I thought about the nature of memories and how they could affect a person and reluctantly understood her logic. So I didn’t push her. Instead, I stared out at the ocean, letting the breeze heal me.
“What were you doing in the beginning?” she asked after a while.
“In the beginning? Probably minding my own business.”
“No. You told me when you first joined OMBRA… what was it you were doing?”
Ah, that I remember well. I was dressed in black, hugging the frame of the Vincent Thomas Bridge thinking it was my love of movies that made me want to kill myself there. Not only had the bridge been the filming location for such movies as Gone in Sixty Seconds, Lethal Weapon 2, To Live and Die in LA and The Island, but it had also been the place director Tony Scott had chosen to commit his own suicide. He’d directed Top Gun, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout and Man on Fire, four of my top ten favorite movies of all time. Each of those movies featured a man who’d once been on top of his game, broken, in need of redemption. In each of those movies, Tony Scott had found a way to redeem them. But in the end, much like Tony Scott had come to realize, not everyone was redeemable. Not everyone was the hero of his own movie. So just as Tony Scott had decided to remove himself from the film of life, so had I… that is until Mr Pink stepped into it and convinced me to join OMBRA.
“I was trying to kill myself.”
“Why were you doing that?” she asked.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Which was true, but she deserved a better answer than that. “I had too much going on in my brain. I couldn’t make it stop. It was just so overwhelming.”
She nodded, adding, “No matter what you did, your brain kept trying to figure it out by replaying over and over what it had seen.”
“Yes. It was like a computer that was so overloaded with programs that it needed to be reset.”
“The ultimate reset,” she said. “How to control-alt-delete your life.”
I stared out at the Pacific, the water crashing against the cliff beneath us and realized why she’d wanted to come. Mother had known all along, as had Black Johnson only I hadn’t listened. My heart sank into my stomach. “That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it?” I asked the obvious question, if only to put it into real words. “You want to control-alt-delete.”
She sighed as a wave crashed below. “WWWSD? He’d control-alt-delete.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do. Look at how he was at the end of The City on the Edge of Forever. When he let Joan Collins die, he could barely live with himself. Of course, he couldn’t really do what he wanted to do. That was the last episode of the first season. If they ever wanted another season, he’d just have to deal with it. So really, they cheated.”
She was right of course. Kirk was passion incarnate. No other character perhaps in the history of television wore his heart so far up his sleeve. My only hope was she wouldn’t mention Rayna, but that hope was dashed in her next words.
“Then there was Requiem for Methuselah. He’d fallen so in love with Rayna that he didn’t want to live without her, despite the fact she was an android. Remember what he did?”
I stared out at the water hating William Shatner as I said, “He had Spock erase his memory. Vulcan mind meld.”
“Control-alt-delete. Return to earlier iteration.”
“One in which he’d never known Rayna.”
A wave crashed far below.
“Do you remember before you left? Do you remember our date at Grauman’s Chinese Theater?” she asked.
“We saw Matrix Reloaded,” I said.
“And invented the WWWSD game,” she said.
“You know you can’t go back, right? We aren’t computers. Our life is a straight line from birth to death.”
“Maybe somewhere I can find it. Maybe somewhere I can go back. All I know for now is I can’t find it here. This timeline is set.” Then she turned and smiled — an honest to god smile from the before time as if nothing had ever happened to her… to us. It was so true, so powerful, so infectious, I couldn’t help but smile in return. Then she nodded, waved at me once with her right hand, then leapt.
My heart stopped and my mouth opened, but I didn’t watch her fall. I didn’t see what happened. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. We were too high for her to survive. The rocks and the waves were too unforgiving. But then again, so was life. What would William Shatner do? He’d kill himself and hope to come back in a less complicated time. He’d proven so with Rayna.
What was I to do? Was I to be next… go back to the place it had all begun, me ready to jump from the Vincent Thomas Bridge? To end it all just like Tony Scott had? Should I join her?
WWWSD?
WWWSD?
WWWSD!
I screamed into the wind.
Fuck that game!
Fuck William Shatner!
I grabbed my ruck and turned to go. Then I paused, hurling it to the ground. I wasn’t going to jump… that I knew… but I wanted desperately to see below, wanted to check and see if she’d died, hoping she’d somehow survived the impossible. I balled my fists and shook my head hard enough to become dizzy. Bo. I knew better. She knew better. She’d orchestrated it perfectly. She’d said as much, making sure the last image I wanted to see of her was a live one, of her truly happy, and not one where she was tossed and battered on the rocks.
WWWSD?
He’d move on, just like he always did.
He’d leave the scene of the drama, return to the captain’s chair and log it.
Yeah.
He’d do that.
He always did that and things turned out all right.
And I guess, so would I.
I wiped the moisture from my eyes, picked up my ruck, and headed back to where’d I’d come, or at least to where I’d been.
All ahead full.
Aye, Aye, Captain.
Prepare for warp drive.
Aye, Aye, Captain.
Engage warp drive.
Scout Mission
Jack Hillman
“All right, you apes. Lock and load.” Gunny's voice rasped in my right ear over the comm link. “LZ in thirty seconds. Let's hit the dirt running for a change.”
I checked the magazine on my weapon and flipped on the laser sight, not that I expected to be using it much. The comm was working, proved by mumbled comments from the rest of the squad coming through in a low rumble. I ran a quick check of the pouches on my belt and vest, checking extra ammo, explosives and backup weapons. I was as ready as the next guy. Unfortunately, I was at the end of the line and there was no next guy.
The sled hit atmosphere at an angle and quickly dropped to come in low over the hilltops, brushing the feathery vegetation and avoiding the anti-ack fire and scanners. By the time we down, a clearing had been scorched out of the valley by our antipersonnel lasers, and wisps of smoke whipped away as the sled grounded. The sides lifted in their gull-wing sequence and all ten of us rolled out at once and scattered to the edges of the clearing. Five seconds after grounding, the sled lifted up, headed for high atmosphere and its spot as our observation post and comm relay, watching our backs.
We were still scanning the brush for enemy warriors when the flash and concussion of the explosion made us look up. Pieces of sled rained down over several hundred square meters.
“Shit, we're in it now,” I heard over the comm in an echo of my own thoughts.
“All right, assholes, move out. James take the point. Harris, you got the back door.” Gunny swept the clearing with a hard look, knowing what we were all thinking. “First the mission, then we go home,” Gunny stated.