The Shyam!

March 12th, 2012

“Welcome to the FUTURE!!” Eli cringed as a speaker blared a bit too close to his ear and tightened his grip on his mother’s arm. He looked up only to see his mother calling out excitedly to his father. Following his mother’s gaze, he saw his father waving at them from the other side of the crowd. “Don’t let go of my arms, ok Eli?” Nodding at his mother, he tightened his grip and let her lead him. His time was better spent staring at all the amazing things here than worrying about losing his mother. He had never been in such an enormous building before, nor seen so many people at one place. His parents had told him that the Union of all free countries in the world had been successfully formed. Aditya Singh from the Southeast Asian Federation stepped up and won the entire world over. And today was his coronation, the day that was being touted as the first in an era of peace.

All that was now left was taking out the small pockets of resistance that remained. And optimism was at an all time high with Aditya taking his place at the head of it all. Sure, Eli might have been just 14, but even he could feel the hope and optimism that seemed to saturate the building. The wars, the black outs, the hiding in fear would all be things of the past. Eli couldn’t believe that from tomorrow, they would be able to leave the light on as long as they wanted without worrying for their lives. No more rationing of food, no worrying that every day might be their last day. Aditya was going to change it all.

Or atleast thats what his parents had told him. And so he wanted to see this Aditya. What kind of man must he be to give hope to the people? What kind of man is able to bring bitter enemies who would kill first and talk later together and have them peacefully solve their problems? That is what Eli wanted to see. So he obediently followed his mother to where his father stood. His father had been camping out in the conference for the last two days to find a spot close enough to see the Union President. “Ah Eli, what did I tell you? I found the best spot money can buy. One day, you’ll be able to tell your kids that you were there when history was made.” Eli just smiled and nodded, not really understanding the relevance, but he had rarely seen his father smile in the last four years. So any occasion which brought smiles couldn’t be too bad.

And there he was, walking right past him. THE Aditya Singh. He had seen his picture on every page of every newspaper he had read in the last few days. Oh sure, a few people seemed to be calling for his head, but the majority had nothing but good things to say. The first thought Eli had when he saw Aditya was that he was smaller in real life. Much smaller. And then he started speaking. And before long, he had the audience enthralled. Eli found it incredible how Aditya kept everyone hung on his every word, his every sentence. They cheered when he wanted them to, and silenced when he raised his hands. Eli watched the unadulterated glee in his parents’ eyes as they cheered for their new leader. And that was when they heard it. Gunshot.

Eli had gotten tired of the speech and had let his attention wander to the multiple television cameras to the security guards and then finally to the growing commotion in the area beside them. It first started with a few annoyed glances at someone pushing through the crowd. It wasn’t long before someone shrieked out, “He’s got a gun.”. And then things got ugly. Real quick.

Eli could see the security guards carrying guns split off into two groups immediately. One group set off to secure Aditya while the other headed towards them to take care of the disturbance. While his parents started dragging him away from the commotion, Eli’s eyes never strayed from the commotion. He could see the guards surrounding a single individual, even as he shouted and waved frantically at where Aditya was heading surrounded by his guards. Eli could make out the bearded man straining against the armed guards, before they subdued him with a blow to his back. While it brought him to his knees, the man valiantly tried to get up, and aimed in the direction of the Union Lead. That action was enough motivation for the armed guards to react swiftly and decisively. With multiple gunshots to his arms and chest, the man was stopped brutally. The last Eli saw of him was his bloodied face and pale blue eyes staring at him.

Turning away with a whimper from the grisly scene, Eli was dragged along by his parents away from scenes of death. Even as they were evacuating the center, they heard a blast, this time from near the stage. That was the cue for mass panic, as everyone started screaming and running for the exits. Eli cringed and shouted in pain as people stepped on his feet as they scrambled past them, pushing and shoving and doing whatever was necessary to get out of what seemed to everyone a giant execution chamber. It would only be later that people would realize the repercussions of this day.

Date Unknown, Approximately 25 years later

Eli brushed away the sweat dripping from his brow as he stared at the chalk board in front of him. The swaying bulb overhead wasn’t providing him much light, but then again, he didn’t have much of a choice now, did he? He had no estimate of time or date, not that it mattered either way. Daylight and sunshine were all long forgotten luxuries that had disappeared after the nuclear fallout. It all came back to that day, he concluded. That day when the Demon Lord of Chaos^TM started messing with his life (and everyone else’s as well, but that was just collateral damage, he was sure).

He scratched his beard as he contemplated what to do with the overflow from the temporal backlash. This was the missing piece. He knew it. Once he could get the equations to balance, approximate the Van Kilweed’s multiplier, he could plug it in and give it a whirl. Its not as if he had anything to lose. While running through various scenarios in his head, he turned towards the clippings he had stuck on the other wall. He had had 25 years to think, analyze, examine and study the series of events that had led to the near extinction of humanity. And it all came back to that day. The 12th of March, 2012. He snorted as he remembered his father telling him what a momentous occasion it would be. If only he knew, if only…

Eli hadn’t spent long staring at the board before a dizzy spell hit. The first time he had experienced it, Eli had panicked. Now it was routine. It was sheer luck that his roommate back then had some medical knowledge and had diagnosed it as radiation overdose. Not that it would have been a difficult diagnosis, considering almost every single person alive would most likely be suffering from it. Taking a deep breath, Eli plunged a needle into his arm, exhaling as he pressed the plunger and muttering, “Its fine, its fine. nothing new.”. The effects weren’t instantaneous as they used to be. Eli coughed into his hand as he disposed of the plunger, idly noting in the back of his mind that he was coughing up more blood than usual. “Not good, not good. Need to step things up. Wonder if Sam would have been able to do something about the increased blood?” After a second, he replied to himself, “Nah, probably not. Atleast mom and dad aren’t around to see this and worry themselves.” Sighing to himself, he muttered, “No one is.”

Hindsight is 20 / 20, Eli realized for the umpteenth time. No one had predicted that offing Aditya Singh would have had so many repercussions, but in hindsight, it seemed obvious. God damn Solomon had stepped up, and had ridden the fear and rage of the public to power. And his first act of power? First strike on the various pockets of rebel territories across the world. The total annihilation kind, the take no prisoners kind, the utter savagery kind. And the people, the sheep had lapped it up, believing it to be just retribution. The idiots. And they learnt the hard way what happens when you push too hard. Things break. And they did, spectacularly.

All it took was one person. Last name Austin, first name Manny. He was a security specialist in charge of the nuclear facilities. And it seemed he was the only human in the Union with an ounce of conscience. Feeling bad for the oppressed, he had let in a rebel into the base, thinking that giving them leverage would bring about negotiations and an end to the hostilities. Poor sap. He was shot by the very same rebel he let in. And then the rebel activated the nukes. And blew up the control room. Or did some crazy thing to prevent the failsafe measures from activating, Eli had never found out what exactly. And on January 26th, 2013, 90% of earth experienced the first and last nuclear war (if you could call a one sided attack on the entire earth a war) ever. Most of the population was caught unaware and instantly eradicated. Lucky bastards.

The unlucky survivors were ones who were at the fray edges of the populous zones or deep underground for one reason or the other. With barely any survivors, the surface of the earth a boiling pit of radioactivity, forced to survive on bare minimal leftovers and cans, it was a harsh existence. Absently grabbing a cockroach running past him on the floor, Eli bit into it as he cursed his decision to visit the Wieliczka Salt mines in Poland. That had protected him from most of it, but his parents who had been waiting for him outside weren’t so lucky. He had eventually made it out with a few survivors and to good old industrial London before everyone else succumbed to various diseases and disorders. Humans weren’t meant to survive such a nuclear winter.

But survive he did. Eli had read tomes of history, isolating the solitary cause of the fallout to the assassination of the peace loving Aditya Singh and Solomon’s takeover in his absence. If only that assassination could have been prevented. And that had been the start of an exercise in futility. But insanity had strange effects on the human psyche. The impossible just seems a little harder. And the most obtuse approaches suddenly seem logical. And so Eli had toiled. For 28 years. With a singular focus. Through a decaying body, through starvation, through isolation. He had no clue anymore to what day of what year he was living in. He sometimes even questioned whether he had passed on and this was all a surreal hallucination.

But the intricate art in front of him (and Eli considered himself an artist) proved otherwise. That he was alive. And dying. And insane. And probably the first and last person on earth to successfully create a time machine. Possibly. Maybe. All he had to do was try it out. And then go back and assassinate the asshole who assassinated Aditya Singh. And maybe die in the process, but hey, what better way to go than by saving humanity (though whether it deserved to be saved or not was altogether a different question he dared not poke at, lest Eli decide otherwise on a whim). And all he needed now were batteries. Lots of them. Goddamnit.

The next day, as he looked at the rusted hunk of metal in front of him, Eli wondered what purists and fiction lovers would feel when they found out that the first (and last) time machine ever built was not the shiny, sophisticated, artistic technological piece that everybody envisioned but instead a rusted, hunk of metal held together by tape and wires. But beggars can’t be choosers. And the car batteries still seemed to have some juice. So with a quick flip of the switch, Eli walked into the pod. And stared and scratched his chin as nothing happened. Eli crouched as he saw a wire had split. Licking his fingers he joined the split ends only to arch his back in pain as the machine whirred and creaked into action. He could feel his body decomposing into atoms even as he wondered if he would be the cause of the earth’s destruction instead of the Large Hadron Collider as people had predicted back then.

March 11th, 2012

Eli wiped the sweat off his brow as he checked with his other hand the gun he had concealed in his trousers. He had three bullets he had somehow scavenged, the fourth one had been wasted in ensuring that the gun still functioned. He glanced up at the bright sun and rubbed his eyes, pretending that that tear from his eye was caused by the dust in the air. Breathing in deeply, Eli exhaled and plucked a grass from the ground, staring unbelievingly at the greenery that had vanished from the earth of his time. Looking at the videos and campaign posters, he still had a day to go before Aditya Singh would be sworn in. And he, Eli, would make sure that history will be rewritten. “Yes sir, no more nuclear winter for anyone.”

As he got up, he saw a girl pointing at him and whispering to her mother. The mother scolded the girl for pointing, before she turned to look at him, and winced. The wince, though subtle, hammered home the fact that he was a mess. With a haggard, unkempt look, discolored skin and an uneven beard, even a tramp would think twice about associating with him. Shaking his head to clear such maudlin thoughts, Eli struggled to his feet and decided to figure out a way into the convention center.

March 12th, 2012

“Welcome to the FUTURE”, bellowed the announcer right in Eli’s face. Eli scampered away cradling his ears which had become overly sensitive with nothing to listen to in the future. Cursing under his breath about the noise pollution, Eli ran his hand over the gun that lay concealed. Assured that it was still there and he had successfully smuggled it in, Eli started walking over to the section overseeing the route to the stage. From what Eli remembered, there were two assassination attempts that day. One which the guards took care of right in front of himself. The other, he was here to take care of.

Before long, the procession started, with a few introductory speeches. Eli barely paid attention to them, preferring to spend his time looking for the would-be assassin. Just as Aditya Singh was announced, he spotted the assassin inching his way towards the route to the stage. Eli wondered why no one else recognized or reported his suspicious behavior, with the way he was not listening to the talks nor meeting anyone’s eyes. “Is everyone else this oblivious?”

As Aditya Singh started talking, Eli was subjected to the man’s charisma and fervor yet again. Just as the speech reached a fever pitch with the audience, Eli saw the killer spring into action, moving decidedly towards Aditya. Realizing that it was now or never, Eli started inching towards him, hand on his gun. Eli suddenly broke out into a racking cough, drawing his nearby fellow audiences attention. “Are you all right?” asked one concerned bystander, while the others inched away at the sight of fresh blood on Eli’s hands. Ignoring the concern and the blood on his hands, Eli looked up immediately, biting back a curse as he realized he had lost sight of his target. Brushing aside the man beside him, Eli strode purposefully towards the entrance lending a deaf ear to the muttered annoyances at his haphazard movement.

It was during one of these brush asides that his jacket was pushed aside, revealing his lone possession. And wouldn’t you know it. The Demon Lord of Chaos^TM made his reappearance in Eli’s life. As logic dictates when you see a lunatic (as that is what Eli appeared to be to normal people) with a gun, you shriek. And so the lady who saw it did. “He’s got a gun.” The security, which was at an all time high during the event immediately started swarming his area. The scene evoked a sense of deja vu in Eli’s memory, but couldn’t remember what it was.

It was then that he saw Aditya Singh being escorted away from the podium. And right towards the assassin, whose life (which was about to be dramatically shortened) was made much easier, as his target was being led right to him like lambs to the slaughter. As the guards surrounded him, Eli shouted out in desperation, “He’s gonna kill the President of the Union. I have to stop him.” As he tried to lunge past the guards, he felt a sharp blow to his back bringing him to his knees. His vision swam as he tried to make heads and tails of what was happening.

As his eyes focussed again, he saw the assassin a few steps away from the President. Deciding that this was it, Eli reached for his gun and started aiming it at the assassin. But a decaying body has nowhere near the reaction time of a well trained army agent. And so even before Eli could bring up his arm completely, he could feel his body being pierced in seven different locations by what he assumed was gunfire. The strength leaving his body, the gun clattered to the floor even as chaos unfolded before his very eyes. As his body hit the ground with a thud, his eyes remained opened for a second longer before it closed forever. The last thing Eli ever saw was the pale blue eyes of a terrified kid staring right at him.