Chapter One: Battle Protocol activated.

Zyon

I have only one piece of advice to give anyone who wishes to avoid being transported from one Dimension to another against their will.

When you walk into an advanced AI lab and see no one around, just turn right back and leave. Seriously, maybe your life won't turn out as badly as mine has so far.

It all starts on a Thursday morning, I hurry into the impressive tall building that houses Nova Tech enterprises while checking my watch,

"Damn," I hiss and adjust the collar of my khaki work uniform, hoping I don't get into trouble for my tenth late delivery this week.

When I enter the large lobby, I come to a confused halt. The place is completely deserted, no security guards, staff, or even visitors. Sunlight reflects through the glass walls and windows in soft hues of golden yellow. And an eerie quiet greets me.

A crisp female voice breaks the silence causing me to flinch and almost drop the delivery package in my hand. 

Welcome to Nova

The automated voice says.

We're breaking new discoveries everyday

The future is AI

Unease bubbles in my stomach. It's strange to see no one in what is usually a busy lobby.

 "Hello is anyone there?" There's no answer.

Even the receptionist desk is empty. The address slip attached to the package reads: Nova technologies 8th floor room 14C. So I use the elevators and go up.

The eighth floor is mostly just a long corridor with dim flickering florescent lights. My footsteps echo as I approach the single door at the end of the hallway. It's slightly open and I can see rows of humming servers blinking inside.

I step into the door and almost swallow my tongue,

"Oh my god! I'm so sorry!" I splutter, my cheeks heating up with embarrassment.

The man and woman locked in a tight embrace haven't noticed me yet. I start to step back, wondering how long I'll have wait for them to be done before I have them sign for the package.

Though I have to say they make an odd pair, both of them are dressed in combat gear instead of lab coats or IT overalls.

I stop backing out when the woman huffs loudly and shoves the man away from herself.

"I won't let you stop me you fucking abomination!" She yells.

I squint at the fists she has up. Does she have on boxing gloves?

The animosity in her voice sounds genuine, so it's either this is a real fight or some serious dedication to role play. It's a sad play to my understanding of social cues and dynamics that I can't immediately tell which it is.

"You can't stop the Technocolus," The man says, arrogantly blocking the kick the girl aims at his head.

He makes an attempt to sweep her other feet. But the girl is fast and her blonde hair is a blur as she darts away easily. They circle each other slowly, shoulders tense and eyes watching for possible openings.

The man is average height with a shaved scalp and his voice is inhumane, like an automated response system or a robot.

 "We're the peak of human evolution." The creepy man says, "AI sentients are more powerful than ever, you've already lost the war,"

Should I call the cops? I wonder. This sounds so weird, like some kind of conspiracy.

The girl's lips curl in disgust as if the man's words leave a bitter taste in her mouth, she looks vaguely familiar, but her hair is shielding most of her face from me.

"We created you, never forget that. We can just as easily destroy you." She says, and shrugs off her trench coat.

Underneath is a vest with swirling lines that glow with faint blue light. Her gloves are bulky and now that I can see them more clearly they look more like gauntlets.

She holds them up in front of her face. There's a biometric interface strapped to her forearm, lifelines and several options are spread over the blue graphic screen.

Eyes glinting with defiance, she yells, "Prepare for a reboot tin can!"

The man's hand slips toward his gun holster, but the girl doesn't back down. How's she planning on moving faster than a bullet? I think to myself.

They're about to engage each other again but a loud thump catches their attention and they both look in my direction,

 I blink at them, a pained grimace on my face. The package in my grasp is what slipped. I curse myself, I have no idea when my fingers went lose with fear. 

It is all I can do not to wave my hands at them in apology and say 'carry on don't mind me, just your harmless delivery boy coming through.'

But I don't do that because now that they're both facing me, I recognize the girl.

"Arlene?" I say in shock.

She's my ex-girlfriend, and she's staring right back at me just as surprised as I am.

"Zyon?"

I last saw her three months ago when she broke up with me and disappeared from town. Now she's fighting a guy dressed up like some bad ass commando?

Her eyes dart back toward the man she's fighting and there's genuine panic in her eyes.

"Where did your stupid portal bring us back to? This is all wrong, he shouldn't be here,"

She's spouting nonsense, but the man seems to understand her because he raises his gun in my direction,

"This just makes my job easier. I'll kill him and you. The knowledge of the logic code will be lost forever."

My stomach clenches painfully at the sight of the barrel pointed at my chest.

"No!" Arlene's reaction is immediate, 

She dives at him, tackling him to the ground, and tries to pin the hand holding the gun away from me.

I'm more shocked as to how quickly this situation digressed to me being in danger when I literally just walked into the room.

"Zyon run!" She screams as they roll over each other, 

I try to obey, but my feet are glued to the floor and my mind is racing. I can't just leave her here.

Veins strain on her face, and blood leaks from her nose. She's close to being overpowered, and she's using all of her strength to keep him away from me.

I look around the room in panic. There's a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall close by, I unhook it, it's heavy and cold in my sweaty hands. Determined but trembling like a leaf, I rush toward them, ready to slam my weapon against the man's skull.

The battle cry on my lips trails off when a shrill sonic hum pierces the air as a blue laser beam escapes from the nozzle of his gun, barely missing Arlene's ear by a few inches.

My first thought is what the fuck? Laser guns?

Everything else happens in slow motion. The laser beam flies to the ceiling and zaps one of the optic wires connecting the servers to a super computer suspended in the air and slices it in two.

The cord is running thousands of electric voltage and so it starts to dance in the air like a cobra being serenaded by a snake charmer.

The severed end burns with sparks of heavy current, and just my luck, the cord dives straight for me. The moment it touches my chest, my entire body stiffens and electricity sizzles through me. My body starts to fry like a chicken in an air fryer.

I feel no pain, just thousands of raw data computing its way through my brain. I can only describe it like flipping through the pages of a book really fast.

Images and flashes of some weird symbols that I don't recognize burn behind my eyelids.

A mellow voice much like the one I heard in the lobby whispers into my brain.

"Zyon! Don't accept the phasing, fight it!" Someone cries out.

I don't know what that means.

I feel my life slipping away, I don't mind dying to be honest. My life has been miserable. I've just been insignificant. I dropped out of college, got cut off by my family and then got dumped by my girlfriend, who it seems came back to rip my life to shreds one last time.

I'm in a dreamlike state while my consciousness transmigrates into something more advanced, reaching between realities

Someone cuts the power off and I stop vibrating and land painfully on the floor. Arlene rushes to my side, "Oh no this is all wrong, what have I done?"

What happened to the bald guy? I wonder.

My vision is strange, I'm hovering between two states of reality. There's a hologram in front of me.

I can see stats. My heart rate is recorded in electrical pulses. My energy level reads 12.5/100 and I'm picking up on everything around me, the smell of burned skin, the fact that the room is about to explode due to the accident that just happened, and also a strange interference vibrating in the air building up into something on a cosmic level.

Facial recognition of my holographic vision zooms in on Arlene's face, taking note of all her key features. She's beautiful under her grim expression.

She's looking down at my dying body, her brows wrinkled with concern and her marvelous green eyes more hardened than I remember.

"You're going to wake up in a new world Zyon. The Technocolus are going to come for you. You have to survive and find the logic code," She says, "And when you see me next time, I want you to run."

She leans forward and presses her lips against mine feverishly, "I love you," She murmurs, "And I'm so sorry for everything,"

The explosion that follows is deafening, and then everything is swept up in a beam of light.

 * * * *

When I wake up, I'm confused and disoriented. It's as if I'm stuck inside of a vacuum cleaner with air whistling through my ears and roaring at a deafening pitch.

A girl is kneeling before me, her head a hairsbreadth away from my crotch. Running her hands all over my sternum, tightening straps and adjusting my belt. She's not Arlene. I think to myself.

Who's Arlene? Another part of me wonders. Faint images of a fight, an explosion and a soft kiss sift through my memories and then disappear like grains of sand blown by the wind.

"This is not a drill," The girl strapping me up says, "It's your second chance to do everything again or else everyone dies." Her voice is desperate.

"What?" I'm still trying to catch my bearings. Was I not just in a computer room a few seconds ago?

She stands to her feet and our eyes meet, they're red rimmed and swollen like she's been crying.

She's still talking fast. "Remember, AI used to be Automated Reasoning. They might have taken over everything but you can still break the Logic code,"

"What are you saying? Who are you?"

She shakes her head, "There's no time,"

And then she promptly pushes me out of the plane fifty thousand feet up in the sky.