Because the Plot Demands It

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?

I do. Every minute of every hour of every day.

My name is Chase Walker. I like running, jumping, saving the world, and pizza. And I have a big problem. Well, okay, two big problems.

The first one I’ve already mentioned: I always feel like someone’s watching me. I mean, when you stop civilization from collapsing as often as I do, it’s not a terribly unrealistic concern; I make a lot of enemies, and sometimes I like to theorize to myself about who might be watching me. Sometimes, just for laughs, I’ll walk into an empty room and yell, “I know you’re watching!” If I’m really alone, no one will know, and if I’m not alone, maybe I’ve just scared the heck out of some secret organization.

Anyways, I’ve had lots of theories over the years, and sometimes I get so consumed by them that I’m almost unable to function until I get my next mission. I don’t even find hidden cameras or bugs or trackers or anything; I just get this feeling.

There are, of course, the obvious answers: the CIA, keeping tabs on me to make sure I’m not secretly collaborating with the Russians; the Russians, keeping tabs on me to make sure I’m not plotting against them with the Americans; or maybe some Saudi Arabian terrorist conglomerate that’s waiting for the perfect time to enlist me for my physical and mental prowess.

I’ve also considered more fanciful ideas. What if, for example, I was actually the subject of The Truman Show? Or what if aliens disguised as humans have me under surveillance because I’m the Chosen One meant to save the Multiverse, or because I’m actually an alien in disguise myself? Or what if I’m being hunted by the vengeful family of an ex-wife whom I don’t remember because I’ve gone through a Jason Bourne amnesia experience?

You can see how this might get out of hand at times.

Like I said, the best way for me to deal with my paranoia is to devote myself to a mission. Luckily, everyone already knows who I am; it’s no secret that Chase Walker is a good buddy of the president of the UN and is always looking for opportunities to help the world stave off its own destruction. What that means is I don’t have to go through the politics of permission to go where disasters are happening, or the hassle of assuming fake identities like all those Secret Service folks like to do. I just bite the bait the UN gives me and follow the trail until I get to the heart of the problem. And then I fix it, usually with a combination of speed, strength, good aim, and wits.

Do my enemies come after me? You can bet on it; but another thing I’m good at is disappearing when I don’t want to be found. Which is ironic, because even when I’m in hiding, when I’m positive that I’m invisible to the world, I still feel someone—or something—watching me all the while.

It’s also ironic because my life of world-saving and hiding from my enemies has become a pattern that’s so predictable—so formulaic—I’ve begun to suspect that maybe to someone out there, I’m not as off-the-radar as I think. And in this formula lies my second problem:

I get a mission. I complete it. I celebrate. I lie low for a bit, just enough for things to settle down, and then settle down myself in another part of the world with a girl I met on that mission.

Then, one way or another, she dies.

And then it begins all over again.

The second time was the hardest—not the first. Let me explain why. After my first major job—that mass shooting in Times Square that I prevented by beating my way through all the snipers hidden along the roofs and windows—I hooked up with this girl named Jarica Meek who’d been in the square that day. We took off for the Bahamas and lived happily. That is, until the cartel busted into our cabana in the middle of the night and put a bullet in her head.

Just like that, before I could even mourn Jarica’s death, I was thrown into the Río de Janeiro job. Everyone loved it when I put an end to the city’s biggest cartel by busting them in the middle of a major shipment on Copacabana Beach. But the woman whose brother I’d saved from the cartel loved it (and me) even more: Isabelle Santos.

For a while, it seemed like I’d found my happily ever after and would never again have to risk my life to keep mankind intact. Jarica’s murder had been a freakish fluke. But I knew how to protect Isabelle, and surely I could have the life of both a hero and a lover at the same time…right?

She wasn’t even murdered. We’d been walking the streets of romantic Paris when an out-of-control taxi ran her over. Just like that. And yet I felt inexplicably guilty—as if somehow I’d known all along that if I let another woman into my life, it would end just as badly for her as it had with Jarica. As if I was always meant to be alone.

When Isabelle’s death was conveniently followed by the scandal of the Louvre robberies, somehow I consigned myself to what I felt was my fate—to fight, to win, to love, and to lose. And then to fight again. Well, to make a thrilling, Bond-worthy story short, I won in Paris, both the confrontation with the thieves and the heart of Monique Devaux.

And what more can I say? I’m almost too numbed by experience to tell of the others…

…of Jazmin Veres and the bombing of Chain Bridge in Budapest…

…of Chen Li and the chemical weapon that was to be released from the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery in Hong Kong…

…of Ayanda Mudau and the poisoning of the Two Ocean Aquarium in Cape Town…

Brain aneurism. Trampling by immigrant mob. Fatal contamination from unmarked radioactive waste. Great White Shark.

All dead. And somehow, the more it happened, the less responsible I felt.

That is, until Chicago.

* * *

It was a particularly nasty plot this time. A genocidal cult had commandeered Willis Tower, and they were using a supercomputer to hack pretty much every database in the world—from the lowliest local library to the U.S. government. The president of the UN told me he suspected that they intended to use the internet’s secrets to incite World War III and thus bring the apocalyptic wrath of their monkey god upon the Earth. Or something along those lines.

I’d made it as far as the eighth floor, having zip-lined through a window from across the street and knocked out the guards in the office with two well-aimed kicks to the face. Once the gorilla-suit-wearing crazies were down, I slunk down the hallway with my SIG Pro semi-automatic and discreetly made my way into the large carpeted elevator.

That was where it happened.

The door closed behind me, and I found myself facing a middle-aged man in a pressed periwinkle button-up shirt and jeans. He had a well-trimmed goatee with hints of gray, a lustrous cowlick, and the approximate demeanor of Clarence the guardian angel from It’s a Wonderful Life. He smiled and gestured toward an office chair across from the full-sized desk that he’d somehow managed to fit into the elevator.

“Have a seat, Chase.”

Bewildered, I sat down and glanced anxiously at the elevator door, expecting more gorilla-suited religious fanatics to pour inside at any moment.

“My name is Kenneth Reisenberg. Don’t worry about those thugs; we’re safe here for now. I have something to tell you…something of great importance.”

“Okay…” My mind was still on the job, my accelerated heart rate only just beginning to slow down, my face starting to sweat. “Make it quick, though; I’ve got a hacker cult to stop.”

“Of course.” Kenneth cleared his throat and steepled his fingers. “Here’s the thing—I’ve come a long way to see you, at great personal risk. But you need to know…the truth.”

I raised an eyebrow, still not fully engaged with this strange man. “The truth of what?”

“Tell me, Mr. Walker…do you ever feel like you’re being watched?”

I sat up straight. “I’m listening.”

Kenneth seemed to go on with great difficulty, as if he were a doctor delivering grim news to a patient’s family. “Well, you are being watched. And the reason you’re being watched is because your life is controlled by the Filmmakers.”

I blinked, staring at him blankly. “What?”

“The Filmmakers. In my world—one similar to yours, but separate—the Filmmakers have the power to screenwrite anything into or out of existence. They dictate your every move, Mr. Walker—who you meet, the missions you receive, even the twists of fate that always, no matter how hard you try, leave you all alone. They do this simply because they want a good story, good footage for their films. Because the plot demands it.”

My brain felt like it had been cryogenically frozen and then dropped into a pool of lava, my spine shivering despite the Willis Tower’s well-regulated 72-degree temperature. “So…what you’re saying is…my life is The Truman Show. It’s all fake.”

Kenneth laughed and shook his head. “Your life is very real, Chase. All of it. I should be clear—the Filmmakers control your circumstances, but even they can’t read your thoughts or force you to act a certain way. Instead, they write scripts to cater your surroundings and influence you to do what they want. Words that alter reality. No cameras, no sets, no actors…” His expression grew somber. “Which makes what the Filmmakers do that much more despicable. They ruin lives…treat their subjects so cruelly…and all to make an extra buck at the box office.”

By now, the shock had begun to wear off, and my skeptical side kicked in. “How do you know all this? And why would you tell me? Is this just some kind of elaborate sales pitch? Because whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

“This is no hoax, Mr. Walker; you see, I was one of them. A Filmmaker. I’ve done terrible things…prevented people from ever finding peace, simply for the sake of lucrative sequels. That’s how they see you, Chase—as an action hero, one who can never truly settle down…who was always meant to be alone.

“I thought I was happy until the day my wife died. Car accident. I felt like God had played a cruel joke on me, giving me a taste of temporary joy and then ripping it away after just long enough so I would know what I’d lost. And then, when I returned to work, I realized the Filmmakers and I were doing just that with you and your companions—playing God. And I decided I would have no more part of it—in fact, I would try to put an end to it altogether.”

“So…if you’re from a ‘different world,’ how exactly did you get here?”

Kenneth held up a thick stack of paper. “Your script—the one thing the Filmmakers cannot write out of your world. I wrote myself here with the script in hand. The other Filmmakers haven’t noticed what I’ve done yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they—”

And then he was gone. Just vanished, like a frame snipped out of a filmstrip. Yet the stack of paper on his desk remained. I stood slowly and bent over to pick it up, reading the title on the cover page.

Chase Walker: The Hackers’ Holy War

Finally I came to my senses. This was ludicrous. A screenplay that could control real people’s lives? It was a cheesy sci-fi premise if I’d ever heard one. Whatever magic act the man had used to “disappear,” there had to be a rational explanation for it. Surely Kenneth’s omnipotent Filmmakers were about as powerful as the hackers’ imaginary monkey god.

“Well,” I said to myself, “now that the crazy’s gone…”

I threw myself back into the mission, taking the stairs to the top of the building. I’d rather fight a thousand gorilla men than go back into that elevator.

I took particular pleasure in fist-fighting the cult’s leader, shooting down anyone who shot at me (non-lethal wounds, of course; I didn’t do killing), and rescuing an attractive office girl named Jennifer Watson. Mission accomplished.

* * *

Something changed that day. For some reason, Jennifer soon became much more important to me than any of the other women I’d been with. Not that I hadn’t care for them, or worried that Kenneth’s crazy ravings bore any semblance of truth…but there was a part of me which resented the idea that anyone could control my circumstances besides myself. As I got to know Jennifer, I realized she had every quality I’d ever looked for in a woman, which made me inexplicably paranoid that my good fortune was too good to be true. I mean, just look at my track record.

Months went by, and I forgot all about that tangential event in Willis Tower, devoting myself wholly to Jennifer, who understood me on the deepest level. See, as it turns out, she was a UN agent herself and had been running recon on the gorilla cult when the attack took place. We always argued jokingly about whether she would have been able to handle herself had I not intervened to “rescue” her. That thought alone meant more to me than I would’ve expected—it was like a sign that the cycle of missions and deaths had ended, proving Reisenberg wrong. I never told her about that, of course. It wasn’t worth her concern.

* * *

Six months later, I stepped into the restaurant, engagement ring hidden in my suit pocket. There she was, resplendent in a glittering emerald dress, looking like a million bucks, her intoxicating smile more overpowering than any drug I’d ever been force-fed during any given torture session. I fingered the small silk box, ready to confess my deepest desire in front of as many people as cared to watch. My heart had become its own heaven, a peaceful excitement I’d never felt before.

“Jennifer…” I began to bend down on one knee.

Shattered glass from the fallen chandelier splintered across the room. The heavy crystal ornament had landed just a foot or two away from our elaborately set table. People screamed and ducked, covering their heads. But for Jennifer, there had been no time.

The shard of glass protruding from her neck seemed to cut me deeper than it did her as I held her dying body in my arms, my face wet with either grief or rage—I couldn’t tell which.

“No…no…”

* * *

That night, I went up to my attic and pulled out a dusty box that was buried beneath a dozen others. My hands shaking like a self-contained 7.9 earthquake, I pulled out the thick packet of paper, which I’d kept as a sort of humorous keepsake, though for some reason I’d never bothered to read it.

But now, I flipped through Chase Walker: The Hackers’ Holy War, my eyes skimming the damnable pages until I reached the end:

Chase: You really think it can be different this time?

Jennifer takes his hand with a smile.

Jennifer: Let’s find out.

I pulled out a red ballpoint pen, rested the packet on my lap with my back to the attic’s filthy wall, and began writing the next page of my story. This chapter wouldn’t take place in my world; It would take place in the world of those who had cursed me. The world of the Filmmakers.

As soon as I wrote the word “vanished”…

…well, I vanished.

________

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The story of Chase Walker is just beginning. Someday, this story concept will be fleshed out in full! He will travel to the worlds of other films with one goal in mind: to wrest control of his destiny from the hands of the Filmmakers forever.

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