The City. Mainframe. 2400 hours. 17.15.3012

 

The rain fell hard against the electric fence that surrounded the mainframe, which loomed like a great monolith in the distance, almost imperceptible against the backdrop of the night sky, except for when lightning flashed and cast the stark building in sharp relief. How many hours and days had it taken to bring him to this point?

His name was John searcher, though the name seemed ill fitting now, like a skin he was about to slough off. There were answers here, he felt it, and perhaps he was to be a searcher no more. The metahumans were fighting before the great building and shadows loomed in the skies above; deep, heavy shadows, shapes that flowed into and out of the darkness, shapes at once strange, and yet strangely familiar. All the while as the searchlights washed over the dark earth, and the battle raged on and the lightning flashed and the darkness closed in John Searcher could feel a single truth coming down on him. He knelt in the rain soaked grass, and clutched at his head, and then it struck him like a bolt of the lightning that sprayed the skies with white light in the distance. His eyes opened wide, and his entire body felt electric.

Fragments of memories fired in his neurons, in a light speed procession, too fast for his mind to follow. It wasn’t just the past few hours, or the past few days. It was everything, everything for all his life all the way back until the breach. The memories were not going into deep storage, or being rearranged in his mind, they were leaving him. He reached out, bodily, as if he were able to grab them, as if he could strangle them into submission and shove them back inside his mind. They were leaving him, all his thoughts, all his memories. The darkness in the sky drew nearer, and floodlights filled his eyes, a brightness almost beyond imagining. He saw the silhouette behind the light somehow, and he knew what it was finally. He held on to the last memory, tugged at it, even as some unseen force sought to pull it away from him. He held to it tightly, yet felt it dissolving in his mind, He held to the memory, clung to it with all his might. He heard voices, saw a light so bright that the word white could not be used to describe it and then he felt that last memory go, tugging free, and burning away to nothing. He sat still, and empty, he did not speak, he did not think, he did not even breathe, and then at last he gasped for air and it all came rushing in, too much to comprehend, too fragmented to sort from the chaos of the whole, all he could do was weather the storm, all he could remember was the moments of nothingness, the great emptiness of being a blank slate. And then as the memories settled into their new homes in his mind, he felt that he could touch them, hold them, turn them over in his hands like the knick knacks on a person’s shelves. His eyes opened wide and without really knowing why he screamed into the storm.

For the first time in his life, John Searcher knew who he was.

 

The beginning…