The Kiss that Tore the World Apart (Permanently On Hold)

Chapter 8

Dedicated to ima_emo_unicorn, 'cause she knows what's coming.

Lyna kept appearing in his dreams.

In some dreams he would re-live her disappearance, in others she would accuse him of killing her. "I don't know how I did it in the first place!" One dream in particular stood out, because there was another girl in it, one John didn't recognize.

"Why did you do it John?" she would ask. "Why did you leave me behind?"

"I didn't know you wanted to come in the first place!" He would shout to her receeding figure. "Come ba-!"

He woke up and got a face full of bush. What the heck was that? He crawled out from underneath the branches and dusted of his clothes the best he could. I've never seen that girl before. So how come I knew her in the dream? While he was thankful for the distraction from Lyna's death, he was also disturbed by the strange dream that had woken him up. 

He ate some of the food in his backpack while he studied the maps he had made at the library. I'm somewhere along this streach of road here, in the forest. This forest goes on for quite a few miles, and the research facility is over here, to the northeast of where I think I am now. And it looks like there's a road to it too. So if I follow this road I was on yesterday and take this one, then... He looked at his watch. ...if it's nine now, I think I can hike there before it gets dark. 

He put the maps back in his backpack then stood up to get his bearings. He set off in the direction of the road, but it took him a little while to find it since the landscape looked different in the sunlight. When he finally got back he resumed his trek. Still wary of his possible celebrity only a day after he had gone missing, he would hide in the woods whenever he heard vehicles approaching. Around lunchtime, he arrived at the fork in the road that would take him to the facility. He hadn't made as much progress as he had hoped due to his (well deserved) paranoia. He stopped to check his maps again, and determining that he was on the right course, he set off.

He finally got a glimps of Tempic Labs at nightfall, where he got a nasty shock. There was a guard at the front gate. Why is there a guard at an abandoned facility? That doesn't make sense. Was the research here that top secret that even the old buildings need to be guarded? In any case, I'll have to find a different way in. It looks like they're only guarding the road. Probably to turn back any cars that come this way if they aren't supposed to be here. But they probably aren't expecting many people to actually TRY to get in. I might still have a chance. He slipped into the woods and started to circle around to another side of the facility. This was made difficult by the fact that the sun had just gone down, and the lab's property appeared to be rather large. What am I thinking? I'm insane! I'm still considering getting in there when I know that it might not be as abandoned as the records show. Something about this is really fishy.  But another part of John had a different idea. But if there are still people here isn't it even MORE likely that I'll find some answers? I just have to find a way in...

Luckily for John, the rear of the compound wasn't guarded like the front. In fact, it looked like no-one every came to the back, otherwise they would have noticed several holes in the fence from severe rusting. John had to bend some of the fence a little to widen one of the hole so he could slip through. 

Once inside, he hurried over to the nearest building and found the door unlocked. They really must not care about security out here. Or they've never needed it before... He discontinued his train of though as he found himself in a lit hallway. Okay, this place is definitely not abandoned. I wonder what they do here, or did, that they need people to think it's abandoned? This still makes no sense. He heard footsteps coming around a corner, and voices. John ducked dashed over to the nearest door, which was also unlocked, and ducked inside, closing it just before a pair of guards rounded the corner. He could make out their voices as the walked past, but wasn't particularly interested in their conversation. 

"Easiest patrol I've ever had. Nobody ever comes out to this building."

"Yeah, tell me about it. They only use it forstorage now. I heard that this used to be one of the lab buildings, though."

The voices faded after that, so John risked turning on a light switch to see where he was. There was a projector and screen in the room, along with a couple boxes marked "City Builder's Records." This discovery surprised John so much that he forgot about finding out about the holes. In History, they said that the city builders didn't leave any records of themselves at all, only the blueprints for more cities and some technology. How do they have records of them here? They came from another planet for crying out loud! When he pulled off the lid off a box, he found it contained a number of data disks. All of the disks were in order by dates. 2085? That was almost 300 years ago! And that's around the time the city builders would have launched the ships to colonize New Earth, by historians' calculations based on the technology in the old starships, anyway. There's no way these can be real...

He took the disk out of it's sleeve and stuck it into the projector. He was rewarded with a view of many starships taking off from what he could only assume was the original Earth. He popped the disk back out. Either that was a reneactment or something or...I don't know what. I wonder what's the earliest date they have here? Looks like it's 2068. 17 years before the launch. Maybe that was the start of the planing or something? He put this disk into the projector. A young man in a small office showed up on the screen, hunched over a digital drawing pad, furiously sketching on the digital surface.

-----------------------------------------

"Monitoring Station to Patrol 1, there is an intruder in your building!"

"What! Who the hell would break in here?"

"From the looks of it some teenager. He's in room 106."

"We're on our way. Is he armed?"

"It doesn't look like it. Just take him up to the main building and find someone to deal with him."

------------------------------------------

Someone must have walked into the man's office, because he abruptly lifted up his head. John, recognising the face on the screen, fell on the floor in shock, knocking over the projector in his wake. That is not possible. 

The guards John had heard earlier reached the projector room in time to see him fall on his butt. He was too much in shock to do anything but be handcuffed and draged away. The only thing he registered at all, albiet vaguely was one of the guards saying, "Hey aren't you that kid who was on the news the other day?"