“Not again!”
That
wasn’t right. The cracked glass scattered in clear shards around her
feet was positioned well away from anything else - say, the transparent,
translucent pool of liquid newly formed on the floor - and yet it was
slowly sloping into a puddle of melted glass. Cursing, she stepped away
from the mess, kicked it into the drain on the floor, and turned away,
frustrated. It had been two years since her last major breakthrough and
the Majors were getting bored, not to mention her pay was going down.
The
room was brightly lit, white on all but one side, and smelled of
anesthetic, which only added to the “hospital” vibe you got standing in
it. Numerous steel tables were placed in corners and all around, piled
with messy stacks of papers, microscopes, and scientific instruments she
couldn’t even pronounce. Stacked away behind one of the tables there
were numerous cages, containing myriads of birds and mammals, and the
occasional bug or two. As the woman watched, spacing out in frustration,
one of the leopards turned its head to her, banging into a giant
tortoise.
“Gonna be fired,” she muttered, angrily flinging aside the name tag reading Dr. Cast. She was going to get fired! She’d have to work at the front desk, the Smog, maybe at the Factory. A... Creator?
As if.
Marching
across the room, Cast swatted over an albino mouse cage and slammed
herself down into a chair. A tiny humming nanopod, labeled ana,
carefully deposited an elegant black pen in her fingertips and she sat
for a moment, thinking what to write down. A million things, mostly
about the frustration accompanied by a hard task. Well actually, it was
literally impossible, because Time wasn’t something. It didn’t exist. It
wasn’t a physical attribute, it was something humans had created, it
wasn’t real. Time was something that didn’t exist, that only appeared because humans needed it- it didn’t exist.
And she was supposed to bend it.
“People
be crazy,” she snarled to herself, flinging the pen across the room; it
hit the glass wall across from her with a satisfying ‘ping’ and
clattered to the floor next to Cessa. Surveying Cast with an amused
frown, the Siamese elegantly leaped down from her perch on a bookshelf
and landed perfectly next to Cast. With cold, shining blue eyes, Cess
swatted ana down and watched, satisfied, as the tiny white pod fizzled out on the floor.
Cast
rain a hand through her hair and began to pace. Striding back and
forth, she bumped back and forth between cages and desks, not bothering
to pick anything up as it fell, just thinking. Cess sat primly on a
table watching as the dark-haired woman spun around the room in a fit of
frustration, and then stand in shock as a sudden thought hit her.
She knew where.
She knew when.
She knew how.
Inhaling
sharply, Cast bolted. Grabbing her backpack and a coat and a couple of
substances encased in glass jars, she slammed out the lights, darted out
the door, jumped, and hit the ground running. It was still dark
outside, being just around three in the morning, but she didn’t stop,
kept sprinting until she hit the Forest outside the lab. Swathed in
darkness, Cast ran through the undergrowth and panted as she passed the
huge stands of wet green pines and oaks, feet slamming the damp grass,
breathing heavily as startled animals flew out from under her feet and a
deer watched with wide doe-eyes from the edge of the path. The
landscape shifted into a slightly drier more open terrain; still scaring
out rabbits and birds, the woman bounded across the dirt road and
skidded to a stop outside the falls.
Normally it would have been
crashing down with tons of water, slick and cold, but they were, of
course, in the middle of an extreme drought, and now it stood immensely
tall above her, the bottom filled with huge rounded boulders, stones,
and rocks. Pausing to take a breath, Cast quickly surveyed the rocks,
shifted her backpack, and jumped the edge.
Hitting
the ground hard, she landed on her side and scrambled to her feet;
running again and ignoring the pain crawling up her side, Cast raced
along the flatter ground and started climbing the immense rocks
littering the bottom. Scrambling along the edge of the granite, the
dark-haired scientist forced herself to leap and scramble across the
boulders, clawing at the edges and cracks, pushing for footholds.
Reaching the edge of the rugged, rockbound field, Cast took a jump
toward the edge of the cliff and slammed her hand into a cleaved-out
space, pulling herself up into the waiting tunnel. Tearing through the
opening, she reached the other end and took a flying leap downward.
Ouch.
Probably broke something there, thought
Cast, grimacing as an explosive pain reached up her ankle and she
dashed toward an uphill slope. Another waterfall roared in the distance-
Almost there.
Reaching
the top of the slope, the scientist fled through the path, inhaling the
scent of water and rock and grass; scattering another herd of deer,
Cast hurtled through the open air toward the Falls. Now breathing like
someone had hit her with a bullet, the American, hissing at her
weakness, hit the top and skidded to a stop, staggering over her feet as
she finally slowed, a mere foot from the edge, gazing down at the
Horsetail Falls.
It was fire.
It
was February, it was around three-thirty, it was dark, it was perfect.
Splashing down the rocks, the Falls had turned into a thing of fire;
where water should have been was instead a heat so intense she couldn’t
feel it, the substance shining red and gold and orange, glowing and
burning. Crashing and slamming back and forth, it radiated an aura of
light and blaze, and Cast watched in shock and amazement and laughter at
this thing no human ever would have thought of.
Get moving.
In
the shining golden light, Cast unpacked her few things, and set them
out by the edge of the falls - one container holding a roiling blue
liquid, the other a cloud of orange, the last a little ticking thing, one that Cast had never understood, one that would, in the end, kill her.
It was Time.
That
little black thing in the bottle was Time. Cast had no idea. To her, to
the world, it was a little black bug, a splotch of not-color, immensely
disappointed. But to Itself it was Time. It was the rest of the world,
it was free, it couldn’t be controlled. And as Cast smiled to herself
and began her experiment, it made up its mind.
The ground began to hum.
Cast
took a step back. Eyes wide, she watched as the Firefalls began to
turn. Under her feet the rock began to shake, under her fingers and skin
her flesh buzzed and her head was struck by some crazy thought that she
wasn’t in control. A morbid flake of rock split off from the edge of the cliff, dangerously near Cast's feet as she danced away. The Falls spilled backward - the sky went
black, the little Time Bug smiled, a bolt hit the ground, the bottles
clattered. Abruptly the world shifted; the beakers spilled, the Falls
washed over Cast, and the little black bug escaped.
And as it crawled away from the mass of water-fire, Yosemite exploded.
--Becca
