Day One

It was a normal Friday, just like any other, and I was lunching with my two best friends in the world, Sal and Terry. “Be right back,” Sal said, and started over to the trashcan to throw away her leftovers. I watched her closely, and caught myself before my eyes drifted too low.

Terry nudged me. “You gonna ask her anytime soon?”

I stared my friend right in the eye. “I’m pickin’ my moment.”

“The present, my friend, is the perfect moment.” I opened my mouth to explain my reasons, but Terry cut me off with this: “Besides, if you don’t ask her today, I’ll ask her for you!”

“Are you out of your mind?” He just grinned at me, that huge, dopey grin, that could mean only one thing. “You really are outta your mind!” He nodded. I sighed. “You…you’re a connivin’ bastard, you know that, right?”

“Yeah. Hey, here she comes, now’s your chance!”

“Hey, Sal, I was wonderin’…would you…uh, what I’m tryin’ to say is…”

“Of course I’ll go to the dance with you!” she replied, hugging me.

“What the -? How the -? Wha?”

“Terry told me you were going to ask me. Look, I’ve got a ton of homework due next hour, and I haven’t started. I’m going to the library to work on it. You can join me if you want.” I turned around and glared at Terry, who shrank back under my gaze. He knew I was pissed. “Then again,” Sal added, seeing the daggers I was shooting, “maybe you’ve got more important things on your mind…see you later…”

When she finally out of hearing range, I lunged at Terry. “Gimme one good reason not to beat you into a bloody pulp!”

“Because I was just trying to help y- oh crap MOVE!” He rolled over and shoved me under the bench we had been sitting at.

“What the-?” But my question was answered before I had a chance to ask it. A strange person dropped out of the sky and landed right where I had been seconds earlier. And if Terry hadn’t moved me…wait, did I say answered? No, that most certainly did not answer anything. The two tussled for a bit, and I was thankful that we were in a secluded area of the school. The bell rang, and all my classmates went to their classes blissfully unaware. I finally dug up some guts and crawled out of my hiding place. With a mighty kick, I tore the strange man off of my friend. “What the hell was that about?”

Terry, a gash on the left side of his face, gasped and answered, “No…no time…run…”

“Not until you tell me what just happened!”

“That guy – he’s an assassin! If you wanna live, get as far away from here as possible!”

“He’ll kill you!”

He grabbed my shirt and yelled, “JUST RUN!”

“It won’t do you any good,” the assassin hissed. “I’ll find you, and if not me, others will come…you will die, Lawrence Asder…you will die!” He sprang up and tried to stab me. Terry shoved me out of the way, jumped up onto the bench, and launched himself forward off of it, landing an extremely hard spin-kick on the guy’s face.

“Get the hell out of here, Law,” he called to me. “Go to my house, you’ll be safe there!” Again the assassin leapt up and the two started fighting. They accidentally entered one of the hallways, and I had no choice but to follow them. There was no way in hell I’d miss this.

When I got in, they had already reached the far end, where the hall took a sharp left turn. From where I stood, I saw two highly trained fighters aiming to kill each other. Assassin threw a sharp punch at Terry. Terry dodged it, and Assassin’s fist left a hole in the wall – the brick wall.

What amazed me most about this fight is that it all done in complete silence. I didn’t know how they were doing it, but not even the hits that connected were making a sound. I rushed forward to get a better view. “Law, no!” Terry shouted. He threw his fist up in the air, and out of his watch flew a shiny metal spike. It impaled itself into the ceiling. He jumped up into the air, holding his left wrist with his right hand, and used his legs to crack the assassin’s neck. The assassin was dead.

I had just witnessed my best friend kill someone – and the body had disappeared completely. “What the hell?”

Terry smiled and pressed a button on his watch. The spike in the ceiling came back into it. “That’s getting to be a regular catchphrase with you, isn’t it?”

“It’s also a legitimate question, Terry. What the hell’s goin’ on!?”

“Come with me, we’re skipping school.”

“What!?”

“Shut up and come with me.” I didn’t know what it was, but something in his voice told me that refusal wasn’t an option.

We got into his car and he drove to his house, where I followed him down into his basement. We had often hung out down there, watching movies and having LAN parties, but this time he didn’t even pause to fire up a system. He just walked over to the bookshelf, pulled out one of the books, and pressed a button that was hidden behind said book. The shelf parted, revealing rows and rows of lab equipment, diagrams, sketches, blueprints, and half-finished machinery. “What the hell?” I whispered.

“Would you cut that out?” Terry asked. “It was kind of funny at first, but now it’s getting on my nerves.” He started walking into the new room, beckoning for me to follow. I willingly complied. I had no idea what was going on, and wanted to find out. “This,” he explained as we walked, “is my home, my real home. That house up there is nothing but a façade, an illusion. It’s functional, true enough, but not where I live.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s a laboratory, my friend. But don’t you go thinking I’m some kind of mad scientist; no, I’m quite sane. I just enjoy building things in my spare time.”

“But…how?”

“That’s what I’m about to tell you.” He motioned to a corner of the room where sat two reclining chairs and a plasma T.V. “Have a seat.” He pulled his palm-pilot out of his pocket and hooked it up directly to the screen. A slideshow popped up, art in his drawing style. “Before we start, I should tell you that this isn’t completely accurate. I had to draw most of it from memory, and it’s a complicated story.” The first image was a young boy with dark red hair and a square face. “That’s me,” Terry sighed. “When I was twelve. I was born a genius, and by my twelfth year, I had already earned a degree in astrophysics. I was on par with both of my parents.” He pressed a button, and a new image appeared. It looked like a supercomputer, but Terry’s next statement made me realize how far off I was. “That’s the last project I ever worked on with my folks, a future-viewing device. We were about to fire it up for the initial test when things went to hell.” The next was the same picture, but with dark-clad people carrying machineguns storming in, killing the scientists. The young boy with dark red hair was hidden behind a desk. “Apparently, there had been a leak in the Pentagon’s security and the Russians heard through the grape vine that there was some top-secret stuff going on.” He clicked the button again, and the image was…me. I was in the screen of the future-viewing machine. “They used the machine, the only usage it ever saw. They wanted to know what the future held for them. It told them that the Axis of Evil would, in 2048, rise again and you would almost directly contribute to bringing it down for good. It was then that they started trying to find you and kill you.” He dropped his PDA and sighed. “I was the only survivor, the only other person that saw what went on in that place. I made it my mission to stop them from ever getting to you. I found my uncle; he knew what kind of things my parents were elbow-deep in, and gladly gave me a place to live. A year passed as I looked for you, and finally found you. I visited a few government websites and arranged for my own transfer to your school system. Although you didn’t know it, I was the only thing keeping you from a quick, painful death.”

I sank down into the chair. “I…Jesus, man, do you expect me to believe any of this horse crap?”

“Did you see the assassin? Did you hear him threaten you? Do you see the room in which you are currently sitting? You can attest that all of those things are, in fact, very real. My past is my past, Law, whether you believe it or not.”

“So…for the past four years…you’ve been lyin’ to me…”

He shook his head. “No. Well, maybe a bit, but only about the ‘I’m a normal guy who gets 200 percent on every test’ thing. But not about being your friend. It was stupid of me to get close to either of you, but I did.”

“Either of who?”

“You and Sal.”

“What does Sal have to do with any of this?”

“She plays a larger role than you know in the destruction of the New Axis. I can’t tell you what that role is, for if I do, it will surely turn you away from her.”

“Fine. But at least if those assassin boys are comin’ to get me, isn’t there somethin’ you can do? You know, to help me protect myself?”

He rubbed his eyes, which were caked with crud, then stood up and stretched. “You know, I do have one thing, but it’ll take time for you to get used to it.” He walked over to a workbench and grabbed a watch that looked like his, only blue instead of yellow. “Catch.” He threw it to me, and I caught it and put it on.

“Is this anything like yours? That spike thing was cool.”

“No, I have training on my side, I don’t need anything very powerful; yours is more of a weapon. Come with me to the training facility.” He walked me over to an elevator and we took it a few stories down.

“Terry, why haven’t you ever told me or Sal about any of this?”

“What would I have said? More to the point, would you have believed me?”

“Hell, buddy, I’m not even sure I believe you now!”

He shook his head. “Exactly my point. You weren’t supposed to know.” He pushed a button on the panel by the door and the elevator slowly stopped. “We’re here. Step into the middle of the room, I’ll give you instructions from the control room.” I walked to spot he had signaled to and waited. “Can you hear me down there?” Terry’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“LOUD AND CLEAR!” I shouted up toward him.

“There’s really no need for you to yell, Law. There are mikes set up all around the room, as well as cameras. I use them when I train to find flaws in my techniques. Ready?”

“For what?”

“Just let your instincts guide you.”

“Sounds like some Jedi bull…”

“Focus yourself. Get ready.”

“Right.” I cracked my knuckles. “Ready when you are.” I stood there facing the control booth like a complete moron. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a mannequin jumped onto my back and I did what came naturally – I screamed and started running with great intensity.

Okay, so I wasn’t ready.

After a few minutes, Terry barked a command. “Unit Twelve, get the hell off his back. This is his initial workout.”

“Sorry, boss,” the mannequin said and climbed off of me. It walked around to face me and – even though it had no visible mouth – said, “Look, pal, sorry about the whole ‘perching on back’ thing. It’s just that I’ve seen plenty of my brothers go down to the boss and the only one that ever came close to getting the jump on him hit him in the back.”

“Don’t worry about him, Law – his ‘brothers’ were all him. I just get kinda carried away during training and smash him. I then take two weeks to rebuild him, though he never acknowledges it. Now gut his metal ass.”

“Go ahead, kill me,” Twelve said. “Goodness knows I deserve it.”

“Great, a sentient robot with a sense of sarcasm,” I muttered. “What do you expect me to do, Terry?”

“Unit Twelve: please initiate level one training program.”

“That’s the program I was running before, boss,” Twelve responded.

“Um…gimme a minute to code a half-level program…” After a few minutes, he came back. “All right, it’s done. Uploading now; you receiving it?”

“Yeah, boss, I’m getting it…but are you sure about this? The kid looks like a pansy to me.”

“Why you little…” I shouted and before I knew what was going on, the watch had laid a thin strip of metal across my hand, where it became a circle, which branched into five strips, one on each finger and one on my thumb. Once the secondary strips reached the tips of the appendages in question, they formed rings around them. These rings started glowing an eerie blue, then bolts of lightning shot out of them and stopped half a centimeter away from the palm of my hand. The lightning started forming a sphere, and when it reached about the size of a baseball, I instinctively threw it at Twelve.

Keep in mind, this all happened in less than half a second.

“Ouch! So…much…d-d-data lost…so cold…feel faint…goodbye, cruel world…” and with that, Unit Twelve fell to the ground, his hard drive erased.

“Y’know, Law, sometimes I wonder if I didn’t code a dramatics program by mistake…”

I ran over to where the stairs to the control booth met the floor. “How’d I do?” I asked as Terry skipped down them two at a time.

“Not bad, for a beginner.” He pushed the button on the wall, and the elevator roared to life. As we stood there, he started clearing his throat every five seconds.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT!?” I finally shouted.

“You don’t think I’m going to let you carry that thing out into public, do you?”

“Oh. Right.” I unhooked the watch and handed it to him. “You gonna rebuild him? Unit Thirteen?”

“Nah, I only make him a new unit when his body’s completely obliterated.”

“What about his hard drive? Didn’t I erase it?”

He waved his hand around dismissively. “Bah. You fought subroutines, nothing more. His personality will be easy to restore.”

“So…you’re tellin’ me I fought with a robot that wasn’t even paying’ attention to the fight?”

“That’s a dumbed-down way of putting it, but yes.”

“He could’ve killed me!”

“Yeah. I know. That’s why I’m advising you come back every day this week for training. And by advise, I mean if you don’t show up I’ll send Unit Twelve after you.”

“Him, or his ‘subroutines’?”

“Him.”

“I’ll show.”

“Good.”

I walked home that night feeling like I was about to explode. My head was filled to the brim with knowledge, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t tell Sal any of it. I ate cold cereal and milk for dinner, showered and dressed within thirty minutes. As I came out of the bathroom, my dad said, “Hey, kid, how was school? Didn’t learn too much, I hope?”

What could I say? I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t there for half of the day. “Nah, not too much.”

“Ooh, before I forget, Sal called looking for you – said she wanted you to help decorate the gym for the dance, seeing as you and she are going together. Said to be there tomorrow, at eight.”

“What? I can’t believe she’s trying to rope me into it…”

“Well, that’s how it goes, son…look away – even for a second – and they fit a collar on you…preferably a chain one. Hmm…if I remember correctly, that’s what your mom did when you were conceived…”

“Ugh. I can add that to my list of disgustin’ mental images. Thanks a lot, Dad.”

“Hey, just doing my job!”

“Whatever. G’night.”

That can pretty much sum up my relationship with my father. We hate each other, but we will always back one another up. Single life does that. See, my mom ran off with some other guy after I was born, leaving my old man and I alone. He started working two jobs; I started becoming mostly independent. He started drinking heavily, and has subsequently quit; now he smokes. Guess everyone needs at least one vice.