For months he'd been immersed in
one world after another. Each step had been guided by enemy hands, each scrap
of food a crumb meant to sustain him only as long as was necessary to align him
for their next upload.
The faceless and nameless enemy
worked tirelessly, layering subtle changes one upon another every few days or
every few hours. At first it would seem he'd entered a parallel universe with
this or that minor shift, but a terrible change would soon be revealed. Worse,
with each new program they cruelly encoded an ever-deepening obsession for her:
Aurora.
But the heart that knows both love
and hate isn't a mass of firing neurons. Blood-pumping organ aside, the true heart
isn’t even a muscle. What it is, then, is part of the soul, as intangible as
the emotions it feels, and something within his heart fought against that
obsession and everything else, causing him to display trust in nothing and no
one -- not even himself.
Unable to overwrite his
paranoia, the enemy used it: lost in illusions where they controlled the
light his eyes detected, he came to doubt that a day was only twenty-four hours. Some had felt like weeks.
After adapting to countless
revisions, remembrance of home disappeared, as did the purpose behind all he
suffered. He believed himself a crazed madman bent on the lustful purpose of
touching and possessing the dangerous beauty called Aurora. It drove him. Haunted him. The link to his trusted command had become nothing more than a whispering phenomena in his
head, a demon he sought to exorcize.
That, his enemy knew, was the
sign they had been waiting for: he was broken.
They brought him in.
The shock conducted by the
electrified prison had forced a total reboot. Typically, once the established
connection is severed, separating what had been real and what had been upload required
days…more, if the mind had been systematically scattered, and Aurora had been very
systematical.
But she didn't know everything
about the damn implant in his head.
Sure, the enemy had
hacked his mind-server to upload illusions so real and seamless that he
couldn't tell where the splices occurred. That didn't matter. What did matter
was the reboot activated a hidden secondary processor that fried his original implant.
It meant his brain had no access to the files accumulated since leaving HQ and
the non-reality experiences stored within were destroyed. His back up server created a factory reset, bringing him online anew.
The voice had said, Red
cross for the infirmary and Patient Zero's blood sample. Yellow biohazard leads
to the containment cells holding the rest of your team. Blue ouroboros...no one
knows.
