Chapter 1: Human After All
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Rattle, rattle
Rattle, rattttttle
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I awoke to a hum-buzzing and a rumbling. Normally a deep sleeper, I grabbed my phone to check the source of the buzzing. It showed me that it was four o'clock on the eighth of September, 2025. However, the buzzing continued, so I used the phone's flashlight to determine the source. What I found amazed me.
See, there are only two things I keep on my bedside table. One is my phone, the other (and, thus, the source of the buzzing) is a disc. This disc had many reasons to be special, and one of these reasons was that it was spinning on my table like a perpetual motion machine.
Another reason was its provenance. A year ago, I had completed a 24-hour long mixtape. I still believe that this mixtape was absolute musical perfection. I had named it Homework, as I had selected the tracks in my bedroom, and had then gone to my friend Sebastian. Sebastian used a special 3D printer to engrave a gold-plated disc with absolute precision, so that it could be played from a modified ultra-high-precision record player.
Then, I had lost it.
Well, not quite lost. A week after making the Homework disc, I had gone for a stroll in the forest near my house. There, I had apparently passed out and when I'd come to, I'd been lying in a hospital bed. I had reached for my pocket, the place I had always kept the Homework disc, but it wasn't there. In its place had been this silver disc.
During the year, Sebastian had looked at it, I had looked at it, I had even taken it to University for a proper analysis. The results had all come back the same: The disc had grooves in a non-random pattern, but was completely illegible, most likely encrypted somehow. I had started naming the disc no-access memories.
Rumblegrumbleumbleumble
So then there I was, in my childhood bedroom with this alien disc spinning for no discernible reason, when I heard another rumble from outside. I would have written it off as thunder if it hadn't come so immediately from behind my head that I almost jumped from fright.
Completely awake now, I cracked open my door to check what was outside. However, when I opened the door, I was awestruck for the second time: Instead of the familiar landing with the four bedrooms, I instead found a haphazard, whirling mess of corridors and doors, as well as a staircase that definitely wasn't where it should have been. Shocked, I closed my door quickly. Was this the disc's doing?
Reaching out to grab the disc, I noticed that it began to glow as my finger approached it. Using my other hand, which didn't cause this odd effect, I put the disc on my left middle finger, where it kept spinning with the same speed. Then I moved my right index towards the disk's edge. It glowed brighter and brighter. The glow seemed to envelop me as my index moved ever closer, the nail poised to fit into the grooves perfectly. I felt slightly apprehensive because of this alien object, yet excited and completely curious. I knew this disc contained the answer to my questions about the events of the previous year. I would find out where Homework had gone.
I placed my nail on the disc decisively and was promptly swallowed by the glow. A voice boomed:
TRACK ONE:
THIRST