The Illusion of CTRL

One Of The Boys

Uzi tried to brace herself when she saw the bright light bleeding in from around the edges of the next door she found, but not even testing her own flashbangs prepared her for the level of lumens that assaulted her when she opened it. It hit like a physical force and caused her to stumble forward through the threshold, against all logic. Unable to see, Uzi could've been forgiven for throwing herself to the ground on instinct as an ungodly roar came from overhead.

A second later, her vision cleared and she looked up to see two fighter jets streaking away at full afterburner.

"Goddamn Jet Jockies!" an indignant yell brought Uzi's optics down from the amazingly blue sky to look at a bunch of human men some ten yards away from her.

At least, she thought they were human men; all she actually saw were three-dimensional shadows. Human silhouettes with white ovals for eyes and no defining traits, not unlike how Nyx appeared in her own mind.

"What?!" one of the men yelled.

"Tch, 'your hearing loss is not service-related'," another man said mockingly before he went back to jogging. The other dozen shadows quickly followed, all grumbling a variety of curses.

Uzi blinked as the group of humans literally faded out of existence, then she took in the rest of her surroundings. Loads of tents and prefab units, rows of combat vehicles and parked helicopters, and every few seconds more shadowy figures would jog or walk by. She was on a military base.

Uzi briefly wondered if something had gone wrong when she saw no sign of N, until she noticed that the roaming humans only appeared as they passed by the large tent directly ahead of her. He had to be in there, unable to see the humans, hence them having no detail, but still aware of them through sound. Thus, they were part of the construct.

"So is my situational awareness that bad, or is his just that good?" the alt girl mumbled as she walked up to the tent. On the rare occasions she looked at her own memories, she had never seen anything outside of her immediate vicinity.

She peeked into the tent, her head going right through the material.

"Permission to speak freely?" a tired-looking black man with graying hair asked with a deep, gravely rasp.

"Denied," sighed the same man who had been standing next to the General in the last memory.

"What the hell are we supposed to do with that?" the black man ignored the denial and directed a disdainful knife-hand towards his superior officer's right.

Where N was standing ramrod straight, so high-strung that the just the act of someone pointing made him visibly jump.

The officer, an Army Major named "Kennedy" now that she was actually paying attention to his uniform, rolled his eyes at the blatant insubordination, but made no move to reprimand the soldier.

Seeing that the door wasn't being shut, a younger man with tanned skin and a mop of chin-length black hair barged in as well.

"It's hard enough to be incognito in these parts even when you kinda, sorta, almost look like a local. If you got us dragging a combat clanker around, all that 'hidden hand' shit goes right out the window."

Major Kennedy's gaze immediately hardened and snapped to the Hispanic man.

"That ship sailed a while ago, didn't it, Click?"

The younger man held his gaze for all of three seconds before looking away.

"There it is," the second of the two white guys in the tent drawled. "One mission goes tits-up and now we got us a mechanical babysitter."