There Was A Time

“No, I’m not really super happy about this either,” Ariel muttered into the phone. She knocked another high-tech piece of trash to the ground around the other bits of the PILC-DI. The machine looked like it had been nuked, and from the inside.

“Look, Batey, I was here as soon as I could after you rang. The big guy’s the one who could travel at will remember?”

She kicked over some debris as the phone squawked it’s reply. “Yeah, from the inside, like I said. Almost like their travel beams.” She turned over another stone with her heel and sighed when she spotted a mostly burned picture showing her with her father, Wesley. She picked it up and looked at the reflection of herself from six years ago. The pre-teen floating in the image seemed like such a dream.

“He’s going to do what?” Ariel let go of the picture and snapped her attention back towards the burst PILC-DI. “When? Now? Hell!” She moved fast, leaping over and behind one of the overturned pieces of lab equipment. The PILC-DI had already started to glow by the time she peaked over. The mass forming was humanoid, but metallic. One of her father’s ancient robots.

The mass seemed to ripple like water, before solidifying in the heart of the remains of the PILC-DI. And then there was a star where it had been. She covered her eyes fast and ducked down to make sure she wasn’t caught in the travel beam. They were common enough these days that even a normal person knew not to look directly at them unless they wanted to risk blindness, being pulled into the beam, or both. She wasn’t interested in either.

When the light died down, Ariel peaked over at the PILC-DI, or the dust cloud that was left of it. The robot was gone, left only with cough inducing flecks of matter hovering in the air where it had just been. A sound came from her left hand and she pulled the phone back up to her ear.

“Yeah, as soon as the teleport finished. Now we know they have Theo.” There was a pause, a longer one than she was comfortable with.

“Well yeah, of course we’re gonna go get him.”

There Was A Time by Justin Diehl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.