Just Don't Die

For Better

Forty-five minutes later, Blaine and Kalvin heard a car pull into the drive next to Blaine's red pickup. Kalvin got up and headed to the door to open it, and Blaine sat on the couch, not knowing what to expect. Kalvin opened the door as Adam Latourney walked onto the porch.

"What did you tell him?" Adam said in a very agitated voice, walking through the door.

"Who cares what I told him? The better question is, why did you send him back?" Kalvin said, matching Adam's tone.

"I didn't send him back," Adam said, looking at Blaine. "What do you know about how you got here? What happened before you shifted? Are you sure it was me that sent you?"

Before Blaine had a chance to formulate a response to any of the questions thrown at him, he got a vague sense that he knew Adam, not from his future, but from his past. He didn't look anything like what Blaine had seen a week before. Right now, he had a full head of straight but messy black hair and a seriously pissed-off look. The eyes were the same, though.

"Yes, I'm sure it was you. You gave me a general idea of how it was possible. You helped me get out of a mental hospital, drugged me; then I woke up here." As Blaine answered the questions with the same brashness they were asked, he couldn't shake the recognition of the man asking them. "Why do I know you?"

"You just said I sent you back."

"No, I know you from this time," Blaine said, searching his memories as he eyed Adam up and down.

"We'll get to that. Right now, I will fill you in on what happened before and why this shouldn't have happened."

As Adam started his story, Kalvin got them each a bottle of beer and sat on the couch next to Blaine, facing Adam. Adam began telling them that he, Blaine, and Kalvin were all assigned to a Special Forces unit in Washington. Adam was the commander, Kalvin was the weapons sergeant, and Blaine had just been assigned as their newly graduated medical sergeant. They quickly became friends primarily because they deployed together but also because each of them had inquisitive natures beyond that of their peers. They would come up with ideas and theories while deployed and test them as soon as they got the chance. It started with ideas like improved potato cannons, which they were apparently very close to being charged with a war crime for using it to take out a terrorist leader. From there, it evolved into more theoretical ideas, like light-speed travel, quantum entanglement, or new pharmacologically induced psychological interrogation techniques.

"When you left the Army," Adam started, looking at Kalvin, "you continued with school and ended up with a Doctorate in Quantum mechanics. You and I started a tech company trying to find ways to utilize quantum entanglement to create faster forms of communication across the globe. While the ideas were solid, they could never consistently predict or control the entanglements, and we lost millions of investor dollars. As a last-ditch effort, we contacted you." Said Adam, pointing a finger at Blaine.

"You had left the Army, and instead of going to Medical School like everyone expected, you simply took a few online classes for electronics and circuit boards. You started working with your dad and soon came up with some innovative ideas for using Graphene tubes within the circuit boards to increase the processing speeds. By 2010, you had produced a computer processor capable of 5GHz. When Kalvin and I contacted you, you brought us on to the staff of the research and development team. Like before, we would start meeting up and discussing ideas and experiments, but now we had the money to do almost any experiment we could imagine.

"Your wife became a medical doctor in 2011," Adam said, meeting Blaine's eyes, "and she started to get more involved with the company. She had started to push biotech ideas and planted the idea for you to use your Graphene processor technology to help people with dementia and amnesia. She thought the processors could transfer copied memories from a human brain onto a hard drive. Once digitized, the memories and thoughts would be searched for 'corrupt files,' and then we would return the files to the patient.