To Save a Life

“If the calculations are right, you should land in the Community Gardens just north of Vine Street.” The technician tapped the icons on his tablet and Erik felt the prickle of static electricity wash over him. Every hair on his body stood on end and the light cotton t-shirt clung to his flesh like a second skin.

“Do you remember the route?” the technician asked, never looking away from his tablet, even as the temporal displacement core’s humming grew louder and louder.

“Take Vine Street southeast,” Erik said before coughing. The taste of ozone hung heavy in the air. “Pass Beldare Avenue and the row of homes. Take the next left into the parking lot.”

“And?”

“And then I slip inside the enclosure.”

“No, no, no,” the tech’s voice rose, almost shouting. “YOU stay out of the enclosure. Everyone stays out of the enclosure. The zoo, that’s where you enter. Stay clear of the animals. They are just as likely to kill you if you enter their enclosures, and then we will still be in this twilight reality.”

He said the last bit with a dark sense of irony, but it was a thought they had all entertained in earnest at least once.

“I know, I know,” Erik said. “Trying to add some levity.”

The technician scowled and returned to his checklist.

“You remember the date, I assume?”

“28 May 2016,” Erik recited. He would remember that date long after he had forgotten his own birthday. The tech made an exaggerated check on his tablet before turning and exiting the room. He reappeared a moment later, joining the other members of the Restoration Project behind the thick glass.

Dr. Maris, the Project’s Director, keyed the microphone between rooms.

“How are you feeling, son?”

“Prickly, sir,” Erik replied. “Quite heroic.”

He could see the technician shake his head in exasperation behind the glass. The Director actually cracked a grin, only the second smile Erik had ever seen from the dour scientist. They worked for a decade together on the Restoration Project, and all their efforts led to this one try.

“Don’t forget the hat,” Dr. Maria said over the speakers.

Erik reached to the back of his shorts and grabbed the flatbill hat from his shorts. He still wasn’t used to the attire. The t-shirt and shorts left him feeling exposed. To think that people once survived on the surface

“Sorry, I would have remembered eventually,” he pulled it over his buzzed hair. It was orange with black stripes running diagonally. In the center was a stylized capital ‘B’ in black lettering. “I don’t see what good this is going to do for me.”

“Camouflage,” Dr. Maria replied.

“From the tigers?” Erik said sarcastically. “They’re on the far side of the compound.”

“Zoo! The far side of the zoo,” the technician angrily corrected, eliciting a smile from Erik. “The hat will camouflage you as a member of the general populace of the time. They were quite fond of their Football Tigers.”

“Bengals,” Erik corrected under his breath.

“Bengals,” the Director corrected loudly. “Some of us are old enough to remember the Before Times. Erik, that hat was given to me by my father. May it serve you well on your mission.”

“Sir, I must protest,” the technician said. “We only have one chance at this. Erik is NOT the man for this job. He is far too cavalier and…”

“Son, he’s the only one for the job,” the Director replied. “His genome is perfect. Besides, we are out of time. The barbarians are at the gates, as it were.”

Erik crossed his hands behind his back and stifled another cough. The ozone was watering his eyes and he simply wanted to be done with it.

“Engage the mechanism,” the Director ordered.

The floor parted around Erik and the temporal distortion chamber rose to surround him. Small bolts of electricity jumped from his skin to the metal shell as the room disappeared around him.

“Good luck, son,” the Director said. “You’re our last hope. Save Harambe. Reset the timeline.”

Lightning wreathed the inner surface of the chamber. The humming intensified to the point Erik thought his bones would shatter. The forces lifted him from the ground, and he found himself suspended in midair. Just as he thought his body would be shaken to bits, the humming ceased. Erik briefly felt his stomach drop as gravity reasserted itself before he crumpled in a heap on…something soft. It was cool to the touch and tickled his skin.

Grass.

It was a half remembered memory of his childhood, before the world fell into chaos. The only green grass he’d seen in the last ten years was at the Conservatory. Erik looked around to get his bearings and was nearly blinded by the searing light overhead. He cursed and dropped the bill of his cap over his eyes.

In his time, the sun was obscured behind dark clouds of radioactive ash, cloaked in a perpetual twilight that left the world in a deadly winter. Despite the cold of his era, Erik wondered how people could ever have lived under so harsh and searing a light. Even the trees overhead couldn’t blot out the blazing rays of pure daylight.

His eyes, so long accustomed to darkness, slowly adjusted to the daylight, and he saw that he was surrounded by a veritable garden. Trees overhead, grass underfoot, and flowering bushes surrounded him. Even the conservatory, a ‘garden in a box’ as the Project scientists called it, couldn’t compare to unfettered Mother Nature. Erik wanted to lay back down, to bask in the clean scents of earth and flowers, but the task could not wait. It would not wait, and Erik already worked on a tight schedule.

Branches tugged at his clothes as he pushed through the bushes in what he determined to be roughly south. The thrum of vehicle engines grew louder until he burst out of the park, the grass yielding to evenly laid concrete beneath his feet. A busy street, filled with automobiles, appeared in front of him, and Erik fought the urge to jump back into the brush. He felt utterly exposed under that open sky, as though every passerby saw him and knew he did not belong.

“It’s just your imagination,” he said to himself. “They don’t care about you. You’re just another Bengals fan walking down the street on his way to the zoo.”

With a deep breath, Erik turned left and walked southeast. He almost dove to the side as the first vehicle hurtled around the curve at high speed, but it passed him by on his right side, barely six feet away.

And Erik thought his era was chaotic…how did people not simply die walking around town?

He laughed aloud at the thought. That bit was the same. His era just replaced the dangers of civilization with those of anarchy.

The road bent around and followed a more southerly course. Erik eventually found himself in a crowd of people drifting towards a break in the cookie cutter houses lining Vine Street. He forced himself to breathe deeply as agoraphobia began to set in. He’d never been in a crowd of more than a dozen people in his entire life. Three pandemics in twenty years drove humanity to space out what little of their society remained in the interest of survival. Here he was packed shoulder to shoulder with who knew how many people.

He clutched the small pouch hung around his neck and let himself flow with the rush of humanity. The little bit of old currency they could scrounge together was in that pouch, as was the best picture they could find of the boy. The cash was worthless in his time; the barter system reasserted itself out of necessity, but it was his only hope for redirecting the flow of history.

As he reached the booth, he pulled out the pouch and handed the woman behind the glass a faded green bill marked with the number fifty and the face of a long dead president. The woman took the money and drew a line across the dead man’s face with a marker.

Erik stifled a scream. That bill was half of his money and the woman had just casually defaced it! If he failed to even get into the compound, how could he accomplish his mission?

“Don’t get these too often,” the woman said casually before placing the bill in her drawer and counting out a handful of smaller bills. “Here’s your change, sir. And one adult pass for the day. Enjoy your stay!”

Erik took the change and the small white ticket and left without a word. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened in the exchange, but he seemed to have his entrance secured.

The line flowed deeper into the compound…zoo, Erik reminded himself…and Erik had little choice but to follow them. All of the study, all of the time drilling for this mission, and Erik was at the whims of the crowd.

The visitors queued in front of a strange metal gate and began handing their tickets to the attendant. Erik shuffled forward until he saw the gate mechanism clearly, some sort of metal bar crossing at the waist. He handed the attendant his ticket, and the man promptly tore it in half and returned the top portion. Erik then stood dumbly, staring at the metal bar expecting it to move so that he could pass. But the mechanism remained stationary, blocking his path.

“Please move along, sir,” the attendant said impatiently.

“I…uh…I’ve never been good at these,” Erik said. It wasn’t quite a lie, he’d never tried to go through one of these before.

The attendant gave an exasperated sigh. “Just walk forward, sir. It isn’t locked.”

Erik turned back to the bar and took two steps forward. The bar offered some resistance with his first step before giving way entirely with the second. Another bar rotated around and smacked Erik on the rear end, making him jump through the rest of the gate. The attendant merely shook his head and called for the next visitor. He was in.

The entry plaza bustled with activity. Visitors and staff mingled about as children ran about excitedly. Erik pulled out his pouch and returned the bills then drew out a print of his target. The child he must protect. It was nondescript, but the boy was young, about three years old with dark skin and wearing a gray t-shirt. It wasn’t much, but the Project had worked for decades to recover the image from the shattered remains of the ‘Intranetwork.’ Without the semi-AIs mucking things up, maybe they would have been able to find something more clear.

Erik set off into the zoo. There were maps nearby, but this part he knew by heart. Take a left after he passed the gift shop, keep the lake on his right, pass the Reptile House on his right, and then Gorilla World would be the next stop on his left. The sun had risen to its noon day height and the strain on Erik’s eyes was almost unbearable. He dipped inside the gift shop for a momentary respite and noticed darkened glasses for sale. The quality was not good and the price would cost him much of his remaining funds, but if he couldn’t see then the mission was as good as done.

He paid and left the gift shop, taking a left and following the flow of people. With his cap pulled down, dark glasses on, and just a white t-shirt and khaki shorts, he hoped he looked inconspicuous in the crowd. He looked at the picture in his hands then glanced around at those in the crowd. Nothing, no one matched the picture.

The landmarks faded behind him and he found himself at a hedgerow, looking down into a steep valley. Gorilla World.

Erik pushed to the front railing and looked over four feet of hedgerows into the enclosure. A number of vaguely humanoid creatures milled about on the ground floor, their bodies covered in thick black fur, and their arms extending far longer than their legs. Erik realized he had been holding his breath and exhaled sharply. He knew they were gorillas, but for a moment, all he could think of were the creatures in the wastes. Vaguely human, but misshapen and mutated.

“A different time, a different place,” he said quietly.

He turned away from the enclosure and scanned the crowd again.

“He has to be here,” he muttered in frustration, drawing the stare of a nearby woman. Erik gave her a smile and walked away along the barrier. He glanced back at the picture and then at the crowd, frustration gathering until…

There he was. The boy stood maybe twenty feet in front of Erik, bouncing up and down at the railing as he pointed excitedly at the gorillas. Erik took a breath to compose himself. All he needed to do was make sure the boy didn’t fall into the enclosure. Do that and the timeline would reset. The silverback down in the enclosure would not die today. The degeneration of the Republic would not ensue. The war and disease of the twenties and thirties would fade away. Erik imagined that he would as well, but what was one life against the horror humanity witnessed since Harambe fell?

The boy drifted away from his parents, keeping his hand on the guardrail as he walked. His eyes never came away from the gorillas. This would be it.

Erik took a step closer, then another and stepped up to the railing to block the boy’s path.

“Hello there,” he said, kneeling down. His eyes were on level with the boy’s and Erik gave him a smile. The boy pulled back skeptically and gave a look of distrust. “I’m Erik, what’s your name?”

“I don’t know you,” the boy said.

“That’s okay!” Erik laughed, keeping up his smile. If anything, keeping the boy talking would keep him away from the edge. “So you like the gorillas, huh?”

The boy nodded. “Mommy said I could see them. But, she won’t let me get closer.”

“Well that’s good. You should-” he was interrupted by a thump on his arm.

“And what do you think you’re doing, sir?” it was the woman who had seen him earlier. Her umbrella, the apparent source of the thump, held in her hands like a weapon. Erik rose to his feet and held his hands out to show he wasn’t armed.

“Ma’am, I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “I just-”

“You just want to take the boy, eh? I see the picture!”

Erik realized he still held the picture of the kid in his hands and reflexively stuffed it in the pocket of his shorts.

“No, no. It’s not like that!”

“Child, run! Hide!” she ordered the kid, and swung her umbrella at Erik again and again. Despite her age, the swings were backed by surprising strength. Erik fended them off as best he could as the woman screamed for security.

‘No no no,’ Erik thought, fighting desperately not to lose the boy in the crowd while the woman beat him with her umbrella. Finally, Erik caught the umbrella and pushed the old woman away from him. He turned about frantically, searching for the boy in the crowd and failing to find him. He realized after a moment, the crowd had parted around him and shouts echoed over the visitors to make way.

Security burst from the crowd and several bystanders pointed at Erik.

“He attacked that woman!” one accused.

“He tried to take the kid!” the old woman added, rubbing the wrist that held her umbrella.

Erik threw his hands up, pleading a misunderstanding.

The lead officer stepped forward. “Where’s the kid?”

Erik looked about, as did the nearby patrons, but the boy was nowhere to be found. A blood curdling scream pierced the air and visitors pointed into the enclosure.

“Oh no,” Erik said. His heart dropped into the pit of his stomach.

“He fell in!” Someone yelled.

“Give the retreat signal!” One of the officers yelled in his radio, before turning back to Erik. “You! Stay right where you are.”

The signal went out from the gorilla enclosure, the call to return to the interior of the habitat. Erik knew what would happen. The two females would go inside. The big male would not, and the world would be forever changed.

“Thought you could change it, did you?” an old voice said from nearby.

Erik whirled around and faced the old woman. A sly smile crossed her face.

“Time is a funny thing,” she continued. “It doesn’t like to be meddled with.”

She met Erik’s eyes, something deep and ancient lurked behind that façade.

He turned and ran, there was something he could do. He could still salvage the mission. He could-

The guards tackled him to the pavement. He hit hard and the breath was driven from his lungs. He tried to fight back, but the officers already had leverage over him. Cold metal cuffs snapped around his wrists. He looked up and saw the old woman standing above him, her umbrella daintily laid over her shoulder.

“It was a good effort, lad,” she said with a smile. She opened the umbrella and held it overhead. A momentary flash and she was gone. Erik erupted in a coughing fit as the smell of ozone filled his nostrils.