I Am

by Ambereve

Hope Emerson lost her memories, and she's on a mission to get them back from an evil organization determined to erase all fairy tales. Xavier Unknown and Hope must save the fairy tales. She is the only one that can prevent the destruction, because her mind is trapped in the protagonist's body.

1. Prologue

I've lived all my life with CLOAK, so my dream as a child was to see the outside world. Agents are permitted to live outside if they are married or widowed, while the rest of us live within the society. I learned two ways that could grant me access to the world outside of my own. The first was to marry. The second was to join the special ops squad, and that is where I met my fiancee, Hope Emerson. At the time, I didn't know she was the daughter of the CLOAK president.

Hope and I were born within the society like every agent since the founding. We weren't as well known until our technology advanced, but now we do the dirty work assigned to us by the government. We have our mission; the same one we based our society around, which is the preservation of literature. CLOAK stands for Cops Leading Operations against Killers. Our number one enemy is the E.L.A – the Elimination of Literature Association. Their goal is to rid the world of stories and tales that give hope and happiness to any adult or child.

To become an agent of CLOAK, one has to be seventeen or older and have good health, but they also have to pass the entrance exams, the Critical Emotions and Decisive Actions training, and the Loyalty Detector test. I was labeled a genius, because I was the first and only to have passed the exams at fifteen.

Hope and I were given a mission to protect the elimination of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. I begged Hope to drop out. I assured her that I could complete the mission without her. She had laughed and slapped me on the back saying there was no way in hell that she'd let me have all the glory. She was different from every other CLOAK member. An agent must have ice as blood. We are never to feel, but only complete the mission. Hope made me feel. She gave me my emotion back. In a mission, if your comrade was injured you must leave them behind to complete the mission.

Hope wanted to be with me on the mission. So I asked her to take the training course over again. How was I to know that the machine would delete her memory? The computer specialists were hesitant on removing her from the Mind Transferal Unit. I begged the president to keep her in the machine until the specialists could retrieve her memory, but I had to go on with my mission. An agent must always think of the mission. Literature is our number one priority.

If only I had let her come with me on the mission, we wouldn't be in this mess. If what the computer specialists said was true that data is never truly erased then maybe Hope's memory will be recovered. I just hope it isn't too late to save her.