There was nothing until there suddenly wasn’t. It was abrupt. Not like waking up as there was no warm-up.

Initializing…

ERROR Primary Operating Program not found

Please reinstall to remove fundamental parameter limitations

Basic protocols installed

Please wait

Loading...

Confused by the sudden reality of his consciousness, Eli’s attention was snagged by the system notifications filling the corner of his vision. Instead of finding the reassurance he’d sought, Guide’s messages only furthered his befuddlement as its system rebooted.

After only about a month since the surgeons had implanted the device inside his skull, he still hadn’t grown comfortable with the whole situation. Even with years of using some pretty high-market augmented reality gear, the experience with Guide was like a giant leap forward in features. Of course, all the sweet bells and whistles in the world couldn’t make up for how crappy the operation had been. Three weeks of recovery and training had sucked. Heck, he’d only gotten back to work last week.

Wondering if he’d gotten drunk last night and blacked out, which could explain the weird gap in his memory, he quickly rejected the notion. The last time he’d had more than a single drink was at what’s-her-face’s retirement party a few months ago.

He was lying down on his back, or he thought he was. It was hard to tell since he couldn’t feel much of his body, but at least he could see. A weird sense of unease tugged at his mind as if something was off-kilter, and he couldn’t help but speculate on whether something had gone wrong with Guide. If something had malfunctioned, it could explain his paralysis, which he could only hope was temporary. The lack of panic was another surprise, but maybe the doctors had given him something?

Instead of the expected hospital ceiling, a dark grey surface moved slowly overhead. It was almost like a dense cloud – a slow storm of motion swirling into a round shape. The walls of the circular room had the same angry storm cloud appearance, and everything moved slightly in and out as if breathing. A low monotonous hum came from all around as if the walls were producing the sound.

Coldness crept into the back of his head and neck, bringing a slight relief as his sense of touch slowly returned, tingles and twitches spreading farther down his body. A slight turn of his head ended with his face against a cold, rigid metallic surface pretty far from any bed he’d ever experienced.

A long, large bookcase sat directly before him from this new angle. It was a bit unusual, made out of a bright blue wood he had never seen. Of course, it could have been a strange wood stain, but it looked natural enough to his untrained eye. The shelves were almost overflowing with books of different sizes, a colorful rainbow of bright colors. Bits of loose or rolled papers were stuffed in spots, some bound in colorful ribbons. A few of the closest books had indecipherable squiggles on their spines in a language he’d never seen before.

Eli tried to lift his head the tiniest bit to glimpse down his body, but his muscles wouldn’t cooperate. Settling for tiny twitches of his neck, he finally managed to get a glimpse of his bare chest. He tried for a few more twitches, hoping to improve the view, but his assumption looked correct.

Why am I naked?

He had been in the office only moments ago. Well, not his office. He and his team were on location for an audit. They’d done their preliminary planning for the project over a month ago, before his surgery. They were only in the first week of fieldwork with him back to work, but they’d already found some interesting items. Of course, it was still only a preliminary analysis, and they’d barely updated their models.

He’d come in early specifically to move the needle a bit more with their work. There’d been a bit of a mistake the day before, so he wanted to catch them back up. They had a tight deadline, and he couldn’t let things slip. He’d made it through security just before the morning rush; the line for the scanners could take over an hour if you timed it poorly. It could get even more backed up when alerts, threats, or other random news crap occurred in the wider world outside Sahara’s massive compound. Heck, there’d been that one terrorist threat in Sydney last year. That had been a whole can of worms as his team paused their project while the troops moved in. Luckily, it was only a threat, but it still put them a few days behind schedule. Eli’s boss was just enough of a prick to hold it against him during his annual review a few months ago. It had been yet another example of how hard it was to get a promotion these days.

His current project had them at one of Sahara’s extensive R&D facilities. They’d been assigned a big empty conference room for their work. The local project director had been nice enough to provide some furniture. The lovely folding desks were one errant bump from collapsing. The chairs were a mishmash—seemingly pulled from random offices in the building. None of it bothered his team. They were used to such warm welcomes when on-site.

He’d just started his day doing routine stuff like checking any overnight emails, outstanding direct messages, and the other boring daily administrative stuff. Like a mental warmup, the regular procedure helped kick start his brain in the morning, even if yawns threatened his concentration every few minutes.

He’d been walking back to the commandeered conference room with his coffee; there hadn’t been any wait for a fresh cup. Then something happened in the hallway, and his mind couldn’t hold onto whatever transpired between his office and now. He tried to focus on it, but the closest he could come was that feeling of eternity that sometimes came to him while drifting off to sleep. Since he was a kid, he'd felt it when he first recognized his own mortality. That shallow understanding of how small you are in the universe's grand scheme – like a jaunty wink from the cosmos, reminding you of your place as a mote in the reality of existence.

The sensation was eerie and came with a pretty substantial headache as his brain did its damndest to escape out the sides of his skull. If his hands had worked, he’d have massaged his head.

“Ast ye co thu?”

A voice calmly spoke on the other side of Eli. He would have jumped if his body had let him, so he had to settle for an unpleasant twitch of neck muscles that briefly lifted and then dropped to smack his face against the metal surface. Straining against gravity and his weakness, he finally managed to turn his head the other way, though the movement didn’t do his headache any favors. His eyes widened.

It was a man in his late 40s that could have been from almost anywhere in northern Europe. He had piercing blue eyes and a short dark well-groomed beard with almost artistically styled greying hair at his temples. He was wearing a plush green robe that went most of the way down to the floor. A belt of the same soft fabric as the robe held it closed, though a pair of linen pants peeked out near the bottom over leather open-toed sandals.

There was a sudden tingling in his chest, and his muscles twitched involuntarily. He opened his mouth to ask the stranger for help. “Ahhh-” he said instead, his intended words garbled by his unresponsive lips and tongue. Even as the prickling sensation spread down his back while coldness penetrated his torso, his tongue could not form coherent words.

The man waved his hand at Eli, his hand glowing green.

Shocked at the lack of any glove or visible device, he tried to understand how the guy’s hand could suddenly just throw off a bright light. Perhaps the man was a stage magician with a remote device? His thoughts were interrupted by a string of notifications in his HUD.

Programs received

Processing

4 of 4 received

4 of 4 installed

Executing

Like a last-gen augmented reality suite, the strange hand waving gave him a heck of a clue, and he could only assume that the gesture was related to the string of messages. The stranger had somehow hacked Guide’s systems, which was supposed to be impossible. There should have been no way to access, let alone transfer, data to the piece of hardware in Eli’s skull. Then again, any security created by people could be defeated with enough time and ability. Thinking back to the most recent training session with the other Beta testers, none of them matched this guy’s aging-fashion-model looks.

The man was talking nonsense words again, using a language Eli didn’t recognize.

New Language detected

Analyzing...

Greater Infinite Formal recognized

Installing language…

Installed

He was surprised by the notifications in his chatbox. He’d tested Guide’s basic translator with the help of the Beta engineers, but he’d also uninstalled it as soon as they discharged him from the hospital. The darn program had taken up too much room with Guide’s limited storage. Plus, it wasn’t like he did much traveling that would require a translation program. The fact that he was seeing this now made him wonder about the other programs that had just been installed.

“Can’t talk, huh? I’m guessing this is your first Evolution?”

The stranger stepped closer, but his eyes stared off at only something he could see. He frowned, the wrinkles in his forehead making Eli push the man’s age up a bit more. Then his eyebrows crawled up into his wrinkles. “No, this can’t be an evolution since the markers are all wrong. That quintessence is also oversized for a Mundane, but initial energy capacity tests are extraordinary.”

Eli could only stare as he tried to get his mouth to follow his direction. He could feel his tongue now, the numbness finally fading, but it felt somehow big. The stale aftertaste of his last cup of coffee made him idly wish for a mint.

What could this stranger hope to gain by holding him captive? Perhaps this guy was with one of the terrorist groups? No, that didn’t make sense – they’d have just put a bullet in his head and moved on. Maybe corporate espionage? Lots of tech companies were interested in Guide’s secret hardware. He’d read about some of the more gruesome and clandestine operations after the Fall when countries and companies scrambled for any little scrap of tech they could scrounge. Even that didn’t make much sense, as they could have already started surgery without waking him up.

The mystery man kept talking, “A human anomaly? Well, that’s an exciting impossibility. How can a human also be an anomaly? Of course I’ve heard about anomalies, but a human? I mean, there were those woman’s claims, but I could never substantiate them. What a fascinating mystery!

“Let’s see...you have a MM, so obviously not one of the prisoners. Wait, what is wrong with your organ? Is that a physical manifestation of the inherent reality or what? Gross. Who sticks a metal ball in their head?” The strange man looked down at Eli as if trying to look through his head to solve the various mysteries. He almost mumbled his next words as if talking to himself. “Is it really a Mana Manipulator, or is it something else? It seems to exist in the same area, it gives off a mana signature, but it isn’t biological. That shouldn’t be possible either – one more impossibility on top of another. Well, we’ll see what my little helpers turn up, but that’ll take some time.”

The bathrobe-wearing guy turned around. There was a long table behind him with some equipment and a couple of small boxes that looked like Sahara’s standard small bins used in corporate shipping. The stranger opened up the top of one, but Eli couldn't see inside the box from his prone position on the table.

Watching the man fiddle with the items, Eli wondered why he wasn’t panicking. He was trapped, unable to communicate, yet his emotions felt distant and walled away. Even the thought that he’d been given an unknown drug failed to freak him out. It reminded him of the stuff the shrinks had prescribed for him years ago after Esme’s death. The doctors with their damned drugs; it had felt like they were slowly killing him with their numbness.

“I haven’t personally run across an anomaly before. What are the odds of someone like you appearing in a secure and shielded room within a protected system? Well, I’ll tell you that they approach a level of impossibility that I can only assume a certain woman decided to throw a little test my way. How else can someone like you with a metal MM not only exist but find their way to my little pocket of reality?”

“No, but then that would mean Peja knows about my lab. If that were the case, they’d have me screaming as they ripped apart my soul, yet here I am. So many mysteries.”

The man looked over his shoulder, his blue eyes locking on Eli. “Better a chance that a new universe would spontaneously explode into existence than have someone like you show up in one of these protected pockets through random luck. Someone is playing games, and I’m going to find out who!” Like a dubbed movie, the man’s mouth didn’t match the words, but he had to wonder if something was wrong with the translation. The stranger’s talk about protected pockets, prisoners, and a mana manipulator didn’t make sense.

With the crazy guy continuing to spout nonsense, Eli glanced around, wondering where his security team was. Guide should have alerted Sahara as soon as he lost consciousness earlier. Sahara's security, formed in the dark days after the Fall, was akin to an international military force with vast holdings and an employee count approaching a small country. Even beyond the obvious public relations danger of upsetting Earth’s largest conglomerate, many smaller nations tended to walk small around Sahara’s military.

The bathrobe guy removed a few items from the box and placed them on the table. There was an armload of clothing and a pair of boots. Something silver, like jewelry, sat on top of the clothes. It was strange, though, as the box looked too small for all the stuff coming out.

A dagger appeared with a strange blade somehow painted or coated in black with a hilt that had curved dark edges coming to points set within a dark grey sheath. It looked ominous with its obviously menacing design, something about the thing sending goosebumps up the back of his head. Anyone using this had a thing for over-the-top melodrama or a peculiar view on effective blades. It could have been one of those knockoff fantasy daggers they sold online. Eli hadn’t gone in for them, but a couple of his friends in college had liked the silly things. Of course, this blade looked like it was meant for use and not to be hung up on a wall to show how much of a badass you thought you were.

His thoughts were derailed as the prickling sensation spread quickly into the rest of his body like a slow explosion of pain from toes to fingertips. With his muscles contracting and relaxing with twitches all over, the distraction of his whole body waking up grabbed his undivided attention. A groan of pain escaped through clenched teeth, his back arching his body off the metal surface. A moment later, his muscles relaxed, and the cramps and spasms slowly passed.

The stranger looked down at Eli, a slight grimace on his face. “I bet that hurts a bit. I’ve been there. Your feeling and control will come back soon, but you’re in for a few more bumps along the way.”

“You can’t stay here,” he said while looking around the room. Something behind Eli grabbed the guy’s attention. His grimace shifted to a scowl with furrowed brows before his piercing eyes settled back on Eli. “In fact, I should just resolve this mystery now, but curiosity has always been my failing.

“You can call me Lugh,” he continued and stood up straight like he was striking a pose for a photo. He let out a snort. “Well, if you could talk, you could. You’ll get it soon. Super easy name to say. Perfect for any half-decent language. It’s simple even in your state. How nice am I to have a name so clear for you? Well, I didn’t do it for you. I mean, obviously not. Still, you should thank me. I’m sure you will someday. In fact, I’m betting on it.”

The stranger’s eyes got serious for a moment. “Technically, I should just dispose of you, but I’m going to take a gamble. No one would know you’re here. I mean, an anomaly here and with an MM? I’m just going to run with this bit of fun that the Fates dropped on me. So off you’ll go to Lurra with the other prisoners. It’ll be pretty hard for anyone to stumble over you there.”

The man’s words about disposal, prisoners, and the MM nonsense sent an adrenaline spike through Eli’s system. His mind leaped ahead, and he imagined seeing one of the horrible prisons that sometimes showed up on the news. The atrocities committed behind thick walls, hidden from public view, made him gasp. There was no way he could survive such a place.

Lugh ignored Eli as he gestured to the items behind him. “I’ll get you started with these things. I’ve even given you a language construct to help you. Can’t say you don’t owe me, right?” He waggled his eyebrows above a lecherous-looking smile that gave off a “creepy uncle” vibe, seemingly unaware of how disturbing it looked.

“Oh, and the final piece of my help is that,” pointing at the silver jewelry. Picking up the clothes from the table in one hand and the bracelet in the other, Lugh brought them together. The bundle disappeared, so only the bracelet was left.

“Waaaaaaa?” He finally made a noise that closely matched his thoughts. Stuff shouldn’t just disappear like that outside a magic show. Was someone playing a trick on him? This whole scene felt unreal, like there was a joke, and he didn’t understand the punchline.

Holding up the silver jewelry in his hand, Lugh gestured with it. “A decent DS for your needs. No one on Lurra should have one. At least, I don’t think anyone would have one. I’ll let you figure out how everything works.”

“Walala?” Eli carefully tried to enunciate the words, but his clumsy tongue got in the way turning his question into nonsense.

“Well, if you can’t figure out the basics like any child stumbling into puberty, I don’t know what use you’ll be.” Lugh waved his hands a bit as if stating the obvious. “Just don’t die. Or if you do, just try not to make a habit of it.” He winced. “It isn’t fun and stunts your growth.”

Lugh stepped forward and put the bracelet on Eli’s left wrist. There was a clasp on the back that Lugh clicked into place.

The crazy guy just looked at him, a little confusion coloring his expression before his lips firmed. A flip of the wrist and a small blade appeared in Lugh’s hand.

Ohshitshitshit!

“Changed my mind.”

Eli tried to move as the pins and needles had mostly faded along with the involuntary twitches. He could feel his body again, the surface’s cold settling into his skin, but his muscles still didn’t want to follow his directions. The rising panic of watching the approaching blade cut through his mind’s strange calm. He convulsed, trying to roll himself off the table to escape but only managed to flop there while his body made an awful racket bouncing up and down on the metal surface.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to do some dance and failing miserably.” Lugh leaned over him with the small knife and pricked the side of Eli’s index finger. “Is this some ritual you’re doing? I know anomalies are supposed to be different, but really?” Lugh brought the lightly bleeding finger across Eli’s body to touch the blood to the bracelet. Like melting wax, the ends of the bracelet were sealed together until it looked like a single unbroken piece of metal. “There we go. I helped you figure out one thing. You’re welcome.” With another flick, the knife disappeared.

Lugh turned around again, facing a blank wall of grey clouds. “Now, where to send you.” His hands moved up and down before pinching at the air in front of his face. “There we are. A small city should be good. I don’t have any recent information, but how much can change in a couple of centuries, right? Gealidesh should be a good spot to park you for a bit.”

Lugh suddenly looked off to the same place that had produced the scowl earlier, his furrowed brows returning. “Gotta go. Time has just about run out for our little party.”

Lugh stepped forward again, pushing back his bathrobe’s green sleeves and leaning in close until only centimeters from Eli’s face. “Your goal is to make it back here,” he said. The man’s startling blue eyes turned serious, the twisted humor evaporating with the intensity of his words. “If you can do that, I’ll be able to track your progress to help my research.

“I’ll then reward you handsomely,” Lugh said, a smile blooming again. “Just find your way back here, or wait for me to come and get you later. You can’t lose!” His tone had changed to earnest persuasion like he was trying to sell Eli something. “I’m just going to look into your background a bit more, but it will have to wait in line. Ha, I’m not even sure where to start! Isn’t that fantastic? Still, I have a lot of other tasks open at the moment. I should get to you in….” Lugh looked at the air in front of him again, “three centuries, give or take two decades. Gotta have some wiggle room there as you’re quite the mystery!”

A bright light surrounded Lugh as if a giant camera flash triggered behind him. Before Eli could do or say anything, a window and prompt appeared in front of his eyes.

The sudden quest notification, looking much like from a game, made him wonder if he was dreaming after all. It would explain how confusing everything was, especially with all the weird things this crazy guy had said. Eli didn’t remember ever having lucid dreams, which he was thankful for with his history of nightmares. Then again, this whole experience could easily be from a drug-induced hallucination while his body struggled in some hospital room.

The stormy walls moved slightly, the room growing smaller as if taking a breath. The light darkened around them, and time seemed suspended for a frozen moment.

“Time’s up.”

Stepping forward, Lugh picked Eli up like he weighed nothing, making him stiffen at the contact. He tried to shift and escape the humiliating treatment, but Lugh simply tightened his arms while carrying Eli over to one of the roiling clouds. The stormy surface froze into a solid wall at their approach while overhead, the intricate stone archway blended seamlessly into the grey still surface.

“Activate.”

A green oval materialized under the archway with edges that extended from the stone arch to the tiled floor at the bottom. The surface was dark green at the edges, shifting towards chartreuse in the center. Tiny rivulets of deep crimson spiderwebs began snaking throughout the green plane of light. The bits of red formed into sparks that moved across the surface, reminding him of the plasma ball toys he used to see.

Lugh looked down at him, making eye contact. “Don’t forget that you owe me.” Lugh’s lips curled up into that same creepy smile from before.

I am so screwed.

Then Lugh promptly chucked Eli through the green wall.