Mind Nuke

[hextraterrestrial]

Looking up from his phone, Zak smiled at Fred. "Look here". Zak pointed to his computer screen. "This is the partitioned environment coding. This is where we could see all the data inside your mindscape while you were out."

Fred squinted towards the screen, his face rather blank. Zak proceeded, "The whole point of going to Def Con was to recruit new talent who could bring me up to speed on what we were dealing with. To make a long and convoluted story short, I ended up doing mushrooms with a few guys in a dorm room while hacking our way through any vulnerabilities within range. When all was said and done, we had linked 1,332 phones into our hub and broke into every hotel database within a 10 mile radius just to prove to ourselves we could do it while totally discombobulated. We held to the principle of 'do no harm' and dismantled the whole thing the next morning but it had given me ample time to discern the skills and temperament of potential interns. I ended up hiring two dudes from the dorm and a chick who broke my Cicada riddle named Xena. Between us four, we were able to partially cipher the origin of 'Team Cement's' core five weeks later". Zakari removed his foot from his desk, setting down his phone. He picked up his mug of tea, gingerly sipping at its contents.

Fred came in for a closer look at the code on the monitor, perching himself on corner of Zak's tidy desk. "Ok, that's all fine and well but you still haven't answered any of my questions about what happened to me. I mean, I remember things so clearly, despite holes in my memory. I swear I was in my car previous to waking up. I remember feeling the cold of the night, I remember being tired after hours of driving. I remember going through the hard drive you gave me, your graduation, Angela's kiss... that was beyond just any fantasy or dream Gooch! I don't understand." spouted Fred in mild desperation.

Zakari held his tea with both hands peering over the lip of the mug at Fred. He was momentarily silent staring Fred in the eye before he sat up, rolling his chair closer to his keyboard. Setting his mug down, he worked at the keys while explaining. Fred watched the screen while Zak minimized the green text window and a new window opened with blue lettering. Zak opened several other windows as he spoke.
"The blue text is your recorded dream-state data."

"Whoa, wait!" mumbled Fred, "You mean you can record my dreams as text? Like literal dictation?"

"Um, yeah! Images too Mudi, I thought you were tracking this?" Zak surprisingly mocked. "I thought you realized this?"

"Yeah, no." retorted Fred. "I thought that was theoretical still. I thought the whole point of our original work on Knight Tech was to bridge that gap? As far as I knew, we were in the middle of building the Alpha/Theta wave detection and translation units!"

Zakari sighed letting his shoulders slump. "That was before the raid of the lab back in twenty-ten. Since then, we have made extraordinary leaps. You are experiencing overlap and are jumbling timelines but that is to be expected. You have transferred from another dimension, on another timeline and this is not your point of origin. You are not on the Earth you know. You are on 'Java 2'; in fact you are not you."

"Wait... WHAT?" Fred blurted.

Zakari tapped the touchscreen on his tabletop pc then leaned back in his chair as a color diagram of a three dimensional cat-scan of a human brain rotated on the screen. Pointing to the monitor Gooch said "N.C.T."

Fred cocked his head quizzically to one side, "What's that?"

"Like I said Cap, this is a complicated mess. N.C.T. stands for Neurological Consciousness Transfer. Thanks to your boys at Cern, you jumped here from a parallel universe. Well, you didn't jump really, you were... transferred."

Fred's jaw went slack, his eyes bulging towards the graphic on the screen. He looked to Gooch then back to the screen, then back to Gooch.

"You were selected for an experiment based on your military psych profile. Lucky for you, your personality is found in only about 1% of the population, which in turn made you a prime candidate for the transfer. No one in the military thought it would actually work."

It was obvious to Zakari that Fred was reeling.

"Now mind you Cap," Zak paused to lean in closer, "I had nothing to do with the selection or transfer. I only found this out recently. You were taken from a reality with the closest matching parallel with the most consistent history. The thought seemed impossible until the Def-Crew and I figured out a portion of the alien quantum core programming. We were six levels deep into the core before getting a foothold on how to crack the cipher. Although we understand a bit more, we still have a long way to go. I thought the technology was a relatively recent development but it turns out to be far older than we dared to even speculate. The military had the physics and tech all worked out as far back as 1942! Although the tech was very primitive, they had a working prototype! While cracking we found a dossier archive of files encrypted with all your files and that of another 22 transfers in the data set."

Fred placed his hands on either side of his head. "Bloody hell." he murmured.

"Oh, that's not the best part." smiled Gooch. There was another consciousness in there with you, which again, we thought impossible till we observed it. He was laying dormant in the background. Didn't show any activity whatsoever which was a real surprise when he finally went active."

Fred stood up, turning his back to Gooch. It all oddly made sense to him but he was trying to catch up. Something seemed set his gears turning. His mind was patching some gaps. "Who is he?" asked Fred.

Gooch continued, "We nicknamed him 'The Watcher' but I'll get back to him later. The first N.C.T. attempt was in 2008 but the booster signal coming out of Cern was interrupted when that magnet broke. Which explains your subsequent meltdown of that year. The transfer was not completed and you were left with just splatters of the whole program. It is amazing you didn't go completely insane right then and there. Probably something to do with that 1%. Many on the team have speculated that it was actually extraterrestrial sabotage but I have a different theory on that. The point is, your reclusive behavior and spike in anxiety levels were a direct consequence of the failed download. Luckily you were able to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps... at least partially. The complete transfer didn't comense till the cusp of 2012. Apparently you weren't even aware of it. I know that you know something was going on, that something with you had changed but neither one of us had any idea of the scope nor depth of the situation. It wasn't until the night of January 3rd, 2017 that it clicked into your head that something huge was going on. Unfortunately that was the night you were also assaulted."

Fred turned to face Gooch once more. His face as pale as a ghost. He was about to interrogate Gooch with a million rapid fire questions before taking a deep breath. All he managed to say came out barley over a whisper. "I need a cigarette."