Veridis Quo

Chapter 27 - Oddity Amongst

Today, like thousands of days before and many more after, was an ordinary day.

The sun was shining, the hot bastard. The birds weren't chirping because they were sapient and that was an intimate act. The clouds were drifting and I was doing what I do best on slow weekends; streaming.

Yup, just like any other day...

Why did that come off like that?

There wasn't anything inherently wrong with being normal. Although it was a flimsy term, it was nothing absurd. I was like any other student, a bar above average if the description was generous. The bonus points I possessed for double-clubing covered the accursed tongue of the sea so there were no exploits on that frontier, and...

In the rare moments I come across the museum, I like to leisurely stroll through.

I'd like to take a step back and restart.

Who would have thought that I would die? Well, I wasn't biologically dead, or brain-dead, though the former encompassed the latter, a broader vagueness. One cannot argue with biology, the facts, the truth that always were and will be.

Just like how one couldn't deny the end of the human race.

Yeah, it's over.

It's been over since the last time I saw another human face, belonging to an egg-head, no less. And worse was my inability to recall his features. But it didn't impact me much, a city-sized meteor to Jupiter.

My parents did.

I could not, for the life of me, remember their faces.

I'd cried a lot back then.

Every night, actually.

I simply did not remember. There wasn't more to it. I knew their skin was similar to mine, again, biology doesn't lie. I knew I had some of my father's traits and less from my mother. I knew for certain I was made of them and that I would always be their son.

I just couldn't recall anything distinguishable.

The color of their hair, the hue of their eyes, their heights, whether my father had a beer belly or was built like a strip of beef jerky and many more details one should be capable of answering given the opportunity.

It was as if they... never existed.

But they did.

They did.

Yet, my life in the Old World was as clear as still water in the basement of an abandoned hospital, flooded over the years without evaporation. The brain-eating amoeba had other amoeba that ate their brains! Mitochondria, their powerhouse, whatever it was called since they weren't exactly the same as human cells.

Or any other cells for that matter.

They are called animal cells nowadays.

And they sure were diverse.

From the moment I reawakened into their world, my fate was sealed. In those days, my little dark age, I could taste the memory. I could see them, I did see them! A bad dream, any moment I would free myself and open my eyes to my old bed, in my old room, come down the steps to my old kitchen and eat an old breakfast my mom made before skedaddling off to my old high school.

It never happened.

I never escaped the matrix because there was no matrix.

There was no magical solution that would reverse the march of time.

That would bring them back.

Or me to them.

Well, there was a way, but there was no proof it would work and it was an irreversible advancement. Kind of life taking a loan from a bank, a deadly trap to those who come unprepared, though it doesn't mean a muzzled dog can't bite.