Apathy

The year is 2075 and Jamal is a mechanic, but not one of the kind you may be thinking of, he is a hitman by profession in the most crude variation of his trade. Often he is hired for jobs of retrieval of evidence. On occasions, he has to engineer certain situations to happen according to the precise terms of his contracts. This time, Jamal was hired to ruin the career of an incipient actor and comedian named Joe Jenkins. There is a catch, though. Joe lived seventy-three years ago. The name of this game is reverse causality enforcement, and it may imply more than Jamal was hired for.

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“The cause is hidden, but the result is widely known.”

--Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV.

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-- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.

To those who feel that life is an uncomfortable experience.

Photo elements by John Cameron on Unsplash

<T-plus 7,404 seconds>

Most likely, his timer was out of sync. Whether he had been unconscious for two hours or his cyber malfunctioned during the time slip. The first sign of temporal consistency was the alarm, which was chiming at the same rhythmic cadence as before.

When he opened his eyes and looked around, he found himself lying on the floor of a quite different apartment. There were no radio beacons, and no sound except a distant rumbling; his head kept spinning, preventing him from standing up; he suddenly became aware of a debilitating migraine; his temple was pulsating.

Alarmed, he closed his eyes and waited, laying his head cautiously on the cold, dirty floor.

An alert message was blinking, switching between red and yellow fonts in the upper-right corner of his field of view.

<Attention: medical alert>

“Ugh, no kidding!” he grunted. “Run a full-body analysis and pull down a diagnosis,” he commanded his cyber aloud. “Ugh— Shut down that beeping alarm and remove the timer overlay. My head is killing me!”

The cyber displayed a status report overlaid over the darkness on Jamal’s field of view; he kept his eyes closed while scrolling down the medical report.

“Oh, that’s great,” he muttered hoarsely. “Shut off overlaid info and allow me some time to recover.”

Photo elements by Josh Nuttal on Unsplash

The backstage was boiling in activity at that time of the evening. Staffers smiled at Joe and waved welcoming signs at him while passing by, but Joe shyly ignored them and walked straight to the men’s restroom.

The restroom was empty of people; however, it was a place of mirrors better to avoid. Bending over the sink, he cupped in his hands a generous amount of cold water and splashed it onto his face to wash away his numbness. Then he dared to look at his reflection, just to see a portrait of how he was feeling.

“I can’t do this. Not tonight,” Joe mumbled while shaking his head, “I better go home.”

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