No Time to Lose

Chapter One: Mordecai Fergus

When I was born on December 31, 3099 I had a microchip implanted in me, who knows where, that was supposed to tell me how long I had to live. However, this wasn't the case. The nurses were very confused to find that when they did implant the microchip the timer was permanently set to zero, yet I was still crying and screaming like newborn babies do.

At first they thought that the chip was broken so they tried another one only to come up with the same result. Still confused, the nurses reset the timer. That was their first mistake. When they reset the timer time did appear but I had stopped kicking and screaming which alarmed the nurses. I had died.

Five minutes later, when the time on the timer was up, I came back. The nurses were completely befuddled by the miracle they just witnessed and attempted to explain to my mother and father what they couldn't even explain to themselves. Until that day, this had never happened before and, after that day, it never happened again.

When I grew old enough to work the timer my mother, ever so kind and sweet when I brought up the subject, would do her best to explain to me why my timer was always at zero.

"Mommy?" five year old me would ask.

"Yes, dear?" she would reply. She got down on one knee so she could look into my sad hazel eyes.

"Why is my timer at zero? Oliver showed me his the other day and he still has seventy years left to live. Am I dead?"

Oliver was my best friend all through out school. We first met because I was so fascinated with his unusual height and white hair. I later became mesmerised by his color changing kaleidoscope eyes.

"No, sweetie, you're very much alive."

"Then why is my timer at zero?"

"Because you're different from everyone else."

I never could figure out what she meant until I was ten and died for the second time in my life.

My mother, father, and I live in a rather large two story house in Bristol, Connecticut. My father is the owner of a very successful motor vehicle repair shop and my mother is a college professor at the community college a few blocks away from where we live. With this being said, we have a lot of money and valuable things that are tempting to steal.

I was the first to wake up and hear the noisy rustling of the thief. They were obviously an amateur. Thinking quickly and calmly, I grabbed the baseball bat that always sat next to my bed and creeped down the hall to the living room in order to get a look at this thief. I was not prepared for what happened next.

While I was walking down the hall I accidentally hit the bat against the doorway to the bathroom. Luckily, it was loud enough to wake my parents up. Unfortunately, because it was loud enough to wake my parents, it was loud enough to alert the thief of my presence. They, the thief, came barreling down the hallway wielding a pistol in their left hand. A hockey mask and plain black clothing concealed their identity. I think it's safe to say that my baseball bat was no match for their pistol, something I figured out as I crumpled to the floor bleeding from the bullet wound in my chest.

My parents made it into the hallway just in time to catch the bastard that shot me. My father tackled the thief as my mother ran to check on me, the timer that was always at zero was now at half an hour. This was the first time my parents experienced my death and resurrection firsthand.

Once my father had securely bound and gagged the thief he called the cops so they could come pick them up. He hadn't unmasked them yet because he thought it best if the cops did that. Mother had moved my lifeless body to the couch as soon as she came back to reality, the shock of my death and the thief having taken her elsewhere. When the cops arrived, much to my parents' dismay, I still had three minutes until revival. Explaining the revival of their dead child was not easy for them when they had no clue as to why it happened in the first place. Moral of the story: waking up from death surrounded by cops is terrifying.

After that night my parents told me to be more careful when I heard noises in the house. I did my best to stay out of trouble, and I still do to this day. Since then I've tried my best to keep my parents from having to explain my resurrection from death because I knew how difficult it was for them.

Nowadays I don't think about the timer as much. I'm almost sixteen so I've learned to live with the fact that I'm different from everyone else. Oliver still teases me about it but it doesn't bother me because I tease him right back.

There is, however, one large group of people that I hope don't know about my defect. Those people would be the body of people that make up our government. They've been known to do malicious things to people like me who are different. With the world war that's about to break out I can think of many things they'd use me for...