I huff as I hike up Birobong Peak at Odasan National Park in South Korea. The spring sun beats down on me, oppressive even in the mild March morning. I stop and take a swing from my water bottle. A cool breeze provides a moment of relief.

  A elderly man smiles at me and says something in Korean.

  “I don’t speak Korean,” I say embarrassedly with a shrug.

  “Tired already?” He repeats in broken English.

  I nod as I sit down on a rock, a warmth filling my chest.

  I really shouldn’t be so out of shape given how much time I spend walking.

  A strange charge ripples through the air, and the taste of energy, power, and something more washes over my tongue.

  Everyone stops and looks around, all of them speaking in rapid-fire Korean. I can’t catch a word in a hundred. The warmth in my chest grows until it burns like fire.

  I clutch at my shirt. I can hear screaming. It’s me. I’m screaming.

  I fall to the ground, and blackness overtakes me, but I don’t pass out.

  To describe what I’m feeling as agony would be inadequate. To describe it all would be impossible. It is an agony beyond measure, beyond thought beyond reason— beyond reality.

  Every atom of my body is torn apart in an orgy of nuclear fission and then slammed back together with four times the fury.

  Every thought, every memory, every errant neuron activation in my twenty two years of life is vivisected, torn apart at the fundamental level only to be tossed aside in a heap. All of it done in the effort to ask a singular, wordless question.

  WHO. ARE. YOU.

  This endless cycle of agony, suffering, and question repeats again and again. I’m kept alive only for the sheer reason that this pain is not lethal. It’s little comfort to me, though.

  WHO. ARE. YOU.

  I don’t know. I don’t know! Okay! I don’t know! Just, stop!

  The agony tears apart my life, bit by bit. Each horrible memory shredded and discarded in a way that only makes them worse.

  Please! Just stop!

  WHO. ARE. YOU.

  A failure! A nobody who can’t do anything!

  The news of the car accident that took my parents streams by into the inferno of all encompassing… everything. Heat. Light. Cold. Hatred. Sorrow. Love. Emptiness. Joy. All of it, all at once.

  Too much! It’s too much!

  Dropping out of college, bitter taste of defeat on my tongue as I sign the papers.

  Coming back to the empty house, a lawyer in black.

  The unending feeling of emptiness, listlessness. Hollowed out. Cold. Weak.

  I wish I was something stronger. Something that didn’t mind the cold. Something more.

  YES. WHO. ARE. YOU?

  I’m someone who wanted to be somebody. Someone important. Someone strong. Someone helpful. Someone useful.

  I want to live up to Mom and Dad.

  YES.

  The agony fades away into a blissful nothingness.

  Suddenly, I am conscious. No waking up, no groggy feeling. Just one second off, next second, on. As I sit up, the world around me is almost overwhelming. It should be overwhelming.

  Why is it not overwhelming?

  I have a complete 360 degree view around myself. The sky is filled with colors I never knew existed, ones I know humanity has no names for beyond their frequencies.

  That color is high frequency radar, likely used by the Incheon International Airport to locate and track aircraft, 121 miles to the west of me. That color is a telecommunications satellite. I can see it glowing high above, the light wavering in the turbulent atmosphere.

  The world is filled with a million new colors. Part of me wants to be overwhelmed, and I am deeply concerned that I am not. Because in the time it has taken me to wake up and catalog all 14,356 radio wavelengths crisscrossing the sky above me, less than a second has passed.

  What?

  The mountain side and forest looks beautiful with the thousands, millions of new colors I can see. Odaesan National Park was a great choice for a hike. Though when I first decided to take a vacation in Korea, I did not expect for this to happen. Whatever this is, anyway.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  People around me mutter amongst themselves, though I still cannot speak Korean. I discard the data as useless.

  It takes me only a few seconds to realize that I no longer have a sense of touch. Yes, I sense pressure, texture, and temperature. But the qualia, the combined whole the human brain creates and feeds into a conscious mind, is gone.

  Everything is data, now. The ground underneath me, data. The air temperature, data. Things are no longer cold, cool, warm or hot. They are temperatures. The ground beneath me is 71 degrees Fahrenheit. The air temperature is 78 degrees. Humidity of 24%.

  I cannot think like this. I cannot live like this. But I have options, control over myself in ways I never had before. I am not sure where that knowledge came from. I discard those thoughts as useless.

  I slowly weave the qualia every human spends their whole existence living in back into my new senses. I pull from memories, once fuzzy, now in stark certainty.

  It takes me hours, but finally I’m able to feel again. The feeling of cold, damp dirt has never felt so good. I sit up, and look down at my hands.

  Not that I need to. I was able to see myself from the moment I awoke. I just didn’t really believe it. Or maybe I didn’t want to?

  Where is my face?

  I brush one of my metal gauntlets against my face, searching for the features I grew up with. I find none of them.

  I had Mom’s nose, and Dad’s eyes.

  I’m now eight feet, eight inches tall, and just over forty-four hundred pounds. I am huge, with bulky, inhuman proportions. I’m made of a dull gunmetal gray substance. I hesitate to call it metal. I look like a medieval knight, helmet and all.

  Gone are my flesh and blood hands, gone is my flesh and blood body. Everything I had on me is gone! Shit, my fucking phone! My hotel key! Goddamn it!

  The people around me are not muttering to each other, they are talking at me. Or, more likely, ordering me, considering they’re all soldiers and pointing rifles at me. One shouts at me, ordering me in a language I still can’t speak.

  “Uh, I’m American?” I call out hesitantly. “Don’t shoot!”

  One calls out stiltedly, “Hands. Air!”

  I put my hands in the air.

  Speaking Korean would make this a lot easier.

  As I look up at all the countless radio transmissions above my head, I wonder.

  If I can see them, maybe I can do more?

  I reach out with a muscle I never had until now, five hundred and fifty kilometers up, and grab hold of a telecom satellite in orbit. It takes milliseconds to make the connection. I tear through databases and servers and a million other digital roads like a wildfire, ripping a phrase here, a word there.

  I speed read a thousand lessons on the Korean language in microseconds. A cultural idiom here, a common pun there. I’m pretty sure I slow a dozen websites to a crawl in my veritable raid. I chew up ten thousand Korean forum posts over fifty sites in less than half a second. I hog the entire telecom satellite, forcing hundreds of other connections to suddenly drop.

  Whoops.

  The interruption is brief, lasting only a few seconds. Five seconds after I first connect to the telecom satellite, I’m fluent in Korean, both written and spoken.

  “Please don’t shoot me, I don’t understand what’s going on!” I say to the soldiers around me.

  They look amongst each other in confusion for a second, though their rifles never waver. I can see down the barrels, all the way to the firing chamber. I can see the bullet racked, ready to thunder out in mechanical hatred. I can see the scratches and tooling marks on the bullets, the firing chambers, and the barrels.

  An officer calls out from behind an armored vehicle, next to where all the other soldiers are taking cover.

  “Identify yourself!”

  “I’m Seth Ryans! American tourist! What happened? What’s going on?”

  “Do you have any identification!”

  “I don’t think so? It was in my pocket and—”

  As soon as I think about my wallet, and the other things I had on me, a strange feeling wells up in my… something. Not my chest, not my head, or anything in my body. Something both a part of me and separate. Like I’m in two places at once.

  With no small amount of confusion, I reach for the sensation, this new part of me. It’s natural, scarily so. With a flash of knowledge, I realize that I do have my wallet. And my phone. And my hotel key, along with everything else I had on me. Even what I was wearing is here, for an extremely vague and uncertain definition of here, anyway.

  “Oh, nevermind. I think I found it?”

  The officer, one Jang Ha-joon, gives me a look of confusion before it swiftly clears.

  “Toss it here. Slowly.”

  With a thought, my wallet materialized into my right hand. It starts as a glowing, small dot, before rapidly growing and becoming the familiar black leather wallet my father gave me for my birthday.

  I miss you, Dad.

  I throw the wallet, a perfectly aimed throw. It lands on the hood of the armored vehicle, bouncing once before landing directly in front of the officer.

  I even knew how far it was going to bounce. What the hell?

  The officer carefully reaches out, and grabs my wallet. Pulling out my ID he glances at it before looking back at me.

  “Take off the helmet!”

  “I’m not wearing a helmet! I don’t know what happened to me!”

  The officer is clearly taken aback, and the soldiers look nervously at each other.

  “Well, how do we know this is you?”

  How do I know I’m me anymore?

  “I don’t know if I’m me anymore! I’m even more confused than you are, I promise!”

  Jang chews on his lip for a second before coming to a decision.

  “Fine, alright. Get up. We’re going back to Seoul. You’re coming with us. People have questions for you. No sudden movements!”

  I slowly come to my feet with my hands in the air. It’s a slow, smooth movement, unlike anything I’d done before. My rise and shifting of my body weight is exacting and calculated. There’s no uncertain wobbling, and with unnatural grace I stand to my full height.

  They look so small.

  I was never a tall man before, only 5’8’’. Being at eye level with people in a vehicle mounted machine gun feels good.

  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  Jang orders his soldiers into their vehicles before waving me over.

  “Look, Mr. Ryans. As long as you don’t cause any trouble, we won’t cause you any trouble. We have plenty as it is.”

  My first instinct is to give him a confused look. I’m quickly, brutally, reminded that I no longer have a face to express with.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Jang stares at me.

  “Right. You wouldn’t know. You’ve been unconscious, laying there for three days.”

  As I turn around to look at where I was laying, I reach out again for the telecom satellite. Skimming through various news sites across the world, I quickly find out that, yes, I was there for three days. More importantly, magic has come to the world of Earth, and it has set it ablaze.