The ghost system

6

[Ghost System]

[initialising...]

Rhys blinked, waiting for the baffling words to disappear from his vision. When he saw that the words were not going away he tried to reach out and touch them, only to find that he was grabbing at air. Just when he was about to investigate the weird words, a flood of nurses and doctors rushed towards him.

"Young man, look at me! Are you okay? How many fingers am I holding up?" Nurse Jackie was the first one to his side, she lifted up his chin and was holding up four fingers in front of his face while shining a small light in my eyes.

"Four." Rhys croaked out the number from his dry throat while squinting from the bright light in his eyes.

"How is this possible?" A man in a white doctor's coat next to Rhys looked baffled as he stared down at his life scanner.

The young man had definitely died, and there had never been a case where someone had suddenly regained consciousness after being declared dead by the life scanner. Furthermore, they had not even tried to resuscitate him, yet he had woken up all by himself. This was unheard of in this late century. Doctor Rayburn had studied pre-invasion medicine and learnt about cases of people waking up after being resuscitated, but since the invention of the life scanner which could calculate the possibility of someone being able to resuscitate after death, such cases had gone down to zero. How had he just spontaneously come back to life? However he had done it, Rayburn was certain there would be negative side effects, loss of vision, loss of use of some limbs, there had to be something.

Rayburn wrestled his way to the front of the other doctors and nurses fussing over the patient and began his own checks on the young man.

Rhys was still quite disorientated. He was not expecting to wake up in a hospital with a bunch of people surrounding him, so all the noises and questions that were being thrown at him were giving him a headache.

"What happened?" He asked while pushing back the people around him, trying to recall his memories while trying to wrap his head around the strange words in his vision.

[Ghost system]

[Loading...]

"That's what we want to know." Rhys stiffened at the sound of a colder less caring voice than that of the medical staff. He looked forward to see a huge burly man in black military apparel standing at the foot of his hospital bed. The man in the front looked to be middle aged but with a thick muscled body and a rugged shaven face. Behind him were four younger-looking military agents with the same cold stern faces, all staring at him.

"I need to know everything that happened while you were in the black portal, as well as how you managed to obtain the portal."

As soon as Rhys heard the words 'black portal' his memories came rushing back. From the moment Barrow had approached him after school to the moment he inhaled the core before those boney monsters attacked him, everything was as clear as day to him.

Rhys's attention refocused as the soldiers behind the main burly guy placed their hands on their sheathed weapons. It was a clear threat directed at Rhys, showing him the danger he was in if he decided not to talk.

Even though Rhys was forced to go through the portal in the first place, he was pretty certain that the military could still slap him with the infamous 'treason' charge that they applied so liberally to those who disobeyed them. Pissing off the military was a bad move, especially in sector 5 where they had an authoritarian like control. Thus him holding back information could land him in a lot of unwanted trouble. Rhys just wanted to get back home to gramps as soon as possible so he decided to be as honest as possible.