Our mission was to capture the rogue lighters alive, not to kill them, but things rarely go according to plan when concerning those people.

— Damien Ice, Flash Agent

Not everyone was happy to leave work when the clock struck five. Especially, people who were driven and ambitious would rather keep working to gain experience. They were out there to make careers.

I– I had a job that I was happy to keep. For me, work was a necessity, and life… a noose tightening around my neck.

“That’s it for today. Save the files, SIMP.” I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyelids to relax my eyes.

“I’m worried for you.” My artificial partner said. The emotions in her voice were as real as they could get.

“I’m fine,” I told her but she didn’t believe me.

“Why don’t you participate in the new ignition research project? The researchers have found varying amounts of success in helping people past the golden age to ignite their fuel and produce a flame.” She insisted. The display projection wobbled and a floating face made of blue fire replaced the work screen. “The success rate is as high as seven percent! And there are no side effects. Would you like me to apply with the department on your behalf?” The sound came from the floating face.

Some turn their SIMP's into people, others turn them into animals. I had integrated her into my display so it could help me with the work.

“Thank you, SIMP, but I’ll be fine. I don't need a flame to be good at this job.”

“That is not true. Even becoming an Asher will increase your chances of promotion by a whole ten percent!”

That made me interested. “How much does that make?”

“Ten percent…”

“That’s all right. I’ll be fine.” I couldn’t stop the laughter from flowing out of my mouth. Nothing got out since the cabins were soundproof, but it made my Semi Intelligent Machine Person worried for my mental health. She suggested I see a therapist on the way home, so I ignored her.

I removed my prism key from the terminal and SIMP turned off with it. Pocketing it, I stood up and walked away from my levitating chair and it automatically moved into a neutral position under the white metallic desk. The walls of my cabin turned transparent around me at the same time. The cabin lost its privacy and became an observation deck with a view into the hollow center of the Flame department's mission control room and the mammoth holographic projections of Flare Agents in dark skintight Nannite suits. Everyone would see the success and failure of their mission. Their glory and tragedy were for everyone to witness and share.

It was a tool of propaganda. Everyone joined the agency in hopes of becoming an agent. You could be an operator, part of the tactician team, member of the staff group, or you could be a Flash agent if your flame was hot and strong.

“It’s an amazing view, isn’t it?” Timothy Hover, my neighbor from the next cabin greeted me. His voice traveled through the now transparent glass walls and reached me without breaking.

A young kid, fresh out of the academy; he who hadn’t let the trauma of an ignition accident that made his lower lip droop leave a mark on his heart was the perfect candidate for the agency. He was ambitious, self-righteous, and best of all, he had joined the agency with hard work. I knew how hard it was to get into the Flash agency with such a low-temperature flame.

“It’s all right,” I replied.

“You always say that, Chris.” He said. “Do you know what's their new missions about?”

“I don’t.” I was the last person to know what the agent’s mission was. I was simply an operator. One needed to be at least a member of the staff handling the mission to know what was going on.

Timothy wanted to say something but held himself back. I didn’t need a field to see through him. He was a good kid, adversely transparent.

“No worries.” He said. “It’s all the same.” He put a longing hand on the glass wall and silently stared at the control room.

I followed his sight. I knew what he meant. I had the same eyes once. I was new into the agency then and the truth hadn’t crushed my hopes and beaten my ambitions into a pulp.

People in tight soothing red and scarlet coats shuffled in the control room like ants marching from hill to hill. Bright sheets of light hovered beside them, listing graphs and parameters difficult to make from the cabin. But I knew they pertained to the health of the agents on the job, connected directly to the life monitors on their nanite suits.

Besides these people, were their supervisors in dull orange coats. The colors of their coats represented the strength of their flame, and thus their position in the agency. We the operators in turn wore no colors since most of us were not yet agents.

The red coats worked tirelessly, but there were smiling… happy… excited. They were the lighters, after all, those who had successfully ignited their flame and become superhuman. They might not be the best Lighters but they had the talent to become the best, and the agency had the means to nurture their talent. They would have never made it into the agency otherwise.

The best Lighters were out in the world, changing society every day with their groundbreaking research and helping the poor people fight famines and droughts.

I looked at my neighbor. Timothy's Indigo eyes still had a bright shine to them. A least some of us still had a chance to earn a coat.

The Flare agents in the projection did a final check on their weapons and got ready to roll out of their safe house. Even though people could ignite a flame, grow a tree in seconds or cause a small quake, guns hadn’t lost their effectiveness. A bullet could still kill a person.

“Chris,” The voice pulled me back, away from my thoughts. “Can I ask you something personal?”

Timothy licked his lips, a sign of nervousness. I knew what he wanted to ask. I had many neighbors before him and they had all asked me the same question at one point in time.

“Sure,” I said nonchalantly, but my thumb went straight to play with my wedding ring. It wasn’t there; It hadn’t been for a while since the divorce. All there was but a depression left on my ring finger and a pale band representing its mark on my life. I thought I had grown used to the question, but my heart skipped a beat when it came. Someone who had ignited a field would have heard my heart loud and clear, like the big bully of my batch in the academy. What a piece of shit he was.

“Is it true that you were batch mates with Hank Fields during your academy days?”

“Wha--” That was not the question I was expecting. “Who told you that?” I said and it was the same as admitting it. The kid’s eyes opened wide in reaction. His hesitation disappeared amidst gusts of winds that shot from his body.

“I knew it!” He hovered in the air and rushed to the wall separating the cabins. I wish I could turn them opaque, but that would mean logging into the terminal. Frankly, I was more worried about what my SIMP would do to him if she found him acting so deranged.

The kid continued undisturbed. “I knew I had seen you in the academy album. Surely, you have changed, aged over time, but I could see the resemblance! You know, your colorless, pitch-black eyes really stand out.”

Hank used to say the same thing. He was a six-foot giant in real life with more muscles than a bull. He was an Indigo coat, elite, picked straight from the academy and nurtured by the agency.

He was also the academy bully who didn’t like the dull color of my eyes. You don’t forget some things no matter how many years pass.

I joined the agency to fight bullies like him and learned that the one who bullied me was a hero to others. That was how I learned that dreams were dead and only Lighters could have ambitions. You were nothing if you couldn’t ignite your flame. Either you were a Lighter with a bright flame, or a pile of ash left after burning your fuel. I was neither. I was someone whose fuel never reached the flashpoint. I was a disappointment.

I—

“I think I don’t need to tell you anything,” I said and walked out of the cabin. The kid wasn’t being pretentious; he was young and excited. He thought he had found a way to learn the secret of the youngest superhero of the department. I guess, he should have paid attention to his hero’s stories from the academy instead. Or he did pay attention and that was what he wanted to confirm with me.

“Where are you going? Oh--”

Timothy realized his mistake as the cabin door opened with a swish and a burst of cold air careened through my hair.

“Forgive me, Chris. I didn’t mean anything by it. I only wanted to ask you about Mr. Hank Fields.” His voice cut off as the cabin door closed behind me and separated my professional from my personal life.

I walked through the glass corridor, five hundred meters off the ground with a view of the bustling city and the sunset. Would have loved the sight through my cabin instead of what we got. For someone who had been an operator for close to half a decade, the projections, though relatively new, had long lost their attraction. Fists clenched, I took an empty Capsule at the end of the corridor. It buzzed delicately, a beetle flashing its wings to take off, and shuttled me to the bottom of the Torch tower, directly onto the street.

Sundown, night on its eve, yet the world was bright and awake.

My car picked me up and hummed down glowing LEM roads, made of the light-emitting material that could absorb sunlight in the day and emit it back after sundown. The same material lit the outer walls of all public offices, including the Torch tower. The new was fading out the old and the rusted. Soon, the material would be commercially available to everyone under the sun-light initiative and give people another toy to play with.

Giant holographic billboards displayed larger-than-life-sized commercials. As if, the people needed another reminder about the most popular products on the planet. We were ants in front of the giants, conditioned to believe we were free.

The car dropped me in front of my apartment building and took off to wait in the basement until I would need it again, lonely as its master.

The old crinkly diodes woke from sleep and the dark corridor lit up around me as the elevator door opened with a ding. I reached my home on the seventy-first floor wondering if the neighbors had found their lost cat or if it was gone forever.

My outdated security system refused to acknowledge my electrical pass. I had to let it scan my iris and then the rickety door opened. The air conditioner was going off at full strength when I entered the home.

A face with pitch-black eyes and a circle of uncertainty around them greeted me in the mirror at entry. The face was free of wrinkles and character, making it impossible to figure when it had last laughed or cried. His white shirt was wrinkled as his ego.

He was my reflection.

He was the leaf that had fallen in the storm. His thoughts were his own. My thoughts… I had none.

He looked at me while I removed my shoes and slipped into a pair of slippers, then followed me through the corridor, turning on the lobby lights ahead of me.

“Dim the lights,” I told him while loosening my tie. My shadow accepted my order.

“What would you like to eat?”

“Order something light,” I told him and fell onto the couch with silence hanging around me.

Life was too boring.

I sometimes think the reason I got the job in the first place was so that the government could keep an eye on me. The longer it takes one’s fuel to reach the flash point the stronger the ignition and hotter the flame. They lose nothing if I don’t ignite, but they have an agent with great potential if I do.

Most people ignite a flame while they are teenagers. The oldest one to ignite was a man from Germany, who successfully ignited temperature manipulation at the age of twenty-one. It happened while I was in my early twenties, and gave me false hope. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I was an operator at the agency and accustomed to the reality that I would be neither a Lighter nor an Asher.

At present, I was over such needs. I didn’t need to care about igniting my flame. I was too old in the sense of the matter. At the age of twenty-nine, I had no hopes of igniting my flame. I was done. My age of becoming an agent was long past overdue. An Ignition would destroy the calm of my life.

Yet, I found myself on the ground breathless and profusely sweating. A fire burned inside my chest. I knew what was happening. It was not a heart attack. My fuel had reached the flashpoint and it was igniting. Supposed to be an instantaneous process, but for all that mattered I was burning up. I would have been slightly happier for finally igniting if I was not dying in the same breath! FUCK!

My senses expanded as my fire burned hotter. It quickly changed colors from red to a dazzling orange and continued burning hotter. Slowly, it first turned white and then blue. I stopped breathing, but the fire kept burning hotter and hotter until it turned pitch black. My eyes opened wide then. I took a deep breath and something floated out of me. I smelled a strange odor at the same time.

My emotions disappeared somewhere in the darkness of the pitch-black fire. It burned my fear, my anxiety, and my passion.

It was as if my perception was expanding. The world grew distant in my eyes as I floated out of the bright blue planet and flew into the stars. I burst right through the moon, exploded through the sun, reached far and wide, flying through the darkness that covered space. I flew past planets and stars until I saw a bright cloud of gases around a void that had light-converging around it.

The gases burned me as I flew through them until I was nothing more than a speck of bright light. Then the black hole swallowed me.

In reality, a colorful smoke floated out and around my body. It stopped expanding after a while and started contracting. Quickly, it wrapped around me and made my body float.

I, as a person, disappeared from the world for a femtosecond of time, only to reappear back again screaming and gasping for air. Tears in my eyes, my heart drummed wildly in my chest because what I had experienced in that one femtosecond was enough to make anyone go crazy.

I saw a new world!