I’ve been sitting in a concrete, steel reinforced room with three two-way mirrors and a twelve inch thick titanium door since the turn of the Millennium. My prison has 238 digital micro cameras that let my keepers watch and record every single movement I make. Well, every movement the cameras are able to see and record. Truth be told, the normal human eye has no chance of ever catching my every gesture.
You see, there is an unbelievable world under the everyday façade that you wander around in. That’s my world, the one you are oblivious to. Not that the world you are living in now isn’t the real world. By all means, it is. Your world is the only reason mine exists.
My 21st birthday was the pinnacle. By pinnacle I mean just how self-aware I came to just how different I was from everyone else. Brutally, the world was flipped upside down and has never been nor will it ever be the same again. Not for me and a few others, that is.
There is a lot of time to think about things. Years have passed and even though I’m stuck in this cell my learning has increased. I’m forever in the world training myself and moving even though no one notices me come and go as I please. In fact, it would have been impossible to learn as much if I hadn’t been cooped up in this depressingly gray tiny little room.
Even now I’m sitting here telling this story to just one of the 238 digital cameras as it writes using a little needle etching it onto a steel cylindrical disk or, to make it simple, a hard drive dedicated to this single camera. The real question to ask is which story or past am I telling? Is it the me in this room now or the me from before or the me in the future. I’ve come back to this place in order to tell my complicated story. I’m talking to the single camera and 237 cameras and 16 people on the other side of the mirrors only see me crossed legged in a room with no movement from my body except the slightest heaving of my chest.
Every single day they, they being the keepers of the keys, come in and perform numerous tests on me. Some are the same each day and some are new or at least variations on previous test. I like to keep them guessing so I’ll occasionally miss something here and there or change my psychological test answers from one to the next. It does amuse me.
It has taken me years to get control of my abilities. Though none of the people walking around this building know it, I now have the ability to tear down any of the walls or doors around me. Turning the metal into Jell-O would take the blink of an eye. It would be easy enough to just move so fast they could never see me. Burning deep inside of me is a tiny spark of revenge that I work at each day to keep at bay. Images and thoughts of tearing down every floor has had an unfortunate feeling of euphoria.
Now I’m just getting off subject.
Sitting in this compact space preparing for what is coming, I wait for the moment when it’s time for me to leave these confines. A moment to hear her delicately tranquil voice coming through the echoing reaches beyond this room, persistently urging me to come to her.
Remembering how it all started is important to keep me grounded. I wasn’t born this way. I didn’t wake up this way. It happened so quickly and at the same time it was so slow that it took forever.
It simply started when my hand went through a wall, a wall across the room. At least that was the moment my mind fused with it and we became one. At that moment your world didn’t exist to me anymore.
“Michael,” a voice said softly breathing heavy breath with a delicate whisper into my ear. “Michael, don’t you have a meeting?” My eyelids tried to unglue themselves and pop open. Where is here? What was that fluttering sound? Whose voice was that whispering in my ear? Turning my head to see the pale off white skin and pinkish cheeks of a blonde woman I couldn’t remember the name of. My mind was racing to come up with a name. “Sharon? No. Sara? No.” It was too early to try and remember names. “What, baby?” slyly. Of course it was smooth enough not to be noticed and went over fine. She looked at me with soft eyes telling me she had just woke up. “Don’t you have a meeting?” “Yeah,” looking at the window of blinds behind her. The sun was a bit of a pinkish orange with a hint of yellow reflecting onto the ceiling. At that moment I knew what time it was. “Let’s see. It’s 7:13, right?”
Bars had always been a fun place for me. Little did I know that someone in the bar that night was not my friend. Just watching me from the other side of the room as closely as they could. Of course, I was oblivious. “Michael!” My best friend in the world, Matt Hickson, was throwing me a birthday celebration at one of my favorite sports bars, Riled. “Get over here and take a shot, mate!” He yelled when he drank too much. The entire bar was aware of him that night. Matt worked for me. How could I not hire my best friend? He was the only one that actually tried to be my friend in college. I was the genius prodigy and he was the imported British guy. It worked for us. We were inseparable from the first pint together and the first shot of Tequila just sealed the deal. Jimmy, the owner of Riled, didn’t care that I was under 21. No one thought of me as a kid. They all saw me as the guy that owned a few successful companies an
Bathwater warm ocean washed over my feet as the shells rattled against one another. The sun was setting over the water to the west and reflecting all the way south. It resembled the Florida Keys with the palm trees and shells clanking around. To the north side of the sun was the Rocky Mountain range of Vale, Colorado as the sun went down. I could see the sloped snow range as the twinkling light reflected off every flake. My heart pounded faster to the north with the mountains than the south with the ocean. I could see myself sitting on the porch of the Chateau in Vale while I was sitting on the beach. I could see the shells of the beach on my feet in the sand from the rail of Vale. Could this be? As the sun went down, the light brightened in my eyes with the haze and glare. My eyes raced back and forth furiously. I could feel a cold hand on my face and echoes of a voice in the distance. “Michael!” The voice was growing loud
Sitting there catching my breath, I watched Bob coordinate everything for 30 minutes before he came back over to check on me. By then I had gathered myself and had plenty of time to focus my thoughts and memories of the last 35 minutes into some sort of single order. “You alright?” He didn’t seem to really know whether that was the right question to ask or not. It was obvious he did mean every word and was truly concerned with my state, but I could tell he thought it was a dumb question given the circumstances. Anyone else would have been in complete shock. “Yeah, I’m fine. How’s Fred doing?” Understandably, he looked over his shoulder at Fred and then back at me. Fred was active and animated talking to another detective. “I’m guessing you know him,” he said with what would become a normal look for me from that point on, puzzled. “No. I have no idea who he is. I just know his name.” Being honest was the best thing
In comparison to everyone else’s life, mine has been bizarre. I’ve always done things a little different and really just felt my way through life. If something felt right or I felt like something was trying to tell me to do something I just went with it. I made money and did some things with it other people might not have thought of or even thought was realistic. The black limo filled with Matt and the girls pulled to a stop in the underground garage on my 20th birthday. The ’10 Car Monty’, as it came to be known, worked. Well enough to get us away from whoever was chasing us. Riled, the sport’s bar was fun but the chase seemed even more fun for everyone, except me. Matt looked at the girls as the opaque glass became see through again. He opened the door and hopped out of the limo. The girls followed him out and I just sat there for a moment. My mind was still preoccupied with who it was that followed us. It was the tactical boots that we
It’s funny how people will make what seems like a meaningless decision that turns into a stupid one. Seeing it over and over again in my life, people have a tendency to overlook the things that they think are mundane or small. I’ve been guilty of that so many times in the past. Standing in the snow covered hills of Vale, Colorado, I was starting to feel a little dumb for not grabbing my ski jacket instead of just the normal day to day rain Columbia I threw on as I rushed out the….window. Well, that was a strange set of events to begin with. The tactical boots were a good idea. They were woodstove warm and keeping my feet bone dry. Of course that’s what they are meant to do so, it makes sense. Even in the freezing snow. When I slipped them on all I was thinking about was they could handle any climate. With those boots, I really would have felt dumb if I’d chosen the Florida Keys with its hot dry sand. There was only one goal to
Nine years had passed while I sat in a small concrete room. They were good enough to give me a box-less bed and a metal chair and desk. No doubt they were waiting for something to happen and they either wanted me to be bored while we waited or they thought it would happen fast. Everyday of the last nine years, since right before my 21st birthday, had been spent in my room. Locked away from the world, but never locked out of my own mind. Day after day I escaped deep inside my mind learning every detail of this bizarre ability I had and learning how to use it consistently. Still, I was always aware they were behind the glass. Some of the learning had to take place outside my head just by the very nature of what it was. The majority, though, could be learned inside my ever expanding mind where I didn’t have the mirrors. The very first thing I taught myself was how to be in two different places at once. Each time I had done it before
Food has never been something I thought a lot about. Maybe it’s because I spent so little time between family dinners and posh restaurants. By the time I was sixteen I had my first college degree, though I didn’t graduate until I was seventeen with my masters in hand which I had setup that way. Before I was fifteen I had a company setup in my Dad’s name and was running it through him. I never really wanted for money so I always ate the same way, just enough for my stomach not to complain. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved food. Pulling up to the curb, I could see a sign that read ‘Mastro’s Steakhouse’. We were somewhere in Beverly Hills. Just a wild guess, but I figured this would be Bob’s choice. They had fantastic steak and I had been several times and at least once every trip to Los Angeles. I glanced over at Bob with a wide grin on my face. He looked down as to say “What”. “There goes getting out of my suit,” I chuckled and let my