Redshift ||| Shiftred

The dose hits, blindsiding me with a gentle, warm light, and at once each of my trembled breaths is filled with a sweet taste like water ice. I will float over every ache and smooth over every edge until I indulge in the deliberate, ponderous, redshifted joy of living.

And indulge it is. Even though after this I will wake up thirstier than I’d ever felt, even after that time an additional convenience fee from my landlord meant taking double shifts became my new norm. I remembered that colony well. Its shoddy, half-functional forced gravity system had plenty of little convenience fees. But that place was a distant memory now that I’d been enlisted.

Many of my dreams the night after the first dose are of the home-sized rock, a rock I’d seen as a child on hikes of a planet I’m sure I loved once. The rock edges slightly further, leaving an imprint on the cracked lakebed. When it reaches the mountain on the other side, a great distance for a weary traveler such as a rock, I know somewhere deep down inside it will be the signal of my end.

But for now that seems too far away, and I traded enough doses of Neutral to tide me over for a great time.

We know we are on the losing side of the war.

At impossible speeds, our enemies are building and designing and testing and executing and building their weapons all over again. We have few materials and fewer margins of error.

We fight for too many forgotten things; too few declared ones.

When I take a dose to ride the redshift, I can make many mistakes. I can test the weapons, too—not on live subjects, but enough to be effective.

My friend Hiraeth, a lowly Aspirant like me, once gifted me an hourglass filled with black sand. I use it to think about how time on Earth used to feel: even, measured, precise. Not quite how time on the station feels, where we are unsure that even the next moment will bring peace. On the station, time is measured by sound. A horn blows and you move on to the next thing in the routine. If I am exercising, I move on to weapons training. If I am training, I move on to lunch. The horn tells us what to do and when to do it, but we have no idea what time it actually is, and have no recourse but to trust the blare unconditionally.

When the horn blares three times, it is time to collapse to sleep.

Hourglasses like Hiraeth’s gift were thought of as kind of a joke. The sand falls at the expected speed, our ship adjusted to the gravitational comfort fit for Humans, but out here in the vastness of relativity, how could you measure the exactness of time with sand—the material of planets? We could only use sand to keep our dreams, our hopes for victory. We reconcile when our ship shifts in or out of the space-time in the galaxy we inhabit.

Doses are from the drug I call Neutral because that’s the name of the planet I’d found it on—I don’t know it by any other name. The planet was a stopover, the name betraying its greatest weakness, its entire reason for existence: absolute objectivity. No wars, no battles, no disagreements. No opinions matter—the only opinion of any value is that Neutral is a beautiful planet, is great for vacationing, and thinking is only mildly necessary. The whole point of Neutral was to please.

Our ship had docked at Neutral to give us a brief break before the worst, most perilous part of this war. Our administrators, anticipating the level of loss, gifted us time here. As restful as a few vacation days when you’ve been overworked for much of your lifetime.

I hadn’t been searching—it found me. The planet Neutral was known for random stuff—it scours the galaxy for the best, the factum obscura of universes, from ancient astrolabes to presses of flowers from near-extinct plants.

Lieutenant Commander Allïk huffed, his white pepper eyebrows contrasting his face like I used to remember Earth nights: dark with hairlines of light, spoke, “Havin to convince deh rest of de universe Humans really ain’t dat bad—when we really is—ain’t deh way I wont to finish my careea.”

I stared. My Lieutenant Commander had broken three rules in one admission. He’d revealed our species. He used a dialect—one we both shared. And, while he hadn’t said the W-word (war), the C-word (career) was a close second. No one speaks of careers anymore except in the context of war. If he were capable of smiling—and I only caught him once—this was the second time I’d seen his lips stretch in that direction. A swarm of drones should have appeared as they do when someone violates Neutral’s zero-tolerance policy. But of course they didn’t. LC Allïk either never made stupid mistakes, or he was lucky enough to never get caught.

I blurted, “Where can I find water ice?” This dessert of my ancestors was notoriously available on Neutral in its real form.

LC Allïk laughed and waved a dismissive hand, his voice finding its standardized dull, “Up there. The last shop.”

The last shop sat on the top of the hill, a looming tangle of plant and metal.

I find Hiraeth first, to ask if she wants to join me. She doesn’t know anything about a place called West Philly, where I was born and where water ice was abundant. She laughs at my enthusiasm.

“I’m really fascinated, but not now?” she said, distracted by another shop filled with manga-zines with fake news headlines. I didn’t want to lead her on a dead end.

So I headed up alone.

“None of that here!” the frantic-looking shopkeeper sputtered, waving stubby, shell-like arms in the air. “All I sell are wares that shift your mind like siphon forms.”

Honestly, that’s what real water ice does for me. “Space” water ice, manufactured to mimic the real thing, is a special brand of loathsome chalkiness, devoid of inspiration, made as though it was speculated in a plant near a planet that only imagined the existence of such a fruit. Real water ice, the kind I’d had on Earth, reminded me of days splashing on the water pads of parks in the city, humid but bearable, gleeful and sugared with flavor, fractalling on my mouth with a burst of senses that I’ve forgotten about as war steals all joy.

Just as I’d turned to leave, the shopkeeper added, “Do you ever want to have more time? For hobbies, perhaps? I’ve been advertising a special on this one…” She lifted up a little red bloom in my direction—

and for the first time I laid my eyes on my becoming.

I’d taken my first dose of Neutral on the planet Neutral.

This planet’s three axioms must be accepted before entering: we are impartial. We are unbiased. We are unprejudiced. I’m fairly sure our enemies are on Neutral, since all are welcome, but since we all could walk around freely, even species considered hostile to the galaxy, I have to accept the lie of objectivity and keep moving forward. I don’t know my enemies outside of their warsuits, but I try not to wonder about this as I wander.

It was useful to enter a space where my species does not register as a threat. We could descend and enjoy the beaches, cultivated so that all attendees could find pleasure, relax in the winds of its oceans and movements of other species. No one knew what I was, and I didn’t want to know what they were, either. Hell, I could even share a drink with my enemy on planet Neutral and wouldn’t know it and they wouldn’t know, either. Here we were not enemies, we were just here.

My first dose of Neutral was both exhilarating and slightly unpleasant. I’d felt an incredible joy that I had felt in small moments of my life, as well as a sickness, recognizing how happy I could have been all along. The rise within me was like sucking in fresh air on a planet when you’ve been breathing the stale manufactured air on a ship, especially, especially, if that first breath is nearly glimmering, filled with tide and salt and refracted light.

“You’ll get used to the waves,” the shopkeeper told me after a moment. Twenty suns have passed in my mind before she spoke, but I know that my physical body had not left the shop the entire time. She held up a booklet with brown-stained corners. “If you buy at least 60, you get this guide for free.”

A grain of sand falls, slowly, hovering, hovering,

hovering

h o v e r i n g

plunk.

The booklet tells me the right amount to take and build toward for my biology. It tells me how to move, shifting as my own body would. It helps me understand that I cannot interact with anything biological, but I can manipulate non-biological elements.

In a Neutral dose, a single hand gesture moves too slowly for anyone to be offended. I can’t interact with anyone on my exact wavelength, and I can’t stop time, but I can explore it. It flows through despite my wavelength, but the time in me and the time outside run different.

Once I get over the sickness of being here, the world in Neutral is more beautiful than living. I can see movement in its tiniest discourse. Small, subtle movements force me to look closely. Every breath takes what feels like half a day. A Neutral user takes nothing for granted.

“Humans fuck up everything!”

Hiraeth understands, nodding slowly. She leans in, and I can tell she is asking for clarification. She is Human, but she may as well be alien. As a child, I grew up covering my hair and face in summers drenched in brick-and-stone city heat; she apparently spent her childhood, hair wild in the gale, in some kind of island country where both ice and abundant green thrive. She grew up waking and falling asleep under starry absolute; I knew the comfort of a stalwart sun.

When we are back on the ship after our brief stay on Neutral the planet, we are finally feeling back to ourselves. Neutral was a good relief, but it destabilizes the whole crew from our routine.

“Give them a fucking toothbrush and Humans will figure out how to make it a tool of the colonizer,” I continue, hissing. The charts for the next weapon we are supposed to design are impossible. The energy and material usage limits are paltry, because we have nothing, but we are stuck in the in-between of making it happen.

Or death.

Which would allow other Humans to become victorious colonizers once more.

Hiraeth’s sudden wisdom frames her face like the sunlight behind a cloud when she says, “Toothbrushes have never been the original tools of colonizers, but they can be used by them. And,” she squeezes the top of my spine, my neck, “they do not have to be relegated to the status of the colonizer’s tools. They could be beyond them, found outside of their house completely.”

I haven’t told Hiraeth about discovering Neutral yet, but her words comfort me from the guilt of each increasing dose. I deliberate. She might think I’m weak, unable to deal with the pressures of this ship. Three horns blare. I link an arm with hers, “Time to brush our teeth with the colonizer’s toothbrush, then sleep in the bed the colonizer has made for us.”

She doesn’t laugh at my joke, instead opening her mouth to say something. It takes her so much longer than the quick-witted retorts I am used to, so I stare at her mouth patiently, until she blurts, “We Humans are more than colonizers. That’s why we fight this war.”

Her innocence is sometimes annoying. Not all Humans. What a boring rebuttal.

I cut Hiraeth off, even though I know she has more to say. “Then we should have sent a different group of Humans into the universe before us.” Instead, we sent the Humans we did, and now they think we’re all colonizers.

Winning this war will be our corrective.

I’m in the world but I’m not experiencing it. Anything bright, beautiful, verdant is within reach but so devastatingly far away.

I try to remember why I joined the war against my inclination. I can no longer picture Stef in my mind, nor hear his voice, but I can still see his mirage, and in redshift I can remember him most: his silly, abundant laughter; his curious obsessions over small things.

We were children, then we were children in war. War: an abstraction, a game. Until I was shoved abruptly into not-childhood, into whatever this was. It was not adulthood, where you could simply be responsible and obey the regularity of the slicing of time—its predictability, regularity, a mundane ticking, the feigning sound of equal slices. In this in-between, I could still decide what was abstract, and what I decided to give myself to as real.

Redshifting in Neutral is an ocean wave: it forces the time of life into a different rhythm, making time both predictable, like riding a wave you expected—and surprising, like the surge of an ocean that knew more than you.

Instead of pretending, I fully remember the moment Stef was conscripted. Redshift not only allows it, it demands a full, immersive, slow, slow contending with everything our minds are allowed to run away from in the sludge of the every day.

I could sit with the moment Stef died, and remember him, the way he ought to be remembered: laughing, bright, loving any bit of light life gave him.

One horn blares. We move from lunch to the weapons research lab.

“Progress?” If Lieutenant Commander Allïk’s sneer over the rest of the Aspirants weapon-inventions is any indication, I would not fare well. As Aspirants, unofficial, we were hopeful to rise in the ranks, to prove ourselves in a war where disposable bodies were so utilized on the front line that, given this lowest rank, we would accept almost anything else.

When LC Allïk inspects my weapon, his sneer briefly turns into somewhat of a thin hairline frown. He picks up my weapon to ask the question we’d all been desperately hoping to hear. “Mods?”

“A third of the required materials—half the energy.”

He even steps further. “Demonstration.”

I suck in my breath. None of us Aspirants in our cohort had gotten this far yet. I turned and pointed it to the android who was supposed to mimic Human response. My weapon aimed. Fired. A brilliant shot—I knew it would be. The android crumbled as a Human would, shuddering. The data displayed itself exactly as I’d said: we needed about half the energy most our weapons required to execute. And the smallness of the weapon spoke for itself.

LC Allïk’s face did not waver. But he says, “This must have taken you a lot of time to perfect, Aspirant.”

Time is finally what I had. Instead I say the mantra, “I am obsessed with progress.”

He hands it back to me and tells me the words we all long to hear: “Prototype One…” My prototype was named. He continues, “…is not enough. One sixth of the required materials. One third the energy.”

“I can do it, Lieutenant Commander.”

He lays the weapon down in front of me, my Prototype One, my beginning, finally, “You have until the 3-horn blow sounds twice.”

None of the other Aspirants, not even Hiraeth, are looking at me. They think I have done the impossible. Some, I know, think I’m some kind of genius.

I’m nothing of the kind.

I only have time.

The horn blares. On to the next.

A bite of Neutral so I am off:

to do the impossible:

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I would never call Neutral boring, but it is beginning to be more than familiar. I start tinkering with weapons for the next mission, only able to interact with the material.

When that gets repetitive, I turn to dance. The wavelengths let me. It’s not exactly redshifting the way the physics disciplinarians understand it, because there is still sound and jawns (material), but I think of it as such, because I shift slowly, slowly, dancing on wavelengths. I don’t physically go anywhere, but I appear to shift away, my whole body emitting both light and sound that others cannot see. I stretch. I disappear. I am still there. For a moment (from the vantage of others) they see a me in a slice of time. In redshift, I do not (cannot) interact with them.

Another grain of

“You don’t have to believe in the spirit of the war to fight in one,” Stef told me when he first broke the news about his conscription. When I pressed, he admitted, “I don’t care either way. Both sides don’t have it fully right. I’m happy to fight on the side that actually has the weapons to do the job. Remember that song we liked? About getting the job done?”

Stef embodied all that I remembered in my homesickness for Earth. Because we grew up together, I can be firm with him. “But you’ve seen how civil wars play out. Our ancestors did, too.”

Stef shrugged. “They say history rhymes. They didn’t say it might be an off rhyme.”

I pushed him to provoke a fight, just like the old days when we were kids bouncing around in the backyard, but he backed away.

“Prove me wrong, sis.” This wasn’t like the games of what feels like yesteryear. There was a deep and haunted glitter in Stef’s eyes, the glint of an artificial light off the eyes of an animal meant for night. “Double dare you.”

It’s hard to forget about the incremental moments that make ourselves.
That make our being.
When war tells us to think about the “bigger picture,”
All we can see are the tiny faces of those we love.
So we move.
I shove Stef away but I’d wanted to bury my head in his shoulder. I can’t. I can’t because…

We move against our own species. Other Humans who want us to colonize, despite all we’d apparently learned about colonization. Now that Humans see fit to take our colonization elsewhere, we can block them, make their task harder, prevent them from doing to other species what we have done to ourselves.

You see? This is why the war is so important. We cannot let the worst of us become colonizers, become the worst of representatives of our species, when so many of us do care about the anti-colonizing mission.

Stef says, “Our voices fade in each conquering.”

The civil wars in the history books tell of families pit against families:

siblings sharing a table,
then shedding each other’s blood.

All I can think of is Stef who committed to a side of war on the chance that an off rhyme will save him. Rhymes are just shapes of sounds: curves, waves, rhythms, shifts. Nothing is ever precise enough.

I have another dream about my home-sized rock. The real one is too far away to imagine, on trails I no longer have time to hike. This dream version is busy crossing the desert in its slow way, the way it should. But in the dream, it halts halfway and shatters. Its pieces scatter into the grains of sand, quickly engulfed by the blowing wind.

I shouldn’t feel panic at this image, but when I wake I remember, my heart palpitates,

I suppress a scream.

Lieutenant Commander Allïk glares at my newest prototype. It needed exactly 1/6th of the materials from the previous prototype, and used 1/3rd of the energy. So confident that I had done right, I say, “I can have five prototypes to you after the next 3-horn blares.”

Unblinking, he snaps, “Ten prototypes. If it works.” All of us Aspirants flinch. We know how much time this would take. “We need to deploy these to the front line as soon as possible.”

Before the next 3-horn blares, I hand him fifteen prototypes. It took six entire doses but it was worth it. The look on his face was priceless. No one ever actually heard LC Allïk utter the words brilliant in reference to anyone but himself, but he let it slip, here.

Horns blare and blare and blare. By the next inspection over our weapons-inventions I feel screwed again. I am having trouble gauging time, and for some reason the last dose didn’t last as long as the others. Still enough time to get the task done, and to identify two problems at once. In our inventory, there are now only enough materials for fifty more weapons. When I tell LC Allïk this, I didn’t tell him that I was also running out of doses of Neutral.

I’d had enough time to do research to say, “If we can just stop by the planet Goeb—”

“We don’t have time for that.”

Time? Time, in redshift, was the one thing I finally had, even if in limited quantities.

“Halve the battery life again without compromising the power of the weapon, Aspirant,” he orders.

When I return to my chambers I despair, counting my doses of Neutral left.

It’s hard to forget about Stef, whose face I still see, haunting. That’s why I like thinking about Hiraeth, who is quiet, still, observant like a planet’s moon. Because when I forget to think about Hiraeth…Stef appears.

Hiraeth stares hard at me after a sleep cycle where I forced myself to make two doses work when I clearly needed more.

“You look different.”

I tell her it’s my exhaustion, but she thrusts a hand into my locs. We’re close—but I’m not ready to be that close, and too tired to show I am offended. “You have a gray hair.”

I do? “Damn,” I try to smile as I pull back. Already?

Hiraeth isn’t done, “Your face has changed. Your jawline is…more convex.”

I know she’s trying to be polite. The skin on my jawline is sagging, my face is wider. This comes with age—I experience time in the redshift, but I don’t know how much time is taking a toll on me.

How long? How long before she finally knows how deeply I am into Neutral?

Perhaps it won’t be an issue. I am close to my last dose, and after this my contraptions will be useless and I will go back to being the expendable Aspirant everyone believes me to be at my rank.

“I’m fine,” I force a smile, knowing almost immediately it wouldn’t work even on me.

“The stress of this war has gotten to you.”

I breathe relief. Hiraeth really has no idea what’s going on. When she first started here, she sobbed inconsolably all night until I curled up next to her to comfort her, for a week straight. Some of our recruits can’t handle the pressure, especially the ones that only know war in the abstract, in the research, like Hiraeth—but this ship needs bodies more than military geniuses.

“I’ll survive,” I say.

In my dreams the night after the nth dose, I watch the home-sized rock creeping slightly further, leaving measured rocktrail prints in dried mud. If I continue this path, I know the rock will reach the mountain on the other side. It will be my end.

Its motion, hastening in slowness, seems inevitable.

I begin to wear my locs shorter. I also switch how I approach redshifting time. Instead of using it to extend waking time, I work on semi-prototypes fully in view of everyone, then finish while everyone sleeps. This is easier, because if I wake up after a redshift on a Neutral dose right before the ship’s waking blare, I can clean myself up before anyone is wiser, cut my locs to the same place they need to be, and present myself back in the space-time they are used to.

I need more Neutral. That will solve everything. I don’t need to interact with anyone else. There will be plenty of time after the war to spend with Hiraeth. More Neutral will give me time to do all the things I need to do to create these weapons to win this war.

My last weapon is such a disaster that LC Allïk pulls me aside into a room by ourselves, no doubt to reprimand me for the promise I had shown and had not lived up to.

Before I begin my sniveling he hisses, “I know what you’ve been doing. Anyone with half a brain could see that it’s not possible for you to create these weapons at this pace. You’re not doing this without some kind of…help.”

I shut my mouth, waiting for the next words: a reprimand, a court martial, an end to my career.

“I know you need more of this help,” he says instead. “And I know how to get it. But you need to stop showing off.”

“You can get me to Goeb?”

“I can’t,” without hesitation, he adds, “But I know of an alternative.”

My last red bloom of Neutral goes into a hydroponic vessel where it quadruples in growth. I knew we had these but I was too afraid to steal one from the cafeteria where they are stored, too afraid to see if it would work. LC Allïk shows me where the extras are and how to account in the ship’s logs for them so no one second guesses their use. The bloom is so vibrant, it is not long before I have too many pieces. I hide these behind the one picture of Hiraeth and me, another in my cosmetics box, and still another in the folds of a journal entry I wrote of my last interaction with Stef. With my Lieutenant Commander’s blessing I can now do the impossible,

without brilliance
or brut,
or anything,
but
time.

The first battle of my career was the battle at Station 540-Tryjaii where I unleash weapons I had been trained on but never saw their effects on real Human beings. I don’t sleep for several 3-horn blares since, and for one more when I receive a message from Stef’s mother, in which she sends Stef’s obituary and a cold letter asking if I would consider defecting to the “right” side of the war, the side in which Humans prove themselves to be brave rather than weak.

Stef has bravely perished at the battle at Station 540-Tryjaii, the header reads.

“I heard they’re going to promote you to weapons division soon,” Hiraeth whispered after our training rounds.

I scoffed. I’d wanted the combat division, which I’d dreamed about since I got here: coming face to face to the enemy that drove me to who I was now. “I’ll tell them no. I’ll tell them I make weapons to use, not to sit in a room and make more.”

Hiraeth glares at me icily. She could say anything, but one thing I admire about her is that when it is absolutely necessary, she chooses violence. “What would Stef say about this?”

About this? I don’t know what she means. It seems both deep and vague enough I can answer her any way. About redshifting? Hiraeth can’t possibly know enough about that to make a judgement. Maybe she’s talking about how absent I’ve been, how distant I’ve been, how absolutely focused I’ve finally been able to be. To bring Stef into this…I regret opening up to her about Stef at all.

“Stef would rejoice at how I’ve sacrificed to win this fucking war,” I say, standing up and gripping my latest weapon to show Hiraeth how serious I am. “And Stef would tell me to do more.”

There was no way to know, among the chaos, of the firelight colliding with flesh, if it was me who put Stef to his final sleep. The number of unknown unknowns on the battlefield is its own, expansive, immensely solitary universe.

Stef’s final dare, double dare, was a hope, perhaps. Did he want to prove me wrong? Or did he know me well enough, in my stubbornness, that I needed his dare to keep pushing forward…despite?

We, Humans, are colonizers; yet we, Humans, are anti-colonizers.

We fill the emptiness of space with the blood of our dispute.

Prototype 115 is a fucking mess. It’s not just time—it was as though Neutral stopped working like it’s supposed to, a cracked hourglass with sand spilling out every once in a while, anomalies that make me jolt forward, or freeze completely, in time, often without warning so when I phase out of redshift I have to figure out how long I’d been trapped there. Often longer than I’d liked.

I wait until physical evidence forces me to see LC Allïk. My weapons are no longer efficient. They are but heaps of junk when I analyze them after a good sleep after working a shift in Neutral.

“The redshift stopped working.”

LC Allïk raises an eyebrow. “Are we revisiting introductory astrophysics?”

I breathe in sharply, trying not to be annoyed at how I’m being treated so callously. “Redshifting is not the right word, I know. It just describes how it feels.” Stretching time out, away, away from the pressures of war while never taking me fully away from it.

It’s not just that I need more. I need it to work differently.

LC Allïk sighs. Somehow, he knows exactly what I mean by it; it doesn’t need to be named. “How have you been taking it?”

The booklet had told me to ingest it. I don’t know any other way. Apparently, LC Allïk instructs, there is a way to set it so I could breathe it, and another way to insert it directly into my bloodstream. I chose breathing: an injection into the blood felt like too much. LC Allïk showed me the breathing routine so I could finally return to my work.

My work is brilliant.

My work is shit.

I am stuck. I have been in this redshift for much longer than I’ve ever been. Everything is frozen, and has been for what feels like too many shifts of what should be horn-blares, which I’ve missed for quite a while. The booklet and LC Allïk are no longer of any help.

On my own, I begin to experiment. If I can mix Neutral means of dosing, which sometimes extends, and sometimes blunts the effect. This help is limited. I miss that first blinding dose that eased me so beautifully into a world where I finally had time to win the war.

A blue star, in a sea of black, stares at me when I wake.

It’s not a blue star. It’s Hiraeth’s eyes. I curse both her and the Lieutenant Commander.

“He told me what you’re doing. You need to stop,” Hiraeth says. My response is to vomit myself out like a cloud sheds hailstones.

LC Allïk is in the corner. I catch sight of him. He does not budge. I know he is still waiting for the next prototype. Perhaps he thinks bringing Hiraeth into this will inspire me.

It will not.

When I redshift, I am pulling closer, pulling objects that would rather move apart, pulling so we are intimate, connected, intertwined.

I see LC Allïk again. Hiraeth is gone. It feels like she left my room only moments before, but I don’t know anymore. Before I have a chance to respond he says, “Stop taking it. That’s an order.”

I laugh coarsely. I’ve never felt more empowered. “You order me because it’s all you can do. You don’t know what to do with someone like me.” I get close enough to make him uncomfortable. “Who are you going to be after the war, Lieutenant Commander? Or are orders all you know?”

Before he responds, I turn away and pinch a few fractals of Neutral in my pocket, then put it under my tongue, just for the fun of it. When I turn back, I smile. He blinks. He flinches. He realizes what I’ve done. At first he seems to rise in anger and I wonder briefly if he’ll strike me.

“I will be alive, and if you keep taking those, you will be dust. You were supposed to be a prodigy. Haven’t you figured it out yet, Aspirant? This isn’t a child’s game, this is war.”

No. A child’s game is what Stef and I thought we were playing, before we’d realized our roles were very, very real. “I think I know a thing or two about that, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Then why are you failing this mission I sent you on?” he roars.

And suddenly I feel I am hovering in redshift without having taken another dose. I am certain I haven’t, because I can see us both move, even though we are perfectly still, and the sweat drips easily from Allïk’s silver eyebrows. I am not moving but my mind is racing, retracing every step up until the moment I’d touched Neutral for the very first time.

“You sent me to the shop on Neutral knowing what I would find,” I whisper.

For once LC Allïk has no retort.

I take another dose just to show him who’s in control, but accidentally thrust myself 3-horn blares forward into the timeline. I blink. He is no longer there. Next to me is a jump rope that I’d gifted Hiraeth, after her fascination hearing the stories I’d told of playing games in the middle of the street.

The sand in the hourglass Hiraeth gifted me hasn’t budged. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I pick up the rope and begin jumping.

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I jump to the anticipated sound of the rope beating across the floor in perfect rhythm. The perfect rhythm that carried me across the inconsistency of time.

When I tired of the rope I moved to the easier physical movements such as push ups, sit ups, pull ups. I learned well enough not to do anything intensely physical in the beginning. If I were to break my leg in the beginning, the very beginning, it would be hours or days before I could receive attention. That had already happened once, and it was excruciating as I waited to shift back into time so that I could see the medic—who was furious, why hadn’t I come sooner? The damage was neglected for too long. I didn’t know, I’d said. I hadn’t had any choice but to wait time out.

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___

_________

_____________________

_________

___

_________

_____________________

________________________

_____________________

_________

___

___ing.

________.

_____________tap.

_____________tap. tap.

tap. tap. tap. tap. tap.

pating.

tap.

tap. tap. tap.