In a dismal future with a birthrate of zero and a death rate of "inevitable," world-weary Dirk Strider stands on the top of his apartment block, held up only now by welded scaffolding in an endless ocean. He contemplates death as he stares down at the gently lapping waves below, but then, that wouldn't get him anywhere really. Except to hell, and he isn't quite ready for that. A swift wind is constantly making hurricane conditions on top his home these days, making it nearly impossible to fish. He ducks back inside, letting his body drop gracefully onto the floor of his living area.
He cracks an Orange Crush and slumps down at his table. "Happy sixteenth," he congratulates himself with a murmur. He can't help but feel that the day of reckoning is upon him, with his resources ever dwindling. Either something needs to change, and fast, or he is just, and always has been, doomed to a premature death inside this towering refuge.
He can connect with certain people from the past, but not the right people. Not the people that are able to help him, if indeed, anyone would be able to help him. No, it won't be very useful to send an instant message imploring the help of an average 15-year-old girl. S.O.S. Days numbered. Send help approximately one zillion years into the future. Now there's a great idea. Should he start rationing now and get to work on a jet pack or, in spirit of a defeatist attitude, grab his sword and make it quick and painless?
He decides to stop thinking so dark and heads to his room. Why not make some sick-nasty beats or watch You, Me and Dupree for the twentieth time that week? Nothing to make him feel better like watching some actors he had already outlived cavorting around on his television. He starts his computer, preparing for an inundation of birthday wishes and finding only one, solitary offline message from someone he'd never talked to before. He accepts it, unable to see the harm in it, even if it is a troll.
turntechGodhead: happy 16th bro. time machine is in the closet, meet here in 2012. bring your sword. peace.
Dirk stares at the cryptic message, his eyes never faltering from the red text as he tries to decipher the meaning of it. There is no time machine in the closet, and he doesn't known anyone named turntechGodhead (although the name is so reputable it's hard not to believe). However, this person had known that it was his birthday, and he sees no harm in perusing the closet. And there it is.
In his bedroom closet, a sleek, metallic blue hunk of metal, shaped like a pill, apt to Dirk's six foot stature. He hauls it out with reasonable ease, assuming it to be made of aluminum and other lightweight alloys, and lays it flat on the floor, like a sleeping bag. It takes up a considerable amount of space in his room.
This makes no sense. Obviously, if a giant metal turd had been seated in his closet since the beginning of time, he'd have known about it. The fact that it has just inexplicably landed there in the course of a day, no, hours, is beyond comprehension. And no, he will not chalk this one up to elaborate practical jokes, because the barren earth is sans just one other living human being besides Dirk. He hurries back to his computer and spams turntechGodhead with inquisitive messages, subtly and ironically as possible for a cool kid with this magnitude of consternation, but to no avail.
Minutes pass. An hour, two, three more elapse. Dirk feels restless, lying in bed, lounging on the sofa, playing X-Box aimlessly while a shiny, hermetically sealed capsule sits on his floor, ready to be investigated. And still, no answer from the mysterious contributor of the gift. When night falls and all of the lights of his solitary box glitter on the surface of dark water, he decides to open it. With clicks and whirs, it comes to life almost instantly, lighting up with bright, almost neon words and dates and numbers.
A stiff, black seat reclines backwards, filling the bulk of the little pod. Somewhere to sit. To idle in helpless unimportance while this little machine, claiming so much, such a huge accomplishment to the study of science, will take him back to the year 2012. What does he have to lose? Dirk grabs his sword, his puppet, and water to last a few days, taking his seat in the machine and closing the hatch overhead. If nothing else, it's elaborately designed.
An arcade of lights inside glow like galaxies in the otherwise complete darkness, and Dirk quickly determines how to configure dates. He enters the year on a large touch screen in front of him. He enters the year, 2012. The date, he enters, June 6. Then he takes a deep breath before stilling his lungs, pulling the lever to thrust himself into the past.
Being belted inside the metal turd (which Dirk will now refer to it out of spite during a bout of motion sickness), a timeline rapidly flashing before his eyes on every myriad screen, is similar to being trapped inside a garbage can while rolling down a steep bank as everyone laughs, without the laughing of course, more like just a thousand whirs and beeps and alarms that could or could not have been signifying inevitable doom, all moving too quickly for his ears to keep track of. Finally, a monumental crash and complete blackness. Dirk is lucky not to have been stabbed through the neck upon impact.
He twists open the hatch with some trouble, and as sunlight pours in through the hole, he unbuckles himself and climbs out painstakingly, instantly wishing he hadn't. He is in the middle of what appears to be a jungle, hot and humid as all get out, with a splitting headache. The turd is completely trashed. Whether or not this thing was meant for multiple uses, it is not going to be getting him to another time. Not that he will ever want to return to the future anyway.
Removing his belongings and ditching the totaled pod, Dirk heads out. He knows little about survival in the wilderness despite a genius IQ, and it is just beginning to sink in that this little expedition could cause his death. His death, which would go unnoticed in a different world, where no one knew his name, except possibly this turntechGodhead, waiting for him in Houston, Texas. And his current location remains a mystery.
The only thing to do is search for something undefined - animals or buildings or cave drawings or anything, anything that would lead him to civilization. For all he knew, he could be on some doomed island, inhabited by incommunicado cannibals waiting to drain his blood and cut his ears off to hang on their Christmas trees. Dirk smirks at his katana, gleaming in the sun. He'll massacre yet another generation before he lets that happen.
Despite all this, taking a look around, the forest seems habitable. There are ample bodies of fresh water and wildlife. Weather conditions are not as harsh as he earlier perceived. He decides to take a break, to reserve his energy, and slumps down beneath a tree. Fortuitously, he falls into a deep sleep, experiencing something comparable to jet lag, time lag, he coins drowsily once he wakes up. The sun is lower along the horizon now, but still providing adequate light, and the arousal of his nap is not accompanied by only silence.
A voice, presumably human, foists itself upon his ears. At first it sounds like keening, wailing, terrible noises that make him cringe inwardly. But he follows them, never having heard another human voice aside from his own, in real time of course, and shortly realizes the voice is singing. Singing in just about as tone deaf a way one can sing, but cheerfully, and the voice itself is not entirely unpleasant. The song: a dissonant rendition of the Sound of Music's My Favorite Things.
He spies cautiously from behind a large tree, immense in circumference, at a boy, possibly in his age range, lying on a gently sloping bank with his knees up, facing a small body of water and fiddling with a big green mass of tissue paper and dowel rods and cloth and ribbon, all conglomerating to form an ugly dragon looking thing, a kite. Dirk had never had one of his own. And upon closer inspection, he realized the thing in his other hand is a needle. He watches silently for as long as he can stand, the obnoxious rendering of the song punctuated by the occasional, "Ouch!" when he pricks himself.
Finally, Dirk emerges from his hiding spot, flustered rather than nervous, and feeling superior. "Give it to me," he says as the boy gapes up at him, big green eyes wide and face slightly embarrassed (with good reason because no one should ever have to hear his singing).
"What's with that sword?" he asks impolitely, and Dirk realizes he hasn't been the most gracious either, suddenly appearing out of the woods and demanding his kite. "And the puppet?"
Deeming him harmless enough, he tosses his sword aside, sets Li'l Cal down among a patch of wild clover. "Just lemme see that thing, dude."
The boy pauses, unsure of himself as his eyes settle unwillingly on the toy. Then he hands it up to Dirk, cautiously, along with the needle, his tan fingers much slimmer in comparison to his but obviously not as dextrous. Dirk throws caution to the wind and plops down next to him, locating the slight tear in the fabric and beginning to work on it. The two young men are silent until Dirk finishes, handing the dragon kite back, unharmed and repaired. He hopes that this will give him some credit with the boy, the only human he has ever seen.
"Thank you," he says softly, a smile evening out the tension in his face and causing him to look even younger. "You're a right one to be wandering out of the woods. Where the devil did you come from?"
"Texas," Dirk answers bluntly, not about to give any more information than that. "What's the date?"
"Sixth of June, I believe," declares the boy, seeming quite taken aback.
"And the year?"
"...2012, why would you ask such a silly question?"
It worked. He can't believe that this thing actually worked, and he is currently in the year 2012. It must be a dream, some stress imposed on his brain from bumping it on something or other. In reality, he's probably unconscious in the crawl space, knocked himself out by some ninja antics. He lets his body collapse back in the grass, feel its cool, soft texture lick his neck and his bare arms. And this boy, the first real person he has ever seen, looming over him, looking very skeptical. Thank God he's so friendly - the last thing Dirk needs is a bitter taste of the human race left in his mouth. "Er... are you quite all right?"
"No, I'm about to wake up from the most wonderful dream," he responds impassively. "I envy you, flying kites on a hillside. How many people do you know? You're the first I've ever met."
He seems nonplussed, and sad. "Not many friends, but they come and go every day here. Sort of assumed you were one of them."
"One of who?"
"Tourists! They come here in droves to see Grandma's giant pumpkin."
A giant pumpkin. Is this the kind of thing that, as a person of the past, he is now expected to be enthralled by? This pumpkin better be the size of a goddamned house. That's when the boy suddenly jumps up, grabbing him by the hand. "Look, I'll show you!" Dirk nearly tears away, not accustomed to human contact, but does his best to keep up as the boy scuttles up a little hill, nearly losing his balance and clutching Dirk for support. He grins crookedly as Dirk raises an eyebrow, the greatest display of emotion he could usually muster.
Seated at the center of a sprawling field is the touted giant pumpkin, and giant, indeed it is. It towers menacingly over the rest, estimated more than five times Dirk's height, superimposed against a dusky sky like a crappy greeting card. All that's needed is to Sharpie shop a face on that sucker and bam, Happy Halloween. And behind it, all lined up to take some shitty souvenir photo are masses of people, real people, so easily impressed as to wait God knows how long to get their picture taken with a vaunted vegetable of mammoth proportions. Is this the place he has risked his life to come back to? A glorified pumpkin farm?
"Where are we?" he asks, suddenly turning back to his companion and nearly smacking the dweeby glasses off his face out of frustration.
"Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean," the kid answers most seriously, his messed up teeth so white and his eyes so big and green and his skin so smooth and perfect that Dirk can practically smell the innocence on him. "Is something wrong?"
"No," Dirk mumbles quietly, not about to share his shortcomings with an almost-stranger. That reminds him. "What's your name?"
The kid grins, extending his hand. "Jake English, pleasure to meet you!"
Dirk shakes it, against better judgement. "I'm Dirk Strider."