Unheroes

She’d lost count of the days She’d been here. How many years? Dozens? Hundreds? A Thousand? She wondered to Herself, half-joking, knowing it was impossible. Hoping.

Time worked differently for a Timer – not least of all a real one. Sure, She’d met other Timers before, but none could really touch time. All they could touch was the mind.

But She was different. There were very few limits to Her ability to manipulate time itself. She could speed it up, slow it down, reverse it. She could skip backward or forward. She could alter it for an individual, or an entire city. In all likelihood, She could have shifted its flow for the entire planet, but She’d never tried, and never would.

For years She had used Her ability to help people, to undo mistakes, both Hers and others. She’d averted disasters, undone conflicts, and reset the years for so many people.

She had done real, tangible good.

But then Helen. One hundred and three years old, the oldest living Unpowered, but very sick and close to death. Those by her deathbed, her children and grandchildren, asked for more time, to have years back.

So She reset Helen, tried to take the woman back to thirty. Thirty was a good age, an easy age for readjustment to happen. But something – a glitch in Her power, like an involuntary muscle spasm – and Helen was reset to eleven.

The thing about resetting is that it doesn’t just reset physicality; it resets everything. Emotions. Personality. Memories.

Kids need stability. They need constants. They need family and friends and a culture that shifts along with them, and in ways they can keep up with. Helen had none of these things, not as her memory told her she should. Her now-family stayed with her, so happy to have their Helen back, and they tried to comfort her, to make her a part of this world. But they were unprepared and unable to be the family this little girl needed.

Young Helen, no knowledge of a world with powers, couldn’t wrap her head around resetting, and She had never tried resetting an unwilling person, never wanted to. Surely the girl would adjust – had to. Kids were malleable.

But it was too much instant change for a kid. After three days, an inconsolable Helen jumped out of her hospital window, and fell seven stories, while She slept on a chair in the same room.

That was when She had discovered the first limit to her power.

A true Timer could change and undo many things. She was able to reset Helen all the way from the crowded street below back up to where she had jumped from, erasing all the brokenness and blood from the body. But once back in place, Helen’s fixed body fell to the floor, lifeless. She couldn’t undo death.

So She went home, drank heavily, and placed a gun to Her head. But as She pulled the trigger, She only heard it half fire, and then unfire. And so She tried again and again and again, each time with the same result, discovering the second limit to Her power: She couldn’t die. Whether this was Her own instinct, or Her power’s sense of self-preservation, She didn’t know.

And so She left, wandering the waste outside the city, unable to age, unable to starve, unable to even truly grow weary, which was a weariness all its own.

Now here She sat, at the bottom of an ocean, Her power constantly resetting the internal and external pressure, deviating any potential predators, regulating Her body heat, and keeping Her and the world safely isolated from one another.

---

Donny didn’t take his eyes off the woman, but he considered what she said. If she was lying, he was caught already. And if she wasn’t perhaps she could help him find Her.

“I’m looking for someone,” Donny started. “Someone special. I was told she lives near the ocean. Are there others out here?”

“No,” she responded, smiling apologetically, “just me. Who exactly were you looking for?”

“A Timer,” he responded.

“Well,” she smiled, “you’ve found one.”

He started at her, not believing what she claimed. “But She’s supposed to be...old.”

“And so I am,” she laughed. “But a real Timer doesn’t change with the years. Not in the same way others do.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Are you Powered?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Well, Powers are interesting,” she continued. “Whether a symbiotic existence with something else alive, a genetic mutation brought on for our survival, or something else entirely, they have a survival instinct all their own. A Flyer, for instance, doesn’t have to choose to exercise their Power if falling from a great height. They simply will fly. And a Timer...well perhaps my Power’s self-preservation is something altogether more effective.”

“So you don’t age?” he asked in wonderment.

“No, I don’t. And I can survive without food, without sleep, in the most extreme of conditions.” As she said that last bit, she looked back at the water behind her. “My Power constantly resetting and reworking the oxygen in my lungs, the environment around me, ensuring its own continuing existence, and thus mine.”

“So you won’t die.”

“I can’t,” she said. But she sounded sad to Donny.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” he asked. “To not die.”

She looked him over for a brief moment. “What’s your name?”

“Donny,” he responded.

“Well, Donny, no. I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing. Watching loved ones die, being carried off to whatever comes after this life, unable to join them? Unable to alter my mind, remembering every mistake ever made, every hardship ever not averted, every injustice, every tear shed.” She looked off into the distance, catching her breath and wiping away the tears that started to gather at the corner of her eyes. “No, Donny. If my Power would let me, I would have welcomed death a long time ago.”