Chapter One
Bound to Happen
Time
is a strange thing. It is always there like air or water or sunlight. Just like
any of those things, when it fades away, you miss it. You are reminded that you
took it for granted. When there’s no air left to breathe, you are as good as
dead. When there is no water left to drink, you recall what thirst is. When the
sunlight leaves, you are suddenly cold. Now, when time decides to leave, when
time hits the big red button in the sky, you feel all of those things at once.
When time is running out, you have a
thirst for what could have been, you suddenly feel cold, and you are just a
future corpse. It’s like drowning in ice cold salt water. Even if it doesn’t
swallow you whole, eventually the cold feeling will cause your death regardless.
If the cold feeling doesn’t kill you, then you will swallow enough water to die
of thirst.
It would force you, like gravity, to
collapse in on yourself. You would be obliterated into a singularity. You would
become a single point in both time and space. It would be the only point that
those two things would agree on, because it would be the single last ending.
Everything that anyone has ever known or loved has been moving forward in time,
while occupying a specific space. Yet, was its being the sum of the space that
it occupied or the time in which it thrived. The only way to know was to sprint
straight towards the ending. The only way to know was to run out of time. Run
until there’s no space to run. Without time, there’s no relevancy for space.
Without space, time has nowhere to occupy.
Whether time and space were physical
entities, cosmic forces, or even gods, it was hard to tell. They were things
you could feel, but they were never really visible. Whether they acted through
coincidence or through luck was also up for debate. They were, at the very
least, at odds with each other, incapable of existing without the other, but
still entirely locked in struggle until the final moment.
Then there’s me. I’d like to say
that I was dying, or that I had a hard childhood, or that I was chosen
specifically by the gods, or that I was super powered, or half a vampire, or
something that made me stand out from all the other people of the planet and
all of the people through time, but as luck would have it, I was just a guy. A
simple guy. A dude even. Carl Carlos Carlson was the name. Okay, so that’s not
my name. Who in their right mind would name their child Carl Carl Carl. Not my
mother, that’s for sure. She had a sense of humor, but it wasn’t typically at
my expense.
My name rooted in the time of my
birth, only took up the space of a single piece of paper and the depth of the
ink. Greg Anthony Warren. If you were thinking that my parents let me name
myself, you’d be completely entirely exceptionally incorrect. Even if my first
mumbled utterance sounded something like, “Gaw.” My parents weren’t crazy…
that’s to say they aren’t crazy
This story starts on the day of my
birth, October 21st. I was born on a dark and stormy night at the
stroke of midnight in the back of a cab being driven by Charlie Sheen himself.
My mom had a mouthful of the back seat that she had clawed out due to the
immense pain caused by going into labor. My father, as luck would have it, was
busy, in his lab studying a new machine capable of moving light particles
through sheets of thin metal without any trace of penetration. In the moment
that my mother began to crown, he finally perfected the experiment. Thus when
the light particle teleported, I moved through the womb to reality.
It was symbiotic foreshadowing to
how I would come to be a “wibbly wobbly space time lord” as it were. Constrained
by space, I would shoot forward in time to take my first breath. The first in
terms of time, not the first in terms of chronology. I had been born,
premature, because a cab couldn’t get close enough to a hospital. I’d been born
in a tiny space too early for my own good. Am I layering on the symbolism and
the analogy too thick? This space/time nonsense is pretty important.
What I am really trying to say is
that I am pulling your leg again. I was born in a hospital like most babies. On
the exact day that it was projected. I had hardly cried on that day. I guess
when you are a badass, you are typically born that way. When I would turn five
years old, I would get bitten by a radioactive grasshopper. It would shortly
give me the power to hop through time. By using my new superpower, I would jump
through time to save people in dire need.
I would call myself Hoppy. This
story only truly starts on a day when the bad guy named Mick Sanchez had
planted a bomb inside of a school. I had learned about it too late to save
anyone. Instead, I hopped back in time to save each of the people one at a
time. I fell in love with a high school English teacher, but she turned out to
be an alien going by an alias known as Prosefessor. Her alien species comprised
of blobs covered in different words taught me to control my powers, and I
became the first Time Cop. I was a badass in the past, present, and future.
Mostly the future, because the future is also badass.
Man, I really wish that the story
was that good. I guess that comic books had taught me to think of some cool
origin story that no one could disprove. Regardless, the real day started on a
Tuesday or Wednesday. The time is inconsequential. The space was very
important. I was crossing the street on my way to some online date. He name was
Victoriann? Or Ranch? Maybe it was Ketchup? It was something to do with houses
or condiments. Condo-ments maybe.
The point is that she had a name or
username, something that made her unique compared to other people online. I
mean, how could I pass up on a date with a girl named Ketchup?
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