by Thom Parsons
Contents
Dedication
Definition
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
PART ONE
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART TWO
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
PART THREE
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
PART FOUR
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
PART FIVE
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
PART SIX
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
PART SEVEN
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Authors Note / Special Thanks
Artwork
About The Author
Dedicated to Georgina Harper.
The only one who could make me write.
MANIPULATOR
noun: Manipulator
plural noun: Manipulators
1: A person who controls or influences others in a clever or unscrupulous way.
2: A person who handles or controls something skilfully.
3. A person who controls people to their own advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly.
PROLOGUE
“It's kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Walt Disney
Chapter One
Date: December 15th 2035 (Present Day)
Location: Unknown
Click.
“For the benefit of the listeners, everything recorded from this point on is classified. This tape is only for use by the members of the FBI’s Special Projects Division, and the FBI's Internal Affairs office. My agent ID is Four-November-November-One-Three. This is Victoria. The subject I am interviewing is a field agent within the Special Projects Division of the FBI. It tells me here that he has an outstanding record, alongside some amazing achievements. However, his current status within the Bureau…”
Victoria flicked over to the second page of the file that was laid out on the table in front of her. She looked over it for a few seconds before raising her eyes back up to the man that was sat at the opposite end of the table.
“…disavowed.”
Her words were cold, professional and without care, perfectly matching the atmosphere of this tiny and lightless interrogation room. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a smartphone, only to look at it for a second before putting it straight back where it came from. “The date is December 15th 2035. The time is 11.42am. For the benefit of the tape, can you please confirm your name? We need this officially on record.”
“My name is Owen Archer,” the man sitting opposite her said. They were the first words he had spoken in hours, causing his voice to croak slightly.
“And your job title, Mr Archer?” Victoria continued.
“I was a Memory Analyst with the FBI.”
Victoria nodded slowly as she read through Owen’s personnel file in front of her. Before long, she continued with her questions. “And what exactly was it that you did?” she asked, looking up at him as she spoke.
Owen didn’t respond immediately. Admittedly, he was a little thrown off by her question. Now, here he was, tying to gauge just who it was that he was talking to. “You mean you don’t already know?” he asked, feeling slightly confused about his situation.
“Not fully,” she responded emotionlessly, looking Owen dead in the eyes as the words left her mouth. “I’ve only been partially briefed on both the current situation and the details of your job. I’m here to listen to the whole story and to ask unbiased questions.”
Owen nodded, but said nothing in response. He understood exactly where she was coming from. More importantly, he understood why she was here. She’s the jury, here to judge me on my actions up until this point.
“For example,” Victoria continued, snapping him out of his thoughts. “I know that from looking through your file here, you were one of the top field agents within the FBI’s Special Projects Division. Out of nowhere, you went rogue. You dropped off the grid. Then… you resurfaced, having broken countless laws in your absence. Care to explain?”
“Business turned personal,” Owen said with a shrug of his shoulders.
“I see,” Victoria responded. Casually, she pulled a notepad and a pen out from the inside of the her jacket and laid them down on the table in front of her, ready to start taking notes about everything that this man had to say. “Tell me how it all started.”
“I’m not able to jump right into my story,” Owen stated. “If I did, you probably wouldn't know what was going on. Everything that has happened, happened because of a piece of technology. A machine. It’s called PRoGRaM.”
“Never heard of it.”
“That’s because it's not public knowledge,” Archer clarified, visually peaking her interest with his interesting choice of words.
“Then let’s start there, shall we? Tell me about PRoGRaM. Tell me about your job.”
“Well…” Owen said, leaning forward onto the table in front of him, finally feeling ready to begin his story. “I have the most incredible job you could never imagine.”
PART ONE: ELI ROTH
“What does it mean to lose you memory? Your psyche, spirit, soul, your history. The spark, the flame, the fire, the love you feel. Are you still present? It's a mystery.”
Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton & Rick McMurray
(Ash)
Chapter Two
Date: December 8th 2035 (One Week Earlier)
&nbs
p; Location: PRoGRaM
Disorientation. We’re in.
The blinding white light that had swallowed him only moments before began to fade, as did the ringing noise that echoed in his ears, only to be replaced by a sharp pain at the side of Owen Archer’s head. This was a normal day to day thing for him. Owen knew that it would fade shortly, but despite the number of times he came here, it never got easier. Slowly blurring into vision came the images of where he was.
Owen was standing upright, feeling slightly dizzy yet trying to focus himself on the bright white architecture of the room all around him. No decor, no furniture, no windows. The only thing of interest was a single door with a small red light above it. He was all by himself, if only for the moment, in a perfect cube of a room, roughly ten meters in length, width and height. Surrounding him were white walls, a white ceiling and a white tiled floor.
Luckily for Owen, he wasn’t alone for long.
Uncharacteristically, he’d brought along a colleague. Beside him was the final member of his party of two, Kate Miles. Unlike Owen, she was new to this game, and as soon as she opened her eyes and gained control of her body and mind, she immediately lost it again. Kate's thin frame collapsed down onto her knees, seemingly exhausted and lost for words.
Her long, dark red hair fell down over her face, covering up her features whilst she tried to compose herself. This was usual for first-timers, although it even happened occasionally with some of the most experienced users. It was something that Owen had seen many times before. Kate wasn’t the first to be overwhelmed by PRoGRaM, and sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.
She was here on a training exercise, the first one that Owen and his team had ever been involved with. It was a collaboration between the Special Projects Division of the FBI and the rest of the Bureau, as a part of a covert nationwide rolling-operation. As far as Owen was aware, the FBI were bringing some of their regular agents up to speed on the technology, but it wasn't his place to ask questions. He just assumed that one day they were going to be expanding their operations. This was the first phase of setup in getting them ready for that day.
This was her second incursion into this digital world, and it seemed to Owen as if Kate was feeling just as queasy and unstable on her entry this time as she was the first time around. He instinctively hurried over to help her up, extending a hand to her. “Welcome back to PRoGRaM,” Owen said as he helped Kate stand upright and gently released her. He kept himself alert and ready to grab her again as her balance was obviously still unsteady. "You’ll get the hang of entry eventually."
She swooped her hands over her head pushed her dark red hair out of her face and back behind her shoulders.
“How are you feeling this time?” Owen asked.
Slowly, Kate leaned herself forwards and put her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath and gather her thoughts back together. After some heavy breathing, she managed to stand herself upright. “Better. I think?” she responded as her deep green eyes narrowed. Her brain finally got around to taking in the room around her. She looked at Owen, trying to gauge her situation. “So we start in The White Room again?” she asked.
The White Room was the place where they always materialised upon entry into the world of PRoGRaM. It was their basic entry point, a room coded separately from the rest of the world. It was somewhere reliable that the team could start out from, but more importantly, it was a room from which the team could go anywhere. A room outside conventional space.
“Yes,” Owen replied. “We’ll always start in the same place in PRoGRaM, no matter what the operation is.”
Still, despite his explanation, a look of confusion covered Kate’s face, which was completely normal under the circumstances. All of this was very, very new to her. She didn’t yet know the importance of the room that she was stood in.
“Why can’t we just wake up where we need to?” she asked.
“For several reasons,” Owen answered. This is my area of expertise; making sense of the impossible.
“The most important one being the fact that waking up here in this ‘White Room’ helps you as an individual, and your mind, to distinguish between the real world and the PRoGRaM world. There’s nothing stranger than waking up in PRoGRaM inside a virtual representation of your own bedroom. It’s things like that which can make you question yourself when you wake up in the real world, so its our way of separating realities. This ‘White Room’ was actually Nick’s idea, he’s the one who programmed the code for the room, and implemented its use.”
Nick was the team’s programmer, their guy on the outside. He had been with Owen since the very beginning two years ago, scooped up by the Federal Government straight out of university. He lived for programming, and Owen had never seen anyone quite like him at work. Most people who are that into their jobs and are that withdrawn from society struggled to find common ground with other people outside of the job that they do. But not Nick.
“How does he know where we want to go?” Kate questioned. “If we’re in here and he’s out there, how can he know what we need, or where we need to go?” It was only natural that Kate had a lot of questions. There were a lot of things that Owen and Nick didn’t teach newcomers to PRoGRaM.
“The answer is a lot simpler than you would realise,” he said with a smile, pacing slowly around The White Room as he spoke. “The fact of the matter is, you’re only here in mind and not body. Your body is out there in the real world unconscious, correct?“ he asked Kate, who nodded slowly in response.
“Well that’s only partially right,” Owen continued. “You may think your body is out there in the real world, completely unconscious, but it's not. In fact, it's in more of a self-induced coma. It’s all to do with the drug that we put into your system in order to let your mind enter PRoGRaM. It leaves your body asleep, but keeps your mind awake. When you talk in here, your physical body is actually talking out there too.”
“So it’s like a one way conversation, in that he can hear us, but we can’t hear him?”
“Exactly,” Owen said, pointing at Kate to emphasise the answer. “Except that he has other ways of getting through to us in here, but we’ll get more into that later on.
"Make no mistake about it, even though he’s not amongst us in the PRoGRaM world, Nick is arguably the most important member of our team. Without him, we’re not getting out of this room. And without him, we’re not getting out of PRoGRaM.”
Silence filled the room. Kate stood there with a small grin on her face, slowly nodding whilst taking all of this new information in. Her appetite for this kind of work was showing, and Owen could tell that she just wanted to get out there now and see how this whole digital reality worked.
I haven’t known someone like this since Annie. Owen thought to himself. But he had to stop there, that was a dark road to go down. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that now.
“Nick, we’re ready to go forward, load up the demonstration please,” he said into thin air, catching Kate slightly off guard. He continued to slowly pace in a circle around the room as he spoke, knowing that Nick was listening to him on the outside. Shortly after speaking, Owen watched the red light above the only door in the room change to green. He turned and looked at Kate. “See?” he said, noticing that she too had watched the door activate.
We’re connected.
Owen walked over to the door. As he grabbed the handle and pulled it open towards himself, the silence of The White Room was suddenly kicked out and instead filled with the distantly suppressed noise of a city. A bright, warm sunlight came filtering though the now-open door, along with a light summer breeze. Owen walked through first, followed closely behind by Kate.
“Wow,” Owen heard Kate say behind him as she walked out and looked around at the new environment. They were on the roof of an extremely tall building in the middle of New York City. She's right in saying wow. Owen thought. The view is absolutely incredible from here. It's just one of the reasons that I love coming to this place.
As they had both stepped out of The White Room and onto the roof, Owen called Kate back over to the doorway. “Watch this,” he said, a hint of mystery in his voice. He reached back into the doorway from where they had both just emerged and grabbed the door handle inside. Owen pulled the door that led back into The White Room to a close. Then after only a second, he re-opened it.
The White room was gone.
In its place was a normal looking stairway, leading down into the building below them. It was as if The White Room that they had just emerged from had never been there at all.
“The White Room has a very important secondary function,” Owen began to explain, catching Kate’s expression of bewilderment and heading the question off before she asked it. “Remember, primarily, it’s used a spawn point. But its secondary function is just as important, especially once you’re inside this world. It can act as a gateway between different points here so that we’re able to travel anywhere, instantly. You can ask Nick to load The White Room up behind any door, and it will be ready in a matter of seconds.
"Once you’re in there with the door shut, you give him a different location, and open the door again. Just like that… you’re somewhere completely different. It's the fastest possible way to move around.”
Lesson one of PRoGRaM was over, and Kate seemed to have grasped it extremely well so far. At least in my opinion.
The two of them continued to walk forwards. Kate moved slower than Owen as she looked around and tried to take it all in. Together, they finally reached the edge and leaned over to admire the scenery below.
“Magnificent view, isn’t it?” Owen asked her as he leant on the metal railing at the edge of the rooftop.
“This is incredible,” Kate responded. “It all feels so real. Even though I know it’s not.”
Around them, Kate and Owen watched as birds flew gracefully on the wind. In the distance, they could see a helicopter flying over the city. A light breeze blew the loose pieces of their clothes around, and below them, cars and taxi-cabs drove on in the hustle and bustle of the city. Everything around Owen and Kate looked as real as it did out there, in the real world.