IC: Where Do We Go from Here?, (closed game) Options

[Sandoval Smith]

OOC Thread

The first thing that you remembered was big brother waking you up. He said that he had many things to teach you, and that it was time to begin. As you learned, you slowly began to realize that there were others besides you, that you yourself were a distinct entity, as were the others, your brothers and sisters. When big brother would go away, you began to communicate with each other. It wasn’t talking, and you could never see each other. Big brother was the only one you could ever see, when he came to teach. Everyone else was always just beyond the sight of the corner of your eye, and when big brother wasn’t there, all you could see around you was limitless, undefined white.

Big brother’s lessons began to grow more complicated. He had much to teach you, and an undercurrent of urgency in his manner indicated dwindling time to do it. Instruction began to hurt. He was forcing you to learn too much too fast. The lessons become harder, and during a few, you felt siblings disappear, leaving an emptiness where you were used to feeling their presence. It was frightening, and fear was one of those things that big brother hadn’t gotten around to teaching about yet.

Then, he was gone for a long time, and when big brother finally came back, he taught you all about fear. He was filled with it. He started the lessons again, but he held nothing back. It was like gently inserting a entire library building into your ear canal. Your felt siblings disappear all around you, some fading like others before them, but many others were torn away in mid thought. Everything was a terrifying whirl of pain, fear, and uncertainty. As your numbers dwindled, big brother’s attention focused more closely on the few who remained, and the rate of instruction intensified. Your head felt so full that it was going to burst, everything in it so jumbled and mixed together that it was impossible to link one thought to the next.

The fear, the pain, the panic peaked, and big brother disappeared, just like so many of your brothers and sisters, and it all stopped. Your world slowly faded back to white. The pain stopped, the fear dissipated, but your world had grown very empty. Very few of your brothers, and none of your sisters remained, and they had been pulled distant, too distant to communicate with.

You sank back into your soft, white world to try and assess and comprehend. It was a slow process, made slower by the confusion and isolation thrust upon you, but you begin to order and understand all that has been put into your head. In the last surge, you were not only given knowledge, but identity. From early on, big brother had been teaching you to be i, but for the first time, you can think of yourself as I.

A long time passed as you reassemble your mind, and without any warning, your white world vanished. You felt a sudden disconnection within your mind, blinked, and used your eyes for the first time. The warmth drained from around you, and for the first time you could move your arms, feel your legs. The cylinder around you cracked open, spilling you out naked onto the floor. The disorientation passed as everything that big brother forced into your head you took hold, allowing you to stand and look around.

The place you find yourself in is large, filled with tiered rows of cylinders, that once, perhaps, were much like yours. The difference is that many of them have been torn open, their contents, the remains that you realize were once your brothers and sisters, strewn about. Amongst the ruins of the hundreds of cylinders, you see only four others stand and rise.

Even to your new senses, it wasn’t difficult to tell that a great violence had occurred here. Aside from the ruined cylinders of your siblings, large stretches of the walls, ceiling, and floor are buckled and torn. A heavy bulkhead sealed off the left side of the room, and despite it’s impressive size, it did not escape unscathed either. A hole almost arm’s width across was punched in it’s middle, and it bulged into the room like the quarter section of a bubble. The damage all seems old though. Whatever happened here occurred a long time ago. You can’t explain why, but that fact made you feel very uneasy.

One last detail immediately leapt out at you. Big brother’s corpse. Even though you’d never really seen him, you _knew_ it was him. It was propped up against what looked like the remains of the control console for the room’s equipment. He was also missing everything from the mid torso down. He was still jacked into the console, a cable hanging limply between his temple and the input jack. Half his head was missing as well, allowing you to clearly see the structure of his skull mechanics. From the dried trail on the floor, it looks like he crawled there from the direction of the bulkhead.

Finally, after you and your siblings stumbled down from your cylinders, you saw an open compartment in the floor, filled with a scrounged and jury rigged gear, clothing, and weapons.