The barrel against his side didn't waver in the slightest, so he knew it wasn't their first time. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a prone figure on the ground: Wizah. The pressure on his side intensified, and he raised his hands excruciatingly slowly to demonstrate he didn't have anything in his hands.
His own pistol was holstered and hidden on his right side for easy access, but he didn't dare reach for it, cautious of how he hadn't sensed anyone coming up behind them. He hadn't even heard anyone knocking Wizah out, so it was clear to him that the person holding the pistol against his side was likely of a higher calibre than him in pure skill.
Not that he didn't have any other advantages, but he would keep quiet about those.
"Wizah shouldn't have brought you here."
The voice was familiar, but he couldn't quite place it, which was roughly about the same with everything else he'd learned about himself recently. "I asked her to."
"She should have known better. How did you get to her?"
The side street was quiet despite it being noon, and he had a slight hunch that perhaps 'base' wasn't just a building after all. It would also explain why nobody was protesting the pistol being pressed against him.
"There was a thumbdrive," he said, willing his thudding heart consciously to keep calm even as his subconscious reassured him that he would be fine. The conflicting emotions were getting more confusing to handle: parts of him wanted to let his buried skills and personality take over, but other parts of him didn't quite want to hand the reins over.
Those other parts were only ever scared, though, which was useless. He didn't have much of a choice but to let those buried skills surface.
He did feel it was fine to talk about the thumbdrive because it was likely that this organisation - community, whatever this was - might be more familiar with this ancient technology than the average street urchin.
"A thumbdrive. A goddamn thumbdrive. Where did you find it?"
"In my apartment."
"In your a-" Uari heard several deep breaths from behind him, as though the person was trying to calm themselves. "Okay. You found a thumbdrive in your apartment. What else?"
"There was a postcode on it." He carefully avoided any mention of the other phrase, which he still knew nothing about.
"Who wrote it?"
He shrugged and asked a question instead of giving an answer. "Why did you knock Wizah out? She's one of us."
"None of your business," said the person behind him, all but confirming that Wizah hadn't known all the details about his deep dive mission after all. She was probably a loose end that needed to be dealt with, and might even be subjected to the same memory wipe that he had undergone.
Old Uari seemed like he would have said that it was all part of the process, to clean up the mess. New, current Uari - the Uari that was a Searcher, that was average, that had debts to clear - decided stubbornly that he wasn't Old Uari, and that his new personality happened to have a conscience even if he had to borrow some of his old skills.
He made two moral decisions in the span of three short seconds: one, that memory wipes were Unethical Unless Consented To; and two, that he didn't like this organisation for promoting this nonsense, regardless of prior entanglements he might have had with them.
The person behind him shoved him forward, and he stumbled against the building, knocking the flimsy door open and falling flat on his face on the dirt floor. He resolved to give the person behind him a very bad time.
A slight kick on the leg prompted him to get up, and as he dusted himself off he took in the contents of the space: a small, dark room with no windows, a single table, and two chairs. Someone had been kind enough to leave a few cans of Lightspeed on the table.
They had been expecting him, then.
He heard someone else come by, then a smidge of murmuring he wasn't quite able to make out, and then something was being dragged away. It was probably Wizah and despite his annoyance with her, he felt a small pang of guilt at the manipulation of her memories. She wasn't his priority, however.
What was important now was that he needed to figure out what was going on with this whole community.
A week's worth of travelling had convinced him that he would likely never 'get his memories back' - not in the traditional way people had memories, at any rate. Wizah was right: the wipe did work and he had only suspected something was wrong because he had made that one connection, found that one thumbdrive.
He could learn about things and about himself, he mused as he cracked open a can of Lightspeed, but he would never regain the memories themselves. Learning about himself would be like reading someone else's diary.
His heightened senses were retained. His skills remained to be discovered. He could only acknowledge the entire situation and make a decision to move forward as New Uari.
Old Uari was gone now.
He poured out a bit of his can of Lightspeed in a darker corner of the room, then sat on the chair facing the door.
If they wanted to kill him they would've done it already. He was also sure that they could have stopped his journey at any time: whatever it was, they wanted him here and couldn't kill him. He wouldn't put it past them to have put something in the drink, but that's why he was making it look like he'd drunk a bit of it.
Everyone was a semi-amateur here. Just because they had killed someone before or knew how to hold a weapon before didn't mean they had the years of experience his body seemed to remember.
He only had to be concerned about the person he hadn't managed to sense, but even then his instincts as Old Uari told him that this person wasn't a danger to him.
The door opened again and a large, muscular, heavyset figure stepped in, gun in hand and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on their face. He wasn't sure if he wanted to call them Muscles or Glasses.
Glasses scowled at him and flicked a strand of hair out of their face, eyes flickering to the opened can of Lightspeed. "You sure make yourself at home."
He shrugged. "Haven't had anything but water for a week. Missed the hit."
Glasses muscled their way over to the table and sat down on the other side, back to the door. The gun was still in their hand.
The barrel was still pointed at him. "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you right now. The higher-ups want you re-wiped and just sent back, but you being here has potentially compromised our base, our plans, and our safety."
Glasses cocked the gun at him, biceps flexing threateningly.
"So why," they asked softly. "Should I keep you alive when you've put all of us in danger?"