You indicated to the red pill, and she placed it carefully on your palm. As you closed your fist around it, she drew out a pair of bolt cutters from her suitcase, and casually cut your cuffs. She barely seemed to exert any effort at all.
You brought the pill up and placed it on your tongue, then grabbed and downed the entire bottle of water so quickly you choked on it a little. She laughed, then indicated for you to put your hand out. You did, and she placed an electrode against your wrist.
"Normally we do this in a secure location with a lot more equipment. This is somewhat more improvised, and it's going to be very uncomfortable," she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Breaking you out," she replied briskly, tapping something on the computer. "The pill is going to help us find you, but in doing so it's going to kill you."
"W-wait, what?"
"Yeah, I know. Don't worry, just a little," she said, pinching two fingers. "Just enough. Okay." She took out a cell phone and flipped it open, jamming a thumb on a button and bringing it to her ear. "I don't want to say hurry up, but do hurry up. I mean, look at her, she's half-dead already, this is a rush job."
"I don't want to die," you said, feeling cold washing over you. Feeling a sudden panic rising in you, you started clawing at the cuffs still around your wrists, pushing yourself away from the table. "I don't want to die!"
"Hold on, sweetie, you're going to be okay! I... just sit, please sit down, oh bugger-"
You stood unsteadily, the room swimming. There was something deeply wrong, you were too warm, overheating. You pulled at your tie.
"What's happening to me?"
"Ever woken up from a nightmare in a cold sweat?" she asked. You nodded. "Same thing, just bigger. Sit
down."
You moved back toward the chair, but it slipped out from under you. You suddenly felt very weak, the world seeming to slide until it was sideways as you crashed down onto the floor, dragging the laptop half off the table by the cables. You were having trouble breathing, like you were underwater.
There was that woman in the rusting warehouse again, tapping on a keyboard and glancing up. She leaned close, staring through thick glasses, mouth agape, and she pulled another panel from somewhere and-
You saw red all around you, a cloying wet warmth, a weight on your chest. You were choking on something. You felt so weak-
You were lying on the floor of the interrogation room in a puddle of your own vomit, twitching and spasming involuntarily. The woman was lying down next to you with the laptop, tapping furiously, pausing to dab your forehead with a cloth.
"Chrysie, please tell me you have her. Please."
"We do, I'm sending the signal! Disengaging the macerators!" you heard somebody say. The woman in the warehouse, staring at you through the walls of this place, the walls beyond the walls, before the twisted and dissolved into nothing, the world falling away around you, receding to a single point of light.
The light took on a sickly red character, and you opened your eyes for the first time.
You were surrounded on all sides by metal, wires, hoses, in a warm liquid that pressed in around you on all sides. There was something in your mouth and nose, a pressure, awful, choking. You strained to reach out, to try to break the surface, but it resisted. You dug your fingers in against it and finally, it yielded and you pushed yourself upright.
You lost your balance in the liquid and collapsed against the edge, and there was a flash of somewhere else. Your body, lying on the floor of a tiny room, a woman reaching down to close your eyes. Her hand swept over your face and you were back, straining against the edge, struggling to breathe.
You gripped something metal at your mouth, already rapidly cooling, and pulled. You could feel whatever it was leave your body, leaving your retching and sputtering. The heat was already fading and you were so, so cold.
Pained, you tried to look around you. There was nothing but many blurry dots of red light, everything beyond a few feet indistinct. There was no point looking beyond yourself, so you looked down instead.
There was a body. Metal ran from every part of it, from the arms and legs and up to the back of your neck, ports along your torso. But the shape of it was new, completely unfamiliar.
Because wasn't the body you were trapped in.
It was
your body.
You didn't understand anything else that was happening, lying against the side of some tub of goo in a cold and desolate place, unable to see past your hand, with steel sticking out of you, but you cried tears of joy, overwhelmed by it. You didn't have the energy to do anything else, you had no comprehension what was happening, but none of it mattered.
There was a change in the air pressure around you, and a shadow loomed over you. You glanced up to see something hovering over you, regarding you with a host of dispassionate eyes. It brandished strange, sharp instruments at you on a multitude of limbs, drifting closer.
You smiled at it. You didn't have room for terror.
It seized you around the neck and there was a roar of pain through your body as cables and wires disconnected, the sound of drills and knives, then you flopped back into the liquid, helpless. The last thing you remembered was falling.
---
You remember only bits and pieces of what you were told were the next two weeks. You remember harsh lights, voices familiar and strange, a rusting steel ceiling. You remember struggling to focus on anything, being unable to move, being cold. You remember people moving you from place to place, pulses of electricity in your limbs, pinpricks of pain. It passed as a strange, disjointed dream.
You awoke on a ratty cot, in a small, dark steel room. It reminded you of movies about submarines, that same claustrophobic metal box, the pipes and gauges and valve wheels all around you. There was an IV in your arm, but rather than leading between a bag and a needle, it was a glass jar and…
There was a round, dark steel port about the size of a quarter in your forearm, into which it was inserted. Gently, you poked it, shivering at the feeling where your flesh ended and the metal began. You tried to dig your fingernails in, but you found they were only half-grown, not nearly long enough to reach.
You were wearing something like a hospital gown, almost, just a single sheet of ratty, paper-thin material, and as you sat up and watched how it draped over your body, you realized that you weren't dreaming. The metal in your body was suddenly of secondary concern.
Delicately, you started to pull it aside, barely able to believe it.
There was a knock on the door, and you pushed the cloth back in place.
"Uh…. come in?" you said, your voice different than you expected. Raspy and weak, yes, but also a different pitch, a different tone.
The door
clunked and swung open, and there was the woman you'd seen, the one in the warehouse you realized was this place. She was tall, a bit heavy-set, South Asian you think, with long dark hair and a broad smile. She wore a pair of thick, round glasses with mismatched arms, one of which had wiring and lights crudely soldered in place.
"Alice?" she asked, and you nodded. "Oh, good! Uh, we're going to need to get you some clothes and stuff, we're going to get that done, um,
don't leave. There's no back on that gown, and as much as I'm sure you are
thrilled to see the real you, I don't know how much you want to show that off to everyone else. I mean, not that they haven't seen… well, no… Sorry."
"Hey. It's okay," you said, and she leaned against the wall and let the door close.
"Sorry, I'm… not great. At words. Generally," she admitted, pushing the glasses back up her face. "Or, like, talking. Humaning. Ironically."
"I really understand. I… I have a lot of questions," you said. "Uh… first one being… who are you? Why do you seem familiar?"
That threw her for a loop.
"
Huh. Well, my name is… okay, so, we all go by handles, like, usernames? So when I say Chrysalis, like, that isn't weird here. Uh… most of us have names they'd rather leave behind?"
"Oh," you said. "Well, Coda then."
"Alice is fine, it's a pretty name. Names can be handles," she said.
"Um, is… is Cache here? Or Page?" you asked.
"Okay, um, well, they're asleep, it's just me and the captain working the night crew, you know? Saw your, uh, biometrics light up. Uh, we could wait for everyone, but I think you'd probably want to do the intro now, get the questions out of the way?"
"Sure," you agreed, "Uh, if you could get me something to wear?"
---
You staggered out a few minutes later, feeling very strange. The fact you'd never walked on these feet before was one thing, but there were so many differences from what you remembered. You were shorter, smaller, your hips wider, the centre of gravity different. You'd say everything was subtly off, but it was more like the opposite, moving freely after a lifetime weighed down.
You were wearing a ratty sweater over a turtleneck and a long, woollen skirt that Chrysalis had found you. They smelled a little odd,
stale, if that was a thing clothes could be, but you were grateful all the same.
Chrysalis led you out, down a short hall to a familiar chamber, that rusty metal warehouse you now saw was some kind of control centre. There was an enormous workstation of flat screens, panels and keyboards, all looking salvaged and welded together, and beyond it a half-dozen of what looked quite a bit like dentists chairs, surrounded in steel and wires.
"What is this place?" you asked.
"Um… well, we'll get to all that, but it's a ship, sort of," Chrysalis said, sitting down in her chair. It rolled partway across the floor and bumped against the station as she turned and started booting up screens. "If there's any meditation exercises or deep breathing or anything you like to do, now's a good time to start, by the way."
"You said there was another person awake? The captain?" you asked. "Where are they?"
"Oh, you'll meet Frag in a minute. Okay, sit down over there and we'll do this one piece at a time, okay? Basically… that's a VR device, it's going to make this easier."
"Okay," you agreed, sitting down and placing your head against the rest. She swept over and indicated where to put your limbs, then started pulling straps over your wrist with an apologetic expression. "Um, I'm going to guess that I've been using a device like this my entire life, right? It was all… virtual reality. Like Plato's Cave?"
She paused, then laughed.
"Yeah, shit, got it in one," she said. "Damn."
"Fuck, really?" you asked, feeling somewhat disoriented. "So, like, everything?"
"I know, it's a lot. And, uh, sorry about the straps, it's just, we really, really don't want you falling out of the chair, okay?" she said. "Look, don't worry, Most people have a way worse freakout when we tell them their entire lives have been a virtual illusion. The rest of it shouldn't be a problem at all. You're taking this like a champ!"
"Yeah, well…" you said numbly, voice trembling. You didn't feel like you were handling it all that great. She clamped two more straps over your mismatched boots, then moved around behind you. "So is there a headset or?"
There was a sharp pain behind you, and the room was gone. You were standing in a white void, on nothing, surrounded by nothing. You turned and looked all around you, disoriented by the vast blankness.
"Um… Chrysalis? Hello?"
"She can hear you, but you'll need a device to talk to her. Most of the time, at least," another voice said. You turned to follow it, back to another expanse of blank space, and you saw a woman, reclining back on an elegant loveseat, smoking a cigarette. She was an Asian woman with a short sweep of hair, wearing what looked for all the world like an all-black Victorian dress partially rendered in PVC, with a pair of small, square sunglasses.
"Frag?" you guessed.
"Hello Alice. Take a seat," she said. "You are
astute, I'm impressed."
You turned to see a chair behind you, and sat down… and that's when you noticed something wrong. It wasn't you in VR, not your body, not the
real body you only had for a few minutes. It was… back… back to-
You hugged your arms to your chest and shivered.
"
Oh, I'm so sorry," Frag said, the stoic tone of her voice instantly gone.
"Let me out. I want to go back. Let me go back," you begged. Frag sighed, shifting a little closer.
"Alice, this is temporary. What you see when you look at yourself, what others see inside this place, is something called residual self-image. It's an interplay between the information fed to you and your own perceptions, in a loop to create a consistent avatar to represent your physical form."
"Why is it wrong?" you asked, trying to stare up into the bright void, away from it, trying not to feel it.
"We don't know. It may simply be a glitch in the way the system is programmed, an exception caused by a hormonal imbalance during the creation of your nervous system, an oversight in the installation procedure, we don't know. It isn't uncommon for elements of our RSI to not match our true selves. In much the same way, it is equally common for our RSI to better reflect who we are than the physical body outside the system. Do you understand?"
You shook your head. You didn't care about any of this. You just wanted out.
She sighed.
"Your mind and the system are going to need time to resyncronize. Now that you are disconnected, as you grow more used to who you are, as your understanding and self-understanding grows, your RSI will change to match it. You can leave at any time, but the longer you stay, the more it will adapt to reflect the real you."
You nodded, slowly, pained.
"I'll stay," you assured her.
"Thank you," she said. "Well, there's not much point in dramatics, so let's cut to the chase. Your life, and the life of everyone you have ever known, has taken place inside a vast simulation. This simulated world imitates select parts of Earth, as it was in the late 20th and early 21st century."
"... what year is it?" you asked.
"We don't know. Our best guesses from the records we have retrieved indicate it may be sometime in the mid-to-late 2800s," she said. "With a margin of error of hundreds of years, potentially more. Information is difficult to come by. In any case, it hardly matters to the material situation."
There was a shift in the void, and you found yourself sitting back into the control centre from before, Chrysalis sitting behind the desk. She waved to you and you waved back. Frag was sitting next to her, still dressed exactly the same.
"Did we just unplug?" you asked. Your arms and legs weren't strapped down, you sat up, and looked down. Nope. Nope still the awful old body, in the shirt and tie. "Fuck. This is just an illusion too?"
"Yes. The nature of the software we are dealing with allows a complete capture of all sensory input and all nervous output. The reality inside of these simulations is, to the naked human perception, indistinguishable from what we could see if we looked outside our window. Follow me."
She got up and moved down another hall, the one opposite of the one you came from, and you followed her up a set of metal stairs and through a door. It leads to a cockpit of some kind, with places for three people to sit, and nothing but white void outside the windows.
She sat in the third seat. You leaned against one of the consoles.
"This ship is the
Ashur. It's a magnetic hovercraft. It uses vast amounts of electricity to suspend itself inside the Earth's magnetic field. Don't ask me to explain the physics to you in more detail, I don't understand them well myself, but this system allows us to travel the world freely. It's a small ship, but fast and nimble, and needs very little maintenance."
Outside, the white void was replaced with a cold blue as the ship seemed to swerve toward a tunnel in the void, the controls moving of their own accord. The ship was plunged into darkness as it swept through the tunnels, shifting and turning.
"Who built the illusion?" you asked.
"This one was programmed by myself and Chrysalis, as a little taste of home. But… I imagine you mean the one you lived most of your life in. The Matrix."
Something about that word felt familiar. Like you'd seen it, in your deep dives of the internet's weirdest conspiracy freaks and their Geocities pages.
"Yeah."
"It is a more complicated question to answer than you might think," Frag replied. "The definition of
built can cover many meanings. But, if you want to ask who the Matrix
serves, who controls it… there's your answer."
The ship emerged from the tunnel to stare over a vast, apocalyptic landscape. Under an endless spread of stars, lit only by dim red lights, lay a vast and inhuman city. Towers stretched to the heavens, breaking the clouds, enormous devices clattered and groaned as they worked. Swarms of red lights buzzed between every structure as the ship drifted forth.
As you got closer, flying between the towers, you started to see them in detail. A dizzying variety of insectoid bodies, in steel and glass, hovering and climbing and skittering over every surface, regarding the world with a multitude of glowing red eyes.
"They're machines," you said.
"No, Coda. They're
the Machine. A vast hive mind of drones and controllers, in a network that spans the Earth. They only rarely create independent consciousnesses, and less now than ever. How they came to be, how they came to dominate the Earth… all we know is that there was a war, and we lost."
The city sank out of view as the hovercraft dove back underground.
"So, do you fight these machines? The… machine?"
"Yes. Some ships are warships which can sally out to destroy their facilities, frustrate their scouts, turn them back, but if we had to fight them head-on we would lose every time. They have the numbers, the cold coordination, technological capabilities we can't match. That is where ships like ours come in. But we'll get to that. How are you feeling?"
You sat down in the pilot's seat, watching the controls twist in front of you of their own accord, feeling a little faint.
"Overwhelmed," you admitted.
"Well. Let's take a break from history and… current events, then," she said. "Have you ever been in a fight?"
"Not since middle school," you admitted.
"Then you may be out of practice. Chrysie?"
The ship was gone. In its place was a bar of some sort with a distinctly Chinese vibe and last decade's aesthetics. There were four men in work clothes at the bar, drinking and laughing, then all as one they turned to face you. Their expressions hardened.
"I-I don't know how to fight," you said, as they all stood up as one and started pacing toward you.
"Let's fix that," Frag said, sitting back against one of the chairs. Nobody seemed to notice her move, it was like they couldn't see her. She plucked one of their drinks off the bar and took an elegant sip. "Is there a martial art you always wish you knew?"
"Wh-what?" you asked, backing up. You bumped against a table and glanced for the windows. There was nothing outside but void.
"Better choose quick. They look pissed."
---
Once she's had time to get used to the capabilities of her RSI, what is Coda's greatest strength?
[ ] Her reflexes and instincts to avoid danger. (+TWITCH)
[ ] Her toughness and ability to take hits. (+GRIT)
[ ] Her precision and power with her fists and feet (+FORCE)
[ ] Her accuracy with firearms and instincts in a gunfight (+COOL)
What is her weakness?
[ ] Her slow reaction times. (-TWITCH)
[ ] Her fragility and low pain tolerance. (-GRIT)
[ ] Her hesitation on the attack (-FORCE)
[ ] Her handling of firearms (-COOL)
What martial art will you be starting with? Pick something fun and interesting I can research and incorporate into fights! This is a purely narrative choice, but narrative still matters a lot!
[ ] Write In
This is a plan vote.
