An Undeserved Chance

By Justin Mynheir

Aram sipped black coffee in a café on a street corner, quaint for a metropolitan area. He scanned his mark from a rough wooden chair on a little porch outside. An insurgent patrol, one of a few hundred targets to be obliterated in the same second, drove by.

The missiles were already launched.

To celebrate his achievement up close, Aram snuck onto the planet and chose this café for the minor target. Those generals popping champagne on the ships above never understood decorum in victory. Aram preferred his way.

The force of mentally piloting the ordnance raining from above shook Aram in his chair, but a passing waitress frowned in pity. Funny how palsy and imminent destruction looked the same to some people.

The patrol stopped at a crosswalk as planned, but chance disrupted Aram’s meticulous timing. Never in his career had Aram taken the life of a civilian, yet a mother and daughter in the crosswalk changed that. They vaguely reminded him of his own wife and child. Perhaps that was the foundation of his sudden guilt.

His muscles constricted from the stress of so many missiles crashing down by the orders of his thoughts, but he turned this rocket as far as he could in the last second out of faint hope. A foolish one. The most important mission of his career ended with a horrible flash, intense and orange like the fires of hell.

“This resumé is certainly impressive, Mister Kazarian.”

Jim Warren flattened out his grey suitcoat, and he blinked through the pages transferring into his retinas. He was apparently wealthy enough to afford one of the faster ocular augmentation models.

Aram inhaled a final breath of peace before the inevitable questions. With a single thought, he sent the last page from his own augmentation’s memory banks into Jim’s. He missed the simpler times when it took at least a few seconds of focus.

“This is fantastic,” Jim said. “An exemplary mission success rate, praise from generals, and you want to work for us?”

“That’s why I applied.” Aram forced a smile. He wished that he had taken the pills Milly suggested. The presence of her or their daughter would have calmed him. Scars of age and stress never healed easy.

“Confidence! I love it.” Jim pointed a finger-gun at Aram, oblivious to the painful meanings such a friendly gesture could carry. “This position is yours. You are a war hero… no, a legend. Sorry if I’m freaking out a little, but I admire you so much.”

Strange how admiration made somebody point symbols of death at someone skilled in causing it.

“It’s not worth mentioning, really.” Aram tugged at his black slacks with one hand and scratched his grey-speckled hair with the other. “I’m just here for the job.”

The office was roomy on the walk in, even with its opulent furnishings. Now, Aram’s presence seemed to choke the space. He twisted his thumb and two other fingers as if turning a knob. His doctor recommended the gesture for dealing with anxiety.

“You controlled the ordnance of an entire fleet with your mind!” Jim leaned in. “You blew up insurgents safe and sound in their own city. How did it feel to have that much power? If you aren’t comfortable sharing, I get it. But I really don’t understand why a man with your skills would come work for a pyrotechnics company like us.”

Aram closed his eyes. He found himself in that café, where he’d already been a thousand times over. Why had he installed the memory retriever into his brain after coming back from the war? Some said reliving mistakes was problematic; he found it cathartic.

Aram, having suffered the memory enough for the day, opened his eyes. Jim waited patiently for a response, hands folded in front of him almost as though he prayed. A thousand prayers would not change all Aram did.

“I didn’t feel,” he replied. “I wish I could say the same now.”

A crowd of thousands gathered in a colossal park as evening sunk into the oceans of nighttime. Trees and daisies filled the field where observers did not. Aram stood in the center of a circle of circuit boards dotted in buttons and connected by wires. A couple of tech guys who helped him set up sank into lawn chairs nearby.

Milly waved. In her arms, their daughter giggled. Aram returned the wave, his heart pounding with the deep love for his ladies. The time had come to make amends where he could. He owed many people that much.

Vibrations shook Aram’s bones as cylinders rocketed into the dark blue of the starry night, trails of smoke blocking the twinkling white dots. His heart fluttered erratically at the strain as timing sought to disrupt his plans once more. As burning pulses cried out in his chest, he focused his wavering mind skywards.

The fireworks exploded.

Blue erupted first, but the colors danced their way through the rainbow as they dissipated. Some of the fireworks spun in helixes and shed sparks over the crowd. Others unified their bursts to form shapes of animals, a skyline, and people. The popping exalted joy rather than heralded war.

Aram gripped his chest as the torrential pressure of his mind tore into his body, but one more display remained. He leaned on one of the consoles and willed his remaining mental energy into forty separate rockets. They launched.

The sky exploded in a collective flash of every color but orange. Up among the stars over a crowd of cheering people, the beautiful, innocent face of Aram’s daughter smiled down at them, his one true success in life shaped by colors. He smiled back. The embers cascaded down, sizzling well before reaching the grass.

Aram collapsed. The techs jumped from their lawn chairs and ran to his side, but his heart already surrendered, having repurposed his skills for one final, precise act.

“Look,” he whispered, “I made something beautiful.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When Justin Mynheir is not editing his Military Science Fiction trilogy or writing an Urban Fantasy one, he attends college, outlines new ideas, writes short stories, studies any number of statistically violent topics, and defends his distracted daydreaming by calling it “creative practice.”

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