The Aethernet Falls

Chapter 8 - Trust

Greco sat there, carefully considering everything that Boros had to tell him, which wasn’t much. He woke up in the light of the Streams, heard a strange noise, and figured he knew everything that was about to happen. He only figured that the fusion plants would fail like the fission plants.

He was right about the fission plants, however. Somehow he had enough insight into that even though it became clearer and clearer to Greco that the man was not an industry insider or some sort of whistle-blower.

What had sold it for Greco was the fact that he predicted the other battleships would soon be crashing down, following the first, in a hail of fire and superheated steel and ceramics. And that the defense grid in the Americas would not be operational to take them out as they had the first. It had made landfall while they were talking, though it had been blown into so many pieces that they couldn’t even feel it down in the subbasement. He already had the knowledge from his previous phone call that the other ships’ orbits were decaying at an alarming rate, and while Boros was telling his story he received a text-only message that stated simply >.

Even if he had somehow overheard the phone call, there was no way he could have known that the defense grid had fallen as well.

“Say I believe you, and I’m not saying I do, what’s your plan? What are you going to do about this?” Greco was eyeing the man, looking for some sign, any sign in the way his eyes twitched or his nostrils flared. Anything that might tell him if he was making the right decision by aligning himself with this man.

“I know things…” He stopped, that wasn’t quite right. It felt as though he already knew them and that he was recalling them from memories locked away in his mind. “I’m remembering things. Things that will happen, but haven't yet, and only more are coming to the surface.”

The way the man’s face remained stony and cold, his lips narrowed and pressed tight, his eyes tired but unmoving, the way he sat there still as a statue, everything pointed to him telling the truth, a very serious truth. Greco got the impression the other man was trying to sell him something. He was, in fact. Selling the ridiculous notion that he new what was happening because he recalled it from memory.

“I need help to get my sister out of the city, maybe we can survive longer that way. This is going to be our extinction event, or at least it will come damned close to it. You wouldn’t be talking to me now if you didn’t have the same feeling.” He brushed his wavy black hair with his fingers, a quirk he shared with his sister, “And I believe that if I can survive long enough, remember enough, then maybe I can stop this.”

“How on Earth do you think you can stop this?” Incredulity now. He could even see it in Clarissa’s face, like she wasn’t completely behind her brother’s outrageous claims. “What makes you think that you of all people can stop it?”

Boros leaned forward in his chair and looked Greco in his eye, as though challenging the other man to call a bluff when really he had all the right cards. “I’m going to remember something, anything. It might be a clue, it might be the answer outright.” There was a seriousness to his tone that played up now more than before. “I’ve lived through this before.” He carefully annunciated each syllable trying to drive home a message that sounded completely insane to anyone else.

Time travel hadn’t been invented, modern science had decried it as pure fantasy decades ago and had stopped all official pursuits into the make-believe science. There was no way someone was going to crack it now, even if it were possible. And here he was saying that he had done it, been to the future and back, and telling it to the stranger he had hinged all his bets on. And to his own sister. The fact that he had experienced this before. The very notion seemed completely and utterly insane, bordering on nonsensical.

And yet, Greco wasn’t entirely unconvinced. Had someone told him this morning that the multi-quadrillion dollar endeavor that was the orbital battleships would fall from the sky for, what was in all intents and purposes, no reason, or that the entire Americas’ defense grid would go offline at the same moment, he would have treated it with the same derision as if someone had told him he had come from the future. Because they were all impossibilities.

But that was this morning, and this was now.

“Boros, I need to talk to you.” Clarissa smiled at Greco, her eyes held concern though.

He took the cue and got up from the surprisingly luxurious folding chair and shot a glare that screamed don’t you move, at Greco. He followed his sister to a discrete distance.

“What are you doing?” She was fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, something she had done ever since she was a kid when she was nervous. “You never told me any of this coming from the future shit.” There wasn't just concern in her eyes, but also anger.

“Look, I can’t explain it. That’s just the way it feels. I told you about that feeling of forgetting something important, how could I forget something I didn’t know in the first place?” He pleaded. He wasn’t liking what this was doing to his sister. What even more tragedy on the global scale would do to her. He could only keep her safe and bide his time, hoping he remembered that small thing that could prevent this, or slow it down, or at the very least keep some people alive so that humanity didn’t blink out of existence.

“How can you know things that haven’t happened yet? How do you know these things?” She sounded like she was begging him to tell her, but her eyes were cold. It seemed even she wasn’t sure if this changed something irrevocably in her or if it was a temporary sensation borne of disbelief. If this is what broke her spirit or strengthened it.

“I…” He took her hand in his and looked down at it. “I don’t know… I just do.”

“That’s not good enough for me.”

He couldn’t help but get upset. His sister was finally changing before his very eyes. Years of abuse, living on the street, taking s**t work for s**t pay from shitty people. Living in flop houses, in apartments crammed with far too many people, having absolutely nothing. All of this had failed to change her. Even the apocalypse, it seemed, had failed to change her. But her wavering faith in her brother, the one thing in the world she had never second guessed in her life, that was changing her. Like a crust forming over her heart, finally closing herself off from a world that had abused her thoroughly.

She turned away.

She didn’t want him to see her crying for some reason.

Tears began to form in his own eyes but he stopped himself when he saw Greco coming up from around the corner. He didn’t have the energy to lift the gun, as light as it was, and make good on his implied threat.

“It better be f*****g good enough for you.” He said, straightening his tie. “We’re f*****g leaving. Now.”