Light.

Bright light. That was the first thing she noticed. Then confusion.

Where am I? She tried to look around, but her vision did not respond. The light, in any event, was omnipresent, and she had a vague feeling that it should have been blinding. Then a more pressing question occurred to her.

Who am I? The answer eluded her.

The light began to recede. She found herself in a corridor, clearly constructed from stone but in patterns so intricate as to imply that it had been grown, not carved. She tried to take a step, but found herself incapable of movement.

A lengthy amount of time passed, though she couldn't tell how long. It could have been hours, or years. But eventually, she heard noises coming from somewhere behind her. Gunfire, followed by animalistic growls of rage and screams of pain. A man ran past her line of sight, wearing some sort of metal armor painted in an orange pattern of some sort. He turned around and shot a weapon of some sort at something outside her line of sight. She noticed that his brown hair was cropped short, and his goatee treated similarly. On the chestplate of his armor was emblazoned a symbol that she didn't recognise. His glasses clashed oddly with his military outfit, as they resembled something a bookish technician might wear, and yet at the same time they seemed to complete him somehow.

He didn't appear to see her. She tried to call out, ask what was going on, but she had no control over herself.

She felt a humming in the air. The man didn't perceive it, but somehow she knew something was changing that should have never been changed.

With a rumble, the wall directly across from her shook once, twice, and then exploded outward, knocking the man off his feet. A huge creature stepped into her line of sight, not from behind the destroyed wall but from where the man had come from, seeming at the same time biological and mechanical. It raised a pincer-like claw and brought it to bear on the man. At first, she thought it was hunched over to fit in the tunnel, but after looking at it for slightly longer (not that she had any choice but to do so - all the functions her instincts told her she should have failed to function) she realised that its back was simply unusually bulbous. Its one eye sat deep over a wide, fanged mouth.

With a humming noise, its claw clicked open and emitted a blast of heat. She didn't feel it, but the walls and floor of the tunnel turned black and even began to slip as if molten. The man, having fallen out of her field of vision, made no apparent effort to fight back.

Then her vision shifted up to the dust-filled gap in the wall, even without her willing it. When she attempted to look around, she found herself once again incapable, and the creature, like the man, took no notice of her. However, she saw something it didn't: many lights burning through the cloud of dust. The lights were orange and blue, and flicked around like searchlights.

There was a beep, a humming, and then a loud crack as the creature vanished. There was no cinematic recoiling or theatrical scream, but one moment the creature was there, and then it wasn't.

The lights moved forward, scanning the vicinity, and in the process revealing themselves to be robots of some sort. There were two distinct models, corresponding to the orange and blue lights, which of course emanated from the units' optics.

The orange-optic models were slender, with an elliptical main body connected loosely to a framework of limbs. They each held a long-barreled weapon of some sort, the barrel of one still smoking. It was notably taller than its blue counterpart, which would have been about shoulder-height to a human. The blue units were also much more heavily built, with spherical bodies and wider-set arms and legs, apparently designed more for stability and strength than the agility built into the orange units. They wielded short metallic blades, rather than the projectile weapons in the hands of the Orange-units.

She remembered them from somewhere, but she couldn't figure out where. Suddenly an image flashed over her eyes of one of the orange units standing on a ledge in a collapsing building and dancing about as if startled. As quickly as it started, it was over.

A blue-unit gestured rapidly towards half of the unit and then down the hallway where the man and creature had come from, while making a noise that she could only describe as 'burbling'. A pair of orange-units rushed down the hallway and then back, making a noise of their own, more higher-pitched than the Blue's. The Blue nodded, and the group trooped down the tunnel in the direction in which the man had been going.

She heard something crack, and she sped after the troop of robots, watching their movements sped up not unlike a video on fast forward. Still, though, she could exert no control over her trajectory, nor could she sense herself touching the ground. The images flashed by too fast for her absorb details, but she did see flashes that she thought corresponded to weapons fire.

Then, suddenly, she stopped. Events returned to normal speed. Now she was standing outside a huge concrete complex. A symbol of the greek letter 'lambda' was emblazoned on the door. A group of people in lab coats stood at a certain distance away from the building, setting up a ring of metal rods around it and hooking them up to a series of generators. When one of the people passed in front of her, she expected to see the same lambda logo on the coat, but instead there was a logo of a partially opened iris, with the word Aperture running out of it.

A window shattered in the concrete complex and the squad of robots that she'd seen in the tunnels burst through and ran towards the scientists. As they ran, a swarm of easily thousands of alien creatures of every description ran, crawled, jumped, or hovered after them.

They leapt one by one over the barrier of metal rods and, as the last one passed over, a scientist pressed a button linked to the rods and a rippling blue energy field spread out over the complex in a dome shape.

The aliens slowed down, stopping at the edge of the barrier. A large one similar to the creature that she had seen kill the man with glasses stepped forward and extended one of its appendages toward the barrier. As it touched, it jerked back as if in pain, but the barrier somehow held on to it. It then began to pass through the barrier, sparking and trying to pull itself back. As more and more of it passed through the field, it began to blacken and crumble until it arrived on the same side as the scientists, nothing but a pile of ash.

The other creatures drew back, and then began to turn around, before stopping and cowering as a large potato-shaped object hovered overhead. Large masses of technology protruded from its 'body', including what appeared to be a breathing apparatus of some sort.

The hovering creature looked at the scientists, and then it focussed on the barrier. The rippling field flexed, but held, before what was apparently the sheer power of the creature's thoughts.

As the barrier flexed, it appeared to vanish briefly. Apparently emboldened, the creature floated onward and attempted to pass through the now-invisible barrier in front of it.

More sparks and crackling, and a few moments later, the hovering creature, too, was ashes.

The robots and scientists high-fived each other. One of the scientists pointed to the device and said, "The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Field is a success! Greg should be pleased to hear this!"

/

Her vision whited out again, but seemingly seconds later the light receded, revealing a large room with wall-to-wall bookshelves, and a large desk in the center. Behind the desk sat a man. At first she thought the man was extremely old, but then she realized that his shoulder-length hair was simply bleached bone white.

He was dressed in a long duster that bunched awkwardly around the armrests of his chair. The old-looking coat was light brown and made of battered leather.

The man looked up at a huge portrait that sat above the doors into the room. It depicted a man superficially similar to the man in the chair below, but with receding, short hair and an older-looking face. He wore a similar type of coat to that worn by the man behind the desk.

"Dammit, Uncle," said the man. His voice rasped like that of a much older person. "Why do you torment me even from beyond the grave? The AI was my last hope. With its failure..." The conversation sounded like one he'd had often with the picture.

He moved out from behind the desk, revealing that his right leg ended in a stump at the knee. His pants were tied off just below, and he sat in a wheelchair. He rolled in front of the desk.

"Every turn you've outshone me, even being dead twenty years. At least you were buried whole. That bitch who shot me... They had to hack off my leg. All the things you tried to do over the years - the Mantis Men, for god's sake - and the worst that happened to you was some breathing problems. It'd take a miracle to..."

There was a knock at the door. "Come in!" he yelled.

A scientist, one of the ones from the complex, opened the door and said, "Mister Johnson, the upgraded Material Emancipation Grill has been a success. They closed off the Black Mesa facility with the alien creatures still inside. There are media people outside waiting for a statement from you."

Mr. Johnson didn't hear what the scientist said for a moment. When he did, his face split into a huge grin.

He looked up at the portrait. "Do you hear that, old man? Not even you could have bested Black Mesa." Then, to the scientist, "Tell them I'll be right out."

/

Her vision whited out again, this time interrupted by brief flashes: Mr. Johnson giving a speech to a crowd, then a flash of the blue energy dome, thousands of alien creatures milling about underneath, then a group of individuals standing around a desk. One sat behind it, in front of a typewriter, and holding up a sheet of paper to the others. She felt some connection to them, but before she could think about it further, more images flashed in front of her. A production line, building millions of the military robots from the other vision, then an old woman on a hospital bed, then a ceremony of some sort. Then she found herself in front of a screen which displayed a dizzying sequence of new images, mostly of unrecognizable technology.

Though she didn't catch many of the images, she noticed a massive vault-like chamber, a wristband with a device attached to the rim, and some form of polearm.

After those images ran down, her vision whited out once again and she found herself floating in the air over a simple double bed. On one side lay the woman who she had noticed in the image of the people around the desk.

Once again she felt the connection to her, but now with more time to think about it, she was able to organise the sensation and describe it.

She felt drawn to the woman below, as if she were a piece of dirt being drawn into a drain. She had a strong feeling that the woman below shouldn't exist, and yet her presence was infinitely more powerful than her own.

Now, she began to feel the parts of her body that her instinct had told her should be present, but no sooner had she regained sensation in an area, was that area reduced to glowing dust and 'sucked' down into the body of the woman below. In fact, it almost seemed as if the disintegration was happening first.

She flexed her hand experimentally, and at the same time, the hand of the woman below twitched unconsciously.

It's not my body I'm feeling, she realized, It's hers.

She had a vague sensation that at one point the idea of becoming someone else would have repulsed and terrified her. Now, though, she was at a loss to feel much emotion at all, even though she wanted to. It was as if her mind was also being absorbed into the other woman, sleeping and totally unaware of the goings-on above her.

As such, she never realized when she was completely gone.

/

Michelle woke with a start, and for a moment felt convinced she had seen something hovering over her bed. But then she realized it was just an afterimage, like when one looked at a mirror with a bright light behind oneself, and then looked quickly away. She put it down to being half asleep and looked over at the digital clock on her nightstand.

The display read 3:00. She groaned in frustration and rolled over, lying facedown on the pillow.

What was that dream I was just having? She rubbed her temples. I think it was one of those dreams again...

/
This chapter was shorter (by far) than the last one, but about average for most of my work. As such, I am satisfied with it (for now). I hope you are as well.

Also, I (finally) completed the cover image for The Six Cores. It didn't turn out as good as I'd expected, mostly because of the fact that it was shrunk something like ten times to fit into the tiny slot provided for story covers. In any case, I'll be taking a break from this story to wrap up that one. Two more chapters there, then back here.

Madhighlander Away!