Mason felt that his dream-self was slowly dying. It started about 6 months ago, and over the last 2 months he has been hallucinating that he was the disciple to an immortal who entrusted his pool of knowledge, compressed into a mental treasure known colloquially as a soul of knowledge. The mental construct was a prototype proof-of-concept knowledge artifact that houses a pool of knowledge mimicking soul characteristics that allows it to be compressed and carried by the smallest of soul fragments. Within the mental construct lies a generic all-purpose automated soul-cultivation art to allow the transmission of the knowledge to be accelerated by transmitting over larger bandwidth lines as the soul grows. The treasure operates by intent. The treasure has an artificial imitation soul, hence the cultivation art does not work on it self without a real soul, or it's associated fragment, to be attached to - much like a parasite.
If you ask yourself, "How do I get water?" You will receive a mental answer of the number of ways like it was an already memorized number, such as, "Oh yes, I only know 150 ways." To receive an actual answer, however, you need to question yourself such as, "What was the first way, second, fifth, 110th way to get water?" The mental construct is automatically improved as you actively confirm new facts and knowledge; noting perception and point-of-view.
For the last few hours, Mason had an out-of-body experience watching himself go through the motions of being found and being transported to different locations. He felt depressed that he was being swept aside for some meager sums. He worked at A corp for 3 decades as a janitor. He volunteered for the questionably safe test, because his retirement was coming up and wanted to make a contribution to the company and continue working part time for his retirement. He didn't make much as a janitor, but he has saved 140 thousand dollars in 30 years and slowly investing the funds while working. He had made an additional 170 thousand dollars over the last 26 years through investments, which equated to 310 thousand dollars right now.
Mason is a 48 year old man who wants to continue saving until 60, where he would then have enough funds to do as he pleases for the rest of his life. He hoped to double his funds in the next 12 years. He was going to invest his funds in the sister company where he works at. He has heard plenty of tidbits of information about the new startup.
Mason awakened in the streets, feeling weak and sore, and only wearing his hospital gown still with no real clothes or his personal effects such as wallet, phone, or government identification. He looked around and saw the sign to his bank a quarter mile down the way. He decided he would go to the bank where he had an account. He didn't have anything on him, but he knew all his account numbers and security information. One of the major reasons he got an account at this bank originally was that they offered a finger print scanner to access your account at their ATM machines.
He arrived at the machine and placed his finger on the scanner. The screen loaded with his name, but the account he was expecting was grayed out with the status closed next to it. When he clicked on the account it showed his account history. Today's date was on the top with the current time. He was surprised that there was an additional 17 months on top of the expected 1 month time skip. He saw that his account closed 15 months ago. He then looked over to the unread messages and how the bank received a closure request from the government stating that he has not fulfilled the new government work employment regulations law and that by court order, his account assets were to be seized.
Flabbergasted, feeling a mixture of betrayal and indignation; but he mostly felt indignation. It didn't take long before it developed into malevolent mild anger. He has spent 30 years working as a janitor always saving, accumulating, being economical and careful in his spending habits; often being moderately stingy on himself. He had a plan and a goal, almost ruthless to himself as he always followed his own set rules. He had watched his mother in his early childhood barely scrape by before her inevitable death when he was 12 years old. The trauma was the driving force to his previous goal of chasing, maximizing and optimizing future endeavors.
However, he now decided he would change once again. The past forced him to always aim for the future. The future already failed him, so he decided that he would never believe in the past or future, but would always live for the present and short term. He wouldn't be a maniac chasing short-term gains and neglect long term advantages, but he will never place more than half of his hope into the future.
He decided that he would find out what is going on no matter what. Why was he thrown away and why was there a law that would take away the possessions of citizens while the people it effects don't fight against such things? It's obvious that the only people effected are edge cases such as his where there was no one to fight against such laws. One could easily think of more edge cases where those wealthy folk who were cryogenically frozen fall into the same categories whom had all of their assets taken by the government. This was most certainly a scheme against the rich and an unknown got caught into the net as well. One might even wonder, even though someone volunteered for science and others benefit, was he accepted for the project, because of the foreknowledge and spies within some network that knew of such undisclosed wealth in someone's possession?
Such a person should definitely worry whether or not if they were being targeted from the start!
However, his mind told him that it was most likely coincidental that while there was a 99% chance that there was indeed a scheme for the assets of the higher tax bracket individuals having their assets taken, but him falling to the scheme was not targeted against him personally because of his assets. But is that really the truth?
He decided, 'To survive in this battlefield known as life, I need to find the truth'.
1086 words
(A/N: I originally wanted to write ugly yet beautiful world, but that reminded me of that 2004 anime, so I just went with the first thing my finger tips could think of: battlefield known as life. I also played with the pronouns at the end. Random fact: did you know English is **one** of the few languages where you can use the word 'one' as a pronoun? Do you see what I did there? I even marked **one** to emphasize a word with double meaning just for you guys... lol... Also I don't care about the spelling of A Corp vs A corp cAsE-iNg.)