Interlude 0.5

It began with the dreams. Visions would swim past the surreal scenes, interrupting whatever nonsensical events were taking place therein. He would be dreaming of the past day’s events, and a scarred crag would take its place for a blink of a moment. Sometimes he would wake up, sweating, breathless. Other times he would keep dreaming. Over time, he stayed asleep through the visions more and more.

When he stayed asleep, the visions would flip past his vision faster and faster. Sometimes, it would seem as though he was seeing several at the same time. When he woke up, he had a headache.

Then they began happening while he was awake. He would be driving down a street, and suddenly he would be driving down a desolate, ruined highway. The streets cracked, the sun dark. Then he’d be back, only a little bit further down the same road he started on.

One time, he almost drove his car off of a bridge because of this. When he stopped, he couldn’t remember what he had seen, only that it terrified him.

The visions started out coming once a week, then twice, then every day. They kept increasing in regularity. Over the course of two years they were appearing multiple times a day, and his nights were full of visions.

It was the fateful day, a decade after the visions had begun, that it happened. He saw a vision. Then, another vision appeared overlaid above that. Then a third, and a fourth. They kept building up.

He could see everything. Everything that was, everything that is, and everything that could possibly ever be. All of it, all possible information from every possible universe poured into his head.

It was too much. He snapped. Living alone, it took five days before anyone found him gibbering and drooling, lying on his bedroom floor in his pajamas. He was sent to an asylum, where he was safe. When the visions prompted rabid panic attacks, he was given a straitjacket and put in a padded room with nothing but his thoughts, and of course the visions.

Over time, he learned to suppress them. To push all of the visions back into the deepest darkest recesses of his mind. Eventually, he managed to limit his focus down to just one vision, the one that he thought of as reality.

He was let out of the asylum after endless tests to ascertain his sanity. From the beginning, he had lost thirty-four years of his life to the visions. He was determined to get them back.

There weren’t any jobs open for a fifty-seven year old man who had spent the majority of his life in an asylum. During the first few months of his release, he was homeless. He worked, harder than he had ever done before, and he managed to negotiate himself a stint as a substitute teacher in a local school district.

He was finally able to support himself. He bought a crappy apartment off of a main street. The sounds of traffic reverberated throughout the night, but it didn’t bother him much. He didn’t sleep more than he absolutely had do if he could avoid it. The visions came back during his dreams, so he tried his best to stay awake.

He learned to use the visions as best he could. If he applied for a job, he checked to see if there was any universe in which he got it. If there wasn’t he wouldn’t even send in an application. Before he travelled, he always checked ahead to see if something would happen.

He grew to rely on them. He started to use them more and more often. Eventually, he lost his fear of them almost entirely. The one thing he was scared of was the visions of nothing. At times, he would call up visions of the future, to be greeted with an inky blackness over his vision. It was as if there was a fog across his eyes, but more so. He would flip through more possible futures – all the same. After seconds, minutes, or hours, it would clear and he would have access to all of his knowledge.

An idea began building in his mind. Whenever he had an episode with the fog he always checked the news afterward. Sometimes there was nothing. Other times, something had taken place – something big. There was an assassination this time. Another time there was a plane crashing into government towers over in America.

Something was causing the fog. Sometimes these events were stopped before they could happen. Other times they were apparently inevitable. He could guess what that meant. Some force, some power in the world was working to prevent tragedies. To do this, they needed to have some source of information about when they were supposed to happen.

His conclusion was inevitable. There were people like him. People who, through no rhyme or reason, could see through the fabric of time and try to change it. His next move was just as inevitable. He had to – he needed to – find them. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he did find them, but he knew that it was the correct move.

His mission engulfed his life. He spent his days working to make enough money to live on, and the rest of his time was spent looking to the future and the past. He scanned for people at the sites of the attacks, and took note of when the mind-fog appeared. When it dispersed, he looked through those times as well.

It took a while, but he began noticing a pattern. Just a couple of people who showed up at different events. They always looked the same. They were always dressed according to where they were. They were always close to the same age, no matter when they were.

That clinched it. They were real. They could help him. They weren’t there when he spent two decades locked up for his own safety.

They would pay.