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Unit Alias #1: “The Flow of Water Breaks the Dame!”

As the bullets whizzed passed my head, only one thought stood out from all the noise and panic around me: I know I should have eaten toast instead of that bagel this morning. It’s just, I get so tired of the same old whole wheat toast and almond butter; it’s not my fault the fabric of reality starts to fold in on itself everytime I choose something new for breakfast. After another twenty seconds of some mindless brutes trying to turn my apartment into a modern artist’s tribute to swiss cheese, a voice of remote reason finally speaks up:

“Leonardo Crews, please step away from the bean bag chair”.

I can’t help but roll my eyes. It’s her: Sharon Winstead. The woman who would surely be my handler if the US government had their way and I became a secret agent or lab rat or whatever the heck they’d want me to do with these powers. I stand up and make a couple steps to the right as I put my hands on my head. At least the government sent a nice pair of legs to yell at me.  

One of the armed boneheads she brought with her speaks up, ‘Why would you hide behind a froggy bean bag chair?”

“Cause who the hell would ever shoot a froggy bean bag chair?” I challenge him and the two other armored doofuses.

They all mumble and meet eyes until one of them sheepishly says: “he’s right…” 

Sharon, the not so love-able stick in the mud that she is, won’t let me have fun for too long. “Your work here is done unit Alias. Go downstairs and do the usual routine with the landlord; come back, as I planned, when you’re done”. 

A couple ‘yes ma’ams’ and military mumbo jumbo is thrown around as they leave. I can’t help but feel sorry for guys who would willingly join an organization that has the loyalty of a teenage boy after a positive pregnancy test. 

“Real smart fellas you have there.”

Sharon looks at me, I guess with a hint of disappointment. “You know as well as I that if they were going for the kill, you’d be dead”. 

“Along with a couple billion realtites and, knowing how much the universe seems to adore me, time itself. And what’s up with ‘your plan’ anyway? The military never came in guns blazing before. Don’t you geniuses know how important I am?” 

“Are you threatening us now Leonardo?”

I relax my arms at my side as I walk into the pantry. The universe is on my team, as always, when I see one of the only undamaged things is what I’m looking for. I walk out in a sufficiently better mood with my packet of poptarts. “I’m just asking questions that pertain to the continuation of existence itself”. 

Sharon scoffs and continues on: “Do you understand the magnitude of such threats, Leonardo?”

 I wave her off with my free hand after opening my second breakfast. “ What threats? And please, it’s Leo; I’m not an award winning actor, just a potential destroyer of the timestream” I see the red emerge in her face and can’t help but chuckle. It's a mystery to me how she was able to secure one of the most secretive and ‘important’ jobs in the world with such a short fuse. Despite the fact that she is totally unlikable, the babe has grown on me over the years so I give her restless mind a break: “Y’know I’m not gonna go awol, especially when you pay for all my streaming service. And, uh, time wouldn’t be destroyed, just altered in some terrible heinous way. Such as your occupation being changed to stripper.” 

She gives me one more uneasy look before moving on. “You have a place I can sit?” 

“You mean a place you geniuses haven’t shot up yet? Don’t make me say it.”

“The frog chair?” She groans.

“I do believe it's pronounced froggy bean bag chair.” 

She gives her eyes another roll as she sits down in the thing. “Can you sit with me?” 

Sharon likes to remind me that in some ways I’m still a normal human. An example of 

this being a woman with a face and a body like hers asking me to sit down with a voice like hers using a tone like that,  regardless of if she is a facist pig or not, I’m probably gonna sit with her. 

“What’s the prob Bob?” I sit criss-cross applesauce a yard or so across from her. 

To my disappointment, not exactly my surprise, she grows serious as soon as I sit down. 

“We can’t keep doing this dance Leonardo.” 

“Doing what dance?” I let out the question with a bit of playful innocence.

“That.” She takes a moment to think before she begins her spill. “The U.W.O is not going to remain patient. The fate of existence potentially depends on what you have for lunch and you refuse to follow the guidelines that we give you. You probably can’t count how many times you’ve been told this, but you’re an anomaly. The only thing we have to go off of is my father’s theories: the regular flow of time is completely dependent on you. Every decision you make can drastically change our world’s past and half the time we can’t even detect those changes. Not to mention, if certain parts of that theory are true, the effects you can be having on our future. Leo, history is a book that you can rip up on an unknowing whim and the future is more uncertain that it has any right to be”. 

“And yet we keep dancing…”

“Excuse me?” 

I look at her for a second thinking that she for sures knows where I’m going, but it becomes clear to me she doesn’t. “You’re coming here to warn me. The U.W.O  knows that you’re the only person I can stand getting yelled at by so they send you here every time I decide to live my life so you can flutter your eyes and tell me not to. How many times have you been here this month? I admit the whole shoot-em-up bit is new, but other than that this is the same old routine we’ve done for the past year. The  only difference is I’ve been doing it my whole goddamn life and you’ve been doing it for a fraction of yours”. 

The woman actually cracks a smile as she comprehends what I’m saying. I don’t know if it’s mocking or understanding me, but, seeing as I have nothing else to do, I let her spill. “You call this living Leo? I don’t know what you do to mess up the timestream, but, judging by the hours of footage that features you exclusively watching ‘He-man’ reruns, I sure as hell know it’s not living. What, you played a new video game? Flushed the toilet too fast? You’re not living; the life you’re leading is not worth risking history for”. The sarcasm and aggression starts to leave her eyes as she looks at my face. I begin to open my mouth in defense when she shushes me with a new, almost maternal, attitude. “But I didn’t come here to play our twisted game of house. I’ve been in contact with my father”.

The news strikes a rare chord of hope in me. Sharon’s father was the closest thing I had to a dad when I grew up in the compound. He was also the one who convinced the board of directors to let me out when I turned eighteen. “Let out” is an odd way of saying letting me live in a heavily guarded cell that just happens to be in an apartment building. He ended up deciding he didn’t want to be a mindless puppet and left the U.W.O along with all his research. Last I heard, which was a very long time ago, he was up to a more scholarly pursuit. “How is he?”

She smiles as she thinks of her father. “He’s getting philosophical in his old age. After he left, he started living like a hermit in some remote island in the Atlantic. A place they’d have trouble finding if they ever were to look; he’s getting into some rebellious stuff there Leo. He wants you to leave and come see him. He wants to end this dance.”

“By ‘rebellious’, do you mean some dooms-day shit?” the words come out as the hope comes out of me. “We don’t know what the reaction will be if I get in a boat or plane. We barely know what’s gonna happen if I leave this building again. Make fun of me all you want, but, you basically said it yourself, 80s tv is the only life I can safely lead”.

“He told me to trust him. If he’s wrong, the situation will be no worse than it was before”. I could easily read the doubt in her face. “Or at least to him.”

“So what? The world ending is the same as the world not ending? Existence is all a lie and it doesn’t matter anyway? Don’t tell me he’s become some quasi-intellectual pothead who posts on psychedelic-themed online forums.” 

She rolls her eyes in response to my joke. “He’s disillusioned with our current world authority. He lived his whole thinking a plantery world order would be a good thing, so much so he helped to achieve it. Apparently after all those years and work, he thinks their practices are going to end us all. The way he sees it, the world may just end tomorrow; it’s any day now to him. In a certain manner of words, he’s desperate.”   

“And you?” 

She gives me another genuine look. “I trust my father as a leader and I care about you. He believes it's the right thing to do and you can’t keep up like this. Some of the things I’ve had to do this past year is enough for me to give up on doing the right thing through the government. Your problem is a problem that we might be able to fix on our own and trying is a lot better than you just rotting here waiting to die. Any ‘director’ who doesn’t like that can screw off.”

I let my eyes widen. “No one’s in on this? Why’d you bring the unit with you? Surely the bigwigs wire you up before you take their dogs for a walk?” 

“Watch your words; dogs we are no more, unit Alias, at least, is on this. No wires or strings attached. The general consensus is the current plan of keeping the world safe from you is eventually going to collapse without change; I can’t say they have the personal stake that my father has with the way he views us as siblings”.   

“Can’t really blame them for being worried or not particularly liking me, but they’re not here because of  what happened because of my bagel?” 

“What?”

“You came here to break me out, not to punish me for eating a bagel instead of toast?”

Sharon pulls a phone out of her pocket and scrolls through. “Oh…”

“What?”

“The ephilfel tower was built in Germany”.