Up With This I Will Not Put

April 3rd, 2042

When I woke up, it was purple. The day. It was a pale lavender dream. It reached out and touched me. I said yes. Enjoyed it for an instant. Then I said no. Could the rest of the day top it? If it didn't, my heart would break. I felt my heart break a little. Then stopped it. Then got up. Yada, yada, Yoda. I was at my desk. Or, rather, my focus was. My mind was. My body was still in the bed. There was a specific reason for this. I remembered it when the no came after the blissful instant. That was standing on a bridge between two worlds, life and death. Oh yes, it was a perfect reminder of the perfect present moment, just for you, impossible and infinite, a sparkle of golden dust in a sunbeam. When you're fast enough you can pinch it. That kind of speed involves perfect stillness. But enough! - there is a day here, my hands say; palms upturned imploring action, questioning me, flat on the bedspread, handcuffed at the wrists. Aha, I say. You two again. Well... well. You are not to blame. They say, 'You will pinch it squirt dead between your fingers.' And I might lick a little tiny taste. "Ah, you're away," said Luke, smiling from the kitchen wearing a towel. "Today's the day," he said, turning his back to prepare coffee at the stove. "We'll get out of this fix today, my angel," he said, as his towel fell off. It was classic him to pull out all the stops, and no small nod to his vanity in thinking I'd give up the goods so early in the game.

Potted spider plants watched the cat from the shelves. The cat was asleep as a donut. From a seat in the kitchen, Luke was again wondering how he could be rid of me. He couldn't make love to me anymore and it assailed his romantic notion of life. When we first met, I wondered that too, from my prostrate position on top of the bedspread after a night of no sleep, still catatonic from shock. What else is the point of you? I thought. Really, an opposite sex next to me. You carbonize next to me and acknowledging you means I forget who I really am. All I can remember is that I'm a finite beast like you, and that one day I will die. How could you do that to me? You leave me no choice but to remind you that you're going to die as well. I was just about to do so when I remembered that I wasn't moving. If I did, he would influence me because of the bob. "Come on," he said, promptly standing and slipping on shorts. "We're going for a spin. Come on, Amanda." Luke disappeared in the sound of pulling out the wheelchair and returned, with Amanda the cat sitting in it. "You can sit on Amanda," Luke said, pulling me out of bed onto the chair. Amanda was stuffed and quite dead. "You can pretend you have hemorrhoids." We set off with the chair and he wheeled it through the hermetically sealed building with Amanda sticking into my ass.

In 3022 on April 3rd, the Trich virus was still in the air beyond. Hull owned the place which used to be a vast compound for scientists after the bomb went off a few years back employed by the military to restore civilization with cures and world peace. We didn't even know how many people there were out there to civilize. The fallout had flattened most of them. "Let's check on Tommy, shall we?" Luke said, his deep voice echoing off the vaulted crumbling ceilings, disturbing enough dust in the rafters to make one below sneeze if one waited the few minutes it took for it to reach them.

As luck had it, we still had power. Tommy the generator must have been kept on by Hull over two thousand miles away out of the desert. A wave of rabid drifters had been the last thing to happen and it took out everyone, except for Luke and I. "Report received," Hull had said in an email. "Lock down and await instructions." That was over a year ago. We did the rounds, checked the perimeter, made some adjustments to Tommy who was churring in an uncharacteristic way. Luke's gun swung on his hip across my face as he squatted down to look up into my face. " Sarah, now, look," he said, with a nasty flirtatious lilt in his eye. "Just apologize and let me in on the secret. I love you." Here he pursed his lips and lowered them to one of my hands where they began to communicate his affection. It wasn't exactly hard to guess what his bob was set to right now. One of my solutions for world peace, the bob. A little chip that could control human emotion. His was inserted into his wrist watch. "You're so amazing," he murmured through the smooches. My mother had always liked him. His hand reached for the heart-shaped locket around my neck, his first gift to me when we'd fallen in love. I felt his finger push the button at the back. A flurry of pleasure rippled through me as my bob chip did its job. I was used to it. It flowed through my blood, filled my mind, and switched on the pertinent organs. Eroticism was fully under my control. Though I had invented the chip, I didn't really know how it worked as well as it did. I'm not an arrogant person, but I'm a big fan of happy accidents and like to keep them around. But that upset a lot of people and they debunked my work because they couldn't find a way to regulate it or control it. Worse still, it seemed only to work because of me. If I thought about it I could make the chip make someone else feel this or that. That horrified everyone except Luke, and they had been keeping me in the brig as they tried very diplomatically to get the device to respond to console control only. It was a little cruel of me, though. Even in a T56 Metlon cell that shrouded me in hermetic electromagnetic containment, they still couldn't stop me from manipulating their attempts. It was not easy to resist the panacea of vengeance in isolation. The day the drifters attacked, Luke had jumped into the cell with me to hide. As we waited out the chaos, we fell in love. Everyone else didn't because they died. Well, I don't know, maybe they did. Death might be such a release, such a climax of sudden clarity that it might feel like falling in love, the love-at-first-sight love. But I'm not to be trusted, am I? The current state did not worry me. Luke was not a pervert. He was just trying to rise me, get the information out of me. The only thing he didn't know was that there was something in his watch that was scrambling my ability to control his chip. The only thing he had going for him was that I didn't know how much he knew, if he knew that I was the first telepath science had decided to acknowledge in this little corner of the world, or if he knew I could see the future too, and every possible future. I've died a million times, and fallen in love just as many. I've given birth scores of times and buried thousands of loved ones. I've seen just about everything the human mind can think of doing. I've seen planets created and destroyed, civilizations come and go. I've seen things I'll never understand and places beyond the known universe that make no sense. I've gotten lost time and time again in overwhelming dimensions, and decades have passed and I've still been able to travel anywhere in time. But always back to this state, my favourite one, with Luke. Not to get gooey but it's the only state that is unpredictable. I've no idea why and it pinches my bins to think it might have to do with him. But I have no other explanation at the moment. It's here. It's right at this spot that I'm stuck. A shot fires. Luke slumps over my lap and a warbly looking drifter rushes toward me. I don't see it coming. I didn't feel anyone. The drifter could have been wearing some kind of blocker. I just didn't understand the effects of the Trich and how it was turning people into homicidal monsters. It was some cosmic force I couldn't interfere with.

This, however, would be the last time I would live through this scene. As I looked down at his face, dead in my lap, a decision formed. My hand moved to his cheek. This would be the last time I come back to this state, I thought. It is over. I've looked at it from every possible angle, done everything possible to avoid it in every direction of time and space, but we always end up here. He always dies. As the drifter slowed down in time and froze, I slipped out of the scene. I didn't look at Luke as he slid to the ground. "Aha!" a voice said behind me. Turning, I saw Luke looking at me from the floor. "I knew you never really loved me," he said, climbing up onto the wheelchair. He looked at the ceiling and picked an eyelash off his eye. "And you just blew your cover," he said, blowing it away. "What happened? I know you tried everything. I saw you. I thought you'd at least loved me enough to keep at it for eternity. I wonder if anyone is worth that." He gazed at me with an inscrutable expression. I waited. "I'm not mean," he said. "I'll give you a chance to figure it out." I didn't move. "Come on, you mute!" he laughed. Luke wheeled over and looked up with a gentle smile. "You should've just asked me." He wheeled away. "Good luck," he said, over his shoulder.