The rays of light shone through the thick foliage illuminating the mossy and wild forest ground. An old hunter, a young boy and a charming young lady could be seen talking around the processed corpse of an adult bear.
The casual chat stopped when the muffled sound of a horn could be heard in the distance.
Joseph was the first to act "Something urgent is happening in the village, I will go back with the bear fur and bones. Come after me with the rest. Make sure to be at the village by noon, this is serious. Understood ?"
"Got it"
He was gone in a blink, Astrid and I collected the meat and organs into cloth bags and hastily made our way towards the village.
About halfway through the eastern jungle we encountered a threat and not just any threat.
"Shit, it's a Tiger, it must have smelled the blood inside the bags. We have such wretched luck, encountering two natural alpha predators in a day…" I wasn't wrong, our day was already tiring but I somehow felt it would become worse.
A threatening roar followed by it running towards us triggered all of our natural instincts. Since we were too tired from our previous encounter and the long hike fighting it would only result in our death. The only option was to run, run faster than a tiger.
Sprinting through the thick jungle, feeling the branches, leaves and vines impeding my movements made me expend twice as much energy to flee from the beast and doubled the dread I was feeling.
It felt like hours of running a marathon before I came in front of a boulder stuck between two thick jungle trees that was blocking the way forward.
Turning around to flee in another direction brought me in an unfortunate situation, being head to head with the king of the jungle. Knowing it had me cornered, it slowly moved out of the bushes having its gaze fixed on me constantly. Playing with its prey, me.
"Well… I'm fucked. And I'm going to die all alone, again. At least Astrid was able to get away safely."
[You are not alone host.]
Oh yeah forgot you existed…
[Host has used me twice in the past month to improve on his training program and eleven times for sleep assistance, forgetting my existence is unlikely.]
You are a defective medical AI, I don't see how thinking about you during a fight or even my funeral can be useful.
[I am not defective. My functions are fully accessible once the host starts his genetic synchronisation and/or release.]
Can I transform now ?
[You can but it is unlikely for a baby dream reaper to defeat a fully grown tiger.]
So you can determine the outcome of fights now ? Anyways since you are useless right now please shut up.
[I am not useless. Option sleeping assistance and Caelus connection are currently available.]
The tiger seemed tired of waiting and it leaped at me. "Activate Caelus connection ! I don't care what it does, just do it !"
[Activating the nearby Caelus facility…]
A green light appears from the boulder behind me startling the tiger and making it stop right in front of me.
We look at each other in an almost comedic way.
[Opening the facility door.]
A creaking sound came from the ground, the light that was previously green turned red and the entire floor around me and the tiger fell taking us down with it.
[Welcome-e to the archive, a t-technical problem ha-as occurred, please s-stand by. We-]
Was the last thing I heard before reaching the bottom of the hole. I thank the gods for helping me but why do they always finds a way to make me suffer...
…
God my head…
I am pretty sure that a few of my bones are broken... I can also feel blood…
The fall , all I knew was that finding me down here would be impossible. I had to move.
Pulling myself up I could see a lake of blood surrounding me, next to me was the tiger… impaled by a stalagmite. At least it landed on its legs…
Happy to know the blood wasn't mine I hopped towards my spear that was laying a bit further away and used it as a cane.
Taking the chance of being upright I observed my surroundings for a way out of here.
This was one of the ancient ruins, ruins that I wanted to enter since the first time I stayed in one. A lot of the structures were fused with the damp cave surfaces while the metal and concrete walls sometimes revealed themselves and stalactites were leaking water droplets onto the cold stone floor.
There were rows upon rows of bookshelves, except these ones held something like numerical tablets.
I approached one of them and tried to see what kind of information they held or whether they were just broken.
[Security clearance insufficient. Level two required.]
Looking through the different shelves I could find that each row had a different security clearance required for using the PDA's but I found it impossible to open any, even the level one.
Searching around I found something blinking hiding behind a thin wall of interconnected stalactites and stalagmites. Maybe this was the exit?
I started to hit it with my spear until it eventually crumbled revealing a fossilised human. The trinket it was wearing caught my eye, it was a triangular earpiece that kept on blinking.
I had no intention to wear something from a corpse but I still took it out of curiosity.
[Focus detected, do you wish to merge focus with Phoenix nanobots ?]
I can do that ? Neat. Oh, but what is a focus ?
[No information. I am a medical AI. Please merge to obtain more information.]
Alright, go ahead.
[Combining focus with nanobots… ]
[Basic functions implemented successfully]
[Complete merge failure… Host's physical constitution is not optimal. Merging progress will continue once the host is fully healed.]
I feel a slight dizziness, expected much worse...
Did I gain something ? Superpowers ? Cool high tech guns ?
[As you have integrated a staff sergeant's focus into the nanobot system, your security clearance has risen to level 6.]
Better than nothing I guess.
Having gained access to a big part of the archive and still finding no way out except for the giant hole in the ceiling, the only choice left to me was to hope that one of those records contained information about a secret exit or something.
I picked up a PDA on the shelf numbered two.
[The Mesopotamian civilization was one of the first… The Nobunaga clan… During the french revolution…]
I kept on watching records about this world's history that was very similar to mine yet had vastly different events.
[End of data]
I picked up other PDA's and watched what they contained.
Most of them were boring, cooking recipes, archeology and other diverse subjects. There were some interesting ones however, engineering, medicine, history and weapon design.
Everything here was a precious treasure left by the old ones !
Some of the PDA were missing while others simply didn't turn on but just the rest would make my clan's era advance by leaps and bounds !
I was left with the last record of the shelf numbered 6.
[ Year 2060, Donald Ruth's journal :
The stelar cataclysm genetically mutated all the humans on earth. Half of them weren't able to adapt to the radioactive rays and became humans that were entirely composed of cancerous cells. It should have killed them in a matter of seconds but strangely kept them alive for a few days, making their death all the more horrendous and painful.
The other half of humans survived but their DNA had been heavily altered, we would die in a similar death to the first half if nothing was done soon. To survive, two ideas were put forth.
The institute and some other labs wished to fuse their genetic material with non-human genomes to balance out the strange disease with their bodies, taking this disaster to "ascend" to a higher natural realm.
The Scru enterprise and its supporters on the other hand wished to upload their consciousness in mechanical machines or biologically engineered clones to continue their legacy in another vessel.
These diverging ideas split humanity into two causing war to ensue shortly after. Scru enterprises developed war machines that were even more advanced than the previous generation of weapons to spread their ideology and power.
These battlefield shredders made it impossible for us, the institute to win. We received a transmission from Scru's head engineer, she wished for this senseless war to stop and implemented a shutdown virus into the machine servers and beged us not to take this opportunity to comit genocide.
The war between the machines and us finally stopped, but not for long. The informatic virus that stopped the Scru plague somehow also destroyed the targeting systems present in the drones. The machines now going rogue destroyed the other side from the inside completely and pushed us back to strongholds all around the world.
We specialised in biologic engineering and while some of us were mechanical engineers… There was nothing we could do. The traitor from Scru was our only hope to find a way to put an end to this madness, even though she was the cause of it.
Her project zero dawn was what she came up with but we couldn't trust her wholeheartedly after her previous... mistakes. Thus we implemented project Valhalla as our last bastion, our ark.
End of transmission.]
This… just… whoa.
The world I was reborn into is crazy. Even with a different history there is a war between humans destroying everything around it… Why are humans always the same ?
And all those events and the story the elder told us years ago are really similar… This is obviously a more detailed description of what happened to the old ones.
I suppose that more detailed information about that event or what happened after to be in one of the higher security records. Guess I will have to find a high grade old one to unlock the rest.
Drip, drip, drip ! The previously calm cave ambiance by the repetitive sound of water droplets hitting the floor from the stalactites was disrupted when a real downpour occured.
The dome's rain cycle must have activated above the jungle. And now water from the surface was entering through the gaping hole that I made.
"Shit it's going to flood the cave at this rate."
But there was no exit except for the one on the ceiling…
I know ! I have to wait for the water to rise to the top and hope that it will reach the hole.
There might be a chance for me to drown but since I rested a little bit I could probably swim to the top.
The only thing that made me sad was to know that some tablets wouldn't resist the water and be destroyed.
I waited and waited for the water level to rise, after it came in contact with my skin I could feel the pain around my broken bones subside but I was sure they weren't fixed.
Only about ten meters left to go…