“Give me your wallet.” The voice comes from behind me. “Both of you.”
I meekly slide my hands up and turn slowly. Some guy, his face is covered. He’s got a friend. And he’s got a gun. The woman walking bar to bar with me sees it too. She’s scared. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen. She doesn’t know what I could do. People react differently, when they know. And, quite frankly, I’m not the biggest fan of that. I like how most people normally feel around me. I sigh. I know how this is going to go. I start to sway a little, side to side.
I let out a laugh. “You’ve got a funny face,” I slur out, “It’s missing all the face-parts.”
“Sam,” my, well, friend warns me carefully.
Leaning into it, I turn towards her. “What, he does.”
“Son of a,” he begins, then cuts himself off. “Just toss your wallets over here and you can go. Last chance.”
I turn back towards him, still swaying slightly. “But I like my wallet. It’s so…wallet-y.”
“Maybe your friend will be more cooperative,” he says. His arm stiffens, simultaneously steadying the gun’s aim and reading itself for the kick. I sway forwards and back. The muscles in his hand begin to tense as the mugger squeezes the trigger. I let myself fall backwards. The gun fires as I fall, the bullet whizzing past where my head had been moments before.
I land on my butt. “That was loud,” I slur out as I push myself back onto my feet. “You really shouldn’t do that so close to people’s ear-holes. Isn’t that how people get the tinny- the tinnae- the tin- the ear-ringing thingy.” Fully standing up, I look at the other three people present, “Come on, you guys know what it’s called.
Lauren looks at me. “Sam, I think the not so nice man was trying to kill you, so he wasn’t super worried about your tinnitus.”
“That’s it,” I say, pointing, “Tinni-” then cutting myself off, I look at the mugger. “Wait, you were trying to kill me. That’s rude too. Don’t do that again.” I look at my watch. “Well, it’s getting late and I’m getting sober, we really must be going. Bye.” I turn to leave. As I turn, I can once again see the mugger’s arm tensing.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says angrily. This time, I stumble forwards, so I can catch myself before I hit the ground again. It’s winter, and the pavement is cold and hard. Once more I time it perfectly. The gun goes off and the bullet goes over my head. I break my fall with my hands, walking them back to my feet so I can stand myself up with relative ease.
The mugger is looking confusedly between me and his gun. His friend is just looking scared at the world. “What did I tell you about loud noises and ear-holes,” I say in my best scolding voice. It isn’t very scolding. I blame the cold weather. Then, to hopefully get rid of them, I add, “You know, that’s two gunshots in the span of a minute, the cops have definitely been called. And, given the district, they’re on their way already. You probably want to get out of here.”
The pair of masked people look at one another before they nod to themselves and bolt. Lauren sighs and takes a deep breath to collect herself. “So, you sobered up fast,” she says, definitely more accusatorially than it would normally be said.
I shrug. “I guess getting shot at will do that to you,” I deflect.
“Though being drunk was real lucky, with the falling.”
“Says you, the ground is cold and hard. I’ll bet you my butt’s going to bruise,” I joke, another form of deflection.
She shrugs. “Better a bruised butt than a bullet,” she reminds me. Like I didn’t know that.
“Wouldn’t know,” I lie with a straight face looking right at her, “Never been shot before.”
She chuckles. “From what I’ve heard, it’s not the greatest.”
I laugh along. “Come on, we’ve got another bar or two to hit,” I remind her, restarting our walk through the alley.
“You’re just scared of the cops,” she says as she follows.
I smirk at her. “Well yeah,” I say, “Uniforms are terrifying. You take a group of people that used to be different and some powerful entity forces them to be the same. That’s literally the plot of several horror stories.”
She laughs as we continue on our evening of drinking and relaxing. But she doesn’t seem to forget the attempted mugging. And after being reminded of the past, the drinking isn’t as relaxing as it should be. After the story of the evening finished its arc and settled into the conclusion, I lay in bed awake. Ignoring my surroundings. Staring at the ceiling. Staring past the ceiling. Staring at the past. My brain never turns off, and ever since I saw the gun, it’s been running on all cylinders.
Most people don’t believe in parallel lives or reincarnation. But I do. Not because I think it’s realistic or even plausible, but because I am really not able to think of any possible other explanation for my memory. For my life. See, about a month ago, I suddenly remembered an extra century of my life. Training for a war between powerful people. No, not people, beings. It’s hard to explain. Then I remember fighting in that war. Surviving through that war. I would blame time travel, but I don’t feel a century older than I was a year ago. And, you know, time travel doesn’t exactly exist. Ever since those memories came back through time and/or dimensions, something else came back with it. A whirring in my thoughts. A feeling in the back of my head warning me about exactly what is probably going to happen. And how to deal with it. If warning me about danger and helping me get out of it were all that instinctive feeling did, I would be fine with it. But it also tells me that I can do things. Things that the other me, the memory me, could do. But I can’t do. Because I’m not that person.
In bed, I close my eyes to try to sleep. The memories take over, as they often do. Especially when my mind is whirring like it has been today. Tonight’s show is the raid of someplace indistinct. A city, or a built up area at least. Monsters fighting monsters in a settled area. Our job was to get some scientist types out safely. My squad is paired with another of us normal people squads, and we’re with a group of friendly beings. Then something strange happens. Something different. I remember this memory well. It’s one of the more common ones. It’s the time one of my squad died. The only time. We were just that good, normally. But tonight, there is another element. A voice enters my mind. “You are one of the ones who’s been touched by the alternates,” it says, “She warned us.” In the dream, it was as though the heavens themselves spoke in the voice of a young girl. So, I guess god is a kid? Or in the parallel world she is, at least? “Something is not right here,” the god voice informes me. Then I shoot up in bed, my eyes opening. Pain erupts through my head. Like a migraine, but worse. No, like the migraine that happened a month ago. When I remembered everything.
Slowly, as to not disturb the bed too much, I get up and quietly make my way through the less than familiar apartment to the bathroom, keeping a hand on the walls as often as I could to help me move in spite of the pain. In the bathroom, I lean on the sink. It hurts to look at myself in the mirror. It’s like my brain is on fire, working too hard. Grabbing a washcloth, I run cold water onto it, wipe my face with it, then press it against the base of my skull. That seems to help with the fire in my head. Not with the migraine, though. I put the cover down over the toilet and sit down on it. Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes.
Everything is different. But the same. The built up area is a city. But it’s distinct. I recognize the Chicago skyline. It is in severe disrepair in the memory, but that’s definitely Chicago. I lived there for nine months, I should know. And what I thought before were monsters are just people. People in funny outfits and robot suits breathing fire and throwing buildings and other such things, but people nonetheless. And the strange, nondescript beings we traveled with and worked for: also people. This wasn’t some other world. But it’s still not right. Those people aren’t doing things people could do. And Chicago is definitely still intact. Maybe the god voice knows what’s up. She knew something was wrong before.
“Thank you for the information,” the young voice from the heavens informs me. “Goodbye, human.”
I open my eyes with a sigh. This other world’s god seems not to care about me. Makes sense, I’m not really religious or particularly important in this universe, I doubt I was either in the other. If I could figure out where these memories came from maybe I could learn more or something? I don’t know.
As though on cue, I remember my other self in a plane. “They’re sending us back soon,” I’m saying to myself. No one is awake and nearby. “They’re probably going to kill you and wipe my memory. I’m going to need you to replace it, once we’re sure they’re not watching, alright?” Then, I’m thinking about forming a disc of metal and one forms in my hand. That sort of thing happens often in these memories that aren’t quite mine. Popping open my phone, I whisper, “They brought us here with our stuff, I’m betting they’ll take us back with it too. Just reinfect me once we’re back in our proper time.” And I slide the disc into the phone, then put it back together. The memory ends. I look around. What if… I ponder. No, that’s impossible. But it would explain some things. A lot of things. How did he, no, I do it? It’s just willing a metal disc into existence. But I’m betting it’s got to be something I know, that I can feel. A coin. Think that there’s a coin between my thumb and finger. I hold them just under two millimeters apart and rub them around, remembering the feeling of each ridge on and edge of the coin that I want to be there. Slowly, a metallic substance seeps from my skin in the pads of my thumb and finger and, where once there was nothing, now there is a quarter. A perfect quarter. I look at each side, twirling it in my hand. Well, almost perfect. The eagle doesn’t look quite right, and I think I made Washington look a bit too smiley, but it’s definitely a disc of metal that came from my skin. Which means those memories might actually be mine. I’ll figure out later how exactly I fought for near a century and don’t feel older, but that’s one of those boring questions that likely has a boring answer. Placing the coin in the center of my hand, I let it seep back in. I need to get better at it, of course.
Then I have a thought. At some point, I should check on the surviving members of my squad. I’m not all that clever. If I came up with this idea, I’m betting they did, too. At some point, however, is not this evening. I notice my watch. This morning, I mentally correct myself as I creep back across the unfamiliar apartment and gracefully slide back into bed. I think I might be able to get in a good hour of sleep. “No memories this time, please,” I whisper to the liquid computer flowing through my body. Then, snuggling in softly and closing my eyes, I drift into a relaxing, dreamless sleep.
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