Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, made purely for the enjoyment of its author (and hopefully someone else) and is in no way affiliated with the creators of The 4400. No profit is being made from this creation. Or whatever you want to call this thing.
Happy New Year's, everyone. This was written as a reflection on the last episode of The 4400, and what might have come after. The person whose perspective it's from is not one of the main characters, and will remain unnamed to help me avoid turning him or her into the bad kind of OC. Happy readings!
"The sacrifices of the past few days have not been in vain. This tragedy, terrible as it may have been, had meaning. And those who died... are the Heralds of a New Age!"
-Jordan Collier
The end of the world as we know it came to Seattle recently. Or perhaps not. Maybe the Promicin Virus was not the end, and not the beginning, either. Maybe it was years ago, when the 4400 first stepped out of that ball of light. I remember that. I remember watching on the news, shocked and terrified. In fact, that day, someone predicted all of this. "Things are going to be different now." Who said that? Was it my mother? A friend? Or maybe I said it myself. Whoever said it, we all knew it.
But maybe that day wasn't the day that things changed. Maybe it was when Jordan Collier first took over Promise City. I remember that, too. I remember when I first heard about it thinking, "The world's about to change." I wasn't even sure if it was good or bad, really, just that it would be different. Everyone knew that.
Or maybe it was when Promicin was first discovered. When the 4400 were taken off the inhibitor, that changed everything. And I remember that. I read about it in the newspaper, everything that was known about Promicin. It wasn't much, but even the woman writing that article noticed that things were about to be utterly, irreversibly, changed forever.
It could have been the day when Promicin started to be distributed. Once again, I remember. I remember wondering, wondering who I knew and cared about would take that shot. Who would die... and who would be changed?
I remember a kid who used to work at the gas station. High school dropout, I think, but he didn't seem to care. The first time I met him, the friend I was with watched him serve us so quickly and so happily, be so damn friendly that we both started smiling. She joked with him, asked him how fast he expected to be promoted, with that attitude. He seemed really happy to hear her say that, but then I read in the paper that he'd taken the shot. And died.
I remember the woman who used to live next door to me. When I was a teenager, she'd sometimes give me a job babysitting. She was the best employer I ever had, and always grossly overpaid me. Not that I minded. Her kids were still living at home when she got caught by the Promicin Virus and died. I don't know what happened to them.
I remember a friend of mine who went on a trip around the world. She came back pretty down, told me that the entire world was messed up and somebody needed to do something. She took the shot, and she didn't die. A couple of days later, she got arrested. I never even found out what her ability was.
I remember an old homeless man who hung out a couple of blocks from my apartment. Pretty nice guy, always had a smile for everybody, would stop and chat with people walking by. When people started rioting, he got trampled to death while they ran past him. Or maybe someone killed him. Nobody knows, and right now, nobody really cares.
They were afraid, that's what it was. Every person in Seattle, probably everyone outside too who heard about this, was terrified. Because they knew the world was changing, the 'way things were' was ending. And something else was beginning, but they didn't know what. They still don't, we still don't.
It's funny, really. They say it's the future that got us into this, people from the future who couldn't change things in their own time, so they went back and started changing things in our lives. And some people take a lot of comfort from that, the idea that someone is orchestrating the events of our world. Someone who knows more then we do, who can really change things, if only we let them. That's how my friend's uncle explained it. Personally, though, I think the future bit off more than it could chew. I don't think they meant for any of this to happen. And now people are afraid because they don't know what's going to happen in our future. I wonder if those people, the ones who are changing things, are ever afraid. Afraid of their future, afraid of the way things are going to turn out.
I wonder if they realize how afraid we all are. Probably. Change frightens people, especially when they don't know what things are changing into. Who would be affected, who would die, who would we talk to one day and realize they weren't the person we once knew?
The statistics are terrifying. Ninety-five hundred people are dead, that's what they're saying. And that's just from the Virus, that's not counting the people who got caught in the chaos and the terror, the people who got to close to someone who was angry and afraid and never got up again. I don't think anyone's come up with a number for them.
I'm trying to think of some sort of analogy for nine thousand, five hundred people. But for the life of me, I can't. How many kids in my high school, two thousand? Forty-six high schools the size of mine. That's not quite the number of people who died.
I hate numbers. It just doesn't make sense to me, how that number can represent people I knew. I can't wrap my head around it. People, ordinary people, just suddenly not here, not alive anymore. Not even people who wanted to take the shot, just people who... lived. Walked past the wrong person, stood too near someone, a random stranger who didn't even know them, didn't want to hurt them. Someone who was probably dead, too. Or if not, then different. Not the person they used to be, living in the same world they were before things started to change. Whenever they started to change.
Jordan Collier said these people were the heralds of a new age. I don't even know what that means. I wonder if they can understand it better, those people who got hurt or killed in this change. I wonder if, years from now, we're all going to look back on the people who died, on these heralds of the age we're living in now, and say "It was worth it." Even though it sounds right now like it will be a coldhearted, horrible thing to say about all these people whose deaths are so immediate, I hope we will. I hope he's right, that things are going to be better.
Will the new age that everyone's talking about be worth heralding with too many dead to fill forty-six high schools? Will it be wonderful, a change we could be proud to be a part of? Or will people, in the future, look back at us and wonder why we didn't see something coming, wonder why we didn't stop things before they got this bad? Is this the point of no return, the date that every student will have to memorize, the moment that everything changed? Or did we blink, and miss it?
But, whether it's good or bad, a new age is coming, maybe already here. And all we can do is wait and hope that it will be worth it.