Raine VS The End of the World (3 page)

“R-r-report,” she managed at barely a whisper.

“Rutger in. The
Belladonna 5000
is prepped and ready in fifteen seconds.”

“Th-thank you.”

“You are welcome, Captain. Your voice sounds distressed. I can delay the launch.”

Elizabeth shook her head, and the words that came out of her were faint, but firm.

“No. S… It’s too l-late for me. T-take care of her.”

“Understood.”

Elizabeth savored a parting glance at the gaping hole she carved into the bridge. Saw the UAA men explode out of the vacuum. Felt the
Falcon
lurch forward, spin out of control. Steered it in a last-ditch attempt towards the military vessel’s communications tower.

“Mom!” sounded a most familiar cry. “Mom, stop the countdown! I’ll save you!”

“I’m s-sorry, Lily,” were her last words. “F-f-forgive us.”

And then she was gone.

≡

Silence fell over the dark scene. Large robotic arms attempted to repair the battered warship. The new commanding officer of
Destroyer 1446
looked out from his viewing platform with sadness as the conduits surrounding the flower-shaped vessel blinked one last time.

The artificial wormhole opened and shut within a fraction of a second.
With a blinding flash the space station vanished beyond its folds; the resulting vacuum collapsed into a shockwave. The very space around the
Destroyer
warped out of shape before reverting to relative normalcy.

When the other UAA battleships arrived on-site, there was nothing left to salvage or study, no evidence that the
Belladonna
ever existed.

I. Raine

“Time and space are not conditions in which we live,
but modes by which we think.” – Albert Einstein

Thirteen years later (Lillian’s relative time)

< Recall inhibitors checklist OK >
< Vitals OK >
< Neural checklist OK >
< Subject: “All systems nominal. Seeya on the flip side.” >
< Execute protocol tree: raine_v_endless_metaverse >
< Request accepted. >

∞

The year was 1992. Or at least, it appeared to be 1992, on a cold Sunday night in January. It also appeared to be a video arcade in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, only the old brick building, the falling snow, and the surrounding block were all a part of a virtual simulation comprised of digital artifacts from the timeline Lillian Hermes left behind when she inherited her parents’ time-traveling space station.

It was a program being run for the benefit of one individual, a certain reclusive sixteen-year-old who showed no signs of relenting her attack.

The name of this fierce anomaly was Raine Townsend, and to her knowledge, there was nothing fake or digital about the place. She’d been attempting the near-impossible: to beat the hybrid space shoot-em-up and 2D side-scroller
Super BlastBoy
three times in a row on a single credit. For hours now, the girl danced figure eights in the zone, only to end up choking at the final boss on her last two attempts.

With her rotten luck, she half-expected it to happen again. And sure enough, as a college-aged couple brushed past her, the woman’s shrill laughter brought back an enigmatic memory to the surface, blunting Raine’s focus and immersing her in an all-too-familiar sequence.

She must have been thirteen at the time. With a boy and a girl, both around her age, sharing a delicious meal on beach towels by the ocean shore. The scent of fresh lobster dipped in lemon butter sauce filled the air, and beyond the campfire, a full moon cast a glimmering path along the ocean waves. She eagerly anticipated the next scene.

He holds my hand. I look at the boy, he returns my intense glance, and we smile in the air of romantic expectancy.

Damn! Snap out of it!

But it was too late. Raine didn’t even flinch when she lost her last life to the mid-boss on the final stage, and instead popped in another quarter and took a half-swig from her root beer, tucking loose strands of brown hair back behind her ears.

Always the same stupid fantasy,
she thought.
Way too real to be a dream, but it’s an impossible memory. I’m an anti-social orphan, living with a holier-than-thou museum middle manager. One would think I’d remember if I’d been to the beach before.

Questions without concrete answers meant more wasted time. Her emerald eyes went to the clock behind Ramon’s ticket counter. Ten forty-five, fifteen minutes till closing time.

If Agnes catches me coming in past midnight again, I’m in for an earful. Still, chances are she’s at her boyfriend’s pad. It’s 50-50 on Sundays. In any case, there’s time for one more try.

More than anyone else in her life, Ramon treated her with respect. Then again, he had good reason to; the gifted girl brought a lot of attention to the place. The manager wouldn’t pull the plug on a world record attempt.

Hitting the Start button and powering through the first run, Raine reflected on the insanity that sent her on this near-superhuman gauntlet.

It started last week, across town at the
Mortal Kombat
tourney where she won fifty dollars for humiliating a bunch of frat boys in front of their jeering girlfriends, something she would have gladly done for free.

“Raine!” the voice called out, just after she’d made her way to the finals, squeezed through the fire regulations-breaking crowd, and finished the first slice of the pepperoni pizza she was sharing with her best and only friend, Jordan.

The arcade champ locked eyes with a very oddly composed young woman. Dressed in a sparkling neon leotard, large dark glasses and purple wig, she might have strayed from the set of a hair metal video, somewhat appropriate considering Van Halen’s “Dreams” was blasting from Ramon’s boom box.

“Um… hi. Do I know you?”

“You should, but you don’t,” she cracked. “Which is to say that our relationship is on a need-to-know basis.”

Raine wondered if she was an undercover cop who had been hiding beneath a manhole for the past five years.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” the woman continued. “Talking in cryptic sentences is one of the most enjoyable perks of being a time traveler.”

“T-time traveler? Well met. I don’t suppose you could score me some lotto numbers,” Raine quipped nervously.

This woman is definitely on something.

“Eh. Even if I didn’t have self-imposed regulations against that sort of thing, it’s a real tax nightmare. But I’ve said too much, and I… realize now that you were probably joking. Lost my train of thought… Um. Right! I noticed you’ve achieved every high score on the local
Super BlastBoy
cabinet.”

“SBB is one of my current favorites.”

“With over two trillion points, you must have cleared the game twice on a single credit.”

As if on cue, applause erupted from the inebriated crowd. The grim-faced ‘Scorpion’ user of an exchange student defeated his opponent. Trying a bit too hard, he downed what was left of his concealed beer. It would be his undoing.

“You ready to be Fatalitized, little girl?”

“I fought tougher shrimps in kindergarten!” Raine taunted, to much support from the tagalong girlfriends.

“I’m sorry, we’ll have to talk about this later,” she said to the strange woman while adjusting her beanie.

“Beat it thrice, Raine! Urban legend says there’s an unbeaten bonus level! According to my sources, if you clear it, it’ll be a world record!”

Raine beamed in recognition.

“That sounds wicked! Tell me more once I’m through.”

But after Raine won the tournament, the outlandish lady was nowhere to be found, leaving her with even more questions. The one thing this girl could never resist, however, was a worthwhile challenge, especially one with the potential for an epic win.

A few days later, she and Jordan called and confirmed with the game developers that, yes, there was a secret bonus level, and to their knowledge no triple-run had ever been successfully cleared. Raine knew in a heartbeat that until she accomplished the impossible, rest was for the weak. This could be her ticket to a shout-out in a gaming mag, the Twin Galaxies’ record books, and most importantly, mad props from the pro gaming community
.

She cleared the final boss on her first play-through and kick-started the second, to faster and deadlier enemies.

Who needs vain ambition? Let the other kids get rich. There’s one thing I’m good at, and it’s something that brings me real happiness. If others can recognize my abilities, that’s just icing on the cake.

Gaming’s about constantly breaking my limits. There’s an art to my methods, the rhythm of my heart guiding me ever closer to my dream self. And no one’s going to stop me.

The difficulty spiked at the end of the second run. She honed her focus. Zoning out was her number one enemy. According to Agnes, her self-loathing Foster Mom, daydreaming held Raine back from giving her all in ‘the things that really mattered’. She continued to insist that the undecorated girl would never amount to anything unless she got her act together.

With only a part-time job at the comic book store under her belt and a year and a half to high school graduation, Raine probably wasn’t ready to live on her own, but she was itching to meet the challenge.

Once she turned eighteen, she could go anywhere her heart desired, but lately, Raine fantasized about skipping out on senior year and disappearing on an adventure. The five hundred dollars she’d saved up from winning local tourneys was enough to hop an interstate bus. Though little more than a pipe dream, she had a mental image of standing on the shores of California, gazing out towards the Pacific in the hopes that her dream friends would show up to take her away. Most things considered just about anywhere seemed better than the rut she was currently in.

The final boss went down in flames. The third play-through started, even faster than before, and she was lucky enough to have not lost a single life up until that point.

I’m not going to discover my purpose in life living here
, she thought.
I may never have had a real home, but I know this isn’t where I belong.

The more she read about planet Earth, the more insane living on it sounded, and the less she wanted to grow up.

The price we pay for modern civilization is almost too alarming to consider: over a hundred species every day go extinct, forever. Every second, a football field of rainforest is lost. Hundreds of millions of kids lack access to clean water, and one in eight are malnourished. Unsustainable farming destroys one percent of the planet’s topsoil every year. There may be no resource to match the utility of long-dead dinosaur smoothies, our supply of which is finite.

These are well-known facts, and yet no one seems to care.

Not that I consider myself any better, but do
all
adults just go about ignoring the suffering of their fellow humans? And if this is just how things are going to be, then what’s the use of even trying?

After Raine saw the movie
E.T.,
she imagined that she was an alien stranded on the wrong planet. If nothing else, it explained why she’d never really connected with anyone. Maybe if she were in the right place, at the right time, her spaceship would return and she’d be welcomed back with open arms.

But those were childish dreams. Any escape attempts would have to be enacted without the support of her home planet, on her own terms, with her own resources.

Plus, I’m not exactly in a position to run away and live like a hermit in the woods. Even if I had the courage to do a fool thing like that, I’ve grown mighty accustomed to the comforts of the city.

A close call with some spreadfire explosions straightened her up.

But maybe these thoughts are too big for little old me to worry about, especially right now. It’s the last level! Focus, Raine! Breathe!

Having temporarily waylaid her doubts, Raine shut out all unnecessary stimuli and deftly navigated the bullet-hell gauntlet comprising the last mission’s mid-boss.

At the final battle, the cabinet ran low on application memory. The resulting slowdown gave her just enough time to get a few hits in between frantic dodging and weapon swaps.

At long last, and with no lives left to spare, the feat was done.

Raine took a breather, hands still twitching against the controls. She glanced around.

Just my luck. Not a single witness.

And most of the other machines appeared to be off.
Flynn’s
was completely empty. Even late Sunday night, that was unheard of.

After the credits, a video of Super BlastBoy faded in to synthesized MIDI chirps. He was lying on a hammock, smiling. The background morphed gradually into a tropical paradise.

She had never seen anything like this. SBB’s sprite, resplendent in red 16-bit spandex, opened its mouth and words streamed out along the display.

“Your skills are exceptional, Raine. I am honored to have been at your command. But there is an even greater evil to vanquish before you can discover that which is most important to you.”

Surprising herself, Raine recalled the laminated photograph of her biological parents, snugly tucked away in her wallet. Having been left on a doorstep with nothing but a blanket and the faded picture with her name and date of birth, the girl’s origins were a complete mystery.

This could be her greatest hope, or the ultimate disappointment.

While she weighed her options, Super BlastBoy hopped off the hammock and hobbled away into a maze of palm trees. The screen stuck on the beach landscape, with electric gull cries and crudely animated waves set to a slow sunset. The strange text remained; otherwise, she would have surely thought it a trick of her own mind.

She blinked twice in disbelief, reached into her bag, took out her disposable camera, and snapped a few shots of the screen and her high score. No one else had seen the message.

What was that? And how the heck did he know my name?
Something is very wrong.

Suddenly she caught a glimpse of SBB running along the side of the arcade’s brick wall, trademark red cape flowing behind him. Mesmerized, Raine snapped another shot and followed his progress towards the “Employees Only” door. He slipped in between the hinges. Raine tried the handle. To her great surprise, it was unlocked.

Oh, Raine, you know you really shouldn’t. But who am I kidding? There’s no way I can let this be.

She gathered up her courage and cracked it open.

At the end of a long, dark hallway, SBB gestured towards an abandoned cabinet, visible only by the light of his glowing sprite. It looked like it had been there since Reagan was in office.