Numbskull

Day 5 Part 1

There was snow. Pure, beautiful and cold.

My legs ached as I ran.

They're after me, I thought as gunshots rang throughout the air.

I had to keep running.

A figurative and literal shot in the back confirmed the betrayal.

And I jumped. A fall on the back that knocked the wind out of me.

My eyes flew open as I shuddered, letting out a huge breath.

I wasn't dead. My previous meal threatened to come out of my mouth. I tried to compose myself to the best of my abilities but was almost sure that if there was someone beside me, they would hear the traitorous frenzied thump of my heart.

My breathing was amplified, each intake of air louder than the other. It was the perfect place for hallucinations to haunt me.

This was my room. A table on the corner, my bed beneath me. I was not in 1755 falling down a cliff... but it just felt so real. Looking around, I registered the usual potted plants, notebooks and more stationery arranged neatly in a corner. Not a single trace of snow to be found.

Dismissing the nightmare to be trauma inflicted by using the Animus to view memories, I got up to a seated position on my bed. Searing pain soon shot through my temple. I instinctively put a hand up to ease the pain even though I knew that it would not help with the pain, just the comfort of knowing I can still feel myself was enough.

Why was this happening to me?

***

Men o' War

Clutching the cold brew with both hands, I took a sip but my eyes darting around the place made it look like a sip stolen under the eye of my boss. It made the experience better, the illusion of breaking the rules.

I had this teammate who improved on the Helix system with me back in late 2012. Her name was Diana and she always never got why I drank coffee all the time, commenting "You could drink tea too." Which I replied with an absolute "No." Sadly, she left Abstergo early this year to pursue her other interests and could not see the progress we made with the Helix programs after she left.

I know how I usually mull over the littlest of things, make up questions that constantly make my own head spin. The only way I can steer my thoughts away from that was to distract myself. It usually doesn't work for very long but it's better than thinking about it all day and losing track of what I am doing. Adéwalé... No, no stop thinking about why he was there and how Shay could have killed him there. That traitor who knew that the Piece of Eden would cause the destruction of Lisbon.

Stop. Stop thinking about that, brain.

It had gotten worse since I had worked on the Helix. It might have been something like the Bleeding Effect — a very disturbing similarity at that — causing my mental train to go off its rails often. I smacked my palm on my forehead thrice before going back into the other half of the memory sequence.

Bravado

After I restored other servers and downloaded the files that came with it back into my communicator, I sat back in front of my stack of magazines on my workstation. I do not know how it exactly came to me but after some thinking I have forgotten, the conclusion was clear; Crazy Berg protects us from the Assassins. Who knew that they were hiding under the skin of the world like parasites?

But it only fell together like pieces of the puzzle that I have lost. Getting an overall picture, the end conclusion and not a single detail or piece of information that would remind me of the logic I used to get there.