Mortal Protection Services Chapter 36: X.J: James

Read chapter 36 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

X.J: James JAMES Inside the Experiencer Life was hard back then. Every fleeting calorie fought for in the most dire of circumstances. We picked fruit when it was ripe, and when we couldn't and times were lean - which was almost always - we hunted mammoth. The only 'safe' way to do it was to trick them off a cliff, and then go down there and collect the meat and bones. You'll note the quotation marks on that safe... We'd successfully separated the mother and her young from the herd. We had driven them toward the cliff. I was there to manage the flank, to keep them from turning left and escaping out that way... I did my job to the end. Mammoth and I went over the cliff together, my spear in her flank, and her tusk through my chest. At least my tribe would have enough to eat for winter. I was another tribe member, and then another, in tribe after tribe after tribe. Our stories were all different, yet all the same, even then. I had dogs, and cats, and sometimes lizards as pets. Tending lesser animals took up a surprising portion of my lives. And then finally, I was a farmer. A tribe that grew food. I built a huge city over my lives, an empire. I was a just king, and an unjust king... and I dealt with the aftermath of the first societal collapse poorly, in most cases. Other empires grew, and fell. I help build the pyramids, and I rested in them in state until much later, when I later dug myself up as another me. Life, by and large, was still hard. We had wheels now, and farming, and tons of domesticated animals, a bit of time to study science, to advance our technology... actually, life was starting to get better. At least now I don't get run through by mammoths anymore. I did a lot of that, actually, back at the start. Now it's mostly other people running me through. I get it, I am those people too, now and again. There's just not quite enough for everyone all the time... Until there was. There was plentiful food in this time, enough for all, but other problems grew from plenty. Greed , and corruption . I was in the middle of treating a child's broken finger when they came... they took the mother, and the child. And when I protested, they took me too. I died in the gas chambers, and then... later, in another life, I turned them on myself, and watched them, me, die. In yet another, I arrested myself, the doctor; damn fool protecting these filthy undesirables . I dropped bombs on Dresden and was shot down, and I felt the nuclear fire of the bomb at Nagasaki. I killed men storming the beaches at Normandy, and stormed the beaches at Normandy. I stabbed and shot and bomb myself to death ten thousand times in that war, and more than once we both died. Me and me, fighting to the bitter end. I tended the wounded, I made the wounded. I made the big calls and the small, and eventually I shot myself in a bunker. I really deserved it that time. And then I did it again, in another war, as I had been doing it before, in all the wars before that first great and terrible war, or the second. There was enough for all, but not enough for some, and we all had to suffer as a result. Again and again. I had only started to understand the weight of being human. I had my feet bound as a little girl, and in another life I was forced to march across the great plains until I died. I knowingly gave myself death infected blankets, and I scalped myself for the trouble I caused me later down the line. Atrocities, known, and lost to history, I committed upon myself... Large and small. From personal things like murder, to systemic hate, I made it happen... over and over and over again, until even between lives, in the brief moments I existed as James again, I could not stop crying in horror at what I had done. And then... the playlist changed. The darkness of humanity was but one side of them. I was a gentle, loving man, who used his strength and skill with spear and sword to protect the weak. I was a wise woman, that tended to injured people and animals alike. I