Three Words No. 1: Winning Entry

Here's the winning entry from our first Three Words contest in February 2009:

Refugee
by Dave Sands


Years ago I had left my home, aboard a ship named Sanctuary. It was the biggest ship ever built, the peak of jump technology. I was young, but I remember my mother, trying to hide her tears from me. Her eyes were puffy and red. It’s an image that has stuck with me. I didn’t understand then why my father had to stay behind. I guess I still don’t, but that was a long time ago.

I wonder if mom is okay. I wonder if she’s lost in time and space, or if she’s just dead. When it was all going to hell, I tried to find her. But it all happened so fast. Here I was, a refugee once again, crammed into the cargo hold of some ship with a name I couldn’t pronounce. One of the crew had asked me if I needed anything, a blanket or a pillow, and I couldn’t help but laugh. We were the last humans alive in all of time, if I understood things right, and this guy is playing flight attendant.

And just like that, we were back on Comorro Station. I didn’t get to see it the first time, just on the news. Some people seem to be tied up in everything that is going on in the universe. Every explosion, every murder, there are a few people who always seem to be around in the right place at the right time. Not me. I try to avoid that stuff. My mother ingrained that into me. Stay out of trouble, keep your head down. If you don’t look for trouble, trouble won’t look for you. So I distanced myself from the refugees. Work was easy enough to come by as a mechanic.

It’s hard to say exactly when it started, but I’m pretty sure it was shortly after arriving. I first noticed it when eating. It was subtle. I had taken a few bites, but when I looked back, my meal was whole again. Then later, when I was working on a ship, it seemed I’d blacked out a bit. The repairs were finished, but I didn’t remember finishing them. Still, I didn’t think much of these things and the memories came back eventually. I thought maybe the fumes from the fuel.

I had a dream soon after. Not a dream, but I thought it was. Comorro was dead, her flesh decaying. The smell was horrific. We were stuck, starving. All the ships that could help us had been destroyed or had left and weren’t coming back. I didn’t know what happened at first, but slowly the memories came back. There had been an attack, rogue Hekayti. It happened fast, but I was only beginning to remember. And then it was morning in my room, Comorro was fine. The memories slowly faded, as dreams often did.

The blackouts had continued, and were getting worse. I would lose whole parts of the day. I went to bed on Thursday, and woke up the previous Tuesday. Déjà vu became common place. Maybe you’ve figured it out already. I hadn’t yet, but to hear about it is very different than living it. You are objective, looking at this from the outside. At the time, I was sure I was suffering from a serious head injury or something similar.

So I went to see a doctor. His scanner showed nothing. Post traumatic stress disorder, he told me. I had lost my home, my mother. It was natural that my mind was cracking under the stress. But that wasn’t it. What did I care if my home had been destroyed? I’d been moving from place to place since I was ten. And sure, I was sad for my mother, but I hadn’t seen her in a while. Truth was, the move to Comorro felt fairly commonplace to me.

But that’s when it really started to fall apart for me. It was no longer days I was skipping. It was years, backwards and forwards. I was a child on Earth. I was setting off on my own at sixteen. The past was easy to figure out. The future was harder. How many years had passed? I had a lot more stuff in my room; I looked older in the mirror. The memories would come back if I stayed there, but then fade when I left. Still, like a dream, if I thought long enough it would come back to me.

I kept returning to that future of death and decay. Hungry, resigned. Some began to feed on the dead. But it didn’t matter because we were all going to die. Once, I had gone farther than I had been before. There were only a handful of us left. I too had succumbed to my hunger, feasted on the corpses of those who had passed. But everything was eaten or rotten. It was hard to think, I was fading in and out of consciousness. I felt my life slipping away from me. And then I was back in the present. Past, present, future. Those words meant so little to me now. You could ask how long this had been going on, but how could I answer?

I was working with a Hekayti in one of the airlocks, he didn’t talk much. He kept glancing over at me when he thought I wouldn’t notice. I was leaving Sanctuary with my mother, not understanding how hundreds of years had passed. Now I understood though, I understood how nonlinear time really was. I was listening to an argument in the docking hub. I was fixing a ship on Sivad. I was losing at poker. I was dying, starving.

There was panic and fire all around me. A bomb had just gone off in the docking hub. Ships were destroyed, and people were dead. Explosions rattled the whole station. I saw the Hekayti through the smoke, slipping into a shuttle. I knew him, had worked with him a few times. And I knew he had done this, but I knew I had figured it out too late. And we were all going to die.

I was working with a Hekayti on one of the airlocks, he didn’t talk much. He kept glancing over at me when he thought I wouldn’t notice. And my life, my memories, all came flooding back. All of them, from birth to death, were laid out before me. I knew him, and I knew what he would do. So I write this, wrote this, am writing this, so you will know, so someone will know. I’ve never killed before. But I have died. And so have you all. And I can’t keep you from dying, but I can keep you from the death I saw.

I can lock the airlock, so he can’t override it, but only from the inside. We’ll both die. I think this is what I was supposed to do all along. This is why I became a refugee in time. I know there were a few races out there that liked to play at God. Maybe one of them did this to me so I could change the future.

I had left my home, aboard a ship named Sanctuary. It was the biggest ship ever built, the peak of jump technology. I was young, but I remember my mother, trying to hide her tears from me. Her eyes were puffy and red. I was in the airlock, I am in the airlock …