Assassin's Creed: Outlaw - Book One

Into The Animus

After my mother died I lived with the Grant family. They were kind to me, they bought me a bicycle. Some kid at the local comprehensive showed me how to jam playing cards in the spokes. They made a clacking noise when you cycled along. That was the first sound that I heard when I entered the compact animus.

It wasn't exactly the same. There was a weird phasing effect that accompanied the noise. Telling me that the sound was subject to distortion of some kind. Everything about me was spinning. Producing the sensation like being inside those plastic balls people roll down hills in. I never got that... zorbing I think it's called.

Anyway the sensation wasn't just some kind of random dizziness it had cycles. It felt as if my whole body was being lifted up. There would be a brief moment of nauseating weightlessness. Then my stomach would drop into free fall. My descent would slow until I had almost stopped. Then there would be the fraction of a second where I thought I might throw up and then it would resume.

Everything around me was grey. There was a smell in my nostrils, that was the strongest thing. An odour like fresh earth with something not so fresh buried underneath. Running constantly was the noise.

The whole thing lasted maybe four or five minutes. Then I heard the operator's voices break into the simulation.

"Sam, we're going to bring you out," Helen, earnest tone, gentle voice; she scared the hell out of me.

"Don't panic about this," said a second, male, voice, Paul. "I'm a bit light on the old medical training. Even so, these readings were getting too near the red sections for my liking. Better be safe than sorry."

Then it felt like I landed. Exactly that feeling you get sometimes when you're just dropping off. You jerk out of dreamy weightlessness back into uneasy consciousness.

I had no idea whether that was normal upon leaving an animus session, it was my first ever time.

"Damn it, Paul," Helen was saying. "That was a disaster, we recorded nothing, he experienced nothing."

"Patience, Hells Bells," Paul replied, his voice strained. I opened my eyes to look at the ceiling of the studio apartment in London that my new friends called the 'safe house'. I hoped that was a designation of function and not just an expression of hope. When we'd left Birmingham yesterday evening I nearly didn't make it out alive.

"Patience?" Helen said. "This place won't stay dark for long. The Templars have eyes everywhere. There's some reason they decided to field test Galt's new toys by trying to kill Sam. We need to find out what that reason is."

"And we will," Paul said. "But pushing this rig too hard right out of the box won't do it."

"The logs of Ezio Auditore's experience in Constantinople said he could touch the disc. That might tell us something," Helen said.

"It will tell him as much as it told Goran," Paul replied. "That is, nothing at all helpful."

"Maybe not," Helen said. "Remember, Sam's a direct descendant of Yughi Gal. A disc has never been held by a direct descendant in any known account. It's possible there's more information that he could access..."

"Sure," I said, my jaw felt loose and the word slurred out of my mouth. I imagined it falling onto the floor in a loose heap of word mush. "I can hold a disc, let's see how the magic works."

"It would take to long to take it out of the rig compared to, uh, that," Paul replied. He hadn't taken his eyes off his laptop once since I'd looked over. Now he looked over at me. "Try again," he said.

"You'd better not be winding me up," Helen said. "We can't afford to waste time."

"I used a tool we got from Abstergo Entertainment's cloud support division," Paul said. "It's a go-between codec that allows non-descendants to parse animus flow. It provides a buffer between the genetic information stream in the core and the specific user. It works super fast when the receiving subject is an actual descendant."

"It better," Helen said. "You heard him, Sam, we'd better get on."

"Don't I even have time for a glass of water?" I asked her.

She sighed and rolled her eyes but she fetched me a small tumbler of water from the kitchen.

"There," she said. "Now, can we try again."

I swallowed the water, which relieved the dryness in my mouth for about ten seconds. Then I lay back, closed my eyes. I waited for the sound of clacking, the rolling sensation, the grey abyss and the smell of earth. They came, quickly, just as quickly they wheeled and turned. The pitch of the clacking rose to swoop upwards and then settled into a new rhythm. The sound of hooves beating the earth. Underneath the gentle click-clack rhythm of a cartwheel rolling along the ground. The smell sharpened and I felt cold and wet surround me as if my clothes had been doused in water.

The up and down sensation from before resolved into the gentle bounce of the cart floor on the road. I was someone else. I was somewhere else. I opened my eyes, although they weren't my eyes. I became confused when I couldn't see anything.

There were specks of daylight coming through whatever it was I was buried in. The smell of earth was coming off this stuff. Long stalks of dried vegetable matter surrounded me. Spokes of it poked into my clothes. It was tightly packed, inspiring a feeling of claustrophobia before I identified it.

I was hiding in a haystack, mounted on the back of a cart, riding along a road. The weird sensation of panic was replaced, for a moment, by a sense of wonder. I marvelled at the realistic nature of my surroundings. Then I sensed the cart beginning to slow and I wondered what would happen next.

The feeling of synchronisation with your ancestor is like a wave. It rises up from somewhere deep inside yourself. Before it consumes you utterly you feel a connection between you and one of your forefathers, a connection that is impossible to describe.

All I know is that one second I was Sam Cage, descendent of Yughi Gal, and the next moment... I had lost all sense of that separation.