1.03 – Medication

Argonaut picked up the pill bottle. "I am going to give you a choice." He opened the bottle and produced its contents into his hands. "Either you can go back to your orphanage and forget we ever met," he opened his left hand, producing a capsule full of blue liquid, "or you can come with me and my associates to follow the footsteps of your father," he opened his right hand which held another capsule with red liquid in it. "Remember, once you decide, there is no turning back."

I reached my hand out towards the blue pill, but I froze. I wondered if this guy was telling the truth, lying, or crazy. If he was lying, then both pills could be poison, but if he was telling the truth, then the blue pill would lead me back to a crowded orphanage, sub-par tournaments, and more creepy men in suits wielding chrome sushi. I didn't know if I could trust them. Then again, they've been right all of the other times. How did they know my name? Did he actually meet my father? Was he alive? Why me? Questions raced my mind at this point, and I looked at Argonaut. He was one hell of a character, and he sounded like he was telling the truth. Either sound of meeting my father for the first time since preschool tempted me, I was convinced that this Argonaut was telling the truth, or I was entranced by the girl in the braid. Whatever it was, I found myself swallowing the red pill and half a glass of water. Argonaut smiled and led me into another room with a bookcase, wooden chair attached to a computer as well as some other things. The girl with the braid stood next to me.

"I'm guessing that I'm supposed to sit there, right?" I asked.

"That's the idea."

I sat down and she hooked me up. After I was fitted in, she turned to me.

"Whatever happens, don't panic."

I didn't know whether I was going to live or die, so I decided to act like the latter. "Seeing as I might get lit up like a candle, don't you think I deserve a kiss?"

"Sure." She turned to the kid I met in the limo, "Aequitas, this man needs a kiss."

The kid looked up from the computer in confusion. "Wait, what?"

Argonaut stepped in. "We need to get moving. Graft, get a hook on him."

The girl with the braid went to the computer. Argonaut pulled out a cell phone. "Felix, stand by."

Then he turned to me. "Have you ever thought that you were somewhere when you were actually in another place?"

I didn't have time to speculate on his question, because at that point my lucky ring started stretching. It wrapped itself around my finger.

"What's going on?" I asked. Nobody answered. The silver finished covering my hand, and started creeping up my arm.

I heard that everybody experiences something different when they're unplugged: I heard that Neo, some guy who's prophesized to be a messiah of some kind, had a little fiasco with a mirror. Whatever happens, however, they all wind up in the same place.

What happened to me next defeated accurate explanation. I woke up in a sea of pink. I swam around looking for the surface, but I couldn't tell up from down. A dizzying feeling crept over me, and my arms lost control of me and flailed around wildly. A mass of black chords tangled my torso, restricting my movement, but I breached the surface. A hose down my throat was pushing air into my lungs, but my gagging kept me from breathing properly, so I removed it as fast as I could. After enjoying a couple breaths, I looked around and found myself in what I could guess was a glass bathtub filled with pink goop. My arms had black tubing sticking out of them. My legs had them too. My eyes looked upward, and I refused to believe them: hundreds of millions of people lying down, each in their own glass bathtub, attached to their own chords, spanning in every direction. Again, my eyes looked down, and I found myself suspended in midair higher than I could see, where there were more pink tubs.

Something flew up at me. I couldn't tell what it was, but I knew I didn't like it. An arm of some kind shot out at me and grabbed my neck, where it tugged at something on the back of my neck. It let go of me, and all of the plugs in my body popped off with gunshot-like sounds. All of the strength in my body left me, and I found myself face-first in the pink goop.

The rest is kinda blurry…