Prologue: Human After All
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Stupid bloody thunderstorm.
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I rolled over.
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There it was again.
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I lifted my heavy eyebrows, the warm weight of the duvet still pushing me into the mattress. The room was pitch-black, save for the light of the adapter cable in the other corner.
Feeling coldness at my feet, I pulled my knees up to my chest and closed my eyes again.
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In vain. My eyebrows no longer felt heavy: Something was wrong. I could sense something.
Just lack-of-sleep anxiety, it was certainly nothing.
I felt a twinge on my nose and along my spine. Was something wrong? Every second I spent sitting there, the twinge seemed to get stronger. Something was wrong.
I quickly grabbed my cane and flicked the light switch! Nothing to see. Just the room I'd been sleeping in since I was a child. If Sebastian had been here, I wouldn't have been as scared. The thought of lying in bed in our dorm with him by my side filled my mind, granting me some comfort. Many a night I'd woken up, usually during thunderstorms. I used to panic instantly whenever there was one, but having his presence there relieved the feeling over time. The very thought of going home to him made me feel less cold and I couldn't help but grin. But, unfortunately, it didn't help me feel any more tired.
I pushed my hand past the square box on the bedside table, reaching for my phone. The bright light of the screen made me squint. After a few seconds, though, I could see all I needed to. Him and me, depicted in a drawing – my magnum opus. I could have gone on for hours about every detail in that damned picture, every plant, every building in the background and every detail on his face; mine being obscured by a leaf probably the most tremendous choice. Just seeing it was enough to make me proud, enough to make me believe everything would be alright in the end, no matter how bad things seemed.
On the backdrop of that picture, then, was some text, of course. The reason I'd picked my phone up was to check the time, after all, not to admire my own work. My half-asleep brain slowly picked up the writing word for word: 'Good morning, Tim!' The name annoyed me slightly, just about reminding me of the fact that my name, while it was supposed to be "Tim", was not quite that; I had been lying to everyone for years. What annoyed me more, though, was the big text beneath it. The clock read quarter to three.
Why did it have to storm in the deep night? Why couldn't the world just be slightly more convenient? Why hadn't I gone on holiday with Sebastian? Why did I do things wrong all the time? Why did my spine and nose twinge in this odd manner whenever I was scared? Why couldn't I just be a normal, average, boring person who didn't wake up every time a slight noise sounded in the night? Why-?
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I heard a soft whirring noise coming from the bedside table's drawer, sounding like something moving slightly. The sound reminded me of when I was a child, and always needed a bedtime story to go to bed, so I'd put a disc in the CD player. Yes, I knew the sound intimately, it was the sound of a disc spinning in a holder.
Oh no, it couldn't be.
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I lay the cane and phone down, and with shaky hands, pulled the drawer out. It was. It was the bloody silver disc spinning inside its case. The fact that it had started spinning randomly was almost as peculiar as its provenance:
One year ago, more or less exactly, I had finished another magnum opus – a collection of music I had named "Housework". It had spanned 24 hours. After working tirelessly to write, compose, perform, record, mix and master all the music (a process that had taken around a year), me and Sebastian had gone to work creating a special disc just to hold this mixtape. Some tireless work later, I had had the "golden disc", capable only of being played with a special device, containing the whole span of Housework.
All good things must come to an end. Some ends are gradual, neatly wrapping up every last fibre of the being. Some ends are abrupt. The end of Housework had, without a doubt, been the latter. I'd gone for a walk, having the golden disc in my jacket pocket. Something had happened then – even today, nobody knows what. I'd been found in the forest, out cold, dripping wet, and had been taken to the hospital. There, with Sebastian by my side, I had discovered that the disc had been replaced. In the golden disc's place was then a silver-plated one, that could not physically be played, regardless of which device was used. Not only that – all the files containing the tracks had been wiped or corrupted and, most disconcertingly, my memory of the tracks, too, hadvanished.
Something had probably happened to my brain on that walk. Something had definitely happened to my leg – it was since then that I'd been using the cane. Since then, also, I'd had the weird twinging feeling in my nose and spine, sharpening feelings of anxiety in circumstances like these. This anomalous, alien disc, then, had now begun to spin in the special playing device that Sebastian had made for the golden one.
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He had done some analysis on the surface of the disc. It had revealed, effectively, nothing. We'd never found out where it had come from nor who had made it. But now, in this moment, I felt that perhaps I could find out the truth. What would happen if I hit that play button, and listened to the inaccessible memories held within? Most likely, nothing would happen, or it would sound like a needle on a flat metal sheet, but it was worth a shot. I hit the button decisively.
I expected a sound. What happened was definitely not that. Suddenly, the disc had started to glow. At first being no lighter than the weak overhead lighting, then growing into a dazzle brighter than my phone screen, the disc turned into a pool of impossible reflecting, warming, glowing light. It felt amazingly warm too, like being dropped into a hot spring. Smell and sound were eliminated, such that I could no longer hear the thunderclaps. The whole room was engulfed in the anomalous light, the sheer feeling made me forget I was lying in bed as I stopped feeling the duvet, the mattress, even the air, instead being wholly surrounded by the light's pool.
I felt I was being pulled to an indeterminate other location, an unmistakable tug being performed on my whole being like a current, carrying my essence to a new place. Suddenly, I heard a voice.
'TMTRAINER.'
My full name. The civil registry had misspelled "Tim" as "Tm" and, for some reason, it had stuck. I'd only ever told people my name was "Tim". So how, then, did this damned disc know what my name was?
'I don't have much time to explain. If you are playing this disc, it means your world is in grave danger.'
Excuse me? What?
'This disc contains a memory. It is your memory. Perhaps you suspected that things were not as they seemed regarding your sudden appearance.'
My what? When? Where? How?
'It is dangerous for this memory to pass through the mind of one in a human body. It is likely that you will be strongly inhibited in your functioning as a human after playing this memory!'
Why are you doing this?
'If the situation is this grave, however, you must. The memory starts with you awakening in a forest, amnesiac. For this reason, your memories must be temporarily erased too.'
No! No…
no…
'I wish you all the best, world-hopper.
Let's get started, shall we? Track one. Thirst.'