The Tale of Tara and Emiko

XIV. Zia

There's a beat of silence in the room. It's clear the next message won't be coming in for a while. Your coworker stretches out her hand, flexing and massaging her fingers. There are numerous pieces of paper on her desk, all covered in her flowing script. There's a lot of information, you think as you shuffle through the notes.

"Should we tell someone?" she asks, eyes wide. You think for a moment before responding.

"Why?"

She looks confused. "My sister could be hurt! We need to help her!"

You sigh. "Look, if you want to go find someone, go ahead. I'm not stopping you. But I'm staying right here."

"But what if a transmission comes in when I'm gone? I can't risk missing anything!"

You don't want to risk missing anything either, so you reply with a simple, curt "And neither do I." More for your benefit than hers.

So you both decide to stay.

When the speaker crackles, the sound emitting from it is much different. Tara's voice is panicked and high-pitched. Alarms are blaring and ringing in the background, along with a faint hissing that can't mean anything good.

"If you're hearing this, something's gone horribly wrong!" Your coworker's eyes grow wide, fearful.

"February 1st, 2024. So, the creature kind of attacked us like an hour ago, and Emiko's setting up the escape pods, and there's so much we still have to do and learn and I'm afraid we won't be able to get all the information we need before we have to go. We-ah!" There's a clatter and a large thud as the mic presumably falls over on the table it probably was sitting on.

"TARA!" Emiko shouts. The volume and intensity of her voice is strong enough to send crackles through the speaker. "Hurry up! I'm gonna need your help soon, or we may not get out of this alive!"

"Okay, okay, I'm coming!" Tara shouts. She turns her attention back to the mic. "This is something we did anticipate, but not very clearly! Emiko's preparing the escape pods; there's not many resources in them and they won't last us very long but we'll have to hope they're enough. I'm sending coordinates of our location now, and I'll see if we can send some once we're above water." She rattles off the latitude and longitude, and your coworker furiously scribbles it down. You wonder how her handwriting remains so neat in such a tense situation.

Then you remember her sister's life is at stake. You always were good at predicting the endings to storylines. Novels and animes and reality shows and dating sims and even the occasional soap opera and telenovela. Some of your friends-actually, most of them, considering you never really had a lot in the first place, said it was creepy how accurate your musings were to the actual plot, especially if it wasn't released yet. You have a partially clear vision of how this one will conclude, but refrain from voicing it in the fear that you'll be right.

For once in your lifetime, you hope you aren't.

"This is Tara Grey and Emiko Naga, signing off."

beeeep