Chapter Text
2035
“So what happened?”
“Hit by a car it seems. He wasn’t paying attention at all, knocked into a coma. Seems like the only thing keeping him alive is a machine. What a way to go...” Bridge’s face fell slightly, thinking about the incident that had occurred only a day or two ago.
Sky hummed in response to his partner’s quiet lament of someone they hadn’t even met yet (and considering the circumstances, probably never will.) as they walked down the rather empty hallways of the Amber Beach hospital, dragging a large heavy box along with them. It was late at night, the only people traversing the hallways besides themselves were the nurses walking in to check on their patients.
“Here it is.” Bridge stopped him in front of one of the doors near the very end of the hall.
“We shouldn’t be doing this Bridge.”
“We were asked to.”
“We’ve never--” But Sky was already too late, Bridge was pushing the door open to the small hospital room.
It was pretty empty, clearly the patient hadn’t been there long at all because there weren’t any signs of it being lived in at all. No flowers, no gifts, nothing. The only signs of life were the patient himself and a young lady sitting by his bed, eyes staring at the television that was playing silently in a high corner of the room. But they were unfocused on it, she wasn’t watching it. It took her a few moments to even realize they had entered, but she was snapped back into reality when she saw them off to the side and she stood up quickly.
“Are you two from the agency?” She asked them. Her voice threw Sky off for a moment. She wasn’t from around here. “My name is Chloe Randall...I’m his sister.” She gestured towards the man in the bed.
“Yes, my name is Dr. Bridge Carson, the main technician of this duo. And the grumpy looking man next to me is Dr. Schuyler Tate. But please, call him Sky. It makes him seem more approachable.”
Sky furrowed his brow at Bridge’s comment. “We’re just a bit concerned. We don’t usually do people as young as him. Usually the people we do this on are much older...On their way out.”
“But you can still do it, right? It’s still possible?” She asked.
“Well...It all depends on him.” Sky admitted. “I don’t know if we’d have enough memory from him to be able to complete what he wanted.”
“What is his wish?” Bridge asked curiously.
Chloe went silent for a moment, looking at her brother’s still body. The only sound in the room was the steady beat of the heart monitor next to his bed. “Well...Chase said that what he wanted was...Riley.”
“Riley?” Sky sounded incredulous. “A girl?”
“Boy.” Chloe corrected. “But...that’s what he wanted. To fix a mistake he made with Riley a long time ago.”
Bridge and Sky looked at each other before Sky finally spoke. “It’s going to be difficult. It’s one thing to give them a childhood dream to fulfill. But this relies on someone else to play along.”
Chloe’s face fell. “You can’t do it…”
Bridge waved his hands. “We can definitely give it a shot.” He looked at Sky. “Right?”
Sky took a deep breath. “Alright. We’ll try.”
Chloe looked more relieved as Bridge began setting up the equipment from the box. Sky watched her turn to her brother Chase and gently grab his hand, whispering something into his ear. A quiet reassurance perhaps, before she looked back up at Sky. “So...How exactly does this all work? Chase never explained it to me when he talked about it.”
Sky almost wanted to ask why someone Chase’s age would even be thinking about it. He was only in his thirties, but he decided against asking Chloe, doubting that she’d know the answer herself.
“Well, we’re going to go into Chase’s memories. From there we’ll manage to hop back far enough through all the memories he’s had to an ideal point where we can plant a desire into Chase’s mind from a younger age. In this case it’d have to be something involving this Riley. We flip the switch and hope that the desire sticks long enough for Chase to prevent whatever mistake he made. Then in his own mind, he’ll see the life he hoped for.”
“So none of it will actually happen. It’ll all just be in his head?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be happy.”
“That’s the goal.”
Chloe seemed to be content with that answer, her tense posture loosening slightly.
“The system’s ready.” Bridge said quietly, moving forward to place a helmet onto Chase’s head while wearing one of his own. “Ready when you are Sky.”
“Good luck you two.” Chloe whispered.
Sky nodded at her before placing his own helmet on his head. “We’ll be going to his last accessible memory before the accident happened, and then go on from there. Make sure the doctor keeps an eye on Chase’s condition. Press this button here on the machine if you need to warn us of something so we can get out of there.”
She nodded, and soon after Bridge typed something onto the machine he had set up, the hospital room melted away leaving Bridge and Sky in blank void for a few moments before they arrived suddenly on a sidewalk in front of a shop selling skateboards and other skating paraphernalia. In front of it, looking at a display intently was Chase himself, looking more lively than the man they had just seen on his deathbed, though there was an air of tiredness around him, like even now he still wasn’t quite right.
“Excuse me?” Bridge moved forward first, tapping Chase on the shoulder.
The man looked surprised. “Oh, um. Do I know you two?”
“Yes. Well, no. I mean, sort of. We know you in the near future but you don’t know us. I mean you obviously knew of us, er will know about us. Well maybe you already know of us already but what I’m saying is you called us but we never actually me--” Sky covered Bridge’s mouth before he continued any further.
“We’re from SPD’s branch of memory traversal.”
Chase’s eyes widened in recognition. “Oh...I was just thinking about calling you guys to ask some questions…”
“You already have! Er...You’re going to. Well for us you already did but for you it still hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to happen soon and--” Bridge stopped himself after seeing the look on Sky’s face.
“Don’t confuse him. We’ll have to reboot and start over again if you do that.”
“So you guys are here to grant my wish?” Chase looked between the both of them.
“Riley?” Bridge asked.
Chase nodded. “Riley.”
“...What about Riley?” Sky pressed.
“I fucked up. Bad.” Chase admitted. “I completely blew him off when I really didn’t want to...I want to change that. I want to say what I really meant, but couldn’t. But it happened so long ago, like 20 years ago already...”
“Well...Alright.” Sky sighed. “We’re going to be hopping back through your memories in little jumps. We’re going to need important things, like mementos to be able to go further and further back until we can get the right desire in your head. Then we’ll come back and flip the switch.”
“Do you have anything particularly special on you? Anything?” Bridge asked. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be about Riley at the moment. Just anything from the past.”
Chase felt around himself for a moment, before pulling out his wallet and with it a piece of folded up paper. “Will this work?”
Bridge looked at it for a few moments. “Looks like it. Thank you.” He grinned. “Well, we’ll be going.”
Chase grinned at them, the tiredness that had been etched onto his face previously momentarily vanishing for just a few precious moments.
That was when Sky pulled out his SPD communicator and pressed a button on it, and the world all around them froze in place. “Well, let’s get going then. I want this to get done as quickly as possible.”
He grabbed the piece of paper from Bridge’s grasp and it started glowing gently, and the world all around them, along with Chase Randall began to melt away again to reconstruct another memory, from a mere 3 years before at the local Amber Beach carnival.