Chapter 1: Strange Beginnings
Author's Note
This story will contain minor spoilers for Timewalker, you may or may not notice them and understand what they mean. Read at your own peril.
A recording flickers to life, it shows a room with gray walls and a spartan appearance. The camera is focused on a single person in the middle of the view, a man with white hair, a young face, perhaps in his mid twenties, he's wearing a black shirt and blue jeans, feet out of view.
"I suppose I should do one of these as well, Jack and Mae already recorded their's." He pauses to look at the camera, walks up to it and brings the view downward. Grabbing a chair off to the side, he sits down, now in the middle of the camera's focus.
"I'm not sure if anyone will ever see this, there are far too many things that could go wrong with this operation, but I suppose it isn't the worst idea." He sighs, then looks back at the lens. "My name is Alexander Andros, I was born in 1998, August 12, the planet Earth, in the Prime. I am the founder of the Void Coalition, and this is my story."
The recording suddenly flickers and dies, seconds later a message reads across the screen.
– INITIATE NEURAL INTERFACE? –
Y/N
With a single button press, there is a low whine as the device erupts into bright white light, and everything changes as, instead of a recording, a vision from your own brain, a memory that isn't yours, plays out in front of you.
2028, Earth Prime
I ran through a bombed out building, clutching my rifle to my chest as I sprinted. I wasn't sure if there were any other scavengers around, but I wasn't taking the chance that an opportunistic one wouldn't try to blow my head off. I slid to a stop behind a broken concrete wall, the man made stone shattered from some high caliber weapon years prior.
It'd been what? Five years? I couldn't remember, it wasn't something that mattered right now, so let's go with five. Five years ago, the world had fallen apart, something had sparked the fuse and all out warfare began around the globe, world war three. Nothing had been off the table, Geneva convention? What was that? Nuclear warheads were the last thing used, no one wanted to be the country who started the end of the world.
Everything else though, that was fair game, chemical weapons, bio-weapons, white phosphorus, experimental stuff I had never even heard about, all of it was used. People died by the millions, civilians and military, long before the end. By the time nukes were dropped, only the USA, China, and Russia were left.
It wasn't any of us who struck first, instead it was a fourth group. I don't know what they were called, but everyone knows what they did. In a single moment, nuclear silos all across the world opened up, and unleashed armageddon across the globe. They broadcasted a countdown as they did it, everyone saw as the seconds counted down, and then felt the earth shake as the warheads landed.
Almost anything with electricity stopped working that day, the EMPs from the blasts breaking everything. The air in many places was saturated with radiation, hazmat gear was mandatory in many places. There were many more effects throughout the world, but it would take a while to list them all.
Currently I was searching through an abandoned neighborhood, most residents had left by now, and had taken what they could with them. People tried to stay together for a while, but as the years went by most turned on each other, the only communities still together either stayed to themselves entirely, or were roving bands of raiders, killing everyone aside from themselves.
I had been lucky, or unlucky from a certain perspective, to stick to myself. My family was gone as far as I knew, and even if they weren't I had no way of getting to them. I was in the US, the state of Georgia, my parents and my brother had been in Europe for a trip when the war started.
Moving into a house, I swept my rifle, an old AR-15, from one corner of the room to another. I moved around the house clearing each room, no one was here. I set my backpack on the ground and took stock of my supplies. I had enough food and water for a week or two, about three magazines of ammo for my rifle, and a Glock 19 with two magazines. I was well stocked all things considered.
This house was the most intact of the neighborhood, having two completely sealed rooms, and it would provide good shelter for the next week. I went to work setting up a bedroll, and then getting a small fire started using pieces of furniture. It was cold right now, the beginning of winter, the sun had begun setting an hour ago and I didn't have much time until nightfall.
I finished starting the fire, a nice blaze forming from a broken wooden chair and a torn up pillow. I went into the house's kitchen, searching for a pot of any kind. I found one eventually, a nice sized saucepan, laying it across the fire, I began cooking some of the food I had.
Earlier that day I'd managed to find and kill a rabbit, and it was cooking up nicely. It wouldn't be anything like my mother's cooking, but it would be just fine when the only other thing I'd eaten recently were canned foods.
It was a good meal, once I'd finished I took the pan off. Standing up, I grabbed my Glock and began to walk around the house. I wanted to see if there was anything of value here. One room had a nice collection of books, something nice to pass the time I supposed. There wasn't much else however, a couple interesting knick knacks, but nothing I could use.
Then I happened upon something that didn't quite fit, a computer on a desk, but not just a normal dead computer, this one was open, turned on, the screen lighting up the room. This didn't make sense, almost all electronics had been EMPd back when the bombs dropped, never mind that power hadn't been on in five years.
I stepped toward the device, it was a silvery laptop, no visible brand on it. When I got closer I could read the text on the screen, 'INITIATE? Y/N'. Initiate what? I stepped up to the wooden furniture the laptop was resting on.
I was curious, incredibly so, what was this doing here? What did the text mean? Should I press something? For all I knew it could cause the whole house to detonate, fire off a nuke or some other WMD. What did it matter if it did? The world was already dead.
I pressed the y key, the computer lit up in a swirling multicolor. In the middle four words formed, 'DESTINATION LOCKED - THE VOID'.
"What the fuc-" Then the world squeezed, spun, and shifted as my body disintegrated, the small device sending me and itself across time, space, and universal boundary.
&^(%*O&, #&^*:+_?
I woke up exhausted, like I had just competed in an ironman race. Every part of my body was sore, I looked around, and immediately wished I hadn't. The sky was gone, replaced by an eerie blackness with what looked like trillions of stars.
I sat up abruptly, my head whipped around, only to find everything even more confusing. There were pieces of land as far as I could see, hundreds of broken chunks of land. Some had lush grass and trees on them, others had barren land and rock, some had sand like a desert, some were too alien for me to describe.
In the middle of it all, directly ahead of me, probably thousands of miles away, was an absolutely gargantuan disk of land. Not a planet, it wasn't spherical, just a massive plane of land as large as a world.
The blackness continued everywhere, the trillions of stars as well, below me, to the sides. It seemed that everything here was this nothingness, everything except for the disk, and the millions of fractured pieces around it.
On my second look I could begin to see just how big some of those chunks were, some of them looked big enough for a city, maybe even larger.
"Where the fuck am I?" Finally looking away from the spectacle ahead of, and all around me, I looked back toward where I was. My Glock was here, sitting on the ground, my backpack too. So was that silvery computer, the exact thing that had taken me here, and it was black screened, dead, it seemed.
53 AF, The Void
You stumble backwards as the memory stops playing in your skull. What the hell was that? Looking back towards the recording device, something that turns out to be the exact same computer as in the memory, you grow suspicious.
Grabbing the computer you look at a list of similar recordings, all numbered from 1, the one you just played, to 50. Snapping the device shut, you throw it in the sack strapped to your back, it seems interesting, and the memory doesn't seem to have done any damage to you.
There was nothing else in the room you just looted, nothing of value anyways. Deciding to head back to your camp you step outside the door and head down a hallway. Currently you're on a large starship, a very large ship easily a few kilometers in length, thankfully you're near an exit to the outside.
Stepping out of a large hole that has been blown into and through the ship, you turn back towards it. It's impressive, it must have belonged to someone important before the fracture. Doesn't matter now though, it's just as broken as everything else from before. You can read a line of writing on the side, a name probably, 'VCS SOL OFFENSE'.
Heading back to your camp, you set the sack down, pulling out all the items you looted from the ship, a few guns, a very nice looking sword, and that computer. The guns are nice, better than your current ones, they seem to be a pair of plasma accelerators, fashioned in the shape of revolvers. The sword is well made, a straight single edged blade inlaid with gold, silver and a few nice rubies,Black leather for the grip, there is no crossguard.
They are laid down on a big piece of cloth, then you turn your attention to the most unremarkable looking, but by far the most interesting find. Opening the laptop back up, you see the next recording waiting to be seen.
With a press of a button, the recording begins.
Author's Note
Hello, on a complete whim I decided, "Hey you know how we said we were going to wait for Timewalker to finish before writing this? Fuck that we're doing it now.", and here we are. This is a story I am very, VERY excited to write. No, Alexander is not an SI, kinda. He ain't me that's for sure, but he's from earth, our earth. So he'll know a know some fiction, though not all of the ones I show. To everyone who is interested by this, thank you. Provide feedback and criticism if you want, it's very helpful.