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Chapter 48 - The Spinning of Wheels
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 20:07:49 +0000 UTCChapter 48
The Spinning of Wheels
Everything was normal–least so far Ethan could tell after skimping over the internet for a while. While there was bombastic news galore, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t already expected to happen. A group of people in Germany, dubbed ‘The First Ones’, regaled their tales of going into the Tunnel and how they came out. They’d be proven as fakes in a couple of weeks when the first ones actually came out, but for now, it was all speculative.
Any and all Tunnels discovered under a country’s borders were immediately circled by the military and nobody was allowed to enter.
Furthermore, more and more people began Awakening, excitedly sharing their new magic with others, though, again, nothing too out of the ordinary. It was as though all the alterations to the timeline were concentrated on Ethan himself, though he knew that not to be the case. There was still the matter of the Korean man who could use ice, not to mention the potentially other few Awakened that got an early start.
By now, the number of Awakened likely stood in the millions so it was pointless asking for a specific number–and as nothing further could be discovered online, he closed the laptop and briefly glanced at the conked-out Layla by his side and left the room silently.
It has been four days since they’ve returned from the Tunnel. Kids, old and young, were still reeling and in no shape to truly function past the basic necessities. Ronald spent most of the days in a drunken haze, and wholly asleep for the rest of them, and while Elijah was doing a bit better–namely in that he wasn’t getting drunk on a repeat–he also barely left the sofa.
And that was how he found the two once again–sprawled out on the sofas, the entire room smelling of alcohol. Frowning, he opened the front doors to the lodge to vent it for a bit but said nothing.
One more thing that Tara's death had… scratched, so to say, was the supplies. As they didn't have the time to properly unload everything she found in the city, it stayed in her inventory for the time being. And now… well, nobody truly knew where the items inside the inventories went. The most accepted consensus early on was that they went into the void, but about ten years in the future, that would be proven wrong during a special type of event where the rewards were items that were clearly used and, more importantly, just normal things people would have in their inventories at any given time from Earth–water, pills, spare clothes, and so on.
From then on, it was believed that all items that 'disappeared' from a person's inventory when they died were stored in a massive vault with the potential to be distributed later. How true that was, though, nobody could know.
The core of it all was that virtually everything Tara grabbed in the city–including the new generator–was gone. It wasn't much of an issue, though. It wasn't as if they had to immediately go for a new supply run, and adding an extra generator would have required extensive expansion of the lodge.
Quickly fixing a small-sized breakfast for the two, he snapped them awake and forced them to eat. This sight wasn’t unfamiliar to him–he spent most of his residency days surrounded by catatonic patients, the kind that if you didn’t force-feed them would forget to eat. The kind that seemed immune to external stimuli. The kind that seemed simply… gone.
Elijah and Ronald weren’t that far gone, yet. The kids struggled and were in a depressive haze, but it wasn’t anything outside the ordinary. Though people all grieved and mourned in different ways, some uniformity was ever-present still. After all, humans shared the same DNA, the same core, primal structure, and in the most raw moments of one’s soul, everyone behaved the same–like instinct-driven animals.
While Ethan never quite believed in the perfectly structured '5 stages of grief', as neither human bodies nor minds were construed to follow some arbitrary pattern of perfection, there were stages to it. But they weren't played out in the same order for everyone, and with the same transitions. In fact, people often bounce 'between stages' depending on a myriad of things. There was no order to it, not really–just the mind's desperate attempts to heal, get better, and move on.
He fixed them both a cup of coffee while they ate and sat down with them, drinking it in silence. Here and there, they’d ask him about the ‘future’, but Ethan mostly gave vague answers. There was no need to go into specifics, not yet anyway, and it would do more harm than good.
Elijah was the one to break the silence suddenly. The boy put down the cup of coffee and, with a determined look, shuffled his eyes at Ethan.
“I want to go back,” he said.
“Go back? Where?”
“To the city.” Elijah elaborated.
"... why?" Rather than rejecting him outright, Ethan posed a question instead.
“Your plan,” Elijah added. “To just… wait until enough people have died… I… I can’t. I don’t want to wait. Let me go back, please. I’ll do it, somehow–I’ll convince my dad, and convince others to work with you.”
"..." Ethan remained silent, appearing to deliberate on it. In actuality, it was futile. Elijah was still a dreamer–a naive believer in good. Someone like that couldn't possibly fathom how militaries worked. In the odd-case scenario in which they didn't lock up Elijah on the spot, they would have just used the boy to get to him–with about fifty snipers locked and loaded to put a hole between his eyes. Militaries had to get beyond desperate to seek outside help in any capacity. Ethan, and by extension, Elijah, had no cards to play, no means of proving their worth.
If it were before the Awakening process became widespread, they’d have that as the leverage. But Ethan would have never agreed to it. The dangers were too unpredictable. In fact, he was uncomfortable with the notion of eventually needing to work with the military. If it were up to him, in a perfect world, he would have waited for their collapse after HUMAN became public. But, in some ways, he also didn’t want them to collapse. If he had something else, some other force to hold steady the general order of things, he’d be unlocked to do more things rather than be forced to babysit a whole city of people.
There was also an opportunity here, however. HUMAN had either just been started, or was about to be. If he played the game properly, he might be able to either shut it down or steer it in a more human direction. The truth was that he didn’t have much against the program itself–he wasn’t even above experimenting on toddlers to a certain extent. Human suffering, after all, eventually became just an everyday thing to him. However, there was some certainty in the day that HUMAN went public–in more ways than one, that was the day… humanity died. And from its carcass, something new, unwhole, and unbecoming awoke.
The saddest truth of them all was that the program never really discovered anything that wasn't already known. All they did was create a generation of hate-fueled Awakened whose souls were unmended on the day it was all learned and discovered.
However, would the military shut down one of its programs–and not just one of the minor, side hustles, but one of the programs they viewed in great importance–just because he asked? No. Of course not. Sooner would the fields of wheat turn to gold and rivers to floods of diamonds. He had no leverage–not even a spec of it. He did have the knowledge, and he could play to it, but he didn't want to even remotely become a potential point of suspicion. Then again… he could just lie.
“Alright,” Ethan nodded, much to both Ronald’s and Elijah’s shock.
“R-really?” the boy stuttered, not expecting approval. “You… you think I’ll be able to convince them?”
“Huh? What? No way,” Ethan’s words quickly diffused the kindling hope. “I already told you what would happen. Either they’d lock you up and shove you into permanent therapy until you told them what they wanted to hear, or they’d use you to set up a trap for me. To kill me.”
“Then… why… why did you agree?”
"Because you'll go in and lie your ass off," Ethan shrugged. "As it is now, we have no leverage. No point of contention. If you tell the military who I am, they'll either want to recruit me–in which case, fuck them–or kill me–in which case, fuck me. However, we can just… fabricate that leverage."
“... how?” even Ronald got interested in the conversation, momentarily waking up from the drunken stupor.
“By lying our asses off. I have this uncanny ability to just know things that are about to happen.”
“You don’t mean to say you’ll tell them you came from the future?” Elijah asked excitedly.
“Boy. Shut the fuck up.”
“E-eh?”
“Do you want to see me stretched on a cold, steel table, poked and prodded till I croak?”
“...”
“No, of course not. Jesus. Sometimes, your stupidity really reminds me you’re just a teen.”
“...”
“I’ll simply tell you a few things,” Ethan explained. “That will happen in the next few weeks. Nothing too major, just enough for them to buy the fact that your Class, by some happenstance, is Clairvoyant.”
“E-eh?” Elijah mumbled, uncertain.
“Is there a Class like that?” Ronald asked. “The kind that can predict the future?”
“In broad strokes, I suppose?” Ethan mumbled, stroking his chin. “Nothing to the level he’ll showcase, though. Future can’t be predicted in any capacity because it’s ever-evolving.”
“You’re predicting it, though.”
“Yeah,” Ethan nodded. “I came from it, and I still get it wrong once in a while. Do you not realise how fucked up that is?”
“...”
“Going back to the point,” Ethan turned toward Elijah. “You’ll strut back into the military camp and unload this wealth of knowledge on them. Once you do, you just pray your father loves you enough to protect you from what will come.”
“... what will come?”
“Did you not listen? Poking, prodding, probing–”
“Ah.” Elijah shuddered.
“You really think they’d do that? To a kid?” Ronald frowned.
"... cute," Ethan glanced briefly at him before turning back to Elijah. "If that happens, I'll come and save you. I promise. So, go in with confidence and don't waver. Tell them the future, and once they buy into your spiel, tell them your purpose in coming there. Linking up with me."
“... even with all that,” Ronald interjected. “Why would they want to link up to you? To them, isn’t the entire value Elijah?”
“Yes,” Ethan nodded, his smile turning crooked. “Which is why he’ll also tell them a very simple piece of information: my Class has the ability to enslave other people, so I enslaved him. I control his life and death. They don’t own him–I do.”
“...”
“...”
“I said that with a bit too much zeal, huh?” Ethan said, taking a sip of coffee.
“Just a tiny bit,” Ronald rolled his eyes. “You think it will work?”
“Honestly? I don’t know,” Ethan shook his head. “As I said, I don’t really even know who’s in charge of the military right now. This was well before I was free to roam about and know things. But even if it doesn’t, I will save you, Elijah.”
“... okay,” the boy nodded, curling his fingers into a fist. “I’ll try to convince them. No, I’ll do it. I will convince them, no matter what. I'll also tell them that you aren't a bad person and that you're strong–"
“Oi, oi, no, no, what? What are you doing?”
“W-what?”
“Didn’t you just hear me? I enslaved you. You can’t just paint me as some nice guy doing them a favour. The story has to be consistent. Don’t be overtly negative of me, but imply it. They'll think it's some sort of a lock, a function of my Class, that you can't just outright curse me. I don't need them to like me since, frankly, I don't like them either. I just need them to give me access to their security feeds."
“O-okay…”
“Ronald, you have some hate in your heart for me,” Ethan said. “Teach it to the boy and make sure he’s ready to go.”
“... wow. How convenient. A project to distract me.”
“You can always go back to drinking and conking out eight times a day,” Ethan said, standing up and walking away. “Your call, kiddo.”
