The Loop

“This better be good, Tomas. You might think that just because almost everyone else is dead, we have a vested interest in keeping you alive, but you should rid yourself of that notion before you open your mouth,” Christine said with a snarl in her voice. She hadn’t been someone to fuck with even before she had her powers, and Tomas had tried her patience plenty in the past.

“I know neither of you like me. I can’t blame you. We have … history,” Tomas said, almost laughing but thinking better of it when he saw that the two people in front didn’t seem to be in a laughing mood.

He cleared his throat and glanced briefly up into their eyes before casting his own eyes down again.

“Listen,” he said, sounding as nervous now as he looked. “Just lighten up a bit. All that shit’s behind us.”

“Everything you’ve done might be in the past, but people don’t change,” said Adam.

“I never said they did, my friend. And given the chance to do it all again, I’m sure I’d still do all of the awful, evil things that I did the first time around. In fact, I’m counting on it. On doing it again, I mean. That’s why I’m here.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Adam.

“His power,” whispered Christine, almost in awe.

“You can’t be serious … Are you serious? Did you come here just to waste our time with this?” asked Adam.

“Not a waste of time. Impossible for us to waste time. We have all the time in the world. Too much time to waste, and somehow still not enough,” said Tomas, and now he did laugh.

“That’s not even …” Adam began.

“Not feasible,” finished Christine. “Your power doesn’t even work like that. And anyway, what could you get us? Four hours? I don’t know if you noticed, but they won a lot more than four hours ago, Tomas. This war has been over for a lot more than four hours!”

“Don’t say that,” said Adam. “They haven’t won yet. They can’t have.”

“I’m sorry, Adam, I am. But look around. It’s over …”

At this she spread her arms wide to draw his attention to the world around them. And he had to admit, it was a pretty bleak scene. Many of the buildings they could see in the city were half collapsed or on fire. There was a strange orange glow to the clouded sky, and everything at ground level looked like it was undergoing a process of rapid desertification. It was almost the perfect vision of the apocalypse, the platonic ideal of a dystopia. It was an image of the end of the world that likely existed within the collective unconscious of all mankind. And that was kind of the point; they had tailored the process of destroying humanity and the world they inhabited to perfectly match what humans expected something like that to look like. It was almost performative. Even as they came toward the end of whatever this whole thing had been about, they still created scenarios that they thought would help them learn just a little more about their lab rats.

“There’s still time,” he said with clear desperation in his voice, as if he needed this to be true. “We can still turn things around.”

“You’re exactly right,” Tomas chimed in on cue. “There is still time. As much of it as we need. But only if we act quickly,” he laughed again at the irony of this last statement.

Adam was so caught up in his fevered thoughts about the world and any wild ideas he could come up with to try to salvage it that he had almost forgotten Tomas was there.

“Again, Tomas, your power doesn’t work that way. You have limitations just like the rest of us.”

“I do have limitations, my friends. It’s a sad fact, but I must admit its truth. I have limitations and they are completely rigid. I can’t train hard or work hard to get past them. I am completely at the mercy of my limitations—”

“Well there you have it, this has been a colossal waste of our time—”

“—without external enhancement, that is …” he let his voice trail off into silence, because he knew that at this his two compatriots would fill that silence in their minds with the glimmer of hope his words would inspire in them. He had always had a flair for the dramatic. He chanced another glance at their eyes and was pleased to see in them the hope—the longing—he had counted on.

“You mean …” began Christine.

“One of the devices is still out there?” Adam finished her thought.

“That is exactly what I’ve come to tell you. And with it, my power becomes rather less limited, and our time becomes decidedly less short. In other words, Merry Christmas, my dear friends!”