Prologue 8, Nightmare
Alexander steps out of the gene clinic with a feeling of relief, glad that there had been no complications.
He twitches as, moments after stepping out into the main tower, he receives another virtual ping from On Life Learning. He grimaces in annoyance. Doctor Takashi had assured him that his cyberdeck was clean!
… Hadn’t he?
It was at this moment that Alexander realised something truly bizarre was going on; he remembers asking Takashi to check his cyberware. He's sure he does. And yet, his visit to the clinic had been too short for that to be the case, hadn’t it? He moves his eyes to the corner of his vision and confirms to himself that he had left the clinic on schedule; that can only mean that he didn’t ask for extra services.
At that moment, Alexander suddenly realised that he couldn’t move his body. It was a strange feeling that he has never truly had before.
For the first time in his life, he has a terrifying understanding of what it means to be a passenger in his body. And he hates it.
Alexander is passingly familiar with out-of-body experiences; his nights and schooling practically necessitate it, and yet he has never felt like this. In the virtual world he was still in control; a phantom sensation of his physical body lingers at the back of his mind, but right now he no longer feels in control of himself.
He can feel his facial muscles try to twist into a disturbed grimace, but instead his face stays worryingly neutral.
Stuck, instead he watches as the virtual handshake that was hovering in his vision is accepted again.
Alexander had intended to refuse it. He had told his deck to refuse it; he was sure of it.
“Thank you for accepting a local meeting with your On Life Learning representative! Based on your location, we have identified the nearest representative in the commercial zone of sector 5, and we are scheduling a 30-minute meeting. Here are your directions.”
Alexander flinches as he feels his deck accept the GPS coordinates from the advert.
He doesn’t have auto-accept enabled, and yet it didn’t even prompt him for acceptance.
In fact, his GPS should be restricted; the advert shouldn’t have been able to gain his location at all.
“Thank you for your acceptance! We will be meeting you presently.”
For a moment Alexander considers not going to this stupid meeting, but wait, he had accepted it, hadn’t he? He can’t quite remember why, but clearly, he must have needed this meeting for something… right?
Unbeknownst to him, his organic eyes flash a dark red.
“Let’s get the meeting over with.” He sighs and speaks to himself.
Looking at the coordinates, he realises that he will have to walk outdoors; it is not a long journey, a simple ten-minute walk to the commercial zone. He recalls that this is a task that he has done many times before. With certainty that the situation is normal, he turns toward the ground-floor exit of Tower 5.
As he walks through the main door of the tower, Alexander blinks, realising that it has been several months since he's actually been outdoors. He looked around at what was one of the richest areas of Birmingham.
Considering that the subway can reach most places of importance and that so many things were now virtual, the streets were surprisingly full. Hundreds of people were walking around, some into the tower, others in various directions. Even the roads had some cars on them.
Although it was not comparable to his old home, which still felt like it belonged to the previous century, there were surprisingly quite a few cars on what would be an almost-empty street in other cities.
Alexander looked around the street; it was filled to the brim with adverts, both physical and virtual. Every surface seemed to have the bright, often floating lights; virtual adverts followed people as they moved and interacted with them, rendering those adverts impossible to ignore.
Several surfaces displayed aged physical adverts, featuring almost ancient companies and products with outdated contact details. The local government had apparently forgotten to clean them in the years following virtual adverts becoming universal.
He grimaced, his head shaking in resignation. ‘This is why I don’t go outdoors. Even rich areas have the strangest fragments of decay.’
The streets he remembers are fully public spaces and therefore are the most susceptible to company adverts; the towers and subway count as almost private property, and so there are far more rules about virtual clutter.
He turns to the north and starts walking towards his meeting; as he moves, he once again wonders why he is bothering with this at all. His education and career are already set in stone, aren't they?
Before the thought can truly take hold, he feels a sharp pain in his head, and once again his eyes flash.
Confused at what he was thinking, he instead pulls up his navigation application and promptly notices that while he wasn’t looking, it had decided to take him through one of the few dark alleyways in the entire city sector.
Alexander tries to bring himself to a stop, but instead all he can do is stare at the virtual pathway while his body continues to automatically move in the direction that the application has laid down.
Shocked that his body is moving without his command, he reflexively orders a scan of himself. In his mind's eye a wireframe of his body takes form; in his active memory he has the gene clinic's brand-new scan of himself, and he immediately notices that something is wrong.
The cyberdeck at the base of his neck is seemingly intercepting his commands and sending its own; this he knows should be impossible. They are built in such a way as to make something like this impossible, as they are designed to ensure that user commands are executed without interference from the device itself. And yet, the evidence is right in front of him; the cyberdeck is apparently controlling his movements.
The burning sensation at the back of his neck suggests that the cyberdeck is overheating while controlling his movements.
Reflexively, Alexander remembers his time on the subway. Why had he accepted the damned advert's handshake? Everything seems to go back to that. Now that he knows that something is very wrong, he starts to comb through his recent memories and disturbs himself by realising that several of his actions were not his own.
On the subway, when that man had asked if anything was wrong… he had intended to tell him that something had hacked his cyberware. That would have gained him immediate assistance from even the least friendly of people. And yet instead he had told him that he was alright. Why had he done that?
At the clinic, he had tried to ask for a check of his cyberware, but instead of verbalising the request, he had only thought about it. The memory of his attempt had been immediately suppressed by… what? Some sort of malware that he had inadvertently allowed into his cyberware?
This is completely outside of what a virtual program should be able to do in the physical world.
That malware advert had hounded him and ignored the others in the subway. They apparently couldn’t even see it. What were the criteria for that? Was he the only student amongst them? Or were they simply too wealthy and well connected to risk attacking in this manner?
Alexander desperately wanted to shout or scream, to beg any of the people around him for help, for his face to twist into horror at the defilement of his free will. And yet instead, his body simply kept on moving towards his destination, passed the crowds of unsuspecting people.
Had he heard any rumours about mysterious disappearances?
He didn’t think so, but where can the journey end other than him never being seen again? Someone had completely broken the rules and hijacked a cyberdeck in a totally novel way; sure, some unscrupulous people might be interested in the possibility, but he knows with certainty that the act was so amazingly illegal that the army would get involved if it was ever found out.
Actually, screw the army. The intelligence services would be all over this before he could say ‘security breech’. The risk of a politician being taken over was too significant to ignore.
Alexander frowned again at his GPS. Why was he going into a deserted alleyway when he was heading towards the commercial zone anyway?
… Actually, why did he have to walk to the commercial zone? There are few places in the city with more substantial subway links than a commercial zone; he should have gone to the transportation hub instead of walking, right?
As his confusion continues to rise, his body carries on moving in the direction of the alleyway. With a jolt, Alexander remembers that he truly must find a way out. Why had he waited so long to start trying to break the mysterious hold on his cyberware?
Immediately, Alexander starts ordering his virtual overlay to begin debugging, virus testing, or anything that might free him from what looked like a grim fate.
In the corner of his eye, he watches the progress of the tests which he hopes will free him, but as the crowds lessen and the streets get darker, he becomes sure that something has restrained his thoughts until it was too late.
With a final turn, he enters a dark and secluded alleyway. He moves his eyes from left to right, the only movement he is currently capable of, but he sees nothing as his body continues to move deeper.
Alexander tried to frown. Now that he thought of it, where was this? A dark and secluded alleyway like this shouldn’t exist in modern Birmingham, should it? He eyes the darkness around him and finally becomes aware of how the light of the city and sun seems to be completely swallowed by it.
Alexander's body stops before an old brick wall, the sort that hadn’t been in this city for a century, and he is shocked to see that it immediately begins folding in on itself. The bricks that should have been firmly secured fold away sequentially; to Alexander, it looks like something straight out of a movie.
‘That’s not possible,' he thinks to himself, certain that what he is seeing cannot be reality.
The room he is facing is barely illuminated, but from what he can see it looks as if it is entirely empty. Some type of abandoned warehouse? Something like this shouldn’t be in this area of Birmingham at all.
His body marches inside the hole that has formed, and he catches sight of the hole's edges but doesn’t see the missing bricks; instead of physically folding away into the warehouse, they had seemingly disappeared entirely. Once fully inside the now-revealed room, he begins to hear the hole starting to close, the missing bricks apparently appearing right back in place.
With a final thunk, the last of the bricks slam back into place, and Alexander finds himself in total darkness. He immediately attempts to activate his night vision, and to his mild surprise, it works.
He briefly pats himself down in shock at his newfound ability to move, then surveys the dark room that now holds him captive. To him it looks like any other abandoned building; truthfully, the fact it exists at all surprises him. This entire area has seen billions of credits in redevelopment funds. It's shocking to see a building empty and condemned just a short walk from the affluent Tower 5.
“Hello?!” Alexander shouts, hoping for some sort of response, but he receives none.
Alexander frowns to himself, wondering how much of his thoughts and actions are his own, but the fact that he can now think about them at all makes him believe that whatever had been controlling him has receded.
‘For now,' he thinks grimly.
Alexander turns around to try to find a way to leave and is shocked to see that instead of the old brick wall he expected, he is now facing what appears to be a heavily reinforced concrete wall, which would be much more difficult to smash down with his augmented strength.
He moves forward and places his hand on the wall, almost certain that what he is seeing is some sort of camouflage, but instead of feeling the brick and mortar he knows should be there, he feels a strange frictionless smoothness, completely unlike the brick that was previously there or indeed the concrete that his eyes are telling him he is looking at.
He drags his hand across the wall looking for weaknesses or flaws but finds none; his eyes light up with virtual overlays as he initiates a scan.
Instead, his enhanced senses and functioning cyberware tell him that he is looking at a perfectly smooth surface; his cyberware detects something strange about what he sees, and warnings appear in his vision as his display insists that there are no small flaws that should be on a concrete surface.
“What the fuck?” he breaths out in resignation.
Abandoning his investigation of the wall, he turns around to check the rest of the room he has been led to; clearly, there must be something here. Otherwise, there would be no reason to have forced him to come here.
He looks around but sees nothing; the windows that were previously present are much like the brick wall, missing. Instead, there is a continuous, not-concrete wall sealing him in entirely; if he focuses, he can’t even hear any wind. Was this place atmospherically sealed?
As he walks around the room with one hand on the wall searching for anything that could lead him out, a loud clang of metal falling on metal echoes throughout, temporarily disorienting him. Immediately, he turns around to the source of the sound but sees nothing.
He tries to focus harder, suspecting that his sight is once more being controlled or occluded, but he sees nothing whatsoever. No grates to inject gas and no doors to leave through. Nothing on the floor explains the loud sound that he is certain occurred.
Alexander takes a calming breath. No matter how worrying the situation is, no matter how warranted it might be, panicking won’t help.
“Your journey starts here.” A voice thunders behind him, the sound bringing to his mind the grinding of an avalanche against a mountain. Somehow, the voice makes him feel like an ant before a giant.
Alexander turns around in shock.
PAIN.
Before he can register what he is looking at, Alexander feels a terrible pain in his chest. He looks down, bringing his hand up to his chest, where his heart is, and feels his diaphragm shudder. Part of him cannot believe what he is seeing or what he is feeling, but the wetness he feels on his hand does not lie. He brings his hand to his face to confirm it and sees the dark red of his blood.
“What?” he says breathlessly.
Briefly, he recognises that he has been stabbed directly in the heart and that if not for his augments, he would already be on the floor, the last of his life leaving him. Instead, he looks up and sees something that he would never have expected.
“Leslie?!” What he had intended to be a shout of surprise came out as a whisper, his strength already leaving him.
Standing before him is, unmistakably, Leslie, the nepobaby from the university course. Leslie was a student in the class, wasn’t he? No… was that more mental manipulation?
But as Alexander tries to focus on him, he sees things that don’t make sense. Leslie is seemingly glaring at him with malice; there is a literal darkness in his eyes, the whites missing entirely.
His other features are off too.
In the virtual world Leslie had features that were painfully average; they had even joked that he had been born so ugly that not even a gene clinic could truly fix it, a result of inbreeding, they had claimed. But the person before him, it was definitely Leslie… if Leslie had been airbrushed and rendered perfect. Something about his now-sharp features and smooth skin itched at Alexander's brain, everything about it seeming unnatural.
With his mind and memory restored, he immediately recognises the vaguely familiar person from the advertisement. Had his thoughts been manipulated from the very beginning, so he did not recognise Leslie in the picture?
A flash of memory reminds Alexander of his recent class… Mike and Emily didn’t know who Leslie was, did they? Did any of that really happen?
Suddenly, the room lit up, its air becoming heavy. Strange eldritch runes begin to carve themselves into the walls and floor; deep in his bones he feels that these runes are no human language but something altogether more alien.
Spinning in the air, he sees free-floating circles straight out of a fantasy anime; a vaguely familiar runic language is inscribed in sequential rings. But where could he have seen the runes before?
Alexander knows with utmost certainty that the rings he is looking at are not remotely virtual; despite all rational sense, his cyberware is insisting that the phenomenon he is looking at is physical. Briefly, the heaviness of the circles reminds him of that cursed advert that had brought him here.
“What’s going on?” he said in a barely audible whisper, his voice even weaker now.
Finally, his augmented physiology starts to give out, and he collapses to his knees.
He looks again at the knife buried in his sternum and notices something that he had missed before. This he sees now was no ordinary steel knife, the sort of thing that you could order or buy from a store, but a dark and twisted thing; shining runes are inscribed on its handle and the parts of the blade he could see.
'Clearly,' he weakly thinks to himself, ‘this is some sort of ritual knife.’
He raises his hand up to the hilt, grasping it, and prepares to tear it out of his chest. But he finds that it won’t budge at all; he feels nothing as he tries to move it, almost like it is firmly bound to his heart.
“I don’t want to die," he says to himself pitifully, his eyes heavier now.
The runes brighten even further, and he knows that whatever is being done is about to finish.
As the last of his life escapes through his chest, Alexander has one final thought.
‘Mother.' he faintly thinks to himself sadly.