A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
Copyright© 2025 by Elon Paul
Prologue
What if I told you magic is real? It’s not even magic but science so advanced that it seems like magic ... Blah blah blah. Cliché start. Unfortunately, this story is anything but. And yet it is just that. It feels like the story is just beginning and yet it could make for a whole book. Freakin crazy that a whole book merely covers the start of a story. The only thing that could beat this if the book ends up being merely the prologue. That wouldn’t be possible though would it?!
Rolling my eyes I thought about the start of it all. Humans rarely stop to think how their actions shape the world around them. A single choice can ripple outward like a stone striking water — a ripple that grows, a wave that consumes. Even the faintest flutter of a butterfly’s wing can spark a storm. And once set in motion, no chain of events can be stopped, leaving mortified life in its wake. It doesn’t take too much for ripples to become waves, the point being even a small action could have such drastic consequences that it’d leave one’s mouth agape with shock and the appalling consequences causing even the strongest of people to be left too stunned to even try to stop such chain reactions, not that it can be stopped. Just think of the butterfly’s wing.
I wondered the point of why was I thinking about this now, of all times? Because I never thought before I set the chain of events in motion. Only later did I learn how far the consequences of that day would reach. Ever since I discovered the far-reaching consequences of what happened back on that day. You see, I have always taken the most cautious route but today there simply wasn’t one. And me being me, I found that to be totally unacceptable. Deciding to take a leap of faith, I set the wheels in motion, despite what could happen. Regret. The plan is insane. Images of chaos tear through my mind’s eye — disaster, ruin, death. Horror. Have I doomed myself and my team? Logic. Thinking is pointless I my situation. Reckless, yes — the riskiest thing I’ve ever done — but we all came here knowing the stakes. We chose this, believing we could seize even the smallest chance of success. Chaos!! Disastrous Image ripped through my Mind’s Eye and I found myself falling apart. Horror!! What have I done? I have doomed myself and my team. Logic. But why am I thinking that it’s all bad? It might be the riskiest thing I have ever done and it sure is reckless putting myself and my team in lethal danger but all of us know what we are walking into and none of us would have come if we hadn’t believed in our ability to exploit such a minuscule chance of success. Heck, when even my Team has faith in me, why am I overthinking this? Calm. Breathe, compose yourself, and calm down. All right, Time for Action.
“I suppose we are close,” I spoke on comms.
“Yes, we are, Sir,” a voice crackled in reply
“All right, Folks. Everyone knows the plan.” I ordered the plan to lower the power to a minimum. “Everyone else must go through the final checklist and open the Special Objective Envelopes transmitted to your suit monitors during the briefing. Invoke Code ‘Green Initialize’. Study the objective and we begin our approach. Remember, the time to reconsider ends the moment you get the goddamned briefing, so if you want to chicken out, eject your pods and never show your faces again. Be clear about this. Don’t come if you aren’t totally sure deep down because it could be the difference between life and death. To be as clear as possible, it’s not about your lives but about the lives of your enemies.”
The safer paths promised survival, but never victory. This plan was sanctioned because it held the only chance of absolute success. And yet, I can’t stop wondering — what if I had never taken those first steps? Amidst all these thoughts I can’t help but wonder, what if I hadn’t taken those steps that day?
Unable to control my emotions any longer, I slipped into a flashback of how today came to be.
In hindsight what happened that day was unrealistic. One might think oneself to be impractical for imagining such a scenario. Only Real Life wasn’t always practical...
I was returning from a vacation when I suddenly switched to Alert Mode. It was as if Destiny herself was coming to greet me.
I was driving towards the Yama Shi Mountain Pass, the locals residing in the forest called it the Mountain of Death because of its treacherous terrain which was difficult to pass through even in the best weather. It had been raining cats and dogs yesterday and so I got gifted with an additional day of leave after the amazing deal that I had cracked. Today the fog cleared a little and I moved out deciding to not press my luck. Even before I hit the pass the rain had started, Ideally, I would have switched to a longer route but filing the paperwork late could undo the deal, and given the situation of the firm that would cost me my job and my reputation in the market. The traffic was very light since most people would rather wait for the weather here to calm down or take an alternate route. But I had already risked too much by extending the stay by a day. Maybe braving fog probably would have been safer on its own than in combination with rain. They don’t shut this route even in weather simply because live or die it was a crucial route. Whomsoever is desperate enough to take this pass in this weather is dumb enough to ignore the rules. Unfortunately for people living on this planet mere survival was possible only through dumb choices.
I was probably one of the least important employee on the books but in action I had my redeeming qualities. And so I was given the job of preparing for the all-important presentation. Yes, I was effective but I was hardly efficient, part of the reason why I wasn’t given the chance to lead anything. But that was before Charles came, he wasn’t like anyone I had seen. He had an uncanny ability to see what was holding a person back. Under him, I had been gradually given more responsibilities. And then suddenly the important projects were given to me. Well obviously, the first thing I did was barge into his office and ask him to give it to someone else the first time it happened, you know thinking I was being set up to fail, and I can never ever forget his reply.
“Jake, you know very well you aren’t a raw prospect with hidden potential like you were once. So yes maybe I am setting you up to fail, but if you succeed nonetheless, this victory is your alone. At the end of this project, we have a shot at turning things around for you, they normally wouldn’t even look at us for the deal in question but it was your name that got us a chance. They seem to have dug into your work and figured what my predecessors failed to understand. You have survived so long not on luck but on sheer force of will, so get rid of the paranoia and get your bearings together. I expect a PoA within the hour.”
The project had been a roaring success. Things changed for me from there. Charles guidance helped me. Today it was Charles who had been kind enough to give me a chance. It was a ballsy plan made possible through my and my girlfriend’s innovation. I knew just enough tech to pass off as someone who knew it all in front of people, sadly I lacked the interpersonal skills to do that. Charles got me through that. Then my girlfriend came into my life and I finally saw what I could do. My idea was made possible only because she showed faith in it and worked on it with me. Now we were set to be able to get a payoff.
The plan was to establish a new company with Charles as a consultant and me and my wife running the show. Me and my wife had built most of the product but the last piece was out of our hands. This deal was for that. One of the company’s suppliers had the piece that would complete our tech. Our tech would in turn help m current employers complete a new product stuck for a long time in R&D. To them the resource drain was too insignificant. For me it would help my dreams take off. But the supplier wasn’t going to sell to a company that didn’t even exist on paper. So, off was I to try and strong arm him by instead giving him a piece of business from my company which would help him generate funds to finish another project of his own. It had taken a monumental effort for the three of us to manufacture this business and frankly we would have been caught had our employers not been a multinational that expanded too fast to have the processes in place to catch and root out people like us. Morally there was nothing wrong with what we were doing, neither there was legally but business ethics don’t run on morals or laws.
To the firm I was on vacation, only Charles knew that I had taken the vacation to see the deal over the line. While our efforts had made us suitable for the deal there were other options we had to beat, we committed all our resources, both what our employers allotted to Charles and our personal ones and still ewe had had some competition to beat. Fortunately, the competition couldn’t get an edge and the negotiator decided to host us for a short stay at a posh hotel in the valley; it was a test; to see who could do an underhanded deal. A perfect reader of the situation and of the way it changed in real-time, add to that his ability to change his behavior style with the situation, and you get why the other company brought him in. A tough negotiator who is difficult to get a read on but can read someone like an open book.
Charles could perfectly handle delicate situations and that was exactly the kind of person the company needed for this. Unfortunately, he was desperately needed somewhere else, so he had to hand it off to me. This was something being pushed by us was a low priority to get right and for our employers the perfect test for me. Charles being the asshole he is had nothing to say other than “just be yourself”. Later on I would realise that it was the key to cracking the deal. I went ahead and acted as my usual naïve self, putting up a front for people understanding way more than they comprehended that I did. The negotiator was put off at first but eventually read me and as a curve ball confronted me. My acknowledgement and reasoning cracked the negotiation. Charles luckily had warned me and I never let it on that we had put whatever we could and staked on this deal. That was the only point where our negotiations could go wrong and that was also somewhere I was likely to fuckup. So Charles wanted to do this himself, since he couldn’t, he spent monumental effort prepping me. It helped and I smiled at my luck, everything at the negotiation went in my favour and we got the deal and even at the best possible terms. Perhaps that’s what led me to make such a decision in hindsight.
My colleagues and other parties were looking forward to a day with their wives, girlfriends or children. But I had come to the valley. But I was on a clock. For my company to get established I needed to do a ton of stuff to put things in motion, else we would lose this opportunity that everyone had worked so hard to craft. Who knew things could be very different over the next several years if only I had decided to take a day. A day wouldn’t have hurt me but I still decided to head back soon.
Seeing a signboard I cleared my head and brought my full focus back to the road. I had just started on the pass. The geography of the region surrounding Shi No Tani valley was like a paper that had been straightened after crumpling it, with Yama Shi being the entrance of the fastest route to exit towards the City of Henka Suru. One had to Cross the Yama Shi Mountain Pass and connects through to the Anzen Sei Mountain Pass before he could exit Shi No Tani.
The mountain range in itself wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but the way these two mountains were joined was very peculiar. The way it looked like when seen from a bird’s eye view, it appeared as if these two mountains used to be a single huge mountain before the tectonic activity split them in the peculiar rock formation it is now. The valley these two hills formed was more like a deep gorge but the gorge closed up at one end creating a sort of U-shaped section of rock formation that connected the two hills at the bend of this U, while it was more like a cliff and less like a road, on the parallel side of the hills, but over the years, since the formation of this strange split in the two hills, The tectonic activity made it impossible for modern engineering to construct a simple bridge to connect a road that would pass through these hillsides, so instead the road had to pass through the U shaped rock formation to create a shortcut through the dangerous mountain range and cut down the travel time for the people coming across the river that was situated at the other end of the city previously people used to travel around this mountain range which took days to connect the city to the rest of the continent. But modern lifestyle couldn’t wait for days, moreover the mountain range wasn’t a continuous formation, there were three beautiful valleys within this hilly region making it a hill station of sorts, which in rainy season became tourist spots for unwinding over long weekends, with streams running down the hills and lush greenery covering the hills like a blanket. All in all it became a place that would take anyone’s breath away.
There were extremely clear instructions for people who drove through these roads on how to drive through these roads. During rains things got further complicated when fog would cover the hills. The Fog though would stick near the peak and not come low enough to affect the visibility of drivers driving through these roads. Why the fog behaved in such a way was an extremely puzzling unsolved mystery.
The rains had done a job on the hill face, already famous for being horrifically dangerous. The rains had prepped it for a landslide and all that was needed was some small external force to set the chain of events into motion and see the hillside rip away the road.