Chapter 2

Back to the Past

Sunday, September 14th, 2059

32 days to the apocalypse

Leo woke up standing on a cement walkway in front of a door. The sky was blue; he hadn't seen a blue sky in decades. The doorknob was inches higher than it should have been. No. He was shorter. His arms and hands were young again. Arms no longer extended to his ankles, hands and fingers no longer inhumanly long with fingernails strong enough to claw bark off trees. The scars and calluses from a lifetime of fighting had vanished. He reached for his face and head and felt hair. His teeth were smaller and human. He was twelve again and he was where he'd been standing when he'd put his implant on his left wrist and absorbed it into his body.

Fifty years ago, twelve-year-old Leo had carried groceries up to an old man's apartment. The old man had given him an implant as a gift and he'd put it on. It was that exact moment which Leo found himself reliving in front of that apartment door. One minute passed. Then another.

Hallucination. Had to be. He waited to wake up in a Demigod Boss's mouth.

***

Leo remembered...

He had been about to walk past the quavery old man standing in front of the Food Mart parking lot with five bags of groceries. He had nothing against old people, but he didn't know this guy. For all he knew, the old man's place could be filled with bodies of kids who'd fallen for the old man's “please help me with my groceries” routine.

Then he saw Brick and Brick's two friends hanging out at the nearby park, and worse, they saw him. The week before at school, Leo had accidentally bumped into Brick, spilling soda on the older, much larger boy's shirt. Brick's real name was Bernard but nobody called him that if they wanted to live. He wasn't the kind to forgive and forget or to listen to reason. In fact, Brick had anger management issues.

Suddenly, the thought of being killed by a crazy old man wasn't such a big deal.

“Hey. Let me help,” he'd said, picking up three bags of what felt like fifty pounds of groceries.

“I-I really can't pay you much,” the quavery old man said.

“Don't worry about it, I don't mind,” Leo said. He followed the old man down the block towards the large rundown apartment complex where the old man obviously lived. Not even Brick was crazy enough to come after him when he was with an adult. He noticed the larger kid and his friends following him, though.

Leo climbed ten flights of stairs, zigzagging up the outside of the apartment complex, feeling like his arms were about to fall off. He entered a surprisingly normal apartment smelling of dust and old people. A couple of fishing magazines sat awkwardly on a coffee table. Pictures of what he assumed were family members rested on the faded blue walls (no bodies in sight). Exhausted and out of breath, Leo dumped the bags of groceries on a wooden kitchen table.

“I can see you are a kindhearted individual. I can't pay you anything, but I can give you this.” The old man held out what looked like a flat silver metallic strip, half an inch wide, and six inches long. He let it go. It floated in the air, slowly settling on the wooden table next to the groceries.

Leo backed away. “A demon implant? Are you crazy? Those are illegal. And they cause brain damage.” He recognized the object from cautionary online videos. Nobody knew where the implants had come from, but everyone knew they caused brain damage and homicidal rages.

“Lies,” the old man said. “The implant's competitor, Bio-Blessed, Inc, spreads false stories to make the implant look bad.” He held up his left arm, showing him what looked like a violet bracelet glowing under his skin. “I've owned this Brain Augmenting Device, or B.A.D. all my life, and never had a problem. It's a learning aid. That's it. With this implant, if you want to learn tennis, or basketball, you can practice for a couple weeks, and it will be like you practiced for six months or more without it.”

Leo ignored the obvious fallacy of how an old man could possibly have worn the implant all his life. Nobody knew who created the device, but to the best of his knowledge, implants hadn't existed before last year. Two years at the most. Maybe the old man was exaggerating? Or brain damaged?

“Would it help me learn how to fight?” Leo asked, remembering Brick waiting for him.

“Of course,” the old man said. “If you trained for a month in martial arts, it would be like you trained for years without it. You could become the next Bruce Lee if you wanted.”

“Who's Bruce Lee?” Leo asked. “Uh... Never mind that.” Old people were always spouting names he'd never heard of. “You're sure it's safe? I've seen a bunch of videos claiming it turns people into vegetables.”

“Bio-Blessed, Inc. spent a lot of money to create those videos. You never see anything about the dangers of the genetic enhancer Bio-Blessed.”

“Wait. Bio-Blessed is dangerous?” Leo asked.

“Exactly. Never touch that shit, kid. That stuff will make you worse than dead. Just put the implant on your left wrist. It will make you a new man.” The old man put the strip of metal in Leo's hand and pushed him out the door.

It had been at this moment in Leo's life that he put on the implant given to him by an old man he didn't know, in the hope that it would help him fight Brick and his cronies.

***

Minutes passed while Leo stood on the cement walkway outside the old man's apartment, which was ten stories above the ground.

He waited to wake up screaming in pain, being eaten. Nothing happened. He held up his arm. Focused on his implant, making it glow violet like the old man's had. The implant had somehow sunk underneath the skin of his wrist. He couldn't take it off now if he wanted to.

He pounded on the door of the apartment until his hand hurt. Nobody answered. He peered through the window. The apartment looked empty, with the old man nowhere to be seen. He sat down with his back against the door and tried to think.

What the hell? He was at the place and time he'd first put on his implant, but with a lifetime of memories? That old man, if that's what he was, knew far more than he'd let on. Leo really needed to talk to him.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Since there was no response to his continued knocking, he tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked. He entered the apartment for the second time.

The place was empty. The furniture, pictures, and magazines he'd remembered were gone. So was the old people smell. The place now smelled like an abandoned apartment, like nobody had lived here in a long time.

Weird. Leo shivered.

Could the implant be messing with his mind and memories? The thing was supposed to cause brain damage after all. He quickly discarded that idea. There was no way his twelve-year-old mind, any twelve-year-old mind, could have dreamed up the nightmares he'd lived through. He remembered the first Afflicted eating pit he'd encountered. With its gnawed-on human bones cracked open for their marrow, and torn, half-digested clothes, hair, and other bodily remains. The smell of fear, death, and worse things. He shuddered. Then there was the loss of his friends. Family. The decades he'd lived frightened, alone, always on the run.

“Hi! I'm Imp,” the voice of a sprightly young girl suddenly appeared in his head, making him jump. “Short for Implant Interface. It is an honor to make your acquaintance. I am here to help you.”

“Hi, Imp,” Leo said. “Haven't heard your voice for a long time.”

“That is hard to believe,” Imp said. “I'm your first and only implant and I've never spoken to you before. What should I call you?”

The implant didn't know he'd returned from the future. The implant was like it had been when he'd put it on when he was twelve. Only his memories had changed. Out of habit, he pulled up his stats. A mental screen appeared in his head.

Subject: Name Unknown

Sex: Male

Age: 12

Strength: 5.2

Vitality: 6.3

Agility: 4.4

Intelligence: 5.1

Charisma: 4.9

Common Sense: 4.1

Class: Undetermined

Special skills: None

Demon Tears: 0

Corruption: 0

His basic stats were as he remembered, nothing great, nothing terrible. 10 being the maximum possible for a normal human and 1 being a cripple or mentally challenged. His stats meant he had normal intelligence, was a little clumsy, and his people skills could have been better, but overall he was a painfully average twelve-year-old boy in every way imaginable.

His pre-death corruption level and the red flashing state of his implant stats had been caused by the so-called genetic enhancer known as Bio-Blessed that he'd taken both before and soon after the Change.

He hadn't consumed enough to turn him into a monster. But he'd managed to corrupt his implant and leave his body twisted and deformed. It was also why Imp had quit speaking to him two weeks after he'd put on the implant. Implants and Bio-Blessed did not mix.

Obviously, if he'd known Bio-Blessed turned people into ravenous man-eating monsters, he wouldn't have done it. But his parents practically lived on the stuff. The internet, media, anyone who was anyone, claimed taking Bio-Blessed made everything better.

“Imp. Pull up advanced features. And call me Leo.”

“Right away, Leo.” His stats vanished and a second list appeared.

Implant Interface settings.

Implant Class Selection.

Implant Special Skill Activation.

Implant Replication.

He pulled up the last one.

“Create Duplicate Implant,” he told it. When speaking to Imp, he didn't speak out loud of course. He murmured to himself.

“Warning: while your Implant is duplicating itself, regular functions will perform at reduced capacity.”

In the future he'd lived through, implants equaled life, and there was someone he wanted to save. If he could prevent what had happened last time around, and the memories that still haunted him, reduced implant capacity was a small price to pay.

“Do it.”

Implant Duplication in Process flashed on the screen. It would take at least a month for his implant to duplicate itself. At this point, there was little he could do to speed up the process.

“Leo, I should warn you, any attempt to exchange an implant for money or items of value is forbidden,” Imp said.

“I know.” He'd met the sad wreck of a man who'd made that mistake. Both the man's implant and the one he'd tried to sell had deactivated. Unable to replace, or fix, his deactivated implant, the poor bastard was a walking dead man.

Leo sat in front of the now-abandoned apartment and thought.

Last time, he'd used the implant to train in martial arts to fight Brick and his cronies. He'd taken a bunch of Bio-Blessed to make himself faster and stronger. Ironically, the Bio-Blessed had helped him survive in the short term, making him stronger and faster than he'd have been otherwise, but more importantly, the Bio-Blessed corruption inside his body made him a less attractive meal for the Afflicted. He wasn't quite one of them, but he wasn't fully human either. It wasn't that the Afflicted wouldn't eat him, but it made him a second or third choice. Like the difference between prime rib and mystery meat.

The corruption had hurt him in the long run. His implant barely worked, making him far weaker than he should have been.

Way to go, Leo.

One step at a time, he thought. He'd lived through countless hopeless situations by taking things one step at a time.

Step one, go down the stairs. Step two, go home. Step three, save the world. Piece of cake, Leo. You can do this.

It felt odd walking down the stairs. He had to keep reminding himself that with his current stats, his twelve-year-old body couldn't handle a ten-story drop. Jumping off the walkway to the ground would leave him severely injured, or dead.

His body felt slow and clumsy as his undeveloped muscles clashed with a lifetime of memories of being faster and stronger. This would take a bit to get used to. He stumbled on the stairs more than once, having to grab the railing to keep from falling.

By the time he reached the bottom, his steps became steadier and he was taking the stairs two at a time. A passive effect of the implant was kicking in, helping him learn faster now, even at reduced implant function.

Imp's cheerful voice said, “You have gained +1 skill at walking downstairs.”

Yay, he thought. Improving enough common skills would lead to a rise in his stats. Something vitally important in gaining a decent character class. Navigating stairs was pretty unimpressive, but every bit helped.

When he reached the ground he heard running footsteps. Before he could respond, something big collided with his face, knocking him to the asphalt. He looked up. Brick and his two friends stared down at him.

Shit. Leo knew he'd forgotten something.