Spear of Destiny: Ch 2

[SEED#: NUMBERFETCH 00-001A-TypeNew[HeraldOfMT]: Hector Park.]

[… ]

[HeraldOfMT]: Thank you for your contribution to Learning Cycle 3944390-SZ: Anomalous Malware Activity Resulting from Corrupted Player Data and Data Fragments. In response to a serious attempt to modify, corrupt, or delete your personal files, patches and security updates are being applied to your Seed Data.]

[… ]

[We would advise you that <???NAME_REDACTED> may persist in attempting to corrupt your data. We will continue to experientially iterate and evolve our security in response to this threat.]

[Once we have finished restoring and updating your Seed Data with new security features, you will be returned to the Archemi Reality Framework. You may experience some initial reality distortion and temporary amnesia due to unavoidable data decoherence. Returning your accumulated Archemi data will take approximately 45 minutes. Please do not exit the server until the download is finished.]

[(ATHENA Cell 192018924: Available Memory: 2.5 PB/6 PB)]

[… ]

[Re-encrypting Cell…]

[… ]

[… ]

[Thank you, Hector. There is no further action required by your account. Unfortunately, Ryuko’s Security Team continues to be unresponsive. We will submit a Support Ticket and try again.]

***

I took a deep, whooping breath, and sat bolt upright, a shower of sand falling from my bare skin. 

"Whuu… wha?" My head spun as I looked from side to side, then down. The first thing I noticed was that I was stark naked, because there was sand in places where there should never be sand. I was half-buried in a huge black marble bathtub in the fanciest bathroom I’d ever seen. A bathtub that was full of sand.

"Okay, very funny, guys!" My mouth was dry, my heart pounding, and I couldn't remember how I'd gotten here or what I'd been doing before then. Dizzily, I pulled myself out of the dusty earth and crawled to the edge of the tub. "Star Wars! Johnson! I don't know why you assholes decided to bury me like a turd in a litter box, but if you guys think I won’t... uh..."

I froze as I spotted myself in a mirror across the room. The man staring back at me was a complete stranger. Medium-height, lean, ripped like an Olympic gymnast. Bronze skin, long braided hair… weird eyes. They were big, pale, and filmy blue, the irises startlingly bright against the dark ‘whites’ surrounding them.

As I struggled to make a connection between 'me' – Park Jeong-Ho – and my reflection, I felt something snap deep inside my brain.

"Wh... wha?" I looked down at my hands and nearly freaked. There was nothing except the ornate marble floor where my feet should have been. I looked back up at the mirror. The man staring back at me was still there. "Ah... haha. Hahaha! Riiight! Okay! Sure!”

My head was spinning and my mouth was dry. Colors throbbed in my line of sight: impossibly bright, vivid color. Light scattered along every reflective surface like a prism. I felt like I could see every tiny fleck of metal trapped in the black marble floor.

“Ha… okay. It’s drugs.” I struggled to control my breathing, and mostly failed. “Someone slipped me a tab of acid. Or maybe I took the tab. Just… just calm down.”

But I wasn’t calm, and I jumped as a door in the next room opened. Not closed: opened. My sense of hearing was so intense that the tiny sound made me jump and whirl around.

"Lehni ovatos vi," a woman hissed in a language I didn't recognize. "Hector ozze lesz zvarodna, es em folya emlekez znivi."

A fearful thrill passed through me. Despite the Eastern-European sounding language, the woman had an Australian accent. She was from the Pacific Alliance.

A second woman - older, with a Russian accent - hissed back in the same language, but I made out the word 'sedativni' - with enough emphasis on the 'sedative' part that I was pretty sure it was a loanword from English. There was a pause.

Every muscle in my torso tensed. I backed up against the tub, frantically searching the sand for my rifle. What the fuck was going on? Had I been kidnapped? There was no gun, and when I turned back to search around the room, I noticed there were no windows and no way out other than the door. I got up and stumbled around the bathtub, seeking cover, and noticed that there was a weapon in the room with me: an honest-to-god Chinese-style spear, the kind with a curved glaive-like blade. It was just... like... lying on the ground. 

With a glance at the door, I scooped the spear up with my invisible hand. As I did, my fingers briefly flickered into view - and a wave of dizziness flooded my body, a rush so intense that I flinched forward and rammed my head into the side of the bathtub. "Fuck! OWW! Piece of shit!"

“Hector!” A worried voice – a woman’s voice – rang out INSIDE my head.

“Karalti! Wait!” The Australian voice called out in English, this time.

I flailed to bring the weapon around as the door burst into the room, and one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen in my life charged toward me. Pearly skin, a waist length curtain of fine black braids, dressed like a cosplayer from some anime convention… not exactly the burly Pacific Alliance genome soldier I’d been expecting.

“Now hang on just a goddamn second.” I brandished the spear at her, still crouched behind the palatial tub. “I don’t know who the fuck you are or what you’re doing here, but there’d better be a good explanation for why I’m tripping balls, naked, in someone’s fucking bathroom!”

“Oh… OH! Right! You lost your memory again!” The peppy voice pealed inside my head again. “It’s okay! I’ll fix it!”

“Fix what? And how the fuck are you inside my head?” My vision fritzed as the girl tried to circle around me, a black haze briefly obscuring her features. The ground lurched, and a shock of adrenaline tightened my chest. There was a sudden sharp pain in my left shoulder, but I was too wired to check what had caused it. “Where the hell is my squad?”

“It’s okay! Just calm down, alright?” She held her hands up, fingers loose. No gun, and no sign of one. “Your squad’s not here, Hector.”

They weren’t? But… “What the hell have you done to them?!”

“Karalti! Back it up!”

My head whipped around at the Australian twang, nostrils flaring as I spotted the woman who’d been speaking earlier. To my confusion, she was also decked out in some seriously medieval-looking armor. She was also hot as hell, which definitely meant none of this was real. I didn’t trust my own eyes – these fuckers had drugged me.

“You, the Aussie. You stay where you are.” I crawled back with the Spear in one hand, dizzy with confusion. It had been drilled into us that Pacific Alliance PsyOps pulled weird shit to get into people’s heads, everything from virtual reality interrogations to drugs and fake UNAC military bases. “And you, ninja princess… either you stop walking toward me, or I’ll gut you like a fucking trout.”

Ninja Girl turned her head and fucking hissed at the woman in the doorway. “Suri! Not now!”

The tall red-head put her hands up in the air and turned away, backing out of the entrance to the bathroom.

“And just so you know? I’d take the damn LSD for funsies.” My eyes darted between them as I swung the spear back and forth, keeping them at bay. “So you might as well go straight to hooking my nipples up to car batteries or whatever it is you guys are gonna do, because I ain’t telling you shit.”

“Hector… my name’s Karalti,” the black-haired girl said, hanging back. She still had her hands up, trying to look small and innocent: but I could tell that she was a hard-body under her fancy costume. “You’ve got really bad amnesia. I know you don’t remember me or anything else right now, but I can help you. Okay?”

“My name isn’t Hector.” I reached up to the side of my head, feeling for a BCI adaptor. Brain-to-Interface was the only way she could be speaking inside my head – unless I was hallucinating that, too. “You want to help me? Take me to my men.”

“They’re… they’re not here.” She looked pained now, as if she was holding back some serious emotion: biting her lip, furrowing her brows. I noticed that she had violet eyes… eyes deep enough to drown a man. “Please, let me help you. I’m not a soldier. Just…Take my hand.”

She thrust out an open hand toward me. It was small and delicate, but her knuckles were calloused.

I glanced at it suspiciously. “You know, you’re awfully fit for a civilian.”

“I was worried about you, so I went and practiced striking until you respawned.” She didn’t smile, her eyes dark with worry. “And I’m fit because we train a lot together. Our stats, and… umm… skills and stuff.”

Respawned? Like… in a game? I frowned, and surreptitiously looked down. Feet, legs, dick, abdomen and chest were all where they were supposed to be, except they were the body of the man I’d seen in the mirror. 

Karalti beckoned the fingers of her outstretched hand. “Don’t worry, okay? You get your memories back when I touch you.”

Her other hand was visible. I didn’t see any needles, tasers, or handcuffs. Hesitantly, I shuffled forward, the Spear braced under my arm, and briefly touched my fingers to hers. “If you- “

Whatever I was about to say transformed into a scream of agony as what felt like a river of molten lava poured down between my ears, dissolving into the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my entire life. I was vaguely aware of nails clawing at my face – my own nails. There was screaming, shouting… and then my chest seized with dull throbbing pain and the black rolled me down a second time.