2 Chapter 2 - The mysterious watch from the future
Sylzone was plunged into despair. What happened was his first thought. How did all these weird things suddenly happen? It took him a better part of the day before he could accept that he was no longer in the same world.
After he calmed down and accepted the reality of things, he thought back to the memories he saw. That was when another round of despair hit him. He thought he would be the 100th casualty after watching the recordings, but to his surprise, the original body had made it to college before an accident finally took his life.
A black streak at the end of the 99th video just before the beep signaling the end of the playback told Sylzone a glitch had occurred, not with the playback, but with the host themselves.
As he mulled over everything, he kept replaying certain memories in his head. One of the things that anchored him to reality and instilled some confidence in him whenever he started to panic and feel homesick was Carmen. She was breathtakingly beautiful and was his personal AI assistant. Each of the memories he saw did not have an AI assistant like Carmen. The host was just left to their own devices.
The initial horror that Sylzone had gradually vanished over time as he noticed more and more discrepancies.
As Sylzone processed the information he saw, he realized that there was some underlying theme. In every single recording, and also in the current world, Gravaton Industries was the dominant technology company that had survived for several hundreds of year. The original son that had taken over the company had successors that were only able to hold onto the position for 3 generations. The 4th generation had no interest in running the company so they sold their positions for billions. The current executives were the 2nd generation of the 8th family that had taken over.
The original founder of the company was no longer mentioned, in fact, he even became a taboo topic.
Sylzone found out from Carmen that the reason the original hosts were brought here, according to what she knew, was to find out what happened to that person. She had high hopes because Sylzone was such a strange case that had survived longer than the other hosts.
The personal mystery Sylzone wanted to find out about was what happened to all the hosts? He had inquired about it with Carmen before but she neither warned him against it or helped him. From that, he guessed that her only purpose was to find out what happened to the founder and whatever he did was none of her business.
Personally, Sylzone felt they were related if every host was killed without fail so consistently. However, he had no proof to back this up so it could've easily been two separate events. Sylzone would find out sooner or later.
Carmen suddenly appeared.
"Sylzone! I found some tools to clean the recording, but it will take a long time, about a year. It could be shorter if you found some more powerful tools" Carmen told Sylzone.
Over a year? Holy cow.. In his previous life, anything that would take over a year to decrypt - especially with the current technology was seriously well protected. That told him the recording was super important.
But what could be more powerful? His current body was in the most prestigious university in the nation, Hyper Traveling Nano University. Their technology was only behind the military and private corporations, and on par with the government.
Carmen noticed the grim look on Sylzone's face.
"If I may make a suggestion?" Carmen spoke up.
"Hmm? What is it?" Sylzone asked as he looked at Carmen.
Since Carmen was his ideal girl, he couldn't help but raise the corner of his lips every time he looked at her.
Carmen noticed this and scooted closer to him, holding his hands.
"Why don't you take that mysterious watch out of the closet and activate it? Clearly.. It will help a lot since it's from the future!" Carmen replied cheerfully.
"That…" Sylzone said with a hesitating tone.
Carmen noticed the hesitation.
"Look, this world is more futuristic than the one you came from, but that watch is even more futuristic than this world! It has never appeared before in any of the other hosts. Clearly, the anomaly that brought you here has caused a sort of butterfly chain reaction. There's no way there would be this many unless you yourself are the anomaly. You have a real chance of finding out what happened.
I know what you saw earlier scared you, but with me here as well, we can solve anything that comes our way!" Carmen said in a tone reminiscent of that of a girlfriend caring deeply for her boyfriend.
Sylzone let out a sigh and looked down for a bit. Then he looked at Carmen and signaled for her to give him some space to get up. She slowly created a gap for Sylzone. He was thankful she was an AI and lacked the human emotion equivalent to embarrassment. Things would've been so awkward if she was a human instead.
After Carmen got off Sylzone, he headed to the closet where he found the watch. Opening the door, he saw a huge pile of clothes. He took off each piece of clothing until a box came into a view. The box was made of a black material that was very dense and shiny. Despite its appearance, it was actually very light. Sylzone bent down to grab the box and then got up and carried it to his bed.
Carmen walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
"Whatever happens, I'm here to support you!" she replied cheerfully.
Nodding, Sylzone placed his right hand on top of the box. Earlier, he had tried all kinds of methods to open the box before he smack his palm on it out of frustration. That was apparently the activation trigger.
The box once again recognized his hand immediately and opened up. There was some smoke mysteriously flowing out earlier, but it was gone now. Inside the box was a pitch black watch. It was similar to the watch in the 99th playback, but this one was different because it had no screen on it. The watch was made out of one material, but this material was unexpectedly very flexible. It was hard but could bend. It was one size with no adjustments, but when Sylzone put it on before, the strap automatically adjusted to his wrist.
Carmen had said it was from the future because from the recordings, he found out that no material existed that had these properties. If it came from anywhere, it had to be the future!
After Sylzone put the watch on, he held the front of the watch to his face and said his name out loud. Immediately, the front face of the watch morphed into something resembling a blackhole, but strangely, no suction force could be felt. The only time it reacted was when Sylzone was messing around with some tech earlier and something flew out at him rapidly. In fear, he raised his hand up but nothing ever happened. He later found out from Carmen that the watch suddenly sucked it in and from her description, he knew it was a black hole.
But that confused him and scared him. He immediately took it off because he knew how scary black holes were. Once something goes in, it never comes out. Carmen had attempted to convince him otherwise by saying it only reacted when Sylzone was in danger.
However, now that it already happened once, the overwhelming fear in his heart subsided a little.
With the physical reassurance from Carmen, he experimented with the watch again.
"I wonder if it has any other functions?" Sylzone thought out loud.
"You know.. I did mention earlier we need more powerful tools to clean the corrupt image, but maybe this watch could do something as well?" Carmen suggested.
"But how would I use the watch to do that? Do I tell it to clean the image? How would I link it up?" Sylzone asked.
"Maybe it doesn't work like that? Earlier, it reacted when you were in danger and wanted to protect yourself. Maybe it's an intuition thing? It feels your request and then reacts to that" Carmen answered.
Sylzone contemplated upon this suggestion. It lined up with what happened. He had thought about asking her to help him experiment, but he felt that would lead nowhere because it seemed she had a strong desire to protect him. Any request to hurt him in any way would probably be ignored!
"Alright, let's try that then. I'll wear the watch while replaying the recording and we'll see what happens" Sylzone said.
"Ok!" Carmen replied cheerfully.
Carmen knelt by the side of the bed as Sylzone laid on the bed and activated the recording in his head. He thought about the 100th recording as it slowly filled his thoughts. There was a black cloud around the data in his head, showing it was corrupt. Since he didn't know the contents of the recording, he could only guess what was happening.
Slowly, as he was increasingly furrowing his brows, the surface of the pitch black watch started to deform into a vortex. The surface seemingly melted and started flowing in a clockwise direction. As the intensity increased, black clouds could be seen appearing from the edges of the surface and slowly falling into that vortex.
Carmen, who was kneeling by the bed, was too focused on Sylzone and didn't notice this.
If she was paying attention, she would've noticed that dozens of different faces appeared after the black clouds got sucked in, their faces distorting in horror.
If Sylzone or Carmen was paying attention, they would've realized that these faces were the faces of the original bodies that had died. If they had seen this, they would've realized that the recording wasn't corrupted. It was purposefully obfuscated with the original hosts! The corruption they saw was actually the face of the hosts.
However, did the hosts discover something that made them want to hide this memory, or did something kill them and hide that memory using those hosts?
They would only find out in the future.
For now, Sylzone was slowly descending into the last recording to find out what he wasn't meant to see.
--
*beep*
A man on tv was performing martial arts. He was very fluent at it executing all kinds of punches and jabs with precision. He had just finished a round and was being scored.
The judges gave him 10's and his opponent 8's. Clearly, the man was dominating. Not only did he control his opponent, he made him perform worse.
After the tournament was over, a little boy got up and started practicing those save moves. After an hour, he ran excitedly to his dad who was working in a homemade lab. All sorts of rocks were on the tables. The man who was working noticed his son and turned to face him.
"What is it now Lucien?" the man asked.
"Dad, I practiced some new moves, want to see them?" the boy asked happily.
The man noticed the enthusiasm on his son's face but could only sigh.
"Maybe later Lucien. Your dad is very busy" the man replied.
The boy had a dejected look on his face.
The dad noticed this and felt a little guilty. He knew how much effort Lucien had put into this, and now he was shunning this effort indirectly.
"How about this, if you work with dad a little, I'll watch you later. Deal?" the man asked.
"Deal!" Lucian said excitedly.
As his dad turned around to go back to his work, a strange glint suddenly appeared in Lucien's eyes.
Then, the scene distorted and Lucien was strapped to a table. He was now older, almost 21. He was slowly given duties at his dad's companies and was positioned to take over in the future. Now he found himself on an operating table, mouth gagged.
"I'm sorry it had to come with this…" a man sighed.
"Who are you?? What did you do to my dad??" Lucien screamed at the unknown figure.
His voice was muffled thanks to the gag, but the man still heard.
"I'm a nobody. You just need to know you don't belong here. I'm not sure how you guys keep coming back, but I'll find out. Nothing escapes my eyes." the man replied.
Lucien gritted his teeth.
'Damn, why did it come to this? How did he know?' were his last thoughts before the scene blacked out.
*beep*
This is the end of a partial memory, please find the other half.
