When you've got Chrono-dysplasia you lose track of time a lot, but based on my personal notes I think it's been almost four years since I last screwed up. Or, rather, it was four years before last night. God damn it. The rules for not screwing up are pretty simple to understand - do the temporal awareness exercises so that you only lose control when you sleep, and then find somewhere to sleep with clear temporal boundaries. Like, when I found myself too far into the future I snuck into the Grandview Heights Motel the day before it was going to be demolished and slept there, in a filthy room covered in graffiti. I got a few spider bites and had to drug myself to actually fall asleep, but when I did I had nowhere to go but backward. Chrono-dysplasia won't ever move you to somewhere that you'll be up in the air or embedded in a wall or anything. Likewise, if you want to make sure you move forward you pick a place that was just built.
For me, for the past four years, that's been my house. I bought it with a lot of help from my family, and I was the first tenant. I appear in different years but always the same bedroom. Sometimes - mainly if it's after 2024 - the door is on the opposite side of the room with external stairs leading down because someone else is living in the rest of the house, but that's okay. Usually I have clean clothes waiting for me, my sorted newsfeed ready to prep me for the world outside, everything I could ask for. And then last night I had to go and ruin everything.
Four years of really limited bouncing, keeping things under control, and then I get cocky and decide I should fly to Las Vegas - just for the day, right? After all, it's been so long that I've stayed in one spot. I told myself I could stay awake the whole time, and I almost did. Then I was there, on the plane, and I figured... well, I can't travel from a plane. Right? This power, obnoxious as it may be, would never drop me from forty thousand feet. And what are the odds of another plane being right here in the very spot I was as I slept? Well I guess the odds - whatever they are - aren't zero. Now it's 2002 - the very height of the terrorism panic over September 11th, and well before anyone knew what Chrono-dysplasia was. They don't take kindly to people showing up mysteriously on airplanes with a fake-looking ID and a mysterious device implanted in their neck (yes, fine, I know it's tacky but you would want a hands-free phone implant too if you never knew what year you were going to wake up in).
"One last time," the government spook says, "how did you get on that plane?"
I can wait it out, fall asleep here somewhere. This will be okay. The cavity search was unpleasant, having my implant cut out was traumatic, and this whole ordeal is embarrassing - but I can make it. I just need to get them to let me sleep. Another suit comes in, hands a file to the one that has been questioning me. The spook's eyebrows go up like elevators. Are they learning the implant was advanced technology from their point of view? Did they find little two-year-old me in Cincinnati?
"Well, well, well. We've found our record on your twin brother. Did you think we wouldn't find out?"
"I don't have a twin brother."
"No," the man says, "not anymore. Is that why you were sneaking onto airplanes with strange devices? Are you trying to get revenge?"
"I have literally no idea what you're talking about. Look, can I just... get some rest? I'll tell you anything you want in the morning."
The man shakes his head. "Fine. We'll do this the hard way." He leads me to a cell and shoves me inside, locking the door. "In the morning, you'll tell us about yourself and about your brother."
"I already told you, I don't have a brother."
"You know, this is the very cell he was shot in? Why someone would break into a government facility and then hide in an empty cell is still a mystery to us. One that you will soon be solving."
Oh, shit. Shit. "No. Wait. Don't go. I'll explain everything, you just can't let me fall asleep here. I have a condition, it sounds crazy but you have to believe me!"
"Good night, mister Doe. We'll see you soon."
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