Dome of Souls (Book 2 of 2, after Story Less Told)

Ch18: Beginning and Ending

Izzy and Greg sat in a holding cell. He just finished checking for cameras as Greg wondered if Rika got the Shiva stealth systems online or not.

"I swear Greg, it's like sometimes you're a different person, and sometimes you're that same asshole I knew. For a guy who spent the better part of human technological development asleep, you seem to have caught up a bit too fast."

"I'm adaptable." he smirked.

"Nobody's that adaptable. I remember you going under the ice. You were a science exhibit in a jar for 200 years. When you went in, humans didn't even have gasoline engines yet, and when you woke, there were flying drones delivering pizzas. It took you the blink of an eye to memorize 200 years that you missed and a few years after you were thawed, you were operating computer software, designing industrial equipment and functioning on social media. How the hell did you instantly absorb 2 centuries of human history like you were catching up on a TV series mid-first season with an all night binge?" she asked.

"You want the confession?" he asked. "You wanna know why my memory is so broken and why I seem to have missed the past and somehow still experienced it?"

"Absolutely, because it makes no sense otherwise and I don't believe your bullshit anymore about how quickly you adapt." Izzy barked.

"What if I told you that this entire empire wasn't the first round?"

"I'd say you were about to feed me another line."

"You don't find it suspicious that the Osirian Empire managed to take out the human planetary defenses in one perfectly orchestrated move, when they never even visited Earth before?" he smirked.

"They had thousands of years to study Earth while the fleet arrived. They planned it for millennia, watching humanity from afar. They had a handful of halfbreeds like me back then studying humanity."

"Right...never met a human, but with just my crude samples they knew human DNA enough to clone them, replicate bodies and understand their very nature. Even the humans don't really buy that nonsense. This is, at the very least, round 2, The first attempt wasn't as clean. The first universe the Osirians conquered had its own Greg. He lived for the same millennia I did, foregoing the freezing process. When they arrived, Greg 1 had already damaged the global history, brought the Fae to modern day and practically waged war on humans, and Osirians weren't welcomed. They spent so much time trying to fight him...that other me, that they couldn't defend against humanity and the world was lost. 1200 Osirians lost the planet and put that Greg on ice after it was too late. They used him as a battery to punch a hole through to another universe, the one we're standing in. They restarted the Greg project...made me, just like before, but with some safety measures. Better implants. This time they fooled me, got me to willingly freeze myself before humanity reached technological levels, and if it wasn't for some assistance in my family, I'd still be there beside old Greg 1, powering the empire. We don't know how many universes there are or how many times they tried it over until they got it right, but at least twice they ended up with me, and both times they couldn't figure out how to kill me or control me. When I came out to a world of emails and face-identification phone apps, I was lost and overwhelmed. The Osirian piloting technology we all know and love is designed to allow several partitions of consciousness and let one entity like you or Christophe be multiple you's at once. I thought I could adapt to that, and so did a few of my supporters. The benefit of living forever as a god, you get followers that support you even when you're frozen and left out of the party. I decided the only way I could adapt was to go back and merge both Greg's memory. And it worked for the most part. That day, 15,000 years of 2 memories were overlapped. The result wasn't as seamless as expected. We both remember some things and seem to be missing others." he shrugged.