Stupid, Stupid, Stupid! These were Adam’s first thoughts as he came to lying on a table that seemed to be moving. As he tried to move he realized that he was shackled at the wrist and ankle, and he also had a collar around his neck.
“I wouldn’t try anything if he were you,” a guard in a simple black shirt and black slacks said.
Adam stopped struggling and looked around then closed his eyes. He was in a modified truck that was moving along at a pretty good speed. Also, he could tell that they were on a gravel road. Adam pulled up his nanite interface and checked the compass and realized they were moving in an easterly direction.
The man poked Adam until he opened his eyes and looked at him as he said, “Don’t get any ideas. The collar around your neck suppresses any magical abilities and your nanites should be offline until they’re rebooted remotely.”
“Who will reboot them?” Adam asked.
“That is all I’m permitted to say. Just lay back and enjoy the ride, we’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”
Adam didn’t bother to respond. He was obviously a military type and there was a camera looking down on him. Besides he already knew one thing he’d stated was false, his nanites were up and running. Adam also didn’t bother drawing on his mana as he, or that camera might be able to detect it. Instead, he closed his eyes and pulled up his nanite menu to issue a system history check for the nanites to find out what had happened. Prompts started scrolling through his vision.
Your Manifestation has died
Death caused by a triangulated electrical attack. Amplification caused localized EMP secondary effect. – Nanites unaffected.
Sedatives neutralized.
Body Repair started. Mission directives limiting environmental interaction reduce efficiency. Estimate 30 minutes to 100% body repair.
100% likelihood attack was meant to kill and permanently disable normal nanites.
Brain placed into a coma until repairs completed.
Host body at 100%, Induced Coma lifted
Host waking up.
Adam scrolled through the prompts until he found the following.
Hostile nanites are trying to infiltrate host body. Permit Yes or No?
Adam chose “No” and through his nanites felt for the entry point. The collar around his neck seemed to be where they were trying to invade him. Adam could allow that but realized that without his full mental prowess, he might have issues. Better to keep them out of his body for now. He needed to know how pervasive the nanites were here and allowed the nanites across the surface of his body to inspect all adjacent molecules and atoms and then return.
As he suspected the air, table, restraints, and collar were flooded with nanites that resembled the nanites that he’d released when he’d first started out. If he was comparing them to the generations of nanites that he’d created these nanites were small enough to fit into individual atoms but still hundreds of times bigger than his own. It was still very doubtful they could even detect his. Thinking back, he realized that if someone or something had a similar mentality to his at the same time in development, mentally, with his current mental faculties, he was going to be far outclassed.
Adam set up some contingencies with the nanites that had manifested with him in this Cosmos and decided to nap while he could. There was no point in trying to access any phones or satellite uplinks until he knew what was going on. he kept his eyes closed and utilized the compass function of his nanites to follow the path the vehicle was taking.
Estimating that it had taken them at least 15 to 20 minutes to load him into this truck. All he knew for certain was that 33 minutes had passed since the drones had released their electrical attack. A minute ago, we’d turned left and his internal compass informed him that we were heading east. If memory served, and it always did, they were on Highway 92 which meant they’d hit the west side of Wahoo Nebraska, and probably take a left to follow 77 until they veered back to the east and turned into highway 275 or West Center Road. From there, if they were taking him to Offutt Air Force Base (AFB) there were a couple of routes they could take. Determining the exact path would be problematic without allowing his nanites to get him an outside view of where the vehicle was going. Adam considered it but stopped himself. He didn’t want to give away any possible advantages he had at this point.
That got him thinking. He was in another version of his original Universe. The drone had used the word “Citizen” to describe him which normally indicated some form of a militaristic governmental system. Yet, the map function had been a perfect match for how this area was set up in his world. Adam guessed if he was going to keep thinking of his original world as “his world” then he needed to come up with a way to categorize the other version of Earth that were similar.
His World was the Cosmos or Universe where he first found the ring made by Apolyn. That was also the same Cosmos/Universe he returned to that had been locked out. Cosmos 2 would be the one that held the copy of his original Universe as well as his original place of power, the city of Venoran and the Dungeon of Divine Elements he’d come across, the Cosmos he’d saved. Not that it mattered but he could end up there again someday. Cosmos 3 would have been after the reset and contained the Syndicate. Or were Cosmos 2 and 3 the same Cosmos that had changed? The fourth Cosmos he’d visited was the last one he’d just left that had the Vrax in it and contained his second Soul Projection or Birth.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
While he had time to think, he considered everything he’d learned to this point. When he was connected to all his nanites his intelligence and processing power were magnified astronomically. Did this in some way reduce his ability to feel emotions or to let his emotions guide him? As he reviewed some of the crazy things he’d been through he realized that the choices he’d made had fallen away from the lessons that the Goddess Serena had been trying to convey to him. Had he become numb to the feelings of others or oblivious to them? Did knowing that there were souls make those he killed any less important because he knew it wasn’t a permanent death? Part of him quickly answered yes. Another part of him considered the question and felt for an answer. If he was being honest with himself then yes, he was becoming insensitive to others, but only when they crossed him.
The next question he asked himself was Are you going to change? To which he answered no. He’d be as fair as he could but if someone crossed him, all bets were off and if he had to, he’d end them. Which brought his thoughts to his current predicament. This world seemed to be at about the state he’d taken his original Earth to when he’d brought the successes of Portal Inc. to light for everyone. The Earth he was currently on seemed to be following a similar path if mechanical nanites were infesting everything around him.
A helicopter flying low above them brought him out of his thoughts and he realized that we were still on the west side of Omaha. They must be heading to the airfield in Menard instead of going to the Air Force Base which was on the southeast side of the metropolis in the Bellevue suburb. The truck took a few more turns and then came to a stop. The back door opened and the table he was on hovered up and out of the truck under its own power. Was he Han Solo after being frozen in carbonite? Adam couldn’t help himself; he giggled a little.
“So, this is funny to you, tough guy?” the guard that had accompanied him asked belligerently.
“Sorry,” he said with mirth in his voice. “I was just thinking that I must look like Han Solo being carted through Cloud City.”
The guards thought for a second before responding with a smile, “I guess you do at that, though where you’re going, Han had it easier,” he said as he placed a gag over Adam’s mouth.
Immediately he set his nanites to infiltrate the gag. If he wanted to talk, he would damn well talk. For now, though he laid back and watched his surrounding through the nanites all throughout his body. Sure enough, they were at the Millard Airfield, it wasn’t really an airport as it catered to small aircraft. The guard led his hovering body between two open hanger doors that closed behind him as lights came on. The hanger was empty except for a triangular arch that could easily fit a semi-truck through it. The base took up almost the whole side of the hanger. As he watched the portal activated and four guards came through. The guard that had accompanied him turned, walked to a small access door in the hanger door, and went back out onto the airfield. The door clanged behind him, and the four guards took up positions above his head, one on each side and one at his feet. They led him toward the portal, and they passed through.
They moved into a receiving area that had noticeably lower gravity than Earth or the Moon. Each of the guards placed a hand on the table he was on, and he realized that the table was guiding their movement as they held on. Their antigravity technology was coming along nicely then. Adam was guided toward a large, actuated door that rose off the floor and closed once we passed under it. Adam found himself in an observation room. The table came to rest on a stand in the center of the room. The guards did something to lock it in place then all of them exited through a glass door on the opposite side of the room as he lay there. They stood there in an obvious breech set up waiting for orders to move back into his room. You’d think someone had some trust issues.
Adam looked around for a few more moments and when he realized nothing else was happening, he closed his eyes, set his nanites to wake him if his circumstances changed, and went to sleep. He didn’t dream, He just closed his eyes, and when he checked his internal clock almost 4 hours had passed when his nanites woke him up as a speaker in the room crackled just before a very familiar voice asked, “Johnathan Bennard?”
“That’s me?” Adam said as the gage disintegrated in his mouth. He also verified that guards were still in the adjacent room to him. There was another door into that waiting room and only one of the guards was familiar, so he was betting they’d switched out people while he’d been sleeping.
A portal appeared and a man, no, another copy of him, stepped through on his left side as he leaned over and said conspiratorially, “Actually, that’s me,” his doppelganger said.
“I was wondering when I was going to run into you,” Adam said.
“You were wondering when you’d run into me?” Johnathan asked seemingly nonplussed by the fact that Adam was no longer gagged.
“So, are you going with the Evil Overlord, Sith Master, or Classic Hitler-style bad guy,” Adam asked.
What are you rambling on about? Johnathan asked.
“Well, either my evil twin, though technically you’d be my ‘real’ self’s evil twin.”
“I am not your evil twin and I have all the power here; you should show more respect,” Johnathan said as he cut off Adam’s quip.
“I’m sure you know I’m going to say this but I’m going to say it anyway, Respect must be earned,” Adam said with a smile.
“You insolent cur,” Jonathan said as he struck Adam’s face, which is what he’d been hoping for. Adam allowed the area he’d slapped to infect Jonathan’s hand and had them start multiplying.
“Very sneaky,” he said. “Trying to infiltrate me with something I can’t even detect, not bad. I must give credit where it is due. Seeing myself so pathetic and then egging me on until I struck you so that you could try to infiltrate me with something. I wonder what it is. My scanners can’t even detect them though I know they’re multiplying because my mass is decreasing. They must be converting parts of myself, the air, and maybe even the particles that are passing through us. Are they nanites? Are they smaller than mine? Impossible! Yet here I am gaining mass in an almost vacuum. Alternate me from another Universe or Dimension? Possible, but what are the odds there would be another me with access to nanites or nanites that were just as small or smaller than the ones I’ve”
Adam listened to Johnathan mumble and ramble to himself as he continued rambling until his voice died off and then brought his attention back to him as he said, “Can’t have that happening, “
“I wouldn’t do that if he were you?”
“But you’re not me,” Johnathan said as his fingers came together and he snapped them.
***
Adam found himself coming to groggily in his soul space in the place between places. Wait? How am he only level 1?. Adam pulled up his information and realized that he was him, with the astronomically high stats and levels, not level 1. He had just lived through the memories of a manifestation that returned to his soul. As his mental faculties returned he realized that by setting the criteria he had he had created an equal, almost infinite number of soul shards across all the known Cosmos and that command had been followed exactly. His soul had just been hanging out while his manifestations went to work. Speaking of which, how had he died? Before he could seek out an answer to that question prompts started filling his vision.
2 Manifestations have Returned.
3 Manifestations have Returned.
4 Manifestations have Returned.
….