Realms of Sci-Fi

Future Self

I stared at the computer monitor, fighting to keep my eyes open. It was a losing fight. The entire week had been a mindless gray of numbing tedium. I glanced at the clock on the wall above my computer and could've sworn the hands had moved backwards since I'd last looked. It was still hours until I'd be released from work to the blessed freedom of the weekend. Weekends always took forever to arrive, endured too briefly, and vanished before I really had time to enjoy them.

The papers on the desk to my left began to rustle, and I looked to the office door to see if someone had come in and caused a draft, but the door was firmly closed and no one else was around. The breeze drifting about the room increased to a whirlwind, spinning papers around me in a cyclone. Overhead lights burst in showers of sparks, and from within the midst of one explosion, a blue-white arc of electricity lanced down and struck the floor, melting the laminate tile into acrid slag and burning all the surrounding tiles black.

Standing in the middle of the destruction was the strangest and most familiar person I'd ever seen. Mid-bicep down on the right arm was composed of silver metallic components. Artificial muscles were concealed behind plates of either gleaming or transparent exoskeleton armor. Flickering lights encircled the top of the prosthesis and blinked on and off in a rainbow of colors as the synthetic limb moved.

A glowing red optical sensor and a pair of gently alternating blue lights on the outside of the housing covered his left eye, and a full and graying beard concealed the lower half of his worn and scarred face. The dark hair on the scalp above his robotic eye had been shaved to a thin fuzz while the rest was longer and disheveled. Body armor fit snug against his heavily muscled form, and a faint hexagonal pattern could be discerned on it when he turned.

The man looked at me, and I sat stupidly in my desk chair, staring back like an idiot. The reason for my dumbfounded attitude had less to do with his sudden and startling arrival and more to do with the fact I recognized him. The features had changed significantly, but he still had my face.

"We need to go now," he told me, reaching out with his mechanical hand and grabbing me by the upper arm. Pulling me out of my chair without either offering an explanation or waiting for questions, he dragged me to the center of the room.

Holding up a spherical device in his human hand, my older self opened the vortex through which he'd arrived. White light and crackling energy surrounded us momentarily, and when they vanished, the office had been replaced by a high-tech world of flying cars and atmosphere piercing towers of monolithic size.

"Welcome to your future," he said. "I brought you here because I need your help."