its wide array of bacteria on the planet. Most of them are viruses of some sort. I got a hundred credits says the damn things kill us all, some way or another.”
“Thanks,” Farran said as he started pushing his way through the crowd, towards the ship, thinking that maybe the little creature that had identified itself as Gai wasn’t insane after all. The end of the Original—which Farran assumed was simply another name for Humans—it sounded like something a virus might do.
He made his way towards the building that the crew was carrying the boxes into, and realized that it was a lab. As he walked by, he heard two crew members, each of them lugging heavy crates, talking.
“So what are you carrying?” asked one to the other, his voice muffled by the large crate in front of his face.
“Box full of vials that the survey team collected on the fifth planet,” the other one replied. “Some strange bacteria are inside. Nobody on the ship could figure out what they do. My guess is they don’t do anything, and we’re wasting time and storage space by carrying ‘em around.”
“Still, you never know,” said the first.
“Right,” said the second in a voice dripping with sarcasm.
Suddenly a flash of light caught Farran’s eye; he turned to see a faintly glowing sphere, pulsing with golden light, past the two workers, nearly a hundred meters away. He remembered Gai’s words and how he might be forced to stay in that white nothingness if he didn’t fulfill that Prophecy nonsense.
In a near state of panic, Farran sprinted towards the sphere, accidentally knocking over the second crew member, causing him to drop his box. Acids flew out of their vials. Some splashed on the man’s face and body; most fell harmlessly to the ground. Farran immediately saw that the man’s face turned red and his veins bulged out, but he didn’t care. As he ran, it looked to him as if no one besides him saw the sphere, since nobody even so much as looked in its general direction.
Farran reached it, and after pushing his hand through to make sure it was the real gate, he leaped in.
He found himself back in the nothingness, clad once again in the white tunic with no shoes. Gai was in front of him, standing in the same position it had been in when he had left. It cackled.
“It has begun,” it said. “The loop has started. Now only one answer remains. Will you spot it before it is too late?”
The world changed.
This time he was in a lab. As far as he could tell, it was the same lab that he had been near during the last jump. He wore a white lab coat and white pants, with a light green mask over his mouth and head. He was in a group of doctors clustered around a medical bed with the unconscious body of the man he had knocked over on top of it.
“Whoever it was that hit this guy deserves to feel a little of what this guy must be experiencing,” said one of the doctors.
After fighting down the sudden impulse to shout “I’m sorry!” to the whole group, he made himself stay silent and listen to the conversation. Gai would not have brought him here for nothing.
“So have you figured out which of the vials did this to him?” asked an older man who approached the table. From the way he held himself and his superior-seeming attitude, Farran decided that he must be the head doctor.
One of the other doctors glanced at one of the screens again, then replied, “No, Doctor Moran. We haven’t the slightest idea which one it was. It was more likely that an unfortunate combination of the specimens that killed him. But none of us could tell you the specifics. Sue Pent was the doctor that did surgery on him to try to repair one of the lungs that had been damaged, but she took a sick day today.”
The senior doctor’s gaze never wavered from the patient s he asked, “Was it something she caught from this man?”
The other doctor shook his head. “Not as far as we could tell. Before she left, we scanned her with the moth sensitive unit here, but the test for infections bacteria or other viruses showed up negative. It’s possible that she got something that it couldn’t detect though.”
“Run her through the scanner when she comes back,” said the senior doctor. “In the meantime, let’s dispose of this corpse. Make sure you tell the tectnicians to vaporize it completely, and not to touch the body with their bare hands. This guy looks pretty messed up.”
Farran would have listened longer, but a glow caught his eye from under the door of the bathroom. Not wanting to repeat his panicked dash, he walked calmly towards it. Ten seconds later he was gone.
“That was totally—“
“Pointless?” Gai cackled. “As you will see, nothing is pointless in this realm.”
“Are you deciding what points in time I go? Because I must say, you’ve done an absolutely horrible job so far. I thought I was supposed to be finding out what happened to Human life. Was there a change of plans that you didn’t tell me about?” Farran asked, more than a little perturbed.
Gai cackled. “If you fail, Hope is lost. Events you witness may turn out to be more than they seem.”
The world changed.
The smell that reached his nostrils was not an unpleasant odor. It smelled of food cooking; of a home. Farran looked down at himself to see that he was now wearing loose pants, brown loafers and a shirt made of some unknown material. It was baggy yet light, shiny but soft to the touch, like silk.
He heard moans of pain coming from one of the doors, and he realized finally that he was in someone’s house. Pulled along by a sudden inexplicable urge, he stepped on the conveyor belt that pulled him towards the door, and pressed his thumb on the doorplate.
“Fingerprint accepted;” said the machine. The door opened to reveal a bedroom. In the small bed was a teenage girl, asleep but still clearly in great pain. Her face was red, and she gasped for breath constantly. He walked over to her, thinking that she looked much like the man he had accidentally killed. Her face was bright red, with white splotches, and her veins in her arms and head were puffy like his had been.
Suddenly the door creaked, and Farran leaped into a nearby closet, and shut the door so that only a crack was open so that he could hear whoever was in the room.
“She’s been like that for three days,” said a woman’s voice. “I just don’t know what to do for her. I’ve tried all the treatments that the doctors at the labs could think of, and she just won’t respond.”
Another woman’s voice answered, and it sounded as if the other was elderly and quite frail, perhaps over one hundred years old.
“It’s just like what I had when I was a young woman,” the old one said. ‘She’ll be in pain for another day or so, then it’ll stop completely.”
“Mother, how can you be so sure about this?” asked the first voice.
“It’s her I’m sure about,” the old woman said. ‘It’s just a question of who else I passed the virus on to besides my family.
“You mean it’s been transferred before?”
“As best as I can tell, from the scans I did, the cell s are passed to anyone I touch. But they’re not harmful. Jessica here is the first one that I know of besides me to show any symptoms.”
“You mean to say that I have the virus in me as well?”
“Yes. But you are in no danger. I only wonder who else is.”
Farran noticed a sphere suddenly appear beside him, and he calmly stepped into it.
“What year is it now?” he asked Gai.
“Infinity.”
“What?”
“Infinity. This is the Unknown; we do not exist in the real universe right now.” It giggled. “Just you and me . . . you and me . . . you and me . . .”
It continued in this vein for some time until Farran finally stopped it by asking another question.
“Then what will be the year of my next jump?”
“By the Original standards,” Gai said solemnly, “Infinity!!!!” It burst out laughing in insane delight.
The world changed.
The robot announcer of the video screen began his story just as Farran appeared in front of a video shop.
“The threat to the human race from the mysterious virus has ended somewhat abruptly,” the robot stated. “ instead of waiting for scientists to cue it, it seems to have cured itself. Nearly simultaneously , all known cases of the disease that has already claimed the lives of countless billions have disappeared. Now all that’s left is the road to recovery for the many billion Humans who have been affected.
“Street riots have broken out in many districts, by people who have emerged from hospitals totally recovered to find that their possessions have been stolen by neighbors and other species—“
The report was cut short when a large piece of stainless steel broke through the window, tearing the video screens that Farran had been watching. He looked around wildly for the block’s source, and for the first time became aware of his surroundings.
A riot raged in the streets. People destroyed cars with low-intensity particle blasters while dirty-looking teenagers threw makeshift quantum grenades into buildingsd, destroying them completely. Fires raged everywhere. And at the other side of the street Farran saw—
The portal.
Panic struck him. How was he supposed to get all the way over to the other side without dying in the process?
Only one way to find out, he thought to himself.
Starting at a run, Farran went towards the sphere, dodging bits of shrapnel from nearby explosions, ducking and evading punches and kicks that were being thrown, occasionally returning them to clear his way.
Suddenly a sharp object struck him in the head and through no fault of is own, he went down. As he struggled to get up, he checked the portal. Still there.
He managed to get up, and ran for the sphere. Twenty feet. Explosions everywhere, shrapnel hitting him, making it difficult to move in a straight line. Ten feet. He was hit again, but he ignored it because he had noticed the portal had begun to shrink. Five feet. It was now half its original size, but—
The world changed upon contact with it.
He emerged from the portal totally healed, not any mark on him.
“It is nearly done,” Gai said. “Time grows short for you to make your decision. Two jumps left.”
The world changed.
Farran could tell that it was immesurably farther in time than from his last jump. The instant he materialized, he recognized the sharp metallic tang of metal and electronics everywhere. Instead of normal clothes as he thought of them, he wore a small unit at his belt, which seemed to emit an opaque field around him. Instead of shoes, Farran wore two more small gadgets, but instead of the dark field, they seemed to lift his feet slightly above the ground, making him literally walk on air.
But his surroundings made him instantly forget his clothing. He stood on a normal-looking street, but instead of it being filled with happy talkative prople, there were corpses.
Everywhere.
Lying sprawled across the street, draped across park benches . . .
It’s as if they all just died on the spot, he thought. Movement caught his eye. Among the bodies milled strane-looking beings the Farran could only recognize as aliens.
They looked a mixture of shock and horrible sadness. Numbly Farran walked over to a small wall that also served as a video screen.
“A terrible tragedy has befallen us,” stated the announcer. “Without explanation, every known Human has suddenly and inexplicably dropped in their tracks. As best as we can tell, Humanity itself has been wiped out.”
Without even seeing the portal, the world melted back into nothingness.
“One left,” Gai said. “Then you must decide who must be removed from the timeline to revive the Original.”
The world changed
Farran found himself in a familiar crowd. But instead of wearing clothes related to that time, he was wearing the white tunic of the Unknown. Finally he realized that he was watching himself, in his first jump.
It was remarkably brief. All he saw was his other self push over and kill the crew member, and running into the portal.
Suddenly the facts clicked together in his mind. He understood the Prophecy now—and what it meant.
The world disappeared.
Instead of Gai awaiting him, he was confronted by a large creature with brown fur that somewhat resembled a monkey or a small gorilla.
‘The time has come,” it said in a deep voice. “I am Kyn, Guardian of All. Choose the person to eliminate from time correctly, and you shall save the Original.
Dread permeated his stomach. Because he knew, without a doubt, what the right answer was, and he would have done anything at that moment to escape his fate and still save Humanity. The Prophecy told of a Chosen One setting in motion a chain of events, called a loop. And the only way to escape the loop was . . .
“Choose now.”
“I choose . . .” began Farran. He was nearly certain that he could not continue, but a voice in his head asked him,
What is one single life compared to all of Humanity?
He felt a bit stronger.
“I choose . . . myself,” he said. The gorilla-thing nodded and smiled, baring his teeth.
“You have chosen correctly,” it said. “Your sacrifice will be remembered for eternity.”
His world went black—for the last time.