Confusion

*Gasp*

Startling awake, I sat up straight and fast as an arrow. My breathing was ragged, a sheen of regular and cold sweat clung to my body, which felt off. Coughing roughly I quickly leap out of bed to find my balance severely off, thus causing me to tumble onto the ground. Rolling to a stop, I struggle to raise myself when I notice a mirror in front of me, slightly dim but still clearly a mirror. In it was a reflection of a young boy, about 4 years old with silver hair and golden eyes that, if you looked close enough, had traces of silver specks in them. Stunned silence was followed by confusion, and very quickly became panic.

"Who… am I?"

*Badump*

"AGH!"

Collapsing to the floor, I rolled over and desperately grasped at my head. Unimaginable pain flowed through me, as if a nuke had exploded in my head.

'Wait… nuke? Why does that seem so familiar?'

Another throbbing pain overtook me as I barely noticed a frantic woman I vaguely recognized rush into the room screaming something, or screaming for someone; I coudn't focus for long enough to make it out. She effortlessly picked me up and brought me to the bed again, before a man came careening into the room. Yells and passive noise began to fade as I felt too much pain to even make any noise, barely being able to breathe. As more pain came, images and emotions bagan assaulting my mind ruthlessly, until finally I exceeded my limit and passed out.

Surrounded by darkness, I seemingly stood on nothing as I glanced around. With the pain now at a dull roar, I began to explore the darkness looking for something-anything. After a few minutes or hours, I couldn't tell, I found a light, pulsating to a rhythm both alien and familiar. Reaching out to touch it, the light shattered on contact, leaving floating fragments all around me.

Upon closer inspection, each shard played a different scene in a constant loop, eah one blurry the first time, but as I watched one of them it became clearer the longer I gazed into it. Once it looked clear enough to simply be a window, it stopped moving for a second, before shooting into the abyss above me. With a strange spark of understanding, I spent seemingly forever and no time at all doing the same to the rest of the fragments, my speed picking up along the way.

As I watched the final piece float up, I was brought with it. In front of me now was a massive polyhedral, and each of the fragmens were inlaid onto ever side of the rotating object. Like a calling from a greater power, I was suddenly before the massive polyhedral, and so I raised my arm.

Once contact was made, I was absorbed into it, and memories of a very small child played at speeds I shouldn't have been able to understand, but I did, and I finally understood what these were; these were my memories. As I watched my life unfold once more, the emotions I felt, my identity itself - all of it came rushing back. And then suddenly it stopped moving fast, playing out a scene I instinctively understood I didn't want to see.

It was heavily storming, rain pattering against the window, and the truck appeared out of nowhere. A crash, a very bad one, and my family was gone. I wanted it to stop; I tried screaming but no sound came out, so I could only curl up and wish for the pain to stop.

The barrage of emotions increased in strength, every second seeming like years, and another memory played in real time before I could process what I just went through. It was my house, reeking of betrayal and pain, and it kept getting worse, stronger; I couldn't understand how I survived all of that pain, and my war was just as non-understandable. Why did I even do it in the first place?

As I struggled to come to terms with my life so far, I noticed a small spark in the middle of the sphere. Trudging over to it, the same polyhedral, only smaller, was in front of me, and so I grabbed it. What else was I going to do? Upon contact, I was brought to another play-by-play of a life, still just as familiar as the first, but this time of a different house, different family, and a different world. With the memories slowing down when a map was in view, countries of somehow familiar names popped up; Vale, Vacuo, and Atlas. I knew those names, and it took a few minutes before the weight of what is happening began setting in, and with said weight came an understanding.

"I'm part of RWBY now?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*Elsewhere, on Earth*

"Sir, are you sure it is safe for you to go alone? God knows what that maniac put in there!"

"I may have been undercover, but I know who he was as a person, so I can handle it. Leave." The helicopter lingered for a minute, before hesitantly leaving. The path to the throne room was empty, and the lab was emptier. All of the tools, resources, and documents were either destroyed or stolen, but there was nothing they could do about that. The passwords he knew were still in place, probably because only a very select few even knew of their existence, and a hidden computer was open and unlocked.

Fidgeting with the fake pinky, he finally puts it into the computer. The large lab table in the center of the room began to lower, and once it was moved out of the way enough a stairway showed itself. At the end of the stairs was a highly advanced and hidden lab, full of cutting edge technology that the majority of the world would believe to simply be part of science fiction. Within the middle was a table with no screen or camera, but a holographic head popped up, filling up a decent portion of the table and the area above it.

"Welcome, Jonathan Redwood. Would you like to initiate project UNITY?"

"Yes!"

And with this simple exchange between man and AI, the world would never be the same.