Emilio had a bad feeling about the confluence of recent unexplained events around the solar system. At first, he figured they were anomalies caused by the arrival of mankind on mars, then he feared it was Marilyn's secret doing. But the cascade of these strange events was accelerating and since Round 24, the game had now become filled with riddles and clues. Today's dead META was another reminder that many events were in play and he did not like it.

Emilio was, at heart, a chess player; he missed the game. He saw life as a large chess board where pieces moved of their own volition, too often manipulated by others. Man had several remote exploratory missions in the outer edges of the solar system. Yesterday, as Sophie was landing on mars, a hotel in Antarctica made the news for the inauguration of its water park. Too many things were happening at once, and they made Emilio nervous.

Sometimes, he felt like life was playing a game of cosmic chess, and heavy invisible pieces were being moved on a board. He alone sided against those who opposed mankind. What bothered him the most was that he felt this time like he was not part of the game, or at a minimum, he was only a pawn. It was his job, as the President to regain the upper hand, and that needed to happen quickly. In fact, before this night was over.

He had a plan.

It was reckless and dangerous, and would surely backfire, but it passed the Muo Jing test. Emilio loved the 60's comedian. He was made famous when he held up a box of spaghetti onstage during his comedy show, and threw the dry pasta on the wall. The stiff sticks bounced, and all fell to the ground. He looked into the camera and said: "Most of you people are so stupid, you go through life doing things blindly and hoping something works. If you are going to throw spaghetti at a wall hoping it sticks... at a minimum, cook the damn thing first!" That made Emilio laugh for almost an hour. The comedian was right. Before actions were undertaken, he needed to cook his spaghetti. In this case, if someone had a larger plan, his action had to have an interplanetary consequence in order to influence these events. Burning a house wouldn't do it. He needed to do something massive and unpredicted.

The best way was to introduce new variables, to stir things up with a tool hidden from the visible game. Right after his reelection of 2068, the life of a little girl named Sophie Lapierre took a turn for the worse. She lost most of her family in a cascade of bizarre accidents and gained an unbelievable level of sympathy all around the world. The girl was hypnotic to watch, and in a strange way, deeply charismatic. Her father's mind had somehow survived a series of traumas to his body in defiance of all principles of science. The pair was part of this puzzle. Laurent should be dead.

Sophie was a player on this board. Marilyn another.

The freakish accident left a barely functioning man as Emilio's only obstacle to his 2072 reelection. The story of Laurent and Sophie was too compelling; he was being set up as the villain in the finale to this great character. Today, destiny sent Sophie and her father from the hotel on mars to the Electoral Center. Emilio's plan against the girl took seconds to backfire. He gave orders to keep her safe, some idiot sat her for minutes in a cell and within seconds his plan had ended. Sophie was gone, out of his reach. He was now the evil man who had jailed this girl.

Emilio was unsure what to think of the strange father and daughter duo. He would have given that girl his job if she asked, and this type of reaction was unlike him. She had a mysterious appeal on everyone; he had to be careful. He gave a lot of thought to the pair. Sophie and her father reminded Emilio of the child who became Louis XIV. It felt as if Laurent was being groomed by some higher force to win the reelection, which would in effect give the presidency on a silver platter to Sophie. A twelve-year old girl would, like young Louis, be vulnerable to Marilyn, a digital version of Cardinal Mazarin. Marilyn, now in contact with the girl, would use her young Louis as a puppet. Or possibly, he felt like Sophie's unique appeal could be the first thing to reach out and get the digital goddess out of her hiding.

Something else was going on, though. Emilio felt it. The President was no ordinary man. Skill or luck alone had not given him the two Presidencies, there was more. The man had a secret which had died along with his mother a couple of years ago. He was not only better at the game, he was different than other humans in a very unique way.

Emilio had a secret no one had ever managed to extract out of him. The President was no superhero, no comic-book mutant, but his brain was wired differently. Young Sanchez was born with what felt like a curse, a condition that he only recently managed to turn into a gift.

The first thing baby Emilio saw as he discovered the world were the faces of his family members dying multiple times each hour. Unless he as a toddler closed his eyes, he would see images of people do violent things: hit him, jump into traffic, as if he was having the types of vision usually enabled by LSD. The child cried for months. His brain forced him to see patterns, roads, or doors, as he called them. As if a mad director was torturing him, his mind kept playing, as quickly as it could, alternate futures for him in dangerous situations. It took a decade for his brain to begin to control these images, to sort them in a way where he could finally have what seemed like a normal life.

As a toddler, he cried uncontrollably at the sight of any change around him. His parents could not understand why baby Emilio kept being scared of everyone. He did not like toys, mirrors, visitors... the list of his dislikes was endless. Doctors and psychologists were unable to diagnose his condition. When his parents strapped him into his car seat for a car ride, baby Emilio saw nothing at every intersection but car floods, violent crashes, cars flying off of cliffs, and fire, fire everywhere.

The fear would end when they covered him with a blanket, but his parents refused to lock him away. Emilio learned to keep the cries to himself and simply close his eyes when he needed time alone. Heights were equally difficult to manage; he saw himself slide off ledges and die, he saw others walk off balconies and fall. In his over active mind's eye, he watched every elevator cable in which he stepped snap. He lived for years in his own private horror movies.

For most normal humans, such visions do come but they are rare and fleeting. They come if at all, when standing on a transparent ledge over the Grand Canyon, or when strapping oneself to an amusement park ride. There, people see themselves fall and fear the edge. Not so for Emilio, he grew up in a permanent state of vertigo. Anyone else would have been driven mad by the visions, but Emilio somehow got used to them. They became part of him.

As the young man progressed through childhood, his brain's wiring began to change. He no longer saw death at every corner, but instead he saw complex alternate futures of possible realistic outcomes. At six, he was living in a permanent guessing game. When someone knocked at the door of his house, his brain generated images of the most probable visitors likely to walk in. After a knock, he saw images of his father opening the door, then his grandmother, or even his aunt. Images flooded until the door actually opened and his mind snapped back to reality showing him who was actually on the other side of the door.

The important thing to remember is that young Emilio had no way to know he was abnormal. With age, the accuracy of his predictions improved. By the time he was a teen, he rarely was surprised by the outcome of his visions. The images were no longer linked with events like a door knock, or a phone call, but instead were connected to a clock. By the age of fourteen, time regulated his life. His brain was changing, adapting yet again. He had no way to understand what was happening to him.

The clock was his drug and his salvation. It helped him, reassured him.

For every living thing close to him, he kept a close timeline in his mind of what they were probably doing. To him, his personal timelines were like a chess master playing fifty simultaneous chessboards blindfolded. He recalled sitting in class, lost in thought per usual, and knowing the principal would knock on the door. For almost an hour, he hesitated between a knock at 10:34:09 or 10:34:12. Earlier that morning, he had seen the man looking for the student who was responsible for a prank in the schoolyard. In his mind, he could see the man walk from classroom to classroom. He could see each class visit, each door the man opened.

Then it happened: the principal knocked on the door and walked in, just as young Emilio had played in his mind. It was precisely 10:34:12. He had guessed the outcome. In silence, he felt proud of himself. He was a movie producer sitting in front of screens with different outcomes as he imagined them. He learned to hide this gift. The smallest evidence of his talent, any sign of a premonition given to the other students led immediately to fear and ridicule.

Emilio mostly kept to himself until he became an adult. His only pleasure was playing chess. Quickly, he became school chess champion and was so strong, he was paired by the teacher with a computer. He loved playing the machine, he could not use his curse to guess its moves.

One day the school's chess team went to a demonstration given by the champion of the world playing the best students of Mexico. Emilio's teacher and parents forced him to go. He needed little arm-twisting. They figured he would do well, and the young adolescent needed some self-esteem.

Each kid was placed in front of a board on the outer edge of tables placed in a large circle. The champion made his way around the inside of the circle, playing each child one move at a time. The champ played white. The tall man grabbed a piece on Emilio's board and moved it. Emilio was nervous. The man moved E2-E4. Emilio reached for a piece; all the possible outcomes, all the variants, began to flash before his eyes. In each scenario, he saw himself lose the game. He moved his hand above a different piece: again, in every scenario he could foresee that he would lose the game. There was no piece he touched that showed him any favorable outcome. He would lose this game; he knew it. Young Emilio panicked, began to hyperventilate, got up, and ran out.

His mother and his coach were upset and disappointed. His mother tried in vain to explain how he needed to lose for years to the man, study him from a distance before he finally could hope to beat the champion, but Emilio saw things differently. He was a fraud and a cheat. The only reason he was school champion was because of his curse. What was the point of playing, he wondered, and he resigned from the chess team the next day.

As a teenager, Emilio was a distant observer of the world he lived in. Of the many things he could have done with his gift, he did none. His curse was also very problematic when it came to sex. When he saw a person that aroused him, his curse went into overdrive. Before he could even introduce himself, his mind would send him images of him in all types of positions having intercourse with the person. To teen Emilio, it proved too difficult for him to approach someone after having just watched a porn movie featuring that person. Emilio learned to keep that aspect of himself private.

Then, after adolescence, his brain still had tricks and tortures for him. It keep growing, as if he was watching a movie produced by someone else, his mind took on a life of its own. It began to show images it had selected for him. One day he saw a flash of a naked woman with a large shoulder tattoo. It was an eagle. Minutes later, on a beach he saw a woman remove her sweater and uncovering a tattoo, albeit slightly different. There was no way for him to have known she was there. From timed visions, his brain began to have premonitions, visions that most often proved right. The gift was growing, learning and structuring itself. With time, the accuracy of his predictions increased.

At twenty, he inherited his father's garage after a tragic family accident. He loved the job as a mechanic; it was simple and far from large urban centers. He lived peacefully without a television, taking care of his sister until she left for Japan. Drinking also slowed his demanding mind down. When intoxicated, he functioned like most people. But to him, this was cheating.

Today, president Emilio enjoyed walking around with a tumbler of Scotch at hand. It was the water which could extinguish the fire of his mind. Holding the drink was reassuring. A sip would stop his visions. The glass was his white cane. He did not care if others had no clue why he walked around with the drink, or better yet, thought he was a drunk.

Young Emilio could not imagine that his way of seeing the world was unique, but after his 2062 and 2068 victories, he was forced to conclude that he was alone capable to guess the future. He was a freak of nature, and there was no reason for him to reveal his gift. Playing the Electoral platform was second nature to him. The interface was a perfect fit for his premonitions. After he logged in, he could guess the game before he even began to play it. The Presidential Challenge was different. Everyone knew the scenario. He figured, for once, his gift would prove useless. Yet he'd easily won. Again.

The President smelled the Scotch.

Emilio secretly hoped the anomalies on mars were nothing more than growing pains of the Electoral software as she passed her own version of adolescence. But he knew her very well; better than any other human aside from her programmer. There was no testing the interface; only participants were entitled to enter the game. As the winner of the last two presidential elections, he had played the game more than any other.

Something else was going on, something much more dangerous. The digital goddess would never ask for his help, but he knew she was in need of it.

Kai, his hand-picked assistant, much like his obsession with holding the Scotch tumbler, was another strange affectation of Emilio's whom no one understood. To his wandering mind, the man was refreshing. The Taiwanese acted as a cold, emotionless android and was therefore was highly predictable. Each time Kai entered the room, there were no alternate futures populating Emilio's mind. Nuclear missiles could be minutes away from impact and Kai would open the door to his office the same way, look in his direction, inspect Emilio's expression, look at his watch and then look to see if Emilio's tumbler had ice. The predictability of this man was music to Emilio's wandering mind.

Today, Emilio knew his gift was needed. It was just unclear how. The stakes were high; that much he knew, he felt it.

Kai was back in his office, and Patrick was now looking for his killer. The President took two steps and was standing alone on the edge of his private elevator going to the 21st floor. In his mind, he saw the cables of the elevator snap and the elevator cage drop, he also saw a hundred other accident. He took a deep breath and tried to think about something else before he set foot on the elevator holding both sides like a child stepping onto an escalator.

People just thought he was fearful of elevators. He stepped in the cage, pushed the button and began his ride down to the SAC. The cables did not snap, but in his mind's eye, he saw them break multiple times.

This world needed saving, he just did not understand he was being conservative in his assessment.