Timeline ?: (x-y)=?(?:?) (N:?)
An adrenaline plateau, was how he would describe it. If he'd had the words. If he'd had the time to have the words. If the aforementioned condition hadn't prevented him from having the words. Lone infiltrator he may be, and nervous as hell with it, but there came a point somewhere after the three-hour mark where you just… loosened up a little. Perhaps it was the power of the newly-acquired FA-MAS in his hands, weighty with the thrill of the stolen. Perhaps it was the ten man team of guards who he had just terminally dealt with. Maybe- just maybe- it was the diazepam. But this whole place- Shadow Moses, was it? Had taken on a slightly unreal aspect. After the fight with the robotic ninja, he was starting to think of the place as a game.
Perhaps that's why, dazzled as he was by the adrenaline- or yes, maybe the diazepam- that he did not take as much care as he should have, did not watch where he put his feet, as he entered the next room.
()
It was…
White.
Very white. And cold.
With not much else to recommend it.
It had the odd quality of being infinitely huge and matchbox-small at the same time.
That's enough to put anybody off.
Snake stared, open-mouthed, into the abyss. It did not stare back. There was a very, very small part of his brain, clinging onto the amygdala and babbling on in a white-jacket-with-buckles kind of way about proportions and space and space-time and reality and lack of same, and wasn't there supposed to be a mission? but this was overruled in favour of simply staring. And staring. And staring.
He was so occupied when he heard a voice behind him.
"Huh."
He spun.
"Never thought that would work."
And that, thought the rapidly-collapsing rational part of his brain, was the cry of the scientist. The soldier's only natural enemy.
Nerves pushed to their limits, he raised his gun with a crisp jerk.
"Who's there?" he called.
A man appeared from the middle distance. 5"7', slight build, mop of grey-brown hair. Would have been around forty years old. About as out of place as an iceberg in the desert, but then so was everything else in this place.
"Hi," said the older man.
The gods of understatement find solace in moments like these.
Snake relied on instinct. He raised the gun again. "Tell me who the hell you are or I'll blow your brains out." Only the mildest flicker of his eyes revealed the gun was, in fact, an M4, and therefore capable of dispensing nothing more terrible than a good night's sleep.
This apparently gave the other man pause for thought- before he laughed, warmly.
"Do you know what, Snake? I don't blame you."
Snake was not confused, or fearful. So much of his runtime was taken up with processing backorders of both that he had no room, as it were, for fresh. The man behind him was looking with interest at their surroundings, or lack thereof. That is to say, he was carefully not looking at Snake, who found this behaviour odd. He tried to be rational. In an admittedly short career, he had seen much that would have sent the average man screaming to the grave. This was just… slightly weirder, that's all. Work logically. The man was not an enemy; or was at least playing the part. Had scientist written all over him, in big letters. And probably suffering a mild case of shell shock, judging by the unbearably calm attitude. He had to know something.
"So what is it? Hallucinogenic gas? Malfunctioning nanomachines? Don't tell me- dimensional rifts caused by some kind of... resonant... reality... cascade?"
"What?" came the reply. The other man was staring at his hands. His calmness was almost obscene. Snake continued trying to keep calm, despite worrying messages from some of the baser areas his spinal column to run and hide up a nice tall tree until all the weird went away.
"What's going on in here?"
"In here? Nothing." Said the other man. "That's kind of the point."
Snake's mind flung itself into a heap. It had given up.
"If I've done my calculations right, that is."
The dreaminess in his voice was oddly disquieting. Snake sat beside him. "What are you talking about?"
The other man smiled apologetically. "Well, if I'm right, this place exists outside of normal space and time. Sorry. Thought you knew."
The resounding silence made it clear precisely how Snake felt about scientists, non-existent spaces and indeed, the universe in general. (If his mind was functioning, it was considering the possibility of giving up the whole super-soldier thing, and maybe finding a nice cottage somewhere, far, far, far away from everything else, with roses round the door, and hens clucking in the yard, and of course a gun rack you could arm a small country with.) His confusion (but where would the huskies fit in?) was such that he did not feel the slim, scarred fingers that took a hold of his chin, and turned his face incrementally towards the light.
"Hmm. You look different too. Blockier. More… squared. But that's only to be expected."
The intimacy was… unsettling. Normally this kind of intrusion from someone he had met only hours ago would have earned the intruder a set of broken fingers. But this man felt… different. Confident. Grown. A patina of cynicism that Snake associated with old soldiers; those who had long since abandoned the notion of glory through war. In short; no-one he would have expected to find on the mission. And this unnerved him.
"No, this whole thing is the result of time travel."
"Time travel?"
"Time travel. You won't remember it. And repeating people is a bad habit. You should get out if it- but you won't, of course. You're too stubborn. I should know."
"How… how can it be time travel?"
"It could be. But it could be something else. After all, time travel is technically impossible, so maybe this is something else." The other man tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Maybe this is some kind of hallucination caused by the enormous strain the mission is putting on your body. Or maybe it's a dream. By your future self. Or hey, ooh, repressed memories expressed as a dream by your older self! Wouldn't that be neat?"
Snake (bravely) attempted to take it one step at a time.
"So... so you are from the future?"
"If I'm real, then yes."
Few other people needed to qualify their statements like that.
"And… does my future self know you?"
"Uh… yes. Unreservedly, I can say yes." said the other man, dropping his head to hide a half-smile.
Definitely not anyone he knew.
"So you created this… place?"
"I think so. Probably out of wishful thinking more than anything else."
"I knew nothing good would come of science."
The other man laughed, giving Snake a chance to study his face. The face was… intriguing. Something just on the cusp of his memory nagged at him, begging him to remember, but he felt he would be lucky to find his own goddamn feet, given the circumstances. Large, dark grey eyes, untidy mop of brown-grey hair- it was something infuriating- a face he had seen before. But he couldn't be. All the personnel in Shadow Moses, it being necessary for them to have no previous allegiances, had been brought straight from training- and this man. It looked like he'd been struck hard in the face with twenty years. He had heard that prolonged exposure to an industrial environment could cause premature aging, but not over the course of a day.
And of course, there was gene therapy. But who would ever believe that could cause such severe accelerated aging?
"And why did you create it?" he asked.
"Well," the other man had shifted uncomfortably, like Frankenstein when informed what precisely had happened to the windmill. "it was for quite a selfish reason. But hey; outside space and time, huh? No consequences."
Snake was intrigued in spite of himself. Intrigued, and not a little worried.
"Why?"
"You see… as I say, in the future… I know you. And… you change. Not in a normal way, either." The other man's face visibly dropped- the full weight of twenty plus years suddenly surfacing.
Suddenly he remembered something- from an advertisement, or perhaps an old girlfriend, or maybe even just a song from long ago.
Worry.
Worry makes you look older too.
The other man had finally squared up.
"I just wanted five minutes..."
As the man poured out his story, Snake found his mind wandering. He was talking about this mission- interesting things too, if slightly unbelievable- and certain tricks and traps he would face, and although his subconsciously duly noted these down, he found he was focusing more on deep, regular breathing.
Because he didn't believe the time travel story for a moment. Who could? The trick was to keep this man talking for long enough until he could call for back up, or, failing that, get his hands on a much bigger gun.
That seemed to solve most problems.
He said as much.
"You don't believe me?"
Note the slightly injured tone there, said Snake's inner pragmatist. The man pops into existence four feet in front of you in the middle of Sarte's dream holiday hotspot explaining that he's your best friend (he was undecided on whether or not to cloak that phrase in quotation marks, not yet) from the future, and he's offended because you don't believe him. This is one sick puppy we've got here.
"Of course I don't believe you!"
"Well, what other explanations are there?"
"… The diazepam! I took three tablets before I got here. They could be causing me to hallucinate."
The other man shook his head, smiled wryly.
"Snake. diazepam doesn't cause hallucinations."
"… That's just what I'd expect a hallucination to say!"
"I can see you're really upset about this. I think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over… Dave."
Snake/Dave looked at him. The half-smile was back.
"It might balance out the effects of all that diazepam."
Paranoia reared in David's mind.
"How do you know my name!"
The other man shrugged ruefully.
"I told you, Dave. Things change in the future. You change. Hence, all this."
So, stripped of all other options, Snake had done what was very possibly the bravest thing he had ever done.
He had asked why.
The older man had sucked air in suddenly through his teeth, in the way of used car-salesmen the world over when asked what the blackened crunchy bits on the passengers' seats were.
(That, if nothing else, had marked him out as an engineer; that noise, combined with the high frenetic whine of discovery and, in Snake's experience, screams, were the basic vocabulary of the common or garden scientist-for-hire (or, as the case may be, scientist-for-kidnap.) He had given the impression that the tale in the telling would need ten thousand clean pages, an dozen pens and a stack of bibles to swear on; he implied epic cycles, wheels within wheels, a thousand elephants and possibly the Mormon Tabernacle choir (for the slow moments). Cecil B De Mille, he implied, would have to have been taken out and given air after merely seeing the précis.
He had settled, instead, on a short history: Shadow Moses (yes, here and now, though "Now" was relative at the moment and, frankly, uncertain), the tanker, sojourns in the wild, a return to battle, betrayal, a loss of hope, then lighting, then, finally, sunlight.
Snake had listened patiently, and had only one question at the end: "why do they only ever come in pairs?"
The other man had looked puzzled for a moment before some internal needle had swung due Snake and he had laughingly explained, No, when I said paradox…
Hal was struggling, and he knew it. It was a problem he often had, though not often in this context- Language has evolved for the body, not the spirit. Once the dark bit behind the eyes started acting up, language fell by the wayside as a hopelessly inadequate method of communication.
(Admittedly, he normally encountered this problem when talking about giant robots- "really, really cool" fails to impress investors somehow.)
"Everything I had has been taken away from me, and I just feel… cheated, you know? If I had known then what I know now- I wouldn't have wasted time. All I wanted was one perfect moment- and you- here-now- you are perfect."
The boy just looked confused. Not surprising. So was he.
"Give me this, this one thing."
Nostalgia is a killer, but, just once…
"Stay like this", he said.
There were no walls to create it, but the words echoed.
"Stay…"
Gently- as gently as a moment passing- Hal leaned forwards, and planted a kiss- little more than a pressing of the lips- on David's cheek. The boy jerked backwards, nearly falling.
Hal regarded him with steady eyes- eyes that resolutely did not cry.
"Stay." He said. "Stay this way. Stay the way you are, and never change. Don't age. Don't breathe. Stay like this- forever."
Tears burned in his eyes. He had sworn he wouldn't cry. What was there to cry about? Where he was now, where there was no past and certainly no future, where this (and back then, back now, he was still a) boy had his whole life to live ahead of him, not knowing about betrayal or conspiracy or the heavy, aching weight of time, time that was always running out, time they were always running from…
There was only this moment.
That was all he could create.
It should have been perfect.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Story Ideas For Tangent Universes That Were Written, But Then Abandoned As Being Too Damn Weird no. 42:
The huge white space glowed and pulsed peacefully. The trained ear could hear the serene hum and coo it made; it might have been the music of the spheres, or it might have been a car alarm going off really far in the distance. Depends on how you listen to it, really.
Snake was sitting alone, in a welter of confusion. The older man- the suspiciously comfortable man- had left, trailing glittering spots from the corners of his eyes. He had muttered something about "any second now, you'll be okay", taken only a few steps, and then-somehow- faded into the middle distance.
It was a good trick, and Snake wished to emulate it. So far, however, "any second now" had not happened. (Little did he realise that, even then, the universe's sense of temporal order had realised what had happened and was curving back, like a great and terrible rubber band, to ping him back to his own time. It's probably better that he doesn't know this though, because the knowledge that one is about to be flung end-over-end backwards through untime and unspace like the Spitball Of The Gods often offends and unsettles.)
In the middle distance, a man appeared- shortish, black hair, middle-aged, glasses, of Japanese descent; a certain impish cast to his features that suggested one who, lacking an exciting, action-filled daily life, creates his own in his head. He appeared to be enjoying the scenery, such as was.
When he caught sight of Snake, his face split into a disbelieving, watermelon grin.
"Oi! Oi! Omae Da! Sorriddo Sunekku!"
He ran towards Snake, grin still stretching from ear to ear.
"I can't believe it! You! Here! Who'd have thought it?" he said.
"And you are…?" said Snake weakly.
"Oh man, I'm your worst fucking nightmare." said the man cheerfully. "Oh man. I'm not surprised you're trying to escape, son- you should see some of the things I've got planned out for your universe. I'm gonna go through that place with a chainsaw; fuckin' slash and burn game design. Here," he slung a companionable arm as far as he could reach across Snake's shoulders, "let me give you a little guided tour of what I've got planned for game two."
Snake's Japanese was rusty, so he could translate only snatches of the man's scattergun speech: "First of all, turns out... the first ten minutes, right, and then... beat the pregnant woman senseless, then steal her dog-tags, so... cigarettes, as usual, and then... taking photographs! Fucking photographs, like "What am I, fucking Vogue Magazine?" And then Ocelot, he..."BRUTHA"... so you get dumped in the freezing ocean."
The man stared, starry-eyed, at some perfect inner vision.
"Oh, man" he said. "You should see as well, the guy we get to replace you. Whoo boy! "Pantywaist" doesn't begin to describe it. See, turns out... girlfriend called "Rose", face like a sack of drowned kittens, I'm telling you... cyborg ninja bitchfight...a vampire, kind of... this tremendously fat man on rollerskates... back and forth, like a fuckin' yo-yo trying to cool these bombs, I'm telling ya, it's hilarious... Gurgalon... stolen pants... sniper rifle... oh, and let me tell you, Otacon? Right up the... His stepmother, for god's sake!... So anyway, turns out-starts acting really suspicious, hem-hem... running all over the place, (ha-ha) buck naked and freezing... Hollow Men...Doc Octopus Mecha tentacles, and a moustache... nanobots... president AI... dog tags... kangaroo notebook... and then he crashes it into Capitol Building. And then it turns out it's all a dream. Kinda. It's really a deconstruction of The Sequel."
The man leaned heavily of Snake; tears of pride, or joy, glinted in either eye.
"Man," he said, "you just wait until Guns Of the Patriots. We're really going to (CENSORED) you up then."
He patted Snake happily on the back. "So! Good luck with all that, then. I've got to be going." He made as if to move away.
"Wait!" said Snake, summoning as much language as he could under the circumstances. "Why are you here?"
The man stopped.
"Me? Isn't it obvious?" he shrugged "I live here."
And he disappeared into the whiteness.
(Yes, (a certain video game producer) lives in the space between universes. HE'S JUST THAT COOL.) Also not that the word behind that "(CENSORED)" up there is probably "age".
