The French-Nevadan Assimilation:
Chapter 1
Re:/ Surfacing
Blackness.
Nothingness.
Complete and utter emptiness.
Suddenly: Light.
A bright light bathing the whole tunnel in radiant white light.
I awakened in this flood of energy.
I felt my senses re-activating, my abilities all coming to strength once again. I was capable of movement, thought, and sentience once more.
I was the Auditor.
I awoke in a dark, smooth-edged tunnel in the middle of, as far as I could tell, no-where.
The first thing I thought after my awakening was "What the hell happened?"
I struggled to collect my thoughts and memories and try to put together what had happened in the previous moments of my life.
From what part of me had told me, only a couple of hours seemed to have gone by since my last moment of being conscious, but another half told me it had been numbering in the weeks.
I still couldn't remember jack shit. Suddenly, a stray shard of memory seemed to come to me. A flash, much like a screen-cap, but it wasn't so vague I couldn't make anything out. It was what looked like me, with a strange energy-like lightning-resembling bolt descending from the sky into me and-
That was it.
The normality restoration back in Nevada. I remembered it. I was absorbing my fallen soldiers to further empower myself physically, and then-
Tricky.
This was all his fault. I could have not even been anywhere in Nevada right now, and all because of him. First he disobeys me, then he kills my former operative and makes him quit, and now this?
That bastard clown was really going to pay now. Speaking of which, where was he?
"Tricky…" I mumbled under my breath, cursing the name of the former weaponized zombie-clown that got me into this mess.
"What?" A familiar voice called out from a direction I couldn't quite make out. The voice was obnoxious, nasally sounding, like what most free-thinkers would call, a "stand-up comedian."
"Who was that?" I yelled into the navy-blue oblivion.
"Tricky, who else, dumb shit?"
"Where are you?"
"Where the hell are you, Mister Fancy-Head-of-the-A.A.H.W.-Guy?"
I found it. The voice was coming from….my…back?
Suddenly, the tunnel became further lit. The walls were a lighter indigo blue, and strange looking items resembling file folders rushed past at breakneck speeds.
In the new light, I looked at my own hands. The palms were normal color (flat black) but the backs….Sickly darkish green….
I found an object rushing past and tried to grab it with my hands. As soon as I made contact, my hand seemed to shape and reform to almost envelope the object, and within a second the whole object was enclosed in a flat black plasma substance that was my arm. Suddenly the "file" began to disentegrate, and what looked like bright white energy rushed up my arm into my brain, and images of thousands of these files flooded my brain patterns, each one numbered with a label reading things like "," "," and "."
Suddenly, they spiraled inwards towards the center of my brain imaging, and forged into one larger file, reading "4."
My mind "opened" the file and played it back, viewing whatever it was. It was as if my own body had turned into a living OS.
As soon as the file opened, and played, what looked like a bearded man wearing a headset appeared. He was sitting in what looked like a large metal room, surrounded by wiring. He said something about thinking somebody was following him, spying on him, watching him. He began to look more and more like a man who belonged in solitary than a man who belonged at the controls of what appeared to be a computer of unimaginable processing abilities.
He also began to talk of his daughter, a girl whom he referred to as "Aelita." This interested me greatly. Before I could push the slider forward to view a different area of the video, however, Tricky spoke up;
"What the bloody hell are you watching there? Some guy's video diary? That's messed up man. Invasion of privacy! You should be fired for such a thing!"
I was so intrigued on focusing every little bit of brain power making connections to this data file I had recovered, that I could only put aside enough mental capacity to utter the phrase "Tricky, please, shut up already."
"Maybe you should mind your own business and try and collect some more, oh I don't know, relevant data before rifling through some dude's personal files?"
Goddamnit. Having tricky being Part of me was not easy. It was like being bipolar, or having double personalities. I couldn't even remember how that came to be either…
Then I remembered….
After accidentally absorbing Tricky's corpse, I had become weakened by his sentience, and my own abilities began to fail, leaving me open for an incoming normality restoration.
Normality Restorations are made of pure, raw, uncontrolled energy, and everything it touches is turned into such as well. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed to a different form, or moved elsewhere, and it seems like the Normality Restoration did both. It permanently merged the physical beings of me and Tricky as one, and after being hit by the Normality Restoration, it created a momentary tear in time and space as my own abilities interfered. We were transported through the network of ions that lived in a blazing hive in the sky above Earth, and transported to a place that fitted the prerequisites for our own existence.
I read the video's date and location to figure out where I was. This was a locale data tranfer network, and files could only come from within a certain range around here. The date and time saved for the video where some time in the 80's, and in France.
France.
