The Long Good Saturdays
The Long Good Saturdays
The Affected Live Weeks of Life In A Day, But Life Expectancy Drops Right Off The Cliff
Welcome to a piece “From The Future”. Each week, I write an essay and/or fiction for you.
My primary focus is completing three books, including “RETRIEVE”, being written this year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
Most pieces are best read online, via the Substack’s App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Below is a preface for a new novel. A writer acquaintance mentioned an idea, within seconds, I had a title, and I had to write “page one”.
You know that feeling, you just need to do something, before you lose that feeling.
PREFACE
Some said it was born in a lab, swaddled in a whitepaper. Others said it didn’t happen.
When stories morph into histories they become realities, and mythologies run loose.
Here is a story about what happened, shared before it, and I, disappear.
Years ago, a research grant, funded by whim of institutional games or writ of law, endured a gauntlet of research and publishing, attracted pre-seed and then seed money, were weaned on a Series “letter in the alphabet” financing and prepped for glorious public offerings. The sky was the limit for the founders who fundraised 24/7 on a jet.
But one day, the founders were disappeared by the-powers-that-be-or-want-to-be. A tragic airplane crash in the Pacific crushes the hearts of investors. The founders are reappeared into a nameless facility, in an unknown place, operated by people who did not exist officially. One of many such “Its” were born this way, founders are forgotten.
One “It” was tweaked, weaponized, and abandoned in the wild years later in a war zone, released after being set aflame by weapons which fell off the back of military truck thousands of miles away, and “fell” into a container ship, tucked between hundreds of others containers filled with other “accidental” contents, including humans, munitions, and luxuries.
A distant war’s self-appointed Saviors, at odds with the other, let fly with every weapon they could get their hands on at each other. At its worst, combatants went house to house, and took refuge in basements. The civilians who survived their house-guests made their way with whatever wasn’t confiscated, in backpacks and luggage, away from the smell of burning and decaying everything. The “It” tags along in the body of one civilian carrier.
Somehow, at one migrant encampment of escapees, fleeing from the end of the world they knew before the saviors, one of the civilians carried it in his body, the realized tweaked research, the “It”. A Journo on a deadline is in the field and catches “It” next.
An aide worker, a grad student who has seen too much and has been given too little to help, gives up and decides to go home, as an unwitting carrier of “It”, on an NGO sponsored flight home, and by strange fate, back to the same university where “It” was conceived in a white-paper. “It” bounces through the quad, lands in a dorm room, and finds a home inside a scholarship student who had the right twists and bends in his genetic code to become more than a passive carrier.
Everyone else goes about their day-to-day except for the student. He’s “off”.
Meanwhile, the thing, “It”, finds itself in the body of another student. She’s also “off”.
They each presented with the same symptoms of an unknown disorder. Blood tests and ultrasounds become X-rays become CT scans, which are followed by psych evals. Memos make it up invisible chains, and the two are transferred to a private clinic.
The doctors call the primary symptom “FOUND TIME”.
There is no way to explain what was happening at the time but those affected can live weeks in days. They can throw time in a freezer and make it last.
There’s just one problem, their estimated life expectancy drops right off the cliff.
The doctors come up with a treatment but it’s toxic. The regimen is five days a week, with a weekend of “detox”. Most do not survive, except for the two students.
One side effect after the treatment: the two surviving “Affected” can SHARE TIME.
There is a long technical name but between themselves, they called it “The Long Good Saturdays”, the best days ever, for as long as it lasts, however long that is.
With time running short for the two Affected, the doctors develop a cure which could work… but there’s enough for only one.
This is about what happened next, even if it didn’t happen.