Pranav continued to stare, blinking periodically to check if it was in fact the name, ‘Ivan Sokolov’. When he was certain he wasn’t tripping balls he tried the door.
Locked. Fuck.
“Aken, open this for me?”
His partner had likely felt the emotions that were rolling through him at the moment, and agreed without complaint. Aken disappeared into the faded glass door for a few moments, before a click! Sound came through, and the door was pushed open.
Pranav strode inside eagerly looking around. The office itself was the size of a studio apartment, the floor was a beautiful shade of mahogany wood, with shelves of books lining the side. Towards the back end was a weird spherical object that was hooked to a strange machine, a large desk with two monitors placed side by side, though he couldn’t see any keyboard or mouse. Then finally…
“A window?” He said aloud. “But aren’t we…?”
“Underground.” Aken finished.
“A fake?”
“Allow me to check.”
Again Aken disappeared behind the window, and Pranav went to investigate on his own. It was cool to the touch, showing blue skies with lazy clouds, crystal blue waters by gentle grass. A beautiful picture, one he recognized even. It was the view from their family’s cabin, one that Pranav had only been to a handful of times, still, it was a memorable place.
“Fake.” Aken said, confirming Pranav’s suspicions. “A maze of human technology.”
“Hmm.” Pranav hummed, “Then I may as well take a look around.”
The first thing was obviously the desk, people usually kept important shit there, right? He settled himself into the office chair, nodding appreciatively at the comfort.
“Damn Ivan, nice.” He whistled, before noticing the state of the desk, “Huh. That’s interesting.”
The top of his desk was marred with little scratches and gouges, something you’d see from a criminal counting his days on his cell wall. It was something a bored child did when he was sick of studying, but Ivan wasn’t like that, he was professional, calm, reasonable to an almost boring degree.
Pran loved the guy, but holy shit he was such a nerd.
“Well not that I can really complain, I’m a Pokémon freak.” Pran thought, feeling around the monitor for a power button, “Hm. But he wasn’t really that into Pokémon, so why? Also where the fuck is the power butt-oh!”
He felt something give, and the screen hummed to life accompanied by a low drone of music signaling the startup, though he had no idea where the fuck the music was coming from, there were no speakers at all.
“Oh shit!” Pran leapt backwards as a blob of black goo was suddenly splashed onto the desk from a compartment within the monitor. It undulated and spazzed for a second or two before settling into two separate shapes, a familiar looking rectangle and sphere.
Hesitantly, he touched the shape. It was like touching ink cooled in a freezer, viscous and almost stretchy in its quality. The second shape he could recognize almost instantly, it was supposed to be a mouse of sorts, it had the look for sure. Then that meant…
“A keyboard.” Pranav hummed, “So where the hell are the letters?”
He tapped the black square a couple times, feeling just a tad frustrated when nothing would remove the main menu screen from the monitor. It was only when he thought of the letter “a” did something actually happen, and he was taken to the password.
“No fucking way.” He whispered, thinking of the letter “P” and tapping the rectangle.
A “*” appeared on the screen
He thought of the word “Pokémon” and smashed his hand onto the keyboard.
“*******”
“Dude, Aken, you seeing this?”
“You touch the thing and dots appear. Wow. I’m so impressed.” Aken said dryly.
“Man you don’t understand! It works off thought, that’s fucking crazy. How does it know? Wait no–how about you give it a shot.”
Aken rolled his eyes but complied, curiosity winning over his pride. The spectral hand of Knock Off formed and he tapped the black rectangle.
“*”
“What letter did you put in?”
“Uaea”
“....what the fuck is Uaea?”
“A better question would be how does the human machine know my letters?”
“Oh.” Pranav blinked, “Good point-wait, you guys have your own letters?”
“It is not like yours,” Aken huffed, “ours is a language of intention, of feeling and desires.”
“So what intent does that one have?”
“It is the desire to win.”
“Amen.” Pranav nodded sagely, “Now where’s the password?”
He opened the shelves and drawers of Ivan’s desk, rummaging through reports and notebooks filled with familiar handwriting. He flipped through each and every one of them, skimming their content before neatly stacking them to the side. He’d find a bag to place them into later, his old pack was gone from the Growlithe attack, which meant no more heals for either of them.
“Damn, nothing?” Pranav sighed, leaning back in his seat. Spy movies always made finding passwords seem easy, you just wrote that shit down somewhere, some guy found it and then bam there you go.
But he supposed real life was different. Most people only had a few passwords they used over and over again. Pranav had gone throughout life with one stupid ass password he’d cooked up in the first grade, and as far as he knew most of his friends did too. Heh, even Ivan was forced to use the password Pran had made for hi–wait.
“Oh tell me you did.” Pranav whispered, eagerly mashing the board, “Tell me you di-AHA! NO FUCKING WAY YOU DID!”
“What? What’s happening?” Aken said, watching as the monitor went to the homescreen, “How did you find the key?”
“So when I was in middle school.” Pranav said, smiling wide as he reminisced, “Ivan had this huge crush on a friend of ours, right? Now here’s the thing, this girl already told me she liked him back, so neither of them wanted to make the first move.”
“So I told Ivan ‘hey, if you ask her and get rejected, I’ll slide my chicken nuggets every day for a month for free. But if she accepts, then I pick your password.’”
“...Chicken nuggets?”
“They’re like little meatballs. I dunno why he liked them so much they were dry as shit. So obviously, tempted by nuggies he went ahead and asked her out, and bam I got to pick the password. Looks like he’s been using it even as a ‘Divine’.”
“And the password?”
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Pranav shot him a smile, “It’s ‘IWantBigNakedMenInMyShowers28’.”
Aken stared, “What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“Is there a joke there or?”
“Well yeah. You see, he didn’t actually want big naked men, and it’s kinda embarrassing to say that out loud.”
“Oh.”
“Really? Not even a smile? A lil huff of laughter?”
“I don’t understand human jokes.”
“Well it’s hilarious, so laugh next time” Pranav said matter-of-factly, before refocusing his attention onto the computer. His eyes softened almost instantly when he saw the home screen. A family photo, one where Ivan was beaming as he sat beside his parents and his elder sisters.
The whole family was made up of blondes, Ivan himself he almost didn’t recognize, looking older than he’d seen him. The man had a nice neatly trimmed moustache and goatee, a pair of rectangular glasses sitting atop grey eyes and a round face. He wore a grey suit, and was holding up an accolade that displayed “Accolade of Innovation” and some writing he couldn’t read.
“You finally got yourself a bit of a beard, eh?” Pranav whispered, smiling to himself.
At the very least, Pranav understood. He didn’t get isekai’d. He time travelled, and somehow the future of their earth was fucking Pokémon world. Okay, cool. The only feasible explanation was Dialga fucking with time somehow, but then came the question of why? Why them?
“I wonder if you had something to do with it.” Pran said to the picture of Ivan.
There was melancholy to his newfound discovery. And as always, more questions. Why Ivan? Is that why he disappeared all that time ago? To work on something absurd as this? His best friend was a realist, had his feet grounded and kept his mind sharpened. The only way he’d buy into the “Divine” charade was if he had no other choice.
“Or if it was actually feasible.” Pranav thought.
Wanting to find some more answers, he pulled up the files onto the screen. There were nearly hundreds, all of them talking about chemical compounds and drug effects he couldn’t wholly understand at a simple glance. The context he figured out pretty quickly however. They were testing regenerative properties, some new chemical compound they’d dubbed “Ambrosia”.
“Wonder if this is what the berries are made of.” He mused. Idly he wondered if it would be a good idea to take the notes for himself, pawn them off somewhere. But in all honesty, considering what the Pokémon world was capable of, he’d probably be better off not wasting his time.
He switched over to videos, and frowned a little at the sight. Ivan had labelled them all by date and number, being the neat freak that he was. Unfortunately over half the files looked like they’d been deleted, the only thing remaining being a grey icon that wouldn’t play when he clicked on them.
“Just my luck.” He sighed, before clicking on the earliest video, “No answers to what happened to you, or the rest of your stupid organization.”
“My name is Ivan Sokolov, junior research assistant at The World Tree organization. This marks day 112 of my term.”
Ivan looked tired, more tired than he’d ever seen him before. His eyes were red and baggy, he was twitching as he sat down atop of his couch, his foot constantly tap-tapping against the floor as he wrung his wrists.
“...I guess I should call it my ‘ascension’, instead.” The young man scoffed, falling silent as he appeared to remember something. “Ah. um. The recording. I’m making these videos to document the work I do here, and to remind myself…remind myself I’m human.”
“Where do I start with all this…? Oh, right. I think it began during the cold war, but American military researchers stumbled upon what they labelled ‘The Soul of the World’.”
Ivan reached for something, a glass filled with clear liquid. Judging from the way he let out a strained grunt from a single sip Pranav assumed it wasn’t water.
“The ‘Soul of the World’, as reported.” The young man said, tapping a piece of paper atop his coffee table, “Was a being of unknown origins, shape, and purpose. But what we do know, is that it was alive, and that it was keeping our Earth together.“
“I’m a scientist, a man of logic and knowledge. Some of my employers call this thing “god” and the “reason for life itself”, but I deny this. Life has, and always will be, the byproduct of an environment created in the most insane of circumstances.”
Another sip, another snarl.
“But I do believe this thing has had a hand in…expediting the process. So yes, big powerful thing living in our earth, so what do our dear neighbors down south do?”
“Take it?” Pranav guessed.
“They take it!” Ivan hissed, slamming the table so hard he nearly knocked over the glass of alcohol, “And don’t ask how I know they’ve taken it, I wasn’t there. But by removing the Soul they cursed confined Earth to a fate it should not have seen until billions of years later.”
This time his friend let out a tired sigh, settling into his couch, “By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. The Soul had been ‘killed’ to an extent. No longer sentient. Brain dead would be the proper wording. Estimated time until Earth’s destruction was 2030.”
Pranav paled. 2030? That was...less than a decade away in the Before.
“So of course, they went scrambling for solutions. None of the public was informed, any case was quickly ‘debunked’ and their authors either ridiculed to obscurity or given 3 shots to the head as a precaution. In response to finding a fix to the end of the world, the World Tree Foundation was established, and guess who we’re funded by?”
Ivan turned the camera around, revealing a set of portraits. The most familiar being the Bezos smile.
“Every rich fucking asshole out there who doesn’t want die.” Ivan sighed, before turning the camera back around. “They contacted me shortly after I’d achieved a breakthrough working on a side project I’d had in the lab I worked under. Human regeneration.”
Pranav thought about the notes he’d skimmed over earlier. That was his work?
“Granted it’s not all mine. Human regeneration has been studied extensively for years. I just managed to find the missing piece. The pay was good, and they even offered a couple spots for my sisters as on-board doctors. Took it instantly.”
Ivan sighed, checking his phone, “Work’s tough…I barely get time to leave the lab, and even then it’s just to get a couple hours of sleep. But I’ve got the fucking world to save, so I guess I’m stuck here. Pran’s texting me right now, heh. When this is all done I’m so going to brag about this.”
The video ended, and Pranav eagerly clicked the next one.
“Day 156–”
“Day 302–”
“Year 2, day 74–”
He didn’t know how long he watched for, but he made sure to ingrain each and every video into his memory. It was nerd shit, biology and his work towards regenerative medicines. Ivan seemed to think it would be used to help with regrowing portions of the Soul that had been lost. The information was important, sure, but Pranav found it hard to focus on the details, instead losing himself to nostalgia.
It was like they were teenagers again, Ivan going on and on about something new he’d learned, Pranav occasionally bugging him about something else or as a question here and there, but he always listened. It was nice hearing someone’s passions, and the fact that he could just bounce off each other whenever they wanted to switch topics was the big reason why he considered Ivan his best friend.
“Year…fuck, what does it even matter?”
Pranav blinked, this one was different, gone was the hope and passion in his eyes. His place of residence was different as well. Gone was the room he’d gotten accustomed to over the last dozen or so videos, now he was sitting in the same office Pran was.
With a black eye and a busted lip.
“They lied to us, fucking lied to us.” Ivan began, snapping his fingers as a pack of ice just appeared in his hands, “Everything we did, everything we’ve done, it wasn’t to fix the Earth. No, assholes wanted to make a new Earth, a kingdom for gods. All my research, everything I’ve cultivated, not for the masses, not the people I helped. No, for the richest and those that can contribute to society.”
Ivan sat back, taking a deep breath, “I wondered what they were doing with the Soul. They used it as a fucking battery, ripping it apart for energy. The Soul acted as a miniature wormhole, interdimensional travel. It was too dangerous for us to go through, so we took instead. Stole technology, resources, anything and everything we could from other dimensions.”
“With the technology stolen, we now have the technology to halt Earth’s 2030 destruction for a few extra decades. No known method to stop it completely. The higher ups say they need something strong enough to replace the Soul, and something strong enough to contain it. But that’s not the point, the point is, the Soul doesn’t have enough power to capture a new one, so they’ve decided to wipe the world clean. July 17th, 2021.”
Pranav balled a fist in anger. The nukes. The death, the destruction, the fallout. The constant struggle to survive day after day.
The loneliness. Oh the loneliness, if Arun wasn’t there Pranav would have likely gone insane.
“The R&D alongside the engineers, they temporarily turned the Soul into one massive vacuum. Theoretically, when a person now dies, their souls will enter the being, thus powering it enough to find its replacement.”
There were tears in Ivan’s eyes now, his voice choked as he spoke, “8 billion souls. My friends. They’re all going to die. I tried to fight, believe me I did. But you can see how well that went.”
A bitter laugh, the tears were falling freely now, “I did the best thing I could. Pranav, David, Aman. I entered your names. Please, please stay alive, don’t you dare die, just find your way into the facility and it’ll take care of the rest, it’ll give you everything you need, so please.”
Red-stained eyes stared at the screen.
“Please let me see you again.”
The video ended there, and Pranav was left to his thoughts.
“...are you alright?” Aken asked, “He was your friend?”
“I…I need the videos.” Pranav said instead, going through the cabinets again, “Ivan’s got answers. More than I thought. Help me look for a USB or something.”
“A what?”
Right. He didn’t know what that was, “Just look for a small rectangular device.”
He tore through Ivan’s papers, skimming and tossing any that wasn’t important. Pictures, little knicknacks he put carefully to the side, but there was nothing, no USB, nothing he could do to take the videos with him.
Maybe he could take the computer itself? He looked behind the monitors, but then clicked his tongue in annoyance, a single wire ran down to the floor, and it didn’t seem to be detachable. A security measure, definitely.
“I need the fucking videos!” Pranav shouted, smashing the drawers apart.
“Calm yourself.” Aken hissed, suddenly in front of him, “Stop deluding yourself. You don’t want the videos, you want something else.”
Pranav turned away, his eyes cast down. Aken wouldn’t let him have it.
“Do not deny your desires!” The Ghost shouted, “You have always acted for yourself. Why do you deny it now? It’s not the answers you want to save, you want something else! Say it!”
“I…I just don’t want to forget his voice again.” Pranav whispered.
The photos he kept in his phone had allowed their memory to last. His parents, his sisters, his friends. But the time he’d spent in the fallout, the people he’d talked to, the battles he’d fought. They’d replaced the happy times, turning them into dreams he could just barely remember if he concentrated enough.
This was the first time, the first time he’d heard any of their voices so clearly, and he didn’t want to forget again. He didn’t want to have their memories replaced. He wanted them back. He wanted them all back.
“Good.” Aken huffed, “You are selfish, Felis. Don’t run from it. Embrace it. Who you are now is what has survived the test of time, it is your claw and your fang.”
Felis let out a soft chuckle, “Selfish…you couldn’t put it in a better way?”
“I speak truth, and only truth. Now forget the…’usb’ device. If your friend exists here, he exists elsewhere, we will find him. Now what else are you here for?”
“Answers.”
“And we appear to have one more video.”
Felis sat down in his chair once more, and hit play.