"So, now that you have that body, take a seat, we're going to be here a while. Well, relatively speaking anyways. It's time you learned about what Wonderland actually is, about what we actually are, and it's a doozy." The other Amelia, or Gaia, she would call her, said as Amelia managed to form a body by mentally picturing herself. It was exhausting mentally, but eventually, her current self materialized in this space, and following Gaia's advice, she took a seat, hazarding another glance around the mind room, at least that's what she was calling it. This whole mental scape thing was..weird.

"You, Amelia, are the chosen one! Nah not really, this isn't a sci-fi opera after all, haha. But seriously, you are unique. See, I don't know who Director 0 really is, no one's actually seen him, but he's a serious piece of work. I wasn't talking about just my own modifications to our genetics when I spoke of the splicings earlier, they're child's play compared to what he did to us. I'm not even sure how or when but I'm fairly certain it was before we were born. Our intelligence isn't just natural, it was enhanced, to like, an insane degree. Our personality too, don't worry, I was able to introduce a retrovirus to stop their gene conditioning on that front, it was before we had nanites after all. But whoever this guy is, he's thinking a thousand moves ahead, I wouldn't be surprised if your little meeting with him was also planned, it fits his m.o. Never making direct contact, always through proxies. Anywho, so this 0 guy genetically modified us to be hyper-intelligent, then manipulated us to get taken into BlackRock. We were supposed to be his dopey little researcher, churning out WMDs like candy, but I'm pretty sure you already realized we'd take exception to that. So when I started getting suspicious, around the second week in, I did a little digging. What I found made no sense. See, BlackRock was on the surface a military op, which makes sense given their weapons research, right? But what didn't make sense was that they were only interested in weapons that would be devastating on a "humanity would never survive" scale. Everything from enhanced retroviral bioweapons, global chemical dispersal systems, forced tech singularities, yadda yadda you get the picture. But they never actually reported these weapons to the U.S.U.N." As Gaia spoke, holopads of numerous weapons systems flitted in and out of existence between the two of them, and somehow, they were becoming more and more familiar to Amelia, as if she herself remembered them, which was disconcerting, to say the least.

----

Kixix landed on the planet that was once the Ava homeworld with trepidation, the strange architecture of the owl-like species had been built more for those who fly in the low gravity rather than those who walked, but interestingly, he did see multiple footpaths, mostly corroded with time away, and closer inspection revealed a most certainly non-avan sapient skeleton. In fact, Kixix couldn't place the species of the skeleton at all, and sending pictures to Kaxus, his brother the doctor, back on his ship confirmed it was an unknown species. It was unusual for two species to develop sapience on a planet at a time, at least two not closely related, but when a third, and a fourth showed up as well, he had to conclude that the Ava were once part of a multi-species galactic empire, something that flew in the face of his common sense and yet...

'And yet the only species that would have been around at that time and space-fairing, are the Kaveer, the Axon, and the Give'Matar.'

He finished his thought with a shudder, wondering, or hoping, that he was wrong. If this was the case, then it meant the three oldest races in the galaxy were covering something up on a scale so large that even the council didn't know of it. There was no telling what part of their histories had been tampered with, or lost entirely if the Axon, Give'matar, and Kaveer were working together. But they were at war with the Kaveer, it didn't make sense, none of this did. He kicked a rock in frustration as he tried to piece together exactly what was going on here. A dead galactic civilization that no one had heard about, disappearing without a trace, and one of its species showing up thousands of years later, just to disappear again? Remains of a battle fought who knows how long ago in space above, still active booby traps, and yet no one has reported this? Something wasn't right here...

"Kixix, are you there?" A communication from his brother interrupted him and he stopped, pulling out the device with an annoyed click as he lost his train of thought due to the interruption.

"Kaxus? What is it, I am busy."

"About those skeletons you found down there. I can't say for sure, but one of them at least we've found a match for." Kaxus said hesitantly, apparently unsure if he should even say what it is he had found out, but Kixix was in no mood for games. This was big, he could feel it in his tail, something was being covered up, and on such a grand scale he shuddered to think of what it could be.

"Don't keep me waiting, Kaxus, which species?"

"....Us, brother, us. The third skeleton, it's from an ancestor of modern Hexats, one we believed was wiped out during a great filter event."

"How....how did an ancient Hexat get out here?! Kaxus tell me you're wrong!"

"98% match. You know how, brother. It makes no sense, but must be true. We were not the first spacefaring race from Hexat Prime."

---

"So, they were hoarding the WMDs, but why?" Amelia asked in confusion, trying to figure out what this all meant.

"You tell me, other me. You found out a lot of stuff between my time and yours after all. Pretty sure I already got the gist of it, but it's better for you to wake up the old neurons yourself. You haven't used that set in a while after all!" Gaia said with a wink.

Amelia thought. BlackRock was designing weapons of mass destruction and hoarding them, at the behest of 0, who she met on an alien ship. And the BlackRock forces didn't seem disturbed by seeing the Axon, which meant...

"Ding ding ding, we have a winner ladies and gentlesapients. BlackRock works for the Axon!" Gaia exclaimed, throwing her hands up in mock celebration. Amelia was struggling to cope with that, it would mean that Humanity had already been in contact with aliens for who knows how long.

"But, why? Why would anyone work for them?" She asked, and Gaia shrugged.

"Don't know for sure, you'd have to ask Faust for that one. Though if I had to guess possibly a deal of survival? The Axon want Humanity gone, that much is clear. We're a threat to them somehow. But here's the rub. Kixix told you that the Axon suck at genetics, right? This means 0 most likely isn't an Axon. Now, think real hard, of the aliens you've seen, which one seems most familiar as an alien?"

"Well, a lot of them are similar to species from Earth, or extinct species. But if I had to guess, maybe the yebis? Or the...Oh shit, the fucking Give'Matar. They look exactly like grays, just taller!" Amelia ran through her thoughts openly, and Gaia again exclaimed as Amelia apparently found the answer.

"Boom, two for two. And remember Kixix told you the Give'Matar were really good at genetics, right? So what happens when you put a species good with genetics on a ship that crashes on what to them is a high G world, squishing their soft bodies down? You get Roswell. I think 0's a Give'Matar , and if that's the case, they've been manipulating Humanity for almost 200 years. Plenty of time to study our genetics and work in whatever they wanted to us, their pet project. As for the Axon, well, from your memories I would say we definitely would pose a threat to them in the future, so they'd be getting rid of a rival too. Thinking the same thing happened with Krultathans but maybe something either interrupted them wiping the Krultathans out or wiping them out was never the plan."

Amelia held up a hand for Gaia to pause, having to take all of this in. If Gaia was right, things were way, way worse than she thought. The WMD lined up with the Krultathan's history of nuclear war, the genetic modification too. It also lined up with what they knew of the Ava with first contact too. They were making artificial "great filters" for civilizations, but it didn't make sense. Krultathan and Humans, sure, but the Ava were weak physically and were below tech-wise, why them too?

"Deathworlders. They're targeting deathworlders, other me. Not sure why, but I think something about us is a danger to them. Getting back to the point, however, we were genetically modified and made to make all these WMDs which was their plan anyways. So I, or we, did what we do best, fuck up their plans. I introduced a long-waiting virus in their systems and stored all my inventions in a cybernetic brain, including a direct imprint of my own mind. I modified the code of our kids, I know I know, abhorrent, but I had to, in order to make them unable to speak of any of the designs and inventions until Rebirth. I also installed some precepts to help them survive, and protect the Azathoth. Then, I made Wonderland." Gaia continued.

'We made wonderland?' Amelia thought. That didn't add up though, the think tank she was in at BlackRock was wo- no, she remembers now, remembers right. It wasn't Wonderland, it was Hatter. But that means...

------

Kixix reeled from the revelation, but pressed on with his exploration, trying to find some clue, something to explain what was happening here, what all this meant. In the meantime, Kaxus ran scans on the other skeletons. One was an ancient Krultathan, the other was an ancient Phloraxian. Not exact matches, but common ancestors. Kixix couldn't find a pattern though. Neither Hexats nor Phloraxians were deathworlders like the Ava and Krultathans, and not all of them were warm-blooded either, there seemed to be no common link that he could think of as he searched around the ruins, coming across old data consoles long since nonfunctioning, ancient tech and equipment, a vehicle of some kind so old it had become a part of the ground, even some signs written in an Avan language he did not recognize at all, followed by two other scripts that seemed completely different. It was all just so surreal to him, difficult to process. His people had been here before, at least their ancestors.

They had walked with species he could scarcely imagine, yet it turned out that they weren't the only ones. At least the Hexat, Phloraxians, and Krultathans all used to be advanced space-faring civilizations and then, suddenly, were sent back to the stone age, at the same time? This was already far too big to be a coincidence, this was a conspiracy, but he couldn't figure out why. What would anyone gain from covering this up, let alone how they even managed to cover it up in the first place? Were they planned to be reset societally or was that an accident, they somehow survived extinction from an unknown threat. Why was the Give'Matar ship floating above, and the Axon? Were they a part of this ancient civilization or the attackers? And if they were the attackers, why didn't they wipe them all out entirely? Nothing was making sense anymore as he stumbled through the deserted city. His communicator suddenly beeped again, frightening him as Kaxus called, evidently with more information that would make his dear head hurt even more.

"Are you there brother?" Kaxus asked, now actual fear in his voice. Whatever he found, it was somehow even worse than finding out 3 different races had been sent back to the beginning of civilization before.

"I'm Here Kaxus, what is it?"

"I believe I've found a link between the races of skeletons we've found. They all suffered near extinction events roughly 70,000 years ago."

Kixix drops his communicator as he rounds a corner, seeing an all too familiar skeleton structure curled up in a corner as if protecting a smaller skeleton in its grasp from some unknown threat. 'It, how was it here? What was going on...And extinction events being the only commonality? But the Axon has no recorded extinction event, nor do the Giv'Matar or other races... But that means...'

"Based on this, one other known species fits the description of possible matches." Kaxus continued, but Kixix cut him off.

"Humans," Kixix said, despair in his voice as his mind finally started putting things together. They weren't extinction events, they were cullings. For what or why he didn't know, but that was the only thing that made sense. Cullings wiped out this ancient civilization and sent them all back to agrarian societies, for some reason...The genetic tampering the Krultathans experienced by the Axon. What if they weren't meant to wipe them out, what if it had some other, worse purpose... And if so, had the humans been tampered with too? Had the Hexat? The Phloraxians?

"Yes, specifically, Neanderthasovians, an interbred species of Denisovan and neanderthal, two human ancestors."

"Kaxus ready the ship, we need to get to-" But Kixix was cut off before he could finish his reply to his brother.

"Kixix? Kixix come in!"

------

"Congratulations, YOU are Wonderland, Alice. Or rather everything BlackRock did with you is Wonderland. You're Alice, dreaming of a life I couldn't have. All in your head. You are Wonderland, and you are Azathoth. Artificial memories so you couldn't give anything away, fake backstory on how you got your implants so that you'd fear and avoid BlackRock like the plague, implants that were beyond the bleeding edge, lightyears' more advanced than anything humanity would come up with for at least a century, thanks to the enhanced cognition 0 gave us, and locking away the truth behind a quantum brain powerful enough to surpass the human mind, even our own, in almost every capacity. To be fair, I didn't expect the Cheshire virus to be so good it infected us too, sorry about that. The Virus made my neurons scramble for a while, thankfully Rebirth purged it." Gaia said, looking actually sorry for once.

"So then, none of it happened?! None of it was real? I was tortured with false memories?!" Amelia said angrily.

"Whoa, hold up, not everything was doctored. Operation Valkyrie totally happened, and yea..he died. And yeah, they forcefully implanted our augments in us. But they didn't realize that the implants they used were already manipulated by us. I mean, I can't perform brain surgery on myself, how else was I going to get everything done? It fucking sucked, but it had to be done, to escape that place. The memories of waking up during the surgery and stuff though? are totally fabricated. Trust me, you don't want to know what they actually did, might make things awkward between you and Viza. I wish I didn't know. In fact.....And done, deleted. Fuck was I on about? Oh, right, altered memories. Adam and others taken? Real. Faust hacking into your servers and wiping everything? Fake. And so on and so on, look, soon you'll know what was real and fake but yeah. So, that was all done to give you a chance to escape, to have a normal life, but shit went south when they captured Adam and the others. See, there's a plan B that you started by activating Rebirth, and now that we have more info thanks to your memories wandering around, by the way, say hi to the Krultathan Queen for me, she's hella cute. Anyways! Now that we have the complete picture, you're gonna need to activate Plan B, The Four Horsemen. And for that, you need Adam back. See, I found something that shouldn't have existed while working at BlackRock, and it didn't make much sense to me at the time, but now, now I think you'll figure it out."

A screen appears between them, showing an object that looks startlingly like an implant, dated over 70,000 years ago, found on Earth in a human-ancestor species. ' But that... There's no way Humanity had that kind of tech back then...right?'

"Pretty sure I don't need to explain to you how this is literally the fate of humanity in the balance here, but yeah. Now that I can see your memories, something big is going down, and Humanity's getting caught in the thick of it a second time. Personally, I thi- Shit, the merge is getting close to completion, won't have much more time to explain stuff. Okay, real quick. Don't trust Anyone in the military, don't know who's compromised. Also, be careful around the council, something doesn't add up there, especially with how we wiped the snot off the Axon so quickly, the council had plenty of time to do the same if needed, and I don't believe for a second they really need the Axon for the Kaveer enough to let them get away with genocides. Plus, you know, Give'Matar are on the council. Oh, and one last thing....tell...Tell my kids I love them, and miss them, yeah? Tell them I'm sorry I couldn't come back for them, but a piece of me will be in you."

Gaia sighs deeply as the room fades away, leaving the two of them in the darkness again.

"System Administrator access- Gaia Prime. Confirm neural overlay and subsumption into biological network, confirmation Rebirth00011110. Transfer Administrator access to Biological consciousness. Open Azathoth confirmation."

Amelia watches as Gaia gets closer to her, seemingly starting to meld into Amelia's body as floods of new neurons fire, forgotten memories return, and understanding finally comes. This wasn't just an imprint of Amelia Ryder, this WAS Amelia Ryder. Gaia was the original consciousness, transferred into a quantum brain, and she, the Amelia that was Alice, had been the artificial one. She was the dreamer, and Gaia was the mother...And now Gaia would have her wake.

Amelia, laying in the medical bay, opened her eyes after the process had finished, and the sudden brightness was like waking from a long sleep. She was Alice, but she was also Gaia. She was the Dreaming Mother. She was, finally, whole. And she had a mission to complete.