Michael woke up in the dark. The nightmare he woke from seemed so real that he was shaking. He could still see the shiny black bumper of the German sports car as it knocked him over on the street corner.
He reached for the bedside lamp but couldn’t find it He pawed and pawed and got frustrated and sat up. The lights slowly came up by themselves and an old man in a white gown carrying a clipboard was looking at him.
“Hello Michael”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a sort of reception committee.”
Michael suddenly thought about the dream and felt a cold lump form in his gut.
“you mean I’m dead, right? You’re like St Peter, right?'”
The old man chuckled.
“Let me answer the second part first. I am a representation of what you expect to see, I really have no physical form or name. If it helps you can think of me this way and call me Peter. As to the second part, well not dead yet. You are in a bit of a coma right now and you will be waking in a few hours. But we wanted to have a talk with you while you were out.”
Peter helped Michael off the bed and started walking. The walls of his “room” seemed to dissolve. They seem to be walking down an office corridor. On either side young men and women hovered over what seem to be combination computer stations and drafting boards. One or two of them looked up at him and seemed to regard him as junk yard dealers regarded a wrecked Maserati.
“you see, it’s about you an a matter of scarcity. Have you ever thought about what went into making you?”
“I suppose carbon, and hydrogen…”
“Oh no not the physical aspects, but your characteristics, how you think, feel, what makes you scared, or brave?”
“No, not really, Don’t really get what you’re saying”
Peter sighed. They walked on and past all the tables and seemed to now be walking on a catwalk over a lab of some kind with several tables and technicians working with vials and what looked like gas cylinders.
“you see we made you here. Everything from the physical parts of you to the undefinable qualities that make up your character. You were designed out there and built on one of these tables years ago.”
Michael tried his best to take it all in but was still stuck back at the part of being in a coma. This had to be a bad nightmare of some kind.
Peter saw he was facing some resistance. He walked to a large monitor and showed Michael a collage of images from his childhood, to youth, to his adult life and little by little he felt Michael coming around.
“Some qualities like bravery, genius, charm are rare. We have limited reserves of these. Back before you were born we were expecting a minor Armageddon breaking out just as you would reach adulthood. We needed heroes and brilliant scientists, and leaders fighting for the side of good, but do you know how “expensive” those can be?”
Michael shook his head
“Yet we needed minor leaders, and heroes, and so on to take up the fight as well, and that’s where you came in. We had tagged you as a minor hero and imparted some rare qualities into you in small amounts.”
Michael and Peter walked over a table where a finished human received the last of his qualities before being sent out
“But as sometimes happens. these Armageddons sometimes get called off. Bad scheduling, mystical misalignments, who can say? Your career as a minor hero got called off and we tried to fit you into a humdrum everyday existence as an accountant. Long and short of it is, that we want those rare qualities back. As I said those materials are rare and this was too good an opportunity to pass up. You won’t wake up the same as when you went into the coma but you will be happy.”
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