The Gaming Outpost

“Jack, Jack, oh, wakey-wakey….” I heard, and grumbled back to my mother.
“Let me sleep just a …”
Wait. That was not my mother. I’m not fifteen anymore, hadn’t been for over a century.

I was on my feet with my plasma pulser drawn, and aimed at the uniformed man who had a small smile on his face. My boots shuffled in the worked, dry-baked soil of the empty field as I backed up to make sure I had everyone in the waiting group of four men under my gun before I relaxed.

“Chipper.” I whispered. The bio-mechanical finch on my shoulder with the eyes of an eagle, and the talons to shred steel, chirped back. No snipers, good.

None of the four men, two in black uniforms with red hourglasses against yellow backgrounds on their shoulder patches moved. Neither did the glassed fellow in the gray suit, or the whacked out fellow in the nice pale green pajamas who continued staring at the sun.

“Whats his deal?” I asked the speaker, jerking my shoulder toward Pajamas.
“Its rude to speak about me, when you can just ask me Jack Montgomery.” His voice was mildly chiding.
“Um.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“Oh, yeah.” I said flailing.
“I’m a seer, an oracle, a wanderer of the future paths of time, a master of ….by the way, you have a candy bar in your left pocket. Its chocolate. You think…”
I pulled it out, and tossed it to him as he ravenously dove on it, and luxuriously imbibed every last bit.
I stared. I mean I like chocolate, and I’ve been known to over-indulge which is why I run ten miles every morning, but this guy was practically weeping for joy.
“It is why, our seer saw you, Jack. Chocolate bar caught his attention.”
“Really?”
“My names Eldon Cooper, Capt., and when all you can see is Ragnarok, along every possible future, and no one has had a chocolate bar for the last ten months, well, yeah.”
The chocolate bar was finished, and Pajamas lay down in the midst of the vast open field, and began to cry inconsolably until the man in the gray suit jabbed him in the neck with a needle.
“Sergeant Branson.” Capt. Cooper said to the beefy sergeant who grunted unhappily. He stepped over to the seer, and tossed the man on his shoulder.
“We have a car waiting, and while the Sergeant is a redoubtable man, we don’t want to risk giving him heat stroke.”
I looked at the sergeant who smiled bleakly. Personally, I thought he could hike across a dessert juggling flaming torches and not get heat stroke. He looked very tough. Well, so am I.

I’ve been in a dozen wars, some on Earth, some off Earth, and even one in Hell. Yeah, I really did kick open the Gates of Hell, but I was not armed with a bucket of water. I had a sword formed from a superstring (as in the stuff that helps tie the universe together below the quarkial level.)
“Of course.”
We marched to the edge of the field, a half-mile away. Chipper occasionally chirped letting me know in his code that we were being recorded and scanned with X-rays.
“You could just ask.” I said. “No need to feel me up.” I added as I got into the black limosine on the empty two-lane country road that bordered the empty field I had arrived in.
The sergeant chuckled, and the captain spoke.
“The muckety-mucks thought better. But you earn me ten marks.”
He holds out his hand to the gray suited man who paid with an irritated face.
We got in, and a sudden rush of AC cooled us. Nice.
I saw another larger Houglass emblem in the back.
“Time Travel Unit, Captain Cooper?”
“Temporal Velocity Change Research Division, Mr. Montgomery.” He smiled faintly. “Nothing so vulgar as time travel.” He seemed to be laughing.
“How is it different?” I asked.
“We get paid more with a longer word.” The sergeant said smiling.
I looked skeptically at the captain who nodded his head in rueful agreement.
“So…Armageddon, how…”
“No, Ragnarok. The Creator is unhappy with us, I’d wager, but Thor even more so.”
We zipped through the roadways, and I noticed some were broken down.
“You’re going to have to explain.” I finally said, drawing a blank.
“We are a good and wonderful species now, Mr. Montgomery.” He said. I raised an eyebrow. “All the best people say so. We’ve genetically curtailed the need to overeat, and to overspend. So it was such that our good and wise government dropped a virus to wipe out the cocoa plants. After all, chocolate is bad for you, and we’re so very, very good.”
“Chocolate.” Moaned the seer in his sleep.
I looked at him.
“Special medical waiver, and it was very hard getting it. We had to go straight to the President to override the Health Commissariat.”
We went through a town, and nobody seemed about in the day.
“And while I agree that seems stupid, but ….Ragnarok.”
“Ah.” Said the Captain.
“Ah.” Said the Sergeant.
I did not say ‘Ah’, but it was very hard indeed.
“The very nub of it.” Quoth the Sergeant.
“These idiots will keep on going for five minutes in their stupid little game.” The gray suited man snapped out. “They love to see if someone has the nerve to call them out. Which is the problem. We’re so ‘very, very good’ that we don’t need to fight, nor defend ourselves. Right now, we stand at the end point of a battle that started two decades ago to destroy Courage.”
I blinked.
“How?”
“Oh, the usual way. Movies where the hero was the coward. Stories of the fatal hubris of the reckless man, but the wisdom of the cautious lady. Punishments for endangering civilians when you ran into the burning building to rescue them. Truth be told, I think most people found it a relief, especially men. They were told ‘lay back, goof off, take a vacation’, and boy howdy did they.”
“Last two years, it got worse. Now we not only have to cope with Non-Agression Seminars, and drugs to calm self-defense instincts, and public shaming of heroes, but we’ve had certain heroic people imprisoned and operated on.”
“Two of my best men. Good at hiding what they were, but stone cold brave. They got caught and went under the knife. Came out terrified of small dogs and pretty much everything else.” The Sergeant said bleakly, working his hands unconsciously in a gesture I recognize. Its how you break someone’s neck.

MORE LATER….