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When he was given a new job, he was like a man possessed. He wouldn’t come out of his room for days at a time.
Even when he kissed me and my mom on the cheeks in the morning, his mind was somewhere else.
The Supervisor moved aside for me to step in front of him.
“Go on. Have a look.”
I put my eye to the microscope and peered through it.
The focus wasn’t quite right for my eyes, so I turned the little toggle on the side to zoom in a little more.
What I saw was something alive but on a scale so tiny I had no idea what I was looking at.
It showed a bunch of tiny shapes that interacted with each other, then they shivered and returned to their previous position.
Then they would move off in another direction and then shiver and shift back to their original positions.
The strange thing was that when they made their initial move, it was a normal inching process along one axis, but when they moved back… It happened instantly, like teleportation.
“What am I looking at?” I said.
The Supervisor removed his glasses and carefully folded them up.
He massaged the top of his nose as if he’d been hard at work and hadn’t stopped all day for a nap, a break, or even something to eat.
“It’s the cells of a species called blinkers,” he said. “There are stories of them in every ancient civilization throughout the galaxy. Creatures that could see into the future and decide which course of action to follow next.”
“If you have their cells, I guess they must be real, huh?”
“Exactly. But we only have the sample. The creature eluded us. But we’ll continue our hunt. The question is, once we have him, what will we do with him?”
“You’re not going to use him to fight?”
It felt strange having this conversation with the man in charge of one of the Ikmal prisons.
Did he have anything to do with me being brought here? I wondered.
“The unique thing about the blinkers is that they can see into the future, not far mind you, about ten seconds,” the Supervisor said.
“Wow.”
“Indeed. Their bodies evolved to detect danger to such a degree that they can tap into God’s own design. He can see each of the potential pathways and then snap back to the moment ten seconds earlier and make a decision on the best course of action. Of course, that will always be the right one.”
It sounded like something from the X-Men, I thought. But something about the ability confused me.
“If he can see in the future like that, how do you intend on catching him?”
The Supervisor smiled warmly.
“Very good question! The answer is: with great difficulty. There are various weaknesses with his ability. He can’t see anything when he’s asleep, for instance, so if you put something in his coffee that won’t take effect for thirty seconds or more, you can catch him easily. The blinkers are an exceptionally rare species. He might be the only one in the entire galaxy for all we know, and it’s our duty to ensure his species doesn’t die with him. Do you agree?”
“I guess so.”
“Excellent. How about we take a seat?”
He led me toward a pair of short sofas that faced each other.
The Supervisor hurried to pick up a stack of papers and dump them on a side table.
