Archeia's Atheneum (The First Shift)

Episode Four: The Old Man

He'd lost time. It was the first time Kent experienced this. One moment he was watching Archeia dissolve in his hands, the next, he was in the house--sitting on a chair in the empty living room. There was a lingering scent of gun smoke in the air. Kent tried to move from his seat, but his legs weren't responding right. It was because his abdominal muscles felt weak. He couldn't explain it to himself; no clay, no bricks.

He surveyed the sky from out the nearby window and saw it was pink from the horizon up, gradually turning dark blue, then black. Kent's internal clock told him it must be around five and eight PM. This scenario was becoming stranger by the second. Kent felt a chill when he spotted a spent shotgun shell on the floor. It made him remember something.

***

"You're not like the others..." he will say to me. He will sit in the armchair which I'd purchased in my bachelor years, for the apartment I'd owned prior. The sun is at his back. Light on the back of his head tells me he's an older man, mid-late seventies, by his silver hair and liver spots. The rest of him is covered by shadow, save for the suppressed Remington by his right side. I'm sweating, attempting to understand what went wrong.

I exhale deeply and immediately respond to the stranger's voice with the same desperation of one clinging to the side of a cliff. "What others?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to play the pronoun game...the other subjects..."

***

The armchair was empty now. Kent could see the outline of where the old man had sat. A sight which made the newfound dream-like memory very real. A sudden urge to cry washed over Kent, drowned him. He shook, he gasped, and he sobbed.

***

"I'm one of you're subjects?"

"Yes."

"Will you tell me why?"

"I could. Do you really want to know?"

"...No. You're here to kill me. It has something to do with what I've been hiding. I don't understand what I'm hiding, and I doubt I'll understand why I have to die over it."

"...Indeed. You're quite different from the others..."

***

He should be dead. He'd been killed, and yet still he lived. Kent was having a lot of trouble with that, he needed to distance himself from those thoughts, at least for a while. He tried to remember what happened after Archeia broke down. He tried to remember, but whatever thought-forms came were not so clear. Kent visualized how he'd frantically been gathering the blue sand off the blue tarp ground.

***

"You have a family. What do you think about leaving them?" he will ask me. It's difficult for me to think about my family and I don't respond as quickly.

"I already left them," I say. The stranger will look upon me with intrigue, and I feel I should keep talking. "I quit my government job because I was having an existential crisis. I was...depressed, numb...any way, I left my job and my wife didn't fully understand why I'd done that. We started bickering, and that was new for us. Then this thing crashlands in our backyard. I went outside to see what it was, but my daughter was already out there. I told my wife to bring her back inside. I threw up that shed, out back, to hide it. So long story short, my wife and I had a disagreement as to what to do next. She left with Mirna and I stayed here." I will then lower my head. I feel like I've done my last confession. I expect to be dead soon and I'm telling myself that I'm ready for it. I'm not.

When I look down, I see that my hands have dozens of red specks on them. I know why.

***

They're from Archeia. Kent remembered how as he attempted to gather the sand. He recalled the stinging that occurred. He fell back, brushing his forearms and hands madly. It was of no use. The sand was stuck on his skin--sinking into it. This magnetic effect surged as Kent struggled. The fine crystal pieces flew off the ground and swarmed him like wasps. Kent's neighbor, an elderly (somewhat blind) and nosey woman, was watering her garden when she heard Kent screaming. She'd have called the police, but she assumed he was having a meltdown because Lanna left him, and decided to leave him be. The last thing kent remembered was agony.