139 Years to the End of the World

Year One, Part Two

We left the hospital as soon as I got changed. Long black jeans hid my new prosthetic legs and a fresh set of blue shirt and grey cotton jacket warded against the breezy temperature. Though the robotic legs are functioning properly and I was capable of standing, they moved too slowly as they had not fully synchronised with my neural pathways yet. Thus, I ended up leaving the front door of the hospital in a wheelchair.

I had thought the world was bright upon waking up, that the light in the room was blinding. Once outside though, I realized just how wrong I was as my senses were bombarded with the colours and luminosity of the pale, azure-tinted sunlight.

Agent Matthews walked next to me. At his full standing height, he was a towering 2.1 meters, a full 30 centimetres taller than I would be when standing. He had offered to push my wheelchair but I declined, saying I should do such simple things myself.

"As you wish," he had replied. His tone and manners reminding me of a butler, complete with a suit.

A black sedan was pulled up at the entrance with another man-in-black waiting by the car. This one had a full head of brown, ruffled hair. Instead of shades, this other agent wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and had deep brown eyes and a scar across his lips.

As we approached, Matthews introduced, "My partner, Agent Golph."

"Call me G," Golph cut in. He was audibly friendlier than Matthews. The standard good cop, bad cop. Mutt and Jeff. The sticky and the stickler.

"Agent G," I replied, "Now that's a spy name."

G opened the passenger side door for me and offered to help me in. I waved his hand away and slowly stood from the wheelchair before slowly pushing myself into the back seat. I lifted my new, heavier legs into the car with my hands. Matthew loaded the wheelchair into the trunk and took the driver seat while G went the long way around and sat beside me. In just a few seconds, the engine was started and we were out of the hospital's vicinity.

The engine was relatively quiet and the car's radio was turned off, dragging out the silence that had fallen in the vehicle.

Breaking the stillness in the air, I turned to G and asked one of the millions of questions on my mind. "Does my family know about this? I know we're under time constraints but I would like to see them again before going under."

G, his voice with a hint of southern accent, replied, "Your wife was told an hour before you. She's on the way to the lab with your daughter now," he removed his glasses and took out a piece of cloth from his shirt pocket to clean it. "Your mother and father are being escorted there as well."

"And they're all okay with me doing this?" I asked a question which, in hindsight, I should have asked the moment the proposal for turning myself into a time ice pop came up.

Agent G stopped cleaning his glasses, put them back on, and kept the cloth. "I think that's something you should ask them yourself."

I turned away from G, pondering the decision I made to be frozen, in order to save the world from a future I was not sure was going to happen. The city buildings of New Roagnark scraped the skies. Each one with their non-reflective solar panelled windows glowing under the setting sun, bathing the cityscape with a light teal. Hundreds of cement towers, held up by metal, wrapped in glass, unwavering even as they touched the heavens themselves.

Another question popped into my mind. "How did you guys know?"

G replied, "Know what?"

"That the world was going to end in a hundred and thirty-nine years? Kind of a specific number if you asked me," I asked.