August 10 2121

  Valencia pulled the chip out of her machine, and placed it gingerly back into the padded box she pulled it from. She pushed it asside, before looking back at me.

  “We cuffed the three men and took them in. We had a major problem, though. They officially didn't exist”, Valencia said.

  “How do you mean? Like they were stateless?”, I asked.

  “Exactly! No government database had any information on them. They were ghosts, and nothing we had could determine their origins. Again, they didn't exist”, Valencia tapped on the table for emphasis.

  “Well they came from somewhere, surely”, I replied, trying to figure out where this was going.

  “Obviously, yeah. The big problem was from where. Omni-Corp's intelligence teams tried multiple terrogation techniques, but Carmine and his boys wouldn't budge. According to Daniels, the company had to resort to less legal and more... Drastic Measures”, she said.

  “Less legal? What did they do, brain scans?”, I asked.

  “Yes, exactly”, Valencia said, matter-of-factly.

  I nearly spit my coffee out. Beyond the moral implications, the legal status had been settled law since the '40s. Somehow, the supreme court came to the decision that police pulling brain scans from suspects was against the 4th amendment. After everything else, that was a weird principle for them to take a stand for.

  “The company ran full brain scans. Since they were stateless, and there were no record of them. Who cared about legality? What national laws were they truly breaking?”, she continued, “regardless, short of the scans being used for police work, there wasn't anything illegal about it. OCP didn't care, and if they got caught? A fine is just a business expense by another name.”

  “So the company scanned the three men's brains.... What did they find?”

  “They obtained an address to a warehouse in the city of Pullman, Illinois.”

  ___________________________________________________________________________________

  July 23 2078

  I had been spending my Saturday morning the way I usually did. I would wake up at 03:00 and doomscroll for a few hours, holding my cat. Miss Seusse rather enjoyed this arangement, and would spend that time cuddling and snuggling up with me. After the sun got up, I made some toast and eggs, before pouring the little cat her bowl of dry crunchies.

  I was back, laying in bed, when I received the message.

  “I'm sorry, little one”, I said picking up Miss Seusee, before kissing her soft little forehead and setting her down beside me.

  She let out a pathetic little, “meow” and gently pawed at me in a vain attempt to get me to stay home.

  “Don't worry, Miss Seusse. I'll only be gone a little while”, I said ruffling her little kitty head, before standing up and heading out the door.

  I poured me a cup of coffee, grabbed an L, and was soon walking into the front doors to the OCP building downtown. Before I could get to the armory to change, Daniels grabbed me and whisked me to a briefing room. The others had already arrived, and were sat down. I took a seat, and looked at Daniels intently.

  “Alright, I'm sure none of you want to be here, so let's get to business. The intel team got some premium information from those three ghosts you picked up. We got an address”, Daniels said, flipping on the screen to see drone footage of a warehouse.

  “This warehouse in Pullman is where they claim they were going to take their little goodies from Tycho. Omni-Corp wishses for you four to go and investigate it and see if they were just making things up.”

  “Wait, so what do you want us to do?”, Max asked, pressing for more details.

  “The company just wants you to go in and check out the warehouse at the provided address. The suits up above think they could be implanted memories, but in order to cross out any potential red herrings, they want you four to go check and confirm the situation”, Daniels answered.

  “Unarmed?”, I asked.

  “Afirm, Sanford. Just a quick in and out. Shouldn't need a weapon or armor to go and take a peek”, he replied.

  We all acknowledged our orders and checked out a vehicle from the motor pool. The entire 50 minute journey, James kept pouting about missing part of the horror movie marathon he'd been waiting for weeks to watch. Beyond the fact that there were others beyond the genre, James was upset for missing, “Sarah Summers' Spooky Summer Slasher Spectacular” movie marathon. He was missing out on Dracula currently, which was an odd addition to a slasher movie marathon.

  We got within a couple of blocks of the warehouse, and parked on the side of the rode a little ways away. Just far enough to not see the building, but close enough to walk. The four of us got out, and walked the short distance to the warehouse.

  The place looked run down to all hell. Fence and gate were sturdier than the standard chain link fence, and was instead made of thick steel posts. The gate was split down the middle, with a chain and lock keeping them closed. The parking lot was cracked in several places, with grass and weeds popping through the concrete. One of the windows near the roof of the place was smashed in, which certainly made me afraid of the incoming risk of nasty smells.

  “Alright, so how are we getting in?”, James asked.

  “Well, we could jump the gates”, suggested Max.

  “Max... We're both in our forties. We aren't jumping shit”, Alex replied.

  “The royal we, Alex. We have two youngins here that could do the honors”, Max said, looking my way.

  James said nothing while the other two suggested I jumped the spiky metal fence. I instead walked up to the gate and looked at the lock. We were in luck; it was a WonderLock. The only wondering about these was how that company still sold any. I grabbed the lock, and with the flick of a freely rotating wrist, the shackle snapped away from the gate. I sent a small thank you to the Lockpicking Legend for teaching me how to deal with this brand.

  “I guess I'm also in my forties”, I said, tossing the broken lock to Alex.

  “Fair enough, kid”, he replied, slapping my shoulder as he passed to open the gate.

  The rusted gate screamed in defiance as we opened it. The hinge needed some oil for certain and for sure. We all pushed the gate opened, and began to cross the heavily cratered parking lot. Wildflowers were growing in potholes, and from the surrounding trees, last years leaves were rotting in the cracks where grass now grew. I saw a few monarch butterflies flutter up as we went.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  We reached the front door. Alex asked me to get this door too. In the time I took to explain that just because I ripped the lock out of one door doesn't mean I can do it for every door, James had already tried the door. To all of our surprises, it was left unlocked, and the light inside the lobby was on.

  “I suppose it's time for us to harvest the succulent house-meat within”, James said under his breath.

  At least he tried, since Max replied with, “What was that, son? House meat? Trying to eat some metals to keep your teeth squeaky clean?”

  James brushed him off and stepped inside. The three of us followed closely behind.

  Shockingly, the interior was fairly nice. The furniture in this lobby area was well kept, although covered in a layer of dust on the tops. Besides that it was all in near factory condition. There was a window, opposite to the door, where a secretary's office would normally have been, yet it was sparsely decorated. There were a couple more doors to our sides, and one in the rear left corner of the room.

  From behind that last door, the sound of mechanics whirring, and the movement of machines could be heard. James, attempting to return to his beloved horror movies, took the door, and revealed what lay behind. There were shelves, full of boxes and crates. Then to our surprise, a machine moved past the doorway.

  The four of us stepped inside, where we proceeded to see several of those machines. They were these large, robotic forklifts, square in shape and wist high. From above they had about the footprint of a golf cart. They had white panels with forest green stripes running along their lengths, and were bisected by a ring to allow the forks to rotate around the body. There were tracks running up the shelving units to allow the forklifts to go up and down the entire height of the shelves. These giant shelves allowed for less wasted space in the warehouse, and dimmed the lights significantly.

  The four of us began to trek down a row. Several forklifts beeped and booped around us. One began to follow us as we walked down the hall. Midway down the corridor, the shelves opeened up, into a central boulevard in the room.

  I looked right. Endless rows that hit a flat wall.

  I looked left, and beheld four doors, two on either side of the corridor. For two sets of doors, the forklifts entered. The other two had them leaving. I alerted the others to this fact, and pointed to the doors.

  Ultimately, there were hundreds of these forklift robots. They skittered about, coming and going on their own. One gently used a fork to push me aside to lift itself on the vertical track of the shelf I was standing in front of.

  “What do you think happens behind those?”, I asked, beginning to move toward them.

  “Secret crime, perhaps?”, suggested Max as he began to follow.

  “Either way, we should go check”, said Alex approaching the door.

  Alex stood at the side of one of the doors and waited for a forklift to go past. One rolled up to the doorway, moving its forks between forward, and pointed toward Alex. After a few back and forths, the robot relented and went through the door, after which, Alex busted in behind. Shocked, I followed, and the rest thereafter. The door shut with a hollow “ka-thunk.” We were sealed in.

  The cramped cab began descending. For some time, we didn't notice anything strange. We accepted for far too long, just how normal it was to have no idea how far down an elevator could go. It was when our systems disconnected from the internet, that we were alerted to just how strange of a situation we were in.

  For the first time in months, we were disconnected. No internet. No trackers. My mind slowed to a crawl, like crashing off of a stimulant. The worst part of it all, was this is how I figured out I was directly wired into a timing server. My absolute sense of time was deleted the moment network connection dropped. The clock on my HUD was nothing but x's.

  I leaned up against the forklift to try and attempted to get some sleep. Sleep never came, though, as I soon found out. Every little noise made sleep more impossible to obtain, and so I found myself counting to attempt to pass the time.

  “3857.. 3858...”, I thought, the numbers driving me mad.

  I wiped away the dreams of sleeping, and looked at the others. Max was asleep, and Alex had a blank stare, looking at the wall. James was sitting on one of the forks of the forklift. I looked up at him, and a devious thought entered my mind.

  “James, what move would you be on if we hadn't been called in?”, I asked with a sly smile.

  James looked at me with an expression of utter contempt. A cold chill came over me for a second.

  Taking his gaze upwards, James answered, “Well, I'm not quite sure, but either 'The Masked Nightman', or 'Dr. Spooky's Anthology of Bad Times.'”

  I looked at him for a moment, before replying, “You made that up.”

  James slowly looked back down, and with a smile, replied, “Yeah, but you believed it for a second.”

  We stared at each other for a moment before sharing a laugh. After we quieted down, the rest of the ride was uneventful.

  After what very well might have been forever, we stopped. The elevator chimed as it opened, and the robot beeped repeatedly, and loudly. We shuffled out of the cab, and into a massive warehouse. Looking to my sides, the room seemed to stretch endlessly. The air here seemed to shimmer. Moving in a mass chaos were more of these robots, all in a delicate ballet.

  I took a few more steps into the room, before I turned around.

  I saw a wall, which had to be over ten stories tall. It was at a slight outward angle, and across the entire wall were millions of flowers. Floating about flowers were thousands of butterflies, moving and flying with the ebb and flow of this chaotic room. Each dancer in this room knew their part, moving past each other with ease.

  I felt a tap on my leg. I screamed, jumping into the air in an absolute panic. Below me was a forklift robot, beeping rapidly, tapping my leg every few seconds. I acknowledged its existence, and moved out of its way. James and Max were laughing at my reaction.

  I saw a butterfly descend from one of the planter boxes. It came down, and landed on a forklift that was hovering around us. After a second, the butterfly, as if possessed, rapidly opened and closed it's wings while landing. When it was finished, it dissolved into nothingness and disappeared into the ether.

  The forklift proceeded to come to us, and beckoned us to follow it. More than one of us had our shins hit by those fucking forks. Once we all learned to follow it, we were taken to the lifts going up, but before the door was opened for us by the robot, it tapped the wall four times. On command, a planter lifted upward, and four small boxes popped out. We each were given a meal for the ride back up.

  The robot activated the lift to go up, and in we went. The meal inside the box was not too dissimilar to the one given to us by Omni-Corp on that training day. The bread was better, at least. The chips inside were excellent, too. All the same, I sat on the floor of the cab, eating a boxed lunch, as we ascended back from the depths.