Teleporter

“Have you ever heard of what a Teleporter is”?

Those lines echoed inside my head. My eyes were half closed when a strange man approached me when I was hanging around the park. I knew he wasn’t from the neighborhood. Almost everyone knows everyone in this part of the state. I wasn’t really worried. Our neighborhood isn’t really the type that crooks and thugs hang around in. The trees swayed against the wind and my hair seemed like it had a life of its own as it danced in the breeze, despite its boyish length. You know, kind of like one of those scene kids ranting about something irrelevant on the internet. I ran my right hand across my face, rubbing my right eye as I did. I gave the man an odd look under the cover of my hair that reached till my eyes.

He had a crooked, yellowish smile on his face. Like he was eager. It was kind of creepy. I could almost trace with a pencil the lines on his aged face, and the few hairs that dangled from his scalp didn’t help his appeal much. “Uh. Is that like the one from Jumper?” I asked, as I looked up. He looked as if he towered over me. Nothing about him stood out. He was just a plain, old coot. An old creepy coot. He nodded in excitement, quickly pulling out a weird device from his brown coat’s breast pocket. I thought it was a gun. But then again, what was the point on mugging a 16-yearold teenager? I mean I can’t even be considered a sight for sore eyes. Not with my acne problem, at least. Some people even joke about me being a thug myself. Imagine: a girl like me who looks like a crook.

He presented the device to me. Like he wanted me to take a look at it. I shot him a quizzical glance; I was really starting to doubt this guy. As I tried to shove him away from me for me to get out of the park bench, he took that opportunity to slap it around my forearm. The device just wrapped itself around my arm, almost a bit too lose, even. “Dude, w-what the hell!” I stammered, as I tried to pry the thing loose from my arm, only to find that it was slowly gripping to my skin. It felt like that one time at the clinic when the nurse took my blood pressure, only worse. As I shifted my eyes from the weird thing on my arm to the old man, I watched him as he replied with a cynical laugh, and then quickly pranced away from me.

It was disturbing -- a man in his prime prancing, that is.

A sharp pain came as soon as the man disappeared as if like smoke before my very eyes. I grabbed my arm and curled in pain as what felt like a needle dug through my skin. I could almost feel something being injected in me as it urged on in my forearm.

‘Sequence Initiating’

“What?”

‘Starting nanobot protocol 23”

It sounded like it came from my head.

There was a weird, metallic female voice inside my head.

Talking to me.

--Or at least announcing something, to be more precise.

I felt dizzy all of a sudden. It felt like my vision was swinging from left to right so fast that I felt like hurling right then and there. ‘60% Synchronization Ratio…’

I dropped to my knees already. My mind was so frazzled that it couldn’t even process pain anymore; or I think it doesn’t really hurt anymore, unlike a minute ago.

‘90% Synchronization Ratio…’

‘After a full synchronization ration, what in the world will happen then?’I asked myself – and by a long shot, I hoped the metallic voice would answer the question that just drifted aimlessly in my mind.

My sight wasn’t just running wildly from left to right now. Apparently, since someone or something thinks I haven’t quite enjoyed myself enough, my brain started making me hazy by throwing my vision up and down as well. I felt like laundry in a washing machine on turbo, even if I just staggered there in the middle of the cemented pathway.

‘100% Synchronization Ratio…’

“Fuuuuuuuudge.” I stammered, hearing that whatever that’s about to come is coming; and I don’t think it’d be something I’d like.

‘Synchronization Complete. Final Sequence initiating…’

Oh.

Well apparently, there’s another sequence.

Great.

My vision was starting to normalize again. My hands searched the surroundings for the park bench. As soon as my finger stubbed the steel frame, I knew I was still here in the park. I closed my eyes as I sat back on the bench. It felt sort of different. I don’t remember it being cold. It was summer.

I rubbed my eyes with my palms. The weird device that the old man attached on me was still on my arm. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt. Like I was never wounded in the first place. I opened my eyes after what seemed like minutes, and people were staring at me. I then realized I wasn’t California anymore.

‘Welcome, Subject 09 Stump, Elisa Marie. You are now part of the Teleportation Reconnaissance Squad.’