Chapter 6: Go Big or Go Home
Over the course of the following month we continued experimenting with jumping all over the place. I won’t bore you with the exhaustive list of everywhere we went due to either not staying at ‘em for long, or nout particularly interesting having happened at most of them. I know nothing exceptional happened in Brixham either, but that was the first time we had jumped so far, and I felt like that was important to note. So, shoo out of here with your criticism.
However, some of the more exotic places we visited will get a special mention however. They include: Tokyo, always wanted to go there even though I didn’t speak a lick of the language. Spent a few hours there taking photos, getting lost, even tried some sake, turns out sake and our stomach like to argue, violently. I dropped into the Ukrainian countryside near Chernobyl, stupid I know, but I had always fancied going there, bit of a morbid curiosity really. Only thing I ran into whilst there was a deer. Again with the blooming deer, maybe it is our spirit animal? We noticed one another at the same time and immediately bolted; it ran away as I jumped away. In my defence all I saw was a big brown furry thing, for all I knew it could have been a mutated two headed bear.
We spent a day at NASA, I didn’t jump straight into the facility for obvious reasons. Instead, we took a tour bus there. After a quick look online, I jumped around the corner of one of the scheduled stops the bus picked passengers up from, we arrived just a few minutes before it pulled up. Then, all we had to do was simply wait, I think it took nearly two hours to get to the actual complex due to us stopping everywhere and letting others on. The main thing I remember about the trip though was the driver, he was friendly enough, but told terrible jokes. The kind of jokes that, despite being totally crap, you still couldn’t help but laugh at; he also offered everyone a printed coin if we reviewed him on some website. I remember promising to do so but I simply forgot, still feel a bit bad about it, it has been far too long now and it would be embarrassing to do anything about it at this point. Sure, we could just go back in time to leave the review for him, but I am not risking the fabric of reality for an online review, not today anyways.
NASA itself was great, saw one of the retired shuttles hanging up on some string, gawked at some of their ‘future’ projects, including a big piece of circular metal. Impressive I know, and, as a group, we received a speech from an astronaut. They even had a building dedicated to the local wildlife and their history, although that might have been somewhere else, all the jumping across the globe back then… Everything kinda gets blurred together. I even puddle jumped over to the Grand Canyon to go on one of their tours, took photos and all that. You best believe we snuck to the bottom of the canyon to take a few snaps on our phone before going back up. Pretty sure people aren’t allowed down there so I won’t be showing any of those to anyone. Before I forget, prior to every international jump I made a visit to the local currency exchange and got some of the legal tender for the countries we visited. Really didn’t want to be using the card internationally.
During that time, we also experimented with the physics of teleportation, mainly with any momentum that had built up pre-jump. Does it transfer along with me? Yes and no, we had a ‘great’ time figuring that one out. Whatever velocity we had acquired before jumping does come along with us; however, we are able to choose the direction we point towards. We can’t just ignore the laws of physics. Sure, we can tiptoe around them, maybe even get to first base with them after a few glasses of wine, but never completely ignore.
Time for a poorly worded example: if you have built up speed whilst falling, you can manipulate which way your momentum will travel with you after teleporting. So, if you’re falling face first, then jump so you’re facing upward, the momentum will then make you ‘fall’ towards the sky. Thanks to gravity though, you won’t be going full rapture mode for long, that split second where you are just floating there before gravity completely re-exerts itself upon you, you just teleport back down to the ground, correct way up. Not convoluted or difficult at all, it really is that simple. Winky face.
Despite having used my vast reserves of brain power to come up with that before attempting any physical trials, it still took me a few panicked jumps back into the sky before I got the knack of it, practise make perfect and all that. Oh, and momentum in relation to vehicles is different, if you teleport out of a car that is moving at 100mph, you won’t be flung forward at that speed once you’re out. If you’re walking at 2mph within a plane and teleport away however, then you’ll be moving at 2mph as you land. Relative momentum and all that cool jazz. If it wasn’t like that, then as soon as we jumped anywhere we’d be hit by the 1000mph spinning tidal motion that Earth rotates at. Lucky us I suppose.
Right, back on track. After five weeks of all that we visited Las Vegas (15th November), gambling capitol of the world. I had booked the Friday off work so I could get a nice early start, I thought we could spend a nice slow and leisurely weekend there having a good time, and naturally winning it big boy style. Nothing quite like discovering you have powers to bring a person out of their shell. Now, as it turns out, we have a slight gambling problem, and we ended racking up quite a few hard loses in multiple hotels. To be fair, I had never gambled properly before so how was I supposed to know? As per usual when visiting other countries, I had acquired some physical cold hard cash before travelling. Didn’t really want to use my card whilst jumping across the globe and risk getting caught, or have the bank lock me out for suspected fraud. Anyway, I had withdrawn a few hundred dollars before jumping, but after a few drinks, plus a few major loses, I stupidly started performing bank transfers.
I wasn’t in debt or anything, yet. But we still lost a good percentage of what was in our bank account, really didn’t know when to quit. Sure, some of the staff suggested I stop, or at the very least slow down, but due to the low (but constant) supply of alcohol into our system I refused, quite adamantly. Thank you, idiot juice. I ended up losing pretty much all of our savings. In the span of a few hours I had drained over ten grand, so naturally when I realised what I had done I was rather angry and cursed somewhat loudly, repeatedly. Security was on me pretty quick to escort me out of the gambling area of the latest hotel. I apologised to them whilst leaving. I needed to try and clear my head, in my light-weight condition though that was proving to be a difficult task.
I thought some fresh air might help, so we walked outside into the evening streets, I rested my head against the wall of the hotel, and had a long old think about what I had just done. All those years of hard work, the wealth that we had amassed, gone, all because I had been a stupid donkey who didn’t know when to quit. I slowly slumped down into a crouching position, with our back pressed firmly up against the brick wall. I just wanted to be left alone, to sulk in my own pathetic misery. There were just so many people though, and they kept walking on past. So rude when everyone doesn’t know when to just stay away.
I started to hit the back of my head against the wall, hoping that a small concussion would somehow lower my anger, either that or wake me up. It didn’t really work though, we tried to contain our rising fury, a fight we almost always lost back in those days. I was hopeful that we would win that time, but alas it was a big no no. The rage boiled over the edge of the saucepan when some drunk alpha chad tripped over my leg and nearly face planted on to the pavement. His equally inebriated friends started to laugh at him and myself, I was instantly on my feet, in that moment I really didn’t care whether he was injured or not. All I saw was red, and yelled something along the lines of “just piss off all of you!”. I am a tad bit ashamed of that, getting so angry that you don’t care whether someone might be hurt or not. Well that, but also for shouting at some half comatose idiots on the street that couldn’t exactly defend themselves against my verbal assault.
And they did indeed “piss of”. With a strong gut-wrenching lurching feeling, he and his compadres were gone, along with the shining bright lights of Vegas, all abruptly vanished. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sudden darkness, and once they had, the entire area looked like a wreck. All the vehicles on the road were missing, replaced by cracks within the asphalt, with weeds growing through them. I mean big ones, not your week-old variety kind, the entire scenery had changed within an instant. The sudden shock to the system sobered us up sharpish, I had no idea what the hell had just happened, all I knew was I suddenly felt absolutely shattered, like I had just run a marathon kind of tired. Our mind was racing though, had I just unlocked another power that could make people disappear? No, even if I did somehow make those people vanish that still didn’t explain the lack of electricity, and the general dishevelled appearance of the place.
I forced the fear I felt rising down enough to attempt a jump, it took longer than usual due to the alcohol in the system mind you, along with the general spazzing out I was going through. We landed in the middle of the road outside our apartment to see whether the sudden, and drastic, change was localised to Vegas or was more widespread. It took me a moment to realise that since it had been the late evening in Vegas then it would be past midnight in England. The streets were shrouded in complete darkness, save for the moon and starlight. To be fair though that was normal for there, the streetlights went off after midnight, and it wasn’t like I could just jump into someone’s home to see if they were home. It didn’t even occur to me to go into the apartment and try switching the lights on, you can thank the booze for that one.
I needed a place where people would be awake to make sure everything was okay, and was also well lit, somewhere many hours ahead. Then, the dangerous wildlife country came to mind: Australia, more specifically: Sydney. From my fatigue-fuelled calculations it should have been late morning there, I had an old school friend that had moved there a few years back and I thought that it was a good a time as any to go visit.
So I stood in the middle of the road, and after a while I was able to coax a jump out. Even landed in the right city, in what should have been a busy road, apparently wanting my powers to remain a secret goes out the window when drunk. In fact, we landed on the very street our friend lived on; he lived above a row of shops just down from where we had landed. Problem was the area was devoid of human life also, literally, no vehicles on the road, no signs of any life aside from plant life, and the same general dishevel like in Vegas.
Actually, that isn’t entirely true, it wasn’t exactly the same, there was an added feature: a skeleton slumped over a table by the window inside a café. I gasped and took a step back when I saw that, not something you’d expect to see in such a public place, unless it was Halloween of course, but funnily enough it wasn’t.
After collecting myself I slowly crept towards the café, without breaking my gaze at the corpse. I tried the door, it was one of those old timey doors that rings a bell when opened, and rather surprisingly it unlatched. I cautiously walked in, the first thing that hit me was how musty the air inside was, everything was coated in a fine layer of dust. I crept towards the table in question, and when we were close enough I saw a newspaper under the skeleton. There was no way in hell I was curious enough to try and peel it from underneath the sole occupant of the café though. No offence to whoever that person had been, but I had seen too many horror movies, and played an excessive amount of zombie games, to start manhandling a dead body, even if it was just a pile of bones at that point. Again, no offence.
After a brief and creepy look around, we saw no evidence of anyone else there, alive or dead. We concluded that whomever the skeleton had once been had probably been the owner of the place. Although we weren’t prepared to grab the newspaper underneath them, there was a pile of newspapers on the main counter just beyond. I stared at the corpse for a while, I wondered what had happened to them, what on Earth had happened to cause something like this? The collection of newspapers had the answers.
God, this sounds like rubbish. I’m rambling and trying to use big words. Just need to finish this up and I’m off to rest for a bit.
Anyways, it was one of the country’s major publications, the story on the front page was about Australia, in its entirety, being put under a major lockdown. No-one was permitted to enter or leave the country, they weren’t even allowed out of their homes unless for medical crisises. The government had set up emergency food deliveries to each household so nobody would starve, you weren’t even allowed out for shopping. Scanning through the first few pages, it turned out there had been a virus, suspected man-made, that had spread globally. According to the journalists, Australia was one of the few countries that was still not, at least when the newspaper had been published, completely ravaged by the virus. Judging from the skeleton a few feet away though, it had not stayed that way for long.
From hastily performed global studies, scientists had concluded that it only affected humans, all experiments to expose various animal and plant life resulted in zero infectivity. All data available pointed towards the virus being extremely infectious and spreading faster than a paid hooker’s legs. It had an excessive mortality rate, between 94-96% in Europe, a rough estimate of 95% in the Americas, even worse in the Middle East, 99.2%. It had only taken a few weeks for it to go global, and you were dead within a week after contracting it, perhaps two if you were unlucky.
The pathogen itself was transmittable person-to-person via physical contact, direct fluid transferals, and via the air in the immediate area, however it couldn’t survive outside the body, nor in water, for long. So, unless you decided to French kiss a recently infected corpse and finger their butthole with your cut finger, you should be fine. It appeared that when the disease offed the host, it died along with them. Kind of stupid really, you’d expect it to go on and infect others, but guess not.
That is when my still inebriated brain put all the jigsaw pieces together, I spun around and looked at the stiff, I realised that there was a very good chance that the virus was the cause of their death. Our eyes darted to the top of the paper for the publication date; it was printed on the 16th December 2011, almost eight years ago. Since it had been so long my fears somewhat subsided, still wanted to wash my hands and mouth out liquid nitrogen though. We pretty much had zero chance of getting infected, well, at least from the bones inside the café. Yes, I know that sounds a bit selfish, and I did feel a tinge of guilt once we had calmed down. It sounds weird but we apologised to the body that they had died, I placed the newspaper back on top of the pile and walked back outside. I had to clear my head and think about what my next move was, something I wouldn’t be able to do in Café Corpse.
Going by the date of the newspaper, we were at least able to confirm that we hadn’t manifested the power to create, and spread, a genocidal virus across el globe.
What the hell happened here then? It would take years for a body to fully decompose like that, and I doubt the locals or government officials would just leave a corpse in a café window like that to scare off the kids. Perhaps I had time travelled? I certainly don’t remember a global pandemic in 2011 that nearly wiped out humanity; I think we would have remembered something that. So that scrapped the time travel theory. That left three options open, I was either having the weirdest nightmare ever, we were having a major psychotic breakdown, or I had somehow teleported to an alternative reality. I know that last option seems the least plausible to most people but come on, we could slow time and teleport across the world, why would alternative reality jumping be off the tables?
To test the first theory, I walked over to a window and head-butted it, naturally it hurt like a bitch and the pane cracked, I could feel blood dripping down my head. Not a dream then, shame. Possibly a concussion though.
I jumped to various cities across Earth and ended up in Tokyo. It was similar to everywhere else I had visited, empty streets, skeletons (mostly in homes), the only real difference in Tokyo though was I could not read the literature left lying around. Since I didn’t really know how to prove to myself whether we had completely gone off the rails (unless of course we started dribbling and a padded cell suddenly materialised around us) I had to accept the facts presented. In my inbred rage of wanting to be left alone, I had transported myself to another version of Earth, one where some viral infection had wiped everyone out.
Whoopsie-daisy.
Now that we had come to some form of conclusion, the solution should be simple: concentrate on our home reality and skip right on back. No such luck though, no matter how hard I tried, we just kept jumping back to that reality’s version of the apartment. I could ‘sense’ our actual home, our original reality, but I felt some kind of resistance preventing me, the barrier between realities perhaps? Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to let me slip through like I had done in Vegas. The situation I found myself in started slowly sinking in, I was on an Earth where I could very well be the only human left. Not just that, but more importantly, we were stuck there, it would be fair to say I was more than slightly uneasy at our current predicament.
Finally, I’m going to bed. Ciao for now babes.
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