Ch 19: Jim White's Own Story

The Futureness Part Two

May 16, 2025

Eric flails under the blaring alarm. Hanna doesn’t know what to do with Eric’s hands, whether to take them from his ears or to hold his thrashing head against her body. As his yelling grows louder, she tries both.

“It’s the fire alarm,” Hannah shouts to Methyl. She extricates herself from Eric and pulls a chair from nanna’s letter-writing desk to the center of the room. “Go up and kill the battery, Jesus Christ!”

Methyl steps onto the chair and with a hard stretch reaches the alarm.

“What do I do?” she shouts.

“Kill it!”

Eric crumbles into Hannah’s arms, fists over his ears. With two strikes Methyl knocks the demonic device off the ceiling, bringing sweet silence. She leaps off the chair and grabs the radio.

“What? Say that again,” she yells into it.

There’s nothing.

“Richard!”

“I’m getting Eric out of here,” Hannah says, as though she’s trying to help Methyl instead of her own boy.

Methyl shouts Richard’s name into the old radio, but she’s met with less than static. The radio stands mute.

“Oh,” Methyl says. “Where is he?”

“Please stop burning down my house,” Hannah says, clutching Eric to herself.

“She can’t help it,” Eric says.

“I can help it,” Methyl says.

She still wears a sweatshirt and pants, and the shoes Xavier gave her, so running isn’t out of the question. She’s through Hannah’s front door as the woman’s screams of wait trail her.

The night air is glorious. The space per cubic whatever—this freedom is enormous, and even the trees on Eric’s block seem to stand like sentinels guarding her escape. Methyl sprints down the street farther than she’s been from the house in months, with no destination, no phone, no home, and no holding onto anything like old radios—just the sense that she’s closed out once again her place in a family and another vision of the world. As she runs, she tells herself that this is how it ends.

Deep, dull thuds resonate in the air above her. Methyl feels soft sonic booms brush the fine hair on her arms. She thinks earthquake when a black blur fires out from the perimeter of her vision of the trees, hits and grasps her and takes her skyward. Her stomach drops. She hurtles, held by the blur, upward over the block, houses and the trees, then pauses in a sickening hover.

“Remain calm, Sophia,” multiple male voices say in harmony.

“What are you?”

“Your friend called me Jarhead. We met before, at the e-waste pits. You surprised us, Sophia. We are going back whence you came.”

“Jarhead, no.”

The robot has Methyl clutched to its chest with both arms around her waist.

“Just down the street, Sophia. No sparks, please.”

“I’m running away. Let me go.”

They descend.

Jarhead’s chorus of voices asks, “What do you know about Jim White?”

“Who?”

Jarhead turns to Methyl and speaks in rhythmic, distinct male voices: “Gabbyella would like to know.”

“Put me down, Jarhead, okay?”

“I will bring you to Hannah’s house, but won’t you tell us Jim White’s Own Story?”

“What?”

“At only fifteen years old, Jim White was unafraid. I thought you knew of him.”

Below them, Hannah and Eric’s house is haloed by a streetlight. Jarhead slowly descends to the sidewalk. A semi-trailer sits in the street, jet black. Two figures carrying long guns loiter at both ends of the truck.

“Gabbyella’s in there,” Methyl says.

“She is inside,” Jarhead says.

“Xavier?”

“With Eric’s mother.”

“Oh, shit,” Methyl says.

She pushes open the front door. Inside, on the sofa where Hannah spends so many sleeps, the man sits plated by black body armor. When Xavier sees Methyl come in, he relaxes into the sofa as much as his armor allows.

“You’re here, Sophia.”

“I’ve always been here. This is fucking Dayton.”

“We are on a timeline, Sophia. I’ve been explaining it to Hannah.”

Hannah paces the room, wringing her hands. Eric dozes on a side chair with a blanket tossed over his body.

“Welcome back home, whoever you are,” Hannah says to Methyl.

“I’m me,” Methyl says to Hannah.

“There is a group,” Xavier says as he adjusts the plates of his armor around his shoulders. “Anti-immortalists. They were expected, but not at this volume.”

“What volume?” Methyl says.

“We have basewater in thirty-four percent of the planet’s potable water, discounting areas the substance was re-routed or destroyed for local reasons having to do with personalities of particular individuals who will not live a blink over twenty-five years more.”

“The people without basewater will die.”

“As in the beginning,” Xavier said. “Sit down, Sophia.”

“I’ve been sitting too long.”

“The rollout of the serum or is it a vaccine now; the messaging hasn’t been uniformed by any stretch,” Xavier says. “…of the imagination. Some regions filter it. Can you imagine?”

“They don’t know what it is,” Methyl says.

“They know that it cures cancer,” Xavier says. He puts his hands to his head and drops them again. He points at Hannah.

“You! Nurse with no oncology patients, what say you?”

Hannah freezes in the center of the living room, her hands held in each other’s grasp.

“You’re scaring me,” she says.

Methyl meets Xavier’s eyes.

“Not one to lay blame, Xavier, but what about Richard? What are you trying to build?”

“I’m trying to save something. To outline—okay, to begin with, just the scope of the project… Gabbyella, make some noise about what beats the cure to cancer, the cure to more than cancer, and use someone else’s cloud. Let’s see the death counts. And then give me back Siberia.”

“Whose?”

“Serum from the Theians. Death rates from us. Don’t drift on this story, Sophia, we don’t have time.”

“What? Me? Who is Jim White?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Jarhead talked about Jim White.”

“Jarhead hallucinates.”

“And leaks.”

“Gabby, can you run population stats on what a thirty-four percent vaccination rate and—”

“She’s not taking your orders, Sophia,” Xavier says. He lifts a tablet from the couch. “I’m monitoring the space over Siberia, Gabby’s quietly tied down in the truck outside, and Hannah just made dinner.”

“Breakfast for, uh, for dinner!” Hannah calls from the kitchen.

“Gabby can hear us,” Methyl says.

Xavier flicks one finger toward the ceiling, nods, then returns to the tablet.

“Siberia, Xavier? What about it?”

“They exaggerate. Dayton is safe. But I’ve placed a bet that a tactical nuclear device will not, that is not detonate there, some-odd, some-odd, within the next few hours. It’s not happening tonight.”

“That’s what your money says.”

“Some of it says that. You know how this works. I’m in Dayton, sitting on Hannah’s couch and trying to save the world. Or—no, I’m trying to save Dayton from what I couldn’t see happening.”

“You had Gabbyella and the best minds in the world and—”

“I never imagined this many people would want to die, or to die trying to kill someone else.”

“What people? It’s all in hand. Tell me that.”

“Yep. No problem.”

“When are you going to tell people where the cure is from? What did you call them?”

“Theians. The visitors who never left. But no one would believe us. We’re saying it’s a scientific discovery, that’s all.”

“What are Theians?”

“Eric knows. Ask Eric?”

“I just have blurry memories,” Eric says absently to the sofa.

“But after,” Xavier says. “What were they like in your dreams after?”

“Just water,” Eric says. “And then the Big Room.”

“Where is the Big Room, Eric?”

The boy stares at his hands.

“Is it here on Earth?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it?” Methyl says.

“Times’s up,” Xavier says. He points at his tablet. “No detonation.”

“So, the world isn’t losing it,” Methyl says. “How much did you win?”

“Real estate that sits on several basewater reservoirs Gabby located. It will be the way back.”

“Back to what? You got her working again?”

“She’s learning her new structure. She’ll never move again. Whatever you put around her is part of her now.” Xavier turns off his tablet. “But there will be some form of detonation within twelve and seventy-two hours. I can’t get great on exactly when, so I’m not placing bets. Sophia, we will be at war—not now, but in a few days.”

“You’re a demon!” Hannah shouts.

“It’s taking time for the basewater to propagate, which is causing some temporary conflict.”

“Don’t bring war into my house,” Hannah says.

“I brought you millions of years with Eric,” Xavier says. “Just in your water. Hannah, we need to move somewhere safe. Sophia, go get that radio you burned out. It’s all we have. Gabby can work with it.”

Eric chokes on his tears. “It’s dark there.”

“Where?” Methyl says.

“Bats boil out of the holes.”

“Eric…?”

Like a sleep-talker, Eric mumbles on.

“Jim went down there with The Kid for three days in 1901. They brought lanterns, food, and a ball of string so they could find their way back out. They found the King’s Palace, the Queen’s Chamber, and the Big Room. Jim White was the bravest fifteen-year-old cave explorer in history.”

Methyl snaps her fingers lightly.

“Carlsbad,” she says.

“Carlsbad Caverns,” Xavier says. “It was a fallout shelter.”

“There’s pools of water there that no one has seen,” Eric says in his sleep-infused monotone.

Xavier takes up his tablet.

“Basewater,” Xavier says. “Why not? It’s the perfect place—Gabby, why didn’t you look at Carlsbad?”

Xavier’s phone rings and he answers. After a moment he says, “Keep going,” then ends the call.

“There’s lead shielding in some areas of the caverns, I don’t know. She was playing for time.”

“Which means,” Methyl says, “that no one else thinks basewater is there.”

“Doesn’t mean no one’s there, however,” Xavier says. He turns to Jarhead. “Scramble everyone for Carlsbad. Bring the wing for us and hold Gabby undercarriage. Any tech anyone can get their hands on, they bring it with them.”

“The wing is descending from orbit now,” Jarhead says with a single voice.

“He’s my son,” Hannah says. “He’s not your guru, or oracle, or whatever.”

Xavier stands up with his tablet in one hand. “He is, actually. All three. Now, everyone, there’s a lot more to get used to than Eric’s visions. Carlsbad is what?”

“Fifty-two miles south,” Jarhead says.

“The wing?”

“Three minutes.”

“Sixteen minutes to Carlsbad. Methyl, grab your radio. Eric, get your, get your stuffies. Hannah, pack a bag. We are leaving in three minutes.”

Methyl rushes into the old woman’s room and tries to lift the radio.

“I need some help!” she yells.

Jarhead shoves through the narrow hallway, shredding sheetrock on its way. It lifts the radio and reverses its steps out of the room and back down the hall.

“It’s thirty-four pounds, Sophia,” Jarhead says to her in its multi-vocal style. “I will take it. Help Eric.”

Inside Eric’s room, the boy is frantically pulling stuff from his shelves.

“No, not stuffies,” he says without turning to Methyl. “Except for Donna.” His stuffie snake he sleeps with. Methyl grabs it.

“What else?”

“Journals! Of dreams. They might help—”

When Jarhead shouts, it sounds like fifty men are yelling the same thing: “Front yard. Now.”

“Grab your last ones. We have to go,” Methyl yells over the wing’s landing whoosh.

Eric takes two notebooks.

“I have Donna,” Methyl says.

Eric looks back at his room from the hallway.

“Say goodbye,” Methyl says softly.

“Goodbye, home,” Eric says.