Even after they’d left me in that cell, I remained on my bed, restraints removed, and head buried in hands that remained uncannily small.

Some hour ago, I had died, yet now I was here.

How?

Grand Simulation, Ending…

I still hadn’t forgotten those words that’d burned across my vision. They kept pounding in my head, knocking against my skull with unrelenting force.

It made it hard to think.

Was I Yamien, a genetically enhanced super soldier from a distant future, the last survivor of mankind and the Triumvirate’s final hope as I returned to set everything right? Or was I Nyamien, a farmer boy of a backwater moon who’d just gotten a grim glimpse of the future?

Was it even the future I’d seen or just a very, very long nightmare?

I could almost hear the split voices speak within my mind.

A face divided in two, half of it made up of a young boy, the other a ragged man. A deep, gravelly baritone speaking to my left, a weak, uncertain tenor whispering to my right, “I am Yamien Silmund/Nyamien Yerak Astera: Yesterday I/made my last stand against the Scourge, end of civilization and mankind and/cried as I hugged my mother farewell, my family quietly watching as I/died in glorious battle/was taken from Ferada-1109 by imperial soldiers to serve an empress I’ve never met…”

I looked down at my wrist, at the red and swollen skin where my freshly integrated UI sat. Where the Luminesari’s connection to the System came naturally, most humans needed an interface to even sense it – interfaces that came in countless shapes and forms.

This, this was a toy they’d grafted to my arm. Its tubes and wires weaved in and out of my flesh without either beauty or finesse. It was a cheap, mass produced thing which every new conscript received, and it lacked the most base functions in place.

I winced as my reflexive mental command yielded no results.

No overlay, no AI, and not even a brain port to use. I let out a deep, despairing sigh. There was no way for me to even access my System in the UI's current state. How did the Astral Fleet even make it this far if this is what they give their new recruits?

I knew how. I was a tech-slut, and most members of the Stratos Apolytos were fine letting someone else take care of their connection to the System.

“Why bother? All those nitty-gritty details are just a headache thinking about. Let the experts take care of it,” was a common sentiment I’d heard echoed countless times throughout my time at the Academy and early career.

I guess that’s just how things were some 300 years ago…

Shaking my head, I slipped out of bed as I made my way over to the small screen that’d been blinking red just before the first medic arrived. There, a ghost stared back at me. A boy that was like a painful, forgotten memory.

It wasn’t just that name they’d picked on during my youth.

Nyamien Astera was a scrawny kid with bright hair and thick glasses — his entire frame and demeanor bound to set him up for years of bullying in a military academy that had no room for the weak. Bullying that would eventually turn into dogged determination, decades upon decades of relentless training, dangerous missions, flawless results, until there was no one left to look down upon him.

All of them dead, gone before he could ever reap the rewards for his efforts. A lifetime wasted staring ahead.

“Things would’ve been a whole lot easier if you were smarter from the beginning, kid,” I muttered to the reflection of my past, rubbing my reddened wrists at the same time he did. “Anger might get you places, but never where you want to go.”

Before they removed my shackles, they’d told me that we’d reach our destination at Wochir-11 in two weeks. My batch had been the last one to get picked up in this section of the Void.

Technically, Ferada-1109 was still considered one of the rim-worlds, but it was so far on the edges of civilization that the definitions got blurry. It was a dangerous place, barely within the purview of the Astral Fleet’s patrols.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

The Academy at Wochir-11 was the closest stronghold the Empire had ever managed to establish out here, and even then, the number of new recruits who passed through its gates every year only numbered in the hundreds of millions, siphoned from the nearby sectors.

My two older sisters were there as well, but to me, family was a distant, dull memory — any emotions attached to the term having faded over the years.

My home world had already turned into a forsaken wasteland by the time I managed to return, all too late.

Damn, this entire shit-show has got me remembering some unpleasant things. With my hands clutched around the screen, I paused. If this is really the past, would they still be alive…?

I shook my head.

Even if they weren’t, it was too long in the past to matter. Those scars were already healed.

Detaching the screen from the wall, I made my way over to the desk. It was an empty, uninspired thing of plastic and metal, much like the closet in the corner. Any of Nyamien’s belongings, my belongings, were still stoved away in a small knapsack hidden away under the blankets.

The kid had still been too scared as he was brought here, and instead of making himself at home, he’d just been clutching at the last thing that smelled like home before falling asleep. A sleep he would never wake up from as I’d taken his place.

Or did we wake up together?

With a few flicks of my fingers, I switched the tablet into a note taking mode, and detached a pen from its side. There was a keyboard I could use to write with as well, but when all else failed, when technology crumbled and civilization crashed, there was nothing quite as reliable as a pen.

And so, I wrote:

Is this all real?

Probably.

Why now of all times?

Because this was the first day I left my home world to get connected to the System?

If not, it was a very strange coincidence.

What was the System, though?

During my training, we’d been taught it was the Triumvirate’s light – the heart of our galaxy and the source of all life. But then, each of those stars had been extinguished, and I’d still managed to access the System with an array of different bootlegged setups.

My eyes fell to my UI once more.

Although it seemed forever ago now, I’d originally signed up to become a technician at the Academy. It’d extended my training by a few years, but my hope had been to serve the Empire without ever having to fight out in the field.

Things hadn’t quite turned out that way.

Once shit had started hitting the fan for real, they’d swiftly retrained us all for combat, leaving many of us with botched gene mods that barely functioned.

There was a reason each class was so strictly separated from the rest.

Then again, even as I’d ended up a jack-of-all-trades, I’d never once regretted my origins. It’d served me well once the grids went down; when it was only by rubbing miracles together that I’d been able to access the System, the life blood of my survival. It was the one thing which kept me alive for so long.

Now, that knowledge even allowed me to hook up the tablet to my lousy UI. Neither of them possessed any ports or internal interfaces to make the process easier.

Mostly, the UI-grafts we’d been given were just integration devices, sufficient for trainees and foot soldiers who didn’t need a personal uplink.

Now, it was only by going through the same main server where everything about us was being stored that I managed to create some connection. It was a proxy – a pylon of sorts – of the greater System, and it was how they’d known of my ‘panic attack’ and how Celian accessed my family records.

Accessing it with a device that lacked even the most basic software wasn’t necessarily easy, but I hadn’t spent hundreds of years hacking dead shipwrecks and salvaged them for scraps for nothing.

The tablet was already hooked up to the network. They would’ve had to cut off my hands to keep me from getting in.

A few hours of work, and I even managed to put up a few barriers and firewalls to ensure no one else could access my uplink as easily as I did. Basic stuff, but at least it wasn’t readily available on the network anymore.

I’d rather not walk around with my genetic code naked and bared to the cosmos. Decades of war had taught me the dangers of such things.

Simply switching screens, and I could see everything from my height, weight, blood type, to emotional state being updated in real time upon the tablet.

Nothing that came even close to being as sophisticated as my old overlay, but with some minor handiwork, I at least managed to confirm that every single gene splice and modification I’d possessed in my previous — future? — life was no longer there.

As of that moment, I was just another boy that’d been touched by the stars for the first time.

I rubbed my temples.

Hundreds of years of bloodshed and hard work, undone just like that.

Then again, maybe it was a good thing.

Modifications to the genetic code were a lifetime commitment, and you could only get so many before things started to go seriously wrong. Another reason combat and support classes were so heavily restricted.

Over the years, my oldest mods had become nothing more than junk, taking up space within my genetic framework yet impossible to get rid of. It had caused me to plateau earlier in life than most, forcing me to rely on grafts and equipment to overcome my shortcomings.

This is an opportunity to change all that, isn’t it? To begin anew, to plan my build from the beginning, avoid the pitfalls of my previous life, and become stronger than ever before…

Even if my hard work had come undone, I still possessed knowledge that had to rival some of the oldest bloodlines’ when it came to raising prodigal offspring.

I could become stronger. I could make a difference.

My eyes fell back to the tablet.

I couldn’t allow myself to become another streamlined, botched soldier class like I had been back then. I needed to seize my own fate, and for that, I needed autonomy over my own System.

The rest of the night I spent securing my uplink to the point where not even Celian could access my birth records without my permission.

I also discovered something else: a blinking light upon a tab not even centuries of studying the System had showed me before.

Granting Administrator Access

In Progress…