June 25, 2012 - Fairfax, Virginia

537

Went to Lisa’s homemade shooting range today. Let me tell you, it took a lot of arguing to convince her to bring me along. She’s still treating me like I’m fragile or something.

As expected, I was absolutely terrible. It’s kinda hard to aim with only one working eye. And these guns all seem to have been designed with two hands in mind.

Lisa’s become pretty good, though she’ll never admit it. I guess it’s nice that one of us was managing to hit the targets.

After several more of my shots veered wildly off target, I’d had enough. Threw the gun onto the ground and spent some quality time shouting whatever offensive sounding phrases came to mind. God dammit god dammit god dammit. Why’d I have to end up like this? I’m USELESS! Can’t even fire a gun straight! Can’t do anything but lie on a couch and drink! Fuck….

At least Lisa’s… I’m… she’s… WHATEVER, trying to be understanding. She tried to console me, telling I’d get better, I just needed to get used to this, I’d be back to hitting bull’s-eyes every shot soon. After all, the future I-330 she knew could shoot fine with only one eye, right?

Oh hell no. Comparing me to that crazy sociopath? Still, she had a point. If Future Bitch can do it, there’s no way in hell I can’t as well.

Question was then, how did she do it? What’s she got I don’t? Well, a demonic arm of doom, for one. And she was a helluva lot better at time stuff than me when we last fought….

Time… you know, it’s not completely accurate for me to claim that I can see time. “See” implies vision, and it’s not that, it’s… argh, damn human language and its lack of fourth dimensional vocabulary!

Point  is, I don’t use my eyes to “see” time. Which means that it hasn’t been affected by my recent injuries.

Looking down the shooting range, I could see the timelines spreading outward…. Coming out from everything, branching out, shifting from every moment.

Pointed my pistol toward the target, and I could see the lines branching out from the gun. Hundreds of lines, containing infinite possibilities. One of those branches had to be the timeline where my bullet hit the target. Just had to focus until I could single it out….

Pulled the trigger, gun fired. Missed the bull’s-eye, but hit the target. Hell yeah.

After that, I was hitting the targets nearly every time. For the first time since I got out of that hospital, I felt like I actually could competently do something.

I was happy, Lisa was happy for me, we bought a cake in celebration because fuck yeah cake. I didn’t eat much of the cake because I was too busy talking about all the possibilities this opens up for me: mentally following the timelines to predict attacks, do crazy parkour things, etc. etc. Why the hell didn’t I think of this before? Much as I hate to admit it, maybe Grendel and Future Me were right: I have been thinking too much like a human. I suppose it just took a good existential crisis to make me wake up and realize, hey, I’ve got a sixth sense. I should probably take advantage of this more often.

Although right now it’s use is probably going to be limited to fighting very polite people who are willing to stand still and not attack me for several minutes as I try to figure out which timeline is the right one to shoot them from. Never said it was a perfect system, but with some improvement…. I’m liking the possibilities.

I-330