My Friend Came Back From The Future

My cellphone rang like an omen in the early morning. I was stuck to my bed like a digital leech. The Linux netbook lay in suspension to my left side while the desktop computer repeated a nightmarish screensaver. I reached for the cell and missed. My fingers tipped it to the floor with it's digital lungs still screaming out. As soon I grabbed it, the phone went mute, then a voicemail kicked in.
On the cusp of dawn I walked up to Pitkin avenue to check Miranda. I met her distraught and smoldering.
"What's going? I asked. She threw her hands up in the air.
"I dunno where the fuck he is man."
"You said he went to the bodega to get a 40?"
"Yea at 2:30 in the fucking morning. Said he couldn't sleep. wanted to take the edge off."
"I know how it is man. I get the same urges." She watched me like I was an irritant.
"Not our fault, you know how it is." She looked exasperated.
"No I don't know how it is with you black men, just fucking find him okay?"

I hit up the bodega but they didn't know anything. When I called her to explain she slammed down the phone. She didn't speak to me for the next seven years. He called me seven years later. My heart nearly capsized and then hell climbed into my head. I cursed him like a gutter mouth whore but he responded in a zen like geeky voice. He told me to meet him in the nearby Starbucks. He was adamant about not revisiting his old haunts which also included my apartment. My temperature rose another whole degree but I agreed. It would be orgasmic to eviscerate him no matter where we met.

A completely different Terrence stood before me. He had rebooted more than three sixty degrees from his previous incarnation. I felt a tsunami shock hit me. Gone were the long dreads, hip hop clothes and paranoid fidgeting. His skin shimmered healthy and the Tattoos had disappeared. He wore geek glasses, brand new slacks and a yuppie shirt. He held a smartphone in one hand and a tablet PC in the other. I felt like a bug under his scientific stare and my anger leaked from my pores. He sensed my vehemence and slid onto the chair opposite me.
"Well what do you think?" he said. I tried to speak but nothing came out.
"What do you think man?" You are not going to ask me what's going on?" I flew up from the seat. A few people turned to watch.
"I need a fucking drink man." He just smiled and said.
"K I will wait there for you and explain everything when you get back." Starbucks turned to watch me leave.

When I came back he was gone. I ran to Miranda's but nobody was home. I banged on the door and kicked it repeatedly but nobody came out. Their phone had also gone dead. I was about to leave when somebody tapped me on the shoulder almost freaking me out.
"What the fuck?" It was an old Latino lady who lived in the next apartment. She handed me a strip of paper and slipped back into her hole. There was an email address on the paper. I grabbed a 40 ounce at the bodega, drinking it while I stomped back to my apartment. I wanted to be properly soused before I even touched the computer. I wanted to curse him to kingdom come and do it with the sickest vitriol ever written by a mortal. His email reply changed my space and time forever. My inebriation and toxic rage evaporated slowly into the ether like so many regrettable things.

The night Terrence disappeared he was thirsty like the desert. He had tried to chill on the booze on that day but the thirst returned with a vengeance after midnight. He tried to hold out but at two thirty he gave up. They were outside the bodega waiting, strange looking men grasping strange computers. They gave him a choice. He could keep drinking and fall further away into a black hole of the past or follow them to the future for a chance to detox forever and change his fate. He had chosen the latter. They made him stare into a sinister looking webcam and everything fell away. The bodega disappeared yet it was the same street. The bodega was now a tech building with technology that had not been invented yet. Machines cleaned and trained him for seven days in all kinds of subjects from Artificial intelligence and hybrid calculus to bio-engineering and Eco-ethics. He never slept and didn't feel the need too. He rested on the seventh day and returned that night. It was the only other time that he saw the men who had recruited him. They were his handlers and they brought him back to the exact hour that they had taken him seven years before.

I sat back from the computer and rubbed my eyes. I felt lightheaded. The room seemed to swim out of orbit. I needed another 40 ounce to pull me back to reality. I was about to logout when the email disappeared in front of my startled eyes. A new message immediately appeared. It stabbed me deep in that place where spirit and soul bleeds. I had no choice but to comply.

Terrence became my handler and I became his crisis. I came back eight years later effectively becoming the only recruit who had rested on the six day and finished his training on the seventh. He hadn't seen the bottle of malt liquor that I had smuggled in and despite the machines genius five days cold turkey had brought me to the edge of spiders crawling underneath my skin.